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almostjollyprince · 5 months

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100ish Days of Productivity: I fell behind

I uh... fell behind on this. Not because I wanted to, but I'm being pulled in a number of directions and just not finding the time for this like I would have liked.

Day 12 - Jan 15 2024 This was a holiday. I studied a bit for my certification and then spent the rest of the day jumping between other games (Final Fantasy 14 was down for a day-long maintenance for the upcoming patch and infrastructure expansions) and planning out my D&D campaigns. I got an update from the artist I'm commissioning regarding the token I need for my Saturday campaign, and the work so far looks great. I'm excited to see the end result. There's a lot I want to talk about regarding games. Like how one of my friends reminded me that Palworld was finally entering early access later this week (he's super excited for it because he's one of the many people who are disappointed with the direction Game Freak has been going with Pokemon) or how Enshrouded was coming out next week. I'm hesitant on Palworld if only because PocketPair has a habit of making games but not finishing the polish on them. Like, excluding Palworld, they have 3 other games that have been in early access since 2020 (one game per year or something) and they still haven't fulfilled their promises for any of those games. For a game with a lot of promises and expectations, it'd be a real shame if Palworld fell to the wayside. Enshrouded on the other hand I'm neutral on what I'm hoping to expect from it. I dabbled a bit in their playtest but I didn't put in the full 8 hours available for the demo. Sure there's plenty to see, but... it felt empty? Not on the same scope as Pokemon Scarlet/Violet or Breath of the Wild. All their scenic environments are gorgeous, but I was hoping to find something interesting for going in some direction. Enshrouded has a lot of what I call "mountains and valleys". Your mountains are your safe points because the valley is where the shroud is and that's full of danger. But if you wanted to go to the mountain that's across the way from your current location in the hopes of finding something (didn't have to be lore-related), when you did finally make the journey to get there, there was nothing of interest. There's a healthy balance game devs need to find between oversaturating the overworld with points of interest (and handholding the players to get there) and just... not having anything of interest in that general direction. I guess I'm hoping Enshrouded will be closer to that ideal balance than say, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild.

Day 13 - Jan 16 2024 I was reminded today at work that we have a new employee starting next week and that one of the other people we were hiring wasn't going to be able to start anytime soon for reasons I'm not allowed to discuss. Updated the work schedule to adjust for that information and just worked with the junior devs to get the project going. After work was... Final Fantasy 14's latest patch. The wife and I were talking about running the last bit of the Main Story Quest together, and we very much enjoyed the new character they introduced that'll be integral to the next expansion. I also wrapped up the new quests that dropped, collected the rewards, and... hm. I guess aside from gathering the currency for various things all that's left is achievement hunting. Not really looking forward to that. There's raiding, I suppose, but I don't have the time to commit several hours a night for multiple days of the week trying to face Savage or Ultimate content (both of which are among the hardest tiers of difficulty for various raids). The D&D campaign that I play in on Tuesdays was supposed to start today, but the DM pushed it back another two weeks. The DM that runs that campaign happens to be a player in my other campaigns and she looks up to me for DMing D&D games, so I'll have to do my best to meet and exceed her (and the other players) expectations.

Day 14 - Jan 17 2024 It is Wednesday my dudes. Work ended up being a lot planning, and the bossman who was supposed to come out this week to talk to the team in person couldn't make it, so there'll be a different meeting later in the week in regards to that. There's also talks of my project getting started up again, but we'll see where that goes. I honestly don't think I'll hear anything regarding it until later next month. After work, I played Monster Hunter World to get caught up to the wife who's already in Iceborne content. I'm... not particularly thrilled about rerunning this unskippable content again, and my thoughts on it can be found in a previous post. The big thing I'm concerned about regarding Monster Hunter has been Capcom's attitude towards their player base ever since a certain event happened involving a Street Fighter tournament a while back. I'll skip the details of what happened, but essentially their view is 'any modification to our games is a bad modification' and they've been installing anti-cheat software in all their games that have been released in the past couple of years or are still available on various platforms. This particular anti-cheat software is apparently causing significant performance issues, and when the issue was brought up, the response from the people who owned that particular anti-cheat software was... not that great. I didn't like the direction most AAA game companies have been going in for a while, but we've pretty much reached the point where those companies are now like "you don't own the games you buy" as a means of trying to stop people from developing mods for those games. I don't use mods for most games (at best I have a couple of mods for Lethal Company), but I get why mods exist as well as why companies are turning against the modding community. If you honestly need a hot take from me in regards to my opinion on modding, it's "don't change the rating of the game with your mods. *cough cough NSFW mods cough cough*."

