VantaQueen headed out camping today with one of the kids. I keep second-guessing staying home, but I wasn't about to leave Hannibal with someone he'd only met once. Still doesn't stop me from wondering if I made the right call. I was really looking forward to going with her.

So I grabbed an ice-cold Jolt Cola, one of these new salted caramel Butterfingers, made a tuna sandwich (thanks, Vanta, for putting everything together), and wrote code.

Spent part of the day polishing the backend for this site. Nobody will ever notice most of it, and that's exactly how infrastructure should work. When it works, it disappears.

Then I wandered back into Neon Chain.

The game has only been live a couple of weeks, and people are actually sticking around long enough to play instead of uninstalling after thirty seconds. That's encouraging. The weak spot now is retention, so v1.6 is becoming less about new gameplay and more about giving people a reason to come back. Weekly and monthly leaderboards feel like a better fight than asking someone to chase an all-time score they'll probably never catch.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got the house to myself, a case of Jolt in the fridge, and code that isn't going to write itself.