Things are like, somehow actually okay, surprisingly?

I rose up out of my emotional woes and instead found myself in the midst of physical ones, as I've come down with some sort of cold or other, just like everyone else these days, apparently.  Last night was god-awful as my nose was getting 100% destroyed and I had a lot of trouble sleeping through the combination of pain/discomfort and delirium.  Thankfully I seem to be past the worst of it which makes me hopeful that I'll perhaps still make it out to VBall.

I haven't been enjoying my usual White Tea, thanks to being sick, but have instead been finding some nice encouragement for living through...food!  I cooked some blackened chicken + salad with some mayo/mustard/olive oil/garlic dressing that I threw together and it really hit the spot!  Paired with some croissants that my best friend made, it was both a healthy and excellent meal and I boiled the leftover chicken bones to make some nice soup to drink afterward.

Other than that, even though I've of course not felt like doing much, I've still managed to stay functional -- I skipped a meal of cooking, but still made dinner, and have even been making small yet gradual progress on the big Rhythm Quest refactor that I've been working on (unifying all of the level generation stuff to handle all of the different tilesets/backdrops in the game).  There's a lot of work to be done on multiple fronts -- Rhythm Quest, ALTTPR analysis, ALTTPR website, work work, etc, but as long as I'm doing a bit of something each day, it's probably fine, I think?

Spent most of today just in bed sleeping, which seems to have helped things along, but also managed to get through another Augustus level -- this one is Londinium!

I restarted this one midway through and am glad that I did...was quite difficult getting everything to fit!  But I ended up with some empty space to spar in the end -- you can see that I have some empty areas where I could have added some additional industry in case I needed more pottery or bricks or furniture or whatever.

Part of my mistake this time was not really accounting for scaling up the industries.  Like yes, you can put the pottery and brick industries in the same block, and that sort of makes sense since you get to reuse clay for both, but what's going to happen when your city and exports grow and you end up needing like twice as many bricks and 4 times as much pottery as before?  Better to plan for dedicated areas for each, otherwise it becomes a little bit messier to deal with all of the logistics.

I still ended up with a supplemental pottery/furniture station toward the far left of the map; almost makes me wonder actually if I should have had pottery/furniture be made on-site for each of the housing blocks, and whether that would have made things any easier?  Having more separate, small industry blocks feeding each of the housing areas, instead of having big centralized industries that everything else pulls from.  Hmm...maybe both have their merits and it might depend on the layout of the space.  I'll have to think about that in the future.

The "grand temple mountain" in the top wasn't really part of the original plan; that area seems like it would make sense to turn into a housing block, but I had to fit the grand temples and monuments =somewhere=, and they happened to all fit up there, so it seemed as good of a place as any.

If I had to do the mission over, I would have constructed a Pantheon, for sure, to upgrade past 2x2 villas to the 3x3 ones.  I ended up with like 4 entire blocks dedicated to 2x2 villas in the end, and was honestly unsure if I could get my prosperity rating up enough with just those (you aren't allowed to build Academies in this mission).  It worked, and divvying up the food between vegetables and meat to evolve all the other housing to grand insulae helped, but I think things would have been easier if I had just went the Pantheon route.  I just checked and Large Villas are 400 prosperity rating versus Medium Villas at 180, so it's quite a big jump. 

Might have another trip to the land-of-yummy-egg-tarts coming up next month, which will probably be decent, I guess.  Yeah, things are alright.  There's things to be sad about, sure, but there's also things to be happy about too, and that makes all the difference.  Some nice company, whether it be in person or virtual, and a healthy dose of videogames to look forward to, etc etc.