Day 15 - Jan 18 2024 The team had a meeting with the bossman. He has high hopes for the team and is trying to get us more work. It'd be cool if we had more stuff to work on, but he also put a hiring freeze on the team. It was a weird choice and I'm wondering if there's corporate politics going on, but that's above my paygrade and not really my problem at the moment. Aside from the meeting, it was mostly working on setting up validation checks on our input boxes. There were some issues which I think I've managed to narrow down to it being that one of our component libraries isn't playing nice with the others. I have brought this up to the senior devs but I don't know if it'll get addressed or if we'll get direction on what to do regarding it. It would be nice if we had some sort of document that kept track of known issues (not necessarily bugs, but like... technical difficulties), but I guess the only way one will exist is if I make it. After work I played Among Us with some friends. For the uninitiated, you and a bunch of other players have to complete a bunch of objectives while also trying to identify who the killer is. There's a bunch of games out there with similar concepts (Town of Salem comes to mind), but this one is probably the best known one. I didn't have a particularly good time playing this last time (public servers are rampant with cheating that just leaves you in a bad mood at the end of the game), but I figured a private server with friends would be better. And to be honest, it was. It's not the usual friends I game with, but I've acknowledged that if I wanna play games that my usual friends won't play I'll have to seek out those friends that do want to play it. I had a blast playing with them, and I'm hoping we'll get to play again soon. If they're not going to be playing Palworld non-stop, that is...

Day 16 - Jan 19 2024 We got some unfortunate news regarding one of our juniors. The team's already pretty small but with their upcoming departure it'll be even smaller. It didn't seem like they had much of a plan about what they'd do or what living arrangements they had made since they were going out of state, however. I'm sure they'll be fine. The senior devs aren't particularly thrilled about it, but they have my blessing to go seek out what will make them happy. And hey, they can always come back if things don't work out for them. Our Hardware guy is also going overseas for some company work starting sometime next week, so the team had a breakfast together to get together one more time for the hardware guy. It snowed the night before so the roads were particularly tough to navigate getting to the diner. But everyone made it despite the challenges. The rest of the day was pretty slow and the team ended up playing Jackbox.tv games the rest of the afternoon. We're ahead of schedule and we haven't received any sort of direction for the project yet (they pushed the demo day back a few weeks), so this is mostly to break up the drudgery of not having much to do. Palworld entered early access today, and unsurprisingly it's the only thing being talked about in a lot of a lot of my usual hangout places. The game was surprisingly well-put together for a game in early access (minus the clipping and out-of-bounds issues that they're going to address. Definitely a better Day 1 than what Pokemon Scarlet/Violet had with the multiplayer bugs and glitches) based on some of the gameplay I've seen, but there's... a lot of drama for it as well. People are going after it for "ripping off Nintendo's IP" in regards to how some of the Pals look, but the reality of the matter was how game journalists spun the game. Since its announcement a couple of years ago, game journalists have been calling it "Pokemon with Guns" (they do this with a lot of games - Enshrouded is "Valheim with Dark Souls combat", for instance, as a means of trying to market what a game is to people who aren't following it), but the game itself is more than just violating the Geneva Convention against fantasy creatures. PocketPair never described their game as "Pokemon with Guns". The two big issues people had with the game was 1) 'Was it made using AI assets based off of a couple of messages on X that the CEO made some time back?' and 2) 'Did they rip off Pokemon?' Jury's still out on those answers. My take, however, is 'no' to the first, and 'undecided' on the second. For the 'no' to the first question, it looked like someone twisted the words of the CEO. I don't have the messages in front of me at the moment, but when I saw those messages circulating around, it sounded more like the CEO was interested in the direction games could go with AI (I'll talk more about AI later, but let's not forget that AI is more than just asking a computer to generate art using whatever teaching materials you give it). As for the second question... Original ideas don't really exist anymore. Just because some concepts look similar to another game's concepts doesn't mean they're stealing them. Some of Gen 1's Pokemon look similar to some of the monsters from Dragon Quest (and some ideas from later Pokemon generations seemed to be taking ideas from Digimon, but that's neither here nor there). Is using Elves and Dwarves as your fantasy races ripping off Lord of the Rings? Is using dragons and dungeons ripping off Dungeons & Dragons? All of these examples fall under the "Medieval Fantasy" category. Most of the content you consume in media has existed in some form or another for centuries or millennia. Everything draws on inspiration from somewhere.

