On Wednesday I left work and took a slightly different route home, just to do something different. I ended up going to Michael's and getting some berry ice cream cone and wandering around in the marsh area where I found a lot of mosquitos. I was thinking about how it might be really nice to go on a long road trip out west. Maybe we could go to Seattle and visit Moriah. Then I got a text from her about Devin's getting married and going to have kids, and she's so worried that that's not going to make him happy, and I think I should talk to Devin again and tell him about my uprootedness. Maybe he could relate. I was sitting on a grassy hill in the park as the sun went behind the buildings and the text conversation ran out, so got going. There was a guy in the park searching for treasure. As I left he was digging a hole in a flower bed.

I've been stresing out at work because I haven't been getting anything done. And that has resulted in getting even less done. So on Thursday I talked to Steve and Linda and asked if they'd be okay with me splitting my week up by day instead of trying to split my days in half in order to work on both Factorio and EIT. They thought that was fine and we decided to try MTW for a bit.

So on Friday I didn't go into EIT at all. Instead I was going to try to figure out map generation for Factorio. But then Sara and I played Minecraft most of the day instead. We continued the journey north from the place where Justin and I had ended our journey through the jungle back in 2015. After a couple of days and nights we dug a house into the bank of a river (near a spider spawner) that we'd been boating along (and it seems the boats have gotten faster and less brittle since last time I played, and now they have oars) because the river was interrupted there and we needed to cut a channel through. After digging around underground for a bit (because there was coal and iron) and trying to start an underground carrot farm I finally got back on the river to explore some more (meanwhile, Sara got lost while looking for sheep and picking flowers) and found that we could bypass an annoying dried-up oxbow by cutting through a hill. I rescued sara and started the tunnel, which turned out to go through a fatter part of the hill than I meant, but that turned out to be okay because it made it a better shortcut. We eventually continued along the river to the next place where we had to cut a channel, which ended up being two canals, which I labeled "A Canal" and "B Canal". And of course we built a hideout there, too, which was cool because it had a window in the back looking into a valley where skeletons show up sometimes. Sara really liked the window. And then after cleaning up the tunnel canal a bit I ended the session back at our first river hideout because I realized that we needed to mine redstone and iron and grow some sugarcane in order to make maps. But while I was digging around there Sara was digging her own mine under the A/B canal house, where she got 78 redstone and some gold and blue dye stone.

That was not what I had intended to be doing with the day, but it was fun. I had been thinking earlier that I used to use Minecraft to fulfill my need for adventure. And while out on a walk with Sara the other night (a week or two ago) I got to talking about how Factorio needs an adventure mode. And that got me to thinking about Game Thing, and the thing that makes it unique, which is that the world can have crazy topology. Then I could make worlds like in my dreams with magical shortcuts. Or longcuts. Or just more weird places to explore. Maybe I should focus on the exploration aspect more instead of spending so much energy trying to make it Factorio.

That took until like 6:30, at which point Sara finally took off and I got to work on Factorio. I had drank half a rockstar and a lot of coffee. And I thrashed around the Noise code as before, trying to refactor it so that things were less coupled to chunks, but as I was doing so I asked Cube about it, and in doing so I actually came to understand (I think) how it works. As of yet I have not gotten my refactoring to work; the map comes out all messed up. But at least sort of understanding it is a bit of a breakthrough. Hopefully this resolves my uprootedness feeling somewhat.

For a couple of weeks I've been trying to think of the name of the place on French Island where Becky had her birthday party. It's "Shenannigans".