I mean...it's "passable", but not great.  I'm pretty functional, for sure.  I seem to be doing my thing at work and somehow I even seem to have found some fun again in developing Rhythm Quest (and I'm not even working on levels/songs...), which is a great sign.

I spent a lot of time on the upcoming GT basement update for my ALTTPR site today, which isn't a bad thing, but part of me kinda knows it was kind of just an excuse to "have something to do" more than anything else.

There have been bright spots for sure.  Some people have this sort of energy that is so easy to feel at ease with.  It's not super unheard of, but it's not super common either, I guess.  It makes me wonder how I can find more of that in my life, somehow.  But I guess, also, whether I could ever be that way.  I feel like my first instinct is no, but, it's also something I never really thought about before.  I guess it's not necessarily a goal of mine.  And that may seem a little sad, but it's also not at all.  I don't think these people are the way they are because it was a goal of theirs...it just fell naturally out of how they react to others.  That is not to say that I want to just always react to people with my most base instincts either, but...well, I guess that "balance" is something that is still an open question for this year.

I haven't really been feeling great, about things in general.  I know this, I can feel it, too.  I can still have fun, of course, I'm still taking care of myself as well, but there's an undercurrent flowing through.  And usually, this is where I'd fall back onto my past and want to receive comfort, strength, maybe even solidarity, with my memories, but this time it's different because all that has been being called into question, too.  There were times last year when I thought, "oh, yeah.  This small set of important people that I've managed to fit into my life are a source of strength and support for me", or "oh, yes.  If no one else, I can count on myself, for comfort, for consolation, and for empathy".  I'm not really sure what the way out looks like for me this time, though.

Strangely, I don't (or maybe just not yet) feel a desire to retreat and shut everyone out as is common.  I'm not sure if that is a coincidence or whether it means something is different this time after all.  Maybe it's something to the effect of it not being shame that I'm feeling, but sadness.

I watched the rest of the episodes of Kanon (2006).  I'm not really quite sure how to tackle a writeup of them yet -- perhaps all at once, rather than split into Nayuki and Ayu's arcs as they are more sort of tangled up in each other than separate anyways.  I'm...not actually 100% sure what I felt when I watched through it all, only that I was sad and that it resonated with something that I was feeling, despite its flaws.  And, without getting into it too much, there were indeed flaws -- I guess, the rest of Kanon also had them, too, every single arc that we went into.  Shiori's arc was perhaps the most "solid" of them that I covered so far, with Mai's and Makoto's having some more obvious issues in terms of storytelling (though of course we know whose is my favorite).  Nayuki and Ayu's stories...I somehow get the impression that I'm going to find more fault than greatness with them and I worry a lot that they'll suffer from "forced grandeur" where "you feel sad because they're playing sad music" and not because you're really sad at something.  I think Ayu in particular as the main character is in a position where they kind of really try to put forth that it means a lot, so it will be interesting to reanalyze it to see whether I think they actually achieved that or whether it was more shallow and on a surface level.

Still, though, there were some really interesting moments, and actually some really interesting shots, that I never gave much consideration to, before.  I find myself thinking more about the creative process, about the artistic direction of these things.  =Why= was this shot framed this way?  It was obviously very intentional, but also very unintuitive.  What was the thought process behind this?

And if nothing else, I think the process of grief that Yuichi was going through, I think it was kind of the right thing for me to watch at the right time, given where I'm at.  There's always that "low point" of the story, right?  The equivalent of the "death march" in Journey.  Every time I go through that march in the snow, I think about some different things.  What has been really traumatic for me.  All the things I've lost.  Journey really makes me recall these kinds of things every time I take my annual pilgrimage.  That's really what keeps me playing it every year.  I don't think any other game really has done anything of the sort.  Something that really makes me think about life.  It's a pilgrimage, of the truest sort.

Anyways...tomorrow is another day, I guess.  It's time to do my best to catch some sleep, maybe catch some more sleep, and make sure that I keep myself company with some nice tea.

