dailyrandomwriter

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 819

Someone once mentioned that Infinity Nikki is the girl game that we should have gotten growing up. Having played ‘girl games’ in the late 2000s, I felt that comment within my soul.

The reality is that games like Harvest Moon, and Animal Crossing, games that have a high female demographic, were not made with that demographic in mind. In fact, I think the creators of Harvest Moon were kind of surprised by their high female demographic. 

Conversely, there were games made for girls, and the ones from the 90s and 2000s (and beyond at times) that were made for “girls” (assuming the player base were under the age of 18) were… domestic for lack of a better term. And, let me be clear, I liked those games. I love dress up games, cooking games, designing games and all the games that have been traditionally categorized to be “girl games”.

But I also recognize that by selling those kinds of games to girls it was patronizing to the audience it was meant for. Those types of games tended to lack any sort of narrative, or the narrative was a flimsy excuse at best to shoehorn whatever game mechanic the developers thought a girl would like. It was also not unusual for those games to lack a fail state, or a really good compelling reason to do well. If it was a game from the infamous Imagine brand by Ubisoft, that marketed themselves as games for girls, it was often both.

Infinity Nikki is unashamedly a game marketed towards women. The game at its heart is a dress up game. There’s a reason why it has very good 3D graphics for all the shiny clothes you can put on Nikki, and a very, very good camera mode. Does it sound dumb that Miraland is a world where stylists are revered and fashion battles are a thing? Yes… yes it is.

But underneath that dumb surface premise is a world full of complex and at times really dark stories to tell. Stoneville and Florawish are towns divided by religious beliefs that may have been artificially encouraged by a mysterious third party in their past history. The Wishing Woods have a conspiracy that dates back at least 200 years, maybe even longer. The Queen’s Palace Ruins have secrets of a queen perhaps most misunderstood and a victim to politics.

The game does not pull its punches, and in fact this franchise has a history of narratively going off the rails (which is a fun conversation another time). 

On top of the growingly dark narrative is also the game play. Even though it’s marketed as a dress up game, it is technically an open world puzzle platformer game and I am all here for it. Puzzle platformers are not normally my preferred game mechanic, but Infinity Nikki balances so well in being challenging, but generous. It’s clear the intended audience are people who are not as familiar with platform mechanics, which makes sense because this genre is new to the franchise.

And that’s the thing, in order for the game studio to have pitched this idea to the game publisher, they had to trust their audience, who are primarily female, to embrace what they were doing. They believed their audience would enjoy something different and challenging. A game that has often been compared to Elden Ring in terms of the narrative and vibes, and a game that requires players to develop a level of skill to reap the maximum reward out of their challenges.

And so when someone says, Infinity Nikki is the girl game we should have gotten growing up, it’s also wishing the developers back then treated girls with a lot more care than we got growing up.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 818

After a week of holiday, I’m finally back to a point where I think I’m on top of things again. Even though I did have fun during my holidays, such as spending time going through game demos, I spent even longer just catching up on things.

While I do honestly enjoy setting up my journal and take great satisfaction in the final product, it did feel like a rush to the finish line to get everything set up. This was due to being sick for a week, so I couldn’t do anything for a week. But I really wanted everything to be set up so I could have a fresh start in March.

Because one of the other things being sick had done to me was that it caused me to fall off the wagon in certain routines and habits and also meant I had incomplete trackers as a result. It’s not a good feeling when that happens, so being able to start fresh is a great thing.

Also, it’s just been hard to get back into routine. Things like exercising and doing my full housekeeping list was very hard to get back into. It took a weekend to actually do the whole housekeeping list instead of just one day, which is not terrible but it does mean less time to myself.

Though I finished the chores way before 7 p.m., so I can’t complain.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 817

This is my second year of playing through demos, something I’ve never done before and it’s fascinating. Especially because my preference in games lean towards the weird and wide, and at times unexplainable, ‘cozy games’. 

Unexplainable because traditionally video games genres are based off of mechanics, and not off of feelings. Though most of the game mechanics that I prefer tend to be found in games found within the ‘cozy game’ genre.

