Cat ears, vomit comet, gaming

[flexagon]

Some much more positive things:

• I'd been having epic battles with the 21-year-old cat in order to get pills down her strongly resisting little throat. It's terrifying because I don't want to break her, don't want to get bitten, and don't want the little shit to starve to death (it's an appetite stimulant that we're giving her). But at some point while I was on vacation, the bug did some research and there's now a transdermal variant of the medicine! The vet got me some with no questions asked, and now instead of a pill we simply smear some ointment on the inside of her ear (the pinna... such a cute word for a cute little body part). The battles are over, my fingers have healed and the cat's opinion of me is much improved.



• For a variety of reasons, including "I stupidly forgot to schedule much post-vacation to actually look forward to" plus someone making it really, really easy, I am doing an insanely splurgey thing in August. In particular, I am riding on the Vomit Comet on August 3. The money is almost indefensible, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and what is money for, anyway? I have always wanted to do this, ever since I heard of the thing. So far I think we'll have 5 friends in the same capsule, which is marvelous and amazing. And yes, yes I TOTALLY AM going to do a press handstand in the "Martian gravity" parabolic pass. Laugh all you want. Or, if you just read this and thought to yourself "I have nothing to do on August 3!" then join us.



• As of last night, I've cleared all the levels in the first 10 worlds of Baba Is You (and if you don't think that's an achievement, you haven't played). I found some bonus stuff so I'm now going on to that, and there's more bonus stuff somewhere which I will look up hints for eventually if I have to. I just wanna play all the levels.

Typing this on a plane to London, where there is a big manager convention thing; I will be giving a talk to my fellow managers about trans inclusivity, which is fun. The part where I won't really sleep tonight is less fun, but I get to check into my hotel at 2:00 and figure I'll do that, with some napping in the afternoon. And the talk isn't until Thursday.

Comments

[rye]

> As of last night, I've cleared all the levels in the first 10 worlds of Baba Is You

_Wow_. My hat is off to you. :)
(I am just about to start on world 10, having made my way up through the end of world 9 and left 3 levels behind due to being stuck and one other due to having an idea that I just couldn't be bothered to try to implement. I too have found some bonus stuff, though who knows if it is the same bonus stuff, heh.)

[flexagon]

I don't mean to imply "no hints and all alone"... I did ask Lion for strong hinting on one level that just sucked for me, and worked with him on a few more.

Maritime Adventures on the Flower Garden level was the last one to fall, for me. That was rough. Very satisfying to get it though, particularly since certain people who are working together hadn't gotten it yet. ;-)

I'm not doing well at all on the bonus stuff. Blaming the jetlag.

[rye]

Still very very impressive :D
I have a weird and probably unwise amount of pride tied up in solving levels by myself so that's just what I've been doing (also because many people I know are *also* playing the game and thus at various, scattered other parts of their own Baba universes).

Ahh, Maritime Adventures! It was definitely one of those that felt like a satisfying "OMG-brain-just-clicked-into-place" solution. :) But I wouldn't be surprised if there are many ways in which peoples' experiences of what is hard and what isn't varies a lot.

Since I've been spelunking in my map now, to remind myself of which one that was, if you are curious the levels I've currently left behind are
- Island-Extra 3 "Tiny Isle" (grrr)
- Forest-E "Insulation"
- Cavern-7 "Backstage"
- Cavern-13 "Tunnel" (remarkably, the first time this game has felt to me like programming in that I went "ugh, I have a theory on how to solve it but now I have to ... figure out how to implement it?" and promptly gave up :) )

[flexagon]

Can confirm, all the ones you were stuck on last week have some annoyance factor to them! I also had to do some semi-tedious implementation for "Tunnel", though nothing like I had to do for "Guardians" (the one with the UFOs).

Different people definitely get hung at different points, but Tiny Isle has snagged a few that I know of. It's the only one so far that Lion finally broke down and let me hint him through, because he was so frustrated.

I get the pride thing. But the game gets exceptionally hard. :-/ At some point, I want to experience all the content, and, well, I just won't get to if I'm entirely unaided. So where I am now is, I'm going to look up some hints on Baba Is Hint, for at least one level, if I'm stuck with no progress anywhere for more than a couple of days.

[rye]

Ooh, thanks for the pointer to Baba Is Hint! Because my stance on potentially spoilery things is "never any internet" I hadn't dared look for a hint resource yet, but this looks good.

I actually just finally solved Tiny Isle(!) after looking at the nudges there, thinking "well, duh, those were both things I had already noted early on, and I don't think I want 'Specific Hint' just yet", but looking back at the level something just clicked (mostly, I think, a combination of "things I'd been trying to do when I was actively solving it" and "a thing that I happened to use as a strategy in a later level I just solved"). Or who knows, maybe the nudges helped in some indirect way despite restating things my brain thought obvious?

Interestingly I'm starting to reach a difficulty point where I don't quite have the patience to sit down and digest all the rules for the more complex levels -- I find that, for the stuff I have open, I end up gravitating towards the ones where there are only a few blocks and my reaction is "well, there's only so much that it's possible to do".

Also, fascinating, my solution to Guardians wasn't really that tedious, though also who even knows how close I actually was for Tunnel ... hmm. :p

And yeah, I keep finding new content and basically staring at the screen going "whaaat just happened." It's fun. :)

[rye]

(update: looking at any hints prompted me to suddenly be open to looking at many of them, and the Baba Is Hint hint approximately gave away the solution to Tunnel. Bit unsatisfying in the end, but ah well. My idea had been in the right direction but was trying to be too clever.)