ratralsis

[ratralsis]

A very long post about GalaxyCon and meeting people who will forget me within a week

I went to GalaxyCon Columbus yesterday, Friday, December 6, 2024. I took the day off of work.

I wanted to go on the first day, because the only actors I cared about meeting would be there on the first day, which was a Friday, as well as the other two days, but it started at 2:00. That's late enough in the day that it would be dark going home. I didn't want to drive home from downtown Columbus in the dark on a Friday night in below freezing weather.

So I took an Uber to get there, instead, because that was cheaper than a Lyft. It would have cost me $25 just to reserve a parking space, and I'm not sure if that includes the hours I'd have spent parked or not. So, while it almost certainly cost me more to get a ride than it would have if I'd driven myself, it wasn't by a lot.

The ride home was a Lyft, because that was cheaper than an Uber. Funny, that.

I don't know which rideshare service is more ethical. I gave a 30-35% tip to both drivers, which I hope makes up for whatever unethical part of capitalism I was supporting. I doubt it will be enough for some people, though, and they and I just have to live with that.

My Uber arrived at 1:05. It was scheduled to arrive at 1:15. My thought was that it would have been an 18-minute drive if I did it myself, so I'd get there at 1:33 and have ten minutes before it was time for me to get my registration at 1:45. Instead, I arrived at 1:15, because my Uber driver was very good. There was already a line to register when I arrived, so I got right into it.

I stood behind a kid probably a little under half my age who had a foam guitar shaped like an axe. I had to know, so I asked him if the axe was anything specific, or if he liked guitar axes.

"It's a character," he said. I asked him which one. "Marceline the Vampire Queen," he said, like it was obvious. It probably was, to him. I apologized and said that I'm probably a lot older than him and thus don't know fandoms very well these days, but I had watched Adventure time. "It's a great show," he said, and I agreed that it really is.

I made it through registration and got out of the line around 1:35, then into another line to get to exhibition hall D by 1:47. The guidebook I was given said that was where the actors would be for autographs. Around 2:00, it turned out that wasn't the right door, and the people I was waiting with weren't waiting in the right place. I had been waiting outside an exit-only door. People were pretty mad, but I didn't care much. I had my phone with me. I could have stood for an hour without being too bored.

I followed the group I was with to just outside of hall B, but decided to go use the restroom a little after 2:00. I figured I may as well, and it was obvious that there was no such thing as a line. We were nothing more than a mass of bodies loosely huddled near the doors to the halls. I checked my hat and glasses in the mirror in the bathroom. My hat is faded from years of wear and sweat and washes. It looks pretty bad. I should get a new one. It was too late for that now. I was going to have to accept that I'd have a shitty hat on when I met the actors I wanted to meet.

I'd trimmed my beard as neatly as possible on Sunday and Monday morning to prepare for meetings in the office on Monday. My hope was that enough stubble would grow in on my neck by Friday to make the line where the beard stops less stark and obvious, but not so much that I'd look like a neckbearded slob. I worry a lot about my beard. It's silly, and I should just get rid of it, I suppose. A few of my coworkers will shave once a week, or just use a beard trimmer without a guard once a week, and I think that's a valid way to go.

In any case, my shitty beard and hat went into the exhibition halls somewhere between 2:15 and 2:30.

If I'd had infinite time and money, and a VIP pass, I would have certainly stood in line to get autographs from Weird Al Yankovic and Roger Craig Smith (the voice of Sonic in the Dreamcast era) and Charles Martinet (the voice of Mario until earlier this year), but I didn't, so I honed in on the two actors I wanted to see the most: Cristina Valenzuela and Janet Varney. Neither were at their tables yet when I first arrived, so I walked around to the various stalls to see what I could.

Honestly, I wasn't that impressed. It's very much an anime/gaming convention, so most of the booths and artist stands were selling fanart of various works, figurines, shirts, or replica weapons. I didn't want any of those.

I don't know if this is haughty or snobbish of me, but the simple truth of the matter is that I don't really care much for fanart of something else. I saw a few really impressive One Piece artworks, and one or two amazing Zelda ones, but they all felt like imitations to me. I wanted to see artists drawing their own characters. I wanted to be shown something new, and original, instead of sexy drawings of the Hazbin Hotel cast.

There was a lot of Hazin Hotel art. There was a lot of Hazin Hotel cosplay. I haven't watched Hazbin Hotel. I watched a video about the series once that turned me off of it. It doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy. That's fine. It doesn't seem like it was meant for me to enjoy it. The older I get, the more I have to accept that things in this world aren't being made with me in mind all the time, and that's fine.

I didn't see any Dragon Quest art or merchandise, which made me a little sad, though. I do love Dragon Quest. I certainly didn't see any Dragon Quest cosplay.

I didn't cosplay, either, of course. I used to. I still have most of the costumes for a Travis Touchdown cosplay and a Dave's Bro cosplay. If you know, you know. And if you look hard enough in my closet, you can still find my pointy black triangular shades and my fingerless gloves. I don't remember if I threw out the wigs or not. Probably. But the cosplay options for a man my age are quite limited. I mean, obviously I could dress as whatever I wanted. I saw a guy in his late twenties or early thirties dressed as Vanellope von Sweets, and I complimented his impressive wig, with its little bits of candy stuck in it. I said it looked really good. "It has to be, if I'm going to get the job as the stunt double," he replied. I laughed. "Fair enough," I said, and wondered how many other people he would say some variation on that line to over the course of the weekend. I likely wasn't the first to hear it, and I was sure I wouldn't be the last.

But I don't particularly want to dress as Vanellope von Sweets. I'd rather just be the middle-aged man with the graying beard and the shitty, faded hat and the faded blue hoodie and the cargo pants and the generic black backpack. I'd rather just be nobody special, nobody impressive, a void of charisma who people are happier ignoring. Nobody minds if I'm there, but nobody's glad, either. That's the goal.

Anyway.

By 2:30, Janet Varney and Cristina Valenzuela were at their tables. Their tables were next to each other. There was a line for Cristina Valenzuela, so I walked around a bit more to see if it would go down. There had been a line before she'd arrived. Several of the people in the line were in Hazbin Hotel cosplay.

The line did not go down. By 3:00, I realized it wasn't going to, because that was the point in the day when people were arriving more quickly, and that meant that the line would only get longer. So, I got into Janet Varney's line, because there were only a few people in it, and she seemed to be having a great time talking to people.

I have no interest in explaining who Janet Varney or Cristina Valenzuela are, but they're easy to research online if you're interested.

There were only a few people ahead of me in Janet Varney's line. I spoke to her handler and bought a picture of Avatar Korra standing on a bridge overlooking a city that Janet Varney would sign for me for $60, and paid another $20 to get a selfie with her.

I got to speak with her a few minutes later. She was cheerful and had a small amount of glitter under her eyes that made her face sparkle. She's surprisingly tall, and thin. I could see in her eyes that she was as old as she is, but nowhere else. I told her I was just some guy, nobody special at all. She said she was sure that wasn't true. I told her that Korra had meant a lot to me and was inspirational because she starts off so strong and capable but she still can't do everything. She gets knocked down, but she always gets back up, and that means a lot. I said the show had meant a lot to me, though probably more to her, and she told me to "never say never." I said I hadn't seen it in a few years, but I was looking forward to rewatching it with her and Dante soon, like I'd rewatched Aang's adventures.

She asked what kind of bender I'd be. I had a long answer for this, honed over hearing her ask it of guests on her show many times. I'd be an earthbender. It's practical and solid. It's not flashy, but in a scenario where you need to use bending to survive, I think earthbending would be the most useful. Water and fire are things that someone clever can probably figure out, but earth is a hard thing to move around without special spiritual powers. And air, well, I don't see that being terribly useful except as a way to leave whatever environment I'm in.

But I said none of that. I just said "earthbender," and she said that was her favorite, and I said "Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good people in the fire nation," and she turned and spread her hands out and said "A loooot of good people in the fire nation," a reference to her show with Dante. She pointed out that she was wearing a Blue Spirit shirt. I hadn't noticed, but she was.

I got teary-eyed talking to her about how much Korra had meant to me, and she got teary-eyed, too, and said she couldn't start crying this early in the weekend. I laughed, and said I shouldn't, either. She said that she felt that she had to live up to the character, and that it had been an honor to voice her. I'm sure she meant every word.

She eventually signed the picture I'd chosen. She wrote a few extra words, and I warned her that I hadn't paid extra for that, so she was giving it away for free. The sign on the table said that if I wanted her to write a quote, it would cost me $20 for each six words. She didn't mind. We took our photos, and I thanked her again for being so kind to me.

She was incredibly kind, and incredibly generous with her time. I won't forget it. I looked awkward as hell in the photos with her, because I didn't how what to do with my hands or how to stand properly, so I kind of have my head tilted back too far. She asked permission before she put her hands on me, which I appreciated.

I really don't like being touched. By… anybody, really. But I didn't mind if it was from her, especially because she asked first. I don't always hate being touched. I just don't like it.

I felt a little awkward about getting into Cristina Valenzuela's line right after that, but if Janet Varney noticed, she didn't seem to mind.

Cristina Valenzuela's line was much longer. I got into it at 3:24. I got out almost an hour later, at 4:23 or so. At least twenty people went ahead of me, so the line did keep moving, except for a couple of points when Cristina wasn't there. She walked past me to the table a few minutes after I got into line, and then left when I was halfway through it to get water bottles for herself and one of the two handlers at her table.

