Last chance to squeeze in an entry before 2022-05 closes ``forever''.
I managed to tweak my personal web site to make it behave a little less stupidly when displaying it in a browser window that is more landscape oriented. The old behaviour limits the width to 740 px, but I used some media queries to allow the width to scale larger proportionately as the browser's width gets past 970 px, with a hard limit of 1920 px for the sole reason that I think a single-line paragraph looks really stupid.
I've also messed around with using the flex display to fit my figures, and to adjust my footer to not require the messiness that is the float display.
On the whole, I'm satisfied with the results, even though I still think that 740 px for the given font size is roughly the sweet spot for on-screen reading. But then again, not everyone uses the implicit screen-split that I do through the Windows-Left and Windows-Right key commands.
And before I post this and restart Eileen-II due to some software update, I just want to point out that the weather in SIN city is atrociously hot and humid. It is so hot and humid that the interior wall temperature at night is a blistering 32 °C.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
Anyway, that's all I have for this entry. May is about done, June is coming up, and before I know it, 2022 will come to an end and there's next year to... look forward to?
Till the next update.
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Sunday, May 29, 2022
A Short Blurb
I'm always a little confused on what Sunday symbolises: is it the start of the week, or is it the end?
Traditionally, it is considered the start. But I found it mentally a little easier to consider it as part of the end of the week instead, mostly because the start of the week is considered when I need to start working on work things.
These days (for quite a while, actually) work starts on Monday for me, so it feels logically more correct to consider the week as begining on Monday.
Perhaps.
The reason I'm bringing up this rather subjective experience here is from how with each passing week since the relaxation of the COVID-19 control measures in SIN city, there's that unacknowledged urge to return to a sense of familiarity through the types of rituals and conditions that once dominated our lives before everything went side ways for more than 2 years. Whether it is due to fatigue from being on the alert for too long, or the fear of a future with greater uncertainty, it is the general sense that one gets just from existing around.
I can tell because as the one who more often than not lives as an interloper, the tolerance of my presence in general has started to wear thin.
Anyway... the weekend has passed on by quickly. I dug up more teracotta in Minecraft, replaced the signboards with item frames for my mini-productivity factory, added a glow berry farm to my industrial platform, and spent time just AFK-ing at my mob farm to get more gunpowder.
I also finished getting the latest goodies from the recent update for Vampire Survivors, which I still maintain as well worth the SGD 3.25 price tag. I mean, according to Steam, I have sunk in 55 hours into it so far, which works out to about SGD 0.06/hr. That's roughly the order of magnitude of play-time for a more regular AA/AAA game, though to be fair those are more for a one-time play through while this is an accumulation of multiple 30-minute bouts.
The heat and humidity is starting to get to me, and I'm feeling a need to crash out for the night. So that's about it for now, and till the next update then.
Traditionally, it is considered the start. But I found it mentally a little easier to consider it as part of the end of the week instead, mostly because the start of the week is considered when I need to start working on work things.
These days (for quite a while, actually) work starts on Monday for me, so it feels logically more correct to consider the week as begining on Monday.
Perhaps.
The reason I'm bringing up this rather subjective experience here is from how with each passing week since the relaxation of the COVID-19 control measures in SIN city, there's that unacknowledged urge to return to a sense of familiarity through the types of rituals and conditions that once dominated our lives before everything went side ways for more than 2 years. Whether it is due to fatigue from being on the alert for too long, or the fear of a future with greater uncertainty, it is the general sense that one gets just from existing around.
I can tell because as the one who more often than not lives as an interloper, the tolerance of my presence in general has started to wear thin.
Anyway... the weekend has passed on by quickly. I dug up more teracotta in Minecraft, replaced the signboards with item frames for my mini-productivity factory, added a glow berry farm to my industrial platform, and spent time just AFK-ing at my mob farm to get more gunpowder.
I also finished getting the latest goodies from the recent update for Vampire Survivors, which I still maintain as well worth the SGD 3.25 price tag. I mean, according to Steam, I have sunk in 55 hours into it so far, which works out to about SGD 0.06/hr. That's roughly the order of magnitude of play-time for a more regular AA/AAA game, though to be fair those are more for a one-time play through while this is an accumulation of multiple 30-minute bouts.
The heat and humidity is starting to get to me, and I'm feeling a need to crash out for the night. So that's about it for now, and till the next update then.
Friday, May 27, 2022
My Typical Day is Boring
It's yet another Friday.
