Rant 1140 / MM6 Is A Long Game

Started drinking coffee again because it's delicious.

Last week, I just decided to try coffee again because I felt like drinking some. Began with tea, actually, for the same reason, then advanced to coffee after a few days.

Then I ran out of instant coffee.

Hence a few days ago, I bought a few packets of real coffee. Those prices, man! Apparently, normal coffee takeaway in a bag costs $1. Having it there in a glass costs $0.80. Black with sugar, takeaway, costs $20 less each.

I didn't know the plastic bag costs that much. Nor the milk! $0.20 each for both bag and milk!

Ice is another $0.20.

Next time, I think I'll go for kopi kosong (no sugar no milk) but I'll need to check the pricelist again to confirm sugar's also $0.20. Otherwise, I'm sticking with kopi-o (no milk) since evaporated milk is easy to find.


But now I think I'm noticing another effect of coffee. I didn't even know it was there because I used to get it all the time with or without coffee due to my irregular sleep schedule, but now that I keep it consistent and exercise regularly, I notice it immediately when it happened.

Today, I woke up tired and it was hard to start my engine. This is not normal nowadays.

I think I'll go cool turkey this weekend. Not cold turkey because I still have RT in the evening.

Coffee is so bad :(




EDIT: Now I think that was just bad sleep.















Bought a squid the day before and like before, I felt that the gladius inside was too nice to be thrown away.

The problem is that I can't find any use for it and it's broken.

I can't be the only person to think that the squid's bone looks nice. I'd keep it but since it serves no purpose, I don't want to accumulate junk.




















Might & Magic 6 is hard if not for this thing that I'm not sure if it's a bug.

I don't know why they never patched it, but all scrolls are reusable in turn-based mode.

I had to use it so much in the werewolf cave because it was so hard for my team. Fortunately, I had scrolls for Implosion and Fireball, so after I ran out of food, these two scrolls saved me. Would have been better if I had a scroll for Inferno and Ring of Fire, but Fireball's fine too.

The problem with this dungeon is that there are three monsters that do things that will ruin your day regardless of your level.

First, the attacks of the master swordsmen and oozes have a small chance of breaking your equipment. A few of them is ok, but when you're surrounded by like 20 of them, those small chances can really accumulate.

Unfortunately, I did not invest in my Repair skill, so there was nothing I could do but run back to town every now and then.

Second, the attacks of the strongest werewolves have small chances of reducing the HP of a party member to 0 instantly. Although I have two members who can heal, the Cleric with her powerful Cure Wounds and the Paladin with her crappy Healing Touch, there had been several occasions when my entire party got wiped in one attack.

For the first problem, the dungeon likes to spawn ambushes on the way out if I try to run for the exit for repairs. For the second, the constant heals and my need to kill them asap with my best spells instead of my most cost-efficient attacks really drained my MP.

I could run out, but that was a pain. So when I ran out of food, which was necessary for rests, I decided to exploit the bug instead to get infinite attacks.

After finishing the dungeon, I got enough experience to raise my level thrice, up from 35 to 38. As for loot, this was the first dungeon in which I had to leave behind the cheapest items. It was so big and there was so much stuff everywhere! In the end I made about 110k. Pretty damn good haul. Enough for my archmage to learn Dark magic and all the spells I deemed useful, like Day of Protection.






Funny thing is, after so long, I still haven't gotten around to completing the main quests.

Rant 1139 / One More Step Followed By Yet Another Step

So I'm changing the format of my inventory list.

Used to be that I had all the numbers in the Notes app that came with the iPad, but after a few months, I could see that it was not a very good app for such a purpose.

For one, it does not back up anything. If I delete a page, it vanishes forever. I solved this issue by making copies of the page.

The second problem was that it could not handle photos.

That is a bad thing, although not urgent, because I am not familiar with most of my inventory. I have a terrible memory and I'm too lazy to participate much in the actual handling of the goods. If I were to help in the packing and stuff more, I'd gradually unconsciously memorise everything.

As it is now, I can barely remember anything that arrived more than 6 months ago.

So what I need is to have photos to match the product number.

