Yeah okay, I'm overdue for another posting.

I've been relaxing a bit more these days, which I'm told is a good thing.  At the same time, the need for completing tasks is ever-present, so I've taken care of most of my tax forms earlier this week, and did a bunch of cleaning earlier today.  Next up on my radar is music work, I think -- there's a couple projects that I should really take to completion if I can -- another chiptune megamix, finishing up a WIP from last year, and that kinda thing.  I've got more letters to write as well, though I already took care of one yesterday, which was good.

Dead Cells progress is stalled a bit as I finally got through 4BC and am now on the =last= difficulty level, 5BC, which has you going through an entire nother biome and the final secret boss at the end.  Ugh.  I dunno if I'll end up doing it, perhaps I'll give it another few tries though.  But things feel quite grindy at this point, for sure.  I sort of just want to get it over with, more than anything.  But we'll see.

I did end up playing through Coffee Talk and it was...not magnificent/super special or anything, but it was enjoyable enough.  IMHO the writing seemed a shallow or little on-the-nose at times but at other times I really enjoyed some of the interactions.  There were some great moments for example for Lua/Baileys and their interactions with the other characters in the game as they tried to figure out their situation.  That was pretty nice to see.  But I felt that the storyline with Rachel and her father fell pretty flat on me as it lacked the same sort of nuance and depth I felt?

Like, there was a clear conflict between Rachel and her father -- the very familiar conflict of a young one trying to be independent vs an overprotective parental figure.  Where on one side Rachel just wants to be left alone, but also perhaps is a little naive and doesn't know exactly what she's getting herself into.  And on the other side her father perhaps doesn't give Rachel enough space, but also has his intentions in the right place despite being a bit too nosy.  And it's clear that they need to work this out somehow.

Well, how this ends up working out is that Rachel's father basically ends up being "right" in that Rachel didn't really know what she was getting herself into, and Rachel's father ends up getting into (physical) danger because of it.  The surface level moral of the story is, oh, you should listen to your elders because they really are trying to look out for you.  And see, something terrible happened, that just proves it!  But that's really missing the point of the conflict I think, because in these sorts of situations there isn't just one party that is right or wrong and I think it's a disservice to have external factors come in and conveniently resolve everything.  Sure, Rachel's dad ended up being right in this case.  But does that mean Rachel just says "oh okay I guess I really was being naive and I should just listen to dad from now on"?  Like yeah, that works as a story, but it's a little disappointing for me because I was hoping for something with a little more nuance.

It's worth noting that Brave has essentially the same conflict, but Brave works as a story because it spends enough time exploring the interaction between Merida and her mother and having their relationship develop and heal over their time together.  The interesting part about Brave is not the fact that Merida reconciles with her mother.  As a viewer, you already =know= that's going to be what the end of the story is about (it is a Disney movie after all).  The journey there is the important part.  How do these two characters who have such conflicting views end up developing sympathy for each other?  In being thrust into the wilderness, Merida and her mother end up going through a role reversal of sorts and this really helps them see things in a different way rather than being stuck in their old unyielding patterns.

Anyways, enough about that plot point.  Otherwise, Coffee Talk was....okay.  The drink-making "mechanic", if you want to call it that, was not really as interesting or well-explored as VA-11 Hall-A (and it's impossible not to draw that comparison).  In a sense, this sort of matches the environment -- as a coffee shop barista you probably don't really get a lot of "surprise me" or "give me something sweet and spicy", instead you probably get people saying "hazelnut latte please" or whatever.  And I do want to acknowledge that the game mechanic doesn't =have= to have intricacy or whatever in order to serve its point well.  Like maybe mixing these drinks is something that is pretty simple by design and is supposed to just be something calming to do.  The latte art is a perfect example of this, it's obvious that if you use the latte art function in coffee talk it doesn't really affect any outcomes of the game, you don't get any extra points or anything like that, etc.  But that's okay because sometimes it can just =feel pleasant= to just spend time doodling latte art and that is really supposed to be at the heart of the game, I feel like.  Not everything in games has to be mechanically interesting, sometimes you can have things that feel good just for their own sake.  So I wouldn't say that the mechanics in the game are pointless or useless (and there is a little bit more to it even than I'm talking about here).  But it's hard not to draw that comparison here.