I don't really have much to say. I mean, what is there to say? I wake up at 0500hrs in the morning, spend some time with God, catch up on the news over the RSS feed, do the short set of exercises from The Hacker's Diet to maintain my muscle mass, take a cold shower, brush my teeth, chug a cup of weak instant coffee to take my antihistamine, head into my room to check out other news sources online (hello /., and Reddit), start getting dressed by 0610hrs, leave the apartment by 0625hrs, take the bus between 0630hrs to 0645hrs (napping for the first 20 min and then proceeding with reading), change to the next bus at around 0730hrs to 0745hrs (mostly reading), alight at the bus stop between 0800hrs to 0810hrs, march up the hill and set up my work laptop between 0810hrs to 0825hrs while making my next mug of coffee, work till 1130hrs, hide somewhere far from my work space for one hour (spent mostly reading, unless I feel knackered, in which case I'd begin with a short nap of 15 min), make my last mug of coffee before continuing my next bout of work till 1750hrs, do my daily document back up, lock away everything except the LAN cable and monitor into the puny pedestal drawer, leave by 1815hrs, hop on the bus en route to Harbourfront (reading all the way), decide to have dinner there or otherwise, and eventually make my way home by 2030hrs, shower, chill in front of Eileen-II either reading or doing something in Minecraft or write some program or write something else (like a blog entry) or catching up on more news while simultaneously watching/listening to Hololive archives at speeds between 2.0× to 3.0× depending on the streamer and content, grab my other antihistamine and a multivitamin pill by 2330hrs, set up my mattress on the floor, set my alarm to 0500hrs the next day (0515hrs on the device, because I purposely run it 15 min faster than real-time), spend some time with God while in seiza, do my squats, do my hamstring and adductor stretches, do my crunches, then crash out by 0000hrs.
That is literally my typical day. There is hardly time for anything or anyone else.
Is this living? I don't know... what is living for a middle-aged Asian man in Singapore with a middle-of-the-line income like me anyway?
🤷♂️
If you know the answer, do write a comment and let me know. Because I really don't know.
------
SumatraPDF recently updated to v3.4.1 (as at writing). While it supposed to have improved features from the updated components, I do not recommend its widespread use just yet. There are two deal-breakers for me that preclude its use:
In other news, Frescobaldi finally released a Windows build for v3.2, some 22 days after the Linux builds were released.
``MT, I thought you worked with Linux? What's with the Windows daddy-o?''
Linux is for work stuff---for not-work stuff, I use a mix of Windows+Cygwin to get things done, with a side of Linux command-line from a VM when there is absolutely no other [easy] way of doing it.
That said though, Frescobaldi in the new 22.04 LTS release of Ubuntu is broken for the same reason why v3.2 exists---Frescobaldi v3.1.3 cannot run with the Python 3.10 interpreter due to some increased strictness involving types (see Issue #1433 for an example of the class of errors). I'm not sure when the package maintainer will fix this, but that also slows/stops me from setting up a 22.04 update on machines under my control.
Anyway, that's it. It's 2315hrs as I write this sentence, and I'm just going to push this out and call it a night.
Till the next update, whenever it might be.
I don't really have much to say. I mean, what is there to say? I wake up at 0500hrs in the morning, spend some time with God, catch up on the news over the RSS feed, do the short set of exercises from The Hacker's Diet to maintain my muscle mass, take a cold shower, brush my teeth, chug a cup of weak instant coffee to take my antihistamine, head into my room to check out other news sources online (hello /., and Reddit), start getting dressed by 0610hrs, leave the apartment by 0625hrs, take the bus between 0630hrs to 0645hrs (napping for the first 20 min and then proceeding with reading), change to the next bus at around 0730hrs to 0745hrs (mostly reading), alight at the bus stop between 0800hrs to 0810hrs, march up the hill and set up my work laptop between 0810hrs to 0825hrs while making my next mug of coffee, work till 1130hrs, hide somewhere far from my work space for one hour (spent mostly reading, unless I feel knackered, in which case I'd begin with a short nap of 15 min), make my last mug of coffee before continuing my next bout of work till 1750hrs, do my daily document back up, lock away everything except the LAN cable and monitor into the puny pedestal drawer, leave by 1815hrs, hop on the bus en route to Harbourfront (reading all the way), decide to have dinner there or otherwise, and eventually make my way home by 2030hrs, shower, chill in front of Eileen-II either reading or doing something in Minecraft or write some program or write something else (like a blog entry) or catching up on more news while simultaneously watching/listening to Hololive archives at speeds between 2.0× to 3.0× depending on the streamer and content, grab my other antihistamine and a multivitamin pill by 2330hrs, set up my mattress on the floor, set my alarm to 0500hrs the next day (0515hrs on the device, because I purposely run it 15 min faster than real-time), spend some time with God while in seiza, do my squats, do my hamstring and adductor stretches, do my crunches, then crash out by 0000hrs.
