Speaking of expecting things, here's a lesson for the road: to avoid disappointment, try to remove as much expectation as possible within one's life. The logic is at least explainable without having to invoke God (sorry God, not that You are not in charge, but that I am trying to convince someone, so faith is not a valid approach). Let the set of possible outcomes be U. If we develop expectation, what we are saying is that there is some subset S such that S⊂U contains the set of outcomes that we are interested in. We define a disappointment as the event where we obtain an outcome o∈U such that o∉S. Clearly then, the more specific our expectation (i.e. the smaller S is), the larger the number of events that are not contained in it. Sicne we are not clairvoyant, we may assume that the events in U are all equiprobability, so the cardinality of U\S is directly proportional to the probability of disappointment.
Thus, if we set S=∅, then we can never be disappointed since U\S=U, i.e. we are willing to accept whatever possible outcomes appear and roll with it.
Us believers are assured by our faith that in the long run, God is in control and has a plan, and so any small ``bumps'' of seeming set backs are unimportant to the whole picture.
The reason for raising the whole disappointment arc (and the year end blues really) is just a light reflection of an outcome that showed itself up today. I just want to say that if something is important enough for one, then it is always important to plan contingencies to the extent that one is able to assert control over, after which everything else we will leave it to God. That's what I do... partly because I never want to be a burden to others, and partly because as a trained computer scientist working (or going to work) as an engineer, it is our duty to think ahead from the perspective of what the system can/cannot do, and to engineer things so that we maximise what we need the system to do, minimise what we don't want the system to do, all while keeping things affordable and on time, applying the knowledge and experience that we have developed in our specific domains of expertise.
That's about all I want to raise about this for now. Maybe I'll have more to mumble about, but we'll just have to see.
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The thing about Minecraft is that every thing that we do in the world has a sense of permanence. Minecraft has been described by some as virtual Legos, but the analogy doesn't quite capture the allure of the game. As most of us know, at the end of the day, all Legos constructions need to be taken apart back to their original component pieces to be packed away so that we can play with them another day. Some might protest about this concept, but I would gently point out that they are building Legos model kits as opposed to playing with the Legos---they are not the same.
Minecraft, as I mentioned, has permanence. Build a house today, and the next time we load the world, the house will still be there, especially if it is in single player. Dig a long-ass tunnel underground, and it will remain there, possibly populated with mobs the next time you log in. Permanence... this is what makes Minecraft an excellent game to putter about when there's nothing better to do, since any and all changes stay in the game world. Not to mention that there is no real ``end state'' of the game---it being a genuine sandbox game means that apart from the basic physics and [crafting] chemistry, the scope of what one does in game is limited only by the imagination of the player. Yes, there is a game-like ``goal'' of killing the Ender Dragon, but even after doing that, it is not the end of the game itself---there are more resources to gather, more physics to play with, and more construction/exploration of the world map one can get involved in.
That was also why I was hesitant of dropping my old map to launch a brand new one in 1.18.1.
Anyway, I spent much of the day just puttering about. I seem to develop an interest in digging out the hill that my base is sitting on, but through layers and using glass to cap the exposed ends, creating something that looks like an apartment layout. You can see the exposed ends of it here:
Actually, let me just put up the hilltop base plan and give a simple tour.
Across the one-block chasm from my red brick living quarters where I split the original hill is the large rectangular farming platform. On the extreme left is the wool farm with all sixteen coloured wools. Then sweeping from left to right and top to bottom are my automated chicken & feather farm, my automated chicken egg farm, my manual cow pasture with dual fence gates, my manual watermelon and pumpkin farms. The middle is then my airlock controlled apiary with associated flower bed, with the red brick structure housing my nether portal, and my netherwart plot.
Continuing the sweep, one would find the newly constructed archery range, the manual carrot farm, the manual potato farm, and manual wheat farm. The right side would find my manual beet farm, followed by a small complex of my automated sugar cane farm, my semi-automatic bonemeal composter, and automatic cactus farm.
It's not a great Minecraft build by any account, but it has been quite fun building it up all throughout this sabbatical year. The surrounding areas (except for the left) have been denuded with my tree chopping sprints, and there is an extensively empty 3-block high layer that is my deep mines that supplied all the stone and minerals I needed. Glass came from sand way out in the desert. I used Jack O'Lanterns as my main light source due to their relative ease of creation compared to Glowstones that require extensive digging through the nether (Jack O'Lanterns just required carved pumpkins and torches, and those are quite easy to make/obtain).
Well, that's about all I want to talk about. Till the next update, I suppose.
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