Recovery

I mentioned yesterday about how I ran out of spoons and effectively took a day off from whatever I was supposed to be doing normally [that wasn't work related] yesterday.

Today... I think I got back most of my spoons. Which is just in time for the upcoming week.

I spent the morning with the live streaming of the Sunday service. Pastor was covering Psalm 147, or more specifically, Psalm 147:1. The uninitiated might ask, ``how in the world can anyone preach an entire service based on only this one verse?'', but I can provide a little more explicit explanation.

See, it's the first [Sunday] service of the month, and so there's the ordinance of the Lord's Supper to uphold. Then there's also the rather recent relaxation of COVID-19 management rules from the SIN city government, which simplifies to saying that congregational singing [for worship] is now permitted. So much of the service was really spent on singing hymns and other worship songs. Even during the preaching of the service's message there was even more singing---singing (and non-fleshly music for that matter) are among the core tenets of the worship of God.

Thus, in addition to the rather pithy explanation of why the sole verse of Psalm 147:1 was as important as it was, there was also much opportunity to praise and worship the Lord in song.

Worship aside, I spent some time assaulting the ocean monument in Minecraft. I had erected a set of beacons to provide additional boons to make taking out the regular Guardians (and the three Elder Guardians later on, for that matter) much easier, and had the chance to test out the deployment of the conduit to obtain the boon of ``conduit power'', which gave underwater night-vision, as well as negating the gradual loss of breathing air each time one is submerged within the water. I killed enough Guardians to gain enough materials to make my own prismarine blocks, and with that, I had managed to deploy a conduit back in my Great Aquarium.

The last thing that I needed to do there was to populate it with various fish. A problem that I will need to solve is to ensure that those fish do not despawn---unlike farm mobs of sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, it seems like fish will naturally despawn if they are not named with a name-tag. I'll just have to trade a few more name tags with the villagers in my shopping complex, and if I do get bored, will probably just whip up some more via creative mode if need be.

Apart from the conquering of the ocean monument in Minecraft, I also spent a few hours on completing The Room 4: Old Sins, the fourth instalment of the puzzle/escape room series of The Room by Fireproof Games. I like that puzzle series---they are not usually time sensitive, have decent puzzle mechanics, and are generally fun without being overly taxing. The puzzle type is usually limited to quasi-mechanical physics puzzles, with the twisting of perspectives as an added bonus, though probably not at the level that Antichamber is known for (a puzzle game that I really need to start+complete, just like The Witness). Puzzles are gated by the availability of pieces rather than specific tool-limitations for the most part, and all of them can be solved based only on knowledge that is available in-game (i.e. no need external knowledge like morse code or anything along those lines).

I have also miraculously cleared up the gradual accumulated backlog of YouTube videos from my favourite Hololive VTubers too, a first in many months. I attribute this to my new-found ability to consistently watch the videos at 2× speed---previously the maximum that I could go was 1.5× while still doing other things and maintaining cognitive awareness and understanding of what is being said, but with the expansion of the original five from Hololive Myth (and the adorkable Reine of Holoro (HoloID Gen 2)) to include IRyS, the new group of five from Hololive Council, some more Holostars like Oga and Aruran, as well as a few Hololive JP folks (Okayu, Botan, and HAACHAMA)... yeah, I was running out of time to catch up.

Mind you, this was with a fairly aggressive filtering process. I generally follow what Ina and Reine have, then be selective of IRyS's streams. Then the rest of the Holomems videos are chosen more or less based on the game they are playing, favouring games that I have not seen before or games/genres that the particular holomem is skilled at, and of course anything else that is a special event that isn't ASMR or karaoke related (nothing against ASMR/karaoke---these simply won't work at anything faster than 1× speed).

I guess it shows just how much output following a group of content creators can put out.

Am I obsessed with Hololive? Eh... I don't think so. It's just a nice collegial group of content creators to relax to after the end of a long-ass day/week... sort of like the earliest days of the Games Done Quick events, before it got all corporate. It's about that casual feel these VTubers bring about as they stream, and about that peeking into a perennial slice of life that I have always been a fan of even from back in the days of following web comics and watching animated series. Hololive Productions is its own slice of life---it is so good at its own fun to the point that I can't even bring myself to watch any more slice of life animes these days.

No one needs to watch all the 50+ Holomems just to keep up with everything---it's good enough to just watch those whom one is interested in, and rely on the memes and updates from r/Hololive for the rest.

Anyway, that's all I'd want to say. It's getting late---I should take my shower and turn in for the night.

No sense getting my spoons back just to lose them due to not having enough sleep.

Till the next update then.