The other people in line talked to each other to pass the time. Nobody spoke to me, and I didn't speak to anybody else, either. Once there were only a few people ahead of me, I did have to take off my backpack, squat down, and open it up to reveal the second backpack inside, a drawstring backpack. Inside of that was my Limited Run Games statue of Shantae that I ordered on July 8, 2022, and which finally arrived in the second half of April of 2024, that is, this year, twenty-one months after ordering it. It's a beautiful statue, but Shantae doesn't come off of the base, so I had to bring the whole damn thing. I wrapped her in bubble wrap and taped the bubble wrap, which turned out to be a terrible idea. It took me a while to discreetly remove the tape and the bubble wrap. I had the time, though, so it wasn't a real problem.

I made it to one of the two handlers. The prices weren't what I expected based on what I'd seen online. Like Janet Varney, there was a note saying that if I wanted a quote, it would be another $20. I didn't remember seeing that on GalaxyCon's website. Maybe it was there and I just hadn't noticed. I had also expected her signature to be $60, because the price was $60 for a picture from the table or for a "personal item." But it was $70 for a Funko Pop or a toy, and I had a sinking feeling that my statue counted as a toy. So I asked the handler if that was the case, and she said it was, and I said that was fine, I only needed to ask, that was all. She insisted I get it out to show to her, saying "If I see a nipple, I'm throwing it," in a joking tone that still made it quite clear that people had brought toys in the past with exposed nipples and she wasn't glad about it.

I remembered hearing Cristina Valenzuela on a podcast once, because I searched for it, and she said that she felt a little strange sometimes about young children wanting her to sign Miraculous Ladybug posters and then other people bringing in Helluva Boss posters with nudity or swear words on them right ahead of those little kids asking her to write an explicit quote.

"No nipples, I promise," I said, and got the statue out. I could have said something clever, like "What kind of guy do you think I am?" or "It's Shantae! She's cute! She's only supposed to be cute, I wouldn't bring a topless Shantae figurine here!", but I know what kind of man I look like. I look like the kind of man who owns a lot of nude anime figurines, because I do own a lot of nude anime figurines.

I once had a friend over who told me later that he had gotten a kick out of that one I had on my shelf of the sexy ninja girl. I sighed heavily and shook my head and told him he'd need to narrow it down if he wanted me to know which one he meant. "The one with the sword," he said, and I sighed again. His girlfriend laughed. But it was true. I have one of Asagi from Taimanin Asagi, which I bought at Comic Market in 2008 when I was living in Japan, and one of Shizuka from Queen's blade, and I thought he meant one of those. He actually meant my figurine of Kasumi from Dead or Alive, which I understood once he specified she'd had orange hair.

Anyway.

I got the okay from the handler, and she asked if I wanted a quote. I said I would, because I did, though it was only three words, or really just one hyphenated word. She asked if I wanted a selfie, and I said I did. This came to $110, but she started to tell me it would be $113.10, but then realized I was paying in cash and lowered the price back to $110. "You only live once," I said, handing over the money. "Count that again, though. I don't trust myself." "I don't trust myself, either," she said, the kind of practiced line that people like her say to everybody. "Then you certainly shouldn't trust me," I replied, because that's the kind of annoying thing customers say back. I used to work retail. I know how it is. I know the role I'm supposed to play.

Finally, I was face to face with Cristina Valenzuela.

I've gone out of my way not to follow her closely on Instagram or TikTok. I think I'm better off knowing as little about her as possible. In 2010, her English cover of the Touhou song "Bad Apple" made the rounds online. A lot of people didn't like it at the time, but I did, and it became a regular song I listened to in the computer lab my final year of college. I finished my Bachelor's degree in November of 2011, because I needed that final quarter to wrap up my classes and didn't care one shit about attending graduation because I'd already attended a college graduation in 2006 when I got my two Associate's degrees. I have three degrees, only one of which, the Bachelor's, is actually worth anything.

To any kids out there who've read this far: never get an Associate's degree in computer science. They're worthless. I'm not even sure that Bachelor's degrees in computer science are worth as much these days as actual certifications and proven experience, but that's neither here nor there.

I wanted to tell Cristina Valenzuela the story of how much her music had meant to me, even though I hadn't known it was her any more than I'd known it was her singing "A Hero Is Made," also known as "Rainicorn Ride," in the 2012 DS game "Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why'd you steal our garbage?!!", but it had been, and that song had brought a lot of smiles to my face when I listened to it across several years. I'm not sure when I learned her name or who she was, but it was certainly in the days when she was Cristina Vee and not Cristina "Vee" Valenzuela.

The sign above her table said "Cristina Vee" on it.

But I fell in love with her voice, a little bit, and when I recognized her voice, which was rare, it was a bit of a thrill for me to know she was still out there working as a voice actor and getting roles with companies from Disney to Nintendo to Rooster Teeth. In 2017, she played young Donald Duck in the DuckTales reboot. In 2023, she was Tulin in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. If you need someone to voice a young male bird, you could do worse than Cristina Vee, who has proven herself in that area multiple times.

When I played Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, which I helped Kickstart, though not to a high enough degree for my name to be in the credits, and heard her voice both Shantae and Risky Boots, it meant something. I thought that it was great that she was carrying all of the voicework for that game, even though the later DLC did add other voice actors.

I'd tried to follow her online, but it was a bad idea. I'm the kind of person who finds things and becomes obsessive, and I know myself well enough to know that's a terrible idea when it comes to real people. Also, when I did check her TikTok, I found a video where she described a mysterious noise that made her wonder if a ghost had made its presence known: a loud thump from outside that left a cloudy mark on her glass door.

That… that was a bird, Cristina Valenzuela. Birds are greasier than people think. They leave oily spots on windows when they collide with them. It wasn't a ghost.

I didn't leave a comment saying so. I decided it was best if I simply stayed away. I didn't want to learn that she had some problematic political views.

I just recently wrote a little about how betrayed and hurt I felt when I learned about the accusations against Neil Gaiman earlier this year. I didn't, and don't, want that with Cristina Valenzuela. Not that I think she'd do exactly what Neil Gaiman did, but I mean I don't want to learn some horrible thing about her that makes me think that I shouldn't be a fan anymore. Ignorance is bliss. I don't want to find out my fave is problematic, alright?

Also, she's hot as hell, and I was already in love a little bit with her voice, so I figured I should steer clear. I don't need to be pining after any celebrities.

What I did wind up telling her was a very truncated version of the story of how I found her music in 2010. I said I was fan from way back then, and I'd saved the song and listened to it in the computer lab in college. She thanked me, and I said "And now you're Donald Duck!"

"I'm Donald Duck!" she agreed.

It was a stupid thing for me to have said before asking her to sign my Shantae statue. She asked what quote I wanted. "Um, something like 'ret-2-go?'" I asked, that being a line from the games. It's a cute thing Shantae says, because she's trying to sound cool and failing. It's an abbreviation of "ready to go," as in, "I'm ret-2-go."

"A classic," she said, and wrote it in silver marker, because I asked her to. Then it was time for the selfie. She asked for my phone, and I said that was a good idea, and fumbled with it. She said she thought it might be cool to have something like a Polaroid instead, and I laughed along, feeling foolish as I tried to get the camera up. She snapped a photo of us together, holding the camera up very high, and I asked if we could actually get Shantae in the shot, and she agreed, taking a few more. My glasses were crooked in the photos. I looked awkward and tired, because I was. I'd been in line for an hour, and I was trying very hard not to tell her that I'd had a crush on her for ten years and being up close to her felt very surreal after all this time.

She's shorter than you might think. I knew she was short, but it was still something I thought about when she was taking the selfie of us together.

I thanked her again, and then it was over. I slid Shantae back into my bag, and went around to a pillar to put her bubble wrap back on. I had another two hours to kill before my Lyft would arrive, so I killed them. I didn't buy anything.

Around 5:25, I figured it was time to get ready to leave. My ride would be there at 5:50. On my way out, I saw a separate, smaller room that was labeled for 18+ attendants. A girl dressed as Ruby from RWBY was showing her ID to get the wristband to go in, so I stood behind her. Her costume was impressive. The scythe looked great. She went in ahead of me, and I asked what the room was about, since I hadn't heard about it, and the woman running the counter out from said I just needed to show ID to get in and I'd be good for the night. I laughed and said that I was flattered that, with all the gray in my beard, she'd still ask for ID.

I'm sure she asks everybody. that's her job. It's probably one of those things like when I worked as a cashier and I was supposed to ask anybody who looked like they might possibly be under 45. But I'm more than twice the required age to get into places that need you to be 18 to go in, and that's the kind of thing old people like me are supposed to say.

"I'm fifty," she said, in response. "Would you believe that?"

"Because you told me, I would," I replied. "Otherwise, no, probably not." She laughed, and I went in.

It was mostly cosplayers selling risque photos. One had a sign explaining that she was a Playboy Playmate and burlesque model, and that I should ask her about topless selfies. I'd already spent $190 on a pair of autographs and selfies. I had a hunch that, whatever she was charging for topless selfies, I couldn't afford it.

In the back was an artist with several binders that I hurriedly flipped through. I explained to the artist, a bored-looking woman, that I only had a few minutes before my ride arrived or I'd take my time. She said she'd be there until 2 AM, and I said no, I meant I had to go in fifteen minutes because of my ride. Oh, she said, well, she'd be there all weekend. I said I might be back, then, and then I looked up at her sign and saw that she was Sakimichan.

If you know, you know.

I said I'd been following her for years, though not that closely in the last few years, apparently, or I'd have noticed right away from the art that it was her. She seemed a little happy about that, but I probably blew it anyway.

