ELSEWHERE

Bonus from the pasted changelog

Despite Cael's determination to attempt to pounce Oz at every possible opportunity, Oz is still doing okay with him. We also did some focused food manners training today, letting him hang out while I ate my dinner, firmly telling him no when he tried to steal from it, and spraying him with water when he didn't listen. He gets a D today, but we'll get there.

He and Sekhmet met through the gate and Sekhmet was a butt about it (Sekhmet is a butt about everything), and he and Ivy also had another couple encounters through the gate that went fine. ash and I talked over potential socialising plans and have an idea of how to proceed, and then we'll iterate on that depending on how things go.

The food bins arrived today, they're in the closet right now but I want to rearrange things a little to give them dedicated storage space. I probably got a size bigger than I needed, but I wasn't convinced the smaller size would hold all of the food -- I might order the smaller one at some point in the future to see if it would work better. This is fine for now

Once again we're napping close to dinner time, so current food amounts seem to be good. Next week we're going to start letting him explore the rest of the house, so this weekend we're going to -- sorry, he's dead asleep and has his eyes almost fully open, it's very creepy. He's sleep-twitching and just slowly rotated his head to one side.

We're going to kitten-proof the house this weekend, and I'm going to do the same to my closet in preparation for letting him in there, in addition to other kitten-proofing plans. We're then going to let him just, roam, while Ivy is locked outside (at first).

And he just woke up and rolled off the side of the bed.

I have contracted some manner of throat illness, but I've tested negative for covid. Going to rest and hope it passes

Saved a ladybug (a real one, not an asian lady beetle) from the pool today, and it ended up clinging to my hand so I just hung out with it until it was dry enough to fly away, first carrying it on my walk and then sitting on the bench with it

Continuing to add things to the weird art project website, this time using code written by ChatGPT

 
Oh my god

Cael has been doing a lot of sneaking up on Oz, both intentionally and un-, so we've put a bell on him. He Cannot figure out where the jingling is coming from and it is driving him Nuts

TIL that the way crane games are rigged is the spring controlling the claw's grip will only engage once in every set number of times (example was 1 in 50), so every other time the claw will close but not grip

Also apparently in Japan, if you're struggling with a crane game, you can ask an employee to come rearrange the prizes for you, and they'll either reset the prizes into a default position so you can try again from square 1, or they'll take pity on you and put the prize in a winnable position so all you have to do is nudge it into the hole

(Or just pretend to do the latter, to trick you into spending more money, I hear. They definitely sometimes put it so all you have to do is hit it with the claw, though)

That makes a little bit more sense when you know that Japanese crane games are usually set up differently than American ones:

 
Where you've got one or two prizes sort of set up in a play field, instead of a bunch of prizes all just poured into a box. The former kind of makes sense to be able to go, "Excuse me, I've accidentally pushed the prize into a corner and made it impossible to win, please move it back where it was so I can try again?", and the latter is just kind of, yes, some of the prizes are impossible to get, what did you expect? Try to win something else instead

(I was going to specify that there are a bunch of styles of crane game in Japan, but you see a lot more of them over here these days, too, so)