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.

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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.