what Amazon gave me when I was searching cross training shoes
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Category: What the Boss likes
What the Boss Likes – More kitten silliness
The Kitten Legion of Darkness members are growing madly, eating everything in sight, and just being sweet.
Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – where I show just how nerdy I am when it comes to magic and religion
And now for something completely different.
I tinker at writing sword and sorcery fiction. The milieu allows for some interesting thoughts about how gods and magic and mortals interact. This is a snippet about how gods, religion and magic work out. The setting is a pair of classic D&D type characters (mage and thief) in an urban fantasy world.
“What gods are in this world?” Myridian accepted a cup of coffee with a nod. “I understand that Katherine and Nightchild are shaman which would be akin to what we have in our world, being able to heal with magic, but do you have priests? Temples?”
Slim sat back, the street samurai exchanging a glance with Nightchild. “Hmmm, well, there are some people who still believe in gods, if you mean really powerful magical beings that control the universe or some crap like that. I’ve seen them on street corners screaming that the world is going to end and their god is the only one that can save everyone. I don’t know much about the idea.”
“A single god? An odd idea. We have many, each with a certain sphere of influence.”
“The monotheistic idea lost a lot of steam when magic came back.” Nightchild sipped at her coffee. “A lot of your average wageslaves will think that since I’m a shaman, I worship a god or gods or something like that, thanks to media making up all sorts of shit on how magic works. But really, I work with Cat, and Cat works with me and we usually have the same goals in mind. What Cat is exactly?” She shrugged her shoulders. “The stories have them being always here, my theory is that they are basically Platonian ideals that have manifested agency and can affect reality in ways mortals can’t on their own.”
Slim chuckled. “And there are some that worship the dragons, but we know they can be killed, so they aren’t what I’d call a god; Azatlan does this, the crazy bastards. Cults spring up all of the time, usually in some rathole where they end up killing themselves for their beliefs. How the heck do you know all of this stuff, Nyen?”
Nightchild pulled out a tablet. “Just curious, you know, like a cat. As for priests and temples, those aren’t looked upon kindly much here in Seattle or most civilized areas. A couple decades ago, when magic started to return, the ones with priests and temples and their one true gods ended up making a fair amount of earth into deadlands, when they started throwing nukes around. They were all sure that their god was coming back, but they found that their religions weren’t getting the magic that others were. That made these idiots jealous and *that* gave them the cause to be attacking each other. Good for the rest of us that sane governments flattened the countries that started the mess before the whole world went up.”
“Nukes?” Ahri looked up from wiggling a feather for a kitten’s amusement.
“Imagine a light so strong that it burns so hot that it incinerates people, so fast that it burns their shadows on walls, the few walls than can stand a blast that can pulverize near anything, and leaves in the center an area of glass so poisonous that you get near it you die because your flesh ends up dripping off your bones.” Slim shuddered. “That war scared everyone so much that pretty much no one even things of using such things anymore.”
“And this is the world we’ve been sent to. What if the demon gets something like that?” Ahri shook her head.
Myridian returned his companion’s gaze. “Then we must not fail.”
So that’s my take on why monotheistic religion fails in a world where magic comes back. This is based on the role-playing game Shadowrun (magic, automatic weapons, megacorps. (I do the pink mohawk 90s version) and a lot of other urban fantasy novels and RPGs that have magic. A lot of RPGs do their best to ignore real world religions, since idiot conservative Christians will take a fit, and they already think that Dungeons & Dragons is satanic. One notable exception is “In Nomine” where angels and demons are fighting on earth, and that can be quite a bit of fun to play.
In this fantasy world, there are no monotheistic god showing that they exist, just like in our world where none can show they exist. I do wish we did have magic. Wouldn’t rush hour be different? 😊
What the Boss Likes – more about the kittens!
So, as I said recently, we have new additions to the family. Here are some photos of them and a few short videos. We did screw up on what sex some of the little beasties are. Since they are going to be spayed/neutered, we don’t know if it makes that much difference to change the names, and well, a lot of the time, cats just don’t give a damn what their human-given names are. 🙂 Athena is a male, and Leo is a girl. The rest of the kittens are males, so Harley, Jason and Apollo are okay names for them. We’ll probably call Leo Matilda now, taking a riff from “The Professional”. Athena is so sweet looking with that little black nose, I can’t imagine him as a tomcat, so Athena might just stick.
Jason is the stripy one. The black one is Tez (Tezcaltipoca) who isn’t sure about this whole kitten thing. Harley is off to the left.
Aggie (Agamemnon) is the big grey and white cat. The darker stripy one is Apollo, the lighter one, Matilda and the white and stripy is Harley.
This is again with Aggie, Harley, Apollo, Matilda and Athena.
Hera, aka MommaCat, is recovering from her spaying operation. Unbeknownst to us she was still in heat, though the trilling and wiggling around had stopped. That makes the operation a little more difficult but she is doing well.
What the Boss Likes – power fantasies
Christians often took fits about sword and sorcery fantasy, especially D&D. Who are the heroes here?
What the Boss Likes – New additions to the family
We have 6 new additions. I had befriended a little kitty earlier this year. She had a lame front paw so I fed her and gave her a place to sleep. Then I saw that she was probably pregnant, but she was so tiny, I figured that she would either have one or two kittens or lose them altogether as is common for new feline mothers.
She had five.
She had them under a neighbor’s shed and then she brought them to our garden. One disappeared and ended up back at the shed. So after a couple of weeks, everyone is now caught, inside the house and being tamed. The vet said the momma cat was only around a year old and she’s only a little over 6 pounds (about 3 kilos). So we are getting her spayed because if she is such a good momma at this age, we’ll be up to our hips in kittens.
