Nomadland

It's been... a day.

I read Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder today. It describes part of the lifestyles of the houseless in the US---these are people who, for whatever reason, eschew the norm of owning real estate to stay in, and instead live in vans or recreational vehicles (RV)/motorhomes. They are the internal itinerant workers of the US, travelling from one potential work place to another depending on the season. The setting is a little different from the more usual idea of itinerant worker, where the source is often from an economically less developed country (like Mexicans heading up north into the US during harvest season).

The lifestyle is one way of looking at minimalism, or the more pragmatic look of trying to reduce personal consumerism to ensure that unnecessary expenses are kept to a minimum. The people that Bruder follows and highlights in the book are of a specific demographic (the old/retired), with some hints that there was a slow increase of some from the middle-age demographic (between 30--50), though there was never much details there. I'm not sure if it was probably hitting a little too close to home for Bruder, and/or the inclusion of a study of that particular demographic may muddle the overall narrative.

There has been hints in the work that with increasing legislation and potentially the scrutiny of Big Tech, it may become increasingly difficult to live half-way off the grid the way the featured nomads lived in the US, but that angle hasn't really been explored in detail---again the narrative might be affected. Bruder is primarily a journalist and not a sociologist, so I suppose it would be asking a little too much for more details.

I mean, there's a reason why the book is a digestible sub-three-hundred-page book and not a thousand five hundred page tome.

It did get me thinking though. Was it possible to turn one's back against the consumerism that is present in SIN and live in a similar way that Nomadland has chronicled? The primary premise of success in Nomadland is the availability of the road (and vehicle) as an alternative domicile, and the easy access to itinerant work for the times where money is actually needed (like purchasing parts and fuel).

Kinda hard in SIN.

Vehicles are pricey in SIN due to the control measure of the Certificate of Entitlement (COE); the COE itself also kills the second-hand market's cheapness since almost all vehicles are less than twenty years old. Fuel is also expensive in SIN. These cost-related issues can already throw a wrench into the feasibility; the road network in SIN is also too dense and compact to support the use of them as surrogates to domiciles. Parking areas in the residential areas are heavily scrutinised---there are only selected parking areas that allow non-season parking ticket holders to park their vehicles overnight. And SIN doesn't really have the space nor the norm to have RVs or motorhomes, leaving only vans as a viable alternative. Vehicle inspections are frequent and strict, making any after-market modifications to the vehicle to support living on the road (like installing solar panels or attaching propane tanks for cooking) cumbersome if one were to make them detachable to allow the passing of the vehicle inspection.

There is also no real itinerant work available in SIN---traditionally, these were provided for by agriculture (SIN doesn't have that scale of agriculture that requires such seasonal labour), and the more recent ``Amazon.com warehouse fulfilment centres'' (SIN isn't a central hub for retail).

The NRIC (a more matured version of the US's Real ID) basically forces everyone who possess it (SIN citizens) to announce an address. Though I am not certain if the address must be residential, or if it can be something like a P.O. Box. If it has to be residential, then it is basically the final nail in the coffin of possibility for living a lifestyle similar to what was explored Nomadland.

Maybe there is a way. But it isn't obvious though... governance in SIN is much tighter than in the US, with very little leeway that can allow such alternative lifestyles to take place, and this is under the assumption that there is no active campaign to prohibit such lifestyles in the first place.

That's all I want to update. Till the next one.

Numbers

Let's talk about numbers today.

I've always had a problem with grokking large Chinese numerals, because their base is 10 000 instead of the ``usual'' 1 000 that I am used to from the SI prefix world.

There is indeed an SI prefix version of the large Chinese numerals, but I do not see them appearing in the mainstream use of such numbers, often in the form of economic numbers/population numbers as reported in the news. In those cases, there is a tendency to use the more ``traditional'' form.

And so, here is a table of the correlation that I generated from the article so that I can internalise it.

Chinese Unit	Pinyin	Exponential Form	Relationship to SI-prefix
十	shí	101	10=1da
百	bǎi	102	100=1h
千	qiān	103	1k
万	wàn	104	10k
百万	bǎiwàn	106	1M=100×10k
千万	qiānwàn	107	10M=1000×10k
亿	yì	108	100M
十亿	shíyì	109	1G=10×100M
兆	zhào	1012	1T
千兆	qiānzhào	1015	1P=1000×1T
京	jīng	1016	10P
百京	bǎijīng	1018	1E=100×10P
垓	gāi	1020	100E
千垓	qiān'gāi	1021	1Z=10×100E
秭	zǐ	1024	1Y
穰	ráng	1028	---
沟	gōu	1032	---
涧	jiàn	1036	---
正	zhèng	1040	---
载	zǎi	1044	---

That's all the content for this entry.

Till the next update.

Beering It Up at Home Instead of the Bar

What a day.

I spent it quietly watching YouTube videos while farming materials for Miriam in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Little Nightmares was sold at a 100% discount on Steam, and I bought it for the ripe price of SGD 0.00.

Drank up the remaining five out of ten cans of Tiger beer that I purchased in lieu of my trip down to my favourite bar, but didn't drink enough regular water to compensate for it, and so I'm nursing a mild headache.

Ah well.

Oh, after complaining and fixing issues on my website relating to IE11, I received news recently that IE11 finally has an expiry date of Jun 15, 2022, though its expiry doesn't seem to be total.

So there are still some good reasons to have done the fixes that I have. Good to know that the effort wasn't wasted.

Anyway, that's about it---it's a short one to keep up with the momentum. Till the next update.

Pops on Rocks

Honestly, I never really enjoyed reading anything by Dr. Seuss out loud. I mean, I will not deny his brilliance in wordsmithing, writing Green Eggs and Ham on a bet of constrained writing.

But he is still a twisted bugger, especially if you realise that he is writing for children. Let me emphasise that: he is writing for children. The words may be simple for them, but man, the execution is just heinous for sanity, and is basically trauma-inducing. To be fair though, massive amounts of repetition is just the way that children learn best from (I'm too lazy to find citations), but it gets really old really quickly if one is already half-way decent at reading.

Anyway, I bring up Dr. Seuss due to this masterpiece by Holo Bass featuring voice samples from Amelia Watson of Hololive-EN during her reading of Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks:



This has a very smooth vibe to it, very ``comfy'' feel. Compare this mix the original (unprocessed) reading session:



A quick comparison will show that while the source material already has quite a bit of the feel except that it was not executed with the intention to be anything more than an ad hoc reading of a piece of tongue twister from Dr. Seuss; there is some strong creative input by Holo Bass to bring out that smoothness in the final mix that made it a [niched] cult classic. Very good work, I would say.

My PTSD-induced misgivings of Dr. Seuss aside, I just want to point out that poetry as an art form isn't some obsolete has-been confined to William Shakespeare's Sonnets---it is very much alive. The more refined gibberish can be seen in popular music lyrics, while the actual wordsmiths are ironically coming out of the 'hood in the form of raps and spoken words.

Poetry is an art form, while the contents are determined by what one has grown up in. It is the counterpart to music since it provides the verbal content as opposed to just the pitch, and co-contributes to the overall rhythm.

So, nerdcore's existence shouldn't be a surprise. I have been following nerdcore raps on and off over the past ten years or so, downloading and listening to the Rhyme Torrents series of nerdcore over BitTorrent (Internet Archive duplicate in case rhymetorrents.org goes away again---it had happened before). They are as intense as some of the material from the 'hood, but of course the source material is more relevant to me than shooting up gangsters and chasing druglords.

I think that as a practical musician, it is important to be made aware of the other styles of music that are available just so that we know what units of expression are there, and how other people have chosen their subset of units of expression to form a cohesive style, and to personally determine if they are successful in conveying what they were trying to convey with their choices. That's the kind of diversity that those who have mastered the basics of the art need to get used to so as to reach out for the next level.

After all, in all forms of human knowledge, the edge can actually be reached, and when that happens, there is literally no master available to guide one beyond---the ability to learn how to explore and define one's own path for progress is literally part of what being called a master is. And that is why the rank of ``doctor of philosophy'' exists in academia---once one has proven mastery over their art, they need to start developing their own philosophy, or associated introspective extrapolation of their art to push the outer edge.

It feels like a weird segue, but I assure you, there is some logic in the madness of the transitions that isn't just an elaborate non-sequitor. There is a fine line separating arrogance from being assertive due to actually knowing what is right, and how this fine line ought to be tread requires a skill in reading people, and the associated patience in navigating and convincing them. Those two skills, I need to practise them more often.

