Ah. The end of November is upon us again, and soon December will arise. Already there are noticeably fewer people on the roads, which of course grants me the opportunity to sleep in just a little bit more since the incidence of slowing traffic jams is just that much reduced.
It's very early a week since I've returned to the usual apartment, having bivouacked at my sister's place for nearly three weeks while they were doing some government mandated/subsidised block-level renovation programme. Things have finally started to become more normal, and as such, my mood has been steadily improving. Elysie-II has been hooked up again, and is currently undergoing various software updates as I am writing here. I had to borrow a power cable because I left the original one in the office when I was moving her there to be out of the dusts' way.
Of course, I've brought my dizi back as well. Cannot do without them, especially since I really need to practise more because I have stupidly decided to take part in a dizi choir. The dizi choir isn't stupid---I am the stupid one here because it is obvious that they are operating at a much higher level than I care to be. Most of them have performance degrees or related certification/awards for dizi playing, while I'm just that guy who plays in a neighbourhood (literally!) Chinese orchestra who hasn't had a proper lesson for a very very long time.
Come to think of it, I think I haven't had a proper lesson from sifu for nearly a decade. A very sobering thought.
But we'll see how it goes. If they want me, hooray! If not, well, no loss. I can still make music no matter where I am.
It's kind of funny. Here I am, at the near perfect witching hour for writing a blog entry and what do I have to gripe about in my mind? Almost nothing. Perhaps it is a sign of good things to come.
Or I'm just too damn tired to do any more writing. Work throughout the week has been quite interesting but draining. I'm not complaining though, just observing---in this economy, finding a job can be considered much harder than it was before (was it ever easy?), and in some ways it is nice that I have a job doing what I like that pays me so I can pay the bills.
Of course the pay isn't fantastic---that's what one gets from a quasi-government outfit. Quasi-government statuses generally imply that we get the worst of the possible pool of accessible private/public traits. Like many things, it's a trade-off---quasi-government status usually implies company longevity, and potentially enough research in the pipeline that they are a little more willing than the government proper to take calculated risks. In that sense, there is some job security.
Alright, till the next reply then.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Select→Move Idiom in GIMP
GIMP is extremely powerful for a cross-platform free image manipulation software, but it has some... oddities. The most fundamental oddity is the lack of the select→move image in selected region idiom that comes from most primitive raster tools.
The best way to do this (i.e. least of all hacky ways) is to do the following:
I find myself needing this more when I start to adjust scores by scanning them as high quality (600 dpi) grayscale images before manipulating them, often to generate a more compact copy (e.g. from 3 pages to 2).
The best way to do this (i.e. least of all hacky ways) is to do the following:
- Press r and select a rectangular region.
- Then, apply C-S-l. This causes the selection to be a floating layer.
- Move at will. Ensure that your mouse cursor is actually on a part of the image that is in the floating layer, i.e. don't click on the transparent ``no pixels'' part.
- Click anywhere outside the image to stop moving that layer
I find myself needing this more when I start to adjust scores by scanning them as high quality (600 dpi) grayscale images before manipulating them, often to generate a more compact copy (e.g. from 3 pages to 2).
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Post Oblivion Rant
Double post much? There's of course a good reason for that: this is the traditional post-NaNoWriMo rant. And I don't really want to have it conflated with that other thing that I was talking about earlier.
This year's NaNoWriMo concept had been vague. I was reading H. P. Lovecraft's works earlier in the year, and his eldritch happenings gave me the idea to rethink of them as some kind of five-dimensional creatures. The Illuminatus! trilogy did little to turn me away from that idea, and so that was how the concept was born.
Initially, it was supposed to be a series of short stories based on a five-dimensional prankster---let's just call him F for short. F was supposed to be the unseen protagonist, and each short story would involve some poor soul (different across stories) who was afflicted by a particular five-dimensional nonsense from F and how that fella lived through his life.
Naturally, that's not what happened in the final execution.
``A series of short stories'' requires more planning than I care to, and the number of five-dimensional gimmicks I could come up with was insufficient to carry through the 50k words needed. So I switched it a bit, and made it into some kind of α versus β story. You can of course view the result from here.
That last bit shall remain a mystery for now. Kudos to those who can read and understand it.
I'm not as proud of this as some of the older entries I have, but I'm not complaining. A win is a win---50k words were reached in around 14 days(!) and I am satisfied with the story. And that marks my seventh NaNoWriMo win. I'm not sure about the eighth NaNoWriMo, but I'm sure whatever I'm reading in between should give me inspiration on what to write next.