Day 17 - Jan 20 2024 It's the weekend, but not just any weekend. It's D&D weekend. I had to finish some prepwork for the session (getting my notes up regarding the temple they raided last session, writing out some concepts that have been introduced previously but finally giving the players the necessary information they need for it now that they're encountering it, finalizing some ideas, etc), but I woke up too early and ended up with some free time between when I finished the prepwork and before the session started. So I picked up Palworld. The game plays more like Ark: Survival Evolved than Pokemon. Instead of dinosaurs that you capture and use for various purposes in the game, you capture these creatures called "Pals" and use them for various purposes in the game. You're less of a Pal Trainer and more of a Monster Tamer or Beastmaster since the only time you'll properly encounter humans in the game using Pals against you is in the various towers. Otherwise, you just have various factions wielding firearms and other weapons to combat the people and Pals in the game that you yourself can fight against or sic your creatures of mass destruction upon them. And I suppose the various Pals you can fight either by yourself or with your monster buddy in the overworld and in caves. I didn't get too far in the game since I only had an hour, but I had fun with the hour I did have. D&D went pretty well. Since the players had taken care of all the major events I had planned for them in that region in the previous session, today's session was mostly figuring out where to go next. It wasn't a particularly long session, but I set up enough to leave them with a cliffhanger for the next arc. I am... intentionally leaving my individual players with bits and pieces of relevant information based on where their characters came from. It's fun to see them come together and discuss between sessions what the hell they think I have planned for them. The artist I commissioned finished the piece I requested, and I paid them for their services with an extra bonus. I think I definitely made the right call sending them information about the character for the piece to look this amazing. I'll be sure to request them again when they have an opening and commission another piece. If you take care of your artists, they will take care of you in return. I won't get the same level of care from an AI model that generates art, and that's part of the reason why I'm against the current training materials that are being used to train AI. There's a reason why Public Domain exists. You don't need to steal other people's work to generate something just because you're not creative enough or don't put in the time to make something of your own. Use the Public Domain to train your models. Don't rob someone of their hard work.

Rest Day - Jan 21 2024 Played some more Palworld. Hung out with some friends and ran some content in Final Fantasy 14. Watched a couple episodes of wrestling with some buddies as a distraction (I think it was the qualifiers for the mens and womens' Royal Rumble from last year?). The Wednesday crew plays this week so I'll need to start finalizing some things for the session coming up.

Day 18 - Jan 22 2024 The new guy started today, but he was going to be coming in a little late. The team sat in on a demo at the recommendation of the bossman. We got the new guy up to speed pretty quickly to the point where he was like "Man I didn't think I'd be able to put my hands on code on the same day I start". Normally you'd be in processing hell for a couple of weeks in this industry, but our team's pretty good about getting new employees access to what they need if not the same day they start then the day after. I had plans for him to work with one of the senior developers all week so that he could understand all the processes but unsurprisingly the senior devs got dragged into doing other stuff. It's fine. He can sit with me and my buddy for the day. After work I did some work on finalizing some details for the Wednesday D&D session. I'm not sure what it is regarding some people and their original characters but I'm always reminded of the meme with the used car salesman. "This OC can hold so much trauma and emotional baggage". I don't usually talk about my plans for either of my campaigns, but the Saturday campaign was always a story of redemption. The Wednesday campaign was something I threw together in some of my spare time so while it doesn't have the level of polish that my Saturday game has, I do try to find something that appeals to each of the players and that's a character arc for each of them. Each of the characters has some sort of emotional trauma they carry with them that the players came up with when they made their characters. One character lost the love of her life, her crew and her ship to a rival pirate. She had since gotten revenge against the pirate and reclaimed her ship, but she had once again lost the love of her life. Another character had a bitter dispute with their father about their career choices and left to become a clergyman before entering piracy. They ran into their father again by chance and had to put aside their differences to work with him to save their family and their village from being sacrificed to a great leviathan. A character currently going through their arc was neglected by their family as the runt of the litter and was picked up by their mentor to commit criminal activities before being betrayed by him. Now, an opportunity has presented itself for them to get their revenge. Will they be able to do so? We shall see~

