Thinning of the Brain Fog

Two days till Aug 09, the national day of SIN city.

The parade's shifted to Aug 21 instead, thanks to the new restrictions that were put in place, and what I suspect to be a deliberate attempt to get some better news to show up during the parade itself instead of holding it in the middle of the totally-not-a-lockdown-lockdown and thus doing the equivalent of having the right hand slap the left cheek.

I... simply don't feel a thing. SIN city as a construct is as dry and dead as it can be. It exists as an ode to the age-old pass-time of merchants using money to make more money, even from the very early days of the city's founding back in 1819 (``founding prime minister'' myths aside).

SIN city's relevance to the world is basically nothing if global trade wasn't a thing. And so, here we are, a cobbled together society of immigrants who have dissociated from their ancestors' origins and staked a claim on SIN city as their home. The irony here is that despite all that rhetoric of staking claim on SIN city as their home, it is all starting to look really shaky within the past three to four generations.

Today's blog entry isn't really for contemplating the socio-ethnic make-up of SIN city; it's just a personal reflection of what SIN city means after a prolonged fight against the worst epidemic/pandemic that we had personally experienced in recent history. And that personal reflection is: well, we still exist, just devoid of a common sense of identity (other than that once-a-year time called ``national day''), and seemingly still having all the stupid race-related issues that we were supposed to have dealt with twenty years ago.

What the hell went wrong?

Simply that race-related issues have been conflated with socio-economic issues, causing ethnicity and recency of one's status as ``citizen of SIN city'' to act as proxies to the real socio-economic issues. What I mean is that, when I say that SIN city has race-related issues, it isn't really about race-related issues, but is more on socio-economic issues that masquerade as race-related issues due to correlation and association over true causation.

It's easier to bitch out someone who looks different from one than someone who acts, and only because looks are that much easier to observe and thus describe over that of actions.

Saying that someone is of green skin (for example) is much easier than saying that someone is really a rich person who has been living in his/her ivory tower and is causing big inequalities.

To move people, one needs to communicate, and it has been shown time and again that the most effective messages that spread the fastest are the ones that have the lowest Kolmogorov complexity, or in layman's terms, ``the shortest messages travel the farthest''. The accuracy of that message matters not the slightest---the easier the message, the farther it spreads.

Much of disinformation/misinformation spread is due to just how short the distracting/misleading messages are compared to truth, whose nuance often requires some stupid paragraph to even be accurate, let alone to be precise.

It is, unfortunately, a flaw of human nature rather than [just] a failure of education. The bad way of saying this is that humans are lazy and want to remember the least amount of things that they can to function, even if that least amount can be wrong sometimes (or even often times); the good way of saying is that humans are more effective at chunking information through their application of very strong pattern recognition skills to simplify concepts into various archetypes that can be retained in a more compact form. That compactness becomes useful because it takes less effort to recall, as compared to the nuanced one that is more reflective of reality.

SIN city hasn't had a static-enough state for folks to develop a strong enough archetype to describe it; in other words, SIN city as a whole has been changing so bloody often that there isn't any time to develop any form of strong common identity that the citizens can share and stand together truly united. Cities all over the world have existed for hundreds of years and have their own developed identity---even [recent] migrants to those cities have something that they can strongly identify with and make them unify somewhat under the banner of the city.

We can't do things like that here when even our architectural landscape changes every five years, let alone our social landscape that has seen increasing numbers of immigrants and other temporary workers assuming a different class from the rest of the citizens while the rich stay where they are and continue to be entrenched instead of leading the way towards helping to carve our own social identity.

Don't get me wrong, SIN City Inc is alive and well---the business identity of SIN city is very well-established in the world. But the business identity is not the same as the so-called humane identity, the type of identity that makes one proud as a citizen of SIN city on all days, and not just that one bloody day in the whole year as an annual remembrance of the forced separation from boleh-land. If anything, using the business identity as a replacement of the humane one means that being a citizen of SIN city is transactional as opposed to relational, in which case the question of loyalties will start to arise from those who were born in SIN city.

The year-and-a-half extent of COVID-19 has exposed that at some level, SIN City Inc is not completely heartless---vaccines for all residents within SIN city were procured by the government, possibly at great cost due to needing to secure supplies at the times that they are wanted. But a cynical take on things can say also that it was not an altruistic step---not having anyone safe from COVID-19 means that SIN City Inc's operations can ground to a halt, which mars the business identity that has been crafted; a true sense of whether SIN city's relationship with its citizens is transactional or relational should be seen in how the latter's entire life-cycle from birth to death is treated within SIN city's policies, where even as much is expected from the citizen to uphold SIN City Inc's business requirements, the returns thus obtained is re-invested into each and every citizen's life so that everyone who is a citizen does get to live a fulfilling life even as they contribute towards SIN City Inc.

Idealistic? Sure, why not? I mean, public service/administration is basically providing an authority or custodian over resources that can easily suffer from the tragedy of the commons, or if leaving it up to private enterprises would mean a moral/ethical failing at some level that is detrimental to the operation of society if pure capitalistic principles are applied to it.

Well, after the rant, I suppose I do feel something about SIN city after all. If I really didn't feel a thing about SIN city, I wouldn't get all worked up just talking about the issues that are being faced now, wouldn't I?

------

The brain fog is clearing up slightly, and I tested it out by going through a fairly brain-dead all-execution round of Halo 3 to complete the game. It was progressing smoothly till one point when it decided to crash out with some kind of weird UE4 fatal error, and it didn't want to start up even to the menu screen.

I left it alone to work on adjusting the transcription of 乙女解剖, tweaking note lengths to better match what Nekomata Okayu was singing (see this stupid o'clock post for the associated videos). I then did the transposition to the B♭ saxophone like before, but since I took out the so-called ``backing'' sections (i.e. non-singing parts), the lowest concert pitch note was just a F as opposed to something stupid like low B.

I then realise that using the B♭ saxophone was a stupid idea: switching to the E♭ saxophone was much easier. For those who are confused, it means writing the part for an alto-saxophone as opposed to a soprano or tenor saxophone.

Under that transposition scheme (recall that Okayu sings the original concert C♯-minor at concert G-minor), we can just play Okayu's part as instrument E-minor (or instrument G-major), and we are gold. This is because concert pitch F (the lowest note), is exactly instrument pitch D, which is completely playable on the alto-saxophone. This has the effect of making the high note reach instrument E instead of some nonsensical altissimo A that I was talking about before.

I did test out the score on a B♭ 大笛, and it sounds wonderful (B♭ 大笛 is equivalent to an octave-higher version of the alto-saxophone). This means that on an alto-saxophone, we will be playing an octave lower than what Okayu was singing---I don't think that it will be a problem though, since the alto-sax has a nice phat sound.

After all that, I returned to Halo 3, and whaddya know, it ran! Well, sort of. My previous progress wasn't restored, and while I did manage to complete the game after loading the scenario from the mission select screen (with the default load-out in my Master Chief compared to the weapons I had from the play-through), it crashed shortly after I completed the epilogue movie.

🤦‍♂️

Aaaaaaanyway, that's all I have as a side story. Till the next update.