I am back from Prague. It is great to be back, but feels weird. Like when I lie down in bed, I'm like, this feels sort of strange, since I'm used to AirBnB bed. But at the same time my time in Prague already feels like another life. This is not exactly a new phenomenon; I felt the same way when moving back and forth between my parents' house and dorm rooms in college. And explains why I'm more prone to existential dread while out on camping trips and such. My physical location is a big part of my identity, apparently. Even in video games.

I think that being able to build a house and have it be 'your place' that you come home to is a big part of why people like Minecraft. I should add that to feature list for Game Thing. Making sure that any place you build stays relevant (e.g. because you've built infrastructure there that's useful but non-portable) is also important. Minecraft does the former part really well, and Factorio does the latter part. And thinking about this makes me realize that the thing that makes those dreams about 'shortcuts' interesting isn't the existence of the shortcuts themselves—it's that I find them in a place that I thought I knew really well already, so finding out that there's shortcuts, or one day realizing that there's something strange about the topology of the world that I thought I knew so well has an emotional impact. That part is going to be harder to replicate in a video game.

Yesterday Sara and I went for a nice long walk, then went to Atwood fest, then visited my parents. I was getting really sleepy at the end of all that.

After sleeping since about 8:00 last night, I dreamt this morning about being part of some team that was making a cool game. I was going to build a map generator. This was announced to the community and people were excited about it. This felt really good. This was slightly different from the actual situation of me working on Factorio, because (1) I was working from the green room in my parents' basement (Sara and I visited yesterday and checked it out, since Timmy's supposedly moving in there for a few weeks before he goes off to the Marines), sometimes with some other dude who I had to share my chair with, and (2) this was some Minecraft-based thing. And it had thunderstorms, which maybe I was also working on.

/me checks on some 3-year-old Minecraft forum thread

Sara dreamt that we were walking around the mall. I took us to a movie theatre and saw all these previews for different shows. One of them looked good until the main character said that he liked Scott Walker. But at that point we were actually in the movie so it was harder to get out.

Then we went to a wedding. But we never actually saw the wedding. We were in the basement of some building, and then the next day there was a funeral. Sara kept finding her car doors open because Nica kept leaving them open. And the people at this wedding/funeral thing didn't seem to like us being there. In fact they kept trying to take our stuff and seemed to want us dead. Sara was missing a piece of luggage.