I think that all this while, I have not been willing to stand my ground and push back, i.e. not living up to the standards that are part of the ``rights and privileges'' associated with having a Masters degree. I spent time to work on my craft, so why should I allow myself to be pushed around by clueless people who have no fucking clue what is going on?

I think also that I have sub-consciously taken a step in the direction of standing my ground when I called for a sabbatical to re-orient myself. I mean (somewhat tangentially) everyone likes to quote Bruce Lee on being water, right?

Ever remembered how old he was when he said all that?

He was less than 34 years old. And he didn't put up with anyone's bullshit---in the end, everyone treated him like some kind of martial arts sage and quoted his philosophy and ways like some kind of mantra for the next fifty or so years.

Perhaps the real mistake that I made was thinking that I was to start a family and become a ``family man'' or whatever the hell that means. This is SIN city---only fools choose to live here and start a family. They can afford it because they are content with what they have now forever---that is literally all I meant by being fools.

I am always disappointed with what I see, wherever I have been. And when I had been successful, I was pushing back against the stupidity that was present to change what I found disappointment in---it is when the stupidity still remains after my best efforts that I end up being despondent and give things up. I am more competitive than I give myself credit for, even though I prefer the type of competition where everyone actually improves/progresses so that we all win against our past selves. So instead of the zero-sum type of game that capitalism likes to play, I seem to want to bat for a team that wants humanity to win against all the evil forces that are out there against us.

I simply cannot operate like as though I'm some average person when I have never really been an average person. I don't know why this breakthrough came at the time it did, but I am glad that it has. Thank God for the timing---the path ahead is a little less fuzzy from before.

There is still time in my sabbatical to plan, observe, and pray. And that will be how it will be.

Till the next update then.

Hoarding and Notation

I'm not a hoarder, despite the fact that I have at least 2 m³ of books and around (379±1)×10² g (or (37.9±0.1) kg) of music instruments. I think part of the concept of a ``hoarder'' is one who stores all things, not necessarily with any intention of actually being able to use them. The stuff I have aren't really hoarded---I do use them, some more often than others.

Besides, to be a ``true'' hoarder would require the near-equivalent space of an entire apartment/house, and lead to rather nasty issues of pest infestation and the like. I don't have that kind of situation, just the ever-present dust nonsense due to living on a lower floor apartment near the road without air-conditioning and the associated sealing/filtering of the external air.

I was just thinking about this because I was considering the notion of minimalism, and just examining it to see just how much of that I was. The idea of minimalism is very appealing---an aesthetic choice that focuses on reduction to the barest of minimum that does not sacrifice overall functionality. But there are different schools of minimalism, and I think I veer more on the choice of ``doing more with less''. So I'm likely to have a jack-of-all-trades Swiss Champ XLT than an entire box of tools.

But that does not preclude actually having a box of tools as well, particularly if they are of exceptionally good quality, and that their use can actually save me the time and effort needed to sometimes MacGyver things in a janky/scuffed sort of way.

So in a sense, I think I like the concept of minimalism, but I practise some kind of careful ``right tool for right job'' aesthetic for things that matter enough. Thus, not quite a minimalist, but not a hoarder; just picking and keeping things according to a context-sensitive thought process.

------

I've recently finished reading A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ``A'' by Bruce Haynes, and it certainly gave me much to think about, particularly about how the historical movements of the [reference] pitch standard affected the way music instruments are eventually combined into an orchestra with their associated nuances in notation.

I would say that the time period of these happenings (from between 1700--1900) is rather similar to that of the time period in which the traditional Chinese instruments are combined to form the so-called 民族乐团 or the Chinese Orchestra. It really puts into perspective the journey that the homogenity of the western orchestra had to take to get to where it is, and even then, how tradition still overrides many sensibilities.

Some highlights of A History of Performing Pitch include:

1. The big schism between church-chorale/organ music, popular opera/ensemble music, and military music;
2. Sonority/timbre challenges for wind/brass instruments that come from their ``native pitch'' depending on which type of music they were predominantly played in;
3. Common transpositions of M2 (two semitones) and m3 (three semitones) to allow a single piece of written music to be harmoniously playable among the different ``native pitch'' tuned instruments;
4. The very large role in which vocal range determined the appropriate pitch standard to work with (tendency to pitch ``A'' lower for better range);
5. The disproportionate amount of influence of the various wind instruments (cornett, flutes, organs) in determining pitch standards after the vocalists.

I think this is the kind of history that every respectable [classical] musician should know so that they can better appreciate the setting in which their instrument and repertoire evolved in.

It also behooves the Chinese orchestra folk to learn from the mistakes/lessons that the western folk had gone through while trying to reconcile the different music traditions to form their symphonical orchestra, and not just copy the final behaviour blindly without thinking.

Yes, I'm still salty about why the staff notation for 笛子 is in concert pitch instead of instrument pitch for whatever type of 笛子 being used. The old consort recorders had their stuff written in concert pitch despite their tuning works because they were following an older music tradition for a mostly recorder-only ensemble---the recorder was a less important instrument in the world of the orchestra, being suplanted by the flute and concert flute. And even then, the tradition of pre-transposing the concert pitches of the staff into instrument pitches have already been put in place to ensure that the players don't have to do on-the-spot transposition of complex writing.

I suppose there really isn't enough history of important transposition instruments in the Chinese orchestra as compared to the western one (i.e. clarinets, and horns). It's just the 笛子, and it is thus easy enough to be ``bullied'' to do stupid things.

Anyway, I think that's about all I want to mumble about for now. Till the next update.

On Reading

Reading is [mostly] fun. I like to read. I've liked reading before I liked writing, and even before I started on my music journey on the 笛子. I've read when I was hungry for new-fangled scientific facts; I've read when I was hungry for a bit of someone else's life explored and unfolded before my eyes. I've read when I was sad; I've read when I was happy. I've read when there was nothing to do; I've read when I needed to get some things done fast. I've read in the day; I've read in the night. I've read when the books were the yellowing pulp paper; I've read when the books are in glossy magazine paper [that weighs a ton]. I've read when I could get hold of my first e-ink reader, my first tablet, and my first vertically mounted monitor. In short, I like reading.

Did I mention that I like reading? I kinda forgot if I did so.

There are many reasons to read---read my first paragraph for some of the obvious ones. But there are more philosophical reasons as well. The thing is, for almost all of us, this mortal life is all we are going to get. Yes, there's life after death for the believers, but that life is different and is at best alluded to allegorically in scripture, and for the most part the metaphors put forth indicate that the after-life is not at all similar to the mortal one. Parenthesis aside, we all ``get'' this ``one'' mortal life. There is only a fixed amount of time per person, and that's all we are going to get, even with the best life-prolonging technology we have [so far]. This limits us to what we can actually viscerally experience on our own.

Now, humanity did not become the dominant life form of earth just relying on the individual visceral experience---this is no different from all other life forms, and look at where they are: they do not have the same planetary-scale modification powers the way we do. No. Humanity accelerates their mastery of the world through ``cheating''---we propagate information (and thus knowledge) at a much higher rate than any other life form that we know. An owl in a county may learn that certain obstacles may be traversed in a certain way, and it can only teach its children about it, while Dr Scientist who discovered a new fundamental law of nature can immediately disseminate that discovery to the thousands of other scientists (present and future) who are eager to learn about it through a published letter or paper.

Information communication technology (ICT) is useless if all we are good at is the transmission of information; an equally important part of ICT is the ability to read (and understand) the bloody thing. And this trick over the rest of our animal kingdom compatriots is what allows a single puny mortal human to accumulate the knowledge and wisdom of thousands of lives past, present, and future [speculative] with only one life time.

Reading is critically important from a personal development perspective too. Recall that I mentioned how reading allows one to accumulate the knowledge and wisdom of thousands of other lives? That's how we ought to learn, to avoid mistakes that had been made by generations past so that we make new mistakes while exploring the thought boundaries so that future generations can learn from us. But there is a catch though---reading about an experience should be considered as a guide of what someone had tried and what happened to them, and is not exactly the same as experiencing it for oneself. This does not contradict the usefulness though, since knowing about a possible outcome from a particular choice of action can be useful too, assuming that one has also developed the capability to think critically about what one has read.

