Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ A nicely-decorated office means she'll actually be spending time there, away from me.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May the decorative fringe of your throw blanket grow tangled.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: I don't like that at all.
¤ Usage: "I didn't like that at all."
¤ Synonyms: That forcibly removed me from my happy place.
¤ Deviations: "I didn't like that at all."
¤ Origin: Malaya-ism.
¤ Notes: Best issued after a seemingly minor setback, delivered in a sad little voice, over a pouty lower lip.  Provokes amusement and sympathy in the heart of a sympathetic listener. -- August 19, 2003

¤ I've updated the Donors page for the 2nd time this month, due to receiving the third donation this month.  It was for $10 and is from an Anonymous donor, and brings the August total to $20.  Since that's what I pay for site hosting/bandwidth, $20 is my break even level, so I guess I'm happy now? I donate all of the time and labor this stuff takes to write and update, since this website is a hobby that I enjoy, at least in theory.

Since the first donation this month was also for $10, you might be wondering how there are 3 of them that amount to $20?  Well, one clever site reader sent a one cent donation a couple of weeks ago, in appreciation for me once again calling the rats' glass enclosure an "aquarium" rather than a "terrarium", his preferred noun.  Yes, I quoted an email from this generous donor some days before he made his generous donation.

He didn't get a mention on the donors page though, since Pay Pal takes a percentage of all donations, and in this case the donation was $.01, and their share of it was $.01.  I guess they round up.

I'm actually happy with that, since I thought it was at least $.35 or something per transaction, and therefore his penny would cost me 34 of them.  The two $10 donations this month were hit with $.59 and $.69 transaction fees, for example. (The 10 cent more one was from Europe, so it's more due to exchange rate costs, or perhaps since the donor doesn't have a Pay Pal account?)  So technically this month's donations are only $18.72, and since my hosting is $20, I'm not yet to the "break even" stage.  I'll try to get over this.

And yes, I'm posting this as a reminder to make a donation, if you can afford it and think I deserve one.  Or just go buy something from Amazon.com via the link in my nav bar.  I get 5%.  Which is slightly less than Pay Pal gets of the money you guys donate to me, oddly enough.

Thanks if you donate, and if you don't, thanks for enjoying my writing enough to visit for free.  It certainly beats doing this just to amuse myself, Malaya, and Dusty-Bo.

¤ Looking at my site stats lately has been relatively boring.  There are always around 10-14k loads a day with no big spikes since I posted the V1.10 Blizzard North article on the D2 site, and had a link to the photos page with shots of my visit there.  That was the biggest traffic day ever.  Plus I used to do those D2 site columns (and may again, at some point) and every time I did one I'd get a big surge of 40 or 60k page loads a day for several days, depending on whether or not I had a direct link to some page on this site, or just had people clicking from my Columnists author info page.  With no big referrals, from me or anyone else, the traffic is pretty steady, and far from heavy enough to 1) rank highly in terms of all Internet sites, and 2) Cost me more than $20 a month for bandwidth.

About the only thing of any real interest on the stats page is the referrers.  Those are mostly boring too, since of the 30 that show up like 25 are various search engines.  There are two recent ones of some interest though.

The first, which has over the course of the last 10 days accounted for over 500 referrals, has the catchy title, "Downloading Porn With Davo" It's a sort of daily links page on a sort of porn site, where the guy has links to several free porn sources or other odd things of a purient nature.  Not an awful site or anything, and he linked to my Hot or Not page, so whatever.  I've looked there a few times since first seeing the link last week, and the best thing was posted a few days ago; a series of links to sites with photos of Vegas casino showgirls and waitresses, who are in themed and vaguely-sexy outfits. Most of them look utterly ridiculous, actually.

The second has sent about 30 visitors here over the course of the month, and is a site I had never seen until I followed the referral link back.  He's obviously a fan of this site though, or at least the layout of this site. Check it out and come to your own conclusions.

¤ Click here for a fun musical thing with singing horses that a friend sent me. Yes, singing horses. It's one of those four-part symphonies where all of the parts sound okay by themselves, but when you overlay them all the result is far greater than the sum of the parts.

For an utterly off topic comment, you can find a similar beat-box thingie on the official Gorillaz site, if you click around for a while to find it. At least you used to be able to find such a thing, they redo their site all the time and while looking around there for the last five minutes, I didn't see any such thing.  They do have a little robot driving 3d game, but I didn't have the patience to screw with it for very long, so god knows what it might lead you to.

