Your Austin game writer thought you might appreciate this video: Broken Head.
Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group
Broken Head · Catherine Wheel
Chrome
? 1993 Mercury Records Limited
Released on: 1993-01-01
Producer: Gil Norton
Associated Performer, Guitar, Vocals: Rob Dickinson
Associated Performer, Guitar, Vocals: Brian Futter
Associated Performer, Bass Guitar: Dave Hawes
Associated Performer, Drums: Neil Sims
Composer Lyricist: Brian Futter
Composer Lyricist: Rob Dickinson
Composer Lyricist: Neil Sims
Auto-generated by YouTube.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aweAg7CSye8
“The cat won’t drink!” says your roommate. “The vet says he’s got to drink more and not drinking water is making him sick!”
This isn’t your typical videogame blog post, but I just thought I would share my lifehack for all you cat-loving gamers out there. Cat dehydration is a big problem. Have you struggled with putting water bowls all over and cat bubblers that stub your toe and make noise that neither you nor your cat like? The solution might be easier and cheaper than what the pet stores want you to think.
UPDATE BELOW for owners of former feral/barn/stray cats!
Cats Won’t Drink Because They Usually Don’t Have To
So as you know, cats are skittish creatures who sometimes don’t fully adjust to urban life. Cats (and dogs) are predators that historically got a lot of water from the prey they ate in the wild. In an urban setting, especially when they’re often fed dry commercially-made food, pets really need water and they don’t know how to get it.
Lack of water for cats is a dire problem. Kidney function is dependent on good water intake (one in three cats has kidney problems in their life), and there are a myriad of other related health issues too.
Dehydration also causes obesity because, just like with humans, we often overeat when our bodies are parched for water because instinctively we are trying to get water from food. Have you ever gone to the kitchen hungry, grabbed a glass of water, found yourself parched, drained your water, and discovered that you weren’t all that hungry? Yep… like that. For a parched cat, this is the worst because the cat is overeating and exacerbating its dehydration by eating too much dry food.
Looking for the best budget cat food? We’ve got opinons that might surprise you and save you money.
How do I know this? Because my cat loves it, and because Danni, my old roommate’s cat, loved it. In fact, she used to complain about how her cat would always drink from the bucket instead of her cat bowl. We discovered this by accident because I like to keep the water I run when warming the flow before a shower and later use it for household chores or flushing the toilet. As a result, I often had the bucket sitting in the bathroom full of water, and her cat would drink it constantly. It was a running joke (no pun intended).
We theorized about the reasons. Was it because the bucket had some concrete encrusted on it, which tasted like the culverts of her wild youth? Was it because the water was somehow different, or the plastic? We don’t know for sure.
My theory is pretty simple: I think it’s ergonomics. If I were a cat, I’d prefer to drink water that I don’t have to crank my neck to drink. Some believe that some cats feel vulnerable when hunched over a bowl, or that their whiskers are impeded by the bowl, which blinds them to threats. Measure your cat and make sure the bucket is right, but it should be a perfect fit for most adult cats. If you’ve got a kitten, adjust accordingly. Maybe a Tupperware tub would do the job.
But I have a few more theories, too. A cat might be able to see the surface of the water more readily at that angle. Certainly it puts the smell of clean water right in the nose, and I suspect a bucket is more comforting, like a deep pond or lake, than a dish. Those shiny metal bowls are especially jarring, I suspect. There’s nothing like that in nature, and cats aren’t good with mirrors; they don’t recognize themselves.
Lastly, I think a cat would prefer to drink water from a bucket because they’re suspicious creatures. Their senses are honed for survival; they don’t want to drink something foul accidentally, like a pool of oil that has a thin layer of rainwater on top. If they aren’t 100% sure it’s clean, pure water, they’re not excited. If you couldn’t read labels or talk, you’d probably be just as cautious about your drinks.
An Update for Former Stray Cats That Won’t Drink Water
Update! In 2023, I received the blessing of my punky tabby, Chica. Like Danni, Chica is a former stray who doesn’t drink a lot and hates those shiny chrome pet bowls. She was pretty good with the bucket, though.
