Man, these blog titles are hard to come up with. I mean, I want to call them something - I tried going with just a date and that's boring and uninformative. The last few titles were riffs on "odds and ends" which is really what my blog posts usually are. But there are only so many iterations of that phrase. I'll figure it out one of these days. And, for now, we really are closing out August.

I'm part of the 32-Bit Cafe and they just had their second code jam. I participated in the first one. The prompt for that one was "That Special Thing Close to My Heart" - Create a page for your fleeting interests. I did my page on Government Cats and Riot Dogs which is about exactly that - official British government mousers and Greek and Chilean neighborhood dogs that participated in riots. The prompt for this month's jam was "character." That's it, just that word/concept. It was left up to you how to interpret it. I chose to create my page on actual characters and if you want you can check it out at Cistercian Numerals.

I've been to the movies a couple times this month: today I watched the Barbie movie and a couple weeks ago I saw the 1975 Rollerball, which I'd never seen before. That was part of a program that our university puts on each semester where they explore "cinematic visions of the future emanating from different moments in history." They have a guest speaker give a brief talk before the film starts and it's just the kind of cool and nerdy thing I'm into. Not sure if I'll watch the others for this semester but they will be Robocop and Prospect.

My reading pace has been kind of slow lately except for last weekend when I devoured 2 T. Kingfisher books, one fairytale retelling (Thornhedge) and one creepy book (A House With Good Bones). She is such a delight - so far I haven't been disappointed by anything she's written. I just found out that another book has dropped in a series that I found earlier this year, Bob McGough's Jubal County series. Well, the book actually dropped last month, I just found out about it last night. These are, urban fantasy? I guess? I'm looking forward to diving into that book SOON. Like maybe tonight.

I haven't worked on my cross stitch project in forever. It's sitting in a pile on the living room table, taunting me. I mis-stitched a section and didn't realize it until I had stitched like 6 other sections all based on where that one was so everything was in the wrong place. I tried to save what I could but there was a whole lot of unstitching that had to be done. What I really want to do is start a new, different quick project but that would require deciding which one to do, getting the supplies for it, and it ends up becoming a THING and it's just easier to do nothing. But I want to stitch. And not have to unstitch.

I finished an audio drama this week, The Fourth Ambit. "This cutting-edge science fiction drama unfolds as a futuristic detective story. Murder, blackmail, conspiracy — and it may all be orchestrated by an Artificial Intelligence." Kind of timely with the AI angle but this is actually a 20+ year old show. Guys, it's really good and I highly recommend you check it out if sci-fi/mystery/AI shenanigans are your jam.

I feel like there was more I wanted to say and if there was I'll probably figure it out once I've uploaded this post. I'm going to leave you all with a picture of my Celine. This is one of her favorite spots (please don't judge the dirty windows). I call it her Cat TV. At the moment she's angry with me because I brushed her and got almost all the knots out of her fur. She has super fine, super long fur that knots up if you look at it. And she, of course, hates to be brushed. So I had to catch her and groom her while she was telling me exactly what she thought of that. That was yesterday and I'm still not forgiven.