The food's pretty good. After eating, she heads back to her apartment and collapses in bed and stares at her shiny new phone. About how much disposable income does she have?

After the apartment and buying food, she has around 20% of the basic income sum remaining. She's meant to have a fairly generous buffer, to permit her to afford things like clothing or to get start capital for a business without needing to take a loan.

Okay. She does not actually have any purchases in mind yet but might try to get like, a laptop eventually.

She's tempted by the siren call of doomscrolling but she doesn't like, have a set of things she's in the habit of looking at any more, so she does actually need to make an active decision.

Can she find any videos that look like they might tell her interesting things about Thomassia? It's all still new enough to her that she's gonna be interested in whatever, but her attention might be particularly grabbed by anything about video games (or interactive media in general). She's also gonna be interested in questions like "what musical scales do they use most often" and "does their approach to mathematics differ from Eifwen's" and "biology is mostly just the same as on her home planet as far as she can tell, right" even though she's not exactly an expert in any of those fields.

Thomassian video games have tons of abstract rhythm games (think Osu), and a huge number of history-inspired visual novels and RPGs. In terms of musical scales, they seem to like the D minor pentatonic scale more than any other, but not by a huge margin. Math uses postfox operators, but otherwise is largely similar. In terms ofbiology, they've bred a couple of decorative animals: pretty fish species, and turkey-like birds with bright plumages to decorate parks.

Okay she thinks the decorative animals are really neat. She's ever heard of stuff like that being done but it's usually, like, weird science experiments, not en masse.

By postfix operators, you mean they write functions like (x)f or similar, where the function comes after the input according to the standard direction-of-writing? She thinks that's one of the things they began doing a few decades ago in one of the grand math notation refactorings, it won't be super notable to her.

...She is tempted to see if she can play an osu!-like on her phone but manages to convince herself to try some history-based visual novel, which will probably be more informative.

It's a very WW1-esque visual novel, about a soldier who had to travel across an exotic continent as part of his mission to prevent the infiltration of the local government. He comes from a colonizer country, so it's a bit morally ambiguous, but he has to both prevent foreign agents and revolutionary groups from getting the country to declare independence and refuse to support its colonial overlord.

Meadow's feelings on colonization are similar to her feelings on lots of things that governments might do: yeah, if it's gonna raise quality of life for people enough then you gotta do it, but be careful about it. Motivated reasoning mistakes are super common here.

How upset exactly she gets at the idea of war is going to depend a lot on how much dying she sees. Eifwen certainly had violent conflicts in its past, but... none at a grand scale, not past the industrial revolution. So she's gonna be a tad horrified if there's a whole lot of death—especially if it seems like the death is historically accurate and not just for drama.

There isn't any dying depicted, only mentioned, next to the Cool Spy Adventures and escapes. You never really get a chance to have any say in how things go one way or the other; either you manage to finish your mission, or you get fired and vanish into obscurity.

She's seen enough fucked up art that she wouldn't care much about direct depiction vs indirect mention, except insofar as the primary reason it's only ever mentioned is that it's super rare. It's the implications about history, that might unsettle her here.

Anyways, she does enjoy spy adventures. She'll play this for like, an hour or so probably—her attention span isn't the greatest, she usually gets bored of things eventually instead of focusing on them for several hours. (She might go for longer if there's enough gameplay variety to keep her engaged.)

Well, it's a visual novel. The variety in gameplay is quite limited, in the end, so Meadow might very well lose interest after seeing a few scenes.

Eifweni has any games that are basically just dialogue, but most of their visual novels intersperse puzzle mechanics or other minigames.

She'll last a little while and then... maybe she'll come back to it later. Probably she won't actually do that, but she doesn't like admitting to herself when she's giving up on something.

...You know, in retrospect (she tells herself) maybe rhythm games aren't any less productive than narrative-based games. She'll get to listen to a lot of Thomassian music, right? She's gonna try one.

Thomassian rhythm games are all abstract, challenging Meadow to press the buttons on the screen as they appear as opposed to giving the illusion of playing any kind of instrument. The muic isn't too different, outside of the songs with lyrics being triumphant, vaguely inspiring power ballads about victory, courage and heroism. Meadow can choose any level of difficulty she wants for any song, using a very impressive algorithm to generate levels of the appropriate difficulty.