Day 19 - Jan 23 2024 I ended up having to write up more stories for the project to give to the other developers so they could have something to work on because the senior developer who is the project lead for it was working on other stuff. The other one is stuck writing up an article for a magazine as a means of advertising the company and the team. We're short-staffed, but man, I sure wish we had some more hands to free our senior developers. Work-wise we had to figure out some issues with input validation, so we wrote some tests first to figure out how to design the code. The team doesn't usually work with Test Driven Development (everything we do is dependent on the project), but at least we can say we have some experience with it. There's still a couple of issues we need to work out, but that's a problem for another day and another pair. After work, I realized I hadn't actually created a character sheet for the mentor that the players would be fighting against, so I spent my evening working on that. It was my first time building a Sorcerer, so I can only hope that it doesn't end up being too unbalanced of a fight. After that I did some cert studying and replaced some lights that had burned out over the weekend.

Day 20 - Jan 24 2024 I can't believe we're already a fifth of the way through this challenge that I'm having regrets about. The new guy was with me again today but he had to deal with some project-related stuff so he was out for the morning. I ended up creating the front end of a couple of pages on my own (having my buddy for the day the senior developer in charge of the project look over the visuals to see if everything lines up with how the original project looked and if the modernization matched our prototype Figmas even though he had to work on something else). When the new guy got back in the afternoon I worked with him to finish the design and layout of the other page I was working on. We realized pretty quick that the library component we were having issues with last week was causing problems displaying the data we want to display in our tables, so we'll work out something for that another day. After work, I did some final prepwork for the D&D session. Some people forgot we played today despite my reminders (I now have a general idea of who mutes the server and who doesn't) but everyone showed up on time. The session itself went pretty well. Granted, I had to improvise some ideas because the characters all split off to do their own thing in different groups, but I was told I did a good job balancing the seriousness nature of some scenes and the lightheartedness of other scenes. Next session, the character this arc is for will face the source of his trauma, his mentor. I also did a reveal regarding the NPC companion that was with the party for this arc that caught everyone off guard, but once they started putting the pieces together, everything was making sense for them. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and it sounded like some of the players are ready for the emotional damage to hit them next time.

Day 21 - Jan 25 2024 The bossman is asking us for logos for the team so that they can get some corporate swag made, so guess who had to go help with that? That's right, not me and my buddy for the day because we lost the rock-paper-scissors game to decide who worked on what. Which, granted, was mostly because we only have 7 people on the team and our senior devs are doing things outside of their job scope due to a lack of personnel and we still needed someone to work on the projects we currently have. We rewired some pathing on some of the pages and reworked the placeholder visuals. We had a team lunch so it was nice to get away and enjoy a good burger. I was also asked to give some feedback regarding some of the designs that the other pair was generating for the logo (using Midjourney as a baseline to generate concepts that they would rework later) and after I gave some input it seemed like we would have something by tomorrow to give to the bossman. The 24th happened to be the day Enshrouded released into early access on some platforms, so I picked that up to play with friends. We got a server going for the usual crew and got into shenanigans for a couple of hours. Overall a good time.

Day 22 - Jan 26 2024 It snowed a good couple of inches in my area so myself and another person on the team weren't able to go into the office today, so we worked from home. My buddy for the day requested the day off so I mostly focused on certification study. I took a practice test to see where I was at, but the questions were... really vague. Somehow only got one question wrong, but I'm not going to complain. The logo designs were posted so we placed our votes on our top choices, and I think whichever ones everyone agreed on were gonna be sent to the bossman for swag. The evening was a mix of Final Fantasy 14 and Enshrouded. I think my biggest complaint regarding Enshrouded is that for a survival game, your only real danger is in the shroud. The game has a food buff system much like Valheim, but there's no worry of death if you run out of food/water like with other survival games that have a food and thirst meter. If the camp had to deal with random enemy raids I could see more of the survival genre aspect the game's being marketed for, but again, your only real danger is the shroud. We have removed the doors to our camp because everyone's struggling with the doors, but there's no serious danger in the mountains outside of the shrouded areas. At least tomorrow is the weekend.

