ELSEWHERE

Thank you! All I really want to do is pet animals and make fancy honey

I have A Bone to pick with how Stardew Valley and Minecraft both treat charcoal, which is that they make it really easy to gather as a newer player but require it in an obnoxious number of high-level builds/crafts with no easy way to keep obtaining it once you're at that level. Why the fuckery does it take ten wood to make one charcoal in the charcoal kiln, what fucking sense does that make. Why is the only reliable way to get charcoal to keep mining in specific mid-level locations, or getting them one piece at a time by fishing or burning trash, who designed this bullshit. You're going to make charcoal a necessary ingredient in every level of crafting both as a component in-and-of-itself and as an ingredient to make other components, and give me no way to "farm" it in a farming simulator? Give me a soot sprite hutch or something for fuck's sake.

Anyway, I added a couple mods to change how the kiln makes charcoal. I play largely vanilla because I plan on making that translation mod and don't want to have to figure out what's base-game and what's something from a mod, or to translate everything the mods add too, when I'm working on it. But I have the above, and multiple spouses because I want to woo everyone but I don't want to have to start n new games to do it, and also I just can't start a game and not marry Harvey, he's adorable and he'd be sad if I didn't.

But the charcoal thing is a thing that happens in multiple games and it's so dumb. Iron, too, runs into it. Because they're important low-level ingredients, so they're placed in areas where lower-level players will find lots of them, but they remain intrinsic throughout the game and the developers just don't, make ways to get them that scale with the player at all. You just keep having to go back to the low-level areas and grind away for it, which is boring, tedious, and bad game design. Stardew Valley gives you ways to semi-automate getting nearly every ingredient except fucking charcoal, unless you want to spend, I can't emphasize this enough, ten entire pieces of wood for one charcoal briquette. It's bonkers.

They expect you to just buy it after a certain point but you have to buy coal from Clint, the most inconvenient shop in the game, so.

"You keep sighing at me."
"You keep being annoying."
"You're dating me!"
"I know, that's why I'm sighing."

I finally wooed Elliott in Stardew Valley! I officially have a polycule! Now to decide whom to woo next,

But more importantly, today Sor and I had a date! We watched a couple episodes of Taskmaster (the second Champion of Champions and the third episode of the thirteenth series) and then decided to stop watching things partly because I was watching-thinged-out and partly because we kept running into technical difficulties that made watching things annoying. Then we spent two hours just talking, ranting about the state of the internet and about exes and about pandemics and just, you know, catching up. It had been a while since we'd talked, let alone video chatted, so it was nice to do that.

I was going to not fire up Stardew again tonight so I could get other things done and ensure I go to bed at a decent hour, but also I am weak and am probably going to fire it up again. I will burn out on it eventually -- it's filling a need for control over my environment and/or life right now and when I start getting that filled in reality then I'll stop needing it digitally (this is how my phases with Animal Crossing go). But in the meantime the only issue with using video games as a coping strategy right now is that I keep spending all of my time on it. So I need to put effort toward controlling that impulse, better.

But I still have a couple hours before I need to go to bed, so I'm going to farm for a while

I would work on something but I decided not to have any caffeine today so I don't have enough attention span to do so. This is however also probably why I've been able to avoid getting as badly sucked into video games as I have been the past week.

But it's bedtime now and I'm going to do the thing

mek wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:18 am

I finally wooed Elliott in Stardew Valley! I officially have a polycule! Now to decide whom to woo next,

Have you ever wooed Shane? I did on one run and his little story is surprisingly very sweet! You also get blue chickens.

erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:13 pm

Have you ever wooed Shane? I did on one run and his little story is surprisingly very sweet! You also get blue chickens.

This'll be my first time wooing anyone but Harvey, and now Elliott. I'm a little put off by how Shane is treated narratively, though obviously I don't know how anything is handled in his actual storylines yet.

Oh my god I went to his wiki page to check if anything does change after he loses his job and saw his original character art

I'm dying

But yeah, his alcoholism bothers me a little and I just, can't believe he loses his job and nothing happens from that? Aside from obviously his schedule not including going to Jojamart anymore. I'm also firmly on the Pierre hate train after what he did -- like cool, you completely dominated the dialogue after the community center was rebuilt, established yourself as a complete monopoly in the town, and lost everyone who was working at Jojamart their jobs, that's awesome, love that for you. He's such an asshole.

I decided to woo Alex next but I do will probably do Shane after that, I just know it's probably going to actually affect me emotionally and need to be prepared for it

Among things Sor and I talked about yesterday was how Kids These Days™ don't know how to make their own websites, or even how websites actually work, and today on Game Grumps, Dan says he has made https://dinodanny.com/, a site documenting his journey to visit every stegosaurus skeleton in the world

ARIN: What? What did you, squarespace? How'd you make your own website?

Arin is my age. He should know you can just, make a website and put it on the internet. You don't need to pay someone to do it for you

Dan is not exactly computer literate, so it's hugely possible that Arin is shocked that Dan made a website and doesn't believe he did it on his own, but it's not hard, especially with all of the tools available with WYSIWYG templates. It could be squarespace! It could be wordpress, it could be fuckin' tumblr. Someone making a website shouldn't be a shock unless they're 82 or 5 years old

When I woke up this morning, I found one (1) ant in my closet, so I can't quite let my guard down, yet. I've just now finally gotten around to sealing the corners in there that they might be coming in through, so if that was their point of ingress that will hopefully stop them. Also went outside and looked for any signs of attempts to re-establish their trail and didn't see anything, but I'll keep checking.

So adding another couple days to the schedule before I can resume pre-ant status quo