Promiseland

[Fetian]

Today, ash and I went into the city again to check out a couple of events -- one of them was a sort of general event, 'live performances, artists, vendors' etc, the other was a queer easter event. The first one was, uh, kind of disappointing! There were maybe six or seven stalls set up and a local radio station blasting their music, and not a lot going on, but to be fair we got there pretty close to when the whole thing was starting so it's entirely possible it would have taken off later on in the day. The queer easter thing was neat but we didn't stay very long -- largely just a bunch of people hanging out on blankets in the park listening to a DJ and hanging out. I did find an easter egg!

It was about a twenty minute walk between the two, so we got a fair bit of exercise in, and then also walked to the train, and then home from the train. It was nice out, a good day to just kind of wander around

when we got home, he played fallout for a while and I did some internetting, then we had dinner and watched Let's Game It Out and Would I Lie to You, and then he went to bed. I did some more internet and then I pulled another vinyl out of the garage (Fleetwood Mac) and swapped out the switches in my keyboard again. I think I do just generally like the as101 yellows more than the holy panda x's, and I do think that's because they work better with the heavier keys. So all the black keys have the as101s and the beige keys have the holy pandas, and that feels pretty good to type on. I'd like to see if I can find a set that has a heavier activation force and see if I like those, at some point

Sor is visiting in less than two weeks! Exciting, and also I need to get ready to have visitors.

I need to go feed the cats, and then I am going to resume doing not much until bed

[Fetian]

Today, ash and I played the Deadly Premonition board game, again, and added a couple new house rules to make two-player games more fun. There's already a house rule that you roll the die before your turn and if you get a 1 you have to check the weather -- it's really clear that the creators of the game expected people to want to check the weather way more often than you actually do end up wanting, because the risk/reward balance is very skewed toward risk -- most of the cards are bad, many of them are 'get one of your people killed' bad, so adding a means to force the weather to get checked helps the game flow.

Last time we played we ran into an issue where most of our people had the same symbols, so we kept not having cards that could affect any of them in our hands, which severely slowed the game down. So we've added a house rule to expand stables by 3 each in two-player games, but still treat the game mechanically like you only have six people. So it basically just adds nine more symbols to your stable to be affectable by people's evidence.

And then we figured that getting one person in a player's stable guilty to be able to accuse them of being an accessory to murder was too easy, so we've added a house rule that you have to have at least half of your stable guilty to be able to be accused

I think what the game really needs is some balancing in what kind of cards there are, but there's not a lot I can do about that with house rules. As is, though, it's still a very fun game, extremely silly and creates very silly scenarios as you come up with why a card means that a given character is guilty or innocent ("Polly is a suspect because the police found suspicious items at the hotel!" "No she's innocent because she has a gun." And of course the classic "The [6 year old] twins are innocent because they were on a romantic rendezvous at the time of the murder") -- the entire premise of the game is very silly, honestly, because it positions the players as secret agents who have all arrived in this town and are arguing over who has committed murder.

We also put more dye in my hair, and we played more 999. And checked the sprinklers for broken heads -- there are four, and the zones with them have been removed from the watering schedule. We need a couple of replacements, and ash is going to try fixing or capping the one that broke off entirely in the front yard -- it looks like someone ran it over or something. And there's a fourth that I don't know what we're going to do with, I'll take a closer look at it at some point. One of the broken heads looks like it got torn up when the whoever-it-was chopped down a bunch of plants in our yard, so that's cool. That fence still hasn't been fixed! So as things stand the plants and our property got destroyed for no reason.

I want to try to get to bed early-ish tonight, I napped today but have been getting not enough sleep for a while so it'd be good to get back on track. Tomorrow I want to swing by a store and get some almond syrup, but beyond that I don't think I have any other plans. I should get back over to dad's soon

Tonight I'll do some Inform reading and maybe try poking at writing more of a game in it, see if I can get the CSS the way I want it, but I'm a bit braindead so it'll depend on if I can clear that up with some caffeine. I also need to get some toilet paper and paper towels put away where they belong, if my back will let me. And I really should start on my physical therapy exercises again, it's really clear that I need them.

[Fetian]

Summarizing the information in Inform's documentation both for ease of future reference and to make sure I understand what I'm reading as I plow through this

Chapter 1: Welcome to Inform
-Information on how to use the IDE, the different functions of the different tabs/pages. Notable: The Index lists all objects that exist in the game, organized by type, including a map of the world; the Skein is a web of every action taken in testing -- note also that the Skein holds onto actions even if parts of the game have been deleted, note also that it does not include automatically-produced actions (eg through 'test me' commands)

Chapter 2: The Source Text
-A gist of the programming language; verbs, nouns, prepositions, how to put them together in a way the computer understands. Best practices to make finding and fixing bugs easier for you when they start popping up (include headers, so the IDE will point to them when it reports a bug). How to install extensions, some settings options and "use options", how to create an options.txt file that will load certain settings and commands automatically in every game file (somewhat confusingly, instructions are located in 2.13 Administering Classroom Use)

Chapter 3: Things
-Nouns and their properties, creating custom properties; properties inherent to certain types of noun and the limits to which you can mess with those properties

Chapter 4: Kinds
-Creating and referring to categories of noun; setting default values; (frankly largely a continuation of Chapter 3)

Chapter 5: Text
-Substituting and formatting text

Chapter 6: Descriptions
-Adjectives, how they interact with nouns and each other, how to use them to point to specific groups of nouns

Chapter 7: Basic Actions
-Verbs, specifically of the kinds made by the player; how to change how the game reacts to them, how to get a little complicated with them

Chapter 8: Change
-Variables and setting them; moving objects and the player to different locations and into and out of play; reporting on variable status; changing ui elements (limited though they are in vanilla Inform); a couple sections on randomness

[Fetian]

I did a little gardening today, but mostly I played video game! The Grumps played Cult of the Lamb on their channel yesterday, and it looks fun but it's one that I haven't been able to afford getting yet (it and Dredge are two I've been keeping an eye out for steep discounts on, I really want to play them but they're both a bit pricey -- justifiably so, I'm sure! But I am poor) -- but I do have Shrouded Isle, which is also a cult simulator with resource management elements. I'm finally getting the hang of keeping everything balanced enough to not lose within a couple of years, but I do still keep losing. Someday I am sure I will successfully summon my god!