#100 days of productivity

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almostjollyprince · 5 months

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100ish Days of Productivity: The Second Week

Day 5/100 - Jan 6 2024 I ran my D&D campaign. First session in months (we took a break for the holidays around October). Went pretty well. I had planned for that part that they were getting into to take 2 sessions, but I've got a pretty clever group so we managed to wrap it up in 1 session. Spookiness awaits. After the session I started finalizing the details for the Wednesday campaign because that's also starting up again in a few days. Rewrote some ideas as a means of hopefully jump-starting character development for some PCs. We'll see how it turns out.

Rest Day - Jan 7 2024 I took it easy and played games all day. I was hoping to be a little more productive yesterday, but I'm already feeling a bit of the burnout from this 100 Days of Productivity thing. On a side note, I'm almost done with Year 1 of Coral Island, so that's kind of cool I guess. I still haven't decided who I want to romance but it could also be that 1) none of the bachelors/bachelorettes really stand out to me as husband/wife material or 2) I don't care about the romance aspect of the slice-of-life farm game genre. It was like that with Stardew Valley, it was like that with Rune Factory, and it was like that with Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.

Day 6 - Jan 8 2024 Weather was pretty bad, so I worked from home and provided support for the other developers. I'm trying to study for the certification exam, but the body doesn't want to do what the mind wants it to do. Like there's some sort of disconnect between wants and needs. I hate this feeling. Part of me wonders if I ever fully recovered from the severe burnout I had from one of my previous jobs that ruined my physical and mental health. I finished wrapping up the stuff I needed for the Wednesday campaign, so that was the evening/night.

Day 7 - Jan 9 2024 Roads were clear so I went into the office. Work work work. My buddy for the day and I built a modal that appears for one of the buttons, but after looking at how the original handles that part, it turns out that it should be a page of its own instead of a modal. That's fine, the heavy lifting is done and it shouldn't take more than a day to rewire it as a page instead of a modal. After work, I double-checked my notes for the Wednesday campaign and then just played games. Oh, and swap out the filters for the HVAC. It's supposed to get really cold over the weekend and it's around the time to swap them out anyway, so might as well do it while I don't have anything major going on.

Day 8 - Jan 10 2024 I'm in charge of deciding pairs every week, but it's really hard to follow the whole 'paired programming' thing when we're working with such a small team for the rotation, I can't pair certain roles together (orders from higher up), and the mid/senior devs keep getting pulled away to handle responsibilities that aren't even theirs to begin with. Someone confided in me that they were considering looking elsewhere because the whole reason they joined was for this pairing system and it wasn't happening. I get it, I really do. We should be getting some new blood in the office in less than 2 weeks so hopefully that can help shake up this feeling of drudgery. Rewiring the modal to the page didn't take longer than a half a day. We haven't coded any functionality into it yet because it sounded like we might be getting some new guidance for the project that might make everything we've done not matter. After doing some research, it looked like we could still connect what we have with the original framework after overhauling the older version of .NET we have for it to a newer version. Cool. That information will probably be presented at the meeting on Friday with the customer, so that'll be resolved. After some last minute prepping (once I got home from work), I ran the Wednesday session for my players. Like the Saturday group, they haven't played since October. Session went pretty well, but I did get some complaints about some stuff that went on during the session so I'll have to address them (again). It's the first session in months so I get that some of the rules we established were broken. Just gotta... remind them of said rules.

Day 9 - Jan 11 2024 Got some mediocre news in the morning. The paperwork I submitted over a year ago still hadn't been processed, and I'm still the only person on the team lacking those permissions the paperwork is supposed to give me. I can't really do my job as a team lead on my own without those permissions, but there's nothing either of us can do about it. The ball's not in our court. Did a team building event with the team in the form of a group lunch. The distraction was nice. The project manager asked me to submit an overview of the work I did for one of the projects I lead so that he could send that to the customer of a particular project, even though all that information is on that project's Trello. It's late enough in the workday that I'll just make a note of it for tomorrow, but I get how the other leads feel about all this work that isn't our responsibility being passed on to us. I had to start putting some events in motion for the Wednesday campaign, so I started sharing some information of what's to come with select individuals. I also do this with the Saturday campaign for their stuff. Speaking of the Saturday campaign... since they're about to wrap up an arc I need to finish finalizing the next arc. They're free to go to any of the other regions, but the only one that makes any logical sense is the Republic. So for that I'll need...