One of the fascinating things that demos have revealed to me though is an issue developers of smaller scope cozy games are running into, especially if they had intended their audience to be within the cozy game sphere. Sometimes those games are just not compelling enough to play.

They’re not bad games, they do exactly what they set out to do, but the feedback loop that makes playing games compelling sometimes isn’t there. Or the feedback loop isn’t tight enough to warrant it to be an absolute must buy.

Games where design and creativity is a core mechanic especially seems to fall prey to this. Often the feedback loop is the unlocking of more features to help with the design aspect of the game, but in demos where you’re trying to show the player the features of your game to get them to buy into it, showing the player too many features may ask them why they want to play this game in the first place because there’s nothing to compel them to keep going.

BloomTale, Instants and Nom Nom: Cozy Forest Cafe all run into this same issue. I think they have pretty art, have interesting concepts and potentially are wonderful games to play if you like to design things. However, I don’t know if I can justify getting those games because I don’t know if I would feel compelled enough to play.

At least with Nom Nom, I’m aware there are a lot of different sweets and drinks to customize, some I haven’t even seen yet and I enjoyed going through each and every one of those in the demo to decorate. So, I think, to just have something to do, I’d like that game at some point. 

Instants, I can see the potential in that game, especially if I played it straight and decorated the photo albums as if they were to be given to people. I would like to see a mechanic where I have to earn points or money to buy more stationery items to decorate the albums just to have a stronger feedback loop, but I think it has potential.

BloomTale though, there is nothing compelling for me to play that game, and that should have actually been the more compelling of the three games to play because that one actually had a puzzle component. I just wasn’t interested in the puzzle as much as I should have been. Which I think is a pity because the design mechanic for designing flower bouquets is very well done.

And that is a risk that developers dipping into this weird genre will run into. That in the attempt to make a game that is ‘chill’ and something that a person can relax to, they may accidentally create a game that isn’t compelling enough to buy.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 816

It’s once more the Steam Next Fest, which means a lot of game demos.This unfortunately started in the middle of my holidays and will end on Monday next week so I’m trying my best to speed through the demos before they’re taken offline.

Because I had been consistently playing Logic Town, one of the games recommended to me was Einstein's Cats. This has nothing to do with Einstein, it’s just a title to convey that it is a logic puzzle game. It’s very adorable with a papercraft art style that is just charmingly animated.

It is also a game that would have benefitted from the mobile game market, if the mobile game market was not terrible for paid games. This is a fact that has killed innovation for touch screen games, which is a pity because when the smartphone and tablet first came to market there were a lot of people experimenting with touchscreen as a control mechanic.

This was especially true in the puzzle and point and click genre for games. Gorogoa and Old Man’s Journey are puzzle games you can buy on Steam for your computer, but they were originally created for touchscreen. As a result, the experience of these games now aren’t quite the experience a player would get out of them if played on their intended device. 

Not that I’ve played them on their intended device. These games were also released in the early days of mobile gaming (otherwise they wouldn’t have been released there at all). As a result, some of us just didn’t have the right operating system, or generation of phone to be able to play this game smoothly. I certainly didn’t as all my phones are hand me downs.

Fortunately, these games were later released on Steam, sadly, the reason for this has to do with mobile games’ race to the bottom. There were a few things that were happening. First, was that free to play games just became very common, specifically the timer idle games associated with Facebook found a new home on mobile devices. Secondly though, causal puzzle games that were originally published on computer, were being ported to mobile but resold at very low prices.

I’ve mentioned this in the past. I'm a fan of hidden object games, and when it was proven that hidden object games ported well to mobile, they became much, much cheaper. Most hidden object games for computer will run between 10 to 15 dollars on average without a Steam sale. When they got ported to mobile, a lot of them averaged around 5 dollars or less as a normal sales price.

Things like this just set the precedent that mobile games are cheaper than computer games, and it became an expectation. As the market became flooded with free to play games that made money through microtransactions or advertisement within the game itself, the mobile game price just got lower and lower. Most mobile games are expected to be 99 cents or free, and developers who want to make a game without ads cannot sell their game on mobile at that price.