Another Augustus reconquered mission down... 

This one is Tarsus, and I kinda barely managed to fumble my way through it.  This is actually my second victory on it -- the first one scraped by barely after every single thing possible going wrong -- food distribution failures, lack of workers, trouble with getting enough palaces, money problems, and more.

I did a bit better the second time, but still had some problems later on with labor shortages and money.  I think I'm learning more and more as I go through this campaign, though.  I skimmed a video of one of the mod/map devs on the Augustus team and they made it look like child's play in comparison.

One of my problems is that I failed to realize that the oil + wine import prices are exorbant on this map, meaning my grand mercury temple bonus should have definitely went to those resources instead of reducing the pottery/furniture consumption.

I also seem to be really inefficient with my workers, still, and take too long in in-game time to finish these missions.  I'm going to have to make sure that I'm making speedy progress towards all of my goals, and try to for example build the grand temples and other monuments as I go instead of stopping everything and waiting a while for them to be completed.

Somehow my exports didn't earn nearly as much money as they did in the video I watched, but again that could just be a general inefficiency thing.  The thing about Caesar 3 is that it's such a complex system with lots of emergent behavior, it's very easy for cities to start to break down later on because of fundamental mistakes that you made where you didn't have a solid foundation.  If you didn't have a solid grasp of how to effectively distribute food, for example, that's something that's probably not going to come into play until later on when there are more and more people to feed and then things start descending into chaos.

I ended up with way more population than the target amount, which I think again speaks to my general inefficiency.  I need to do less with more -- make less goods, stay on fewer people, etc.  This will make it so that I don't have to make as many palaces to hit my prosperity ratings, too.

Well, I'm ready to move on for now, so we'll see how the next map goes.  But again, I feel like there's just a really large amount of stuff to learn about and improve on.  That's what I like about this game!

On a different note, I put the WS POM+ switches back in my Cycle7 and I'm really loving it.  I'm hoping to order a switch tester batch at some point to see if I can find another switch that I can pull the trigger on because I really like it (that's how I ended up with these WS POM+s), just have to decide on all the ones I want to try first.

I know I said I was done with MOO2 a while back but that turned out not to be true, haha.  I've still been having fun playing with Uncreative races, and such.  It's still fun...

Um...I guess maybe I can talk a little bit about not-video-games too?  I'm starting to try and get back into the swing of life in general this week, which has been promising so far.  Stopping by Teance was nice, though I spent the majority of the time there stuck thinking about something for work.  I played a bit of DDR today and tomorrow I'm going to try to head out to dance, so we'll see how that goes.  I have a bunch of social activities lined up for the weekend and I know that's something I had been missing as I was stuck at home over the holidays with Covid so that should be good for me, I'm sure.

For a while I was also feeling pretty glum and blah about Rhythm Quest, owing to not feeling like I've been accomplishing much (not just with RQ, but in general with life) and having a lack of purpose (being sick and not really getting to do much or feeling much motivation will do that, I guess).  I'm trying to reclaim the "fun" in working on it again and trying to escape the feeling that it's a burden that's weighing me down; today and yesterday were pretty good successes in that regard and I did some good work on the level browser.  Hopefully I can keep it up...

My sleep schedule is still off but I'm at least back into the rhythm of cooking and all that.  Hopefully things can continue to look up......

I finished watching Hibike!  I thoroughly enjoyed it, it felt a bit short of a ride thanks to only being 13 episodes long, but it didn't feel super rushed to me either, it's just a different pacing than the first season where many more different things happened I think.

Not going into spoilers or analyses or a bunch of opinions here, just leaving it at that.  Like I mentioned before, this is a series that will definitely benefit from revisiting and I'm looking forward to doing that over time.  The first season of the anime happened =10 years ago=, can you imagine that?  I appreciate that there is so much around these characters, I think it helps you lean into the real feeling of what it's like to go through 3 years (or however many) with the same group, and think about all of the different things that happened.

