Rain and snow have been coming down for what feels like two and a half days straight — roughly 24 hours times 2.5. The clouds seem to have a deep stockpile. I have not seen the sun once. The ground, though, is warm; whatever falls, snow or rain, turns into water. I went out once and regretted it immediately. My shoes have that slightly seeping feeling. A single kilometer is fine, but on the round trip my toes started to feel damp. I am trying to stay in as much as possible.
The younger kid's study time is supervised by their mother, who keeps pushing the schedule forward. When the studying is done, there is a 20-minute break, and that break is mainly for games now — videos have lost their appeal. Red Alert is the current favorite. It is one of the easier real-time strategy games to grasp, and in some ways it feels close to reality: infantry, engineers, dogs, tanks, anti-air vehicles, Kirovs, robots, flying soldiers, ore trucks, chrono troops, nuclear bombs, weather control, and all the special units.
The older kid plays Dota. It started on the KK battle platform, but Win7 support is poor and the page would not load. There was some talk of changing the DNS or something, but nothing worked. Running War3 directly, we found a Dota 6.53 AI map in the downloads folder. The game is more than 20 years old, and it still runs fine on a laptop that is over ten years old. The older kid uses the Dark Ranger. I suspect the appeal is partly the feeling of having something to talk about with classmates who play Honor of Kings. They have not actually played Honor of Kings. I do not have any games installed on my phone.
Just now I installed the Xiao Ma emulator and the Xiao Ji emulator. I put on a dinosaur-themed beat-'em-up, but there were no buttons. I pressed and pressed and the character stopped moving. Turned out my finger had drifted outside the touch area. On the laptop I installed the Youju platform. The short-travel keys are not comfortable, but compared with before it is a qualitative leap.
In the evening after dinner, I started teaching the older kid mahjong. I suggested putting an app on our phones so we would not have to shuffle and stack the tiles, but the phone screen is too small, and there is no feeling of calling tiles. Without that feel, it is not the same, so we let it go. After mahjong, both kids wanted to play Dou Dizhu. I have taught them at home before, but they cannot even sort their cards properly or hold them well. We play the relaxed family way, the way we do with grandma and the others.