ratralsis
Let's Have Fun on the Internet
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ratralsis · 5 days ago
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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.
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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."
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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!
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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.
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ratralsis · 16 days ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 19 days ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 24 days ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 1 month ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 2 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 2 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 2 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 2 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 4 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 5 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 5 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 6 months ago
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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ratralsis · 6 months ago
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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.
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ratralsis · 6 months ago
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I keep looking for Tina. She slept under the recliner in my living room a lot, especially in the warmer months, and it was her favorite spot for the last month or so. So when I'd roll up my exercise mat after my morning workouts, or when I'd go to do my physical therapy exericses in the evening, she'd often come out from under the recliner and see me. In the morning, it was because she wanted food. In the evenings, it was because she wanted me to pet her.
When I worked out this morning, I kept looking to the recliner, even checking under it once, to see if she was there. She won't ever be there again.
At lunch, I packed her remaining thyroid medication into my backpack and walked to her regular vet, which is only a ten-minute walk from my house. The technician who greeted me said she was sorry for my loss.
"Heard about that, huh?" I asked.
"Lap of Love always calls us," she explained.
"Well," I said, and I placed my backpack on the floor in front of the desk. I retrieved four bottles of pills. Two were completely full, with 60 pills each of 5.0mg and 2.5mg of Felimazole, and the other two were partially empty. "Tina doesn't need these anymore."
"These are to be donated?" she asked me.
"Or disposed of," I said. I wanted to act casually, but I could hear in my voice that I was starting to choke up and cry again. "I don't care either way. But seeing them on my counter this morning damn near broke me. Max doesn't need them, and if he ever does, I'll buy more."
She told me again that she was so sorry for my loss, and told me to have a nice day as I turned to leave.
"Thank you," I said. "You, too."
Max looked for her, too, under the recliner. He sniffed the carpet around where she usually slept, paused, then walked away. It's a day-old smell of a cat whose smells are all at least a day old, now.
The box were Tina liked to stand when I played with Max is still there. Only Tina ever used that box. Max never did. Never does. Should I get rid of it? I suppose I should, eventually.
I slept for six uninterrupted hours last night, from around 10:30 PM until 4:30 AM, when Max woke me by laying down under my arm like he very rarely does. He doesn't like sharing the bed with Tina, you see. But he doesn't have to now. Now he finally has me all to himself, and he's taking advantage of that fact today.
It was the longest amount of time I've ever slept in one go in this house, since I moved here in March of 2018 with the two cats. Study after study has shown that co-sleeping, either with pets or even a spouse, is terrible for your sleep. If all you want is better quality sleep, you're better off sleeping in separate beds and separate rooms.
But I'd trade every good night of sleep I'll ever get from here on out if it meant Tina could have stayed healthy forever and kept waking me up by clawing my face, demanding I pet her at 1:30 AM or that I roll off of my side and onto my back so she could curl up under my arm again. I can't say I ever got used to her doing that, but I did at least stop reacting by trying to hit her or grab her.
Let me be clear: she really did claw my face while I slept. She did it slowly and carefully, too. She'd lift up one front paw and gently scrape her claws on my forehead, or on my nose, or, once, she reached under my chin and scraped upward. That one surprised me.
She'd claw my legs when I sat at my computer trying to work, too. She wanted to be pet, or brushed, so she'd claw me. Sometimes she'd just sit and do nothing, trusting that I'd eventually pet her or brush her anyway. I could always tell when she came into the room, because she'd be licking her lips from having just eaten something or she'd sneeze or cough or otherwise make a disgusting old woman sound. She also walked loudly, so, even with earplugs in, I could usually hear her enter the room at night when I was in bed. She weighed 6 pounds or less for the last three years of her life, but she stomped her feet when she walked. She had an incredibly loud walk. I don't know if it was deliberate. I imagine not.
She was a terrible cat. She always smelled bad. It's one of the reasons I brushed and pet her so much. She stopped cleaning herself regularly years ago, when her joints started to ache. But I kept her clean enough that I really only smelled her if I brought her within an inch of my nose, and, really, at that point, it's my fault and not hers.
She had health problems for most of her life, starting with ear infections when she was only a few years old that left her with permanently sensitive ears. She had very large ears. They itched a lot, but if I scratched them, she'd always shake her head vigorously. In her last couple of years, she'd shake her head so hard that she'd lose her balance.
