



That’s how I felt after about 30 hours. I stopped playing and then came back to it a year or two later, progressed on the main story quests, and all of a sudden I’ve been playing for over 300 hours.

Okay, so La-Mulana is technically a more recent game, but I remember the original version from 20 years ago looking just like an MSX game.
Anyway, the gate of guidance theme really stood out to me.
Oh, and the village’s theme too, and several others.
I just had a meeting with HR. So for context, the past year or so has been kinda rough at work with anxiety, depression, and ADHD meds that no longer seem to work quite as well as they had been for the previous 20 years. So when stress got the better of me, I made some stupid mistakes, and made a snarky comment or two on Teams. I’ve actually been feeling burned out off and on for several years, but I do still get some satisfaction from coding, even after 13 years at the same company with glowing performance reviews.
Anyway, today I was given a choice: Take a severance package and leave, or stay with a performance improvement plan. Honestly not sure what I want. I feel like all I needed was was some time to recover from a particularly stressful project. I could’ve been fine. But instead I get an ultimatum and two fucking days to decide.
I’ve saved a decent amount of money over the years, so it might not be the worst thing for me to cash out and let someone else deal with the bullshit I’d be leaving behind. I would love to work part time and focus on my game dev project(s). On the other hand, health insurance is fucking expensive, and I’m going to miss being able to donate “a few thousand dollars” to my church’s food pantry without needing to worry about myself at all.
For example, I saved a bunch of these small cardboard sheets that were separating the rows of cans in a box of cat food.

Add some glue and you have a little tent for your cat.

I didn’t know they had an email client. Makes sense though, they have their own version of pretty much everything else.