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I have a difficult time believing the week is already over – and yet somehow it is. Today was a really productive day. Haolun stayed over again last night and after we woke we went over to the creek and hung around for a bit, although it was uncomfortably cold (somehow it’s dropped down to 22F, wind chill included, over the span of about a week). 

After he left I got to work and successfully managed to port over the system UI from But For Now We Are Young over the next few hours. Aside from needing to update the text on the various information screens, everything else is completely functional, and I even added an additional pop-up window for when volume is changed, which was intended for but not implemented into Young around the time I suspended it. Tomorrow (or later today) I’ll finish up the final touches on the system UI but otherwise it’s working really well and I’m really surprised I managed to implement it so quickly and with so few hiccups. I also managed to create a really cool ASCII version of Avery’s portrait, which looks far better I feel than the original. I wasn’t really considering planning on having a major nondiegetic introductory screen, but now that I’ve seen just how good it looks…

Staoue came over tonight and we drove around for a while, and looked at architecture manuals at the bookstore. Shortly after he arrived we had a pretty hilarious encounter with a police officer who, while turning into the train station where we had parked, apparently saw me gesticulating wildly through the passenger window and pulled over to check in on us. We quickly cleared up the misunderstanding and in the meantime piqued his curiosity about what we’d been talking about so animatedly (we were real up in laughter). Well, I’m not gonna tell you what we were talking about because I don’t want to record it in what’s supposed to be a semi-serious log but needless to say after we told him what we were discussing he too joined in on it briefly and we all had a pretty good laugh about it. He looked pretty young, just a bit older than us maybe. He seemed to have genuinely enjoyed the conversation, and I hope that he had a good time and that the experience had a positive effect on his night. 

For some reason that interaction had a very positive effect on my day, which was already going pretty well (and continued to go well afterwards). I dunno; I guess it was because it was the first genuinely positive encounter I’ve had with someone who wasn’t already an established friend in a real long time. It really surprised me – in a positive sense – and made me feel more, well… optimistic, I guess.