Fortunately I found a free app that can do that.

Now I'm also adding descriptions of each item so that in the future, I can create an index.

One issue I have with it is that when I open the menu that displays a thumbnail of all the pages, they are positioned sideways so I have to enlarge the item numbers to make them easier to read while perpendicular to their normal position.

The best thing about it is that I can upload this in an online storage site so I can also access it on my PC if I want to.

It's a long task and I don't really want to think about the future when I transfer this to a new system. It's really mindnumbing, this data processing work. Kinda reminds me of guard duty.

Also asked my bro's gf if she would help me set up an e-commerce website. As far as I can tell, getting a domain name and a server is going to be ridiculously cheap compared to the cost of selling my stuff the way I do now, so I'm willing to be generous if she agrees.

Not sure if she will though since money isn't really an important point for her. What I worry about is that she may not want to add this to her already full schedule.

Seriously, she OTs almost everyday, sometimes even coming back only after 10pm, yet this is only her first year there as a permanent staff.

But as far as I can tell, she's familiar with this sort of work. Anything she doesn't know, which is mainly about the security, she told me she could ask her friends who work in the IT security line.

It sounds really good to me, but I don't know if this will work out.

I'm also considering hiring someone to handle the e-commerce, everything from the maintenance of the site to the shipping to the customer service. The thing is that I think the site will be pretty dead for months until I get some other things going, so it's too little work to have a dedicated staff for.

I just don't really want to handle customer service because I've heard plenty about the related problems from my buyers.

Of course I have a backup plan in case she rejects my offer.












Also, I spoke to the person who asked me for a quote before and for some reason, she's still interested but is taking forever to give me the confirmation I'm waiting for.

Weird. I thought the long silence was because she had found a better supplier, but apparently not. Or maybe she's still in the midst of comparing prices.

Either way, I'm quite confident it's going to be hard to find a similar price since as my first corporate client, I quoted her a price that won't give me a significant profit. I'm basically doing it for free, really. Sure, it's theoretically possible to find someone to beat this price, but it's unlikely unless she has a good network of acquaintances in this industry.






















Still playing MM6. My characters are at lv27-28 now and things are beginning to look... not so good.

For one, the spells don't scale very well.

The way they work is that they do a specific base damage plus a bit more damage per level of skill.

Although the cost is static, the fact remains that every point I add will never be worth as much as the first point that created the base damage.

This isn't as bad for destructive spells as it is for healing spells since I only have one character out of the four who focuses on offensive spells.

Although healing spells scale like this, the HP of all my characters do not, especially my Knight who's got Master Bodybuilding. His HP does not go up proportionally as he levels up because this skill multiplies the skill level by 4 and adding the number to the total HP. Expert level further doubles the sum and Master level triples.

In other words, my Knight is getting 12 HP points per level of Bodybuilding in addition to his normal HP increase from levelling up. Meanwhile, my heal spells are increasing by 2 points per level. His HP rises exponentially as I raise his expertise in his skill plus add points to it, while healing spells rise proportionally to the level of the healer.

Even if I upgrade the skill of the healing spell to Master, all it does is allow the healer to cast it more frequently.

And although it takes forever before he ever needs healing, it's seriously tedious to do it.

I just wish there's a stronger heal spell but I haven't found it yet. Maybe I will find it eventually but I don't want to spoil anything so I'm not going to google for it.






















So it turns out that the ladies wear from Jshoppers don't last as long as I expected. Apparently the stuff my bro bought for his girlfriend are starting to have problems, like one pair of pants that's beginning to have some stitches unravel.

Yet somehow both my bro's and my pants and underwear that we bought from that website have yet to show any problem.

It's weird because the website has far more women's fashion than men's so logically, since their focus is on those, they should have been better.






















Nothing beats fresh minced pork. Or rather, the week-old minced pork that I left in the fridge is still better than the frozen one I got from the wholesaler previously. Maybe it's been frozen for far longer than I thought.

But having butter corn is amazing. I think I forgot to mention in the last post that I also bought a 1kg bag of corn kernels. I don't really hate butter corn and fortunately, my bro had previous bought a little box of butter packed into little serving-size containers.