I didn't really want any of her sexy nude drawings of Tifa or Aerith, though, to be honest. Like I said earlier, I'd have been much more interested in drawings of her original characters, but there were no such drawings available that I could find. I get it. It's profitable to do art of characters people recognize. Then you have your audience already there. You show up and say "You guys like Tifa, right?" and people say "Yeah, we sure do!" and you say "Well, I draw her naked better than most people do," and people say "That's great!" and you can sell your drawings.

I realize how rude that sounds, how condescending and dismissive, and I don't want for it to. If you want to make money as an artist, it's the smart thing to do. You draw what people want you to draw. You set up polls on your Patreon and you ask people what they want, and they pay you to draw what they want, and what they want is artwork of existing characters, so you hone your craft and become very good at it and you hopefully make money.

Artists who draw erotic art of their own original characters are few and far between, and often insulted online for it. That's just how it is.

In any case, Sakimichan is one of the best erotic artists, full stop, but I didn't want to spend $25 on a print of a nude video game character, and so I didn't.

I found my Lyft waiting for me outside a few minutes early, and I went home. I'll spare you the details of the ride.

I hadn't eaten since 10 AM, so I cooked a frozen Tombstone cheese pizza and stood at my counter in the kitchen and cut it with a pocket knife and ate the entire thing like a goblin, all 1360 calories of it, which is about how many I would have eaten if I'd had my normal lunch and dinner.

Then I went to bed a couple of hours later.

I don't have a point. There's no point to any of this story. I posted the selfies of myself with Janet Varney and Cristina Valenzuela on my Instagram here and here, respectively. Both actors were kind enough to even reply. Janet Varney replied with a simple heart emoji, and Cristina Valenzuela replied by saying that I hadn't been awkward at all and that it had been nice meeting me, which was a kind thing of her to say after I'd admitted in the post to my decade-long crush on her.

I think she understood that it was best not to comment on that part. I'm not dumb enough to think she would have. I'm shocked she replied at all. That was very kind and professional of her to comment on a photo from a weird middle-aged pervert like me.

Janet Varney's heart emoji was, perhaps, even nicer, though. I suspect she might actually be as nice in real life as she is on her podcasts. She's the kind of person I think I could be friends with, but I know I never will be, and that's fine. I'm happy just listening to her shows, especially her fangirling over the Avatar cartoons with other cast and crew.

And buddy, if Dante Basco had been there, you'd better believe I'd have written a post just as long as what you see above here about how I've had a crush on him for more than half my life. Dude was Rufio when I was in grade school. You think I can just pretend he wasn't?

This is the kind of thing I write for myself, so I'll remember it, like I wrote about Dragon Quest III a while ago. It's important to me to remember things. I spent $125 on the three-day pass I only needed for a single day and $50 for my rides there and back and $190 on the two autographs and selfies, making it an incredibly expensive day that bought me fleeting experiences. I want the memories of those experiences to last.

In the end, memories will eventually be all I have.

[ratralsis]

I beat Dragon Quest 3 HD 2D Remake (I guess that's how I should write the title?) today, by which I mean I rolled credits.

Now begins the real fun of the game: I already had two Thieves and a Monster Wrangler who'd class changed through all seven classes that learned skills (Gadabout, Sage, Merchant, Thief, Soldier, Martial Artist, and Soldier) so that they know all of them. Now I need to train up two more Thieves to do the same so that I have a team of four Thieves, so that I can farm seeds at maximum possible efficiency so I can have maxed-out stats on a team of four before I fight all the hidden bosses and unlock everything left in the post-game.

I have a lot more to say about the game, of course, but, well, in case you were curious, this is just how I like playing Dragon Quest 3.

[ratralsis]

It's my 12 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Ah... I guess it had to happen eventually.

I honestly felt, at the time, I was arriving rather late to the party.

[ratralsis]

I will always love Dragon Warrior 3

Dragon Quest III has a new HD-2D remake. I don't love the HD-2D style, if I'm being honest. 2D sprites on a 3D background never look right to me. They looked bad all the way back when I played Xenogears over twenty years ago.

In fact, I googled it: Xenogears came out on PS1 in 1998, so it was actually over twenty-six years ago. Pretty old fuckin' game, Xenogears.

Anyway.

I'm a big Dragon Quest fan. In 2018, I went to a Java One conference in San Francisco for work where I met a developer who worked for Square Enix. He'd just given a presentation discussing their use of Oracle technologies in some Final Fantasy mobile game or another that I'm sure has shut down by now. I approached him and his interpreter afterward to tell him that, because of the company I work for, security is our #1 priority when it comes to our data. How does Square Enix ensure that their databases are secure? Do they do automated testing? That kind of thing.

I got a pretty vague answer, but I wasn't unsatisfied with it. I shook the man's hand and told him, "実は、ドラクエのほうが好きだけど、" and he and his interpreter both laughed.

I'd just told him, "The truth is, I prefer Dragon Quest games, though," using the Japanese abbreviation "Dora Kue" instead of "Doragon Kuesuto." That way, he'd know I was actually a fan. Because I am, and that was a true statement. That's the kind of weird shit you learn when you spend time living in Japan. You can also learn it from the internet, of course. Maybe you just did, from me, earlier in this paragraph. I would be alright with that. Learning things on the internet is fun and easy and cool.

The first Dragon Quest came out in the US when I was very young, though it was called Dragon Warrior, of course. I was too young to be any good at it, because I lacked patience or a mind that could understand how to strategize even in a game where there was only one playable character. My dad played it, though, and I watched him. He played on weekends, because he didn't have time during the week. He named his character "Punky," as in "Punky Brewster," because he thought that was funny. It took us (that is, him) weeks to finish the game, but we (that is, he) eventually did.

I remember being terrified at the final boss battle. The Dragon Lord, the ultimate villain of the game, offers you half the world if you join him, and a Yes/No prompt actually appears.

Now, earlier in the game, you rescue the princess from a green dragon, and she asks you to take her back to the castle. You get a Yes/No prompt there, too, and if you say "No," she says "But thou must!"

"But thou must!" has become a cliche in the world of gaming for this reason.

So my dad assumed that the same thing would happen if you agreed to take half the world from the Dragon Lord. Thing is, it doesn't. Instead, he kills you, and the game ends. Decades later, that ending was used as the basis for the Dragon Quest Builders games, but, as a kid, it terrified me. Keep in mind that the game came out in August of 1989 in the US. Thirty-five years ago. I was five years old then. I might have been six by the time my dad played it, but come the fuck on, that's still pretty young.

We never played Dragon Warrior 2. We never had it. It wasn't until I was a teenager, and NES emulation was possible, that I played it. I never finished it, though, to be honest.

Dragon Warrior 3, though. That came out in 1992. I was eight. I already had an SNES, and Final Fantasy 2. But even at eight years old, Final Fantasy 2 was too much for me. I played it, but I didn't get very far. I literally couldn't find the entrance to one of the game's early dungeons. I won't say which one, because it's kind of embarrassing. It wasn't until I went back to it a couple of years later, at age 10, that I pushed through and finished the game.

I remember very clearly that I was in fifth grade, aged 10, because there was a snow day and I was all dressed to go to school when we found out about it and I went back to the TV to play Final Fantasy 2 instead. I was in the underground, going to the dwarven fortress.

Anyway. I didn't beat the first Final Fantasy game, on NES, until much later, too. I just wasn't good at RPGs when I was that young.

But in 1992, Dragon Warrior 3 was right up my alley. It's a simple game. It's a stupidly simple game. It has a plot that goes so far beyond simple that it's just plain stupid.

You start off at home, sleeping in your full armor, with sword and shield in hand, when your mother wakes you. She explains that it's your sixteenth birthday, and the first time that you'll go to the castle.

You go to the castle, and the king tells you that he's heard about your dad, who died, and how you're going to go die, too.

"It is said that the father Ortega met his end when he fell into a volcano's crater at the end of a battle." "We do hereby accept your petition to follow in the footsteps of your brave father."

He further tells you to get allies at the "eatery," hands you some money, and sends you on your way to kill Baramos, the archfiend, whose name most people don't know, and who is, somehow, going to conquer the world, I guess. And so, off you go. You can recruit three random dipshits from the "eatery," if you want, and you go save the world.

That's the plot.

There are a couple of twists once you kill Baramos. It turns out that there was a bigger Archfiend, Zoma, but he doesn't exist in this world. You have to find a big hole to jump into and find the world of darkness where Zoma lives, and then, once you're there, you find and kill him, too.

That's the end.

At eight years old, though, I loved it. The game came with an incredible manual that contained a walkthrough all the way to the ending, and a giant poster that showed illustrations for every single piece of equipment. I used to spend hours as a kid dreaming of how cool it would be when I finally had the best equipment for all my characters. I would try to find, looking over the poster, what all the best equipment even was. For example, the Zombie Slasher was the best sword for a Sage, as far as I could tell. Better swords existed, but Sages couldn't use them. And the Iron Mask was the best helmet for the hero. And the Magic Bikini was a surprisingly good piece of armor despite clearly being a joke armor.

You can find the poster at https://www.woodus.com/den/games/dw3nes/posters.php if you want. It's fucking excellent. My personal favorite is the Giant Shears, a weapon only Soldiers could equip, because of the utter (dare I say, sheer?) absurdity of imagining a character coming at an enemy with big scissors. Good luck finding the Giant Shears in the later re-releases! Someone realized how fucking stupid they were, I guess!