Kumiko is an incredible character, I really don't think I've really ever seen a character with "strength" portrayed in this way and I think it's something that I'll be thinking about in the future.  Even when I think about "quiet strength" or whatever that I try to embody sometimes I think it's a little different.  There is a part of myself that honestly wonders if she should just be my new role model, ahaha, it's hard not to just look at her and be in awe.  But I'm also not sure that is quite correct for me, either, I'm sure it's easier for me to slot into some other archetype, you know, like Fern or something lol.  Even when I saw Mayu in this season I was like "oh, this seems like the air of someone I could aspire to somehow" hah!  Kumiko's strength is so much more "true", though, I think that's what makes it so inspiring (and rare!).

How many more dreams will I have to seal away before I can be with the stars?

How many more parts of myself will I lose along the way?

By the time I meet you I will have already died a million times over.  Would you grieve, too, I wonder?

We did alright, I guess, on our last day of weekend.  I failed to wake up at a reasonable time, but well, more sleep never really hurt anyone either, right?  Got some more work done on Rhythm Quest, did another room's worth of timings for the ALTTPR site.  I've been playing through Trauma Center: Second Opinion again (after getting myself a working wiimote), just the latest of the games that I'm replaying.  I'm going for all XS ranks, which hasn't actually been too bad; even the difficult missions to XS haven't been excruciating or anything.  Which makes sense, I think New Blood was the game that really made us tear our hair out trying to go for XS ranks -- both because the wiimote is more sensitive in New Blood (why???) and because of how strict the scoring is.  Second Opinion has a few "gotcha" missions where you have to for example let more lacerations or tumors happen so that you can get additional points or whatever, but for the most part it's not too bad.  It's also crazy how when you jump back into one of these without any prep, you get super overwhelmed because you don't remember the specifics of dealing with each GUILT type, but once sort of remember what you need to, it's that much easier.

Dealing with Kyriaki remains sort of the bread-and-butter most-enjoyable aspect of Second Opinion by far.  Nothing else really has quite the same rhythm and flow to it and you really feel great when you're just drilling it through -- suture suture, ultrasound, cut cut, gel, laser laser, suture suture, ...  The missions in Trauma Center have always played in a weird difficulty design space where some of them are hard until you know exactly what to do (e.g. multi-tumors, you need to know whether you should tackle them one by one, or assembly line style, or...), then there are some parts that are hard just because of wiimote shenanigans (certain sutures, especially a ton of them in New Blood, ugh).  Where Trauma Center I think becomes most interesting is when you're given multiple conflicting objectives to deal with at once.  Of course a bunch of different missions and GUILT types try to bring this up, but I think Kyraki is a great example because when you first encounter them you're not really sure exactly in what order to do everything, but after you get the hang of it you really find the ideal pacing.  The Kyriaki + Paraskevi mission is another great curveball added to the mix, although it's not entirely that interesting because it's so obvious how to handle it (just prioritize the Kyriaki, since you can just stun the Paraskevi if it's just in one piece.

Of course this is exactly why I hated the design of most of the mission types in Trauma Team (because they tend to remove the competing-needs interesting parts of missions), but that's neither here nor there I guess.  Anyways, Triti has to be the most frustrating type of GUILT in Second Opinion by far.  I thought it would be Deftera because of its RNG nature, but no, Triti takes the cake.  It requires a lot of precision but also speed, and you randomly get screwed over by the thorns turning into vapor, and ugh.

Anyways, besides that, I've also been watching through the third season of Hibike, which I've been enjoying so far!  I have some minor qualms about it, I think, but they're outweighed by the good, I think.  I'm definitely interested in giving the entire series a rewatch, I think it's just been too long since I saw a lot of it and I think I'd benefit from seeing it all again.  Maybe after Kanon, lol.

