Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘neopets’ Category

Overtures

I lick my nose and turn my head askance
to let you know I mean you only well,
and duck my head in playful bow: let's dance.
Oh no? Your choice. So, care to have a smell?
Well, let me sniff your bottom — what's amiss?
I'm friendly, look: my tail is whizzing round;
let's — gracious me, whatever was that hiss?
You heard that, right? Extraordinary sound.
So anyway, you want to see my toys?
Or run around and bark and bark at bikes?
Why, there it is again, that hissing noise.
Ignore it; let's play chase. I'll get you — yikes!
I didn't know you had a bunch of those!
That hurt, I — Mummy, help, she got my nose!

I'm currently listening to one of cubicgarden's trance mixes. If this thing rickrolls me, I'll have to vanquish him on Monday.

Oh, and as soon as the healing springs faerie heals my Lupe I'm painting her Spotted, because I just got the PB and the spotted Lupe looks just like an African Wild Dog, for which I'm a sucker. (So she'll be a literal Painted Dog, then…)

First sketch of Sankmarray ninja and pirate (crewpir, not king)

I'm not happy with the pirate — pe needs to be a bit more doggy as well as chimpy — and I still have no idea about head hair growth on either of 'em. Luckily you can't see the ninja's hair anyway, thanks to ner headscarf.

Petpet Park load test = slashdotted. There's a surprise…

Up at 06:30 for Neopets giveaway, lulz. I got the spooky site theme for me and the brother-creatures. Seem to have got in before the massive site-laggage, too. *dances* Now I can go back to bed.

I think Piper has an injury to his white eye. There's lots of gunk underneath, which I keep cleaning away, even though there's no cut visible. There's also a little dirty patch on the edge of his white ear (same side), which I suspect is a small injury too. Piper is clearly a menace to society with his hard-drinking, roustabouting, bar-brawling ways.

Since I'm awake anyway, a poem. Amphibrachic tetrameter because I can.

Country Road Meeting

An Anglian roadway in whistling November.
No sign of the taxi; no signal, no money,
A cardie from Primark 'tween her and the weather,
Suspecting she'll come to regret the stilettos.
Some headlights: the taxi? She moves to the hedgerow
And hopes she'll be visible. Funny, no engine.

It comes round the corner; she shivers. What is it?
It looks like a calf but it's burly and shaggy
And looking at her with those luminous eyeballs!
Its claws make no clicking, no noise on the roadway;
No steam from its muzzle. It's not even breathing.
"If this is a pisstake," she mumbles, "it's working."

It passes her swiftly, the muscular creature,
So close she could touch it. You're kidding. She doesn't.
Intent on its business, it wholly ignores her.
A roar from behind makes her jump. A Fiesta
With spoiler and skirts and a strip light beneath it.
A hundred and fifty or more, never slowing,
It bombs down the roadway, so close it could touch her.

The dog—was it hit? Where's it gone? Shit, she's blinded.
She rubs at the afterglow, loses a contact.
The car's disappeared and, it seems, so's the creature.
No body. No impact. No blood. Must have dodged it.
Her sobs become mist as she turns and examines
The tracks of the tyres in the place she was walking.

A few minutes later, the cab driver finds her.

OK, let's see if I remember all of this!

I'm not cold any more. I'm too hot, but so is the weather, so I think that's cured. Actually, the tremor and everything has been behaving more or less; only one noticeable bad case of shakes and one of bad speech in the last week or so.

My unbrother's coming home from Ireland. When he does, I'm making him and my brother-by-blood-relation book a long weekend off and taking them to the zoo and a theme park. Of course, one of THEM will have to drive, but I'll be the organiser and possibly stump up a lot of the cash, so I get to call it my treat.

Guess which zoo? What if I tell you Chester Zoo has red pandas? Yeah. :D

Today on the tram I worked out a detail for Sankmarray (my current solo writing thing) that had been bothering me. It was a good figuring-out, in that my solution is weird and makes perfect sense to me and follows my unofficial inverted Occam's Razor variant: "when stuff's confusing you, throw in another alien and all will become clear".