The big surprise was that her water consumption went WAY up when I put a brick in the bucket. I’d injured my hand playing ultimate frisbee, so I was icing it and using a brick to displace some of the water to get it to a suitable depth.
Chica loves the brick. She’ll lap away at that bucket and ignore other containers of clean, filtered water. And so the theory of concrete culverts is in my mind confirmed. For a former stray cat, like Danni, I think the taste of stone and sand in water is a strong positive signal, confirming that the water is fresh, non-stagnant, and safe to drink.
Irrigate Your Cat’s Dry Food
I’ve also found that adding a bit of water — an ounce or two — to my cat’s dry food has also increased her water intake and it seems to make her more interested in drinking as well.
And don’t forget to check out our recommendations for the best cheap cat food, both wet and dry.
I hope you find this helpful — please comment below if so, or if you have feedback!
Red Dead Online, Red Dead Redemption 2’s online sibling, is a remarkable $5 on all platforms until the 15th. It’s also backwards compatible with the PS5 and Xbox Series X. If you’ve always wanted to horse around in the Old West like a GTA gansta, is RDO it worth it? What’s it like and what’s the difference between RDO and RDR2?
Red Dead Online vs. Red Dead Redemption
RDO does feel rather complete, if very open-world. There are even a number of story missions that go on quite a while; I haven’t gotten to the end of them after about 2 weeks of fairly intense but also unfocused play. It’s like a GTA game with slightly simplified and more generic story missions. You’re not a well-crafted outlaw with a long backstory like RDR2; you’re the somewhat faceless (and voiceless) loner that you designed when starting the game, and you can skew good or bad, but there’s no history to you.
That’s okay, because the world is well-populated with activities like PvP races and gunfights, free-range wildlife hunting/fishing, stranger and mail clerk missions, whole-world events, and of course organic encounters with other players, which can be hostile or friendly.
It’s honestly a ton of content and entertainment for $5, especially if you’re an Amazon Prime member or an outdoorsy type. Why these two exceptions? Well, if you’re a Prime member, you can get a stellar starter package, including a valuable bounty hunter license (which unlocks fun bounty missions and fantastic legendary bounty missions), just by visiting the Amazon Gaming site and linking your accounts. And if you’re someone who uses pine needles for bedding, snacks, and deodorant, RDO is your perfect gaming environment, because you can spend hours tracking game, collecting herbs for tonics, and exploring the lush environments, which are varied and remarkably lifelike, if not quite to the visual caliber of a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn.
It also doesn’t hurt that Rockstar is fully committed to this game, more so than RDR. RDO generates income from impatient gamers who want to buy their way to in-game power through microtransactions. RDR does not. So RDO is getting updates and RDR isn’t.
Beginner Tips for Red Dead Online
Red Dead is fun and (like any other MMORPG) grindy… but not bad. The starting weapons are actually very good and there are lots of rotating discounts. Pay attention to those awards and discounts; thanks to one of mine, I got a free horse that is one of the best transports in the game.
I spent a lot of my early gaming hunting, which is profitable, and a lot more profitable than playing humans in the RDO poker rooms. (Humans playing with fake money are almost impossible to bluff out of a pot.) But the story missions, race circuits, and whole-world events are much more profitable.
Sadly you do need to work up a decent amount of gold (if you’re lacking Prime) to get a bounty hunter or trader license, which adds a lot more fun.
My quick RDO beginner advice:
make sure you’re always in DEFENSIVE mode to avoid getting hassled by PvPers, although there is no cost to being killed (left on d-pad > online settings). This gets set to Offensive after most activities.
do the story missions which are easy and fun
do at least one daily challenge per day to earn gold (left on dpad > challenges)
accept the posse invitations and participate in the whole-world events that you like; they can be profitable
forget about profit! Many players are suffering from RDO greed, trying to buy that fancy hat or provision their camp with extra gear. Seek out the stuff you enjoy doing, and don’t grind just to get pretty shit. That’s a bad way to game, and a bad way to live.
Is RDO a Good Game or a Great Game?