Keyboards have still been enjoyable, though I think I might want a sort of changeup at some point when I've got a bunch of free time lying around.  I might swap the HMX Gachapons out of the Cycle7 and replace them with the WS POM+s that I like so much and remember how those feel like.  Unfortunately it seems like the batteries I got in the Cycle7 are not in a great way somehow, but eh...it's fine and we'll see.  Spent way too much money and time on that, for sure, but at least the board is still working fine in its original form.

Oh, and I broke my streak of last-locating stuff in the weekly ALTTPR seeds the other day, so woohoo.

Life has surely felt a little relaxed but also a little empty lately, but understandably so given that I've just been holed out at home for the past N weeks.  Maybe this next week I'll finally venture out and maybe have some tea and grab some groceries; I guess we'll see how I'm feeling mid-week and whether my two laceration-like canker sores are on their way out by then (blech).  It's not been like..."bad" to just sit at home and play Caesar 3 and such, but it hasn't exactly been great either.  I guess it makes me appreciate what I had going on in my life before it got wrecked by Covid.

Tomorrow is Monday, sure, but also, just another day...

Carthago is down!

This one took a long time in in-game years as I was just slowly waiting for my prosperity to tick up after building all of the palaces.  I'm starting to get a better hang of how to be a little more efficient with the palace/villa blocks.  I used to always strive for 4x4 palaces but I'm finding that unless I have a lot of space and am willing to commit to for example building a colosseum or whatever, it's not super feasible to go for those and I'd be better served with 3x3s.  What I learned this time around is that I don't need as many large statues as I thought, in fact you can see in the screenshot that I didn't even put spaces between the houses as I normally do.  And I filled in some of the awkward gaps with 2x2 villas, as well.

The military was a little tough in this mission, particularly because I chose the "harder military" option when given the choice.  Other than that, things went okay, though I definitely had some facepalm moments here and there where I realized something that was supposed to be setup just, wasn't.  I ended up running into some labor shortages near the end and ended up with one more housing block than anticipated, but all worked out okay in the end.

Played through Mega Man 10 again and the stage design is way better than in Mega Man 9!  I had a lot more fun with it.  However, the game does have its flaws, too, mostly the weapons being awkward to use, which also contributes to the boss fights in general being less well-designed.

A good mega man boss I think, will have two, or maybe three different attacks, and the fight should proceed at a relatively slow pace so that you can try your best to learn to navigate them.  In general Mega Man 9 I think did better at this.  Plug Man was probably the one exception as his fight is really chaotic, but Galaxy Man is a great example of how you can have a slow-paced fight where you really learn how it goes.  Splash Woman, too, has a main attack that isn't trivial to dodge, but you know it's coming and there's plenty of room in the arena to try and come up with an idea.

For Mega Man 10 I think Sheep Man had a nice fight in this style, but some of the other robot masters felt awkward or frantic to fight.  But again, I think half the issue is also with the weapons.  You've got weapons that only work well at close range (the bubble shield, the sawblade), and you've got a trio of weapons where hitting the enemy itself doesn't do proper damage (the thunder cloud, ice spike, and commando missile).  Ice spike is "ok" in that it's relatively easy to get nitro man to run over the spike that you lay, but commando missile against blade man feels pretty hectic to manage, and thunder cloud against pump man feels like a 50/50 whether it even hits.

The wily stage bosses also suffer as a result because as you're doing the dance of "try all the weapons to see which does more damage" you're getting whacked around a lot because all of the weapons are so awkward to use.

But the stages are great, and that mattered more to me.  Well-designed around core concepts that get reused.  These mechanics even show up again one after another in the wily stages, which is really nice.  The one notable exception was a few screens in the middle segment of Chill Man's stage which felt superfluous / bland, but everything else was really nice.

I played through the Mega Man 9 DLC stages as well, it was...fine I guess.  There are three DLC stages for Mega Man 10 as well...I guess I can go through them at some point perhaps, including them all is arguably the one thing that the legacy collection has going for it.

Aaaaaaaand we're back.  Kinda.

I was feeling two weeks ago that I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to be handling my time off (and I was okay with that), but I imagined it would be some playing games, some working on Rhythm Quest tangentially here and there, some cooking, drinking a bunch of tea, etc.

