Milquetoast

Yet another day of hiding in the apartment as the world around me burns for one reason or another.

Today's a passive sort of day. I didn't play any games, not even running Minecraft in the background AFK-ing while the auto-sorted chests fill slowly with mob items, nor did I work on LED2-20. I read a couple more chapters of Luke under analysis in the ESV Study Bible, read a couple more articles from The Best of BYTE: Two Decades on the Leading Edge, finished reading Thaïs, and volume 1 of KonoSuba, and am about slightly under half-way through for volume 2.

Thaïs is a tragedy. While the epynomous character ascends through her reconciliation with her previous baptism under the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the protagonist (Paphnutius) himself who started as being holy eventually became a backsliding Christian when he discovered that his quest to evangelise to Thaïs had mutated into a devolution of his original morals and ethics, becoming plagued with demons and the like after delivering her to the nunnery. While not scripture, it is a parable of sorts to remind ourselves that even the truest of believers must be constantly aware of how the world affects them, and to be honest to both oneself and to God to ensure that one does not backslide to falling back into sin. The story ends on a cliff-hanger of sorts, where Paphnutius finally realised his sin, but does not provide the resolution on whether he had come back from that or not. There were bits of discussion among the pagan philosophers amidst Thaïs, but they were really more of a sidetrack that contributed little to the main story---think of it like how Victor Hugo went on various tangents explaining/describing his pet topics while writing Les Misérables.

Apparently Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp had outages for a few hours while I was asleep. That was... surprising, but it didn't faze me much. As I had mentioned in reply to someone who was kind enough to share with me the news:

Besides, it's not like anything of value was truly lost when those services went down. 🤣

Which is true. Facebook was never a ``serious'' thing, no matter how seriously they want to take themselves (they have to---it's literally their business). Instagram is a cesspool of attention-seekers selling the pleasures of the flesh for the most part, whether it is lust, gluttony, or general envy/covetousness. And Whatsapp... oof... where to start? Mis-information central, spam central... with vague communication uses. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like me some instant messaging systems that allows short (both in length and duration of validity) messages to be sent. But it is a terrible medium for conducting ``serious'' business in, since it is bloody impossible to hunt down references the way that email can handle in a more effective manner. And it being a misinformation/spam central comes from the ease of forwarding all kinds of rubbish-y messages without a safe means of checking them; that last bit, I blame it on the form factor of being primarily accessible over a smartphone. Smartphones aren't exactly conducive for rigour in any sense of the word---that ``tap'' versus ``long tap'' distinction makes it very easy to trigger off the wrong gesture, compared to the ``left click'' versus ``right click'' that one can do in PC-land.

I am thankful that my hard-ass personality has more or less ensured that the people who do have ``my'' Whatsapp contact do not abuse it the way that I have heard from the nightmares shared online; one of the perks of being who I am, eh?

I think that's about it for now. Maybe I'll complete volume 2 of KonoSuba tonight before heading to sleep. I don't really feel like doing anything active today.

Till the next update.