Actual events are occurring

[dorchadas]

We went to baby Shabbat in the park Shabbat morning, at the same park I've gone to Torah study in the past. They also had a Torah study there but I skipped it this time to help wrangle Laila. She needed a bit of wrangling--when the rabbi started reading a storybook (Chicken Man), she walked right up in front of Rabbi Lizzi and stared at the book and ignored the rabbi's polite requests to move away so other people and see. I felt better though when the rabbi's daughter, age 4, did exactly the same thing. Adira was old enough to complain about not being able to see anything, though, so after that the rabbi moved backward and everything was solved. Laila even listened to the story!

Working more on that mod for Cataclysm and it's reminding me of all of those Game Developers Reveal the Nonsense They Had to Use to Make Games Work articles that come out. To pick one example, CDDA makes it difficult to determine who the other party is outside of dialogue, where the other party is the person you're talking to, because the internal scripting language developed out of the dialogue system and wasn't originally designed to handle all the uses it's being put to. However, it's always obvious who the PC is. So when I made a monster that drained the PC's stamina and health (in that order), I rather than actually doing it as a drain I set it up in code so that the monster checks the PC's stamina and health levels and then has the PC secretly use a "drain stamina/health" power on themselves. This is necessary because there's no way to set attack priority or otherwise influence monsters' AI.

I just made a telekinetic power to let people lift cars to change the tires and the way it works in the game is by summoning a jack made of telekinetic force that you hold in your inventory and can use when you work on a car. It's not the DC Metro is actually a hat but I feel like it's on the same pathway.

I'm most of the way through Hollow Knight. I last beat Hornet in Kingdom's Edge, one of the blocker fights for a lot of people. It took me as many tries as all previous bosses put together I think, and while I looked up strategies and found a cheese one--equip charms for fast attack, thorns, faster healing, and just spam attack until you win--I'm stubborn enough that I refused to do it. I used magic and dodged her attacks and learned her patterns and eventually I did win. It's just like all that advice about never giving up.

This weekend we're going out to the suburbs for fireworks! The award-winning Batavia Fourth of July fireworks didn't happen this year because cellular network outages meant the coordinating computers couldn't actually coordinate, so everyone went to the field and spread out their blankets and then nothing happened. The town couldn't have that, so they rescheduled it for the first weekend in August. I'm not sure if it's going to be the same program and super AMERICA themed, which I don't have an ideological problem with but which would be a little weird in August, or if they're going to come up with a new program. They've had a month to do so. I guess we'll see.

While randomly scrolling through Facebook I saw an ad for a candlelit Legend of Zelda music concert put on by Fever. While I've been to multiple Symphony of the Goddesses concerts, those are all full orchestra. This is a chamber orchestra so it will be a genuinely new experience for me. I asked sashagee about it, and though she has never in her life played a Legend of Zelda game she was excited about it, so we're going to turn it into a date night! It's in Logan Square, where I don't know what the good restaurants are but I know there are good restaurants. I'll write about that after it happens.