As a result, games that I’ve always felt would have benefited from a mobile market because the game mechanics would have worked very well on touch screen, just won’t ever get ported there. Like Einstein's Cats would have been a great logic puzzle game to give a kid on mobile. They can play small sessions while out with their parents, learning basic logic or just have fun playing with the sticker book. It is a far more thoughtful game to give your kid to keep their attention, but it’s not going to happen, because no one is going to pay whatever the end cost will be, for mobile. 

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 815

Because it is the end of the month, I have to do some major updating to my journals. Not just the set ups I do for the next month, but part of my routine is to fill out a review of the month. Part of it is done for memory keeping purposes, but another part of it is a check to see where I am at with my life. In both work and my everyday journal I have sections of challenges and successes. 

Challenges aren’t always a chance to be down on yourself for not fulfilling your goals, but also a chance to acknowledge it may have been a hard month. And needing heavy antibiotics because of infection is certainly making it a hard month. I also tend to keep track of when is the last time I got an infection, both out of humour and necessary.

In which I realized, I have a weird sense of humour around getting sick.

I’ve already shown this tracker on my journal blog, but this was the tracker I used. 

On the outset, it looks kind of depressing because it has these sad winter girls on it, but I didn’t use them because I was sad. I had brought that washi tape, for the sole purpose of using it for this type of tracker. Why? I don’t know, I just thought it was amusing to be mock sad about the fact I had to take medication again. Also, this series has some medical themed images in it, so it really tickled me.

The other thing to note is that my alarm to tell me to take medication is set to the song Drop Pop Candy. Now, it doesn’t have anything to do with medication, and the song is in Japanese, but pills are often mistaken for candy by children. There was also a time when candy used to be sold as gag gifts to adults and were packaged in fake pill bottles called “happy pills”. I don’t think this is done anymore, because the joke is in poor taste with the rising knowledge in mental health, but I remembered that. 

So the fact that I have my medicine alarm set to Drop Pop Candy, as in drop what you’re doing and pop in a pill, says something about my sense of humour. The fact it’s also a very cheery and upbeat tune is just the icing on the cake.

At least the song isn’t overtly clear that it’s for my medication, unlike the time I set my medicine alarm to a Spoonful of Sugar.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 814

Sometimes, I pause in what I’m doing and wonder to myself if I miss being able to sleep in until 11 a.m. or stay in bed until 12 p.m. It’s not something I’ve done in about a year, because ADHD medication requires consistency, and the warning was to take it before noon.

Though, as I’ve mentioned in the past, taking it at noon or even half an hour later isn’t going to affect my sleep because stimulants don’t really affect me quite the same way, especially not at the low dose that I take it at. As a result, when I plan to sleep in, I still set an alarm. 

Even when I’m on holidays, which I am at the moment, my alarm is set for 9 a.m. Which, as a somewhat functioning adult, isn’t that early in the morning. In fact, it’s pretty luxurious and should still be counted as sleep in time, but compared to when I used to sleep in, that’s a lot of time to myself.

Which brings me back to the question I asked myself, do I miss being able to sleep in at a much later time? The answer is… sometimes. When I slept in that late, it often meant that I had stayed up very late the night before (often playing video games). You can’t do that, if you plan to be up at 9 a.m. in the morning.

On the other hand, I have time to myself at the moment. I am writing this blog right before lunch, while I am waiting for my bathroom cleaner to soak into the shower enough for a good rinsing. I had breakfast at a decent hour. Once the bathroom is rinsed, I will wash towels and have enough time to update my Nikki Blog for a bit before going out to lunch with my mother.

That’s a really good start to the morning, and I can’t complain about that.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 813

Occasionally there is a game demo I see that makes me think of @wereah and then I ask her if she wants to watch me play it. Sometimes, it’s the graphics, because she likes looking at object models, as they make good references. Other times, it’s because of the aesthetic. 

