The historical simulator and a week's worth of post

One of the classes at my junior high school was closed because of the number of flu cases. I received a notification in my school mailbox about it, which contained what seemed like a useful sentence even though it has almost no meaning in itself. 急なお願いで恐縮ですが、何卒ご理解の上、よろしくお願いします – We are ashamed to make this sudden request but please kindly understand and we are in your care. The last phrase is extremely common as well as difficult to translate into English, but the other two were unfamiliar to me. I’m not sure I will have a chance to use them, but I will look for an opportunity.

As I predicted on the previous Saturday, I found myself unable to resist the lure of the historical simulator. It allowed me to play out the situation that I read about in the history book that I’m reading now as a ruler in control of England. I conquered Ireland, Scotland, and a significant portion of France before getting bored. If I had left it at that, my reversion to video games would have been just a quick dip in my habit records, but then I restarted to play as my favorite nation in history—the Byzantine Empire. Even though the game has been updated since I last played it three or four years ago, I found this situation a little boring because I’ve played it so many times, so I looked for ways to make it more interesting.

I came across an alternate history mod in which the Byzantine Empire in 1447 sends one of the Emperor’s brothers with a few ships across the Atlantic Ocean in order to flee from the Ottoman Empire. I played as this new empire of Elysia, which conquers the Native American tribes and settles the wilder parts of the continental USA. I like to cheat when I play this historical simulator, but obviously it’s no fun if I cheat to give myself everything, so I have rules for which cheats I can use. In the first three games, I became frustrated with my lack of progress, which I attributed to my cheating rules. In the last game I finally found a cheat that didn’t feel too game-breaking but gave me a decided advantage—the instant colonization cheat. Because in 1447 I am the only one with access to both colonists and the continents of America, getting near instant colonization allowed me to grow much faster than my rivals. Even so, there are so many provinces to colonize that I couldn’t expand into Mexico before it was claimed by a rival, and South America ended up being quickly colonized by Portugal. Nevertheless, after about 120 years I returned to Europe and reconquered Constantinople from the Turks. From here it is recommended that I restore the glory of the Byzantine Empire by reconquering all of its old lands. I’m not sure I have the patience for that at this point, but I suspect that I’ll probably invest a few more hours in this game. Although I’d like to start over and see what happens if I don’t tell Portugal where I’m going at the beginning of the game, thereby giving me a better chance at colonizing South America, I think that the tedium of reconquering all the tiny Native American nations and recolonizing hundreds of provinces will deter me from doing so.

Because of this retrogression to gaming, I lost a week and two days of progress on my goals, as well as a lot of sleep. I just barely completed my school assignments on time. A week and a half, though, is not so much time that it inspires despair, and with that in mind I intend to resume my habits on Tuesday or Wednesday. A couple of notes though—despite my firmest resolve ever to give up video games, I lost my ability to moderate my time as usual. In the future if I anticipate a relapse, I need to set up some sort of moderating mechanism. This will prevent me from being too unhealthy and might help me pull out of the relapse more quickly. I’ll have to think about how I would do this. One thing that did change, or maybe that I noticed more than before—even while gaming, I wanted to stop and study Japanese or program or even work on school assignments, but I felt driven to finish my obsession. This might be attributable in part to a desire to get tired of the game as soon as possible and get back to my normal, healthy life.

On Saturday I did work on my school assignments for a couple of hours in the morning, in this break from obsessive gaming I was inspired to work some more on my Rubik’s cube technique. For a few weeks now I’ve been averaging solve times of 70 seconds with a range of forty seconds as long as I don’t make any serious mistakes. This whole time I’ve been using the beginner method, having read that there isn’t any point in learning more advanced methods until consistently breaking the two minute mark. Since I’ve achieved that mark and haven’t made significant progress, I decided that it’s time to learn the new method. The most common method used to solve by most of the fastest cubers is called CFOP. I’ll be learning the lite version called 2-look CFOP, which requires learning only 14 algorithms instead of the normal version’s 78. I found a great website that helps train specific, selectable algorithms, so I’m excited about working on that.

While looking for information about this version of CFOP, I came across a blog about mastering a variety of skills in just one month each. I don’t have personal interest in most of the goals that the blogger had, but his style of writing and tackling the challenge was infectious and inspirational. Thinking about my own goals, I can't remember making any that were concrete and less than six months away. Actually, I take that back—I think in college I had a short term goal of learning all 2050 jouyou kanji in three months, and I nearly met that goal, only getting overwhelmed at 1900. So, I have reason to believe that if I make concrete goals that are only a month long, I might be able to complete them and feel a sense of achievement. Since I have several simultaneous broad goals, my main concern is whether I’ll be able to come up with enough short-term concrete goals. But if I can just do three months’ worth of month-long goals, I will have a better idea of how maintainable this system is and what kind of goals are doable in a month.