But really, it was still a perfectly enjoyable experience.  It's not really that there was anything wrong with it, more that it was missing anything to make it really special for me.  But it's got a nice vibe and I can respect that.  Anyways, with all that said, I highly recommend going to play What Comes After, also by fahmi, since I really enjoyed that game.

In other news, I've been playing a LOT of Hades recently -- finally got the game, and have been going through and doing runs.  I'm on a whopping 16-run clear streak at the moment, out of some 30+ or so attempts I think?  At some point I just sort of understood enough about the game that clears became....pretty easy.  Of course I'm still on lower heat levels so I'm sure I'll meet my match, but for now I'm happy to just cruise through and explore different builds and such.  The progression is slowing down a bit, but this game is =loads= easier on the replayability front than Dead Cells, in many ways, which is nice.

I think I've recovered a bit emotionally, since the rough beginnings of the year.  Being able to reintegrate has helped a lot, I think, and it's also nice having Hades and such as things to just relax and have fun with.  Work is "interesting" as there are some reorgs and stuff happening, but we'll see what I have to say about that later.  My work/relax balance has shifted significantly and I'm still never sure how I feel about that, but for the time being it seems like things are ok.  We all know I always manage to get back to trying to get things done, anyways.  I've been itching to pick up Pharaoh/Cleopatra, or perhaps Terranigma, but we'll see when that ends up happening.

OH!  One more thing, Rhythm Doctor is out on Steam early access now!  This game has been a labor of love for yeeearrrrsssss now so it's pretty cool to hear that it is finally becoming "real".  I'm not one of those to start playing a game early on "day one" or anything like that, so it'll probably be a bit before I get around to playing it proper, but I wish the Rhythm Doctor team the best of luck in the coming weeks/months!

Caesar III complete

Finished up the last peaceful mission in the Caesar III campaign, and with that I have finished every single one of the missions on Hard difficulty!  Don't think I'll try Very Hard anytime soon (pretty much the same, only with less starting cash, less favor/mood to start with, slightly harder invasions), so that means I'm all done with Caesar III for now.  I could move onto Pharaoh + Cleopatra next, or maybe Emperor, but I might take a break first and focus on other games -- I just nabbed Hades on sale, have to finish 4BC in Dead Cells, want to try Coffee Talk at some point and of course there's always rando runs.  There's some other options as well....there's always Fire Emblem: 3 houses, of course.  But I haven't decided to take the plunge into that one.

The last peaceful mission, Massilia, felt like a really good culmination of everything that Casear 3 has to offer, minus maybe the military stuff, but I definitely feel like it was a really good capstone to the Caesar 3 city-building experience.  There are =some= military attacks here, but they are relatively easy to fend off with just a couple of javelin squads (javelin squads are the MVP in all military encounters) and don't require any towers to be built or anything like that.  Honestly the Caesar 3 combat engine is just not terribly exciting, and though you can do some amount of kiting micro with the javelin squads, it's rather inefficient and should only be used when you absolutely have to.  Other than that it's mainly just a test of "did you build enough troops / towers / walls", even though yes there are some tactics that can help out.

The military missions are generally a lot easier because of this, even though it's also easier to just lose them outright and have to restart because you didn't get your military rolling quickly enough.  But provided you do, the actual rest of the city-building is a lot easier.

I should mention that I've been playing all of this on the "Augustus" open-source port/mod, which adds not only a lot of quality-of-life features and bug-fixes (also included in the "Julius" port, which stays closer to the original), but also changes some gameplay features in the spirit of the latter games, and even adds the ability to construct monuments.  Augustus adds a new "Supply Post" building which is required to start training troops, and requires that you provide food to it in order to feed the soldiers.  This actually makes getting soldiers up and running a little bit harder because the Supply Post costs you another 1,000 Dn on top of the barracks and fort(s) (and optionally the academy), plus you need the food itself.  But to make up for that, if you provide your soldiers with multiple types of food, you end up getting a morale bonus that makes them even better than they would have been in vanilla.  Because you can't actually control how much food the supply post stores, I learned pretty quickly that it's actually best to just have the supply post have it's own completely separate set of farms (one of each type of food) to supply it, rather than having the supply post take from your main city granaries, as that can totally throw off your city's food supply.

