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The subject line is actually inaccurate because there's a tileset now.

Having finished Squeak Squad the next game on my list originally was Battletech: the Crescent Hawks' Inception but instead I've gotten distracted by Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a very in-depth post-apocalyptic game about a multimodal disaster. The dead are rising to eat the living, but there are also killer robots on the loose, portals to other dimensions opening occasionally, aliens taking advantage of the chaos to colonize parts of the planet or kidnap people for experiments, the works. And I've modded it with working magic (I'm playing a druid so I'm casting a lot of Vegetative Grasp so the zombies can't get to me) and a few other disasters, so there's a lot going on.

But there's just a lot going on. Like, I spawned in a government shelter, set up before the government completely collapsed, with a lot of rations and bottled water, but I needed to get more water. To that, I had to do this:

1. Smash some benches, lockers, and other parts of the shelter for raw materials.


2. Turn those materials into makeshift tools--hammer, crowbar, and screwdriver


3. Go up on the roof and disassemble the water tank


4. Drag the smaller tanks down to the shelter, then take one into the woods and fill it with water


5. Drag the enormously heavy water tank back to the shelter, which took most of a day


6. Disassemble a locker to get metal to make a brazier so I don't burn the shelter down, end up with the wrong kinds of metal, just drag the tanks outside


7. Build a campfire and use two tanks to boil the water and purify it

This is very slow but it does produce pure water, though now it's telling me that I don't have a proper container to boil the water in and I'm not sure why, since it worked before. Any kind of crafting in this game is like that, plus there's bionic implants, spells (with a mod), skills, mutations...it's extremely complex and most of my gameplay so far as been interrupted by be looking at the wiki, checking youtube, searching through reddit, and scrutinizing the keybind list to try to figure out how to do what I'm supposed to be going.

So far I'm doing pretty well, though I haven't worked through the shelter supplies yet. I've studied my few spells and I'm slowly clearing the zombies out of the giant mansion that's near the evac shelter and which apparently (judging by the clothes the zombies were wearing) was hosting some kind of costume party when they all got zombified. I run up, lure a few zombies away, use my spells to kill them, smash the bodies (so they don't reanimate again), rest to get mana back, repeat. It's slow going but I'm very excited to see what kind of loot is going to be in that mansion. At minimum, there'll be a bunch of appliances I can take apart for raw materials and I'll finally have my brazier so I can make pure water indoors!

I just found a wrecked car in front of the mansion, so that's probably a good source of sheet metal, fiber (from seatbelts), glass shards, plus I can siphon off the gasoline! Things are looking up in post-apocalyptia.

Baby-ful weekend

On Saturday we went to Shabbat morning services for the children's service, which is held in a separate room. The content was a little different this time--previously, Rabbi Deena did a kiddified version of the main shaḥarit service, with child-appropriate versions of the Shema, Amidah, and so on. This time the services were led by one of the Mensch Academy staff, so there were way more songs about animals celebrating Shabbat. When Rachel asked for feedback about what sort of animals would be celebrating, she got a lot of very loud animals like dinosaurs, lions, tigers, and dragons (Oh my!) until she specifically requested something else. Laila wasn't super into the service--instead she spent most of the time wandering around, dodging in between the kids pretending to be lions and snakes, all with a smile on her face. She kept wandering off, sneaking away across the room to the window, and then trying to sneak outside the circle we were all sitting in to make it to the door. Fortunately, as a baby she is not particularly sneaky and everyone was watching out for us.

She went over and sat in another mother's lap and sashagee told me that she had tears in her eyes when she was saying she really needed baby cuddles, so I'm glad Laila is bringing joy to everyone! Now I understand the parents' dilemma--I want Laila to grow up, to see what she loves and what she hates, to watch her navigate life, but also right now, when I pick her up and she smiles and puts her arms around my neck and then tries to steal my glasses...

But time does not stop.

"While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."
-Genesis 8:22

On Sunday, we went to Maison Marcel--sashagee's choice--to meet dinaraua for brunch. I hadn't seen her for three years, not since my Chanukah party in 2019 where "Xanuka" came in second in the poll of "how best to transliterate חנוכה (since then I've grown to prefer "Xnvkh," the better to reflect the Hebrew ), but we didn't actually do that much catching up. She's a huge fan of my Facebook Laila-related content, and I also wanted a chance for her to meet Laila, so most of the conversation was about Laila. We did talk about what we'd been up to the last three years, and dinaraua mentioned the fun of growing up in a Kazakhstan like how the ovens had no child-safe knobs so her parents would sometimes find her turning the flames off and on (and starting to fill the room with gas). She told us to invite her to everything and that she'd be happy to watch Laila to give sashagee a break, and sashagee took her up on it. She'll be over on Sunday while sashagee is sketching out some murals for Laila's room, so Laila doesn't get the bright idea to draw on the walls.

I ordered the ratatouille shakshuka, because I have to get any shakshuka at a restaurant we go to. Next to that is Laila's overnight oats:

Cheese everywhere, the way it should be.