Gonna have to say “good” from my POV, although there’s a lot here. The core gameplay loop is much like GTA: wander around, look for juicy missions and activities, and buy better gear. At heart I’m just not a huge fan of open-world games, especially MMORPGs. I’m allergic to grinding and bored by the open-world formula, which often breaks down to “wandering through town trying to find something cool to do.” To me, 30% of open-world gaming is like channelsurfing and waiting for fun to happen. Sure, it happens, but I’d much rather be in a well-designed encounter that has stakes and some atmosphere.
To be fair, I’m just scratching the surface, and RDO did just up the ante for me. I finally got my bounty hunter license and I went on a legendary bounty mission. I was matched up with the Wolfman, a squirrely bad guy who lives by a wintery lake in the far north, surrounded by his pack of pet wolves. “Bring some predator bait,” it advised.
Immediately I had a smile on my face. It didn’t matter that I had trouble with the finicky weapon draw UI and got ripped up by three wolves well before finding the Wolfman. It didn’t matter that the Wolfman, when I found him, came running out into the open with his pet bear, yelling something random, where I quickly put a bullet in his head. It didn’t matter that, when I turned my repeater on the pet bear, I realized that the bear wasn’t a pet and shouldn’t be antagonized. (It was a wild bear, and it was a juggernaut.) What mattered was that, unlike a lot of the other missions in the game, this felt like an adventure, not a insta-quest that fell out of the developer’s random generator.
Your Austin game writer thought you might appreciate this video: Kitten Zoom Filter Mishap.
This is a live stream of virtual court proceedings in the 394th Judicial District Court of Brewster, Culberson, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis and Presidio Counties, Judge Roy Ferguson presiding. Any capture of video or audio of this stream is prohibited, and may constitute contempt of court with a punishment of up to $500 fine and 180 days in the county jail.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxlPGPupdd8
Your Austin game writer thought you might appreciate this video: LASTING IMAGES: alternatives to traditional burial.
You know the saying “death and taxes….,” but tax time comes only once a year and death comes approximately ninety six times per minute. What will you do when your minute arrives? Enter Lasting Images, a feature documentary showing the lighter side of contemporary choices in human remains disposal, of which there are many:
Traditional burial– still the first choice among Americans today, but
Cremation is rapidly gaining. The growing alternative Green movement, put on the map by the popular HBO series six feet under (oh, and they got it all wrong!); and finally, human composting. You would have to have a sense of humor to make a machine that mulches a loved one.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7imv4V5Um0
Cracker Jack snacks used to be a real treat when I was a kid. Peanuts and caramel popcorn, hell yeah! And the prizes, though they were always cheap, were sometimes a delight. I remember getting a little plastic magnifying glass that was useful and fun, and little toy planes and cars.
I picked up a 3-pack of Cracker Jacks yesterday for some retro snacking. The prize, though, was a little sticker than you can redeem for free play on some kind of game on a page of webgames. I say “some kind” because the games are all 100% broken (Chrome, Windows 10 Home). When you try to start the game, the site attempts to save an index.htm file on your local drive and then loads a blank page. I’ve tried it several times with the same result, using two different stickers.
I’m ambivalent about the webgame approach for prizes. I approve of Frito-Lay’s decision to stop making cheap plastic junk, but a subpar webgame is not going to increase the amount of joy in the world, much less this travesty.
I’d much rather see them design something responsible AND fun. Shouldn’t the minds at Frito-Lay be up for that challenge? Maybe a figure or spaceship made of recycled cardboard? A puzzle? What about a few seeds and instructions on how to cultivate them, or a science experiment with a supporting Youtube video? Hopefully Cracker Jack gets cracking on this; the current effort is lazy and slipshod.
Cracker Jack is owned by Frito-Lay/Pepsi. Sure, it may not make as much money as Diet Pepsi, but this is a sad and undignified way to defile a classic American tradition. RIP, Cracker Jack prizes… at least for now!
It wasn’t all that long ago. Back then, if you talked to a knowledgeable baseball fan, they’d tell you that sign-stealing was fairly common, and that most teams probably had some shady scheme involving the video feed.
In fact, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci wrote a whole article about how sign-stealing using technology is good for baseball back when the Apple Watch scandal started to break in 2017. In 2020, it’s kind of hard to believe that SI would put its weight behind such a trivialization, after a number of scandals, primarily the Astros being caught on videotape thumping a trashcan to signal pitches. But here it is.