Turns out life had different plans for me entirely and that all went out the window as my household got hit by Covid, lol.  There wasn't any sense in even trying to plan for productivity or anything; just getting through each day and toughing the storm was all that ended up being on the docket.  Despite being the only one in my household to have gotten my booster shot this time around, and despite feeling relatively unscathed at first, I quickly also succumbed and went into the ol' "death plague" state.  Not the =worst= I've ever felt (first vaccine shot I was just sitting in a corner holding my head and groaning), but in terms of duration and combined negative impact, it's pretty hard to beat this I think.

Thankfully I'm on the mend, starting to be able to breathe again and all that.  Smell and taste, though, that will take some time (and maybe exercises) to regain...blegh.  Before when I was in the middle of it, appetite management wasn't that big of a deal since I kept on doubting I could keep much food down anyways.  But now it's tricky because I think the lack of smell and taste throws off my sense of appetite yet of course my stomach still gets empty.  Weird...  Cooking without being able to smell is also bizarre.  I can cook without tasting anything, sure, but you rely on smell more than you might intuitively think to inform your process, I think.

Anyways, I decided I'm not going to be back to work until next week, so I have a few more days to finish recovering and shamble back into some semblance of normal life, ha ha.

On the plus side, even though I spent a lot of time with absolutely zero motivation, it's not like I got =nothing= done.  Wrote a letter, did more ALTTPR site work, today I even finished my pixel artwork for January.  But besides that, I also spent a good deal of time on Caesar 3, which was great!

Played through Mega Man 9 as well, actually.  It was...fine, I think?  Somehow I like...expected a little more from it, but maybe I'm spoiled by some of the fan games or maybe I just have a weird rose-tinted lens and expect every mega man to have some sort of mythical great level design.  I was off-put by some of the slightly "cheap" deaths in the game, but I was playing it on Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 so there's limited "checkpoint" save functionality, which helped mitigate that somewhat.  Legacy Collection 2 is...really not stellar; my first thought was actually to play MM9 and MM10 on Wii, but apparently I don't have them downloaded on my Wii?  I bet I played it on a different one...oh well.  It's not a =terrible= play experience, but it doesn't even have proper integer pixel scaling, the controls are a little funny, SFX are too loud for some reason etc etc.  Like, it's =fine=, but a little bit of a let-down.  Only worth it because I picked it up for $5, which is cheap enough for me to forgive those issues.  Anyways, maybe I'll play through MM10 again and see how it stacks up.  At least MM10 doesn't have the sfx being too loud issue (why....?).  I'll have to see what I think of the level and robot master design.  I mean, MM9s definitely wasn't BAD or anything, I guess I'm just not 100% sure what to expect.  Which is silly because I've played a ton of these games, right?

I'm not sure though; I feel like for example Magma Man's stage had an area where you just had to time walking through the large magma beams and that was....really uninspired and not interesting?  I'm thinking back to like Bright Man's stage in MM4 with the moving platforms, or like, even Pharaoh Man's stage had a lot going on.  Heck, even Ring Man's stage had its own very recognizable gimmick with the beam platforms.

Maybe that's it?  Maybe like, the stages in MM9 didn't really feel like they were solidly cohesive?  Like if you go through Concrete Man's stage (the first one I tried, wow that third elephant was deceptively hard to get used to), there's a bunch of generic platforming, then there's a section with waterfalls (some which hide platforms), there's two random fake block / death pit traps, then at the very end of the level there's a section with 6 ascending/descending platforms (no enemies).  I think that last section really illustrates my point, like why even bother introducing that mechanic at all if you're not going to do anything with it??  It only appears once at the very end of the stage just as a one-off and it's not particularly interesting, nor does it make you think "Concrete Man"...