Do No Harm is self-described as an eldritch horror doctor simulator game. In this game you play a doctor who has been offered a job in an isolated island village. Your doctor still prescribes to the belief in the four humors, and it’s your job to figure out what is ailing your patient and balance their humors to make them well.

By the way, Were-Ah notes that the developers have done a lot of research in the old belief of humors, a type of medical theory that was practiced in ancient Greek and Roman medicine and started to see a decline in the 17th century but wasn’t fully disproven until the 18th century. 

Despite the fact you’re playing a sketchy doctor, in an equally sketchy backwater town, the game has a feel to it, very similar to Papers Please, if you’ve played that game. And I say this for two reasons.

The first is that you can make moral choices to help or harm your patients. That may sound strange in a game where you’re a doctor, but there are characters who will come to you with their own agenda. Whether that is the priest breaking confidentiality to give you a list of what actually ails some of your patients, or the undertaker who gives you a list of people to ‘send on his way’ that he assures you won’t be missed.

And why you may want to make those choices, comes in the second reason why this is like Papers Please, is because earning money (or not enough of it) has consequences. In Papers Please, if you’re not familiar with the game, if you do not check enough passports in an accurate manner, you do not earn enough money to keep your family alive. As the requirements for living increases, the chances the player will have to take bribes to keep their family alive increases, especially new players who may not be used to the mechanics yet.

It takes money to refill your medicine, keep your lantern lit and… keep the questionable drink that prevents you from hallucinating the horrors of this island, which would cost you bits of your sanity. 

Like Papers Please, you can get by without doing anything questionable by just doing a really good job. Being conservative with your medicine and accurate with your diagnosis ensures you waste as little medicine as possible. Better outcomes means more money, and quicker diagnosis means more patients. 

But like Papers Please, you may want to do the questionable or unthinkable, to satisfy player curiosity. Like if you let yourself go insane, what would happen? If you did what the Undertaker told you, what would be the end result? That questionable purple liquid that person who is definitely a cultist gave you, if you gave it to your female patients, what would happen? Or if you defied the cultist and attempted to do everything in your power to save your female patients, is it possible?

Do No Harm is a fascinating game, and I think it is a great game for Halloween if you want a bit of horror and not something absolutely scary. The artistic charm makes it more spooky than scary, fascinating rather than horrifying. Certainly a game that I may want to pick up once it releases.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 812

At the time this gets posted, it will be the last day of Fireworks Season in Infinity Nikki, so it seems like a good time to write about my feelings on the Fireworks Season.

I admit, I try my best to manage my expectations around Infinity Nikki because it is a live service game, and those games are hard to manage. I’ve heard too many horror stories about the release cadence of games much older than Nikki falling flat, but it’s very hard to manage those expectations when the developer just does such a good job.

In truth, I probably finished most of the new content in two weeks after it was released. Meaning, I had probably played anywhere between 15 to 20 hours in total before finishing. This is including the time I took to just take pictures while in the middle of completing the new storyline and quests. 

To be honest, that is very impressive for an update that isn’t even adding a new region (that major update isn’t due until at some point in May). 

And technically, I’m not even fully done. The Firework Isle has a few locations that I would like to come back to for photo taking opportunities. Since the island itself is a permanent fixture, that is a task for future me.

Overall, it was a lot of fun, and combined with the trailers for Eerie Season, which starts tomorrow, I’m starting to understand the New Year address Runhao Yao, the producer of Infinity Nikki made to the players. He had, at one point in that address, described wanting the game to be like a digital amusement park that players could enjoy. So far, that seems to be the design philosophy of this game.

Perhaps one of the most amazing moments of this update was seeing the grand fireworks with the song A Journey of Fireworks playing in the background. If you’re not a player of Infinity Nikki, I’d recommend checking that song out, it is a beautiful song and I would like to have it on my phone. But the most amazing part of that, was the fact these elaborate fireworks were playing to match the song in the background. 