But back to my liking of reading. I like reading; I wonder if I had mentioned that before. Someone once said that reading was like a temporary coma induced by staring at abstract symbols upon a dead tree, and in a completely mechanistic observation sort of way, they are right. But I don't see that as a negative---in fact, it is probably a good thing, since it reduces the amount of physical space that a person might need, since that same person, when reading, can just literally sit in one [small] cosy spot for a period of time. Compare that activity against the mountaineer who needs to climb a mountain to feel happy, or a runner who gets sick of the stupid indoor treadmill.

In short, reading is the perfect pandemic activity to partake in, and guess what, we are in the middle of a bloody pandemic now. And so, I have been reading as much as I can. Unfortunately though, the books that I have been getting involved in are starting to get longer and longer, especially for the really technical texts---these buggers have started to number around the kilo-pages order of magnitude. So it is easy to get tired of them.

I mean, reading technical texts now is so different from reading technical texts when I was just eleven. Back then, even the puny O-level physics text was considered sufficiently technical for reading. Now, I can't even read the O-level physics text with a straight-face---not because I'm smarter, but because the concepts have lost their novelty and have largely been internalised already. So to get the same ``high'' from reading, I end up pursuing either the basic texts for college-level disciplines that I'm not a specialist in (hello Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition)!), or advanced texts for disciplines that I have a vested interest in.

And these texts are long.

It's the same for fiction too. Enid Blyton was a loved author back when I was still in primary school, as was the Hardy Boys series. But nowadays, the fiction seems to need to get longer for the right kick? Actually, I'm not so certain about that last point I made: just viewing the latest read items (items 799--718) of my read-list has revealed that I've not really being dealing with much fiction. I mean, I am actively working through the Animorphs series (total estimated pages: 3.6k+), but that's only one fiction series weighed against the plurality of non-fiction works.

🤷‍♂️

It doesn't matter too much though. The key point is that I am still reading. I think that I will never stop reading as long as I am able to.

And I recommend that anyone who happens upon this blog post to consider picking up reading as a low physical impact but high mental impact past time. It can literally make one more aware of what the world is like without necessarily having to leave one's door step.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Discrimination and Finishing Up of My Alcohol Stash

Proper socialisation is the politically correct way of saying that one has accepted the shared mythos that the rest of the local community that one is geographically closest to. There is nothing objective about the truth of what counts as a social norm---it is very subjective in nature by virtue of the fact that it is the result of a not necessarily falsifiable and independently observable conclusion.

There is nothing inherently wrong with proper socialisation; in fact, it is the very assumption that allows society to function at scales larger than an extended family unit. Because complete strangers [from the blood-connection] can know the ``right'' ways of behaving with others that are loosely associated into the tribal connection via these social norms that the violence often associated with ``others'' is greatly reduced.

The problem comes when the said proper socialisation overplays the othering card, either by overly demonising those who are ``different'' (by whatever measure that was decided [organically] by consensus), or by being sufficiently indifferent to any negative treatment of those who are least like them. These two scenarios play out as overt discrimination and covert discrimination respectively.

Discrimination is a fact of life, and despite the negative aspects associated with that word, it just means the ability to separate/categorise according to some criteria. However, there is a fine line difference between discriminating against what cannot be changed (like skin colour, ethnicity, physical/mental infirmities) and what can be changed [by free will] (like knowledge, skills, trainable abilities). Discriminating according to what is an innate unchangeable aspect of a person is considered bad because of the judgement that it is wrong to blame someone for something that they could not have done anything to change with free will, i.e. they are ``born with it''. For ``obvious'' physical issues (like skin colour, lack of limbs and the like), this judgement can be agreed to by most people without any form of major disagreement. But for mental issues and ``non-obvious'' physical issues, the line is much fuzzier, because mental issues are just that difficult to observe, since they occur ``in the head'' and thus can never be directly observed---they need to be inferred from observable behavious and actions, and there is never a guarantee that the conclusions that are drawn are even remotely correct. More importantly, there isn't a consensus either on whether mental issues are truly unchangable, or if there is some aspect of free will choice involved, since the causative agent in brain versus mind hasn't been fully resolved.

So in the secular context, with all things being equal, discrimination through mental issues may be heavily contested on all fronts, and a more conservative ``benefit of the doubt'' approach is probably the most apt till there is more science to show one way or another.

Aspects/attributes that can be provably changed through free will choice and active decision making are fair game for discriminative practices, solely for the reason that a change may be do-able by the person should he/she choose to do so. Thus, discriminating by education level relevant to a job is considered acceptable, as is discriminating by applicability of a certain skill. Now this does not state whether it is practical for the person to change his/her attribute through free will choice (it may cost an exorbitant amount of time/effort to do so), but I think that a theoretical level of plausibility is sufficient to file this form of discrimination as [begrudgingly] acceptable.

What about the teachings of the Bible? Yes, it describes how to discriminate [between the believers and the non-believers]. Yes it also describes what God has intended for humans to do (to glorify the Lord). Yes it also has stories to illustrate what God considers as sinful behaviour (much of it), and what counts as virtuous ones. Yes, the Old Testament has illustrations that can be considered barbaric in the ages during and after the New Testament, but bear in mind that the Bible is more than just the Old Testament---sticking to just the Old Testament without considering the context and lenses from the New Testament isn't really the following of Jesus's teachings; it's closer to being old school Judaism instead. No, the Bible does not prescribe us to go on a rampage to whack non-believers; if anything, the New Testament points us towards leading a life of non-judgement (since none of us are worthy to go round judging other people since we are all sinners as well), spreading the gospel of Jesus's sacrifice as the saviour who was an appeasement of God's wrath against the sinning nature of humankind, and leaving judgement to the second coming of Christ himself. It states that we are all sinners, and that we should help the unfortunate and the sinners to seek repentance through faith in Jesus Christ as our saviour against God's wrath.

It is also a form of socialisation as well, except that it is of a much larger scale compared to other forms of socialisation. It practises discrimination too, though not in the way that any vocal group might say. The teachings has always been about personal development and control, and not about forcing one's ideals onto others. But zealotry is always a problem with anything that has universal truth and appeal in it, and sometimes, zealotry ends up with the wrongful (but forceful) interpretation of what the scripture has said. I'm not angry with them though... just disappointed. Disappointed that they thought it would be best to spread the gospel through such perverted means. But whether what they did was good or not, is ultimately between them and God Himself, just as anyone who is still a non-believer even after hearing the gospel.

I used to say that I did not like organised religion. I also used to say that I don't have any beef with God, just with some of His followers. Now that I'm a believer, I'm still saying the same thing. Because ``organised religion'' assumes a type of groupthink that, from my experience as a believer in church, seems to come from the inherent laziness of people in applying critical thought to studying God's word to understand His will on their own. Preachers/pastors are humans as well, and as such, are also sinners. They are not inherently more holy than us---it is the case that through their more extensive and intensive study of the scripture that they learn and understand God's will better. But that is based on their rather human understanding of things; it is still up to the church body to do their own study of scripture to act as in the internal check and balance to what the preacher has said in the message for the week. I suppose that my old beef with organised religion is with the seemingly sheeple reaction with the preacher being placed on a pedestal that I never thought was justifiable. Knowing that that kind of behaviour wasn't what was prescribed in scripture is heartening, and made me more understanding of the intended nature of things.

------

In other news, I've finished the remaining XO that I have lying around. With that, I have consumed all the high-proof spirits that I have bought over the past fourteen years or so. I am not becoming a teetotaler, but I feel like I have ``outgrown'' my high-proof alcohol drinking phase. Don't get me wrong, I still like me a good whiskey every now and then, but I don't want to keep them in stock at home any more. I've tried all the high-proof alcohol that I wanted, from bourbon to whiskeys, to rum and vodkas, to VSOPs and XOs---I think that's enough experience for a lifetime. Maybe I might permit myself to get a nice big bottle of whiskey for the special occasions, but that really isn't likely to be happening any time soon. It's not that I don't like alcohol anymore, but that there is really little reason to keep a stash of it in my cabinet. Alcohol isn't exactly cheap in SIN city, and this isn't like my college days where programming was sufficiently complex enough that a good shot of whiskey or two would work wonders.

So, it's time to let it go.

