The moon is resetting today and is only 0.7% illuminated. The New Moon rose at 6:34 a.m., about an hour before sunrise, and will set at 4:59 p.m., about an hour before sunset.
Today is the day for the right balanced state, for with it we can attain undistracted samadhi.
Cases of the omicron variant have now been detected in five states - California, New York, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Colorado. Yesterday, the average number of new covid cases per day here in Georgia topped 1,000 again for the first time since November 28. What looked like it might have been a new downward turn in the trendline turned out to be just another fluctuation in the flat-lined caseloads - it's been hovering around 1,000 cases per day since October 29th.
On this day in 1894, novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson died at age 44 in Samoa. His last words were reportedly "Does my face look strange?" Impermanence is swift. Stevenson was the author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the "old books" section of my modest library, such as it is, I have a somewhat worn copy of his A Child's Garden of Verses, copyright 1929. A handwritten inscription on the front page is dated 1934 and reads, "Merry Christmas to a sweet little girl!!," but I somehow came into possession of it nearly 30 years later right around the time I was first learning to read. It's lavishly illustrated with both black-and-white sketches and full-page watercolors, and I used to daydream over those pictures even before I knew how to read the words. The pictures still evoke early childhood nostalgia when I flip through the book (which I try not to do too often as it's now quite brittle). It was my first "reader" and the book may well be the single thing I've possessed for the longest time.
Last night, I finally "beat" the game Fallout 76 by completing the last mission, I Am Become Death, and launching a nuclear missile. Launching an in-game nuke doesn't really make much sense, as from the very beginning of Fallout 76, it's emphasized that the game-world Appalachia is a post-apocalyptic hellscape due to nuclear war and your mission is to secure and shut down the last remaining missile silos. But apparently it's determined that to confront the threat presented by scorchbeasts - large, aggressive flying dragons with radioactive breath - you have to nuke their nesting site or something.
That last mission was incredibly difficult as the missile silos are defended by wave after wave of a variety of robots that can absorb a seemingly endless number of bullets before going down. I started the mission at Level 90 around 7:00 p.m. and finished at Level 92 after 12:30 a.m. I used up some 1,500 rounds of machine gun ammo and an equal amount of gattling-gun ammo, as well as at least a 1,000 rounds of 0.45-caliber rifle ammo. I burned through at least 40 stimpacks (healing medicine for in-game wounds).
The mission also becomes progressively harder as you advance, and to make matters worse, I totally didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing at the last stage of the mission in a room full of dozens of robots. At first I thought I had to take them all out, which proved to be quite impossible due in no small part to the fact that the room kept regenerating new robots every time their numbers started to dip low. It took me quite a while to realize that I was supposed to just sprint around them all and start up some "anti-robot" programs on computers scattered around the room until they were all re-programmed into submission.
I almost quit at least a dozen times, and the only thing that kept me going was the progress I had made so far and which I didn't want to have to repeat again at some later date. War is hell, I get it, but at points I was asking myself, "Is this really fun? Isn't the point of playing games to have fun?"
There's a video posted on YouTube by someone who goes by the handle "Digi Does Gaming" that shows him speed-running the I Am Become Death mission in some 45 minutes, but the video is highly edited and even sped up at times. Still, the big difference between Digi's speed run and my 5½-hour slog is Digi apparently has the high ability and advanced weaponry to take out the robots with a single shot or hit with a sledgehammer. The presence of all those waves or robotics doesn't slow him down much at all. Me? I had to pump 30 to 40 bullets into each robot before it went down, or hit it at least a dozen times with my sledge, by which time at least five other robots would intervene to rescue the one being attacked, forcing me to retreat, take a stimpack, regroup, and try taking on the mob of robots again. And again and again.
Finally, after all of the robots have been pacified, there's still a puzzle that has to be solved to get the nuclear launch codes. The game instructs you to collect eight code "pieces" and then use them with a scrambled word on a base computer to determine the launch code. Okay, I've solved a lot of in-game puzzles before and I'm reasonably clever, but I couldn't come up with the launch code no matter how hard I tried.
I finally looked up the solution online, and found that the completely non-intuitive way of getting the launch code involved first scrambling the 8-letter hint word on the base computer into another word, then dropping each of the 8 letters of the unscrambled word from a 26-letter alphabet, putting the unscrambled 8-letter word at the front of the now 18-letter alphabet, and then using the numbers in the 8 code pieces you've collected to select 8 new letters from the reformatted alphabet and obtain a new word to be unscrambled. Then you take that new unscrambled word, put it in front of the reformed alphabet from earlier, and then use the letters from the code pieces to select their sequential numbers in the new alphabet. Or something like that. I don't think there's anyone who would have intuitively figured all that out from the in-game clues without looking it up on line. Even with the process all laid out, I still couldn't deduce the launch codes, but fortunately, the 8-digit launch codes are also leaked on line, so I just punched in the 8 numbers I got from www.nukacrypt.com (3-7-1-4-8-7-7-9) and voila!, it worked.
I set the nukes to strike an old abandoned mine, as I saw no reason to bomb someone else's settlement. I also knew that if I hit the scorchbeast queen's nest it would have triggered a whole new epic battle that I didn't have the energy, the ammo, or the stimpacks to take on, so I hit a more passive target instead.
Anyway, although it all seemed so much more difficult than necessary, I hung in there anyway and completed the mission despite it all, and feel no small amount of satisfaction now for having endured and won.
With the last mission completed, the game could still be played as a survival and settlement-building game. But according to Steam, I've put in some 323 hours into Fallout 76 since October 15, and last weekend I bought a fresh new batch of games to play. So it's probably time to leave Appalachia and move on to my next game, whatever it is that I choose to take on next.
But I may take a little break first before taking on anything. I'm still exhausted from last night.
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