Promiseland

[Fetian]

Also the bank finally got online banking and the ability to check current balances working this week so late monday/early tuesday I finally got the rest of my bills paid, which is good because tuesday was the absolute last day I could do it and not get hit with a late fee

[Fetian]

Super braindead today

[Fetian]

We got a notice recently that they'd be doing work on the sewers soon, and I think they did it today because it smells like sewage outside

Oh maybe that's what Erik was getting talked at about earlier. Hopefully not anything the household needs to know about

[Fetian]

I am so dang tired, my plan is to go to bed at midnight but I don't know if I'll make it even that far

[Fetian]

Technically made it to midnight, but I started getting ready to get into bed before that so I didn't reach the spirit of the thing

Have woken up at five, gonna doot around a little before going back to sleep

Yesterday was nice despite being so tired -- spent the day watching conlang-adjacent videos and playing a couple video games, I started another playthrough of Chants of Senaar but I'm avoiding actually confirming my guesses for as long as possible (it forced me to confirm 'open', 'close', and 'door' to progress in the tutorial and it might make me fill out the rest of my journal to make things happen in the game later, but I've got all but one of the words for the first area and haven't filled it out yet). The game works like this: you find symbols and write down what you think they mean, you refine your guess as you continue seeing the symbol in use, and then you have a journal with pictures of things or actions that you match to the symbol and if you get a page of them right the game confirms and locks in your guess. It feels much more like real field linguistics to not do that last part, and to just have to assume you've got it right until you hit something your guess doesn't make sense for

The only thing I don't like about this game is that the nature of it means replayability isn't great, because you're always going to just remember what some of the things mean, especially if you played it recently. I believe it's pretty popular and I really hope we see more games like it, it's really well done and deserves to pioneer a genre (though to an extent Heaven's Vault laid some of the groundwork for that)

More meanwhile in conlanging: I have tentatively decided that numerals go before the noun phrase when it's new information, and after when it's not. We'll see if I end up hating that!

Last week I found a sort of, big ol' grammar survey, for conlangs, so I've been filling that out, and the numbers thing is one of the questions. The next one is "What is the order of adnominal demonstrative and noun", the adnominal demonstrative being "this" in "this book", so options being "this book", "book this", or something else. So that's what I'll be chewing on for a bit

Anyway, gonna go eat a little food, watch a little youtube, play a little phone game, and then go back to sleep until a more civilized hour

[Fetian]

Fuckin' got distracted by language stuff and forgot to finish talking about yesterday!! So ash and I hung out for a little bit when he got home, watched part of a Dead Boys Detectives (we have decided to not actively watch that one together because I'm not super into it and we already have too many things to watch together, so he's going to watch it on his own, and so since I wasn't going to be out there the whole time he put it on to watch and continue after I left), and then once Dave got back to an apartment with internet access he, Erika, and I played PlateUp! For a bit under an hour and a half, which is crazy because it definitely felt like we went for longer. We started a pie restaurant, but I had forgotten to make sure our restaurant wasn't in Turbo Mode and even if you cheat and remove the Turbo card it still keeps you in that mode, so we had to close that restaurant and when we started another one pies wasn't one of the options so instead we did fish! Erika cooked this time, I waited, Dave bussed, and I put us in a diner so by the end of our run we had a Nightmare Maze for the customers to get through to their tables, and we also had things running simultaneously smoothly enough that Dave didn't have enough to do and also chaotic enough that everyone was in everyone else's way at all times. By the end he was exclusively in charge of soup (how does that keep happening?), Erika was making fish and broccoli, and I was waiting and making charcuterie boards, and everyone was bussing as they had time to do so. We did make it to day 15! And then Erika was sleepies because it was eleven over in her timezone, and Dave didn't want to keep playing two-player because he likes Erika more than me, or possibly because he wanted to have time to shower before he went to bed, one or the other of those.

Erika continues to be on vacation for the week so we may do some more games together, but Dave is in the process of moving so will probably not have time to join in.

Obviously I also crashed pretty hard not long after all that, the rest of my evening was some more Chants of Senaar, some more youtube, a podcast, and some ramen for dinner. I don't think I got any like, actual things accomplished at any point

Okay, back to finishing up this youtube and then more sleeps

[Fetian]

I did the math wrong, it was a bit under two and a half hours, which does feel more right

[Fetian]

Played three hours of PlateUp with Erika! Dave wasn't there so we didn't have soup but we did have Pizza That Makes You Cum

We did a steakhouse, lost at like, day 12? Something like that, and then we made a pizza parlor that also sells cherry pie and made it to day 16 at which point Erika bailed to go play a different game with different friends. Then I caught up with the internet and in a few minutes I'll go grab dinner and then hang out with ash -- there is a new New Zealand Taskmaster today, so we'll watch that and/or play more Resident Evil

Last night we watched Pink Floyd's The Wall, which I hadn't seen in many years and which was an interesting watch now that I am an adult and less of an edgelord. We then also rewatched Dan Olson's review of Doug Walker's review of The Wall, the latter of which remains just, so baffling. As I talked with ash about while we watched it, it does happen sometimes that you'll set up as like a reward or goal or something, to read/watch/review something people are excited about, and people get hype for your reactions, and then you sit down and watch or read or play the whatever and, just, it does nothing for you. You don't hate it. You don't love it. You don't have anything to say about it. But you've put yourself into a position where you have to say something about it, so you follow through and end up putting out something that just, it's bad. Your review is bad and boring and you end up disappointing everyone anyway, but at least you don't have to figure out refunds or anything?

The baffling part about all of that though is that, like, I can't imagine a huge number of Doug Walker's fanbase was clamouring for a review of a rock opera from 1982? And it's out of his usual wheelhouse anyway so I don't know why he'd have been promising to get to it? I dunno

Obviously it's a cash grab. But why this cash grab. We will probably never know

Alright, dinner and stuff

[Fetian]

Oh for fuck's sake

[Fetian]

Hmm, migraine aura