supermouse

Twitter gives you everything at once, so today I am getting Valentine's Day poems intertwined with protests in Iran and reports of a bombing in Kabul. This mixture of the violent with the banal is always there, but it's especially noticeable today.

I've downloaded and installed f.lux, which 'warms' the colours of your screen at sunset, so that your brain doesn't get the 'blue' signals that keep telling you it's mid-afternoon when you're browsing before going to bed. In theory, it helps insomnia. Even if it's entirely woo, it probably does help insomnia. The placebo effect can be very marked. And it's free, so I am trying it.

I cleaned out my snail tank yesterday, and killed off all the dark ones (by donating them to Random to feed to her Assassin snails), keeping the lighter ones which, by now, are a dark caramel colour. I started off with only slightly speckled black snails, so I am heartened by this change in only the third generation. My aim for pink snails within three years seems possible. Unfortunately, I forgot to clean out the shower tray last night, so when I had a shower, I ended up treading on a nice crunchy floor of very tiny snail shells and dry salt.

Spice seems by now thoroughly at home. My body is covered in scratches and contusions. There is no malice in Spice at all, but she can be clumsy and mistake parts of me for the floor or a toy. My left arm has very deep bruised punctures from when she hauled herself up on what she thought was the top of the mattress. Then, when I play with her, I am clumsy as well and run into things. Frankly, it's worth it for the purrs.

I bet Random that I couldn't breed pink (or yellow, but pink would be ideal) snails from her unwanted collection of pest snails, so I snagged a dozen, set them up in a bucket and then a tank, and now I have a hundred or so. Another couple of months and I can have another cull to end up with the ones closest to my desired colour. It's slow going, but as three-year-projects go, it's fun and easy.

I'm playing Caesary on Kongregate. It's a 'free' game which wants *way* too much money to get ahead (having three builders instead of one would cost me about £3 *per week*), but it does manage to at least be perfectly fun to play even with only the free stuff. If options cost less, I'd probably already have thrown money at it. Instead, everything costs about twice what I consider reasonable. Good game, though.

I finally got around to watching Francesco's Venice and it's astonishing. I didn't realise that Enrico Dandalo, Doge of Venice basically hijacked the entire Fourth Crusade to go and sack Constantinople (then a Christian city) as revenge for their soldiers blinding him a few decades before when he was merely Venice's foremost merchant. Now that's a grudge. It also, finally, makes sense for me of why Byzantium got sacked at all. 'For the money' didn't quite cut it for me, although Venice did take many, many treasures back (and used them to encrust St Mark's Basilica, which holds the remains of St Mark, which were also stolen, this time from Alexandria).

Oh, and look up the Venetian voting system some time. I am trying to imagine it being made into a board game - randomly get nine cards and use them to trade for forty tokens, then roll dice to get 25 of those, and so on and so on. At the end, you have a single Doge, but nobody's quite sure how.

I just want to know when and how Venetians set up the British Civil Service.