Puppy Love

Good afternoon, dear reader! I do hope you're well. It's a bank holiday here in the UK, so I've been celebrating by doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. Well, almost nothing, as I shall soon point out.


Those of you who follow my Twitter (there it is again) will know that my eldest dog, Ben, passed away some weeks ago. Well, I say passed away, but I actually had to take him to the vet. For two months he hadn't been eating, and because of this, he had been getting weaker and weaker. By the end, he couldn't even stand. He was 18 though, so he had a long life. Here be he:

However, last Sunday (the one before yesterday), I got a puppy! This be he:

He's called Jasper, he's 8 weeks old, and he's crossed between a King Charles and a Jack Russel. As you can probably tell for the photo, dear reader, he spends most of his time sleeping. The rest of the time, he's eating. When he's not eating or sleeping, he's biting things. Lot's of things. In fact, everything. He's teething, bless 'im. In fact, I'm writing this just after playing with him, so I'm covered in teeth marks and scratches. And that is not a line to take out of context.

In other news, it's been a slow time in the world of Teddy. All of my work reached a saturation point around two weeks ago, and now I have very little to do indeed for, hopefully, all of Summer. That almost certainly won't hold true, however. Still, I need to devote a great deal of my time to looking after Jasper, especially considering he's not old enough to be left on his own for any length of time yet.

A real timesink for me for the past few days has been Frozen Synapse, which was released on... The 26th, I believe. Of course, the release date has been irrelevant for me, as I was a pre-orderer and so had access to a playable beta. Frozen Synapse (if you can't be arsed to click the link) is a... The best way to describe it is as a simultaneous turn based strategy game. Each player is given a 'hand' of units (the units are randomly selected, but are the same for both players). The current unit selection are riflemen, shotgunners, grenadiers, and rocket launchery people. Each sort of adheres to a rock, paper, scissors hierarchy. The game revolves around making plans: it is divided into turns in which the player has a limitless amount of time to decide what he wants his units to do during the turn. Things like where to move, where to aim, for example. While planning, you can move your opponent's units as well, and you can play the turn without finalising it, so you can see where your units would kill their enemies or get killed, and if they would reach their destinations before the end of the turn. When both players commit their turns, the turn plays out and the match moves onto the next turn. The game continues until it hits a set number of turns, or a player has completed his objectives. It's a bloody marvellous game. Matches can stretch to days if both players are good, but the actual gameplay footage is almost always less than a minute long. For example, here is a video of one of my matches where I decimated my opponent in a single turn:

And here is a slightly longer one against a slightly more competent opponent:

In these videos, my blokes are always green, while my opponent's are always red. You'll be able to find more videos from me, as well as Let's Plays (which are on hold for the time being) here, on my channel.

Until next time!
Teddy