So much drivel...

Yet another long overdue update. I swear that fortnights pass so quickly and silently that I don't realise that they have passed me by till they have actually done so. Several odd things have happened, so let me try to put some sense into some of them by laying out some perspective or something to that effect.

First off, something fantastically funny. Twitch Plays Pokemon (TPP) (associated reddit topic here) is a hilarious anarchistic game play of the Pokemon RPG. The quality of the stream isn't from the content of the game (unlike say any of the Games Done Quick marathon sessions), but from the meta-content. By meta-content, I mean of course the fan-generated lore and commentary on the things that everyone is witnessing. I follow the stream semi-religiously, reading mostly the commentary rather than actually watching the chaos that is happening as the thousands of people mash keys into the emulator over IRC. The best part was that the motley crew actually managed to defeat the Pokemon Red game after around two-ish weeks or something. Considering the amount of coordination (or lack thereof partly due to trolls, and partly due to stream lags), it's a miracle of some sort. And as I'm writing now, they are on to the next game in the series, Pokemon Crystal. And in roughly half the time, they are now attacking the Elite Four once again, which can be loosely said as being the halfway point of the game in one sense and ``completion'' in another (the ``real'' final boss-character is Red from the previous game). Now it remains to be seen of the Red character has the same pokemon that the TPP stream was using---there was a request for this to be hacked into the ROM, but there has been no indication if this was done.

Second, anything I've said before about feeling/knowing that one is an adult is moot given the new situation that I now present. One feels that one has stepped irreversibly into adulthood when one's parents are starting the serious matter of handling their funeral arrangements. Nothing gets one into the ``grown-up'' mood quicker than planning around one's parents' mortality. It wasn't macabre or depressing in the least, but there were some sombre moments during that discussion. I now know what my parent would like me to do when they have passed on, and that knowledge has deepened an aspect of my character that I don't really know how to relate in a semi-public avenue such as this blog. I don't think I have even managed to phrase it comfortably into something that I write into my diary. Maybe I will have a good enough description for it in time to come.

Third, this drought and hazy weather condition is driving me absolutely insane. I can no longer train outdoors for my 10-km run safely---the PM2.5 concentration is bordering on being dangerous especially for vigorous activities like long distance running. Already my eyes and nose are suffering---lots of scleritis and rhinitis reactions. I think my lungs have diminished capacity as well from having to deal with the particulates in the air---when playing the 笛子 for my solo during the rehearsal from last Saturday, I found that I couldn't hold my air flow strong enough to cover the 8-beat/16-beat phrases. It sucked because I felt very stuffy and heavy-lunged, and the emergency breath pauses totally screwed up the phrasing, making the entire piece sound very sub-standard. At least I'm not hit with bronchitis for now, and I think I will have to keep physical exertions to a minimum to avoid destroying my lungs too much. This weather condition is getting rather stupid---isn't the hot season supposedly between the months of May and July? If so, why are we facing horrible conditions now?

Fourth, I find that my tolerance for general incompetence and irreverence to have dropped quite significantly between last year and this. There were a couple of times on the bus where I found myself irritated when some irresponsible bugger decided to keep the sound for their smartphone game on a high volume and keep performing actions that triggered that high-pitched arpeggio albeit in non-regular intervals, which made it hard to ignore. The temptation to stand up, turn around, and yell at the guy to shut it was so high, yet I think the repressive behavioural traits that has been inculcated in me since young are still at work and I just passively tried to avoid it by stuffing my ears with my active noise-cancellers and listen to something from whatever my Rock-boxed iPod have. At least incompetence isn't something that I have to deal with at work, which is a good thing. Oh, some other commuters tried to elbow their way through me while getting off the cramped transport while I was actively giving way, they ended up eating a whole bunch of aiki when I just sunk deeper to hold out against them. It made me happy and them pissed, but I don't care.

Fifth, the Android PDF readers from Adobe and FoxIt died when I tried to read the translated epic of The Thousand Nights and a Night by Burton. It wasn't anything too fancy, at the physical page location of 200+ on volume one, it just caused the PDF readers to crash. I got pissed off trying to get it to work until I realised that the PDFs were basically scanned pages. Using the all-powerful ImageMagick, I extracted and converted the PDF files into corresponding Comic Book Archive format (a CBR file to be specific, because why not):

1. convert -density 300 -strip -interlace Plane -quality "30%" -filter Lanczos -resize 800x "pdf01.pdf" "pdf01/pdf01_img.jpg"
2. rar a -m5 -ma4 "pdf01.cbr" "pdf01"

And it worked like a charm. Of course there were some other steps in between, but these two were the main ones. I've also learnt the power of the rename command---it allows the use of regular expressions to specify how to transform the file names. I made use of it to force zero padding on the extracted JPEG images from the PDF---ImageMagick doesn't do that. In principle, there was no problem, but I liked things to be zero-padded and therefore making a stronger guarantee on the order when listed lexicographically. The newly assembled CBR is then read with Perfect Viewer, easily the best Comic Book Archive format viewer, on both my phone and tablet. No crashes so far, and I doubt any will be forthcoming.

Sixth, in the view of intolerance, I have started on yet another period of non-Facebook usage. This time, I'm targetting at least two months, so between now and say June-ish I will not be accessing my Facebook account. It has been deactivated, and should anyone need to contact me, well, they should know how. I have a cellphone number that hasn't changed for ten years, email accounts, and even doing a simple search for me on the 'net with Google reveals enough contact information that it becomes an unacceptable excuse for anyone who needs to find me claiming that there was no way of doing so.

Alright, it's getting late, and the haze is making me more tired than usual. Time to crash out, and hopefully the next update won't be as late.