First of all, you should perform a BIOS/MBR boot to allow yourself to only have to create and format one partition. Remember to set the bootable flag.

In this speedrun by jlxip, while they wait for pacstrap to complete, they use tmux to prepare another command to generate the /etc/fstab and they prepare arch-chroot with arguments to install and configure grub.

I also noticed they used xfs rather than ext4. That's one character that you can save as you type.

There's actually so little to make a booting installation, it's probably all down to execution. I'll have to experiment if fdisk is the fastest partitioning tool to use or if there's some other one. Maybe I can get good increasing ParallelDownloads before I pacstrap.

This is my run so far:

fdisk /dev/vda
o^Mn^M^M^M^M^Ma^Mw^M
mkfs.xfs /dev/vda1
mount /dev/vda1 /mnt
vim /etc/p*f
/Par<CR>$a9<Esc>ZZ
tmux
pacstrap /mnt base linux grub
^B"
genfstab /mnt > /mnt/etc/fstab; arch-chroot /mnt bash -c 'grub-install /dev/vda; grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg';reboot

He soon shared with me this game where you could draw blocks and they would move. It was a Game of Life implementation-I think Cells was the name of the specific app.

Now he had discovered the emerging common still-lifes and spaceships on his own, documenting them and naming them in a text file which he had shared with me along with the Cells app. They differed from the canonical names. For what's known as a glider, he had called them something like "army guys crawling".

Eventually, I discovered this Cells game was known as Conway's Game of Life and that it had a wider, passionate community around it. Soon I would be exploring the Lexicon and copying patterns into Cells then experience running out of space, forcing me to discover another implementation, Mirek's Cellebration-in which I would install on any computer I had access to, and spend hours clicking through patterns and rule-sets. Cellular automata had captivated my early 6th grade year.

Anyway, all that to say: I'm trying to learn guitar right now, and all these fretboard charts look like Game of Life patterns. I can't help but see blocks, snakes, and gliders buried in the charts. Maybe I'll make little web toy to play them someday. :)