The floating bubble section in Splash Woman makes me think similarly, it's almost just a 100% rehash of the same thing from Wave Man's stage in MM5, but I'll give it a pass since it introduces enemies in to the mix, making it slightly more interesting.  Still, think about how wonderfully cohesive Gravity Man's stage was in MM5!  Built around a core mechanic (or two), not just a bunch of random generic platformer stuff in sequence.  Or Flame Man's stage in MM6 with the fire pits...I'm not saying every other mega man is littered with gems of great design, but as I type this maybe I'm starting to get a better sense of what makes a stage memorable and enjoyable vs forgettable.

It's weird because NicoEvaluates (rip that website) listed MM9 as the best game in the entire classic series, based on design and flow.  But I guess that just goes to show you how wildly people's opinions can differ, I guess.

But enough about MM9...it's time to celebrate my latest accomplishment in Augustus/Caesar 3 -- beating the reconquered version of the infamous Lugdunum mission!

This one was definitely intimidating.  Lugdunum is infamous for being the hardest level in the entire vanilla Caesar 3 campaign, and this reconquered Augustus variant is no joke either.  Of course, you've got access to cart depots and increased trading limits and all that, but you have to build a city with 8,000 people and your prosperity target is a whopping 90!

I kept on having problems in my cities with worker shortages and I couldn't tell whether I was just playing too slowly and letting my population age out, or whether I was just being inefficient with my employment.  I had to give two attempts at Lugdunum, but the second one went very well!  I was a little more conscious of my choices, keeping housing blocks at small casa for longer without giving them any pottery or furniture or anything to avoid supply chain issues (probably also just more efficient for workers to build more housing blocks of those maybe?), and I tried to not go overboard on the amount of industry buildings that I made.  It was a tight fit getting everything in (I built no less than 3 grand temples) but in the end everything pretty much worked all according to plan!

Anyways, Covid sux, would not recommend.

I decided to give myself a little early xmas present and buy and play through Leap Year, by managore (Daniel Linssen).  I had my eye on it for a while, it being a puzzley platformer that is small and doesn't overstay its welcome.

It didn't disappoint!  Like I was fully expecting from managore, it's well designed, hits you with "aha" moments and stumbling blocks, and I was able to finish the entire game in 1.5 hours (ymmv).  It had a nice sense of progression and there was always something to tease out but not overwhelmingly so -- there was only one point at which I felt like I was "stuck" and had to re-evaluate what I had missed / hadn't yet explored.

I don't play a ton of puzzle platformers or a ton of puzzle games in general and it always astounds me how these things can be crafted so well, but I'm assuming that like anything else it comes with experience.  Just like level design is probably a skill that needs refinement, I think puzzle design, or "level puzzle design" is most likely like this too.  I don't really have that sense, only having dabbled in this sort of level design for a few games really (Colors of Your World being the most extensive).  But making a Rhythm Quest level is probably second nature to me at this point, or just making a song in general.

I tackled another level in the Augustus campaign, this time the fourth mission.  My final city looked like this:

I did good with this one!  Didn't need to restart my entire city from scratch, though I was getting a bit worried at times.  There were some silly mistakes made along the way -- the lower-left housing block had some food distribution issues in particular, and the reservoir on the left there is super awkward and only exists to provide water to the concrete makers (which I didn't even need after I finished my monuments).  The aqueducts connecting that reservoir actually completely cut off the southern farm block, which I didn't realize until later when I facepalmed and then made sure to just add a road going through them.

Turning all of the houses into grand insulae was juuuust enough to hit the prosperity rating on this mission, and it looks like 3 "double-size" housing blocks were the right amount to get the population to exceed 5000.  I'm worried about the next mission as the terrain is really challenging (lots of rivers and rocks everywhere) and I need an extra 500 people, as well as 70 prosperity instead of 65.  I'm looking forward to the challenge, though!

It's already going to be Christmas morning...time seems to have rolled along, but relatively peaceful.  And that's a good thing, probably, I think.  Taking some time to remember that we don't have to worry about everything so much.  Life is not "supposed to" be stressful.

It's been chill, but in a good way.

