Happy Blaugust 4th! Today I forgot to bring my flash drive to work with me, which means I wasn't able to type a post, which means I would've had to write one on my phone. And I didn't feel like it, so I didn't. I wrote yesterday's Gauntlet post on my phone while I was at the laundry room, and it was a long one. It's frustrating how tedious and time-consuming it is to write on a phone compared to using a real keyboard. I don't want writing to be something I just tolerate.
I was thinking of recording an audiolog, as I sometimes did during #100DtO, but someone who normally leaves the office at 16h00 stayed until 16h30, so I didn't get any time to myself. I just got home from work, so be advised that this is post-functional-brain writing and set your expectations accordingly.
It's my fault. I remembered to put the flash drive in the container I use to keep it safe, but I forgot to actually put the container in my backpack. I looked at it last night before I went to bed and thought, "should I put that in my backpack?" followed by "nah, it's right there on my desk, there's no way I'll forget it." Good job, brain.
But serendipitously, my spouse saw my wish for a low-profile USB drive, and granted it! It was in the teeny tiny mailbox I keep on my desk. She put the flag up, so I knew I had mail. Usually all that gets delivered is cute little notes or sometimes stickers, but this time, I received an entire hard drive's worth of flash drive! Well, half a hard drive. It's 128 gigs, which is huge, it's 50% the size of the SSD in my main workstation. I was going to get the cheapest, smallest low-profile drive I could find: after all, I only need 32MB for FreeDOS and a copy of Microsoft Word 5.0. This will definitely come in handy, though, because the other day my hard drive filled up, and I learned that Debian doesn't inform you when your hard drive is full, programs just start failing in terrifying ways. I thought I broke my computer. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I opened up my home folder and saw "Free space: 0". It's an uncommon problem, but an easy one to fix. I found a bunch of old files I could delete. But now I won't have to! Izzy's the best! $$froggy$$
I'll take my old flash drive to work as well as the new one. That way, if I forget the one I brought home, I have a backup I can use the next day.
Anyway, my brain is fried because I had a terrible day at work. I was thinking about how I was going to describe it in the audiolog, because it's a mess, and it was fresh in my mind. But now I don't really feel like it. Maybe I will tomorrow, or maybe once I'm sitting in front of my nice laptop keyboard with a functional brain I'll be inspired to write about something more interesting. For now, this is about all I got.
Gauntlet II update
I'm on level 35. I've killed two more dragons since level 18. One of them was optional, but there was a 10 SUPER SHOTS item on that level, so I took out the dragon to get its upgrade potion. It gave me a defense boost.
The third dragon scared me. It was blocking the exit, there were no 10SS items to be found, and it was a straight corridor to reach the dragon, so no possibility of cheesing it with reflective shots. I approached it without a real plan in place other than to run away, and to my bewilderment, the dragon stopped breathing fire. It just sat there and let me shoot it until it was dead. Maybe the dragons that are otherwise unkillable by solo players have a flag that makes them do this? It's kind of a depressing compromise, but if that's the case the developers deserve way more credit than I've been giving them all these years.
My reward for slaying that dragon was an item that expanded my inventory space, from 6 slots for keys and potions to an inconceivable 128. Which might as well be infinite. No longer do I have to carefully consider how many keys and potions to pick up, I can just pick up all of them and I almost always have a key and a potion available. It's a literal game-changer. Solo Gauntlet II is a much more fleshed-out experience than I ever realized. I don't remember the game having permanent character upgrades! Maybe it's because the way Mike and I played, we died and continued too often for the upgrades to be that meaningful. I'm having a great time building up my wizard, though. I'm up to 3300 food, which I never thought I'd see. I'm a little over a third of the way through the game, and if it continues being this well-balanced, I think I stand a good chance of clearing 100. Godspeed you! Red Wizard.
Okay, that's all I got. See you tomorrow, when hopefully my brain is less oatmeal consistency.