Anyways, for Massilia, the invaders aren't particularly powerful, so that's not the real problem.  The real problem is that there's a severe lack of farmland and natural resources.  There's only two spots of farmland -- both on islands on the west and south corners of the map.  Fortunately there are fishing spots, so it's pretty clear that you have to rely on fish to feed most of your population, and then reserve those plots of farmland for providing multiple types of food to the villa/palace blocks that you'll need to construct.  And the prosperity target is quite high in this mission, so you WILL need to build those palaces.

The natural resource shortage is a pretty big issue, as the only resource you can naturally harvest from the map is timber (which is used to make furniture).  That, and vines, which you can grow to make wine (but of course that takes up some of the precious little farmland that you have).  You have to import clay to make pottery, and you need to import olives to make oil.

So the first order of business, as always, is to get your exports up and running -- harvest timber, export furniture.  Then import clay and export pottery.  And then import olives, set up a dock, and export oil.  While you're doing that you'll need to set up all of the fishing wharves and granaries to feed your population.  And unfortunately, the main river border isn't very straight, so you can't just spam wharves all along the coast like you'd ideally want to.  Instead you have to build ship bridges over to the isolated islands and build wharves there.  You definitely need to make use of single-tent labor-providing housing on these islands, no real way to do anything else.

So once you've gotten all that running, and you have your military set up as well, you need to start working towards a better city and higher level housing.  But there's a trap.  Since the only way you can make pottery and oil are to import the raw materials, this puts a limit on how much of those goods you can make per year (cities will only trade a certain amount with you).  There are two cities that will sell clay to you, so that might cause you to think, as I did, that it's going to be feasible to provide pottery to most of your citizens.  But that's a trap.  Not only is that prone to unreliable pottery supply, it also cuts into your pottery export, and you're going to have to pay a bunch of extra money to import all that clay as well.  And money is =quite= tight in this level, even if you carry a bunch of money over from previous levels.

You could try to evolve maybe only one or two blocks of your plebian housing with the pottery and furniture and oil, but that's actually an issue as well since you probably want your granaries to all be connected so they can draw fish meat from the islands.

After having an attempt at this and miserably failing to keep my economy up and running, I ended up going back to the drawing board and instead keeping all of my plebian housing at small casa level so that they wouldn't require any goods besides food.  Of course, your prosperity rating is directly related to the quality of your housing, so this means you need to compensate by building a lot of palaces.

So off to work I went trying to construct the palace blocks, utilizing the farmland in the lower area to provide wheat, fruit, fish from wharves, and a little bit of wine from vines.  My first palace block was looking more or less OK, and I have maybe 6-7 luxury palaces up and running.

That wasn't enough to reach the prosperity goal, so I set up another luxury palace block.  Fortunately by this time the first palace block had provided enough tax income that I didn't really need to export oil and pottery anymore, so I could turn those industries off to A) save employment and B) make sure my palaces are supplied with enough goods.

But then I run into problems.  You can only build one hippodrome in your city, so my second palace block was complaining that there wasn't enough entertainment.  And I had a bigger problem -- now that there was twice as many people, I was running into shortages on wheat and fruit.  And that was a huge problem, as once the markets ran out of food, they stopped being able to provide the rest of the goods, causing mass housing devolution.  Not good.

I tried a number of things to solve this -- I tried getting rid of all but one of the vine farms.  I tried reorganizing my granaries.  I tried building a grand temple to Ceres to reduce food consumption, and a grand temple to Venus to stall housing devolution.  But in the end I realized what I needed to do was actually to import wheat from the sea trading route!  So then I had wheat coming through the dock to a warehouse, then shipped over to two other warehouses near the palace area, then transported to an accepting granary there.  And that solved everything.  Phew!