As a child, I struggled a lot with the game. I took a long, long time to get anywhere. I would grind and level up for hours. I tried a few different character classes, but I decided to take the advice from the manual and used a Soldier, a Pilgrim, and a Wizard as my main party.

The Soldier was Adan. The Wizard was named Matthias. Those were their default names. I named the Pilgrim Joel, after someone I knew from school. It was an all-male party, so I never got to use the Sword of Illusions or the Magic Bikini on my main party.

The hero? Oh, he was named for myself. I hated seeing the first four letters of my name, which is longer than four letters, in the battle menu. Matthias simply became "Matt," but Adan and Joel were untouched.

Adan leveled up faster than the hero did, which made me feel like he was the strongest in the party, and so he stood in the front for most of the game. It wasn't until much later, when I started swapping out characters to level up others, that the hero caught up. But when I first went to the town where you have to send a character solo through a dungeon, I sent Adan. That was a bad idea, it turned out. Adan, as a soldier, couldn't cast any kind of healing spells, so he just couldn't last long enough to make it through that dungeon. The hero could. The hero's meant to. You're meant to send the hero through there. I wound up sending the hero through it enough times to get him to the same level as Adan. I wound up going back later to do it again.

There's a point early on when the king of Romaly insists that you take his crown and become king. You can't refuse him. You have to do it. You have to track him down once you're the king and demand that he take his crown back, which he will, because it's an order from the king, that is, you.

You can go back and become king again later if you want. There's no point. You can't leave town when you're the king. You can't even access your inventory when you're the king. There are little joke responses to every menu option when you're the king that say you have no need to check your inventory or your status because you're the king.

But I was a little kid, and I thought it was funny as hell to go back and tell the king I wanted to borrow his crown and walk around being the king every so often. The only thing I could find that was of any use was that there's one NPC who will tell you that you can use certain weapons in battle to cast spells for free. He won't tell you that normally. Only when you're the king.

I remember visiting the home of a friend of mine and bringing Dragon Warrior III over. I don't remember how old I was then, but I met that friend in sixth grade, so it has to have been when I was, at the youngest, eleven years old. I'd been playing the game off and on for three years by then. I'd probably made it to the end of the game, but I'm sure I hadn't beaten it yet.

We killed an entire afternoon at the monster arena in Romaly, gambling on monster fights. It was fun. We probably lost more than we won, but I didn't mind. It was trivial to reset when we lost too much, and save when we won.

About a third of the way through the game, you unlock the ability to change the classes of anybody other than the hero. There aren't a ton of advantages to doing this in the original game.

Okay, let me break it down. There's the hero, but only one character, your starting character, can be the hero. The hero can't change classes, and nobody else can start as or become a hero. So let's not consider the hero any more when discussing class changes. In the original, there were six character classes you could pick from at the eatery when recruiting random dipshits:

The soldier: High HP, very strong, levels fast. The best at fighting. People often say that the soldier has the disadvantage of being expensive to equip, but that's stupid. Invaluable. You should have one.

The fighter: You'd think the fighter would have some kind of advantage over the soldier, but not really. People often say that the fighter's big advantage is that you don't have to spend so much money equipping them, but that's stupid. Later versions of the game included many more weapons and armor for the fighter that would close the gap between them and the soldier, but in the original, the Iron Claw was the best thing you could give the fighter to use as a weapon.

The merchant: Complete garbage. Can't cast magic, and isn't as strong as a soldier or a fighter.

The pilgrim: one of two classes who can cast magic. Casts healing spells and some buffs/debuffs. Can eventually revive dead characters. Invaluable. You should have one.

The wizard: the other class who can cast magic. Casts attack spells and some buffs/debuffs. Can eventually cast the "open" spell, rendering all keys meaningless, and the "day/night" spell, allowing you to make it nighttime whenever you want instead of having to fuck around walking outside. Invaluable. You should have one.

Goof-off: a joke character. Weakest in every way. Sometimes spends turns doing nothing. No value whatsoever. I mean it. None. Nobody can change to a goof-off, not even someone who used to be a goof-off and who leveled up and changed classes. You should never use a goof-off.

There comes a point later in the game when you need to bring a merchant to a place called New Town and abandon them there forever. They permanently leave the party. They never come back. That's the only use for a merchant as far as I am concerned. Some people will tell you that merchants are actually quite strong in the early game, and thus you should use one until you reach the temple where you can change their class into something else. I am telling you not to do this. I am telling you that there are exactly three good reasons to change a character's class.

One: you have an extremely high-level wizard or pilgrim who has learned every spell, and now you want to make them into a soldier. This will let them keep all of their spells, even though they will be terrible at casting them. See, changing your class cuts all your stats in half, so the new soldier's MP will only be half of what it was, and their spellcasting stats will be, too. They'll be bad at it.

Two: you have an extremely high-level wizard or pilgrim who has learned every spell, and now you want to make them into the spellcasting class they weren't. That is, you want your wizard to become a pilgrim, or you want your pilgrim to become a wizard. This will allow them to learn spells from both classes, and their spellcasting stats and MP won't be utter shit.

Three: you have a pilgrim or a wizard of any level and you want to use the one and only special book that exists in the game to turn them into a sage. The sage is a class that nobody can ever start as. They can learn every wizard and every pilgrim spell, and they can equip more weapons and armor than either wizards or pilgrims. They are the best class in the game. Choose wisely. My suggestion is that you turn your pilgrim into a sage.

Some people will tell you that there is a fourth good reason. Let me explain something to you. They were wrong.

They will tell you that you can level a goof-off to 20, the minimum to change classes, and then, when you go to change your goof-off's class, the option will be there to change them to a sage. This allows you to have as many sages as you want. This is stupid. Don't do this.

Here's the thing. Goof-offs don't gain MP when they level up, but they do gain intelligence, the stat which determines MP gain. See, when you level up in Dragon Warrior 3, the game looks at your character's level and determines, based on their class and their level, what their stats "should" be. If their stats are already above that level, they only gain one or zero points. So your level 20 goof-off becomes a level 1 sage, but has the intelligence of a level 10 goof-off. Until they surpass that point, your new sage won't gain intelligence.

But that means they also won't gain MP! Characters ONLY gain MP when they gain intelligence in Dragon Warrior 3! So your sage will NEVER have as much MP as they would have had if they'd started their life as a pilgrim or a wizard. They'll be a shitty sage.

You might think, well, it's better to be a shitty sage than no sage at all! And to that I say, FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU

As a kid, I never knew that goof-offs could become sages. Nobody tells you that in the game. You're just supposed to figure it out, or read a guide online, which I eventually did, many years later. I thought goof-offs were just fun little dudes. I created one and named her Goofus, because I thought that was funny.

I leveled Goofus to something like level 40. Because she was the only female character I regularly used, she got all the female-only equipment I found: the Sword of Illusions, the Magic Bikini. That kind of thing. I loved Goofus! She was great! Especially once she put on that bikini, because it actually changed her character sprite to make it look like she was suddenly a sexy bikini babe!

Sexy!

As a high schooler, I got access to the GameBoy Color remake via emulation. That was basically a crime, but hey, let's pretend it wasn't.

The GBC remake included a lot of new features. Among them, the merchant and goof-off classes got new spells that only they can use, and the new thief class was added. This means that, if you want a character who can cast every spell, you can't just use a sage.

There's only one thing you can do. You have to become a goof-off, then a sage, and also a merchant and a thief on top of that. Obviously, this is the right and good thing to do. It's the only smart thing. Doing anything else is simply dumb as hell, and you shouldn't do it. Also, all your characters should be female. There are female-only equipment items, but there no male-oonly equipment items. Your hero should be female, and so should all your party members.

They should end as thieves. Thieves increase the chances of items dropping from enemies, including the stat-boosting seeds, which means that you can, with a little patience, have a team of four level 99 characters, all of them with maxed-out stats, three of them thieves who can use every single ability in the game.

This is the only smart thing to do. This is what I did. Twice. Once on the GameBoy Color ROM I had as a high-schooler, and again as an adult on my Android phone when playing the mobile release.

Doing that makes the final bosses, even the postgame superbosses who didn't exist in the original game, pretty easy to beat. That's really what it's all about.

Some people might say, hey, that sounds very boring. You don't need to do that. You could beat the game with a merchant and a goof-off in your party if you want. You could beat the game solo if you want. But that's not the smart thing to do. The smart thing is to max yourself out.

I haven't played the HD-2D remake yet. I'll get my copy tomorrow. I wanted to wait until it was out for a few days before I ordered a copy. I honestly kind of wanted to wait even longer, until it was cheaper, because I don't have a lot of money right now. But I love this game.

I've loved it many times over the years. I credit it with my lifelong love of RPGs, and, honestly, a big part of my love of fantasy in general. Final Fantasy, the original game on NES, included warp cubes and robots and a fucking War Mech who could attack you with an ability called "NUKE." It was fantasy, but only on the surface. It eventually became sci-fi. But Dragon Quest never did. It stayed fantasy from start to finish.

You rummage around in a horse field in Dragon Warrior III to find the material you need to sell to a merchant so that he'll forge the Sword of Kings for you. It's the strongest sword in the game. Only the hero can use it. It didn't exist already. You have to make it exist. And then you go and you kill the strongest bad guy with it, and that saves the world.

There's a twist, at the end, that I didn't see coming as a kid. Maybe you know about it. Maybe the fact that Dragon Quest 3's remake is coming out before Dragon Quest 1 and 2, due to the fact that Dragon Quest 3 takes place first chronologically, gives you a pretty big fucking hint. As a kid, though, I didn't know that. I thought that it was really cool that I could go around gathering, and creating, my own legend as the strongest fucking guy around, even if I also had three other guys with me.

