Paula was injured near the end of her cruise; now we don't know when she'll be coming back. It was a minor injury but she has a number of other maladies that may make the recovery process take longer. Obviously I'm not upset with her for getting injured or needing to recover, but I'm anxious that the full burden of her widget tallying duties will continue to fall on me with no expiration date, and I can't expect any help or additional compensation for all the extra labor and the mental toll it's taking on me. Fuck the system

but enough shop talk

All I've been wanting to do when I get home is play Daggerfall Unity. I discovered a bit ago that the Linux version actually runs pretty decently on the computer I'm using, and was enjoying it, but of course that was two or three OS installs ago. After my first Linux DFU save was wiped, I had written off the idea of playing anything that requires keeping a long-term save file, but I started watching a playthrough of someone using the Archaeologist Guild mod and it seemed so cool that I had to give it another shot.

I'm cautious about installing any software from the various app stores and repositories that Linux seems so excited about, because I don't want to upset the delicate balance and accidentally fuck up my install again. Refreshingly, DFU works just like a windows program: I download a zip file, extract it into a folder and click an executable file. The only difference is that it isn't a .exe file, but they at least did me the courtesy of a recognizable file extension (.x86_64) instead of making me guess which file I'm supposed to try to run. I put it in a folder on my dedicated data partition, and I was hoping that it would keep all the save data in that folder too, but unfortunately it sticks them in a location in my home folder and there's no option to change it. I'm making backups of my save folder pretty regularly, but it sucks that there's still the potential to lose progress. At least I have an easy way to backup my saves now, though. Assuming nothing happens to my data partition. Shit, I shouldn't say that.

The archaeologist's guild is brilliant. It's designed with decades of hindsight about what's good about Daggerfall, and how to enjoy what's good about it. I'd like to talk about it more when I'm not quite so brain dead.

Daggerfall is the closest I come to playing an MMO. It's huge enough to be effectively infinite. There are so many things to do and so many different ways to do them. It's a game I get utterly sucked into. It makes me forget about reality, the hours just melt away. That makes it an excellent escape when I'm going through a rough patch, but I have to be careful not to let it prevent me from doing other things I want to do. I'll try not to get lost