#050

I’ve done a lot of support these past couple of weeks: I was on call from Wednesday the 21st to Wednesday the 28th, then doing in-hours support from Wednesday the 28th to Wednesday the 4th, next week. I also covered someone’s in-hours shift on Friday the 23rd (which is also the only day so far I’ve been called, so it’s not so bad).

But, for future sanity, maybe avoid doing adjacent on-call and in-hours shifts, with on-call involving a long weekend, and covering someone else’s in-hours day before the long weekend.

I’ve not really got much done other than that.

I played a bunch of Minecraft for the first time in months at the beginning of the week, but I rapidly reached the point at which I become bored every time: after setting up a base (which takes several hours to make a good one), everything else is just a matter of time, there’s not really much challenge left in the game.

I think the game I actually want is not Minecraft, but something which starts out like Minecraft (or Stardew Valley, any “managing-a-single-base-yourself” style game really), which gives you mechanics to hire workers and smoothly transitions into a village/city sim. However, village/city sim games have the same problem, but on a larger scale. Eventually your city becomes basically perfect and there’s no more challenge. So ideally you’d then have some sort of smooth transition into national politics, then international politics. I’m not sure what would come after that.

I picked up Rise to Ruins, currently on sale on Steam, as a combination tower defence / village sim / god game. I like all of those genres independently (putting aside the issue of village sims becoming super boring in the end-game), so hopefully I’ll like this. I’ve played a couple of short games now, and had my village taken out by monsters in a couple of game-days both times, so it has some challenge to it.

I updated my Personal Finance memo, which made me notice a fairly large shift in my financial habits which I’d not really thought about before. I used to make use of forecasting really heavily, I’d even go so far as to say that forecasting was almost the entire reason I tracked my finances. But now I barely forecast at all. I suppose this marks the shift from being a poor Ph.D student to having a stable and well-paying job, with no significant financial concerns.