#whatever happens I'll keep you updated...again if/when there's a solution I'll share to help others PASS ALONG this knowledge

[sleepynegress]

THIS ISN'T COMMON KNOWLEDGE BUT SHOULD BE...ABOUT MEDICAID....

If you ever find yourself in the position of living in the home of a parent who is disabled and requires full-time care and you are their primary caregiver for at least 2 years, and they intend to leave their assets to you after they pass, make sure to transfer ownership of their assets, home/land in your name ASAP...or they will require you to pay back any benefits received and claim those assets even out from under you, as soon as your loved one passes. This is yet another way that generational assets /wealth are easily taken out of marginalized communities. It is a loan.

And the sharks circle as soon as your loved one passes. Here's an article about it:

Decided to add context. I don't like to talk about it here, because ehh, social media is for my vapid entertainment thoughts for me. It's a hobby/getaway/ place to get semi-social with strangers and online friends with shared interests, but I don't want anyone else to go through what I am... Of course, this applies specifically to the U.S.'s broken healthcare system. So, for those who don't know, my mom passed recently. I am an only child with no siblings or children. My whole life during that time was 24/7 care. She had insurance, but it wasn't enough to cover everything that she needed, so Medicaid was the obvious solution, right? The government takes care of our disabled elderly who have worked until retirement, right? It seemed like the routine thing to do, I had never heard anything during the process about having to pay it back,but sure enough, less than 12 weeks after her passing, I was hit with a warning (which I followed up on and was told I would NOT be charged because of my caregiver status) and then 2 weeks later the "bill". The lady I spoke to, totally changed her attitude from the first time I spoke to her to the point where I felt scammed. Out came a patronizing voice certain people use with children, that measured whiny thing (it's always a red-flag to me and makes me instantly dislike you if you do this even with kids, btw... speak to kids like PEOPLE). I feel like an idiot. I have been doing this for over a decade and didn't think to transfer any assets of hers during that time because it *was* hers. I wanted her to feel as empowered about that as possible.

Not a single soul said I should transfer those assets to keep this from happening and now I'm facing down what feels like some kind of weird conspiracy to take the land and house.

FYI, there have been weird inquiries, the census came to mark down my mother's death literally *immediately* after she passed...and odd timing called the day of the notice to "help", with all the southern Christian signifiers (bless your heart we'll be praying for you).... It feels so seedy. Anyway, all this to say if you find yourself in a similar position....

TRANSFER THOSE ASSETS INTO YOUR NAME 2 years into caregiving or they will take them from you, house etc..

[cwispydev]

15/11/2022 NaNoRenMo word count: 5,408

GOD, I was writing this stupid update and Tumblr deleted the whole damn thing when I pressed Ctrl + Z and honestly? This website is the bane of my existence.

Tumblr is so fucking lucky that it's the easiest way to keep up a stupid fucking blog.

Anyway, I was just writing about updates. I was unable to update for a few days just becos I've been focusing a lot on the writing of the game and becos I got a little bit sick.

Focusing a lot on the writing meant that there's not really a lot of cool coding comments I can share with ya'll since I want to avoid giving spoilers for the game. And then, being sick of course meant that updates have been slow and I wanted to avoid being stressed so I avoided any coding stuff that would give me even the slightest bit of trouble.

I ended up being pretty impressed by my solution for a random hint generator though so I'll tell ya'll how I ended up coding that for the game.

First things first, what I wanted to achieve was a random hint generator that would give you hints on how to achieve certain endings in the game (though it might not be applicable to the demo). I wanted it to show every hint at least once before repeating. I also wanted it to avoid giving you any hints if you've achieved all of the endings already.

I based a lot of the code I used on xavimat's answer on this LemmaSoft forum post about a random conversation generator. I ended up doing the if/elif/else statement solution that he suggested.

However, like I said before, I wanted the generator to show each hint at least once before repeating any of them. That was a bit harder to figure out.

I did a whole thing where I put a variable (something like viewedhintone = True) every single time you viewed hint one, two, three and so on. So, if the variable was true, it would jump back to the random integer generator and get another integer that, hopefully, would lead to a hint you hadn't viewed yet.

Unfortunately, this gave me a problem. Once all of the hint variables were true, it gave you an infinite loop becos there was no way for the variables to turn false. I thought I had solved this by setting the else for the statement as just viewedhintone = False, viewedhinttwo = False, etc.

That wasn't the case. It ended up not helping at all becos the random integer generator would always spit out an integer so there was no way for it to get to the else statement.

Instead, my special friend had to help me solve it. Basically, for the if statement, you have to set it as if viewedhintone == True and viewedhinttwo == True and etc. so that it checks for that first. You have to set the if statement to check if all your viewed hint variables are true, basically.

Then, if all of them are true, just make them all false and then jump back to the random integer generator so you can view all of the hints all over again.

Also, make sure to have the viewed hint variables set to persistent so that they stay the same even if the player starts a new game.

Another update that I'm pretty happy about is that I started a Trello board and I really like it. I can be really scatterbrained sometimes so having something to put all of my thoughts onto really helps a lot.

I added a list or post or something on there for later on, when people start testing the demo. It's a place they can put comments and stuff about the demo or any bugs they encounter.

I'm not sure if rando people can comment on it or if I have to add them or whatever so we'll see. Hopefully, rando people can comment on it and, if not, I'll figure it out when I get to that problem.

The next challenge I'll need to start looking for? Or, rather, researching about? I don't know, but I need to figure out a calendar system for the game.

It needs to achieve these certain things:

allow player to decide what to do for the next month

show whether or not there's any special events happening

have a random generator to decide what the other characters are up to and then show that

I've been avoiding it becos it's a little bit intimidating. However, now that I'm thinking about it, I think it'll be just as simple as when I figured out how to create a gallery for Ren'py.

I'll just basically have to make a custom menu/screen that I can call up and stuff whenever I want.

Still not looking forward to it, though.

In any case, I'm excited to just finally finish everything, show off the demo and work on the calendar. I'm trying to think of what I'll keep in the demo but, hopefully, it won't be too much so that I can publish the demo by the end of November.

Speaking of November! I'm like so utterly embarrassed! I found out that NaNoRenO is actually during March and I confused it for NaNoWriMo which is in November.

Either way, I needed something to challenge myself so here I am. Doesn't matter if it's an official challenge or not, I just wanted an excuse to churn something out.

I'll update you if anything else happens! Thanks for reading, I guess?