Sunday night, some hours before the fabled stupid o'clock. I really hope that I do not end up at stupid o'clock still being awake---it really is a bad habit to develop, all things considered.
I didn't go out of the apartment today, not even to get junk food. There has been a steady non-zero amount of so-called ``community transmission'' cases of COVID-19 out in SIN city, and already the government has increased restrictions. In fact, the more astute readers of a previous entry of mine would find out that among the list of new restrictions published includes the suspension of congressional singing. I'm highlighting these specifically to point out that the government has assessed the situation to be of a sufficiently credible threat before they would implement such restrictions (especially after only recently having further relaxing them), and thus it would be a little foolish to not take a more conservative approach.
So okay, I stayed at home. I am probably going to stay at home also tomorrow, unless the wanderlust kicks in, at which point it's time to hit some random [small-ish] nature park again. That walk around Windsor Nature Park? I really enjoyed that.
I spent much of my time reading and watching a different type of YouTube video. Let's first talk about the reading. I reached page 705/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. The going is tough, since each chapter is basically like an academic paper, similar to the structure of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) that I am also working through, or even The Dinosauria (2nd Edition) edited by David B. Weishampel, Peter Dodson, & Halszka Osmólska that I had finished reading last year. But I'll get there in the end.
As for the type of YouTube video, I learnt about Hololive Production, or more specifically, the Hololive English (HoloEN) crew. VLogging aside, the main gimmick of the Hololive set up is the use of digital avatars that are rigged to essentially be marionettes that are voiced and puppeted by the talent who exist in a type of kayfabe as the avatar/character does things on stream that are vlog-friendly. The HoloEN team recently got new outfits for their characters, and they are cute.
But that aside, as I was watching some of their new outfit reveal videos (specifically for Gawr Gura, Amelia Watson, and Ninomae Ina'nis), I cannot help but associate the whole Hololive phenomenon with playing of paper dolls from the days of old. With the technology currently deployed for the HoloEN team, the association is more valid than one might think, since the character and their clothes/accessories are still 2D in nature, despite the 2.5D trickery that comes from clever rigging of the character art model. Now I don't mean to highlight this to cast shade on what is done here but rather to express admiration that what is old is now made new again because of the accessibility of technology.
Paper dolls of old could only do very limited articulation if at all, and all the ``conversations'' that one could have with it are fully in the domain of the player's imagination, not to mention the severely limited ``audience'' (usually it's the poor mum who ends up listening in on the tea party---most dads just disappear from the scene, but there are some who don't mind experiencing a different slice of childhood that they might not have experienced while they were still children). Now, the modern paper dolls have better articulation while retaining the aesthetics of the cute art style, changing clothing and accessories are less cumbersome than the old paper dolls, and more importantly, with modern audio-visual recording, streaming, and communication technologies, can have what is effectively an imagination driven play shared with the rest of the world among the like-minded, generating a collective fan-base over the same kayfabe globally.
So wondrous.
What is old truly is remade anew!
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In other more technical news, I took the opportunity to update all the fonts that I was using on my personal domain, including the adding of some fall-back font formats that I would have omitted before due to file sizes (and general stinginess in storing those files that are not used 99% of the time). The motivation for that is the ``experimental'' browser's behaviour for my Eirian-IV. It wasn't doing well with the fonts that didn't exist in the system, and I was wondering if it was because the WOFF2 font format was too new for it to handle.
I still haven't tested it on that browser though. Maybe it will work, probably it won't. It's not that big a deal though, since I don't really use that experimental browser much, if at all.
It was just an excuse to tinker. That's as sufficient a statement as it gets.
Anyway, that's about it for today. Till the next update.
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