Listen to the Rain

We spent most of this weekend at the grandparents' houses, at my parents' house on Shabbat and then at sashagee's parents' house on Saturday night and Sunday. sashagee went out with my parents around noon on Friday, and I stayed behind to finish the workday, vacuumed, did the laundry, wiped down the counters, emptied the dishwasher, and otherwise did all the pre-Shabbat cleaning, then I got on the train, went downtown, and took the express Metra out to the suburbs and arrived just in time for dinner. Pot roast. Delicious!

We didn't go anywhere or do anything particularly special while we were there except hang out with the grandparents and give them Laila time, but Laila had a lovely time! She was so excited that she had a hard time taking her naps but then didn't want to go to sleep because she would have missed out on the excitement. That meant that she spent a bunch of the visit tired, and when we finally got home on Sunday she fell asleep for an hour and then woke up and cried for two hours because she absolutely did not want to be alone. When I went into sing to her, she clung to me like I was a sinking ship and cried when I tried to hold her prone in my arms instead of letting her hug my neck. She finally consented to be put down in the crib but demanded I keep a hand on her head, and if I tried to move it away she reached up to grab it back After fifteen minutes of singing בשם השם to her she calmed down...or so I thought, because she started crying basically as soon as I closed the door. sashagee went in there after a bit and that did the trick--Laila fell into an exhausted sleep around midnight and sashagee wasn't long after her. On Monday she had a much better time.

I'm nearly done with my psychic powers mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and currently having to deal with more bugs. The ones that I can't solve myself are:

• I'm trying to make a teleporter power that warps space so that enemies' movements draw them toward a central point, but the function to move monsters is bugged. My current idea is to make a fake 'enemy' that will pull everything nearby toward it, but that's reliant on being able to make a summoned monster that other monsters will ignore.


• Telepathic powers work on zombies because there's a whitelist for which targets spells can affect, but no blacklist. That means when I set HUMAN as a possible target for telepathic attack, formerly-human zombies--who are tagged both HUMAN and ZOMBIE--are eligible. This is unfixable without me personally adding a blacklist function to the game.

On the other hand, I was playing last night and discovered a feral psychic in the wild, so I know that my attempt to add them to monster spawn list worked! It was a pyrokinetic who proceeded to throw fire everywhere and set the hospital I was trying to loot on fire, so that was exciting! I'm also in the boring numbers-adjusting part of the game. "Oh, I think [Ψ]Fountain of Flames does ten percent more damage than I want, and [Ψ]Stutterstep lasts too long" blah blah blah. The boring-but-necessary part of game design.

Yesterday, I went out to lunch with aaronhparker, who's taking a trip to Japan in April and wanted some suggestions of where to go. Unfortunately, his group's itinerary isn't set in stone beyond being in Japan yet, so I really could only provide the most general advice. I told him that if he had to go three places, he should go to Tōkyō, Kyōto, and (of course) Hiroshima, especially talking up Miyajima. I mentioned Kiyomizu-dera and Arashiyama in Kyōto, too, and when he talked about hiking I told him about Matsumoto. We only met for a bit over lunch because we both had meetings to go back to and I feel like I didn't provide much actionable advice, but I did suggest that we meet up again when he has a better idea of exactly where he'll be. I should be have more advice then.

Alright, back to this unknown physician project. At least I can tell right away that "Dr. Sages Webmaster" and "Dr. Northwest Hospital" are not real people.