I still have three small bottles of [bourbon] whiskey lying around, as well as two small samplers of whiskeys. I'll probably keep them around and enjoy them ever so sparingly. There really isn't much reason to be drinking at home these days---the weather is stupidly hot that it really isn't conducive to imbibing in alcohol [responsibly].

That's about it for now. Till the next update.

Consumer Electronics Woes at SIN

There are two things about consumer technology that irks me every now and then. The first is that the engineer product often doesn't take into account that there are people who wear glasses---VR headsets and over-the-ear headphones are the biggest culprits. The other is the poor choice of [plastic] materials/engineering design that cannot survive well in a place that is not using the mostly-temperature climate notion of room temperature (and humidity).

Guess where I am staying and whether I'm wearing glasses.

For the issue on poor choice of materials and engineering design, I suspect that cost-cutting is the main driving force. The engineering required to ensure a system can cool itself in an environment with an ambient temperature of at least 28 °C and relative humidity of more than 60% is likely to be non-trivial, because the thermal mass and temperature differential is much smaller than if one were to assume a cooler 20 °C environment with dry-ish air of 40% humidity. This means that most designs actually have a lower practical thermal energy movement power as compared to the stated rating. This is bad, and it results in the type of stupid activity that I need to take to ensure that Eileen-II doesn't burn herself down. Intel's ``Thermal Velocity Boost'' feature is an example of the type of tone-deaf engineering choice that clearly is optimising for cooler climates (where they can dump excess thermal energy more efficiently into the air) without caring about the hot and humid climate where most of the under-developed and developing world lives.

Another issue with poor choice of materials and engineering design lies with the plastics. Plastics are a more general form of polymers, and they have various modes of decomposition, with most of them relating to excess energy being applied to it in the form of heat and UV-light.

Guess what do we have an abundance of in the tropics.

On the side topic of plastics/polymers, I just want to point out that wood and other plant-based structures are often the traditional materials used for what plastics are currently covering as their niche areas. These are more renewable than plastics are (plastics come from oil), but with the scale of decades as compared to millions of years, the absolute difference does not impress anyone. This can be a post for another day.

As for glasses-wearing folks and consumer electronics... that's very specific for me, I agree. But the general idea of engineering for accesibility is often something that is done as an afterthought rather than being a part of the original technological drive. That is worthy of another post in the future (I need to remember these).

There are two solutions for glasses-wearing folks, but they are both based on the same general idea---remove the spectacles themselves, either through the use of contact lenses, or some kind of eye surgery to remove the need for glasses.

Those solutions don't solve the problem for those with really bad eyesight though. I should know---I am one of them. Don't let the relatively thin lenses of my glasses confuse you---I already did eye surgery to reduce the refractive error that is needed to be corrected. That was how bad it was. Contact lenses don't work well for me because of the high risk of corneal abrasion.

Thankfully, VR headsets are not in my sights---using them requires space that is often really hard to find especially in SIN.

I have thought of an alternative for the over-the-ears headphone problem though---it is the use of the pince-nez type glasses, where there are no ear hooks. Without the ear hooks, the over-the-ear headphones can seal more comfortably around the ear while still providing good corrected vision.

The only problem is that pince-nezes are basically considered quaint and vintage articles nowadays. And even if one could find a frame, the know-how on how to set the lens correctly for that particular mechanism may be partially lost as well.

Speaking of headphones, I found that when I had the standing fan blowing at me directly from a distance of less than one metre at full speed, ``full noise cancelling mode'' triggers additional white noise. Ironically, ``low noise concelling mode'' did a much better job at filtering out the turbulence sounds of the fan while still keeping all other external sounds at bay.

Very interesting observation.

Anyway, till the next update.

Skills and the Olympics

Skills are our means of creating features to describe a person's capabilities. So we can say things like ``Suzy is good at art'' or ``Ah Seng is good at martial arts''.

But saying that someone is skilled in something isn't quite the full story. The reason for this line of thought comes about from the seemingly great disconnect between officials wanting to run the Tokyo Olympics despite protests to the contrary in view of COVID-10. From the athletes' camp, there are some whose risk assessment says that it isn't worth it to face potential future impingement of performance for a chance at a moment's glory, while there are those who decide that it was more important to get that chance for glory over anything else.

(I am deliberately leaving out the commercial implications for this post.)

Now then, what has that got with ``saying that someone is skilled in something isn't quite the full story''?

The single word ``skilled'' is an umbrella term for four aspects. These aspects are:

General Fitness

An evaluation of a person's general physical/mental abilities. A naturally physically/mentally fit person will usually be more skilled in an activity than someone who is less so if both of them are new to the activity.

Activity-specific Fitness

An evaluation of a person's physical/mental abilities that are specific to the activity. So in the case of say running, we are talking about whether a person has strong/durable legs or not.

Foundational Activity-specific Technique

Basic movements/thought patterns that are fundamental for the operation of the activity. The key difference between this and the ``fitness'' aspect is that it is less based on conditioning and more of a latent long-term activity-specific knowledge retention. So someone who knows how to ride a bicycle will have the foundational ``ride a bicycle'' technique which will resurface any time the said person rides a bicycle, while his/her ``ride a bicycle'' fitness may have deteriorated if he/she hasn't been riding a bicycle for years.

Task-oriented Activity-specific Technique

This builds upon the Foundational Activity-specific Techniques to fulfil a particular task. Examples of these include training for a competition, preparing for an examination, and rehearsing for a concert.

Notice that I have given the four aspects of being ``skilled'' in increasing amounts of specificity---I think that this can provide a template for people to approach the acquisition and maintenance of any new skills that they want to pick up.

General fitness is something that every doctor will raise at some point---if one's general physical/mental fitness is good, it means that the associated physical/mental system has a strong base to build everything upon. So for anyone who wants to level up all the skills that one has quickly, building up a good general fitness is a quick win. Concretely, general fitness is about improving cardio-vascular systems which allows better concentration and good endurance, which are important for the skill acquisition/maintenance process.

Activity-specific fitness refers to slightly more specific physical/mental attributes that are relating to the particular activity that one wants to have skill in. So things like finger dexterity, hand-eye coordination, cognitive training like ear training or haptic sensitivity, and the like. These are types of exercises that one often hears about when asked about ``what kind of physical/mental training can I do to improve my skill in X''. While I call these ``activity-specific'', they can be useful for some cross-training among related activities, as long as the related activities are not using the fitness in contradictory ways. For example, a sprinter probably wants to build up more plyometric movement, while an endurance runner would want a more consistent energy release over a long period of time. These two are related in the sense of using the same muscle groups, but they have rather contradictory requirements.

Foundational activity-specific techniques start referring to the combination of movements/thought patterns that drive the specific type of activity. These form the so-called core of the discipline, be it martial arts, sports, or performance arts. These are the types of techniques that when mastered, tend not to go away that quickly. Masters and grandmasters of the particular skill are usually well-known for having high levels of such foundational activity-specific techniques, and this is true even if their general fitness and activity-specific fitness may be lower due to age or injury. When neophytes want to pick up something new, this is the key set of knowledge that they really need to learn and master, even though it may be the driest thing of the particular activity. Some examples of these are basic body movement in martial arts, long tones and scales in music, and identifying perspective/source shapes in art.

Task-oriented activity-specific techniques are usually the more glamourous aspects of the activity. So a command performance of a difficult concerto, the Olympic-level competition of the athletes, the preparation of new works of art for an exhibition all fall into this category. These techniques are more situational, and may contain within them an element of choice---athletes may choose to specialise in one or two events, a musician can choose which concerto to play, and the artist can choose what medium/style that he/she wants to work with. New disciplines can be spawned off from some of these choices if they are well-differentiated with enough of a community support. Many newbies make the mistake of wanting to jump into task-oriented activity-specific techniques to ``be good''---it's wrong only if the choice was made under the impression that it will make them more skilled in the activity in general, but it is totally acceptable if they ``just'' want to do that something. So people who pick up the piano just to play Ballade Pour Adeline shouldn't really accept the claim that they are skilled at piano---they are just skilled at playing Ballade Pour Adeline. Most self-aware people will not be that shameless though, to be had.

So, after one big long-ass exposition, what's my point?