That kind of fireworks show, I have not seen in person since… probably middle school. And this is not counting Disney’s fireworks, which I had sort of seen as an adult. When I was a kid, there had been a special fireworks show in a smaller amusement park in a city a drive away from where I grew up. That fireworks show was only for one summer, and it was designed to coordinate with the music playing, and that’s what it reminded me of.

I’ve seen fireworks in games before, but the one in Infinity Nikki is the best and most memorable.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 811

It’s been a really busy week, to say the least.

The problem of having gotten sick the week before last week was that I was on reduced working hours to cope with the medication. This is all well and good when you’re not expecting vacation in the last week of the month.

However, I am off this coming week, and so last week was a mad dash to complete my work while the medication worked itself out of my system. This was on top of training someone at work, and going to get a new leg brace that week. As a result, writing in this blog was not my primary concern.

Despite the fact I had things to say, and things done, I was still recovering from medication.

In fact I’ve fallen off my regular routine so hard that it’s been an effort to get myself back on track. My spreads in my everyday journal for February is horribly empty in some places, which is a bit demotivating. Fortunately, there will be new spreads for March so even if I don’t quite get back up to speed by the end of my vacation, I have March to work on.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 810

For the first time since Monday’s doctor appointment I managed to sleep when I needed it the most. Having been blessed with working in a place that has weekends and stat holidays off, it means I can spend the rest of my medical treatment not working.

Now I’ve always had a weird object permanence issue when remembering how medical treatments make me feel unless it’s particularly traumatic. Having to be on this treatment is clearly not traumatic and I have very much forgotten how miserable this makes me.

Though to be fair, the last time this happened was six months ago and last time I was already off of work. It might not have been the ideal way to spend your holidays, but at least I could rest when I wanted.

Now that I have a few brain cells back and have a bit under two hours before I have to take medication again, I am going to indulge in my hobbies a bit before I need to adult.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 809

In the topic of ways players keep themselves entertained in games (thanks to @wereah) I have fallen down the rabbit hole of looking for lore in Infinity Nikki. It’s good to note at this point because I didn’t know anything about the world Nikki had found herself in, when I first came across lore pages, I had allowed it to slide over my brain like water. It meant nothing to me at the time, and frankly a world ending event that required a legendary party of adventurers is about as trope-y trope as you can get for storytelling.

This means, I have to go back to every single place I’ve ever been to so far and re-read (and take screenshots) of all the pages I had come across, because I remembered only the barest outline of what they were about.

By the way, I have not actually finished the main storyline chapter yet. Only just picked back up the Wishing Woods storyline a few nights again.

I’ve not even done all the quests in the places I have been in, nor have I finished exploring all of the Abandoned District.

Also I have a wish list of places I want to go back to, to take photos?

It is bonkers the amount of entertainment I can get from this game that has nothing to do with the primary gameplay.

At any rate, at some point I will rant about the nonsensical nature of Infinity Nikki’s timeline, or I might not, depending on what happens once I finish the main chapters. But apparently, Infinity Nikki has more in common with Elden Ring, than just the general vibe and open world, such as their method of world building.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 808

Since I live in a place with universal healthcare, have a workplace that allows for flexible hours for things like appointments, and I have a good working relationship with my doctor, I made arrangements for an annual checkup. Even if the child in me did not want to do that.

For those who do not have one or more of these benefits, taking time out for an annual checkup may seem like a waste of time and money. Nevermind the fact that I am in my 40s, have a family history of the usual things one has to worry about when they get older and was already born out of the womb with my own set of medical difficulties. 

Annual check up is a good way to make sure nothing else crops up that will make your life difficult. It’s also a chance to talk to your doctor about any difficulties you may be having, or anything you’ve observed.

And if you’re very lucky, check ups are just that, checking up on you. Like, I managed to dodge a family health problem for another year.

Sometimes, you’re not that lucky, says the person who has another infection after six months without one. By the way, I knew that was going to happen, it was just when I called it, it was only two days from my appointment and I couldn’t be bothered to email her beforehand.