Next, the entertainment issue.  This was the first time I had to set up multiple palace blocks in a single city, so I wasn't sure at first what to do about the lack of hippodrome.  Turns out that you need to build enough theaters, amphitheaters, and colosseums in other parts of your city to achieve "perfect" coverage for your population, and that ends up providing extra entertainment points to your housing.  (I also had one of my colosseums in the palace area misplaced so it wasn't providing access correctly)

With all that solved my palaces were finally evolving to stable luxury palaces and my prosperity target was reached -- and then it was just a matter of spamming schools/libraries/academies to get the culture rating, while making sure to build more plebian housing since I needed to keep worker numbers up (so much of my populace was living it up in palaces, I didn't have enough workers!).

So yeah, that mission felt great to conquer, it really felt like a challenge and you had to use every trick in the book to get everything working together in the end.  Brilliant.

It's 2021.

Have you been able to incorporate activism and social justice into your life regularly in a meaningful way, however small?

Have you taken anything away from the doom-scrolling displays of the past year?

Are you still marching forward with us?  Or did you sprint for a bit, claim to be in first place, and sit down on the side of the track?

Everything that I ever do will never make up for all the mistakes I made.

But if you were to return, would I forgive you for all that you never did?

About time for another update, I think.

The other week I wrote about the struggle between productivity and "trying to relax".  Of course, as you already know (but probably still struggle with anyways), to be truly relaxed means not just "not working" but also to not worry about having to go back to work.  That I think is a state that is missing from a lot of our lives -- understandably so because in a sense it is that very worry that keeps us from being complacent.

Anyways, I've recalibrated my balance a little more, as well as took a weekend or two to actually take a break, not from my day job, but from what I call my "real job" -- all the other stuff.  I think I needed it.  Ironically, it almost feels like one of the easy ways for me to handle this is to have more "scheduled" relaxation.  Having restful (or at least non-productivity-oriented) time to yourself is perhaps easier when it's a goal rather than a non-goal.

I started to receive correspondence back from the prisoner who I wrote to through the Prisoner Correspondence Project.  They seem like quite a nice fellow and we have perhaps one or two unexpected common interests as well beyond what was obvious from their bio.  Perhaps what strikes me most is how much time this person is already willing to spend on writing to me despite having only heard from me the one time so far.  Admittedly, this is perhaps due to the fact that they probably don't have a lot of other things that they'd otherwise be doing in prison.  But it's still a little eye-opening, to see so plainly how much attention I would receive from this person.  In a way, I am so used to people not following through and not caring to put enough attention forth, that I had forgotten that there is actually a possibility on the other end of the spectrum.  How many unanswered letters had I written to those people who I always wished to write back?  Yet, none of them had "enough time" for me.  Is that just it then?  All along, was my eternal rut simply steeped in the fact that I lived among Silicon Valley workaholics, well-to-do people with friends of their own, and those whose idea of "friend" hardly involved any sense of commitment?

I know I had become one of those people, at one point or another in my history.  But that idea had always repulsed me; had moved me to straighten my course, to model what I believed a person should be like.  In spite of it all.  But I know also that I have never been approachable.  Not in the ill-fated marching band times, nor on the social dance floor.  I hoped, though, that I would put in the missing effort that I never saw.  Maybe I wouldn't, every time.  But I would try.  Just, not so hard as to feel as if I am taken granted for.  =That= is something that I learned in the end was not sustainable.  Despite the fact that I tried anyways, and arguably succeeded at it, for a time.

Erm, anyways.

I finally released Passing You By, thus checking off one more song off the "unreleased" list and into the public, where...I'm sure it will sit forgotten by most.  At least I know my dedicated Patrons care ;)

I went through a bunch of Dead Cells runs to get some missing unlocks, and now I just have to practice and grind it out until I can do a 4BC clear.  Specifically, I'll probably need some additional practice against hand of the king and time keeper.  At least the Cavern enemies don't quite scare me as much as they used to, after getting a little more familiar with them.

Caesar 3 progress continues...I played through a few more peaceful missions, including the dreaded Lugdunum, which is one of the steepest difficulty bumps in the entire campaign, as the layout for that map is not convenient at all.  I've been experimenting a little with my housing blocks, finding some different alternatives that I'm starting to like.  I'm going to have to experiment a little more with palace/villa blocks as well.  I've been putting the palaces/villas on the inside of the blocks thus far but I actually think it might be a better idea to put the service buildings on the inside, as that seems more space efficient.  I'll try that on this next map, perhaps.