Now I have a very convenient way to get some fibre.

Rant 1138 / DA3 Better Be Good

Just completed Dragon Age 2. I had left it unfinished months ago but never deleted the game. Decided yesterday that I would go back.

So I did and today I realized I wasn't too far away from the end. Although I couldn't remember what went on before other than a vague memory of the main plot, it didn't really matter. Took only a few battles to get warmed up again and it was like I never stopped. Other than the side plots because those I still can't fully remember.

Now I see why it was not popular. The main plot was truly underwhelming and the ending was just a cliffhanger. There wasn't even more to the game after Varric finished his story!

The system wasn't all that bad. Takes some time and some logic to figure out how to use the Tactics system properly so I guess it really didn't appeal to casual gamers.

Now waiting for DA3.




















I must have been bored out of my mind ever since I finished DA2 and quit Neverwinter because I'm actually finding Might and Magic 6 fun!

Right now, I've just completed the nearby abandoned temple and I learnt through trial-and-error that I should not turn in the quest for the disciple of Baa's candelabra. I had actually turned it in initially since it was such an easy quest but later noticed everyone appeared to hate me when I try to talk to them. One of the NPCs mentioned I had a BAD reputation so I checked and saw that my average reputation has indeed been destroyed and the only significant thing I had done by then was that I completed that quest.

Reloaded immediately and ignored that guy ever since.

Anyway, this is the first time I've gone this far in MM6. There is a vague memory of going much further in another MM game, probably 7 or 8, but never for MM6. Other than not remembering the entire abandoned temple dungeon, I also thought I could change the race of my characters. Now I believe race is only an option in 7 or later.

...

Time really passes quickly when I play this game. 






















Ordered again from the online wholesaler.

This time, I ordered minimal fresh food and just stuck with processed food.

Having 3 straight days of chicken nuggets and wedges was awesome. Now I've only got 1kg of crinkle-cut fries and 2kgs of pork sausages. As for fresh food, I ordered 2kgs of whole chicken legs and 2kgs of pollock fillets.

I also realize now that the fillets were not particularly cheap at $6 per kg. Apparently NTUC Fairprice is selling them at $5.

Anyway the pollocks were the bad choices this time. There was such a heavy lye taste I had to rinse them before cooking, and even then I had to add seasoning to cover the lye taste.

From now on, I think I'll just stick with chicken legs and order nothing but processed food from them.

















Just recalled I have an ice pack in my freezer that I had used last year. Now I'm reusing it since it's getting really hot again. At over 30 degrees Celsius every night in my room, my air conditioner has also been very tempting.

However, I've so far been able to resist temptation unless it hits 32 degrees.

As for daytime, I'm using the ice pack rolled in a towel to slow down release of the coldness. No need for water parades with ice water now.

Rant 1137 / Cold Showers For Hot Weather

Dem subtle gay lyrics.













I almost started this rant with, "It's time to finally concede that I cannot live on a mere thousand bucks a month."

Then while making coffee (instant coffee because I don't take coffee often enough to buy fresh coffee beans these days), I realized (again) that my net income was my gross income minus my expenses, and my expenses included my taxi fares.

I had been neglecting to keep my work money separate from my personal cash because I'd always had this impression that I am the business, therefore work money is the same as personal money. Well, legally speaking, that's exactly what a sole proprietorship is.

But practically speaking, that makes things a little different for a sole proprietor. For one, I do not have to pay cabbies with personal money, even if both are drawn from the same account. Therefore I do not deduct cab fares from my net revenue, but my gross.

What's wrong with me?

I need to redo my math again, this time with the expenses appropriately separated.

But regardless, I don't believe I can afford a new fridge. One of the separators (or whatever those sheets of plastics that create the compartments) is broken and I think we'll eventually have to buy a new one. This fridge is at least 3 years old, and that's my bad long-term memory talking.

For all I know it could be 5 years old or more, and I don't have the documents for it.