Olympic-level athletes are skilled in all the four aspects I stated. But the Olympics run only in four-year intervals, so missing out on one such Olympic means waiting another four years, for a total of an eight-year-interval. The Olympics are the pinnacle competitive ground for physical prowess, and these athletes have optimised the hell out of their training/living to ensure that they are at literal peak performance for their event in the particular Olympics. These people have taken activity-specific fitness and task-oriented activity-specific techniques to a whole new level, where the peak-level optimisation can only be maintained for a short period of time just because of how stressful it is for the body. They use a lot of resources and planning to get to where they are to compete among the best of the best, and thus the associated pressure to deliver upon the implicit promises made through such training is immense.

And that is why I can understand why some athletes just want the Olympics running so that they can compete and justify to themselves (and perhaps their sponsors) that all the capital spent on training was wholly justified.

Does this make them tone deaf to the ground sentiment? A little, but when the stakes are that high for oneself, the rest of the world seems to matter less. High-level athletes who can compete at the Olympic level are already in a world unto themselves---they are the closest we will get to god-tier humans that were heavily romanticised in the cultures with pantheons of gods. The level of competition is so intense that having the time to spend on thinking about others is likely to be considered a luxury.

Then of course there's the whole socio-economic aspect from the investment made by the hosting country of the Olympics that make the successful completion of such a hosting important for them. But that can be a write-up for another day.

Till the next update.

Fleetingness of the Second Death

I wrote about the second death quite some time ago, and recent events have made me start to think a little bit more about what I was saying, that one truly dies once the ``second death'' comes about, that is, the time when one's name and memory is uttered/brought up from memories for one last time, never to be brought up again.

Well, I think that for mere mortals, that time can come much earlier than expected, possibly as soon as two generations after. And for those who have the money and means to build their own empires, their names may still be remembered, but their essence or character will not be---only the most idealised form will remain, and even then, it will be moulded and shaped by whoever is currently in the executive level to better suit their [political and] management purposes.

Sobering.

The catalyst for this line of thought came about from a recent Reddit thread that I came across. Those relating to relationships are particularly hard to accept, even though it is obvious that they are true.

That's all I want to write about today. Consider it a means of extending the daily streak.

Till the next update.

Architecting Our Own Extinction

I was watching Ina'nis' playthrough of NieR: Automata and a thought came to me.

Now, more than ever, humanity is at a very critical juncture where a series of choices that are made collectively will forever change the landscape of what makes us human, forever. I would go as far as to say that the impact that we are facing is even larger than that of the industrial revolution, for the sole reason that we are now encroaching into the definition of what it means to be a human.

Is being a human in this modern world one where we are still working long hours like our predecessors, despite the massive productivity increases that have come from massive amounts of technological innovation?

Is being a human in this modern world one where one can still be malnourished despite having an over-abundance of food to the point where most of the human race isn't directly involved in agriculture?

Is being a human in this modern world one where, despite the one hundred years of pedagogy improvements, are still dangerously ignorant and even demonstrate pride in that ignorance?

Is being a human in this modern world one where what we see, what we do, what we eat, who we find attractive, what we find pleasant, are all determined by an algorithm that, instead of facilitating creativity through exploration, strongly promotes typecasting in the form of a rigid but opaque rules system driving everyone towards a new tyranny of the unknown majority that cannot be appealed against?

Is being a human in this modern world one where what we do, who we meet, where we go is closely monitored by governments both ``ours'' and ``theirs'', as well as private businesses, all under the façade of ``security'', through the strategic use of the bogeyman to coerce us into gladly signing away our freedom of choice and association in the name of the false sense of security?

NieR: Automata as a story is very rough---there is no happy ending. Humanity is already dead at the point where the story starts, despite the whole ``Glory to Mankind'' proclamations. We are now at the point where we are capable of architecting our own extinction. If the irresponsibility that causes global warming doesn't kill us off, then the artificial scarcity through manufactured wants might. If neither of those will, then the toil on mental health through the fascist application of arbitrary rules and laws in the name of ``proper behaviour'' will.

It's funny. I'd never thought I would see the day that I would be pulling out the Bible as a point for argument, but here it comes.

What we are heading into is a world that is very similar to that of the biblical Jews of the Old Testament, where tradition and ``the law'' are hailed as the do-all, be-all, and end-all for being a righteous person. It sounds great in theory, but it cannot work for two reasons:

1. Human laws/traditions were never constructed to be bug-free with respect to interpretation---if they were, we don't need anything more than judges who just read the conditions and apply;
2. There is none, i.e. not one, of us who can claim to follow all the rules/laws, even if they were perfectly constructed.

My belief system says that this is due to humans being sinners, but the secular approach of considering that humans are social creatures by instinct and rational creatures by training with the realisation that this peculiar combination virtually guarantees automatic non-compliance to any rule/law that the person isn't actively recalling and verifying (assuming that the rules/laws are perfect) works as well.

I say that we are at that point of being wholly capable of architecting our own extinction for the sole reason that there is too much power being accumulated into the hands of too few. Combine that with the zealous pursuit of capitalistic ``efficiency'' and an increase in risk aversion the higher in status one is means that any choices/actions have a tendency to undergo the equivalent of convergent evolution, i.e. everyone will optimise towards the same solution.

This is bad. This is very bad. This is extremely bad because it creates homogenous systems, and homogenous systems are very weak as a whole---while they may share the same strengths, they also simultaneously share the same weaknesses. This means that if any one system has an exploit in it, then all systems that are based off it will, with high certainty, be vulnerable to the same exploit. And if there are no alternatives, that may mean the end of the normal operation of that system.

With the current trends, we are already having very few systems of that sort out there. And they have already been proven to not be strong the moment someone decides to pay a little closer attention to it and actively seek exploits.

Reversing such trends are hard to impossible---inertia from the current holders of advantage being the biggest of them.

Ever tried figuring out who owns what companies in the world today? I recommend that anyone who hasn't done so, try it out as an exercise. The answer can be quite scary.

And that is the reason why some things are the way they are, despite being detrimental to humanity in the middle and long term. Because profits are more important than sustainability.

Welcome to 1 Timothy 6:10:

¹⁰ For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

But profits alone are not the only contributory cause to us architecting our own extinction: power for power's sake is also another one to behold.

In fact, I would say that it is that want for power that some people create massive conglomerations that end up controlling too many companies and pushing down their overarching agenda upon the many who have been made to depend on their products/services.

And before the pitchforks come out, no, communism is not the answer.

We need to really start thinking about what it means to be human, and think about how the systems that we have put in place now are threatening that intangible cultural aspect of humanity.

What's the point of being a human when the system treats one as nothing more than a data point to be manipulated?

------

I complained about the RT button a couple of days back. I tried running the joystick configuration tool joy.cpl and did some recalibration, but now as I write it, I think I might have done the calibration ``wrong''. See, the LT button and RT button are apparently treated as analogue buttons controlling the z-axis, where LT reduces the z-axis value and RT increases the z-axis value. I calibrated it according to maximum squeeze---my epiphany as I am writing this is to perhaps not use maximum squeeze to define the extent, which can raise the sensitivity (smaller physical movement generates smaller raw numbers that get re-scaled to full deflection, causing a larger ``jump'' per smaller [angular] movement, which makes it more sensitive).

I'll probably try that.

I have started on Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night as well. The funny thing is that despite making such a big fuss of preferring the D-pad over the joystick, I ended up using the joystick in Ritual of the Night. It was less annoying on my thumb, but somehow it felt just as snappy as the D-pad.

Perhaps Feudal Alloy's handling of the movement is just more scuffed than Ritual of the Night.

Anyway, that's that for now. Till the next update.

Thoughtflow Rant

Let's not do any tracking talk for a change. It feels like cheap content masquerading as some faux competition just to make it sound like I'm doing more things than I am doing. Anyone who wants to find out what I have been reading/how much I have been reading can go check out my reading list and my read list respectively. I'll just say in passing that I have been reading as much as I care to each day ever since the completion of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, with the intention of completing the Animorphs series as soon as I can.

Things aren't going smooth with respect to the COVID-19 situation in Singapore. The community case counts per day are not exactly going down, and while it is too early to tell if the ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'' measures are effective in stemming the community spread, the negative effects of the measures on people's lives are starting to show.

I will leave it to the other media (social or mainstream) to focus more on what this means for the average Ah Seng, and just talk about my own perspective instead.