She'd drool, sometimes, when she slept. She'd lay her head down on me and when she got up there'd be a wet spot there. That, thankfully, stopped as she got older.
She would run and hide from me when I wanted to play or pet her, and only emerge again when she wanted to be pet. It made those moments when I could pet her or old her, or when she climbed onto the bed to sleep next to me, feel that much more special.
Before I even had a bed, back when I slept on a futon in an apartment with just me and her, she'd still walk back and forth over my body at night at least once or twice, purring like a gas-powered lawnmower. She had a horrible purr. It was this loud, wheezing noise, unlike any other cat I've known. I wondered for a long time if she was unhealthy because of it, before I decided that it was probably fine. She made it to 18 years old, so I'd say it was.
She'd wheeze and purr her terrible purr and it would lull me to sleep. I loved the sound of it. It meant she was happy. She was relaxed. She was never a high-strung cat, but she was easily annoyed, and hard to please. When I could make her happy, it was the best feeling in the world. The feeling of her resting her chin on me was the best that there was.
Sometimes, I'd be able to convince both cats to relax on the bed with me at the same time. I would think of those moments as the happiest in my life, even when they were happening. "This is it," I'd think. "Winning at bedtime."
I'm glad I had Tina in my life for as long as I did. 18 years is a long time, a good long time, and I don't have any regrets about it. I wish I could have had more, but I was already so greedy in wanting that much.
I dug through my hard drives and found these, which I believe are the oldest photos of her that I ever took, from January of 2008. She would have just turned two years old. This is pre-smartphone technology, here, folks. This isn't even a fliphone. It's just a slide-open phone with a shitty camera, but of the first twelve photos I ever took with a phone, four are of Tina. I still have this bed, by the way, or at least the frame. The mattress and box spring have been replaced.
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Here she is from April 15 of this year, at her oldest and skinniest, sitting on the arm of my sofa for reasons known only to her. It's the best photo I have of her gorgeous eyes. The most beautiful eyes of any cat I've ever seen, even at 89 years old. They were the deepest, most brilliant shade of green, and it simply does not photograph right. Even in this photo, they look more yellow than they did in real life.
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That was her, and how I'll always remember her: as my horrible, stinky old woman, who clawed my face and yelled at me when I had a food bowl in my hand because she wanted it on the floor and who purred like a chainsaw in my ear at night, and who had the softest fur and the prettiest eyes and who let me hold her like a baby, even though she'd always growl at me when I did that to her.
She was simply the best.
I'll probably share more photos in coming days, but I cried less today than I did yesterday, and that trend will likely continue, too.
Sorry to bother you twice about my dead cat like this.
Actually, no, I'm not. Fuck you. She was a big part of my life, and I miss her.
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ratralsis · 6 months ago
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My 18-year-old cat, Tina, passed away today.
Two days ago, she was fine. Perfectly fine. Completely. But she didn't eat much. Yesterday, she barely ate at all, and she seemed wobbly on her feet when she walked around. Today, she wouldn't eat anything. I took her to the emergency vet for a final exam to confirm that there was nothing that could be done, called Lap of Love's local branch on the drive home, and she was euthanized less than four hours later.
Tina has been dealing with kidney and thyroid problems for the last two years. At one point, she weighed 11 pounds, and was a little overweight. I switched her from dry food to wet and she lot a couple of pounds. But once her thyroid became overactive, she dipped below 6. This morning, she weighed only 5.19 pounds. Less than half of what she was at her heaviest.
I didn't love spending $650 today, but it's the last time I'll ever spend money on her, and as long as I don't get a new cat in the next six months, the savings on not having to buy her food anymore will make up for it. Because, yeah, she was costing me over $120 a month in food, pills, and supplements. I still have about two months supply of those left, because I always tried to have about a two-month supply of everything she needed in case I would have trouble getting more. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with it. Probably give the medicine to the local vet, and keep feeding Max the food. I guess I have a four-month supply of it now that there's only one cat eating it.
I adopted Tina on February 14, 2006. It's an easy date to remember because it was Valentine's Day. A friend of a friend had just unexpectedly been forced to deal with kittens being born, and our mutual friend asked everyone he knew, including me, if anyone could take a cat.
I'd just lost a cat. I was still living with my parents and attending a community college to get my Associate's Degree. Spoiler: I did get it. Graduated with a 4.0 GPA and everything! Then I went back to school a couple of years later to get my Bachelor's, where I graduated with a significantly worse GPA.
