D2

30C and humid the last two days. It broke with a storm front passing through; it will be 4C at its coldest tomorrow night. This spring has been uncommonly chilly. It should be short sleeves weather regularly by now. If the forecast is to believe we might get back into the 20s in a week or so, but another stretch in the teens is upon us.

Because I work in a basement, I still put on long pants and a hoodie this morning, and then turned up the baseboard heater before starting for the day, because a damp 19C is no one's idea of fun. It will be cool down there all summer, as it always is. The ground never really warms much beneath the surface.

This explains the need for dehumidification down there, too: if the magic box didn't do it, it would just condense on the walls and floor when it gets real bad. The only cost is...heat, because there's work being done by the dehumidifier.

I have started playing OpenTTD again, just a little 256x256 map. I already have a shipping monopoly on coal: I have connected every coal mine to the same power station by train. I've got every iron ore mine (this map has two) connected to a (the) steel mill. There are...four?...farms I don't have connected to my factory yet, but I'm close on two (they're already just off my mainlines) and the other two are on the other corner of the map...but the mainline to the steel mill goes in that direction. I may be bottlenecked on goods soon. If not, it'll be time to get into shipping wood to sawmills.

It's interesting how my junctions are growing organically. Just like every time I tell myself that "oh sure, I'll use the junctionary", but what actually happens is that I do simple merges where one track crosses over the two-way mainline to a branch, and then I just keep doing that because the number of places I need a "real" three- or four-way junction is almost zero. So far on this map I have one "true" three-way junction, which is really just two merges about 8 tiles apart, and I think I'm going to add a slip lane that lets some traffic skip the mainline by connecting the two around one side. And if that's not enough, maybe I'll rebuild it as a roundabout.

As in many games, I bootstrapped the company with passenger transport via airplane, just building airports in the two biggest towns and let 'er rip. It provides solid financial footing but I'm not really getting much gameplay out of it. I'm considering shuttering airline operations altogether: the division is profitable and it does help the towns grow, but I don't need the money now that big-time rail operations are up and running and I plan to funnel all my goods delivery to one central town anyway.

I also just bit the bullet and started play on the laptop without docking it. A bigger screen would be nicer sometimes, but not having to move from comfy chair to desk is also a win.