"I wonder if blues' teachers have a hard time interesting the students in things when on no level are the things going to be necessary in later life per se."

"I dunno, I like to think that I'd still want to learn stuff and work even if I didn't have to to eat."

"Oh, sure, some of 'em, I guess maybe there's selective blue schools, but even the kids who don't want to, of whom I assume there are many, still need to show up to class."

"I suppose. On the other hand that might make for some clever ways of holding kids' attention in class."

"When I was a kid I loved a lot of the games they market to little blues, maybe they play those all day."

"Ooh, what sorts of games?"

"Especially realistic civ-builder and city-manager sort of games. My favorite was Planet Tehapla."

"Oh I've actually heard of that one. Never played it, though, and I used to be more into puzzle games and some old-school platformers."

"I've tried some puzzle games but most of them seem too wheel-spinny to me."

Giggle. "I guess they can be that."

"For a timewaster on the train trips too short to really read, I like the arty little apps? Where you drop sand or draw snowflakes or something."

"The types of puzzle games I tend to like are more—I wanna say hardcore without sounding lame but I don't think there's a way to do that—when I'm looking for timewasters I mostly listen to music."

"I listen to music too but it's not an activity all by itself, for me."

"Depends on the music, for me. Some I can have in the background, listen to it while I'm doing other stuff, but some I often like to just—listen to as a full-time activity."

"Maybe there's a deeper level of music appreciation than I've reached at which that would make sense. Sometimes I won't do very much else while listening to something new, or something with a story to it."

"Musicals are a very good example of that, yeah."

"A lot of them are too cheesy for me, but some of them are nice."

"The cheesiness is sometimes part of the appeal!—sometimes."

"Sometimes?"

"I mean, there's some cheesiness that's inherent to the medium, you can only break out into song so many times in random situations before it becomes a bit too much, right? But some musicals are good enough, musically and stuff, that you can just straightforwardly enjoy them—Oahk is a particularly moving example, I do recommend—and others embrace the silliness and only sometimes succeed."

"I've listened to one song from Oahk but not the whole thing. I forget the title, the chorus ends 'let's doom our children too' or something like that."

"'Let's damn our children too,' yeah, the song's A Future Bright. On the side of musicals that embrace the silliness you have ones like Amantana, which is one of the good ones, and The Erethani Prince, which is laughably terrible and incredibly melodramatic."

"I don't think I've heard any songs from those." She writes them down on her everything.

"Erethani Prince fails lots of, like, basic history and sociology checks and just tries to coast on the whole thing about, like, 'well everyone is grey in Ereith right?' And fails to make a compelling plot out of it."

"How does it coast on that?"