face the fear, build the future

A Saturday without raid. A chill day. HGR has begun questioning whether I have conscious experiences, so I guess I’ll chronicle the day here.

I took my usual morning walk, then sat down with mocha to browse discord and the FR forums. Mid-morning I got a grocery delivery. Due to bringing up the groceries and putting everything away, I had over 7500 steps by lunchtime. Good stuff.

For lunch I had leftover BBQ pizza and, for dessert, a slice of cookies & cream ice cream pie. Then I took a nap (shorter than usual, from 1-2). It was Axew Community Day, and the plan was to catch a boatload of dragons. However, when I woke up, more interesting things were going on: meisnewbie was starting his Lobotomy Corporation adventure. HGR, numbers, and I all gathered around to watch.

I left off Lobcorp at day 14. I really wanted to like the game: the atmosphere/writing/concept are extremely up my alley. I was a big SCP fan back in the day. However, it’s a game about fucking around and finding out, interspersed with a lot of tedious micromanagement. Sucks to fuck around and find out midday (or just send someone to the wrong chamber once) and have to restart the day and redo a bunch of employee training. Ultimately, the game lived rent-free in my head for a long time, but I couldn’t get into it gameplay-wise.

Watching newbie has none of the downsides because I can just wander off when he’s grinding employee stats or redoing a day. I get the fun of knowing some mechanics in advance (violet noon, Der Freischutz’ weapon) but get to discover other things alongside newbie. HGR steered newbie toward Punishing Bird and away from Nameless Fetus (“omega cancer”) and Warm-Hearted Woodsman.

So that was most of the afternoon. Around 4 I left to at least catch some Axew. It was a baking hot summer day, everything quiet under blue skies. I returned after half an hour (“That was a fast community day,” said numbers) to discover I missed Punishing Bird’s first breach. (I could tell earlier from newbie’s comments on the managerial guidelines that he fundamentally misunderstood the mechanic: “Better suppress him quickly before [redacted] happens,” he said.)

On the other hand, newbie had a zero-death first violet noon because he is a literal gaming god. HGR and I were both watching eagerly and then no one got ganked. newbie is just so good at this game.

(He’s also way better than me at properly training up his employees. Everyone is chonk. Like, when I got Der Freischutz, he chewed up my training team rookies, and thereafter Reinhardt became the Ambassador to Der Freischutz because he was pretty much my only squaddie with justice III. newbie just cruise controlled through the whole thing because most of his employees had justice III to begin with.)

Since it was grocery day, I had the classic dinner of burger + tots. We reconvened after dinner and newbie played more Lobcorp. He finished day 14, which means he’s already ahead of me. At around 11, he and HGR left to do an expert roulette together, and I left to finish my walking for the day. I had meant to do normals to get boots before tomorrow’s raid (I have mostly crafted gear, but normal boots are week 1 BIS for machinist) but never got around to it. Whoops. It’s not clear if we’re raiding tomorrow anyway, since Dante’s computer died.