Bullethead

There are going on 7 billion people in the world. I've traveled the world and have only met a few score who shouldn't have been drowned at birth.

I've had cats all my life. In fact, I learned to walk by holding the tail of a cat, or so my parents told me. There have only been a few brief intervals when I haven't had at least 1 cat under my roof. Lots of cats over the years, many dying before their time. But the way I see it, cats are all warriors seeking Valhalla. And like all true heroes, they want to be remembered in song as an example to the next generation. So it's up to you to be their scald, telling their stories to new kittens so they'll grow up to be great warriors, too.

You can tell that's a dangerous predator. On her back there, she's in a cat's total war fighting stance with all 5 weapons ready to go instead of having to stand on some of them. Watching you closely through slitted eyes, looking all cute and cuddly to lure you in, but armed and ready to take your arm off at the shoulder . I like Siamese cats. They fight well above their weight, are smarter than most other breeds, and look cool. And Pushco Jr. is going to be a monster when he grows into those big feet. Now that's what we call a "wampus cat" around here. Big and mean. He carries his weight well. Had you not said otherwise, I'd have figured him for about 10-12 pounds based on his narrowness. You do know that cats invented punctuation marks, right? The scribe who 1st started using ! and ? obviously got the idea from reading the body language of his cat's tail.

For the record, I didn't say anything about BoB II and know nothing about it. I just said "BoB the CloD" as a sort of joke name for CoD

I had a Siamese that lived 20 years. She was looking forward to voting in the 2010 election but unfortunately got hit by a car some months before (she was stone deaf by then and didn't hear it coming). I was planning on having the full 3-month mourning period before I even started thinking about getting another cat, but Gus blew in just a couple weeks later.

Given the number of dog-related threads here, it's hard to avoid the impression that being a dog person is almost a requirement to play OFF. But even though I have a dog that I like enough not to kill when it comes home after rolling in manure, I'm more of a cat person. I reckon there are others out there, lurking in the bushes at the edge of the campfire. So if you're a cat person, let's see your felines. This is my main man, Tempestofelis omnimortifer, aka Hurricane Gustav of "Gus". He's about 3.5 years old and got his name because that storm blew him into my yard as a lost, starving kitten. You'd never know that looking at him today, resplendent in his winter coat. He weighs 15 pounds, most of which is solid muscle from wrestling the dog every day. He's extremely friendly, has an insatiable curiosity, but is head of the household and kills everything he finds in the yard: birds, rodents, snakes, lizards, and bugs. Other cats as well on occasion. This is Panthera browningii, Browning (after the gunmaker) or "Brownie" for short. She's about 7.5 years old and about 10 pounds. Despite having been raised from a kitten at my house, she's still as feral as when I plucked her out of a friend's barn. She likes to sleep indoors at night but the rest of the time stays out hunting. She's not friendly, usually has a pissed-off expression, and uses more cursewords than I do. For instance, while she does like being petted, she spits and growls instead of purring. "Talk dirty to me, baby." Gus and the dog occasionally try to converse or play with her, but she'll have none of it, so most of the time they just ignore her, which apparently is how she likes it.

All flightsims need a good DM, a good FM, and at least decent graphics by contemporary standards. If you're making a game primarily intended for online play, you can pretty much stop at this point because the players themselves fill the roles of other game features. OTOH, if you're making a primarily offline game, then you also need a very good AI and campaign system because there are no other people involved to fill these roles for the one player. AIs that can do proper ACM and dynamic campaigns take an awful lot of work. Thus, ever since the invention of online gaming, most devs have taken the easy way out and gone that way. This started even back when you could only have 2-4 players in MP. And due to the limited number of planes, the devs could jack up the graphics as a selling point, even though there technically was no gameplay at all: zero offline and so little online that there was no point in it. Meanwhile, FPS games were taking off because they could be made by a few kids in their garage--no flight dynamics knowledge required, no real AI needed, and having only 2-4 players online was actually fun. So, given a choice between piss-poor flightsims and good FPS games, the guess where the customers went? That's why we don't have many flightsims to choose from these days. As to Cliffs of Dover, as I understand things, that abortion is the result of a publisher dictating release schedule to a developer. The devs had been working on it for many years but not with any real sense of urgency, so had they been left alone, it would have been several more years before it came out. But the publisher got tired of this and imposed a quick release date, forcing the devs to scramble to get a half-baked product out in the short time allowed. So naturally, a lot of planned features got cut and everything else wasn't near finished or tested. IOW, the initial release was WAY pre-alpha. I don't have "BoB the CloD" myself, but several of my friends do. They were in an IL-2 squad so were eagerly anticipating the release and are now most disappointed. They assure me that all the patches since release have been as unfinished and untested as the original game, creating almost as many new problems as solving old ones. The net result has been a general improvement but I'm told the game should still be considered a late alpha or early beta. And so, having struggled with it all this time, these guys have given up on it and are casting about for something else to play. Naturally, I've tried to steer them towards OFF but they like flying together so while 1 or 2 do OFF on the side, they're more interested in "the other sim".

Word to the wise.... When you kill a dragon, let it burn before you loot it. Last night I made the mistake of looting one immediately the "Search Frost Dragon" message popped up after the death blow. Although I got all the loot, the dragon never caught fire so I didn't absorb the soul. I'm thinking my looting interrupted the burning animation. I It's OK, though. I have plenty of souls in the bank and dragons I killed later burned properly if I let them. And it was kinda nice to have an intact specimen to study up close without it trying to bite me. They look very nice with all sorts of details on them that you miss during the heat of the battle. So if you can afford to waste a soul, you might want to give this a try yourself. In other news, when I got home to Whiterun late one night, there was a beautiful aurora and moon over Dragonsreach so I took a pic of it for my new wallpaper. Once I had it up, I realized I'd captured the other important things as well: the Talos shrine, the Skyforge, and Jorrvaskr. Damn--I should have realized that at the time and framed the shot to include them better. Oh well, I'll try it again another night.

She's quite well-behaved except when under the urge to dig overpowers her. Then you pretty much have to take a baseball bat to her to make her stop. She can pass herself off as a border collie at least on the behavior side, but obviously had some other things mixed in a few generations back. Note especially the short but very powerful front legs, which I think probably came from pitbull grandfather. Her front paws are about twice the size of her rear paws, which makes her tracks look like they were made by 2 different dogs. She also bays like a hound and has a more hound-like face than the foxy look of most collies.

We don't get enough snow down here on the bayou to count. However, we do have monkey grass, which not only is evergreen, but traps cool air under all its leaves. So, even on a 40^F morning, my dog still likes to plop down in it briefly between bursts of frenetic activity. This is Velocicanis cavitator, sometimes called Speckles, but I mostly call her Ofi Losa, which is Choctaw for "black dog". This dog has a gift for languages. being able to understand anything related to her, even indirectly, whether it's spoken in English, Cajun, Gaelic, Latin, or Choctaw. So when it's time to take her to the vet, we've been reduced to writing down our conversations and holding the paper so she can't see it But linguistic skills don't imply brains in other areas. For instance, despite several years of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this dog is still convinced she can dig faster than chipmunks can run through pre-existing tunnels. But I don't hold that against her because it's a common failing in all dogs. For example, she's not responsible for all this digging. A fox tried to dig down through the top of the stump and also did the damage to the roots. At least my dog is smart enough not to attempt digging through wood