QC

Additionally, I think I need to add something to the puddle so I can track the people in the forest, so maybe I can find the secret pizza meeting. Soot didn’t work.

I do think I’m eventually supposed to get the spellbook from the occult books store. The lady says not to touch any books until I know what I need.

Delores has an “offiss key”. I wondered if maybe it had something to do with the Post Office, but I didn’t see anything that worked. Safety deposit box makes more sense, but if it’s that it won’t work until later.

Okay, I broke down and used the in-game hint system. As usual, I regret having done so. It told me to thoroughly search the occult book store, which was probably the single most plausible idea I had. I discovered that of course the ladder moves.

It frustrates me to no end that I have one procedure for doing a thing, and a separate procedure for doing a thing when I know I need to. It took me a few seconds to figure out how to properly search the book store *once I knew that was for sure what I needed to do*.

I spent many more minutes than that “trying” to figure out what to do using a more casual procedure. WTF. It reminds me strongly of studying for the SATs ~20 years ago. I sometimes made errors, and could basically always see them immediately once I knew the answer was wrong.

I forced myself to look at every answer through the lens of someone just having told me I had gotten it wrong. It was intense, but very effective. It feels like a different way of using my brain...

And I get that thinking the reliable way is somehow costly, but SO IS not thinking the reliable way! I’ve tried to debug this thing in me, and afaict it’s tied up with pretty deep stuff, but I think there’s a leverage point here.