Even more rarely, sometimes your doctor comes up with solutions to problems you were just going to live with. Like, I knew my ADHD medication, if taken first thing in the morning meant I had little to no capacity by the time I was done work in the late afternoon. It didn’t occur to me to ask to experiment with a higher dosage or to spread out my medication across two dosages in a day.

Despite the fact I was just taking advantage of the requirement for an annual check up to get funding paperwork signed and the pending infection taken care of, I’m really glad that I did take that checkup.

It was also a delight to tell my doctor for once everything that has gone right and my hopes for the health of my future.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 807

As playing Infinity Nikki has become part of my (weird) bedtime routine, I was thinking about what I would do next in Infinity Nikki while in the shower. Due to me catching up on all the side quests that I had let fester, I had earned a generous amount of diamonds and was considering tonight to try a few pulls for items.

I’ve mentioned when I first started writing about Infinity Nikki that I don’t normally like free to play games that use the gacha system. In part because I had played games with such a system over a decade ago when I was younger and more foolish, but more importantly I’ve watched how predatory that system has become.

A gacha system after all, is a lottery system, a raffle, a game of chance, and in a digital format there’s a lot of chances for the developer to put the odds against the player. Now most “good” gacha systems will have what is known as a pity system, where if you pull a certain number of times you’re guaranteed a rare item.

Now the way Infinity Nikki does it, may have to do with the fact that full outfits come in pieces, so if you want a full outfit you need to pull every single piece. Combined with the fact that all four and five star outfits can be evolved into a different colouration if you have a duplicate of the outfit, it may have incentivised the developers to make a generous gacha system so the players don’t feel jilted. 

Granted, that has never stopped certain games with a gacha system before, so give Nikki where credit is due, and the coding is fascinating.

On the basic level, Infinity Nikki, most of the time will guarantee a four star or higher item after every ten pulls. I say most of the time, because when Daughter of the Lake and Pink Ribbon Waltz was released, they each were given their own banner where every five pulls guaranteed a four star or higher item.

And I can't begin to describe how generous this setup was, and not just because they cut the required number of pulls in half. See, the other thing about Infinity Nikki is that for four and five star outfits, you are guaranteed to not get duplicates of an outfit item until you have completed the outfit.

Once you complete an outfit, you can then get a single duplicate of every single item until you complete the outfit again. And then the process repeats itself again.

This meant, due to the fact those outfits had their own separate banner, which made them the only four star outfit in that gacha banner, a player could earn a whole outfit in 80 pulls or less. I think both @wereah and I managed to get the Daughter of the Lake within 40-50 pulls.

Which sounds like a lot (it is) but the game is also very, very generous with their diamonds. Assuming you haven’t blasted through all the content (and your diamonds) by the time those banners came up, you most likely could earn enough diamonds to get one of those outfits without paying a cent.

The most interesting part about that, is that it doesn’t even account for the other systems in Infinity Nikki to give you a better chance at getting the items you want.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 806

One of the weirdest things about not having my shit together and then suddenly having the capacity to do so is learning how to do so. In a way that feels… artificial. 

Like, I know logically I should not use my mother as a model of how a functional adult works because I am a dysfunctional adult with medical needs pretending to be a functioning adult. Also, the ongoing joke about my mother is that she will outlast everyone, even me.

Which sounds morbid, but I mean it in a light hearted way. Let me put it this way, if my mother had grandchildren, she would be that trope-y grandmother who acts like they’re still in their 20s and go on rollercoasters and all sorts of fun stuff with the kids.

Ignoring the fact my mother did go on rollercoasters last year because that is her jam.

The point is, my mother makes every day adult life look easy, and I’m not talking about the housekeeping, cooking or anything like that. That stuff is hard and she complains about it as much as the next person. I’m talking more about the social obligations that are required of us as people.

Both my parents make keeping in touch with others to be as easy as breathing. Whether it is people from their childhood, university days or even working career there are a number of people they still keep in contact with. This is especially impressive because a lot of this was before social media and cell phones were even a thing.