As an adult, I wonder what happened to those other three guys. I guess they didn't get to be legends. They just died in obscurity. So it goes.

But tomorrow, I'll play the game again. I'll name my female hero Nester, because Nester can be a girl's name, too, and because I made a promise 30 years ago to always name the main character of any offline game I play "Nester."

I will never explain this beyond what I just said.

My other three characters will be a Monster Wrangler, a Priest, and a Thief, because that's the best party I can think of. I could potentially make a Wizard instead of a Priest. Wizards can do more damage, but Priests can heal more damage. When I can change character classes, I'll make the Priest/Wizard into a Sage.

Eventually, they'll all become Gadabouts, and Merchants, too, to get all the abilities in the game. That's the goal. That's the only smart thing I can do. I'll have to find out if they all need to become Monster Wranglers, and decide if I want to have all of them end as Thieves or if I want one of them to end as a Monster Wrangler while the other two end as Thieves.

There's only one smart thing to do, and I'll find it, and I'll do it.

The game itself? Dumb as hell. I love it. I'll always love it. I have a sad feeling that I might play it again in another twenty or thirty years, when I'm an even older man, or retired.

The idea of sitting down at seventy years old and starting up the newest version of Dragon Quest III and naming my hero "Nester" honestly sounds kind of nice. I hope it happens.

I don't think anything I've said here would convince anybody in the world to play this game, but I wanted to explain myself when I had this rare opportunity.

[ratralsis]

I've made no secret of the fact that I live in Ohio.

I don't like to talk politics. All I want to say about the news today is that I did vote, and I hope we'll all be alright for the next four years, while at the same time knowing that a lot of people won't be.

Good luck out there, everybody. God willing, this post will age poorly.

[ratralsis]

Clocks winding down

A lot of people know this quote from Terry Pratchett's book "Reaper Man." It's the 11th novel in the Discworld series.

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

But I prefer this one, from the 14th novel, "Lords and Ladies."

“Then she wound up the clock. Witches didn’t have much use for clocks, but she kept it for the tick… well, mainly for the tick. It made a place seem lived in. It had belonged to her mother, who’d wound it up every day. It hadn’t come as a surprise to her when her mother died, firstly because Esme Weatherwax was a witch and witches have an insight into the future and secondly because she was already pretty experienced in medicine and knew the signs. So she’d had a chance to prepare herself, and hadn’t cried at all until the day afterward, when the clock stopped right in the middle of the funeral lunch. She’d dropped a tray of ham rolls and then had to go and sit by herself in the privy for a while, so that no one would see.”

It's fair to say that Pratchett was fond of remaking a point he'd made in an earlier novel if he thought he could do it better the next time around. A podcast I found recently, The Death of Podcasts, covers a Discworld book per episode and has a section where they count up cliches like "X happens to other people" and Pratchett's overuse of the adverb "gingerly." Pratchett wasn't a perfect writer, but he still wrote some of the best stuff around.

I needed to take some time to write out my thoughts when my cat Tina died in June. I'd had her in my life for over eighteen years, and it's not something I expect to ever fully be over. But there's work to be done, and I can't be having with spending time mourning a cat when the rest of the world insists on continuing.

At the end of every month, I had to order more cat food online, because Tina had kidney problems and needed a special diet to keep her going. Her kidneys are probably what killed her, based on the description I got from the vet who checked on her the morning before her death who told me that they could be felt through her skin and seemed like raisins. I always made sure to order enough so that I could have two months' worth when the new cans arrived. That way, if I couldn't order more one month for any reason, it would be alright.

The food came in boxes of 48, meaning I had to buy 24 days' worth at a time. When Tina died, I had 73 days' worth of food for her left. Two months and change.

Max could eat that food, too. So he did, at half the rate, because Tina wasn't there to help him. This meant that I had 146 days where Max was eating Tina's food. And that means that Tina's food ran out on October 29.

Now Max is probably happier with the food he gets. Now he gets to eat only his own special food, instead of the mix of his and Tina's that he'd been getting for the last fifteen months, since he went on his special food after his surgery last August. I talked to my vet about it before I started feeding him Tina's special kidney diet, don't worry. I talk to my vet about a lot of things. I spend a lot of money there, so they're generally very patient with me.

But as for me? I feel like the clock has wound down. The ripple has died away. It's one more way that Tina is gone from my life, even if I could cling to that little reminder of her for four and a half months after she was physically gone. And I did cry a little bit when that clock stopped ticking.

I still get little notifications on my phone reminding me of photos I took of her over the years, but because most of them are based on "Look back one year ago today" or something similar, I know that those, too, will taper off eventually. Life moves on. Memories fade. In much the same way that I don't talk about the cats I had before I adopted Tina, I'll someday stop talking about her, too.

Max just turned 15 years old last month. He's in good health. His teeth have some tartar on them, but they aren't decayed, and his gums are fine. He's a little chubby, but his vet tells me that it's better than being underweight at his age. He climbs and runs in circles to chase a laser pointer dot. The fact that he is anywhere from 76 to 83 in cat years, depending on which chart you check, clearly doesn't bother him any.

But the fact remains that he is very old. Tina made it to eighteen years and five months. She was at least 89 in cat years. I'll be surprised if Max makes it that long, but obviously I'd be grateful if he did. I have no interest in adopting another cat while Max is alive, and I think I'll need some time to get used to life without him before I go adopting another once he isn't.

This was a long weekend, partly because I didn't have anywhere to go and partly because of the time change making it one hour longer than every other weekend of the year. I've been thinking about this a lot, is my point, as I work on my novel and play video games.

[ratralsis]

So I definitely noticed that Neil Gaiman had stopped posting on Tumblr and Bluesky, but I didn't know why until just yesterday. I'm sure most people already heard, and it's easy to look up "Neil Gaiman allegations" or similar if you're as ignorant as I was.

It's… not a good feeling, for obvious reasons. If the reasons aren't obvious, you can check and see when I might have written about Neil Gaiman in the past, or that time he answered a question I had for him about a talk he gave that I paid money to watch online. So, yeah, I'm a fan. Or was, I suppose. I have no plans to burn my copies of his books or anything like that, but I probably won't go dedicating any of my novels to him.

I'm also pretty upset about how this seems to have massively truncated season 3 of Good Omens, a show I kind of enjoyed. I'm still a Terry Pratchett fan, and Neil Gaiman's stated motivation for wanting to make seasons 2 and 3 was to do right by Terry's original vision.

I guess I'm mostly just upset that so many things I've loved over the years have been canceled, ruined, or stopped short by the fact that the people behind them have had credible allegations made against them. Which is the kind of thing I say and realize could potentially be ambiguous, so let me be clear: it's not that I wish these things I've loved weren't canceled, ruined, or stopped short when the allegations came up. It's that I wish the people behind those things would stop doing things that lead to the allegations.

I don't normally say anything, because, seriously, in the long run, who cares that I'm sad that there haven't been any new videos from Jirard Khalil in a while and might not ever be again? He's a gamer on YouTube. But Neil Gaiman is one of the greats and has been for decades, even if I don't love a lot of what he's written. I'm pretty sure I'm on record, on this blog, as saying he's my favorite living author.

Well, that's life.

[ratralsis]

I don't normally say things like this, but look, I'm a huge Nintendo fan, have been literally since I was able to form memories, and that means I buy all kinds of weird Nintendo hardware, even the little Pokemon Go Plus+ so I can play Pokemon Sleep better, but I have to draw the line at a $100 alarm clock that senses my movements and stops ringing when I get out of bed like it's too goddamn hard to touch the clock I already have.

[ratralsis]

In other news, I'm a little under halfway through my final writing class where I rewrite pretty much my entire novel from nothing. This is the fourth one of those.

It's the one I've been writing about for years. The one where the main guy marries an orc at the end, though in the last draft it isn't made super explicit that they're married. They just live together and have a kid. I guess he does call her his wife, though. That's pretty explicit.

I'm so tired of rewriting this thing, especially the opening chapters. But I'm about to do it again, because my tutor wants me to.

I'm also tired of being told over and over that I'm telling and not showing when I say things like "She felt horrible" or "He was happy about that" in the prose. Like, I'm sorry, man. I like putting names to my emotions in real life. Can I at least do it for the autistim-coded character who absolutely would stop and think about what he's feeling at any given moment because that's what I do when I start feeling overwhelmed by an emotion? I put a name on it? It's some cognitive behavioral therapy shit I learned years ago, or something like it, I did learn it years ago as part of therapy, at least.

I'm just tired in general.

I got a new furnace and AC. It cost me thousands of dollars. I had to get a loan. I'll be making payments on it for the next two years. That's part of home ownership, baby. It took several more days than it should have because someone from the city had to come check the work of the HVAC guys who installed it and he found a dang ol' gas leak in my basement, which, HEY, that's fucking terrifying. But it's fixed now. The guy came back today and verified it and everything.

It all sucks so bad.

If I keep automatically contributing to my 401k at my current rate, I might be able to afford to retire in my 60s, though, assuming I can keep working for that long. Assuming that the world is still inhabitable for me at that point. I honestly wonder sometimes, but who doesn't, these days, other than people already in their 60s or above?

I have no faith that my novel, when I finally publish it after half a dozen years or more of working on it, will sell even a hundred copies. It'd be cool if it does, and I'm going to work hard on it and hope that it does, but I don't think it will.

It doesn't even have a title and I've been working on it for four and a half years already. Christ.