This infuriates me, because although I feel the Astros deserved to be castigated for their actions, MLB sold the fanbase on the idea that it was an evil Astros thing, not widespread. And it was obviously widespread. Which means it wasn’t an Astros problem. It was an MLB problem that MLB failed to address.
Here are some quotes from Verducci (emphases are mine):
The dark art of stealing signs is a baseball tradition that goes back to when the Phillies’ third base coach stood on an underground box that would buzz depending on what pitch was coming—in 1899! But the craft of sign stealing became widespread—we’re talking every team, every park—when baseball adopted instant replay in 2009.
To speed replay along, MLB allowed live feeds of games in each team’s video replay monitor. Many of those monitors are located directly behind the dugout, which means the catcher’s signs seen in real time can be relayed to the bench and/or the hitter extremely quickly.
“They really should have the monitor on delay,” said one veteran player. “But baseball doesn’t want to do that. Why? Pace of play. They want replay decided as quickly as possible. That means they don’t want even the extra three or four seconds it would take if you had it on delay.”
How common is stealing signs off the live television feed?
“Goes on all the time,” the player said. “Our (monitor) is so close (to the dugout) you could just run up and whistle” to the hitter to communicate what pitch is coming.
“It’s the reason you see all the meetings on the mound—to change signs. You’ve got guys signaling from second base. You see it all the time because everybody is doing it.”
Here’s another good bit:
“It’s kind of like pine tar,” the player said, referring to pitchers using the substance for a better grip, though it technically is against the rules. “Guys use it all the time and it’s understood to be okay, just as long as you don’t go crazy with it, like [Yankees pitcher] Michael Pineda did, with the stuff slathered all over his neck.”
In the short term, this is good for baseball. The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is officially back on. From CC Sabathia moaning about bunting to each team pointing an accusatory finger at the other for dirty pool, we at last have genuine ill will between the rivals. The rivalry was one of the biggest engines that helped drive the greatest economic growth in the game’s history during the last 20 years. Now, with both teams filled with young stars, enabling a steady cast in the next few years, it can become a similar engine.
So that was the attitude. “Boys will be boys” and “everybody’s doing it so it’s a level playing field.” And it doesn’t take much to see a protective baseball royalty attitude here. I don’t want to throw Verducci to the wolves here, but just like many other antiquated attitudes in MLB, this was the prevailing climate in 2017. Cheating is good for the sport when it enhances the draw of the big powerhouses like New York and Boston. In fact, it’s kind of endearing! It’s giving baseball a nice healthy shot of drama!
But Astrogate proved that it wouldn’t take much to bring to the surface all the self-righteous screamers and ill-informed fans in the baseball hoi polloi. People love having a villain, and MLB was happy to hang that tag on the Astros rather than face the problem in a balanced and healthy way.
Your Austin game writer thought you might appreciate this video: You Think I’m the Beast? – Saturday Night Live.
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The Beauty and the Beast realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Aired 10/17/09
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You know, the concept of casting the videogame player as an entire culture in the Civilization games is just brilliant, pure genius. The Civ VI intro cinematic captures the quest for human progress perfectly: the wide-eyed optimism and ambition that encapsulates all the bold and impossible achievements our species has logged over the aeons. Too bad it’s followed by a somewhat flawed and ponderous game.
I hadn’t played this series since college and it showed. The presentation has come a long way and I commend the designers for jamming a ridiculous amount of depth into a fairly attractive and intuitive package. That depth, though, isn’t all bonus: the load times on this baby are ridiculous (about three minutes to load your first save, but it seems faster for subsequent loads), and the game itself suffers from memory leaks because (at least on my PC) it intermittently stops responding and playing audio after several consecutive hours, each halt lasting a few seconds.
It also has two very different ways of drawing the world: a realtime view, which shows all your units and buildings as tiny fully-animated 3D models on textured terrain; and a strategy view, which skips some of the animations and detail and shows the terrain as hexes with simpler patterns. I found the strategy view attractive, faster, and much easier to play.