I am not like that, and for most of my early working career I didn’t keep in touch with people that I should have. People I genuinely get along with, enjoy talking to and would have liked to see where life has taken them. However, this is not something that comes naturally to me. 

Now, I’m not a social butterfly, and the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve noticed my own sensory hangups, but this issue isn’t necessarily the fact I don’t want to be social. I just don’t think about it, like many things in my life. Such as cleaning, flossing my teeth and getting regular exercise. Now I don’t know if this is a byproduct of the ADHD, or if there is something else going on…

I say that hesitantly because I am also aware that I function best when everything in my life is a task, even the things I do for fun.

Complete different side note, I have done more things that I want to do, for fun in the past month than probably in the past decade, because I fucking write it down as a thing I want to do. What the flying fuck.

At any rate, this has resulted in the fact that I have to write down my social connections as a task to be done. Not because I don’t want to do it, but because I just won’t do it. I did that in December, I wrote down to email Merry Christmas to everyone in my contacts, otherwise it won’t be done.

Just like today, where I spent a few minutes emailing the two people I would like to have tea with, if they want to have a meetup this month. It only took a few minutes, but I swear to god if I didn’t write the damn thing down…

I envy my mom, she doesn’t think like that and because of it she has a much wider social network than I do. Not that I need a wide social network, I get tired mentally too easily to do what she does, but there are days I wish it would come a bit more naturally to me.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 805

Because Tuesdays are my on-site days, I tend to list something fun, relaxing or mindless as the thing I would do that night. This means no chores, no journal set up, nothing of the sort. Originally, because I had been meaning to work through my gaming library, I thought I would at least spend two hours on Magical Bakery right after work.

It helps that I knew there was already food in the fridge to just heat up, so I didn’t have to account for cooking time as much.

However, that isn’t what happened.

See, I kind of forgot that one of my coworkers who normally covers reception breaks was off that week, which normally isn’t an issue except that when I got in that morning, instead of the usual receptionist, the head of reception Izzy was sitting at the front. 

Izzy’s job, when she’s not manning reception at one of the sister locations of my workplace, is to organize all of the receptionists and make sure that whatever project, job, or workload that has been assigned to reception, gets done, which is all well and good except reception is chronically understaffed.

Ignoring the fact that reception is under a hiring freeze at the moment, that position has always been difficult to fill. It is a demanding job that requires you to be one of the first people in the building, and the face of the organization. The latter of which, causes the general public to think you know what the fuck is going on at all times, a task that is made difficult with the dozens upon dozens of programs that my work place manages on a daily basis.

And worst of all, you don’t even get paid as much as the other administrators. 

When I got hired from reception to be an administrator for a handful of programs, the hiring manager asked me if I was willing to come in at 8:30 in the morning as my predecessor came in at 9. At reception, if I covered a day shift, I would have to be at work at 7:30 in the morning, and on public transit it means booting my ass out the door at 6:30 a.m. A later start time and a higher pay raise? I don’t think I said yes fast enough.

With all that in mind, the fact Izzy was in one manning the front meant that someone was sick that day, and that was on top of the fact the second receptionist had to take the day off. Meaning it was just Izzy, that day, in the head office, which made it the business location in the organization. On top of all her other work as head of reception.

I’ve also worked with her in the past, and she’s one of those folks who will continue to stay where she is until she thinks she can go, and by go… she probably should have left two hours ago. So, I asked when she wanted to start her lunch break, hoping I would remember to go out on time, otherwise she would probably leave much later than she should.

It was a good thing too, because there was a meeting that day where people were coming in from other sites and someone ordered catering, but didn’t prep a cart to take all the food for some reason? Despite my best intentions, she didn’t leave for lunch when she thought she would, because neither of us knew about this meeting.

On the bright side, I offered to find a cart (I borrowed one of the speech prep carts and hoped no one would notice), and helped take the food down. This allowed Izzy to focus and stay to greet clients and make sure nothing sets itself on fire.