Alright. That's all for now.

I have good days and bad days.

[ratralsis]

I am also, it's worth noting, basic enough that I quite like the new Zelda game. It's cute and it's fun. Whee!

Player Agency and the Utter Lack Thereof

I just don't understand Case of the Golden Idol. I spent a few days playing it, made it to the end, didn't buy the DLC. Just did the main story. And I don't get it. I've never played a game that seemed so uninterested in me as a player in my life. At no point did I ever feel that I had any agency whatsoever, and that's a new feeling from a video game.

If you aren't aware, it's a game often described as being a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn in that you look at scenes and determine, using logic and deductive reasoning and process of elimination and more than a little guesswork, how to fill in the blanks in a notebook which describe them.

It's unlike Return of the Obra Dinn in that Return of the Obra Dinn had you playing as an actual character whose actions meant something. In Case of the Golden Idol, nothing you do means anything. Nothing you do affects anything. Nothing you do changes anything. Your task is not to play as a character in this world. You cannot fail. You cannot succeed. You only fill in the puzzles and move on to the next one. And I've never, ever seen a game do that quite so hard as Case of the Golden Idol.

You can argue, well, in Obra Dinn, you weren't REALLY much of a character. But you were! You were the insurance guy, with a fucking magic watch, and you were trying to provide closure to the families of those who died at sea!

In fucking Mario Picross on SNES, you talk to Mario and Wario after a certain number of stages and they congratulate you, the player, for doing the puzzles! Case of the Golden Idol won't even do that! You're nobody! Nobody congratulates you, because there's no "you" to congratulate!

You start Case of the Golden Idol and everything unfolds in the specific way that it was meant to. That it was always meant to. That it, in fact, already did. You have no influence over things. There are no decisions. As a player, you open the game, view a scene, and then describe it to yourself. Once you've described it accurately, you move on. You're not telling it to someone to illuminate the mystery of the events. Characters in the story know the events. There are witnesses, living people, in just about every scene who can tell you what's going on. But you can't interview them, or ask them. They don't know you're there. They weren't being recorded surreptitiously by someone. They're just existing in the world of Case of the Golden Idol, and you're…

I don't know who you are. I don't know why you're doing this. Any of it. You can't stop what happens. The game just ends, abruptly, in the only way a game about a Golden Idol can end, which I won't spoil in case you haven't finished it yourself and you'd like to.

It left me scratching my head and wondering why the game was so loved. I guess people like puzzle games, and I kind of, do, too, but I felt nothing when Case of the Golden Idol was complete. It's why I didn't buy the DLCs. It's why I won't buy the sequels.

Even fucking Sudoku puzzles can be fun if you're aiming for a record time. Tetris lets you compete against yourself for better scores. You can't keep playing more Case of the Golden Idol puzzles hoping for a faster time or higher score, because each one is so unique to itself that there's no way to redo them.

So I can't compare it to stumbling across a random Sudoku puzzle on the ground which you play and then walk away from. It's not even that. It's more like finding a 10-page short story that has a quiz at the end of every page that makes sure you understood what you've read so far before you can move on to the next page, and then it ends.

I just don't get it. I guess, for some people, the quiz itself is fun enough to make the framing device worthwhile, but the framing device is the heart and soul of a video game to me.

Anyway, that's my take. If you liked the game, awesome! It's well put-together and I'm glad it exists even if I don't understand it or like it and I wish the developers well. There exist many things in this world which are simply not for me. The older I get, the more of them I find, and that's just the way it is.

[ratralsis]

Player Agency and the Utter Lack Thereof

I just don't understand Case of the Golden Idol. I spent a few days playing it, made it to the end, didn't buy the DLC. Just did the main story. And I don't get it. I've never played a game that seemed so uninterested in me as a player in my life. At no point did I ever feel that I had any agency whatsoever, and that's a new feeling from a video game.

If you aren't aware, it's a game often described as being a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn in that you look at scenes and determine, using logic and deductive reasoning and process of elimination and more than a little guesswork, how to fill in the blanks in a notebook which describe them.

It's unlike Return of the Obra Dinn in that Return of the Obra Dinn had you playing as an actual character whose actions meant something. In Case of the Golden Idol, nothing you do means anything. Nothing you do affects anything. Nothing you do changes anything. Your task is not to play as a character in this world. You cannot fail. You cannot succeed. You only fill in the puzzles and move on to the next one. And I've never, ever seen a game do that quite so hard as Case of the Golden Idol.

You can argue, well, in Obra Dinn, you weren't REALLY much of a character. But you were! You were the insurance guy, with a fucking magic watch, and you were trying to provide closure to the families of those who died at sea!

In fucking Mario Picross on SNES, you talk to Mario and Wario after a certain number of stages and they congratulate you, the player, for doing the puzzles! Case of the Golden Idol won't even do that! You're nobody! Nobody congratulates you, because there's no "you" to congratulate!

You start Case of the Golden Idol and everything unfolds in the specific way that it was meant to. That it was always meant to. That it, in fact, already did. You have no influence over things. There are no decisions. As a player, you open the game, view a scene, and then describe it to yourself. Once you've described it accurately, you move on. You're not telling it to someone to illuminate the mystery of the events. Characters in the story know the events. There are witnesses, living people, in just about every scene who can tell you what's going on. But you can't interview them, or ask them. They don't know you're there. They weren't being recorded surreptitiously by someone. They're just existing in the world of Case of the Golden Idol, and you're…

I don't know who you are. I don't know why you're doing this. Any of it. You can't stop what happens. The game just ends, abruptly, in the only way a game about a Golden Idol can end, which I won't spoil in case you haven't finished it yourself and you'd like to.

It left me scratching my head and wondering why the game was so loved. I guess people like puzzle games, and I kind of, do, too, but I felt nothing when Case of the Golden Idol was complete. It's why I didn't buy the DLCs. It's why I won't buy the sequels.

Even fucking Sudoku puzzles can be fun if you're aiming for a record time. Tetris lets you compete against yourself for better scores. You can't keep playing more Case of the Golden Idol puzzles hoping for a faster time or higher score, because each one is so unique to itself that there's no way to redo them.

So I can't compare it to stumbling across a random Sudoku puzzle on the ground which you play and then walk away from. It's not even that. It's more like finding a 10-page short story that has a quiz at the end of every page that makes sure you understood what you've read so far before you can move on to the next page, and then it ends.

I just don't get it. I guess, for some people, the quiz itself is fun enough to make the framing device worthwhile, but the framing device is the heart and soul of a video game to me.

Anyway, that's my take. If you liked the game, awesome! It's well put-together and I'm glad it exists even if I don't understand it or like it and I wish the developers well. There exist many things in this world which are simply not for me. The older I get, the more of them I find, and that's just the way it is.

[ratralsis]

It's a uniquely unpleasant feeling taking an edible and then rewriting the most violent chapter of your novel in which the main antagonist strangles one guy to death, kills two more with an axe, and stabs a fourth to death after many, many punches to the face.

Depiction is not endorsement, and all that, but I still think this was a poor choice on my part.

[ratralsis]

An Uncontroversial Take

So I think we pretty much all agree on this, right? That the song that plays in Mega Man II when you first enter Wily's castle is the best song?

It's a game about an old man who wants to take over the world using an army of killer robots led by eight REALLY STRONG robots while he hides in his castle protected by SEVERAL OTHER STRONG robots, and another old man who's going to stop him by sending out the VERY BEST STRONGEST robot, and you play as that robot, who is a little boy with the last name "Man" and a gun that shoots solar-powered energy bullets, and the little boy robot blows up all the other robots, all of them, with his gun because he is the strongest robot that there is, and the old man who wants to take over the world is reduced to begging for his life in the face of the little blue boy's unstoppable onslaught.

It's the sequel to a game with the same plot. It has a lot of sequels with the same plot.

It has the best song. It's sort of tucked away towards the end, but not at the very end.

I know we all know all of this already, but sometimes I think it's important that I say things that are true instead of just making things up all the time.

[ratralsis]

I finished the third draft of my book a couple of days ago. The next class starts in nine days.

I'm going to try to proofread as much of it as I can in that time, polish it up a little bit more, make the descriptions make more sense, that kind of thing. I'm catching a lot of typos.

I kind of think of this as the "first draft of the third draft," though I know that doesn't make a lot of sense. Basically, I wrote the whole thing from start to finish, but I didn't go back to edit anything after I wrote it. I just wanted to write it. I did the same thing with the second draft.

It's about 100,000 words, so I don't think I can proofread it in such a short time.

Anyway… writing 100,000 words in eight or nine months isn't really anything all that special. Lots of people do it, and do it better than I do it.

I'm still not sleeping as much as I should. I'm working on it. I'm trying to at least be in bed by 10:00 most nights. I'm up at 5:00 every morning, without exception, so that means seven hours in bed each night. An attainable goal. A reasonable goal. It's not easy, though. It should be, but it isn't.

It's the kind of thing I get mad at other people about. It's like when people ask me how I managed to lose weight and keep it off when, statistically, that's literally impossible. As in, the number of people who manage it rounds to zero percent. But I did it. And all I can say is "diet and exercise," because that's the truth. And I've had people respond to that by saying it's just so hard, you know? Like when the family wants to have pizza for dinner, right? And I shrug and say "then only eat one slice of pizza and go to bed hungry, I don't know what else I can tell you," because I don't. That's how I did it.

It's very easy for me to apply that same logic to my sleep problem: "Just go to bed earlier, what the fuck, man. You gotta spend less time playing video games or something, I don't know, get the fuck off your computer and just go to bed."

