Quasi-Circuit Breaker That Isn't A [Complete] Lockdown

This is no news blog, but it's official: many more restrictions are kicking in now-ish, no thanks to the steady increase in the number of so-called local community cases.

Of all the new restrictions, the ones that affect me more directly is the prohibition of dining in, and the further reduction of congregation service size to about 50 (without the pre-testing). That means that I will not be able to visit my favourite bar just to drink, read, and chill during the time period of effect (May 16 to Jun 13). Ah well.

Looking up that date in the article revealed the following excerpt:

This, and other new measures under what the Health Ministry labelled as "Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)" will take effect from May 16 through Jun 13.

The emphasis is mine, and is a demonstration of the leakage of American-styled English (AmE) in our originally predominantly British-styled English (BrE).

To be fair, I'm not entirely consistent with my use of BrE either---I tend to prefer following the rules of BrE for phrasing and orthography, except for the case of the `-ize' suffix, preferring `-ise' over `-ize' because `s' is on the home row while `z' wasn't. So expect to see words like ``realise'', ``actualise'', and even ``emphasise'', over ``realize'', ``actualize'', and ``emphasize''.

I'm not going to comment on the appropriateness and timeliness of this new so-called ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'' other than the rhetorical ``it could have been avoided had the political will be there''.

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I spent much of the day watching Amelia Watson of HoloEN playing Outer Wilds while completing Animorphs Series: Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift and page 961/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications.

Outer Wilds seem like a really nice story-heavy first-person game with some execution-heavy segments, with a time-loop mechanic. Outer Wilds is not the same as The Outer Worlds a game that I had purchased and played some time back. Their names are sufficiently similar that even Amelia Watson acknowledged her screw-up when she was planning to stream it (she bought The Outer Worlds instead of Outer Wilds). Their similarities lie in that they involve space and exploration of different worlds with some kind of global (doesn't sound right since it is a solar system) crisis that needs to be resolved by the protagonist.

And that's where the similarities end.

Outer Wilds is strictly narrative/exploratory---there is no gunplay involved. There are no role-playing elements in the game; progress is measured by accrued lore over some kind of feat/attribute/reputation upgrade, favouring the meta-game over the game per se. Space-flight is integral to the game of Outer Wilds, and do not act as loading zones/hubs the way The Outer World does.

Watching Amelia Watson play through it over 23 hr, 44 min, and 31 s was enough for me to know that it is a game that I might have enjoyed, but would have been a little out of character due to playing the meta-game.

The more astute would ask: how did I manage to watch 23 hr, 44 min, and 31 s within a day? The trick is to use the 2× speed-up available in YouTube, which reduced the total time used to around 11 hr, 52 min, and 15.5 s. The other trick is to watch part of that 12-hour marathon the day before, and complete the rest today at 2× speed.

No games for me today, and that's about it. I'm having a headache that has come from God knows where, and am going to turn in before the clock rolls-over to the next day.

Till the next update.