As you can tell from the publishing date, I’m still working on the “being on time” part of monthly recaps. February was mostly a good month except for the final few days, which were dysfunctional enough that I’m not going to talk about them on the internet. Let’s get on to the fun aspects instead!
Fun
Games
4th Feb – I’m still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I now have the tailor’s shop and the expanded version of Nook’s Cranny, and I’m working on the quest for getting K.K Slider to visit the island. I’m starting to lose enthusiasm for the game though, especially after my experience of testing out the “dream” mechanic and getting surprisingly creeped out by being in a simulacrum-within-a-simulacrum full of appliances and objects that were purely for the impression of community and couldn’t actually be interacted with.
10th Feb – I’m trying out Inscryption on the strong recommendation of my friend Josh, who rated it as one of his favourite games of all time within a few hours of play. I’m less into both deckbuilders and horror than he is, so I wasn’t expecting to have a similar experience, but so far I am finding Inscryption compelling and intriguing. Given that my main card game is Yu-Gi-Oh!, the mechanics of the actual card game are obviously much simpler, and this really works in its favour. The constraints of the card game make it make sense in the game’s universe. Also, the count of times I have stopped to say “what the hell“? out loud as a result of something in the game is already 3, and I imagine many more times are on the way! The only thing I dislike about the game so far is the way the character moves in jumps and 90-degree camera snaps rather than freely – it’s kind of like how some VR games handle movement, and I find it quite disorienting.
18th Feb – I’ve hit the really interesting part of Inscryption, and the “what the hell” count has been upgraded to a “what the fuck” count. I want to write a full review of it, but don’t know how to do that without spoiling what makes it so interesting and effective.
12th Feb – I bought The Sims 2 Legacy a few days after release, which logically was not a good idea given EA’s track record. I also found a bug caused by my audio settings. By default I set MusicBee to have exclusive access to the audio output when its running, so that nothing else can interrupt or conflict with whatever I’m listening to. The Sims 2 Legacy ran fine after being installed, then crashed when I returned to it with MusicBee running; the same pattern happened after a reinstall. When I turned off the audio exclusivity setting in MusicBee, the game didn’t crash, so that’s solved for now at least.
27th Feb – I recieved Two Point Museum as a birthday present (thank you, Danny!). So far I haven’t had time to play much, so I’m still in the tutorial phase, but I’m surprised at the amount of new mechanics and systems that have been added to Museum. The developers could have just copied Campus and Hospital and changed the visuals, but they have instead spent a lot of time on making new elements and a new structure for the levels. Currently my only negative is that the amount of new things results in the game being a little more attention-disrupting than its predecessors, which will hopefully calm down as the game progresses.
Albums
I’ve been spending more time when WFH listening to a playlist of my entire music library shuffled. The device I’m listening to music from, and the context I’m listening in, definitely affect how I listen. More accurately, what I listen to is often decided by whether the device I’m using can scrobble to ListenBrainz automatically, or whether I need to enter the information in manually. If I’m at work, listening on an offline MP3 player, I prefer to listen to full albums – I’ll pick an album that appeals, and let it keep playing through to the next alphabetically etc until either I reach an album that I’m not feeling on that day or suddenly want to listen to a different specific album. At home, listening on either my PC or an old phone that can auto-scrobble, I enjoy putting the playlist on shuffle and re-discovering songs that I haven’t heard in a while or that get lost near the end of their album.
I also bought these albums this month:
Relient K – Collapsible Lung
This album confused me at first, because it reminded me so much of another band!
New Politics released a pop-rock album in 2015 – Vikings – that I really enjoyed, but then dramatically changed their sound. Collapsible Lung sounds more like that New Politics album than Relient K (and more like 2015-era New Politics than New Politics themselves now do). Only the first two songs have the energy and catchiness that I expect from Relient K, but the rest of the album will hopefully grow on me after more listens.
Sugarcult – Start Static (20th Anniversary)
A significant chunk of my music library can be described as “songs that would soundtrack an early 2000s extreme sports game”… yet somehow I didn’t already own this album.
Birthday
My birthday was on the 7th, but I ended up doing something fun each day for multiple days rather than celebrating all at once. My line manager briefly visited to deliver my present from the team. (She used the collection money to buy me chocolate and Disaronno, which was a very good call.)
Then my mum and sister came up from Cornwall in the afternoon. We – alongside my nan and aunt – ordered a chinese takeaway and played Trivial Pursuit. My sister also attempted to make me birthday brownies, but after a wet-ingredient mishap they were unfortunately inedible!
On Saturday 8th I went out for a meal with friends. This was interesting because while I’ve been friends with all 3 of them for 15 years, one had never met the others, and I was surprisingly nervous about everyone meeting. However, the nervousness was unfounded, and I had a great time. On the Sunday I then caught up with a friend who had not been well enough to come on Saturday.
Work
I’ve spent this month being slightly obsessive about the project I mentioned last month, about reorganising the 4 nursing caseloads and services into 8 smaller ones. At the point I was brought in, the project had already been going for a while, but for some reason the people leading the project had decided not to involve the admins who would actually be moving hundreds of patient records, and thousands of patient schedules, until a week before the planned moving date. The original plan from above was also to just start moving patients on Feb 3rd, as soon as the new services had been created inside EMIS, without any structure, communications to the nurses, or safety mitigations in place. This, to put it bluntly, was a terrible plan!
Thankfully, during the meeting on Jan 29th, everyone else from my office also believed that we needed to slow down and make the patient-moving more controlled. So this led to a chaotic (from the admin side; thankfully not for the nurses) few weeks of planning and figuring out ways to move things safely. The plan we came up with created an amount of work for me that I had expected to be difficult-but-doable, but actually turned out to be impossible. This led to a very difficult few days when the first team’s deadline approached, and to one of the worst work-days I’ve ever experienced. At least it was followed by genuine apologies and reflections on what went wrong from the management team in my office, which I do believe will mean this won’t happen again in the same way.
Other things
I begrudgingly have a Google Account for 2 reasons; Pokemon Go and Google Maps. However, I have now installed an alternative map app – Magic Earth – to reduce one point of google-reliance. My map needs are pretty basic, as I don’t often need to drive outside of a very local area. As I’m a fairly anxious driver, my main factor is reliability. I need to be able to trust that if the app is telling me I need to be in a certain lane then it is correct about that, and most importantly I need to trust that the “absolutely no motorways” setting will stay on permanently rather than needing to be toggled for every single trip. (This was previously the case for Google Maps, which once screwed me over when I lost internet mid-drive; restarting the directions reset that setting and redirected me on to a motorway).