Dreams:

Something about the bike path and/or Midvale Blvd. (I may have had more to say about it had I fleshed out my notes earlier.)

I was back at the Factorio office in Prague. In this dream, the office was layed out as a big plus sign, with a large, tall (as they tend to be over in Europe) hallway tracing the outline of the "+", kind of like the 4th floor of the Wisconsin Capitol building. There were rooms inside and outside the plus. Maybe Wube only occupied two quadrants.

There was a somewhat party atmosphere in the place. They were gearing up for the next release, and lots of international employees were there. In a big, informal meeting, Kovarex addressed me directly, asking me what I would be working on. Fortunately I had just been discussing that topic with someone else, and getting familiar with that part of the code. Notably, it was not terrain generation, but some other large and important subsystem. 'Fluid-handling robots', or something like that. I told Kovarex this, and said something along the lines of "this is new to me, but that's why I'm here!" and he liked that, which elevated the mood further.

There was a surprisingly pretty girl here who supposedly had a crush on me and wanted to be my girlfriend. I was looking forward to meeting her in person for the first time since my last trip to Prague. When I finally found her, just past a right turn in the hallway, she and another woman were chanting to music and doing a strange floaty dance that involved being suspended from each other by small chains embedded in their skin. It became clear that she wasn't actually interested in me, but rather in my brother, who was a fish. The chant ended with "That fish of the sea was meant to marry me!"

All this made it clear to me that she had some issues and I was dodging a bullet by not actually being the one she was interested in, but it was still disappointing.

I woke up feeling 'weirdly clear-headed' before 8AM. This was similar to how I used to feel in my first period class after staying up all night, and things would seem quieter than usual.

It had snowed a little bit overnight. I wonder if that has something to do with it, since there was another morning recently when I woke up with an usual sense of peacefulness before deciding 'maybe it snowed?', and opening my curtains to find that it had.

Later, after I ate some toast, the feeling of peaceful clarity gave way to brain fog and lethargy. I wondered if it was something in the bread, and if the sense of clarity was the silver lining of having puked my guts out on Christmas evening.

On December 29th (a day after I had this dream) I reverted to waking up feeling lethargic and groggy after Sara and Marilla had taken off to go spend some time with Anna. I eventually opened Steam with the goal of starting up Factorio and fooling around for a while to 'boot my brain', but saw in my updates that there was a recent FFF titled "Noise expressions 2.0"! "WHAT WHAT WHAT" I said, and voraciously read through it.

I learned that Earendel is making good use of the noise expressions to define unique terrain for different planets, which was fun to read about but also somewhat expected. More interestingly, Genhis (whose name I didn't recognize; I think he's been working on this pretty quietly) has been working on reworking some of the map generation internals, replacing my noise expression AST Lua tables with literal strings, since that apparently has less overhead.

Long story short, I found him on Discord because I wanted to discuss the subject, and make sure that he had the information needed from the original author to make good design decisions. It may be a little too late for some of them. Somewhat disappointingly, the new syntax doesn't allow "-" or ":" in identifiers, breaking the assumption that the name of an expression as stored in property_expression_names could be a special case of expression strings. But Genhis did sound interested in refactoring property_expression_names into property_expressions which would store expression strings.

They also don't seem to be prioritizing backward compatibility with mods using the table-based expression definitions, even though I think it would be trivial to do with only a Lua function (i.e. no need to support both old and new in Factorio itself).

So I'm going to write that Lua compatibility layer.