It also lets you rename your villagers, so I decided to assign ash, Erika, and Dave to three of the houses and name all of the people in that house after their characters, and the remaining two houses after my characters (mostly, I threw in some other peoples' characters as appropriate for the Theme the house ended up with). That was very fun and I'll definitely do it again

It got up to 75 outside, but up to 79 in my room by the late afternoon, which is, a lot. I need to prepare for summer -- start pulling the sun shade down, swap out my seasonal clothes. Actually get the humidifier set back up. That one I've been grumpy about because the place it's probably going to have to go is going to mean plugging it into the outlet that's connected to the light switch, which will mean having to arrange the other stuff on that switch to be able to be turned off at night without having to turn the switch off, which is. Annoying.

Class again tomorrow, not super looking forward to it but hopefully there aren't any more days off to throw things out of whack for the rest of the semester. There at least aren't any more holidays

Gonna go eat some more, convince Oz to eat some more, read some Inform documentation, go to bed at a decent hour (hopefully)

[Fetian]

Cael is handling the reduced food just fine, so I'm reducing it a little bit more -- as of right now he's getting a scoop in the morning, half a scoop in the afternoon, two-thirds of a scoop at night, and then two scoops just before bed. I'd like to get him down to half a scoop at night and then combine it and the afternoon into just one scoop. I figure if I move slow enough, there'll be less issues of him feeling like he's not getting enough food just because he's getting less food, and I'll keep going until what he's getting stops sating him. So far he's doing good, it's not making him grumpy and he's being more active and playing more again. I also need to start being active with him and encouraging him to exercise, and I keep saying that I need to do that and then not doing it. I need to get on that

Oz is still doing okay, still not as good as I want but not terrible. Eating probably a little over a quarter cup a day, most days? Which is better than she had been doing. I know I'm refilling her bowl pretty regularly. She's also more active, comes out of my room pretty often, plays and runs around a bit. She's still nervous around the other animals but not as scared of them, which is good. She's also clearly hungry enough that she should be eating more of her food -- she gets very insistent about getting people food, gets up onto counters and such to eat people's leftovers, which is problematic. Anyway, the CBD is clearly definitely helping and I've ordered another bottle of it. She still needs an appointment for her thyroid labs, which we should get done this month. I should have done it last month, or the month before, but I couldn't afford it. Labs are expensive, unfortunately.

She and Cael are sort of getting along. She does not appreciate his company, but she tolerates it unless he startles her or she's in a bad mood, and he still chases her pretty often but as far as I've seen does not pounce or attack, just kind of runs toward and then veers off before she can do anything about it. They do a little batting at each other occasionally, but just usual cat asserting boundaries and/or engaging in play things (or trying to, rather)

Cael has largely found his niche in the house, I think, and the animals have mostly gotten used to him living here

[Fetian]

I swear to god the professor talks about things with her other class and then thinks she's talked about it with us and gets upset when we don't remember

[Fetian]

Okay, class done! Kind of a low-key one, honestly -- did some review before going into breakout rooms to practice, 'what time do you x', 'i x at y time' etc. Then she tried to have us repeat what our partners said to the rest of the class, but chances were low that any given person would have had the information she was specifically asking (like, not everyone would have answered every question on the list, so asking a person for y person's answer to x question is an odd choice). Oh, and we went over the kanji we're expected to learn and some mnemonics for those kanji.

Then just more of that, 'so-and-so does x at y place at z time', until class was over. We have three (3) quizzes due this week, and a homework assignment, and I really need to convince myself that even though this was the first class this week it is not the monday class and I only have four days to get all this done. I'm very tired today, but I'll take a look at things when they all unlock and see if I feel confident enough to do one or two of them. Oh, one of the homework assignments is more flashcards, so yay. Let me take a look at the workbook assignment and see what it's on,,,, oh boy it's audio comprehension, and more 'does x at y place at z time'. Shouldn't be that hard, except that I'm still going to make myself do kanji for them probably.

I'm surprised actually that we didn't go over any of the homework assignments that haven't been graded yet. I might see if she has any comments on my kanji use so far before I commit to continuing it -- I would be surprised if she'd dock me for it, but nothing has been graded so I don't know, you know

I'm going to go outside for a bit, get some sun, and then have lunch and dick around on the internet for a little. I will probably not do any assignments today but we'll see.

[Fetian]

Someone in the zoom meeting had music or something playing and their microphone was picking it up, and I asked in the side chat what was going on (hint hint please turn it off) and someone else goes "Shhhh it sounds nice" and like??? I have enough trouble understanding the professor without loud-ass music playing under her, please go fuck yourself.

[Fetian]

It's extremely windy, and supposed to storm tomorrow (rain through friday)

Tired. No brain. Very sort of 'can't think of the word I want' sort of day, and no focus.

[Fetian]

Cael has noticed the food reduction and woke me up at 8 this morning because he was hungry. The last go he got used to it very fast, though, so hopefully that holds