The previous cat took over a month to die. I watched her go from being able to jump onto my bed from the floor to needing to jump to the chair and then to the bed. Then she needed help getting onto the chair. Then she needed help standing up at all. It broke my heart, and I promised myself I'd never let any cat of mine suffer for that long ever again. At the time, I had no choice, because I was still living with my parents, remember, and my mother refused to have that cat euthanized.
So I knew, years ago, that I would someday have Tina euthanized, too. I wondered for a long time how I'd know when it was time. I had all these little ideas and rules: when she has trouble getting onto the bed at night, then I'll know! Or when she can't climb onto the boxes by the window, then I'll know! But I worried that she'd slowly get worse and worse, and I'd refuse to end her suffering.
Instead, she went from perfectly healthy to unable to stand up long enough to avoid wetting herself in under 48 hours. Truthfully, I hope I'm that lucky when I die. I want to go from walking around and doing everything I want to do to dead in under 48 hours. Ideally, I want to have a stroke and die before I hit the ground. That's the dream. Three days after my 90th birthday. For me, and this applies only to me, hoping to live to be older than 90 just feels greedy, I think.
When I took Tina home from the emergency vet, she was already so weak that she didn't want to get out of her carrier. I had to pick her up and place her under the recliner, in her favorite cozy spot, lying on the blanket that hung over it. She was happy there for many, many days of her life. Today, she was struggling to breathe. I hope she forgave me for making her suffer through that. Her final four hours were the hardest of her 18 years.
The vet who came to my home to euthanize her was named Jessica. She was very kind. She gave Tina an anesthetic to relax her while she was still under the recliner, and I was there in her field of vision as she relaxed and her eyes unfocused. I'll never know if she was awake when we gently retrieved her and carried her to the sofa, where I held her on my lap as Jessica shaved a small patch on her back leg and, after a long conversation, injected the final drug. I held Tina during the entire process, as she coughed and breathed more easily than she had all day. She didn't purr. She didn't react to me scratching her ears. She didn't move her eyes, but they were open the entire time. Her muscles, Jessica told me, were so relaxed that her eyes had relaxed in an open state.
I watched the color fade from her gums and the pads on her paws. Her pink toe beans slowly turned a pale yellow as I held her, and her heartbeat got softer, and her breathing slowed, and then stopped. I was there, holding her on my lap, until the very end.
Max came out a few minutes later. Jessica took a few steps away so Max would be more likely to come and see me, which he did. Max has never liked strangers. He's always been skittish.
I adopted Max eleven years ago, in March of 2013, specifically to keep Tina company. Now it's just him and me. It will take a long time for us both to adjust, I think.
It will take a few nights and a few days for everything to sink in. For me to get used to the idea that Tina isn't here. Starting with the fact that I just put down only half as much food as usual for Max's evening meal, because there's nobody else for him to share it with.
Jessica said she was impressed that Tina was 18 years old. She'd never personally had a cat that old, though she'd tried. She said she could tell from how good Tina's coat looked and how clear her eyes had been that I'd taken good care of her. The truth is, Tina's coat took a lot of work. Tina didn't clean herself much. But I had a wire brush and a softer brush and she would demand that I brush her nearly every day. She was the softest cat I've ever known. Not a day went by that I didn't at least pet her enough to help keep her that way. At least, not a day that I was there with her. There were times when I was out of town and she stayed with my parents again. During those times, she didn't get brushed or pet quite as much, unfortunately.
But she did during her final days, that's for sure.
She was damp when she died. Despite putting her on a clean, dry towel afterward, she did wet herself under the recliner an hour or so after coming home from the vet, and a clean towel could only do so much. She also threw up some foam, so I tried to dry her off with a paper towel, but there was only so much I could do.
I'm glad she died in the summer. In the winter, because the bathroom becomes the coldest room in the house, I keep a space heater in there. So the cats loved spending as much time in the bathroom as possible, where it was a couple of degrees warmer than the rest of the house thanks to the heater. In the summer, Tina always felt like she had a lot more options as far as places to sleep. That included, of course, her favorite cozy spot under the recliner. I was worried that she would die in the bathroom. I'm glad that she didn't.
I'd love to say she was the sweetest cat in the world, but she wasn't. She was terrible. But I loved her more than any other cat I've ever had. She was my favorite, and I'm not afraid to say that even as Max is still alive and sleeping behind me as I type this. Sorry, bud, but I didn't know you since you fit in the palm of my hand. She wasn't the sweetest cat in the world, but she was the best.