Day 10 - Jan 12 2024 I made sure to let the project lead know that there's some merge requests for the Develop branch. We'll need to lock down the code so that we're not introducing potentially new issues in the stuff that's being demo'd today. The project lead was having some issues getting one of the branches to work on his machine, so after verifying that it worked on mine he just recloned the project and got it to work for him after doing that. I also took care of the overview I put off yesterday while he was getting set up for the demo. After demo, the team played some Jackbox. The team's small enough that everyone gets to play. I didn't win, but I'm just here to have a good time. After work I reached out to an acquaintance about a design for the Saturday campaign. I'm lucky and thankful that I know a bunch of different artists. This particular artist designed some eldritch horror concepts for a different campaign that I'm in, and since I'll be needing one soon they were the perfect pick. We brainstormed some ideas and they got to work, but it was only after they had gone to bed that I came up with an even better idea, and for that, they'll need my notes... I'll make sure to compensate them for their efforts. Treat your artists well, and they'll treat you well in return. Kind of applies to all relationships in life, really. I don't know why some people struggle with that philosophy, but it is what is it.

Day 11 - Jan 13 2024 Oh hey the weekend. Unfortunately there's one hellova cold snap hitting the region and other places so whatever plans I had of going out is... just not gonna happen. I'm just gonna buckle down and stay warm. The wife finally got Monster Hunter World working again on her computer, so we hunted some monsters. My file of Monster Hunter World that we have on the Playstation 4 is much further than where I'm at on PC, but we can't skip cutscenes so it was a bit of a slog getting through more of story. On the Playstation I think I left off around the Alatreon encounter (big dragon fight right before the final big dragon fight), but on the PC version I still hadn't made it to the Elder's Recess (one of the later zones of baseline story). The wife and I are both seasoned veteran hunters so the fights were pretty easy. It was just... the unskippable cutscenes. And before I get any flak for skipping cutscenes, I just wanna say that I've already seen all the cutscenes on the Playstation version. Also, when the fights take less time than the cutscene itself (and you gotta watch the cutscene before other hunters can join you on the fight), there's an issue. Maybe that's just me. I enjoyed Tri, 3U, 4U, and Generations from the old gen, and Rise from the new gen. Maybe it's just the story pacing from World that's making it unenjoyable to sit through a second time. Hopefully Monster Hunter Wilds has a good story (not that Monster Hunter is winning in the story category anytime soon), or at least an option to skip certain cutscenes. Aside from Mon Hun, I sent over my notes to the artist and wrapped up Year 1 of Coral Island. The artist liked what they were seeing in the notes so I've got high hopes they'll design something exceptional. I was also asked by a different artist to conceptualize my character's late wife in a different campaign, and they did an amazing job drawing her.

Rest Day - Jan 14 2024 It took a bit of effort to motivate myself to write this new update for the 100ish Days of Productivity. It definitely ties back to that disconnect I briefly wrote about earlier in the week. I need to get better about it. Otherwise it defeats the entire purpose of this journey of self-improvement. It's still really cold out (yesterday it was in the negatives, today wasn't much better). Bundled up and played some Final Fantasy 14. There's a new patch for the game coming up, so I wanted to spend some time and deal with some of the Challenge Log items, which are basically weekly goals that earn you some extra coin for completing a certain number of them. It was also a good time to decorate the inside of the medium house I won back in December. While I wasn't able to decorate the entirety of it, I did make some good progress on the upper and main levels. I've got vendors set up inside the house that have housing items I can buy, and what I can't buy from them I go out and gather myself. I think I've got some great lighting on the upper floor, but I'll need to add more light sources to the main floor. It's too dark on the eastern side pretty much any time it isn't between the in-game hours of 6am - 12pm. Same thing with the western side but anytime that isn't between 12pm - 6pm. I wonder if the ceiling light is just no good for how I have the marble walls set up? I have tomorrow off, so I'm hoping I can overcome the disconnect and get some studying done.

#100 days of productivity

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