¤ There are a couple of amusingly-sadistic games free to download from this Romanian site.  I was going to take some screenshots and talk about strategy and such, but then I realized that I just didn't really care that much.  They are sort of physics simulators where the object is to inflict as much damage as possible on a crash test dummy.  In the first game you simply push him (it?) down a flight of stairs, but the second game adds a lot more complexity with a truck and ramps and a big damn wall.  You can position the dummy on or in or in front of the truck, adjust the ramps and truck speed, and so on.  The fun part is watching the dummy fall and tumble in semi-realistic human fashion; the parts that are taking heavy damage turn red as they get nailed, and you score points based on how much damage you deal.

Aim for the head, neck and torso, those score by far the highest.  Try to avoid tumbling in a corkscrew fashion, since then your arms and legs whip around and break the fall, keeping you from inflicting gross bodily injury.

The downloads are around 2meg each and very easy to do; just grab the zip and extract them to a suitable folder, then run the .exe file.  They have simple interfaces, all done in flash with obvious function buttons (aside from "dismount" being the action button) and in perhaps the best feature, they have multiple camera angles so you can always see the gore and doom from the best angles.

It would be great if there were more options, like say 100 stairs instead of just a dozen, or slanted ramps, a bigger truck run up, multiple men, etc.  But hey, it's free and if you want more, learn to program yourself and you can make it just how you want it.

Despite these few flaws, we love him to pieces, and would never cause any harm to befall him.  Except when we're fucking with him by poking at his back so he repeatedly flops over pawing at the molesting hands that he's never quite fast enough to catch, or when we let him catch up to the "mousie" primarily so we can then wrap it around his head and open mouth like a poorly-aimed turban, or else just hogtie him with it and leave him to kick furiously until his paws are free from the entangling white string.

He continues doing the "tongue thing" for several minutes at most, always stopping when he bites at something, or yawns, or goes to eat some more Friskies.  Given that he's Dusty, it never takes long for one of these events to come up on his day planner, so "the tongue thing" appears seldom, and fleetingly.

Despite the odds against capturing such a miracle on film, we were able to snap several photos when he did it Friday night, and since they came out more or less in focus, we're able to share them with all of you.  Unfortunately it was pretty dark when he did it and we had to take the photos from several feet away, so they aren't giant and in good focus.  But you can see the protruding bit of pink, though much less clearly and amusingly than in person.

We'll get better pictures next time.  Or not.

And yes, that sinuous strand of white string is Dusty's beloved "mousie", an object that he'll attack and chase for far longer than you have any interest in flipping or dragging it around for him to chase and attack.

His best trick with the mousie is to chase you in circles (squares) if you drag it after you while you trot down the hallway, right to the front door, right into the kitchen, right into the living room, and then right down the hallway again.  He'll do up to 3 or 4 laps hot on your heels if he's in the mood, slashing at the mousie all the while, and yanking it out of your grip if you don't hold on tight.

His worst trick is to slowly and somehow sadly gather up the coils of an abandoned mousie and walk around the condo with it, seeking out the humans, all the while emitting the loudest and most pitiable yowls any kitty has ever emitted.  It's cute in theory, or if you are deaf.  Theory gets old, and neither Malaya or me are deaf.

Dusty doesn't care though, since he will often do this about an hour after the humans have gone to bed, carrying on as he walks down the hallway and right into the bedroom, and even under the bed.  Or he'll even break into a mousie-inspired sob story if the humans are in the living room with him, just not paying him sufficient attention, distracted as they are by computers or TV or eating. This is a very effective behavior on his part, since we nearly always give him the attention he's craving, which of course just reinforces the behavior in his tiny brain.  Hey, you didn't think it was just 2 year olds screaming for candy in the check out lane that knew that trick, did you?

For this reason the mousie is now kept in protective custody, hanging high overhead (well, over Dusty's head) from the horn of a bull's skull that's mounted near the kitchen doorway.  (It's Malaya's skull, well-predating my additions to our bone collection.) Dusty will often give out a few plaintive yowls late at night when he suddenly/belatedly realizes that he's been left alone in the living room and all the humans are in the bedroom and it's now dark.  But he gets over it and comes in to engage his trample mode much sooner if he doesn't have the mousie to bring out the worst in him.

Further Dusty reports as events warrant.

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