The first few days after I brought Tina home, she had a habit of running laps around my bedroom until she was so tired that she didn't know what to do. She couldn't keep running, and she couldn't sleep, so she would just lie in my lap and cry about how tired she was from all the playing she'd done.
Tina would climb onto my bed and sleep next to me at least part of the night starting the very first night I had her. That first night, she licked my earlobe in the exact same spot as the cat I'd had who died a few months earlier, and I cried, because it reminded me so much of the previous cat. Tina didn't do that very many more times. She hadn't done it in years.
Last night, she struggled to get onto the bed, but she managed it. She walked across my body and then laid down on her side, which she'd never done before. She would always slowly lay down on her stomach, then roll onto her side, with her back against my arm. Last night, she laid down directly onto her side, with her back against my body, instead. I sat up and said to her, out loud, "Oh, shit." I pet her and tried to see if I could calm her down, and she started to sit up, because she didn't want to be pet right then. So I laid back down, and she did, too. But she had her legs out, so my right hand was on her front paws. I slid my hand under her front paws, instead, and she flexed her claws and gripped my hand in the way that cats like to put a paw on people to be assured that they're still there. She held my hand, the night before she died.
I don't know how much she knew, but she knew she was sick. She might not have known she was dying, but she knew something was wrong with her. She didn't feel well.
The emergency vet told me that she could feel Tina's kidneys were a little smaller than normal. This is expected for a cat with kidney disease. The kidneys, she told me, shrivel up, like raisins. Like they dehydrate.
Despite my best efforts to give Tina her thyroid medication twice a day, every day, feed her a special diet for her kidneys, and give her a potassium supplement every day, her kidneys finally gave out on her. She lived longer than anybody would have expected. Eighteen long years I had her. Nearly all of my adult life. One of those years were with just me, living together, and then ten with Max.
I kept a lot of plates spinning for a long time, and only one had to crash for her to die. She just ran out of time. That's all there is to it.
Her regular vet told me, a month ago, when I brought her in to get some antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection she was struggling with, that she was doing great for her age. I said at the time that that made sense, given that "typical" for her age was dead.
Tina is now doing typical for her age. She is beyond all earthly suffering and pain. I'll never know if I did the right thing. I wish I'd known yesterday that she'd have to spend those four hours today gasping and damp under the recliner. I'll regret that forever, but I did do the best I could. I have to cling to that.
If my final four hours are spent coughing and damp, I do hope I at least get to spend my final minutes without any pain, relaxed and in the arms of someone who loves me, like Tina did.
That's as good as somebody like me can hope for, I think.
I'll be better soon.
But not right away.
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ratralsis · 6 months ago
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I also had a dream the other night about a pen&paper RPG, more of a party game really, called "The Continental," where everybody was a guest at a fictional hotel called that, like the one in John Wick, I guess, is where my subconscious got it from.
And one person was the guy running the hotel, and they would make announcements and introduce the other guests. The only rules I remember specifically was that the guy in charge could make rule changes with one of two modifiers: "until further notice" meant that the rule change was temporary, and "without further notice" meant that it was permanent. So they could say, "Until further notice, the pool hall is closed in the evenings," or they could say "Without further notice, smoking is not permitted in the pool hall."
It didn't make a lot of sense.
Meanwhile, every player had two sets of cards. One set was the stuff they had to do to win the game. The other was a set of things they had to do to get bonus points, though I don't know why you'd want bonus points if you can either win or lose.
My character was a wealthy aristocrat, and I only saw two of my cards. One of the win conditions for me was that I had to tell every other player about the memoir I'd just gotten published. One of my bonus conditions was that I had to incorrectly call someone by the name "Marty" and get away with it.
You might be able to figure out why this is a terrible game. Everybody playing this in real life would just shout to the entire table "I just published my memoir!" and check off that card and there'd be nothing anyone could do about it. And who gives a shit about being called "Marty?" Even if the answer to that is "everybody," oh well, I just don't get, like, bonus points after I win.
My point is that it was a terrible, stupid game, and I'm sorry I ever thought of it, even in a dream.
Maybe it was my subconscious telling me that all of those games are fucking stupid and awful. I've never played a board game with a group of people that left me thinking, "Boy, I'd sure love to play this again."
Ever.
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