Can't sleep.

Well, on the plus side, Rhythm Quest got some good progress this past week(s), with level 6-1 being finished.  I sometimes don't know how I continue to work on this, but I guess steadiness is just a habit of mine, ha ha.

I finished playing Metroid: Ascent.  Overall it was...fun, but not excellent.  There were some pretty cool ideas, some really neat rooms, some puzzles which I appreciated, some other puzzles which I ended up basically cheesing by using short charges / etc.  There was some stuff that was sort of a drag, like exploring zone 2 (the water-logged one) in the beginning felt really tedious, and it also felt weird that you could boostball to dash fast / jump high even without gravity.  Boss fights were sort of a letdown in terms of overall difficulty, but they were still a little fresh and not too bad for the most part.

Probably the biggest concrete issue I could point to was that there were just too many really big rooms.  I'm talking rooms the size of Cathedral or Amphitheater in vanilla SM, but they're just all over the place.  I think there is a time and place for big rooms (Cathedral I think is fine), but they should really be the exception rather than the rule.  There's simply no reason to explore every nook and cranny of a big room when all you're looking for is items.  If all the rooms have so much extra space in them, you're heavily incentivized to just stop caring half of the room's volume and only go straight from door to door, maybe pausing to check out an item if there is one.  I dunno, maybe it's also because it's a romhack, so I don't feel that sense of "explore everything" that I do when I'm playing a brand new game and I don't know what I could see, but that was something I really noticed.

I got through Lugdunum again!  I learned a couple more things this time around.  First off, the idea of just putting a bunch of mausoleums near the entrance of the map worked fantastically, though ideally you'd build those before upgrading your other housing too far, as you're stuck with tents in that area.  Second, it's really quite hard to carve out enough space for a luxury housing block.  I eventually made it work, but I'm now considering a different strategy where you use the large open space near the east side of the map (closer to the map exit) for the patricians.  Obviously getting food there is a lot harder, you'd have to rely on "getting" granaries, but in my limited testing that did actually work out.  That would be nice since you'd have plenty of room for warehouses and such to store goods.  You could even set up a marble industry there if you wanted?  But since you can only have 9 or so farms in that lower area, you probably can't really feed another full housing block off of that, it'll basically be only the villas, plus maybe a little more.

The other thing I ran into was disease -- which I guess in Augustus now increases steadily with city population.  The lesser-evolved houses on the plateau ended up getting infected a bunch after my city got large enough, so I guess the solution there is that they'll probably need access to bathhouses in addition to doctors and barbers.

Foregoing the initial weapons industry at the entry of the map seemed to work well too -- you can just go straight for trading with the natives from the start.

I did an ALTTPR ladder race for the first time in...probably a year?  Felt kind of exciting, but the seed ended up being a slog to get through, I last locationed stuff and ended up clearing out most of the world before ending up in go mode.  Somehow still won (by only 20 seconds!), which was quite surprising, but hey, we take those.

Life is...honestly pretty sad, no matter how it gets sliced.  There are good things, too, but....few and far between..  There's a constant struggle in my mind between hope and despair.  But like a lot of other things that I've thought about this past year, maybe those two are things that need to be held simultaneously.  An acknowledgement both of the things that could go well, but also of the things that you already know won't go well.

Gimme a break...