SEP 04

2024

Wednesday: after my update last night, I continued playing The War Within, which involved picking up a bunch of flight points I'd missed, followed by the early questing in Hallowfall.

Today saw another four-day work week done. I was able to work on a lot of trade sanctions emails, and on my breaks, I continued watching an Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney stream that I'd recently started. Lunch was a second day of teriyaki noodles. In online distractions, they've started posting updates about the "Perils in Paradise" mini-set for Hearthstone, so I have been saving my gold for that, and in Pocket Camp, we've just started the second half of one of the last garden events before the discontinuation of the online version of the app.

After work, Julie went out for a friend's birthday celebration, I think? They went to some restaurant she hadn't tried before, and they went to a bar afterwards. In the meantime, I finished the scalloped potatoes for dinner, I spent a lot of time treating the cats and laying with them on various sofas and chairs, and I played through a beta version of Ryan's upcoming Ectocomp submission. There's an optimization element that I'm pretty bad at, but I want to take another couple of cracks at it.

Speaking of interactive fiction, after Julie went to bed (and after I finally got Mim moved from the living room to the bedroom), I searched my accordion file to find some old notes I'd made toward games I wanted to make, and I successfully located the following:

Maps and monster categorization notes for a Castlevania-like IF game that I'd made on the back of a D&D 4th Edition resource tracker from around 2008 or 2009!

A list of ghostly entities for my "haunted drugstore" game, along with possible game-ending scenarios, on the back of a pharmacy receipt accounting page dated 07/17/2001!

Two different maps of a "virtual landscape" rendered via more than a hundred HTML files I created for my old Geocities website ca. 1999, which is only partially preserved on the Internet Archive!

Also, a tiny map laying out territory according to which guild controlled it for an attempt to make an interactive fan-game based on the Ravnica: City of Guilds setting, which I'd sketched while working at Intrust Bank!

I'm relieved that I was able to find this stuff so easily. Being unable to locate notes that I know I've made is one of the surefire ways to put me in a bad mood.

2023

Monday: got up late for Labor Day, and we had a lunch of toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I did both my own laundry as well as a load of basement towels in the afternoon, and for the first time in approximately three months, I got back into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I started and finished the Water Temple that my friend Ryan had been frustrated by, and my conclusions were similar to his: use of the water-wheels is not intuitive, and the complex as a whole lacks a strong central mechanic. I continued my search for shrines and related points of interest along the western edge of the world map and made good progress, but I stopped in time to do the dishes while listening to the latest Third Strongest Podcast episode.

By the time I finished the dishes, it was time to go to Julie's Monday night Quizzo, and I accompanied her for the first time. None of her usual teammates made it, thanks to the holiday. We split a Caesar salad and pizza, and she had a Rolling Rock, while I had some kind of pear cider. I liked it a lot. The trivia questions felt a little harder than those we'd had at Kelliann's: we were second-guessing ourselves two or three times a round, and it was always the case that our first guess was closer to the right one. Despite those setbacks, we finished with a comfortable lead, and the prize money for first place more than covered dinner, which felt great.

Now that we're back home, I've treated all the cats, so I'm going to shut down in the living room and move into the office for some more FFXIV before bed. Now that I have a job that feels good to play at 90, I need to unlock all the Endwalker raids and other content I've been missing out on. (No offense to Reaper fans, but I couldn't set up my abilities in a way that the rotation felt right with my keybinds. The Dancer rotation just works better for me.)