The downside was, by the time she did manage to leave the next wave of clients came in, and I forgot how busy reception could be. Normally I cover the evening shift (because staffing issues) and those times aren’t busy. As a result, normally I try to do my normal work up front. I got as far as promising a parent that I would encrypt email their report only to be slammed by three families coming in for service, a parent doing a pick up of things I could not find and a therapist poking their head in for something else.

I nearly did a faceplant tripping over my headphone wires as I tried to get from point A to point B.

15 minutes in and I absently wondered why no one has ever made a time management game of manning a reception desk.

30 minutes in, with screaming children in the background echoing off the high ceilings and I decided that I was not going to play Magical Bakery right after work. After all, why play a time management game when you’ve just spent 30 minutes doing it in real life.

By the time Izzy came back from lunch (she had fled the building for lunch to retain her sanity) I was ready to crawl out of my skin due to late onset auditory sensory processing issues developed after all the Covid lockdowns.

It was so bad that instead of eating lunch in the staff room, I fled to the little office I worked out of to eat lunch and blast Lo-fi music through my headphones. On the bright side, Izzy gave me birthday timbits as a treat, a lot of them, which I now get to enjoy for dessert after dinner.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 804

I learnt a few days ago that the Infinity Nikki devs had indicated they would do region expansions every six months. This is a fact that both fascinates me  and mildly terrifies me, because before this point I thought we got a region expansion when the 1.2 version introduced as Fireworks Isle to us.

It is after all a completely new area, with its own loading screen and you can’t teleport back to Wishfield from there. 

Most importantly, I have played over 10 hours on that island and I know I missed things, but decided to ship Nikki back to Florawish to do other things. You know… because there’s always something to do when you only play an hour and a half a night on average. It’s a good thing that the developers have made the temporary events last until the end of Febraruy, and even better Fireworks Isle is a permanent location.

However, as someone who has not finished all of the chapters in the main quest line, still need to finish helping the White Jade crew, and those partaking in New Horizons day (on top of all the explorations, minigames, mini quests… etc) it makes me wonder… How large would a region expansion be?

Now, the current logic (theory) among players is that a region expansion is probably (maybe) in reference to a new country. We know that in Miraland, where Infinity Nikki takes place there are six regions. So, the running theory is that it’s those other five regions that would be released every six months.

However, what does that mean?

Does it mean more large scale quest lines? Can you do the quest lines out of order like we could with Firework Isle? Does it mean we get a completely new Infinity Heart map to upgrade for each region? What does that mean for the Dews of Inspiration, or will they be something different, again like the way with Firework Isle?

Who knows at this point? I’m just enjoying the ride.

Now I’ve said in the past that an hour and a half of play a night is perfect for my needs, but if the calculations are correct, the next major update is on my birthday month. Maybe I’ll treat myself to a day of playing Nikki.

After all there are other things I’d like to do that have nothing to do with advancing the storyline.

Like taking pictures… gathering lore… being a dress up gremlin.

The possibilities are endless.

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 803

Despite the fact I know I have good days and bad days when it comes to just doing daily things, it always catches me a bit off guard when I have a good day.

Yesterday was housekeeping day which was a nicer way of saying it was the day I do my chores. While most of my chores are cleaning chores (which included the dreaded monthly mopping chore that day), some of my chores are also things I do so I don’t have to stress about it later.

It is the day I refill my everyday outing bag and my backpack with medical supplies so I’m not rushing before booting my ass out the door. I also check my mail on Saturdays, because if I don’t set aside a date it will be at least three weeks before I check it.

And for the most part, all those chores got done, in three hours, including the mopping. While my cleaning is not as good as my mother’s or a professionals, the fact that it could be done in three hours is very telling. Actually, it could have been done in two hours, but I had to sit down and chill.

The only downside to yesterday was that I didn’t start cleaning sooner. If I had stared at 1 p.m. like I intended, everything probably would have been done by 3:30 p.m. and I could have chilled. Though, the fact everything was done a bit before 6 p.m. and dinner making doesn’t start until 7 p.m. is pretty to be honest.

I have to take my wins where I can get them, but occasionally I am saddened by the hours lost, especially because I could have been doing other things.