Momma cat is Hera. The white and stripes (females I think) are Athena and Harley (Harlequin due to her face that you can’t see here), the three stripey/spotty boys are Apollo, Jason ( ala the Argonauts, for being quite the explorer) and Leo. She’s in the midst of weaning them but they are about as big as her.
What the Boss Likes – Our Toronto Vacation
Two weeks ago, we ventured up to Toronto for a vacation. Things had a bit of a rocky start since the airline ceased to be going out of our local airport, and we had to travel to Philly to get on it. It, of course, took longer to get to the airport than it took for the actual flight. I love flying, I freakin’ hate airports. The TSA lines weren’t bad though, and we got up to Toronto in the morning.
After navigating the rail line from the airport to Toronto and then the subway to our hotel, we finally got ensconced in our room. When ever we can, we stay at a Kimpton Hotel, since they are always nice, and they have nicely liberal policies, including taking pets. The St. George was, as usual, in a mid 20th C mid rise building and we were on the 7th floor. The room was about twice the size of the one we stayed in when we stayed at a Kimpton in Boston. And speaking of Boston, it felt like it was about that expensive in Toronto, but with a good exchang
l was near the University of Toronto, and this was definitely a college bar but very nice, and I liked the seating in it. The first time we went, it was great customer service. The second time, there was no customer service, so your mileage may vary.
That evening, we went out to find the reason we ended up in Toronto. I had read about a “nerd” bar, the Storm Crow Tavern that is located out in Vancouver. We were prepared to fly out there to go to it but then found out that they were going to open a location in Toronto, the Storm Crow Manor. It’s a couple of streets back from Yonge Street, which is the main entertainment/LGBT area of Toronto. I do need to show you 
the baby changing station:
They have very good food and drink. The décor is very much for the happy nerd in me. I’m not much of a photographer, so just go out to the link and look around. They were working on their outdoor area when we were there, which is complete now (I think.) You can also follow them on Facebook to see what they are doing. We went there three times during the 4 days we were there.
I got “Romulan Ale” as you can see. and here’s a video of it bubbling.
The next day we walked down to the CN Tower, a ridiculously high observation installation, about a fifth of a mile high. That’s it standing above the skyline. We were going to go up in it but the line was ridiculous and it was hot. So we proceeded across the street to the Steam Whistle Brewery, which had just opened a German-style biergarten. They had a very good pilsner, and I had a radler (beer and grapefruit soda) made with it, and my husband had just the beer. He also had the chicken schnitzel and I had beef tartar. It was a little over mustardy for me, but good, well chopped rather than ground.
We chose to walk up Yonge Street on the way back to the hotel. And there we found a Tokyo Smoke, another reason we went to Toronto. We partook some very low dose capsules. I’ve tried weed before but never had much of a reaction to it. This wasn’t much of a reaction either but it does seem to make it easer to think about things creatively and to get rid of the anxiety that you aren’t doing something “right” when doing art, writing, etc. The folks at the store were very professional and helpful. I really hope that PA gets recreational weed soon. The day was ended at Storm Crow again.
For Wednesday, I had made an appointment at a spa in the city, Hammam. It had advertised that it did Turkish baths and massages. My husband hadn’t had a professional massage before so I thought we’d both enjoy it. We had seen Turkish baths on various shows, most notably Tony Bourdain’s travel show, and wanted to try one. After wrapping up with towels, we spend some time in the steam room, a lovely tiled area with benches. It was HOT, but they had cold wet washcloths in a refrigerator right outside, so I took one and breathed through it while the sweat streamed off me. Then the bath attendents took us into a room with a large heated stone table where we laid down and were sluiced by hot and cold water, body temperature soap suds as well as being well scrubbed with what felt like 80 grit sand paper, but in a good way. After the bath, we were taken to another room for the massages. I got a full body massage and my husband got just the upper body since he’s a computer guy and, being tall, hunches over his desk all of the time. I’d definitely recommend it, even if it was a little pricy. But you only live once, eh?
After the spa, we wanted to get some dim sum, so we walked into Chinatown. We ended up at the Sky Dragon restaurant in a small multistory mall. I think we were the only Caucasian folks there, and we had absolutely no idea what we were eating, but it was tasty. There were several sets of dumplings, I could recognize the shu mai, and then we had a deep fried thing that seemed to be something like a crab cake, but rather shaggy on the outside. These were brought around in cards by elderly Chinese ladies, who were amused with us.
The next day we knew it was going to be rainy all day. We were just up the street from the Royal Ontario Museum, so we saved that for the rainy day. When we were there they had two special exhibitions, one for Indian treasures and the other paintings from the age of Rembrandt. The Indian show had caparisons for elephants and horses, clothing, canopies and jewels. The painting exhibit was beautiful, and I found I could appreciate it more since I’ve been dabbling with painting myself. One painter, I think it’s was Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, struck me as having what I would consider modern sensibilities. (an example of his work).
Finally, for dinner that evening, we again overcame our shyness and anxiety and went to a Japanese barbeque place right across from our hotel. It was called Gyubee, and seems to be a small chain up in Canada. Like the dim sum place, we really had no idea what we were doing, but it was fun grilling thinly sliced meats and vegetables on the gas grill in the center of the table. We had pork belly, brisket, marinated short rib, asparagus and mushrooms. For desert they had these great popsicles, Melona, and we had the mango ones.
We had idly known that the Toronto Raptors were playing in the NBA finals. Being not interested in sports in the least, we really didn’t pay attention. But that night, I woke up to hear all sorts of hooting and screaming. The celebration was on, and we could hear them seven stories up. And we were a couple of miles from the real craziness down at the arena by the CN Tower.
All in all, a good vacation, though every time I come home, I vow to never leave again. My anxiety chews me up on vacations. Hope you enjoyed reading!
