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Friday, March 24, 2023

A little addition to chapter 58:

 I felt there was a minor plot hole in the book, '100 Waifus,' that Christopher had already been granted a perfect memory but did not exhaustively list off every known gemstone of mankind when given the opportunity for the 100th wedding anniversary.  So like other plot holes I filled in Chapter 58 (the reason for the chapter's addition), I addressed this one in a clever manner:

Kuon sat opposite me in my mayor's office, going over the details of world governance in a well-worn routine after 600 years.  She was wearing her peridot, spinel, amethyst, beryl and onyx gemstone bracelets from our 200th, 300th, 400th, 500th and 600th year anniversaries, a tradition we'd had to invent ourselves given there was no precedent on Earth for our situation.

It's not that Christopher's memory was lacking, he just felt eight bracelets was enough for the moment and took the opportunity to add more anniversary commemorations in the future with more gems of equal validity and beauty.  As Machiavelli taught, do all bad things at once so people's memory of them fades, but do good things little by little so that there's always a recent pleasant memory to draw upon as their impression of you.  By giving away the gems little by little Christopher makes the wives feel better than if he had listed them off all at once.

I also think it's a cool way of reminding the reader how massive the amount of time together these spouses have shared, what a tremendous number of experiences they had between Chapter 57 and 58, that they really did live during that period and really were doing things together that whole time.

It's only one additional sentence to the previous version of the book, but I think it's a rather major improvement, filling in a plothole, compared to fixing a minor grammatical or phrasing issue.  This edit was important.  The 36th edition of the book is going to be measurably better than the 35th.

Meanwhile I finished acquiring the perfect two inherited skills for all my characters in Fire Emblem Engage.  That's beating the game as thoroughly as humanly possible.  I played the poor game into the ground.  But that was just the 'hard mode' difficulty of the game.  If I truly want to beat the game, I also have to beat the last boss on 'maddening' difficulty.  So I started Fire Emblem Engage over from the beginning, this time for keeps, with maddening difficulty vs. all the lessons I learned playing the game for the last 300 hours.  It's been tremendously fun and pretty challenging so far -- to beat the Tiki paralogue I required two retries and even on the third try I was down to my last time crystal, no more rewinds allowed or else I'd have to redo the whole stage from the beginning yet again.  That's as high stakes a fight as it gets.  Bring it on.  I would be disappointed if maddening difficulty weren't like this.  I'll match it and overcome it, proving my worth.

There's more good news on the Engage front -- the last wave of DLC is slated for an 'early April' release.  So by the time I reach master class upgradeable characters, the new classes Mage Cannoneer and Enchanter will be available.  The timing is perfect.  Actually I might be a little early and should hold off for a week, but whatever, it will work out.

Kansas State's record passing performance in all of NCAA tournament history was a marvel to behold.  This is also the first time in tournament history all 4 #1 seeds were defeated before the Elite Eight.  This is a tournament of firsts.

Between Fire Emblem and March Madness I don't have time to sleep, watch anime or read SAO.  I assume things will slow down at some point but, honestly, with the new spring anime season debuting in a week, I have no idea when things will slow down.  It feels like the schedule only gets more and more packed.

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