Also, the little vignette I realised I would have to stick in between Sankmarray episodes 1 and 2 to make things make sense has sort of, um, become episode 2, bumping episode 2 back to episode 3. Which is… fine, actually. I don't want to get carried away with enthusiasm on this, but I'm finding I've got quite a lot to play with on this platform, and even starting to wonder if this will take me to book length. It'll be fun finding out. At some point I may bite the bullet and accept that I'm gonna be typecast as a wacky author… muh.

I passed 7.5mill on Neopets by sellsellselling DROO at 60.

Yesterday a kitten stretched out extremely lengthily on my bed (not shown; that's Slen's room in the pic), doing his damnedest to be as tall as me while helping me to read Matter, which I've almost finished. It's good, it's good, it's Iain M Banks's Culture and it's a long book.

My weight's on a downswing, which was occasioned by my studiously forgetting to eat for 55 hours and I paid the price for that by feeling extremely ill on the third morning but still, might as well enjoy the rewards of my stupidity.

I thought there was something else, actually… oh well. Update if I remember.

The prizes are out for the Return of Sloth plot on Neopets, and the top prize is a robot paint brush. As I predicted—and awesome it is too! I can afford one. I've been itching for a Robot Kyrii for ages… although the Robot Gelert is also a thing of stainless awesomium. I am very tempted. Also, the Daily Dare month finished yesterday. We managed to finish it on all of our accounts, thanks largely to two late evenings at the very last minute by Slen. Thank the gods we can stop slashdotting that site between us now and get on with other things.

I wrote the lyrics for a song (or a large chunk of one) this evening. It is about a city-nymph. This counts towards my weekly poem target because I say so, and it'll help Slen, who needs both musicians and material for a music competition he plans to enter. The first prize is the chance to open the V Festival… they don't have a hope, but hell, it's something for the CV whatever happens.

Siblings are awesome. Oh, and I have verrrry tentative ideas stirring for Mews II. Don't breathe—you'll scare them off.

Saw the GP today, nagged him about a few things. Afterwards I was with my mother while she ran a few errands. We went into a pet superstore and, fellows, I think I must be getting hormonal in my old age because I came very close to breaking down and crying. Just from walking into the place. There was hardly any scent to the air that I could detect, but it was obviously enough for that subconscious part of me. I swear my chin dimpled and my eyes overcast. I went and browsed some of their books, which included a couple about golden retrievers and didn't help much.

It's a big shop with a miniature vet's surgery attached, and they allow pets in the store part too. I went over to the waiting area for the vet, where there was the most incredible long-haired dachshund PUPPY, black and brown and ears and oh my DOG you should have SEEN it and and and it came over and said hello and demanded strokies and its fur was so soft and and PUPPY. Walking away from that I nearly started crying again, and got damned close when I got back in the car.

She bought some cat food…

Just got up an hour and a half ago. Head is full of delightful rhinovirus. Did you know rhinovirus can be translated as nose slime? This makes it my new favourite word ever, displacing pallo. Anyway. Look, Neopets plot advancement!

The following will be gibberish unless you're playing along with the puzzle.

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General state-of-the-health update in the first part. Second half is Neopets-related if you'd prefer to skip to that. [Continues beneath cut.]

Having finally worked out how to use my new powerball toy (answer: much less motion in the elbow, as much as possible of the motion in the wrist), I'm now able to begin waging an organised campaign against the heartsickening tremors and general wussiness that are impairing most of my manual tasks to a degree.

Because it's got to this point: If you hear a yelp and a smash, that's Mutt unloading the dishwasher. Indeed, if you hear any sort of impact noise and some swearing, that's a random everyday object escaping my spasmodic grip. I put up with my hands spasming around the strings while trying to play bass, with lacking the grip strength to open a jar, with needing help to shove a washing basket on top of a wardrobe—but when I start to suspect my typing is degrading, IT'S ON, BITCH.

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