It's peaceful enough for me. As the social isolation draws on, people start forgetting about my existence, and I slowly fade away into the background. In many ways, this is a Bad Thing, because despite all the claims of meritocracy, the reality of it all is that the official job market in SIN operates more or less like a CN-lite instead of being a ``true'' meritocracy. Besides, meritocracy doesn't really extend that well into the tertiary education and beyond, because the governmental support to boost high potential adults into the ``elite'' by arming them with the right amount of resources and opportunities to compete at a meritcratic level (sans the more obvious cronyism) gets prohibitively expensive.

Right, fading into the background. It's funny, actually. In some sense, I'm getting my wish granted---I had been in the foreground (and centre stage too) for a long time ever since I was young, sometimes for the right reasons (achievements and what-not), and most times for the wrong reasons (``that kid with the bad skin''). Moving through the school system from a neighbourhood primary school to a ``special assisted programme'' secondary school and finally to a neo-elite junior college gradually showed me that in the grand stage, I am literally nothing, even smaller than the mote of the stars. Because I'm not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

I will never go as far as someone who has connections. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't have connections, but that my connections are absolutely useless where I am---I did my college in the US, so I can probably talk to some folks there should I want to go there to work.

But why do I want to go to the US to work? I'd be a second-class citizen there, with even less support than being a first-class citizen out in SIN. And anyone who I knew who have decided to go to the US to work... let's just say that they are, with high probability, going to be US citizens---they ain't coming back to be proper SIN citizens, ever.

So then, am I a fool for staying in SIN?

I suppose it depends heavily on what criteria I am applying to make that judgement, I suppose. If I am looking at it purely from an economic point of view, then yes, I am the biggest damn fool on the planet for still staying in SIN where the opportunities are slim, the competition is undercut by cheaper labour from elsewhere, and cronyism lurks in the shadows of a supposedly meritocratic system outside that of the civil service.

If I am looking at it from a cultural and familial perspective, then no, since my parents are here, as are folks that I make music with regularly in the form of the Chinese orchestra. I used to have a wife-candidate here too, but that's now passed and is in the past. And thanks to COVID-19, we (as in the orchestra, not the wife-candidate) have not done any rehearsals for more than a year.

Do we still have an orchestra left? I don't know. I really don't know.

The days themselves have started to have little to differentiate among them---each day I need to physically remind my mum (and by secret extension, myself) the day of the week it was, just so that we can keep a certain cadence going. She's been home-bound for a long time for being a housewife, and I'm on sabbatical. Days easily meld into a blur when there is no [obvious] change going on.

Connections; cronyism. A technocratic agency cannot claim to be so if it is affected by cronyism. I don't discount the importance of having good relationships with people, but there is a difference between having a good working relationship and having some other kind of relationship that is taken as a surrogate for a working-type one. That's just disingenius, and more importantly, ends up complicating the decision process, making the final decisions much weaker than they should due to additional and potentially unnecessary constraints that come from the cronyism aspects.

I used to be less exacting---as long as I am not outright being cheated, I'm willing to put up with quite a bit of things. But now, the longer I am on sabbatical, the more stringent I am setting things up in many aspects of my life. My time is valuable, and I need to put my money where my mouth is.

If this means that when I need to get a job, I may need to hold out for a better fit and negotiate for my terms, I will do it. If it means rejecting some HR drone's pathetic excuses for frowned-upon practices, then so be it. In the end, it's just a job, and while the company has the right to pick a good candidate to work for them, I too have the right to pick a good company to work for.

That is, assuming that I intend to work for others as a corporate drone. Not totally discounting that yet---six/seven months is a long time for many things to happen, and that's roughly the number of months I have left of my sabbatical.

Chara once said at the end of a two-month break between jobs that I was going stir-crazy, which I vehemently disagree. I still do, and I'm proving to myself now that I am still in the right. Because I'm not stir-crazy. I'm not restless nor frantic, because I have time to think about things that I need to do, and more importantly, do them, all without having to worry about being badly managed by someone else in a time where everyone is highly stressed out due to living on the razor's edge of not developing reserves/contingencies in the bid for profit.

So much to read, so much to think, so many Steam/GOG games to play, so many flute/笛子 pieces I can play. How would I ever feel bored and restless?

I don't, that's the point. And the scary thing is, it gets dangerously comfortable the longer I am in this state.

Perhaps retiring twenty years earlier than expected is not too bad an idea after all. No bitcoin riches to live off of, but having a small amount of savings, and the willingness to do part time jobs to pay the bills, and to pursue knowledge and understanding without it being tainted by the crushing pressures of capitalistic tendencies. To live like an old time member of the intelligentsia. Very alluring.

I wonder if that can actually be viable. Might be worth a thinking through for feasibility, especially in such harrowing times where the national strategy for economic output is hashed, the labour market is scuffed, and the social fabric of society threatened by all these new measures stemming from a situation that promotes survival through isolation instead of togetherness.

Alright, enough yammering for now. Till the next update.

Bayonetta Surrounded by Idiots

And I'm already a couple of days into month number 5 of my sabbatical.

For those who are a little numerately challenged, this means that I am in the fifth month, not that I have completed five months of sabbatical. This ordinal/cardinal difference is what separates the so-called ``Chinese way'' of reckoning ages and the ``Western way'' of reckoning ages. The ``Chinese way'' is ordinal, so when we say someone is 三岁, we mean that that person is currently in the third year of existence, while the ``Western way'' is cardinal, so someone who is three years old has lived for at least three years already (i.e. they are in their fourth year of existence).

Anyway, the past is starting to stay more quietly where it belongs, and I am definitely more calm and content than I was as compared to January. Of course stranger things are afoot, but that is nothing really surprising.

I completed Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson, and to a certain extent, it is largely a paraphrase of the old four temperaments theory of Hippocrates, except with more elaboration on the specific characteristics, the multi-domain theory (up to three shades of the four temperaments may be present in a single person), and more importantly, the associated adaptive behaviour that is required to successfully communicate with someone operating with a particular temperament. I wouldn't call it completely pop-science, but it does give some actionable food for thought.

And it raises an interesting point that I think many people have extreme opinions on---that the ancients (for whatever definition of ancients) are either wiser than the moderns, or that they are forever less wise compared to the more recent vintages of Homo sapiens.

As always, I begin by stating that both extremes are wrong. Believing wholesale that the ancients are wiser than us moderns logically means buying into all their attempts at explanation and disclaiming the thousands of years of improvements in methodology in natural philosophy---that cannot be right. Saying that the moderns are super-dominantly wiser than the ancients nullifies the early findings of the ancients that set us on the rough path to our current discoveries and knowledge---that cannot be right either.

My personal take is that whatever the ancients have left behind for us is the accumulation of what is popular and easy to be shown to be generally correct in principle; these are high-level archetypal knowledge patterns that can be easily observed by anyone else who choose to apply their time that way. However, the explanations of the why and how of the observations may be lacking for the ancients, for the simple reason that they have not developed the necessary vocabulary and abstract imagery that we have at our disposal from generations of thought filtering that was put in.

Basically, anything that doesn't require precisely engineered tools (concrete or abstract) to observe are generally observed accurately by the ancients, but the associated explanations that accompany them may get the gist of it right, even though the vocabulary may not be up to snuff.

It's like trying to explain the phenomenon of electricity without using Maxwell's equations. It had been done, and it was later proven to be just a [good] approximation under reasonable assumptions. It gives a generally correct picture at the human-scale, but does not give a complete picture of it.

In other words, anyone who believes that ancient homo sapiens are incapable of building pyramids without alien technological help have severely underestimated the ingenuity of humankind in general, while anyone who believes that modern technology describe a reality that is different from what the ancients have observed is similarly mistaken.

Now, pay close attention to what I say: I claim that the observations are valid, and also claimed that the associated interpretation/explanation may not be. So, observing that different groups of humans share different cultures and thus behaviours is valid, but claiming that one culture is somehow ``superior'' and therefore must subjugate all other cultures is not valid.

Thus, I think that there is still value in reading the classics without censorship for two big reasons, the first being to learn of observations from a different era that is unlikely to be too far different from the modern age, and the second is to appreciate why the particular intellectual directions have gone the way they have, and then come to one's own conclusion on whether those intellectual directions that were taken can be considered a progression towards better understanding, or a regression towards [deliberate] ignorance.

------

I started on Bayonetta today, being inspired by Ina'nis' Let's Play of the same game. I don't know if my RT button F310 Gamepad from Logitech is just too stiff from not playing much on it, or if the PC port of Bayonetta is just bad with input lag---I just can't seem to trigger off the dodges/combos that rely on the RT button consistently. In addition, I found that my fingers were actually tired from playing just around 4 hours intermittently.

