A certain restlessness is within me that I cannot describe because I cannot characterise the why.
The weekend has come, and is almost gone. I spent yesterday in a type of mental fog, just sitting in front of Eileen-II in a mostly ``head empty, no thoughts'' sort of way. Just thinking back to what I did right now, I realise that I cannot remember anything about it. Evening church service was attended, and rehearsals at TGCO were done, and the day ended.
Today, I spent the morning finishing up the bible study that was due later on in the week, and then just sat there for quite a while just stoning listlessly. I tried a bit of Hyper Light Drifter, but my heart really wasn't in it. I will say that it does play a little like another game that I had completed before, namely Hob, the last game by Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II, two of my favourite games for quite a while. It's mostly wordless, with an almost minimalistic aesthetic to it.
What I did do was to tweak my mob farm once more. The previous upgrade I did for it had a major issue: while the dual layers gave more space for mobs to spawn, the alternating checker board pattern, combined with the use of slabs to prevent the spawning of hole-clogging spiders meant that after running the farm for long enough, mobs were being trapped on top of these slabs while being blocked by the full-sized blocks in the second level. This meant that eventually, the mobs would all be trapped instead of fall freely down the delivery shaft, leading to the mob cap being reached while not having any mobs for annihilation at the AFK area.
🤦♂️
That was bad, of course. The fix I did was to tear out both levels, clear out the mob collection floor of water, and rebuild them to use the more traditional four water-channel mob farm schema. The idea is to have four 2-wide water channels with a single source block on the farthest end to push mobs that fall into them down the shaft. Spawning platforms are built in the quadrants created by the water channels. I built the second layer above it using slabs set in the upper half of the height, with an additional platform over the central drop shaft to prevent mobs that spawned on the second floor from getting too much fall damage from direct fall. I wired up the red stone lamps that I ran on the outside of the second layer previously such that when I pulled the lever to turn on the maintenance lights for the first layer, it also turned on the second one. ``Maintenance mode'' was basically activated through turning on the red stone lamps to light the interior, followed by me falling straight into the ocean to put about 128+ blocks difference to force a de-spawning of all the existing mobs. This would clear out the spawn chambers, allowing safe entry for maintenance.
Anyway, I had to do some adjustments. In order to build the water channels, and to make it a little more spider-clog proof, I had to raise the effective height by one block, which mean that I had to raise the floor of the drop shaft by one block also to ensure that fall damage was insufficient to kill any mobs that fell. That was quite easy to enact---I just shifted the apparatus up by one block while adding another layer of hoppers. There was some minor tweaking of the surrounding access point to make it easy to still reach in to whack at the mobs' feet, but it was just using stairs correctly.
After all those changes, the mob farm was tested, and I'm happy to report that it works well. The spawn rate does feel high enough, and it had the advantage of also allowing spiders to fall to the auto-kill lava layer as well. This meant that I could harvest string for free, or have spider eyes if I decide to do some manual killing. To be had though, spider mobs are still quite rare when it comes to falling through the drop shaft---this is purely due to the passive mob farm design. I was contemplating if I should build an active mob farm design instead, but did not follow through because it involved an almost completely inverted design (the AFK spot is above the body of the mob farm). It was way to drastic for something that I absolutely didn't really need to have in the most efficient ways since I am playing my map as a mostly Survival mode, switching over to Creative mode once in a while to handle stuff that would be fun but would require too much busy work [that I didn't feel like engaging in] to get.
Having the working canal-design mob farm with spiders meant that I did not have to build that other spider-only mob farm next to it. I spent some time taking that edifice down to reclaim the materials, and it was nice.
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Today's Mother's Day. I had pre-ordered 4× regular-sized pizzas from the venerable Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza to celebrate the occasion with family at home. As stated in their story, they have been around since 1995 in SIN city, which translates to being around during much of my teenage years and into my adult ones. Their pizzas are delicious, and are good value for money most of the time. We always love their pizzas.
I also liked their new ordering system. Throughout the years, I have experienced about 3 of their systems. The first was the usual hotline method with their catchy number, namely 241--0--241 (before 2002), and then 6--241--0--241, all the while referring to their menu which someone would have lying about as a pamphlet/flyer. Then there was the time when they were using Foodpanda to handle their orders. And now, it was back to using their own internal system.
As long as they don't stoop to demanding that I install some weird-ass app on my phone (or elsewehere) just to order pizza, I figure that I'll continue to support them. They are my go-to for home delivery pizza after all.
Anyway I'm beat. I should go get a shower and then prepare to turn in for the night. The long weekend week is segueing into a more regular work-week, and there are things that are coming this week that does require some level of concentration that I may not be looking forward to. The things we do to earn our coin.
On another note, the sheer stupidity of this new plan of effectively holding citizens hostage to the government through only issuing digital certificates of birth and death is something that I cannot comprehend. The excuse that was put up sounds great in theory---everything is authenticated and directly from source, reducing data loss/theft, where ``...government agencies and private entities, such as industry associations and financial institutions, can use QR codes included on all digital certificates to verify their authenticity''.
But I take offense to that. Here's why. The servers that control access to these digital data are government owned, and by virtue of the design of information systems, any access of them via URLs (implied through the QR code) will be logged. This means that if someone were to be doing any sort of business with any entity that requires the use of the birth certificate (there are very few reasons for these, the most prominent being emigration), the SIN city government will know about it, whether they ought to know it or not. Sure they can say things like the law exists to protect the information and not for surveillence of the citizenry... but we all know that laws are only as good as they are actively enforced, and even then, laws can and are often changed. See also the latest brouhaha over the US Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.
People will also throw about the ``I have nothing to hide from the government, so why should I care about this?'' excuse to claim that I am over-reacting.
In an extreme scenario, anyone whom the government has a beef with and needing asylum elsewhere can, in theory, be fucked over by having the access to the digital version blocked through a ``technical issue'', real or manufactured, i.e. the said person can be made into an unperson with no effort on the part of the government. This is undesirable for individual liberties. It does not matter if you have ``nothing to hide''---in the face of power, if any one of us in the minority is not safe, then none of us are safe for the sole reason that we will never know when we might end up being in the minority.
A more prosaic scenario is that the reliance of a highly complex and expensive device like a laptop or mobile phone with associated high dependencies of network connection and associated working infrastructure is just begging to be taken down---all the benefits of centralisation are also weaknesses in times where these very documents are needed the most, in crises where complex supply chains and infocomm infrastructures are strained to their limits. It also places an undue amount of pressure on the economically less able to pay more indirect taxes through having to fund for all these devices/services just to exercise their rights and privileges as citizens. That is not right either.
It is also much easier [relatively speaking] to preserve a physical document over a digital one. The skeptical can be asked to do a simple exercise: can you easily retrieve the file that you saved into your 3½ ″ floppy disk? And no, this is not a fake problem---``bit rot'' is a real issue for modern day archivists who are trying to preserve the digital history. The rule allows people to download the digital certificate for safe-keeping in their physical device, but considering how the average person operates, the digital copy is bound to end up in some third-party cloud storage provider...
...which totally nullifies all the argument about having a centralised system for security purposes.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
This does not affect me directly---I'm so old that my birth certificate will never be affected by this new rule. But it does make me think even harder of having a child in the first place, not that I want to have children.
Each day that passes by just keeps reinforcing the fallenness of this world, and how we are all really just slaves. The only difference is that the figleaf that was keeping us from this realisation is starting to get increasingly transparent the more the polities start applying their traditional skulduggery using infocomm technology.
*sigh*
Till the next update.
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