NieR: Automata and ESV-KJV-CUV

And here we go, Sunday once more. The week flitted on by, hardly registering more than a blip in my psyche.

Why so? Who knows...

Anyway, I finally finished NieR: Automata. It was a nice romp, a little less punishing than the likes of the Devil May Cry series, but it does leave behind that strange aftertaste of existential dread. I'll be honest, this is not the first time that I had seen the gameplay of NieR: Automata---it shows up on and off for GDQ and ESA events. Even Ina played this ``live'' without speedrunning it.

So I'm no stranger to the main storyline. But that doesn't mean that there is no effect on me.

The existence of the androids... was predicated upon a lie. They were supposed to be there to help win the planet back for the humans in exile from the rampaging machines, but the truth is, gur uhznaf unir orra rkgvapg sbe n srj gubhfnaq lrnef, naq gur gehr ernfba sbe gur naqebvqf' rkvfgrapr vf gb tngure rabhtu qngn gb perngr na ribyirq irefvba bs gurzfryirf va n gjvfgrq sbez bs frys-crecrghngvba. Vg vf abg vebal gung bar bs punenpgref vf anzrq Cnfpny, nsgre gur jntre gung ur znqr nobhg orggvat ba Tbq'f rkvfgrapr.

All I know is that there are things that I don't know, and if I were to strictly go with a Bayesian interpretation, then it would make more sense to bet with the majority, even for things that we do not necessarily have proof for/against, especially for outcomes that we have no way of knowing beforehand.

That's what one would normally call ``faith''.

But back to NieR: Automata. It's a fun game, though the colour scheme is kinda drab and clinical. The only places where there was more colour was in the amusement park, and even then it was still dreary. Combat was heavier on the button-mashing, and that includes dodging. I didn't like the hacking parts, since it involved playing some neutered version of a bullet-hell, but it was still alright.

And that's one more game completed. I wonder what I would like to work through next. Maybe Fallout: New Vegas before I completely lose the plot? Or perhaps something more narrative-heavy, like Disco Elysium or Grim Fandango?

Who knows?

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In other news, I created a new monster. I took the book-summaries from NKJV, the text, footnotes, and section annotations from ESV, and combined them with the text of KJV and CUV to create a three-column ESV-KJV-CUV parallel text Bible with NKJV summaries per book.

``MT, why do you need to do this?!''

So, here's the thing. I prefer NKJV's presentation of the usual two-column with centre reference set-up. But PPCC has switched over to ESV as being the primary preaching Bible version from KJV (note that it's not the new version). ESV is fine, but the version I have is not in a nice 2-column format---I rectified this previously, and created a 2-column ESV with NKJV summaries. For some verses though, KJV presents a more poetic form, and the KJV I had was... well just see for yourself. I didn't want to cross-reference between these two documents through swapping to and fro the PDF readers, and thus decided to combine them into one, which I did through extending on my previous work.

Then of course, CUV had to come into the picture. It is the official Chinese version that PPCC uses for the Chinese congregation, and frankly, I've always felt that there were many times when the Chinese translation of something ended up being more elucidative than expected.

But doing Chinese (or CJK in general, really) in LaTeX was a pain. It involved the following:

• Using the CJK LaTeX package;
• Preparing the magic environment of \begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gkai}{...}\end{CJK};
• Realising that creating too many of those CJK environments consumes all available memory in LaTeX, causing a crash;
• Wrestling with the multicol package to create 3 parallel columns, but not letting any longer column to overflow into the next and screw everything up (I just used set up of \begin{multicols}{3}[some_title][1.5in] ... to give enough end space to avoid this altogether).

But it was all done. Here's how the three columns look like, citing from John 3:16--21:

And that's about it I suppose. I now know how to incorporate large amounts of Chinese writing into LaTeX.

And with that, I conclude this entry. Till the next update.