What the heck? I don't have such problems with mouse+keyboard. But I suppose this is just a case of needing to ``train'' the right muscles and associated firing patterns to get used to it. As I had mentioned before, I hardly use my thumbs for anything that requires dexterity, so they are actually quite week in comparison. The RT button though requires the right index finger to squeeze sort of hard (the trigger feels heavy), and it is also an action that I don't do much of since most of the things I do actually require a much lighter touch.

So, there're lots to learn/relearn. At least this time I'm probably not going to develop a blister on my left thumb from rubbing the D-pad too hard.

Speaking of D-pads, I wonder if Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night uses the D-pad or the thumbstick for movement. It's a 2D platformer, and I really prefer the use of a D-pad over the thumbstick for movement in 2D platformers---part of the reason why I didn't like Feudal Alloy was precisely that, oh and the awkward environmental hazards that I was last stuck at did not help at all. Hollow Knight is another darling that everyone likes, but I didn't really enjoy it much, despite getting through more than half-way through the game (I didn't complete it). It's too... fiddly, and at no time in the game do I end up feeling ``powerful''. Progression in character from skills in a combat-esque type game usually means smacking foes down faster the more we progress, but that was never really the case in Hollow Knight. I mean, yes, the Nail gets upgraded with increased damage, but the Bosses/Minibosses have their lives altered according to the upgrade level as well, making the total number of hits required much higher than would be expected with each upgrade.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway, one last thing to note is that I have discovered quite accidentally that Atkinson Hyperlegible doesn't have an en-dash character. I learnt of this when I was inspecting my web pages [for fun], and realised that it was calling on the local Open Sans font for rendering (previous font-face used was Open Sans). I then wrote a little program to pull out all the valid Unicode ranges for all the Atkinson Hyperlegible fonts, and found that Unicode U+2013 didn't exist in the font-file.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Ah well.

Should I fix it? Ah, but what should the fix be? I think that any fall-back font will already have en-dash in it, so any fix on my end would be overkill. But then again, it might be worth it for the sake of ``self-sufficiency''...

That all said and done, that's all I have for now. Till the next update then.

Read and Read Some More

Wednesday!

Read three more books of the Animorphs series (total 14/62 books), and finally started on Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson. Watched more HoloEN videos in simul as well.

Bought two new games on Steam that were on sale: AMID EVIL and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. AMID EVIL is a retro-styled FPS that supports RTX, and plays like old school Quake, but with improved graphics and other modern facilities, while Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a spiritual successor to one of the old metroidvania games.

The first one uses keyboard and mouse, while the second one is going to use a controller. I know I said I didn't really prefer controller-based games, but I really cannot say no to something that is modelled after the best of the old metroidvania games, especially when it is led by one of the old school developers of Castlevania, IGA.

And yes, in the same entry I mentioned Halo 2. It will be done, considering that the entire MCC is eating some 100 GB of space right now.

No ``deep thoughts'' for the day---I did have bible study with my care group. The long and short of it for the curious is that salvation is by faith, and that glory to God is the font from which all good works should come from, and not the other way around.

Right, that's about all I want to write about for now. Till the next update then.

Book Completion and Disappointment

I did it. I finally did it, today. I completed all 1321 pages of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. I can safely file it away under my read-list after having it dominating my reading-list for so long.

As a survey book composed of survey papers, it suffers the same problem that most books of these type suffer---a general decrease in coherence as the chapters advance, itself a proxy of gradual movement from what is established dogma to the cutting edge, to the bleeding edge where things are still very ill-defined. I cannot tell if this is due to the editorial staff, or just the nature of the topic, but I can definitely say that the last two-thirds of the book was a much scruffier crawl than it should have been. Tighter editorial control on the presentation could have made it much better.

But who am I to complain?

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I find that as the years go by, I just don't get as angry as I was when I was a wee lad. Instead, what I tend to feel instead of anger is disappointment. I was doing my teeth-brushing before bed-time a little earlier and stumbled upon this thought. Even the recent posts that demonstrate some form of anger is really just a more impassioned version of disappointment.

I think this changeover from anger to disappointment as a primary reaction to something upsetting may be due to the increased experience that I have of the world, in the sense that after being in the world for ``long enough'', I generally expect people/situations to be of a higher standard than some uncouth cretin. So when such expectations of decency get violated by their very own actions, I just end up being disappointed in them.

In many ways this is part of the unspeakable angst that I have been feeling about the industry/domain/field that I am in that made me seriously consider (and follow through with) taking a sabbatical. Call me an idealist, or even naïve, the label doesn't really change what I feel about the situation---it is one of disappointment in the apparent loss of basic decency/ethics in the face of crushing potential profits. Suddenly everyone and their grandma wants ``artificial intelligence'', or ``blockchain'', or ``data analytics'', and those who have the know-how refusing to teach the unlearnt about what the buzzwords they spout mean, and more importantly, the circumstances that would help them decide an aye or a nay.

Artifice. Snake oil. Unscrupulousness. I cannot abide by these, even if I am comfortable with viewing the world with a bit more gray than before. It is an affront to the thinking person when they abuse their intellect and skills to peddle in things that would make Satan proud.

I cannot abide by that. They should really know better, and act better, but they are not doing so. That makes me disappointed in them.

On a slightly tangential track, I think that it really isn't about failure that people need to learn more from, but rather the handling of disappointment that may come from a failure. It is very easy to fail---most people can do this without even trying for any given task/situation. What I am referring to is the dealing with the type of failure that comes about after careful planning, which didn't seem to have prevented the failure. Or rather, it is about dealing with the disappointment that comes from such a failure.

One of the borderline joking remedies for dealing with disappointment with respect to tasks is to not set the bar of the task too high to begin with, the so-called ``low bar of entry'', or more mematically, ``setting low expectations''. It's a very 柔 concept, similar to the concept of ``jū'' of jūdo---to avoid something, we advance and parry it off in a direction that it wasn't heading to to use its momentum against itself.

So I suppose what I am trying to say is that one concrete outcome that I would like out of my sabbatical is to figure out what it is that I am disappointed in, and how to make it right again.

Anyway, that's all I want to write. Till the next update.

Keeping the Momentum

T'is a Monday, the first work day after the so-called ``Phase Two (Heightened Alert)'' is in place for SIN. I'm still on sabbatical, so it doesn't really affect me. I got in to a couple of light chats with some old friends, before going down the nearly 9-hour rabbit hole that is Ina'nis' stream of Call of Cthulhu as I was reading through Handbook of Data Structures and Applications. I've completed page 1134/1321, and soon it will be done and I can safely file it away (in detail) at my read-list.

What else is there to write about today? Nothing much really... it's mostly R&R taken in a different direction. I am thinking about getting some kind of collapsible reading chair to be more comfortable when reading [large] dead-tree books---while I have a nice big vertically mounted monitor for reading e-books, I still have a stupid number of dead-tree books that I would like to read and frankly, the HATTEFJÄLL I got recently just doesn't quite cut it, despite it being super comfortable for table-work. It isn't about the lack of arm-rests, nor is it about the reclining angle, but more of how it forces a proper posture that is not always wanted in a dead-tree reading mode.

Or I'm just being picky/weird. I mean, prior to my graduation from college, I did do much of my reading over a small 2-seater McDonald's table at the old Jurong Entertainment Centre (now known as JCube after the massive reconstruction some 11+ years ago) while munching on a 2-dollar large fries from the same fast food restaurant.

Eh, I'm just rambling. I'll stop here and do some final reading after my shower before turning in for the night. Till the next update.

More Restrictions Incoming

A slow day. I watched a few more multi-hour VODs from the HoloEN VTubers while making my slow way through Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, completing page 1045/1321, and completing Animorphs Series: The Secret. I'm well in part 7/7 for Handbook, with about 13 chapters (or equivalently, 13 survey papers) to go.

It is slow moving, but it will be done. It's not that I hate the book, but there's only that much technical information that one can take before it gets really out of hand. It seems that I average out at around 40--50 pages for Handbook, or about a couple of papers.

The problem that I raised yesterday about my blogs didn't re-surface, and I am glad of it.