I'm a little low on vegetable supplies but been making do regardless.  Used some of those dried chilis we got from China today to cook Shui Zhu Yu.  Of course, the chilis I usually use are imported from there too, so it's not too different, but it was still a lovely fragrance after giving them a brief toast in oil.  I didn't use enough doubanjiang at first (I tend to underestimate it, I think I need to remember to overindex on it next time especially because I do the nontraditional thing and strain the broth before serving it so it's easier to eat), and I think next time I could probably look to amp up the sichuan peppercorn flavor more, but I managed to rescue it with some quick thinking, stir frying some of the paste in a separate skillet before adding it in to avoid clumping.

I've been taking a bit more time than expected to do bugfixes on the Rhythm Quest patch update that I put out, so I'm looking to take a step back from that now -- maybe at the very most, just do an end-of-year mailing list post and/or brief devlog.  I took some time over the past couple of days to put in some more work on the ALTTPR site -- this next upcoming update is going to be a huge one, when I get around to finishing it, as it's going to include all of the rooms in GT basement.  I've already done the left side entirely, so now I need to start working on the rooms on the right side (which, thankfully, there are less of).

In the meantime, I've started playing Caesar 3 again!  Or, Augustus v4, to be exact.  I started eyeing it again since I called it quits on MOO2, and I've been sucked in again and am loving it.

I've thought for a while that I would just play the vanilla Caesar 3 campaign again (again), on very hard, but this time with the addition of the Augustus v4 features, like cart depots and highways and all that.  Perhaps even trying to be really disciplined with how I approached each of the missions, maybe even recording segmented video playthroughs to show how you can approach them in my style.

But!  I decided to do something differently and I noticed on rereading the Augustus manual that they've got an entirely new custom campaign designed to be played with Augustus, using all of its fancy new features and custom scenario tooling.  So I've been going along with that, and having fun so far.

It's definitely a new sort of challenge; the maps are not generous at all, and so far there are all of these irregularly-shaped outcroppings and rocks everywhere that make it impossible to really put down big ideal-shaped housing blocks.  To my initial dismay, the campaign is designed to be played using a global labor pool, which I've never really used before when playing Caesar 3, as I think having to situate housing close to industries makes for more challenging and interesting housing block considerations.

But you can clearly see that the campaign is structured in a way that expects you to be using it (although it's stated that you =can= play ithout).  I cleared the first 2 levels without, but when I saw the map for the 3rd assignment I decided that enough was enough and I turned it on, since it seemed like there would be plenty of challenge even without that restriction.

And that was definitely true!  My first attempt at the map ended up failing after quite a bit of time spent on it -- I ran into a situation where I just didn't have enough people to power all of my industries/buildings, money was tight, my population was aging (meaning less workers), etc etc.  I had to start over, this time with a better plan in mind, and using bigger housing blocks with multiple fountains.  Besides the few boo-boos I made here and there (I think I ran out of money early on because I had forgot to actually fully connect one of my key industries for trade), it worked much, much better -- I never had =any= semblance of money issues, and though I had to squeeze in one more housing block than I anticipated, everything worked pretty well and I even got some residents living in small villas at the end.

Looking forward to spending some more time enjoying the rest of that campaign, for sure.  Did I end another year essentially alone again?  Yeah, I guess so, but I've made sure to carve out peace for myself -- peace which didn't exist a month ago, sadly -- and I'm finding a way to enjoy it, as I'm apt to do.

I've got another whole week off from work, I guess?  Xmas eve should be more chilling, maybe we'll do hot pot if we're feeling it, and then Xmas day I'll drive down south.  I'll be at one of the concerts this coming weekend and then hoping to watch Liz and the Blue Bird with the rest of them, which should be good as I've actually been meaning to revisit and recall that film; it's been too long.  Reminds me that it will probably be time to watch some more Kanon soon, as well.  (right now my casual watch material has just been more Initial D...)

Hope everyone is having an okay holiday season so far.