I told my bro we'll split 50/50 when the time comes because that's fair and I can't easily afford 100%. He then surprised me by offering to cover 100% since her parents want them to buy new furniture when they get married, but I told him that he can cover 100% for everything they buy for their own room while for anything outside, we'll split 50/50.

And I know he's not making a lot at the moment, just not sure why he's so willing to spend his savings.





























I think regardless of what they say, our system does not work.

It works like this: people work in hopes of getting a raise. From the government, they want more welfare. Over the long term, costs go up. Companies have no choice but to increase prices to cover costs; governments have to increase land prices.

So all products cost more. How can companies compensate? By increasing their quality. But the quality does not increase proportionally to the prices. It costs a lot less to create a quality product than the price implies. Much of it goes to the costs of maintaining after-sale services and R&D of future products. And the bonuses and dividends.

Eventually there comes a point when somewhere in the world, the people are willing to work for a lot less in cheaper real estate. Costs go down, and suddenly regardless of the pride everyone has in their quality products, we all realize we just want generic crap at low prices. Quality isn't really important to the average joe unless it's something important to him.

The point is, quality is overrated. Prices aren't going up because we want better products. Prices are going up because everyone wants more money. Prices also go up as wealth diffuses from the old money to the new money in China and everyone wants a large pieceof the pie.

There will come a time when the entire world is as developed as it can go. What then? There won't be another China opening up its backward lands to become the next "factory of the world", so we'll go back to the old days when we all convinced ourselves we should buy things for their high quality. Exactly how things were back when China wasn't in the picture.

This means something nobody seems to be saying.

We are all indirectly causing everything to cost more because we want more. Greed is not good. Greed is the reason we fear not having enough.

Greed causes more greed.

The solution? The solution takes a lot of time. Generations, even.





















Tried playing a new MMO and I'm having mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, I like it. On the other hand, I makes me less interested in my work. Worst thing about it is that I can't just stop at any time.

People who can enjoy MMOs all day long without disruption don't know how awesome their lives are. Seriously, I can't focus on defending myself in a dungeon when a business call smacks me back into reality. Neither can I just go to the door when the postman rings the doorbell when I'm soloing.

However, Neverwinter is not too bad. I heard endgame is terrible so probably, I'll try Rift next month. Right now, Neverwinter isn't that bad. In PvE, it's so hard to die with my cleric companion; in PvP, I'm only good for 1v1 because my block only works on frontal attacks.




















So one of my buyers decided to make a larger initial order of my latest batch of sweaters. This implies that she actually trusts my taste as much as she did my mother's.

Let the hip thrusts begin!

Rant 1136 / Far Too Much Bibimbap

So the Rigidbot project on KS actually hit 1M USD. This means all backers get the following freebies:

- 1kg spool of PLA plastic
- spool rack to hold the spools with
- heated bed to keep object warm as it prints to reduce warp

Yay!



Like I said before, I'm paying US$570 for this, so it's a pretty big deal to me.

In comparison to most 3D printers, this is a dirt cheap barebone budget 3D printer. In fact, it's going to be hard to match the price even if I try to buy the individual components on my own. They're getting those prices only because they're buying in bulk, hence it's pretty much a mass-order of the printer parts with a few of their own original components thrown in when I ordered the kit instead of a fully assembled printer.

I suspect that they probably added the last few hundred thousand dollars from their own pockets but I don't mind. Even without the heated bed, it's still a pretty good deal, so the heated bed is an awesome bonus.

Yay! Can't wait for October to arrive!



















So I bought a small 30cm wok for cooking eggs. All the pans in my home have very steep edges so when I try to pour fried eggs out of the pan, they have a tendency to flip over instead. That really sucks when I try to leave the yolks runny.

Since I couldn't find a pan with a gentler slope, I settled for this tiny wok instead. Just made a big ham omelette with it and it's definitely making life easier for me.


















Ordered bibimbap from The Korea Food Company and in terms of quantity and nutritional value, I can say it's really value for money.

The whole thing came in a classy bag

Every pre-cooked ingredient came cold and prepacked in these containers

Raw rice

Only half of the beef bibimbap

It's so full of vegetables and it tastes too bland to have any MSG or flavourings.