It's just so hard, you know?

We all have problems, I guess.

I honestly can't recommend my diet method to anybody, for the record. I fucked up my ability to feel hunger. I can go all day without eating without noticing that I'm hungry. I can eat a huge amount of food without noticing that I'm not hungry. I have to be very careful, these days, about what I eat and how much I eat, because my body just doesn't give me the right signals anymore. I see the advice "listen to your body" a lot when it comes to people with eating disorders, but I genuinely don't know how to do that. I'm not sure I ever did.

…We all have problems, I guess.

I've spent the last couple of months, ever since I finished watching all of those Marvel live-action shows I mentioned shortly before my cat Tina died, trying to find new shows to watch while I work out in the morning. I rewatched "Gravity Falls." It holds up. I still like that show quite a lot. I've made it a thing, in the past, of finding lines from things that go far, far harder than they have any right to. I hope to steal them for my own usage someday. For example, in the novel I just wrote, there's this exchange:

“If we don’t surrender, we’re going to have to fight them. We’re going to have to kill them.”

“I didn’t come this far to lose.”

Those are two different quotes mashed together from two different sources, with the serial numbers filed off. So you can't just punch them into a search engine to find out where I got them. I guess you could still punch them into a search engine, but I did, and the original quotes didn't come up, so, good luck to you, I guess.

Anyway, the line "Turn around and look at me, you one-eyed demon," from the final episodes of "Gravity Falls," is one of those good lines. I'm not sure how I can steal it yet, but you can rest assured that, if I live long enough, I will.

I'm not gonna give context or explain why it's a good line. Either watch the fucking show or don't, is all I can say. Then you'll either get it or you won't, and my explanation won't tilt the scales one way or the other.

I also got around to watching "Over the Garden Wall" at long last. I'd watched the first episode years ago, when it was much newer, and really didn't like it. I didn't like it this time, either. I didn't like the show. It wasn't fun or interesting to me. I think it relied far too heavily on the idea that I'd like the way it looked and sounded, and I didn't, so the shoe-string plot didn't impress me.

Still, the last couple of episodes did have some good lines. "I wasn't much good to him alive, either" got a grin out of me, and dual attempt at saying "Are you?" is pretty goddamn good.

But I fucking hated Greg from episode one to episode last, and I won't apologize for it. He really ruined the series for me.

Well. I'm pretty tired. Let's wrap it up.

I still want to write what I said would over a month ago about those Marvel shows, but the longer I wait on it, the less passion I have on the subject. So I'll say this: I think that all of them had a lot of potential, and that none of them deserved to get additional seasons after their cliffhanger endings, from Iron Fist ending with the idea that Danny had found a new way to channel his chi energy into a gun to Peggy Carter ending with some guy getting shot in his hotel room by some other guy. They were perfectly fine shows, solid 7s out of 10, but I sure as hell wasn't left wanting more.

Most recently, because Disney+ keeps telling me about all the Hulu shows I could be watching, I switched to Hulu and tried really hard to find one of the many anime shows they were promoting to watch. I really hate isekai stories, which limits me much more severely than I would have ever expected, but I made it through a couple of episodes of "Yozakura Family" before I decided to read the manga and WOW does that manga turn into magically-powered shounen craziness a lot faster than I would have expected. It's fucking nuts, man. But I'm also over a hundred chapters into it, so I must not hate it, I guess!

I made it all the way through Dragonar Academy, another show that I'm genuinely glad only had one season. It's the worst kind of anime cringe, and I couldn't help but laugh at how far it went out of its way to try to turn me on by having all its female characters get their clothes blown off or removed at every opportunity. It's the kind of show that my younger self would have been embarrassed to talk about, but now I'm an old man who can unironically say that I thought it was a great example of a good bad show. The kind you can only laugh at because it's trying so hard to be a good show and failing so fucking hard.

Currently, I'm almost at the end of the first season (of four) of the 2012 Ultimate Spider-Man series. The one that had Drake Bell play Spider-Man. I like Spider-Man, and, even knowing his recent legal problems and his genuinely tragic past, I really don't have anything against Drake Bell. I mean, I don’t like what happened to him or what he did, but it looks to me like he’s trying. I might be wrong. I’m in no place to judge, though, is the point.

And, you know, a dumb kid's show about teenage Spider-Man is really the kind of thing I like to have playing on TV when I work out.

Hopefully I'll find something else when this one runs out.

There we go. Wrapped it up.

[ratralsis]

Sorry I still haven't written anything that I promised a couple of weeks ago. I'm still working on the ol' novel, and the thousands of words I spent writing about Tina after her death might count for something. I dunno.

If I can manage to get my sleep schedule back to something resembling its previous normal soon, and get a little further ahead of schedule on my progress on the novel, I'll try to write what I hoped to write earlier for this blog.

Tina used to be pretty demanding that I go to bed before 10 PM. I actually had a decent handle on it for a while. I'm gradually getting my bedtime slightly earlier again now, but after she died, I was definitely up pretty late for a few days because I wasn't looking forward to going to bed without her. Which I realize is absurd, but it's still the truth.

If you missed the earlier posts on the subject, Tina was my cat. She wasn't, like, a human lady I lived with who dragged me to bed every night and slept next to me. She was a small cat who demanded I go to bed every night and then came and went several times throughout the night but almost always was there when I first fell asleep. Now she's not, because she's dead, and I let the vet who came to my house to euthanize her take her away for cremation and to scatter her ashes. I do still have Max, but he has never been good at sleeping next to me at night and, at fourteen years old, I don't think he's likely to learn now. He might, though! He's also never been the only cat in the house before. He and I are both still getting used to that.

I spent the last few months playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on my Switch off and on. Much like I did with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, I finished the game and then figured out a way to grind for resources without actually needing to play the game, which inflated my playtime by over 100 hours, but I still put over 200 into the game. That includes all the DLC. I liked the gameplay, though I honestly never really connected with the characters that much. I don't have a specific reason why not. I just didn't like them or care about them nearly as much as I did even in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. But the game itself was fun, and I really did enjoy the postgame Archsage Challenges and learning how to build party compositions that could tackle the hardest challenges. It took me a lot of tries to finish the 140th stage of the Gauntlet on Hard mode, but I did it, and then I did it again, and then I bought everything I wanted from the store where you use the currency you earn in those challenges and I realized I was done playing the game.

Since I did back it all the way back in 2020, I've decided to try playing Eiyuden Chronicle. I started it yesterday. So far, I don't like it much, but I said the same about Xenoblade Chronicles 3 when I first started it, too. But Eiyuden Chronicle has two big things working against it: I hate the way it looks, and it has really bad performance issues on Switch. Neither is a surprise.

I've always, always, always hated the way it looks when 2D sprites are in a 3D environment. That was true from Xenogears back on PS1 up to Octopath Traveler. I just think it looks jarring and bad. The camera moves slightly and the background moves and the character sprites can't and it just looks dumb to me. I can't get past it. I'm not at all looking forward to the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III (and possibly the first two games, as well), but I'll probably get it, because I love Dragon Quest III enough to have played nearly every version of it already, even the untranslated Japanese Super Famicom version. My Japanese is probably at the level of a 9-year-old native speaker, but believe me when I tell you that that's good enough to play Dragon Quest III, because I did it.

It's also good enough to tell you that the localization for Eiyuden Chronicle takes some pretty serious liberties in its translation of the Japanese dialogue into English, but I honestly don't mind that part. I think it goes a good job of turning the subtext from the Japanese dialogue that would be understood from context and tone and turns it into text that an English reader can understand, which is the most important thing. Anybody who complains about the localization would be better off spending that energy studying Japanese themselves.

Anyway, I got sidetracked. Point is, I'm still around. I'm feeling better than I was a week ago. I'm still writing, just not here, and I'm holding down my job and doing everything I need to do and playing video games on the side and so on.

[ratralsis]

This is probably the last I'll be posting about Tina, at least, for now. So if you're tired of reading about my old dead cat, then, hey, no worries, bud. I get it.

I wanted to see if I had any way to get to even older photos of Tina than the ones I posted yesterday. Obviously, I didn't take any photos of her before those. I couldn't have. They were the first photos I took of her. That's sort of how those superlatives work. Nothing can be earlier than the earliest. But I hoped that, maybe, my mom did.

My mom, you might recall from how I mentioned that I didn't take a day off of work when she died, is dead. She died in November of 2021. It took me until August of 2023 to realize I no longer missed her, but that is a story for another day. What's important is that my mom used to take tons of digital photos, and she was fanatical about backing them all up. After she died, I bought a bunch of flash drives and I copied all of the photos and documents I could from her computers (plural) and her phone (singular) and her various camera memory cards (plural again) onto them all. Well, by that I mean that I bought flash drives that were large enough that each could fit all of them. I kept one for myself. Then I transferred all of the photos onto two others, one for my dad and one for my sister, though I took out some of the photos that were ones I'd sent to her myself. My dad and sister didn't need those. I sent those to my mom so she could have them, not share them around. Then I took a bunch of old photo albums that my mom had kept and I scanned them, and I put all of those photos onto each flash drive, too, including the ones that didn't have any other photos on them, and I gave the ones that only had the photo album photos on them to my mom's surviving relatives.

I think, in total, there were about seven flash drives? I forget. One for me with everything, ones for my dad and sister with everything except photos I'd sent to my mom myself, and ones for my mom's relatives.