I didn't attend church service yesterday due to the headache, and went for the online stream today instead. Thanks to the additional restrictions that I talked about on Friday, in-person church services will be suspended until the end of the new ${phase-name} is over. I had mentioned before that the hymn book was not easy to get ahold of, but thankfully during the time between then and now, there was an opportunity to receive one of the church's copy of the Hymns of Praise, thus solving my issues regarding not having the right music for worship purposes. I have not been playing my flutes for a while, and perhaps this is a good time to work on some of these hymns. Praise the Lord!

Speaking of the Lord, I have long since completed Bible in One Year 2020 With Nicky Gumbel, and have started on a new series of readings entitled Reading The Bible In Historical Sequence (Part 1). The entire series has 12 parts to it, and spans about a year. The idea is to use chronology as the key guiding principle in disentangling the verses that make up the Bible. It's a different way of reading, and I am using the ESV as the main reading form.

In yet more general (but SIN-centric) news, even more restrictions have been announced, this time mandating home-based learning (HBL) for school-going children.

I mean, I'm on sabbatical, so this particular piece of news doesn't affect me directly or as much as the previous one. I just feel disappointed that after one year, we are getting very close to step one once more, as though we had learnt nothing from our previous ``big spike trend'' situation. As for whom I am disappointed with, I'll just leave it as an unanswered rhetorical question.

And that ends the day for today. I'm going to do some final bits of reading before turning in for the night. Sorry for nothing revelationary, philosophical, or deep---that kind of thing doesn't come all the time. I just feel the... compulsion to write some kind of blog entry every day just to mark time. There's really no specific intention to entertain or inform, so anyone reading this (and the other blogs) should temper their expectations accordingly.

Till the next update then.

Take Me Home, Country Roads

So I started the day with a rude discovery that this blog could not load in Firefox for Android. I did a quick check with Xiaxue's blog (she's re-enabled it), and was hit with the same thing.

A red warning about how there was a ``Deceptive site ahead'', with no recourse whatsoever to override/ignore/head back.

That my own blog(s) were not accessible made me wonder if there was something wrong with what I did, what with the many tweaks that I had been doing recently. That even Xiaxue's blog was hit made me think that there was some kind of weird intermittent issue relating to Firefox's built-in anti-phishing and malware protection.

Strangely, using Google Chrome for Android on the same phone did not yield the problem. So maybe there was some intermittent API-related issue that I was unaware of that was likely to fix itself given enough time.

Nevertheless, I didn't want to take any chances, and quickly reported the false negative for my blog using the provided form.

Several hours later, I found that things were back to working form again. Whether it was the false negative update, or the restoration of whatever magic that was not working to cause the foul up, I don't know. As long as it works, I'm good.

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Today HoloEN released their first cover music, Take Me Home, Country Roads. Check out the music video:



Frankly, I was expecting something more kitschy, but was surprised at the quality of it. It's not great, but it was heartfelt. Gura really rallied and carried the song with her clean, high vocals. That rendition of ``I belong'' is sooooo good, especially when she is singing it solo at one of her karaoke streams that was clipped out by this YouTuber:



The word on the street for the cover is the word ``scuffed'', with criticism on the mixing. Throughout the videos of the HoloEN VTubers, ``scuffed'' seems to be the order of the business anyway---there's a certain down-to-earth camaraderie among the girls. I mean, it certainly does not fit the mould of a corporation-managed idol group, so if that is kept in mind, then having such collaborations that are not as well-produced as say the more professional EPs as released by Takanashi Kiara or Mori Calliope may make sense.

In fact, I would say that the HoloEN aesthetic is closer to that of an artist collective as opposed to that of an idol group when they are doing things together. And that is why I think I like them---it's all about that kind of spontaneity and realness that is hard to get these days.

I mean, they drop F-bombs appropriately in their live-streams, at the appropriate time, context, and even intonation. Doesn't sound forced, doesn't sound deliberately self-censoring to keep with the corpo image. I won't call it wholesome, but I will call it being earnest.

The VODs of some of their longer streams do serve as a nice background while I do other things, like the reading in between the sit-down naps I was taking thanks to the stupid headache and feverish feel. No, I still don't have an actual physical fever, and I can still taste things. It might just be due to the weather and one too many stupid o'clock shenanigans.

Anyway, I've done page 1003/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, and completed Animorphs Series: The Alien. The Animorphs series are quite bite-sized, with each book at about 60+ pages, and advancing the bigger plot ever so slowly. In the grand scheme of things, I would probably classify each book as a ``proper'' chapter, and eschew the 20+ chapters that each book would have. However, to be fair, these books were written/marketed as ``children series'', so it is understandable for the really choppy carving out of the chapters in each book.

It's a guilty pleasure, and I am not complaining, just merely pointing out.

I think that's it for this entry. Till the next update.

Quasi-Circuit Breaker That Isn't A [Complete] Lockdown

This is no news blog, but it's official: many more restrictions are kicking in now-ish, no thanks to the steady increase in the number of so-called local community cases.

Of all the new restrictions, the ones that affect me more directly is the prohibition of dining in, and the further reduction of congregation service size to about 50 (without the pre-testing). That means that I will not be able to visit my favourite bar just to drink, read, and chill during the time period of effect (May 16 to Jun 13). Ah well.

Looking up that date in the article revealed the following excerpt:

This, and other new measures under what the Health Ministry labelled as "Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)" will take effect from May 16 through Jun 13.

The emphasis is mine, and is a demonstration of the leakage of American-styled English (AmE) in our originally predominantly British-styled English (BrE).

To be fair, I'm not entirely consistent with my use of BrE either---I tend to prefer following the rules of BrE for phrasing and orthography, except for the case of the `-ize' suffix, preferring `-ise' over `-ize' because `s' is on the home row while `z' wasn't. So expect to see words like ``realise'', ``actualise'', and even ``emphasise'', over ``realize'', ``actualize'', and ``emphasize''.

I'm not going to comment on the appropriateness and timeliness of this new so-called ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'' other than the rhetorical ``it could have been avoided had the political will be there''.

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I spent much of the day watching Amelia Watson of HoloEN playing Outer Wilds while completing Animorphs Series: Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift and page 961/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications.

Outer Wilds seem like a really nice story-heavy first-person game with some execution-heavy segments, with a time-loop mechanic. Outer Wilds is not the same as The Outer Worlds a game that I had purchased and played some time back. Their names are sufficiently similar that even Amelia Watson acknowledged her screw-up when she was planning to stream it (she bought The Outer Worlds instead of Outer Wilds). Their similarities lie in that they involve space and exploration of different worlds with some kind of global (doesn't sound right since it is a solar system) crisis that needs to be resolved by the protagonist.

And that's where the similarities end.

Outer Wilds is strictly narrative/exploratory---there is no gunplay involved. There are no role-playing elements in the game; progress is measured by accrued lore over some kind of feat/attribute/reputation upgrade, favouring the meta-game over the game per se. Space-flight is integral to the game of Outer Wilds, and do not act as loading zones/hubs the way The Outer World does.

Watching Amelia Watson play through it over 23 hr, 44 min, and 31 s was enough for me to know that it is a game that I might have enjoyed, but would have been a little out of character due to playing the meta-game.

The more astute would ask: how did I manage to watch 23 hr, 44 min, and 31 s within a day? The trick is to use the 2× speed-up available in YouTube, which reduced the total time used to around 11 hr, 52 min, and 15.5 s. The other trick is to watch part of that 12-hour marathon the day before, and complete the rest today at 2× speed.

No games for me today, and that's about it. I'm having a headache that has come from God knows where, and am going to turn in before the clock rolls-over to the next day.

Till the next update.

Final IE11-Related Fixes

Okay, I mentioned about switching over to DOMParser to handle the conversion of the HTML file into a DOM tree that can be handled in IE11.

Well, that's done.

As always, after I fixed something, I discovered another problem. This time, it's about how the ch unit is garbled by IE11.

*sigh* IE11 is really getting on my nerves.

Anyway, I just set it up using the ideal case (in this case, in Waterfox) and compared the width of 1 ch against 1 em in their pixels as the multiplication factor---this turns out to be 11.0167:17, or 1 ch to 0.64804 em. So I just went ahead and updated all the major references that used the ``ch'' unit to ``em''.

And with that, I think I am done with fixing my website to not appear crappy for IE11.

The next step is to see if there is anything I can do to allow the experimental browser on Eirian-IV to work well.

Okay, that's it for now. Till the next update.