For S$25 per bibimbap, it really does serve 4-5 people as advertised.

The catch here is that they come in ready-to-cook form with all the vegetables and meat pre-cooked and packed in sealed microwaveable containers and the raw rice in sealed packets.

Each packet contains 3 cups of some kind of short-grained rice.

All it lacked was the egg. Fortunately I had bought 30 eggs the very morning so it was ok.

Bibimbap was supposed to have a raw egg mixed in but the recipe on the website states a fried egg should be used. I added the egg raw anyway since they were all fresh.

Ordered 2 and we can't finish them.

First night, I cooked one set, the beef bibimbap, and shared with my bro and I. Couldn't finish. Sad.

Second night, I cooked half for myself. Couldn't finish. Sad.

I almost never pour food away before they spoil but I had to do it in two consective nights because they contained raw eggs and were all mixed properly with the ingredients.

Taste-wise, I have to admit I don't particularly like Korean chilli sauce, so I don't particularly like bibimbap. I have no problem eating it, but it's not something I'd keep eating even after feeling full like french fries. However, it's a pretty good way to eat healthy conveniently.

I'll still keep ordering it once in a while but definitely not all the time. It's nice but not nice enough.

Another reason for not being able to finish them is most likely because I've been starving myself. I'm very sure I could finish 1.5 cups of rice before this.

For the whole of last week, my fridge had no fresh food at all except for the last red onion. Not even milk which I could have used with rolled oats.

All I had left were my leftover dishes, instant noodles and processed meats, none of which really interests me these days.

Hence it hasn't been hard to avoid eating until Saturday when I finally got tired of the situation and went down for some fresh food. That, in turn, is why I bought 30 eggs at one go, plus 3kg of mince pork, 10 onions, 40 fishballs, 10 fishcakes and 4 packets of macaroni.

These should last a while. At least 2 weeks, maybe 3, hopefully 4.

I know for sure the eggs will last over 2 weeks in the fridge, while the pork will still be edible after 3 weeks if I keep it frozen. Fishballs and fishcakes, though, must be finished within the week. Even though they remain edible if I freeze it for over a week, the texture becomes very porous and a bit hard for some reason.

For fibre, I'm going with fruits by getting cheap apples. More fried apples! I used this recipe the other day with one apple and it worked very well. Good thing my bro bought a bottle of cinammon sugar for some reason and it's perfect for my cheap and not very sweet apples.

Anyways, starving for the entire day really does shrink your appetite.

Rant 1135 / Being Too Dependent On A Specific Routine Makes Me Vulnerable To Even Small Changes

The rate at which Care2 is giving out points aka butterfly credits is amazing. Every day I visit the site, I'm awarded points that are equal to the number of consecutive days I visit the site.

Today is my 81st day, so I got 81 points, plus it's some special day so I get 20 more.

At this rate, I'll be able to get 500 points every 5 days or so and that's enough to plant a random tree somewhere. A tree every 5 days. Nice!



























I lost 2-3kg in the last few months. I don't know what's causing it, maybe the daily 20-min sessions of cycling or my watery-porridge-filled diet or both.

Regardless, I'm not stopping them. The problem now is finding another dish I can turn really salty to go with my porridge because I'm about to finish the second mei cai meat cake with my next meal.

This time the meat cake is better because I added a generous dose of sweet potato starch in there and that made the meat more chewy. I got the idea from the steamed meatballs from the cai png stalls. When fresh, all that does, other than improve the appearance, is to act as a cheap filler. When cold, it hardens and makes it chewy. Either way, I like it.

My appetite still hasn't gone down yet because the amount of porridge I eat is still a lot, just that it's watery enough that I spend five minutes every time to drink the water first. Rice water is still more interesting than plain water, and this is kinda similar to the practice I remember from BMT in which we drank a lot of water before each meal.




















I'm not sure if this potential customer is interested although TBH this deal isn't really important to my business. The price I quote her, I'm only make a bit more than what is needed to cover all the taxi fare I spent on going to her office and back. Of course if she doesn't go through with it then I'm losing all that too, so there's that point to consider.