------
I'm not really a fan of using fan fiction as a source for NaNoWriMo; it feels a little... cheap. The taking of characters that had more than twenty thousand prior words to characterise them and clobbering them together to compose a series of hijinks feels hackish. Of course I do not disparage the use of fan fiction for NaNoWriMo; it's just that I will try my best to avoid doing that myself. Part of the fun of writing up new characters is to allow the said characters to grow, to become what circumstances have made them to become. In some ways, fan fiction limits the character's growth because such work often emphasizes the ``canonical'' traits and behaviours of the character, unless there is an actual attempt to revisit the character's traits and behaviours from a completely new environment and do an interpretation there. That latter is excellent for writers because it forces one to make evaluations and decisions on directions that can be exciting, instead of the long drawn out bore that an in-universe styled fan fiction tends to end up becoming.
Anyway, rant over. Head over and download that first draft of Oblivion.
This year's NaNoWriMo concept had been vague. I was reading H. P. Lovecraft's works earlier in the year, and his eldritch happenings gave me the idea to rethink of them as some kind of five-dimensional creatures. The Illuminatus! trilogy did little to turn me away from that idea, and so that was how the concept was born.
Initially, it was supposed to be a series of short stories based on a five-dimensional prankster---let's just call him F for short. F was supposed to be the unseen protagonist, and each short story would involve some poor soul (different across stories) who was afflicted by a particular five-dimensional nonsense from F and how that fella lived through his life.
Naturally, that's not what happened in the final execution.
``A series of short stories'' requires more planning than I care to, and the number of five-dimensional gimmicks I could come up with was insufficient to carry through the 50k words needed. So I switched it a bit, and made it into some kind of α versus β story. You can of course view the result from here.
That last bit shall remain a mystery for now. Kudos to those who can read and understand it.
I'm not as proud of this as some of the older entries I have, but I'm not complaining. A win is a win---50k words were reached in around 14 days(!) and I am satisfied with the story. And that marks my seventh NaNoWriMo win. I'm not sure about the eighth NaNoWriMo, but I'm sure whatever I'm reading in between should give me inspiration on what to write next.
------
I'm not really a fan of using fan fiction as a source for NaNoWriMo; it feels a little... cheap. The taking of characters that had more than twenty thousand prior words to characterise them and clobbering them together to compose a series of hijinks feels hackish. Of course I do not disparage the use of fan fiction for NaNoWriMo; it's just that I will try my best to avoid doing that myself. Part of the fun of writing up new characters is to allow the said characters to grow, to become what circumstances have made them to become. In some ways, fan fiction limits the character's growth because such work often emphasizes the ``canonical'' traits and behaviours of the character, unless there is an actual attempt to revisit the character's traits and behaviours from a completely new environment and do an interpretation there. That latter is excellent for writers because it forces one to make evaluations and decisions on directions that can be exciting, instead of the long drawn out bore that an in-universe styled fan fiction tends to end up becoming.
Anyway, rant over. Head over and download that first draft of Oblivion.
Past Is Past
I don't usually like to talk about or even think about the past, not because there are things from there that have hurt me before that I do not wish to remember, but that the past is there for a reason.
It has passed.
People and places from the past tend to remain there for me because they rarely have any relevance to the present and the future. Those who are still relevant and are meaningful and dear have followed me from the past and into the present, while those who were merely contextual friends would remain as they were within that context, until and unless attempts are made to update their relevance to where things are now.
I bring this up because I have learnt recently that my old secondary school is about to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary of founding. And I'm not even apologetic in not wanting to go back there to visit them.
They have become irrelevant to my present and future.
When I went back about a year or so after graduating from it, all they could remember of me was the fact that I had bad skin. None of what I had done mattered---they could not identify me as anything else other than ``the kid with the bad skin'' despite all the crazy [awesome] things I had done.
That was when I threw my hands up metaphorically and gave up attempting to keep in contact with them.
Now, as the days pass on by and the number of people I meet up as a part of my job increases, some of these people from the past are slowly catching up to me. But they don't bother me much, a quick but vague acknowledgement with sufficient delay is enough to dissuade anyone from pursuing the past any more than it is necessary.
After all, shouldn't it be more important to understand what a person is now than what the person was before?
It has passed.