Hidden among the folders on the flash drive that I have, and hopefully only on that one, though I'm not sure, was a folder labeled "Ratralsis's Kitten," though, obviously, it was my real name, not Ratralsis. If you've followed me long enough, you know my real name, and if you haven't, then fuck you, I'm not gonna write it here. I'm not even sorry!

It had photos from February and March of 2006, and, given that I adopted Tina on February 14, 2006, that meant these were the first photos taken of her after she was adopted. It's possible that her previous owners took photos of her before they gave her away, but I doubt it, and if they did then I will never know.

This is the very first photo of Tina, from February 15, 2006, the day after she became my cat and got the name "Tina" from me.

And here are a couple others from that same day. I really and truly could fit her in the palm of my hand. That wasn't a joke. She had a big personality even then, as you can see from that lucky photo that shows all of her perfect little pointy teeth as she makes her opinions to me known. She also already had those beautiful green eyes, though they weren't fully green yet. The green was still working its way out from her pupils. And she had giant ears, which she never fully grew into.

The cat I had before Tina used to climb onto the bed with me at night and lick my ear. She'd either lick my earlobe or the top of my ear. It seemed random. She'd do it for so long that she'd rub the skin off, and I'd wake up with scabs from where she'd made me bleed. I didn't like it, but I didn't know how to make her stop, so I just tolerated it. That was the price of having a cat who loved me, I supposed.

I have no regrets about that. My only regret regarding that cat was how I watched her die over the course of a month, and I believe I've already written about that.

The first night that I had Tina, she didn't have a name. I sat with her that evening and wondered what I should call her. I asked her what she thought of a bunch of different names. "Tina" was one of them, and as soon as I said it, I knew it was hers.

"What about Tina?" I had asked her, exasperated.

"Okay," she'd told me, in her cat way. "Tina's my name, then."

"No, no," I had said. I had wanted to backpedal away from that name. "Tina's a stripper name. We can't call you that." I remember having that thought very specifically.

"My name's Tina now," she had told me, this six-week old kitten, and it was the truth. Her name was Tina from then on.

When I went to bed, she slowly walked her way up to the side of my head and licked my ear in the same spot that the previous cat had. She'd died a couple of months before I adopted Tina. She died within days of Tina being born.

I cried when Tina did that. It reminded me too much of the previous cat, whom I loved terribly. I haven't found any good photos of her in my mom's collection yet. If I do, I may share them.

I found some bad ones. I found ones of her when she was old and tired and her fur was matted. She had longer hair than Tina did. Here's the best one I could find, which shows her face, and you can see some of her matted hair, because she needed to see a groomer and never got to, and her green eyes. I guess I have a thing for cats with green eyes. Max has green eyes, too, though his have more yellow than Tina's.

But when Tina licked my ear that night in the exact same way as the previous cat, I cried, because I knew in that moment that she'd won, and she was going to be my cat forever, and I was going to love her for every minute that I could, and I would be there for her when she died, however far off that would be.

I was right. I was there, eighteen years and just shy of four months later.

Tina never liked being held. She would growl and complain if I held her for too long, and I would tap her on the nose if she tried to attack me. It was the only bit of training I ever successfully gave her: she learned to never claw or bite me when I picked her up and held her. Even if I held her on her back, like a baby. She would growl. She would even hiss, sometimes. And she would certainly yell. But she never attacked me, because she knew I would never actually hurt her, and that I'd put her down before long. I always did. I tried very hard not to abuse the poor girl.

The first year of her life, one of her favorite things was to attack her own tail. I would pick her up, flip her onto her back, and her tail would flip up and between her legs to cover her belly. Then she would see her own tail and attack it. I was fine with that. I encouraged it. I loved seeing her grab and bite her own tail. I would sometimes grab her tail and move it around, and she'd have so much fun attacking her tail.

The first time I brought her to the vet for a checkup, when she was less than a year old, the vet expressed concern about Tina's tail. She wanted to know why Tina's tail looked like the fur on the end had been trimmed. I said I didn't know. I did, though. I knew why.

Tina went into heat once, and only once. I panicked when it happened. It happened earlier than we expected. I was so upset. I worried that it made me a bad owner. If you spay a cat before she goes into heat, it lowers the risk of health problems, like certain cancers. I spent the rest of her life knowing that if she ever developed cancer, it was because I'd failed her when she was only a few months old.

She never had cancer, as far as I know.

It's memories like those that I want to hang onto most of all. Memories from when I first had her, from when she was young, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and she was surrounded by other cats. I forget exactly how many other cats lived with her back then. I think five or so. When I took her from that house with me to the city I live in now, she went from being one of five or six cats to being the only cat. She was the only cat for about a year.

She had one close friend while she was with my parents. A big male cat, who was neutered by the time she was born, of course, but who she desperately wanted to mate with the one time she went into heat. I caught him awkwardly trying to mount her a couple of times and eventually locked her in my room. Obviously, it wouldn't have resulted in a pregnancy, but I genuinely disliked that cat and didn't particularly like the idea of him fucking Tina whether he had working balls or not.

As far as I know, Tina died an 89-year-old virgin, which is probably the best that a cat like her can hope for, I guess.

But Tina lived as the only cat in my small apartment for a year, and then I adopted Max, and she hated that. I did a bad job of introducing him to her. I should have, it turned out, spent at least a day or two with them in separate sides of the apartment, gradually getting used to each other's scent. I didn't do that. I couldn't do that! The apartment was fucking SMALL, alright? What was I supposed to do, lock Max in the bathroom?

Tina hissed and growled and lost her damn mind when she saw him for the first time. She never got used to him. She always saw him as an intruder. She hated him for the entire time we lived there.

Then we moved to a new apartment, not much bigger but certainly much nicer, in a nicer part of town where there weren't roaches that I had to take care of myself or floorboards that were sinking into the apartment below and revealing nails under the kitchen cabinets or people literally being shot and killed in the building across from mine in drug deals gone bad. It wasn't a great place!

When Tina and Max were both moved to a new place together at the same time, Tina could no longer see Max as an intruder into her home. That last apartment had been hers and hers alone. Max was just some asshole who showed up. But now she was just some asshole who showed up, too! Suddenly, they were on equal footing.

She still didn't like him, but she had to stop growling at him and being angry with him at all times. She calmed down. Max was happy about that, too, I think. Suddenly, he could try to play with Tina and not be immediately attacked as soon as she came into the room.

They never once shared a sleeping spot. All those cute photos of cats cuddling together and sleeping wrapped around each other? Tina and Max never, ever did that, even once. The closest they came was when they both slept on different parts of me at the same time, which was still really wonderful.

But I wondered if I'd done her a disservice in adopting Max. I wondered if I'd done Max a disservice in adopting him, too. But given how many thousands of dollars I've spent keeping Max alive as long as I have through his various troubles, such as his multiple surgeries for everything from the removal of a large lipoma (kind of like a tumor made of fat cells) and a urinary blockage (mucus plug in his bladder that made it impossible for him to urinate and would have killed him in under 24 hours), I doubt he'd have found someone else who'd have kept him alive as long as I have. Whether that's a favor or not is up to you to decide, I suppose. And maybe God, if God cares about that kind of thing. I'm not entirely sure God does.

In any case.

Those are the memories of Tina that I wanted to share tonight. I've now shared photos from the first week I had her and the last, and told more stories than I had any business telling.

But I had Tina longer than I had Tumblr. Longer than I ran @megatownac, or even played Animal Crossing on the 3DS. Remember, the 3DS launched in American in March 2011. I was actually living in Virginia at that time, and Tina was living with my parents. She was five years old.

When I was getting my Bachelor's degree, I lived on campus, because campus was a 90-minute drive from where I was living. I could go home on weekends, or at least every other weekend, and I would, of course. I'd do laundry and shop for groceries and things like that, then come back to my dorm (or apartment, my last year and a half) with a hamper of clean clothes and bags of food to last me until the next time I could go home.

Tina would always act very cold to me when I came home to visit her for at least one day. If I came on a Friday, she'd wait until Saturday night to be friendly to me again. If I came on a Saturday, she'd sometimes wait until I was about to leave on Sunday before she'd approach me to let me pet her again.

From September of 2008 until March of 2009, during which she turned three years old, I lived in Japan as an exchange student. My life-changing trip to Japan happened after I adopted Tina. That's how long ago it was that I adopted her. I finished my Associate's Degree, started and finished my Bachelor's degree, got a job that I kept for five years, lived in two different apartments, bought a house, and made it through a global pandemic.

Eighteen years. People born the same day Tina was are old enough to vote now. I thought about that a lot when she turned 18. If she'd been my actual baby instead of my fur baby, she'd have been an adult. Instead, she was an extremely old and frail woman dying of kidney and thyroid problems. One whom I could pick up in one hand and carry around and make fun of.

"There's my horrible, stinky old woman!" I said to her, two days before she died, as she emerged from under my recliner to demand that I give her dry food as a treat. I picked her up and raised her high. She hung there and stared at me, her tiny paws dangling and idly swinging at my face. I held her close and smelled her. She smelled bad. I pet her, and then I put her down, and I gave her the dry food she wanted.

I don't plan on writing about her any more. This is enough, I think.

I'll always miss her, but writing about her like this has honestly helped. There were a lot of happy memories I went through in these posts. In the end, that's what we have in our lives. Memories. I'm glad my memories of Tina were good ones, overall. I hope I gave her as good a life as she could have gotten. I really do hope so.

[ratralsis]

Don't think for a second that I'm not also still writing at least 400 words a day for my novel.

I miss my cat, but I didn't even take a day off of work when my mother died.

No days off. If it matters, it matters no matter what.