I'm also curious about whether she can find lower prices than mine because as far as I know, very few manufacturers are willing to go this low for such a tiny quantity. She's not even asking for 300 pieces; there's no such thing as a good deal below that number. The best she can hope for is one that isn't bad.

Of course I never told her these. I don't believe this is even important to her; it's just one tiny aspect of her pretty big task.

But if this works, I'll be a lot more motivated to work on the marketing aspect of my business. It's not totally necessary because of the exposure my current customers already give me and I'm by no means an ambitious man, but it's a fun game to me. My current customers, they're like my daily grind quests, sometimes known as "dailies" as in the case of my old RoM days. Any new customers are going to be new quests, except it's not clearly stated whether they are side quests or main quests till I finish a few of them in each quest chain.
























Rigidbot probably isn't going to hit 1M; I'm not getting a heated bed for free.

Oh well.

So I'm spending so much on this printer. US$330 for the printer itself, $90 for shipping, $100 for 5 spools of PLA, $50 for the z-rod, totalling US$570 or about S$700.

As for the freebies, I'm also getting a spool rack, an extra 1kg spool of PLA and an upgraded power supply so that I can install a heated bed in the future.

This better be worth it because I can't afford to spend more on any unnecessary luxuries of this price level or more for the rest of the year.



















Finished Red Faction: Armageddon. Short game. Nice overall but really lame deus ex machina at the end when SAM suddenly knows somehow the weakness of the final boss and then the Nano Forge is somehow able to fix the destroyed structure. Seriously, why couldn't they have done it right from the start?

Rant 1134 / The Malaysian GE2013 Has Led To The Creation Of A New Chinese Idiom: 大马停电 (Da4 Ma3 Ting2 Dian4)

Day 51 of my 6th run in Don't Starve. 11 days to go before I break my personal record.

I've got everything I will ever need to survive a major catastrophe. I even have a bee box to produce honey for honey poultices.

With 6 sleeping darts, 2 spears, 2 log armours, all I should do now is get marble suit and pig helmet to complete the best armour set in the game.





It was day sixty-something when I got bored and decided to just move on to Adventure mode. I had found Maxwell's Door conveniently located close to the worm hole exit whose entrance is close to my base.



Now it's day 6 in the first world of Adventure mode and it's already winter!

What?

For the first 5.5 days it had been raining almost constantly with the occasional frog rain. Not only does the rain drives my sanity level down slowly, the frogs also get hostile when I get close to them, making life pretty annoying.

Worst of all, grass isn't common even in the grassland biome, making sanity increase expensive, so I have to do everything quickly so as to reduce any time wastage.

Now I'm in winter and it's even more annoying because I can't explore much in the cold.

Since this is probably the easiest world, I wonder what it's going to be like in the last. Hostile bees everywhere? Treeguards from every other tree?





































Got tired of the lack of camera hole at the back in my iPad cover so I switch to the last one. My only backup option now is a tablet sleeve I had bought as my backup together with my first iPad cover.

This one is way better because not only does it have the camera hole at the back, it fits the tablet almost perfectly. In addition, it has an elastic band that I can slip my hand under for a better grip, a small pocket for tiny notes, a magnet inside that locks the iPad when I close the cover, and it's made of faux suede so it has a nice texture.

Two things that aren't as great are that the leather isn't as soft as the one it replaced and it has a strip outside for locking instead of magnet. The magnet locking mechanism allows me to close it simply by flipping it shut while this strip has to be manually slid into the loop with both hands.

When I travel overseas, I need to refer to the map often and simultaneously avoid exposing the screen to the elements as much as possible, eg snow, so this inconvenience might be an issue then.

I'll have to hold it differently then, I guess.

As for the "almost perfect" fit, all I had to do was slip a folded piece of paper inside to nudge it to the right position. Doesn't look pretty and ruins the improvement in appearance over my last few iPad covers but still, looks aren't my priority.
























I know part of the attraction in Don't Starve is to die, but like Die2Nite, I don't find dying fun.

So now I'm playing Red Faction: Armageddon, and it's a lot better than I thought.