Civ VI Gameplay
The gameplay itself is ridiculously addictive. As a game writer, perhaps I should be more disturbed that a completely narrative-free game could be this intoxicating, but as with a good procedural (think “roguelike”) game, I quickly become invested in both the short-term story (I want to assemble a themed art museum to attract lots of tourism) and the long-term one (I want my culture to dominate). I also enjoy seeing the progression of cultures, from ideas to technologies to “Great People,” who are famous and not-so-famous luminaries who appear as I advance to contribute tasty treasures like substantial bonuses or advances in political thought that unlock economic, diplomatic, and military bonus cards. It’s refreshing to be in a game that reflects the world we live in, acknowledging the importance of art and science, and punishing diplomatically players who rely on conquest.
Some things work well. Others are pretty awful. Pathfinding often seems broken, with units choosing to slog through forests rather than taking a nearby seaborne route. The AI suggestions for what to build are often nonsensical. Your cities get crowded fast, and it’s pretty mystifying as to what resources and bonuses you gain or lose when you build things. (Key among these are the all-important production levels, denoted by gears. If you build the wrong things on geared tiles, you can cripple your city.) Districts, which are city enhancements, can simply never be removed once they are placed, which seems ridiculous, even granted the many interdependencies. I was also a little disappointed to see that almost all of the units you can build and manage are military; I’d like to see a more sophisticated tech tree here that reflects the game’s non-violent victory options.
Even seeing your city boundaries is a hassle, because as your cities start to creep close together, the game draws them as one united mass. I’m sure there’s some option somewhere to disable this, but I’m stumped as to why this is the default.
And the Civ VI Bugs… They Are Legion
I could see myself playing this game more but there were a few headscratching bugs that convinced me otherwise. First, my traders started telling me they didn’t have any valid trade routes. There were plenty of routes available, even in the game’s own trade management panel. Reddit said this might be a bug that requires reinstallation; I suspect it might also have been that I lost some bonus that increased my trade routes, leaving my trader crippled. Either way, the game should’ve handled this better.
The real capper was in the endgame stages when most of the Great People had been already awarded, which means that the Wildcard bonus cards for them were being removed from the board. I got to a point where I had more open Wildcard slots than there were cards, and the game insisted I fill those slots before ending the turn. Which meant the game was completely stuck. Reddit provided an answer for this dilemma too: restore a previous save. In the game industry, we call this an “A” bug — a bug that completely prevents a normal player from finishing the game, and one that a completed game should never contain. I ended up reverting my civ from a democracy back to a feudal chieftaincy to reduce the number of Wildcard slots just so I could get my game to a semi-satisfactory ending.
Thanks, Civ VI. It was a good ride, but I expected more polish from a game of your pedigree. Enjoy the uninstalled afterlife.
As a game designer, I think this looks more like a stylistic error than a “SJW” political issue. This world has enough Gamergate bullsh*t so I’m loath to see yet more political griping, especially when it so quickly gets personal and irrelevant to the game.
IMHO it was a stylistic decision. And honestly, it wasn’t necessarily a bad one; I mean, BF has NEVER been a combat simulation. I mean, have you ever blown up a tank with a grenade? Just take a look at BF 1942: Secret Weapons. You didn’t see all the battlefield reality fascists up in arms about Natter rocket planes flying around like pigeons. And amped-up costume choices and style can be fun. But I do think the team went too far with some of these designs. The character classes need to be identifiable, and it’s jarring to see a character with makeup and a prosthetic arm in a WWII game. At a certain point it’s not a WWII game any more.
I see that the devs did say some things about being inclusive and diverse. Sure. But this is a videogame, and devs love to put a hot girl on the box. What I see here is an attempt to evolve the genre in the Quake/Gears of War direction. DICE tried to pivot their franchise, and the fans didn’t like it.
Nobody goes to the drawing board and says, “How can I take our gravy train franchise and use it to advance my personal politics?” That kind of crap just doesn’t happen. Advancing this kind of conspiracy theory is simply naive.
Follow the money. This was DICE’s attempt to spice up the genre and do something fresh. But they should’ve done themselves a favor and simply called it an “alternate reality WWII.”
