Promiseland

[Fetian]

The tragic thing! Is that it would actually be a really great fishing minigame if the dev had just gone the extra step of not making the bite window last a millionth of a second and given better visual and audio cues! There's a lot of very creative and interesting design in the minigame, derivative though it is of Stardew Valley. I'd love to be able to hang out at a fishing spot and just fish for a couple hours, but it's exhausting to have to put all of my focus on a four-by-four pixel square spot on the screen and watch for the character's hands to skip a frame. It could have been so fun

[Fetian]

As I recall it was 'all the fish are available from merchants so you don't have to fish' which is kind of like serving someone food that's raw in the middle and telling them they can just eat around it if they don't like it

I know I don't have to fish, I don't have to play the game at all. I want to! But alas.

[Fetian]

Cold today

Woke up shivering at about 7, with Cael burrowed under the covers. 66F inside. Luckily I hadn't put the space heater into storage yet

[Fetian]

It's 62 outside now

[Fetian]

I'm not going to upload an updated file because the actual gameplay hasn't changed and no visible content has been added, but the inform game now:
-Forces the player to refer to Mr. Marjan by his proper title (you're reprimanded for calling him "Ash", "Marjan", or "Mister")
-Will let the player call him Mr. Marjan instead of Mr Marjan (by default Inform wigs out if you include the period, because that signals to the parser that it's two commands broken up by a full stop)
-Ends the game if you dick around outside Mr. Marjan's apartment for an hour before knocking
-"Preening" while outside the apartment is finished (needs action text while inside the apartment)
among a couple other tweaks

A lot of researching how to get the name stuff to function before I figured it all out

I've also broken the script I'm supposed to be recording for ash down into sections and have been reading it over and getting the rhythm of it into my head. Hard deadline is in a little less than a week, we're already past the soft deadline, so sooner is better on getting that done. The house has been very full of people¹ lately and it's been distracting me.

The mental health day did help a lot and I feel a lot better, though the weather has me pretty tired again.

 

---

_{¹just Erik and ash, not, like, a bunch of strangers or something}

[Fetian]

All the screenshots I've seen of the remastered Oblivion so far look like they're from ads for a mobile game

[Fetian]

Man I wish I had a way of knowing how long software updates will take because usually it's not that long but then sometimes it takes hours and that second one seems to exclusively happen when I decide to run the updates right before bed

[Fetian]

Screenshot_2025-04-26_06-24-14.png

 
This is the information I have. From this I'm somehow supposed to glean "Don't lock yourself into this unless you're ready to spend three hours at the computer!" -- this doesn't even give me file sizes. And most of the time it takes a few minutes and sometimes the thing upgrading will interrupt my workflow so it's to my advantage to wait until I'm about to shut everything down for the night anyway, so I'm not at all primed to be on guard against the possibility this'll be one of the 10% of the times it decides to take Forever

[Fetian]

Just ran the flatpak updates, which was 17 items that did tell me the file sizes before I agreed to install and literally took two minutes to finish

Computers!

[Fetian]

Finally finished Stories of Your Life and Others. The last story was a documentary about a neurological mod that prevents you from seeing human beauty in the same way prosopagnosia prevents you from "seeing" faces -- that is, it doesn't obscure the user's vision in any way, it just stops aesthetic judgements of people. It's an interesting one, but a little weak for me, especially to end the collection with. There was a chapter after that with brief thoughts from the author on each story and I found that I didn't remember several of the stories at all, even after going back and trying to remind myself of them. Some very strong stories in it, though, as well, and I didn't hate any of them. Ted Chiang is very much a speculative writer and some of the things he's speculating about just don't engage me very much.

I'm back into Woods All Black now -- I've been craving some culture-clash/fish-out-of-water narratives and this will scratch that itch some now that I'm feeling less raw about the current political situation.