Compared to Red Faction: Guerilla, this is practically a totally different game except the storyline and the penchant for the destruction of buildings.

Unlike the first game, this isn't open world at all. It's extremely linear and there are no sidequests.

However, it's not that bad. The combat isn't too complicated and it's loaded with cut scenes, just the sort of RPG I like.

It's funny how they gave me such an overpowered gun right from the start.

In the first game, the sledgehammer was the best tool for destroying everything. Now, it's the magnet gun.

The usage is simple: I shoot to fire one sticky magnet, then I shoot again to fire another sticky magnet. Then they attract each other regardless of distance.

I'm practically killing everything with this gun except for the toughest fights and the ones that can't be won with it.

It's so good, I'm simply using the magnets to fling every monster up and away. For those that are either hard to hit (eg humans) and huge monsters that can't be lifted, I just fling all kinds of debris towards them. Well, except for the behemoth because concrete rebars don't damage it much, so I have to rely on the gun that fires explosive charges that need to be manually detonated.

I'm only playing on Normal and it feels like I picked Casual mode for this. There is some challenge in some boss fights but that's it.

EDIT: I was wrong. The magnet gun is even more OP than I thought. I can kill anything with it, even behemoths. Just did it in the area with the dead archivist, using nothing but the magnet gun. Oh yea!

I was actually running out of undestroyed structures to pull onto it and was prepared to shoot the repair nanites but it died without it. Phew!














My first corporate customer. Holy crap!

Actually I'm not sure if the deal will be confirmed but it is awesome that someone even asked. I've been waiting for months since I botched the last enquiry last year before I had known how to handle such requests.

The first time was actually embarassing. I didn't know if I could sell what I sell to my biggest customer to other people, so I told them I can't sell anything to them.

It was only during my mother's funeral last year that I asked the buyer if I could sell those to others.

Well, that sucked because that was a boutique. Anyway, it might also have been a blessing in disguise because I was completely unaware of the risks of selling to small businesses like that.

Now I know, but I expect issues to crop up as I go. I guess this is one of the tests in life to see if I have what it takes. Good thing this is just a tiny test.

Exciting.

Rant 1133 / Shipping Pigs

Spider queens :(

Died on day 61. Froze to death while running from the spider queen. Contrary to what I read on the wiki, I can't set it alight. Neither do the warrior spiders get trapped by my test trap.

I was only trying to farm spiders for webs by luring them into my traps. Totally didn't expect them spider queens that came crawling out of the nests.

The first one, I managed to lure it to a pig town and then ran away. The second queen was the one that caused my death. Unfortunately I had spent the second touch stone when I accidentally froze to death a few days earlier while trying to mine for stones far away.

I need to try out the combat more instead of building a gigantic farm.

Also read about the adventure mode. I'll try that once I get used to the combat.



























I like the trailers, particularly the pun-filled release trailer.. Not so sure about the game itself.



















5th run was sad. I had unlocked Wolfgang in my last run and decided to use it since he could hit harder. Turns out his bigger stomach also made life easier for me.

However, I got overconfident and greedy after a while. When the hounds attacked me, I lured them to a nearby group of guardian pigs where they both slaughtered each other.

Of course the pigs won, and much loot was dropped by the hounds.

That was when I got greedy and decided to sneak in and pick the meat and teeth from amongst the hostile pigs. I'd run in, pick it out, and run out. On average, I got hit once or twice per run.

Then my overconfidence in the log-armour-clad Wolfgang made me take more and more risk, causing my accidental death when 4 of the pigs managed to hit me at the same time.

With my one and only touch stone spent, I still wanted to risk it. Ate some food to replenish a bit of health and went back in. The plan was to get my pan flute to put them all to sleep.

I snatched it and used it, but couldn't pick up everything because I had picked up the marble and nightmare fuel from the broken touch stone and had neglected to drop them in my base before coming.

So I returned to my base, left some stuff behind, and went back to the pigs to retrieve the rest of my stuff. However, this time, the pigs reached me before I could use the pans, and the constant hits from multiple pigs prevented me from using the flute before I died.

:(