farla

Home again.

Thanks to some eleventh-hour rescheduling, we went camping for a few days.

I don't much like camping, but it isn't like I hate it either. I don't like the bugs (I'm okay with mosquitoes biting me. It's the swarms of flies, the spiders, the wasps, the grubs falling out of trees, the other spiders...), I don't like the cold, I don't like the way all the bedding in the tent inevitably develops this faintly dampish feel or the way Mom believes I can sleep directly on the ground.

But I don't mind it overall, and it's nice to sit, or to talk without having people distracted by TV, and to build really big fires.

We ended up bringing the dog because we were leaving the day before its owner would return, assuming no inevitable travel problems. We happened to get there right as everyone was leaving, and leave right as everyone was returning, so the dog ended up spending a lot of its time running free. When it wasn't, it enjoyed demonstrating that it didn't understand the concept of leashes tangling around things. And we laughed at it and all was good.

Our campsite was really nice. We were on the edge so that it was just woods in one direction, and then everyone left and it was just woods dotted with picnic tables in every direction. It was one of the many pine forests which aren't technically able to exist in this area, but because I'm so used to them they don't upset me the way most large scale changed ecosystems do.

The trees all grew too close together and were pretty thin and sick, but I don't like pine and it was what was supposed to happen, with oak and birch growing up underneath with wide branches. There was one tall oak right where we were, its trunk covered in moss in green stripes from the way the trunk had widened so fast. The pines were mostly scarred and woodpeckers were drilling holes in them and they had weeping black injuries and only tiny green tufts at the top. Some were stranding but dead, and the ground was littered with stumps where trees had been chopped down.

Pine forests always feel sleepy and peaceful to me. And dying, but not in a bad way, just of old age and tiredness. In some of the most open patches there were a few seedlings trying to grow, but next to them were hardwoods with several years growth in their favor. The forest was created and wrong (probably planted, we thought, but maybe just the result of heavy logging) but okay, because it was already going back to the way it was supposed to be. And in the meantime there were chipmunks in force, unmenanced by squirrels who were still waiting on the oaks, tiny brown frogs hopping over the pine needle litter, and wide spaces to walk.

We kept hearing ravens, too. They sound like exponentially more dangerous versions of crows. I'm just sad I didn't get to see one show up and beat the shit out of something. I'm sure they do that.

We visited a farm/zoo thing where there were animals everywhere, all sorts of old breeds. Some of the goats and chickens just ran about free, you could walk in to half the enclosures and a good number of the animals were able to climb in and out of their pens. I picked up a tiny baby goat and petted others.

And there was wood everywhere for fires. Do you know in fairy tales how they mention gathering sticks for a fire? They really meant sticks, tiny twiggy things that barely give any heat and are consumed in minutes. There were times when having wood to burn was an impossible luxury. We usually think how improved our lives are from our ancestors who had to cook over wood fires, but their ancestors didn't even have that.

And I could just walk and pick up thick branches that litter the ground even on a campsite where people build fires all the time. If I wanted more I could just take another few steps and get it.

When we came back we opened the door and walked around the house calling for the cats. The kitten we found in the basement, and the other cat we didn't find at all. I walked around the house calling, and then through the house checking that everything had been open and she couldn't have been trapped somewhere and thinking things like if she were dead the body would have rotted in the heat and we'd know. Then I went outside and called for her, and walked. I tried again later and still nothing. She wasn't there in the morning either.

Then about noon she appeared, skinny but perfectly fine. it's the first time we've gotten a cat back here.

Besides that, I've celebrated a return to electricity with video games. I've "finished" the dot hack series and just have to complete the optional-except-not-really undoable dungeon that was unlocked by finishing the game. (by which I mean reaching the most "my god that is not an ending" ending ever. I know I should have been expecting that after the nonending of the anime, but it's even less of an ending than that one.) I'm at a similar state in Pokemon XD, where I just have to snag the last few from Miror B (I caught the tauros in a premierball. Take that, you Safari Zone fuckers!).

I also finally tried out the Emerald cloning glitch.

It's a neverending source of bafflement how glitches are treated among players. People (somehow) stumble upon a glitch, and their minds instantly seem to toggle into irrational superstition mode.

Remember the G/S cloning glitch? I found five or so alternative uses for that by experimenting. (I mean, come on! It's a warp in game reality! How can you not want to explore something like that?) Some of it was purely by chance, and some of it was pinned down once I had an idea of what the glitch was - namely, that the pokemon inside the box were saved first, and the rest of the game was saved second, so, among other things, you could start a new game, deposit the starter in an empty box, and turn off midway through saving to get starters on your existing save file.

While I was doing this actual guidelines on the subject gave advice more to the effect of "do exactly this or your game will melt into a radioactive blob that will kill you horribly".

So Emerald's glitch. Reading about it I see repeated admonishments that violating any part of the procedure may delete your game. Or you might do everything right and your game gets deleted anyway. Or maybe you'll just lose the pokemon you were trying to clone. There is a staggering lack of any actual mention of this actually happening. Doing anything different - say, trying to clone more than one pokemon at a time - will lead to all your pokemon being deleted if not your save file. Etc.

Basically, it's the superstition model - I don't know how this works or what causes it, so I'll try to repeat everything I did last time because I don't know what caused it, and I don't dare vary anything because it could go horribly wrong, and at any point something unexpected might happen. While using an investigative model quickly works out how it works and what causes it. As far as I can tell, the program saves your team before it asks you to save your entire game. That's all. You don't need split-second reactions and turning off during the lag doesn't harm your game, although presumably if I did so fast enough, the game wouldn't have time to save my changed team and the glitch itself wouldn't work. And you can do with six pokemon - the game is saving your entire team one way or the other, so it doesn't matter if you changed one pokemon or all of them. Meanwhile, the only way you can delete a pokemon is by doing it backwards - saving the game, depositing a pokemon, then activating the glitch. And while that can happen, it's not some mysterious thing but works for the exact same reason - the boxes and team are being saved separately, so any change you make to your team is carried over while the box resets to the way it was when you saved.

There's nothing random about it, and it's weird to see how people treat it as such. There's something really...wrong about people's behavior defaulting to superstition, especially when it comes to something as concrete as a videogame.

Well, anyway. My two pawpaws did fine. That's something.