It's finally June! A year and a half has been burnt waiting for this dreaded pandemic to be over.
Not much has changed since my previous post. I'm still stuck in my apartment more or less. Since I'm fully vaccinated now, I have started to wander into grocery stores more frequently. A few days ago, I even renewed my Costco membership. I also met up with coworkers for a game night a few weeks ago, though admittedly, the event made me realize how much of an introvert I am. Boring stuff...
One thing I did realize is that I haven't had to deal with peer pressure in quite a while... maybe I'll talk about that someday...
Work
At work, I think I may have managed to get my lock optimizations for a certain component into some sort of a working state. Previously, this component had a lock that was used to synchronize access to multiple resoures. I ended up splitting this lock into a couple smaller locks. So far, it appears to have improved the responsiveness of queries. Unfortunately, the changes ended up being quite massive, so I expect that the code review will be quite nasty.
Home
At home, I recently received a lease renewal letter 3 months before my current lease is slated to end. For the past 3 years, I've been living in a 516 sqft apartment unit. When I chose this apartment unit, my desire was to save on rent. The rent in King County can be quite expensive! Unfortunately, when I moved into the apartment unit 3 years ago, I realized on the first day that it was a bit too cramped for all my belongings. This is sort of an argument for minimalism, but I digress. Having stayed in this apartment unit for 3 years through numerous good and bad experiences, I think it may finally be time for a change. As a result, I've started looking for a new apartment unit.
Pokémon Platinum
Aside from trying to find a new apartment, I've also been trying to get back into video games. Recently, I've been playing Pokémon Platinum, a game from 12 years ago. My goal with this playthrough of Pokémon Platinum is to beat the Elite Four, become the Champion, and capture all the legendary Pokémon accessible in the game (including event legendaries such as Darkrai, Shaymin, and Arceus). In order to capture event legendaries, I'll be using Action Replay cheat codes to enable the events, since these events are no longer available or were never distributed to begin with (e.g., Azure Flute event). Since Regigiggas requires Regice, Regirock, and Registeel to be transferred from Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald, I've also started playing Pokémon Emerald again (a game from 16 years ago).
HP Bar Animation Speed
Playing Pokémon Platinum, one of the things that hasn't aged well in my opinion is the 30 fps gameplay and the slow-as-molasses HP bar animation. For whatever reason, the speed of the HP bar animation in generation 4 Pokémon games (i.e., Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, SoulSilver) appears to be scaled to the HP of the Pokémon (more HP implies slower HP bar animation). This behavior can make Pokémon battles feel very drawn out. What's odd is that games from generation 3 and generations after 4 of Pokémon do not exhibit this strange quirk. The fact that this quirk is present in Pokémon Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver (these games were released after Diamond and Pearl) makes me question whether this behavior was by design.