People and places from the past tend to remain there for me because they rarely have any relevance to the present and the future. Those who are still relevant and are meaningful and dear have followed me from the past and into the present, while those who were merely contextual friends would remain as they were within that context, until and unless attempts are made to update their relevance to where things are now.
I bring this up because I have learnt recently that my old secondary school is about to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary of founding. And I'm not even apologetic in not wanting to go back there to visit them.
They have become irrelevant to my present and future.
When I went back about a year or so after graduating from it, all they could remember of me was the fact that I had bad skin. None of what I had done mattered---they could not identify me as anything else other than ``the kid with the bad skin'' despite all the crazy [awesome] things I had done.
That was when I threw my hands up metaphorically and gave up attempting to keep in contact with them.
Now, as the days pass on by and the number of people I meet up as a part of my job increases, some of these people from the past are slowly catching up to me. But they don't bother me much, a quick but vague acknowledgement with sufficient delay is enough to dissuade anyone from pursuing the past any more than it is necessary.
After all, shouldn't it be more important to understand what a person is now than what the person was before?
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Les Novembre Bleues
I shouldn't be writing this now. No, really, I mean it.
I'm at work. I have around 14k+ words left to go for NaNoWriMo.
And I have a letter to reply to.
I really shouldn't be writing this now, but I already am. What can I do about it?
This month is passing by quickly. My sister has kindly lent her spare room for mother and I to stay in while the apartment toilets are undergoing some government-funded renovation project to upgrade after nearly thirty years. It is a kind gesture from her.
But I feel trapped, like a bird in a gilded cage.
I'm used to crashing out on folk's couches, or in many cases, floors with my trusty sleeping back from 1998. But on those occasions, I'm not on a schedule --- it's mostly for fun stuff, like vacations or visiting conferences.
This time, I need to keep to my work schedule. Waking up early to get to work, work, then going to my surrogate home to rest.
Harrowing.
I do get my sleep for sure --- I am too used to sleeping in a thin sleeping back on a hard-ish ground. But I'm missing lots of other amenities in life, mostly ways to vent and relax.
Elysie-II is not available because it is not nice to lug her all the way to the apartment to be set up. I left my dizis in the CC because it's much more convenient. I do have my concert flute and piccolo, but I dare not play them for fear of annoying my temporary neighbours and incurring bad karma for not me.
And NaNoWriMo demands every word I have for it each day as a sacrifice to appease its greedy nature.
To be had, it isn't all as bad as I make it sound, but I do miss the things I get to do back at home. Particularly the access to better laundry facilities. I was raring to return to Aikido training after having to miss two months of it thanks to the haze/smog.
Now I have to miss another month more because there is no way to wash my gi and have it dried in time. I'm not going to go to an out-of-the-way laundromat and spend an hour sitting there watching my gi wash and dry just so I can train.
And now I've made myself sad.
I'm at work. I have around 14k+ words left to go for NaNoWriMo.
And I have a letter to reply to.
I really shouldn't be writing this now, but I already am. What can I do about it?
This month is passing by quickly. My sister has kindly lent her spare room for mother and I to stay in while the apartment toilets are undergoing some government-funded renovation project to upgrade after nearly thirty years. It is a kind gesture from her.
But I feel trapped, like a bird in a gilded cage.
I'm used to crashing out on folk's couches, or in many cases, floors with my trusty sleeping back from 1998. But on those occasions, I'm not on a schedule --- it's mostly for fun stuff, like vacations or visiting conferences.
This time, I need to keep to my work schedule. Waking up early to get to work, work, then going to my surrogate home to rest.
Harrowing.
I do get my sleep for sure --- I am too used to sleeping in a thin sleeping back on a hard-ish ground. But I'm missing lots of other amenities in life, mostly ways to vent and relax.
Elysie-II is not available because it is not nice to lug her all the way to the apartment to be set up. I left my dizis in the CC because it's much more convenient. I do have my concert flute and piccolo, but I dare not play them for fear of annoying my temporary neighbours and incurring bad karma for not me.
And NaNoWriMo demands every word I have for it each day as a sacrifice to appease its greedy nature.
To be had, it isn't all as bad as I make it sound, but I do miss the things I get to do back at home. Particularly the access to better laundry facilities. I was raring to return to Aikido training after having to miss two months of it thanks to the haze/smog.
Now I have to miss another month more because there is no way to wash my gi and have it dried in time. I'm not going to go to an out-of-the-way laundromat and spend an hour sitting there watching my gi wash and dry just so I can train.
And now I've made myself sad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)