That is literally my typical day. There is hardly time for anything or anyone else.
Is this living? I don't know... what is living for a middle-aged Asian man in Singapore with a middle-of-the-line income like me anyway?
🤷♂️
If you know the answer, do write a comment and let me know. Because I really don't know.
------
SumatraPDF recently updated to v3.4.1 (as at writing). While it supposed to have improved features from the updated components, I do not recommend its widespread use just yet. There are two deal-breakers for me that preclude its use:
- The F12 key to show the bookmark side panel has bad focus after, which means that after showing the bookmark side panel, one can no longer press F12 to toggle the side panel away again. As noted in the link, it will be addressed in the next release, either v3.4.2, or the pre-release of v3.5.
- The removal of FontName and FontSize options (compare the help file on settings for v3.3.1 against the one for v3.4.1). It's a deal breaker because the default font for Ebooks (that I can't seem to change/patch directly) is Georgia, while my preferred reading font these days is Atkinson Hyperlegible just for the much better readability. I'm not a fan of the E-book format (i.e. Mobi or EPUB) that isn't PDF anyway, but the SCP Foundation tomes are necessarily in those formats due to the sheer size and unwieldiness otherwise. Reading these 3k+ pages with Georgia instead of Atkinson Hyperlegible is eye-strain city, and is a hard-pass from me.
In other news, Frescobaldi finally released a Windows build for v3.2, some 22 days after the Linux builds were released.
``MT, I thought you worked with Linux? What's with the Windows daddy-o?''
Linux is for work stuff---for not-work stuff, I use a mix of Windows+Cygwin to get things done, with a side of Linux command-line from a VM when there is absolutely no other [easy] way of doing it.
That said though, Frescobaldi in the new 22.04 LTS release of Ubuntu is broken for the same reason why v3.2 exists---Frescobaldi v3.1.3 cannot run with the Python 3.10 interpreter due to some increased strictness involving types (see Issue #1433 for an example of the class of errors). I'm not sure when the package maintainer will fix this, but that also slows/stops me from setting up a 22.04 update on machines under my control.
Anyway, that's it. It's 2315hrs as I write this sentence, and I'm just going to push this out and call it a night.
Till the next update, whenever it might be.
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Thank You for Your Graciousness in Putting Up with Me
Well, the day started off nice enough.
And I think I never learn because of my obstinacy and arrogance. Not ``perceived arrogance'' or ``alleged arrogance'', but just plain ``arrogance''. I do not ``choose'' to be arrogant---it is something that appears in the way I carry myself.
It's funny because here's the definition of arrogance:
Probably the only thing that applies that rubs people wrongly is being of an overbearing/offensive/obnoxious attitude. So-called being ``intense''.
I cannot open my mouth: if I do so, whatever I say is considered arrogant because I try my best to reason it out based on what I have read up/learnt. I cannot keep my mouth shut: if I do so, my expression conveys a certain smugness indicating that I somehow believe that I know more than what the other person is saying.
Thus, any form of interaction will deem me as arrogant. Perhaps then the only right move is to walk away and not interact at all.
🤔
Maybe.
Or alternatively, stop engaging in what I like to do (like reading, writing, or making music), and partake in what the ``normal people'' do---be a consumer and buy all the latest gadgets, watch lots of television, have passive hobbies waiting for people to tell me what to think, engage in work that everyone can do/understand, attempt to get married, raise children, be a wage slave paying off everything until I am dead. Without the heretical thoughts put in place through all these reading and thinking, my arrogance will be curbed because I will be like everyone else.
Maybe if I fry my brain enough with different drugs, I can do that---but as it is now, I cannot see how I can change in character so drastically.
Ultimately though, I think that people are just putting up with me because they are gracious enough to. And I'm a terrible person for just living in my own little world, as done by a person who has enough privilege to do so.
Geez... just kill me already.
And I think I never learn because of my obstinacy and arrogance. Not ``perceived arrogance'' or ``alleged arrogance'', but just plain ``arrogance''. I do not ``choose'' to be arrogant---it is something that appears in the way I carry myself.
It's funny because here's the definition of arrogance:
- arrogant
- exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner
- showing an offensive attitude of superiority; proceeding from or characterised by arrogance
Probably the only thing that applies that rubs people wrongly is being of an overbearing/offensive/obnoxious attitude. So-called being ``intense''.
I cannot open my mouth: if I do so, whatever I say is considered arrogant because I try my best to reason it out based on what I have read up/learnt. I cannot keep my mouth shut: if I do so, my expression conveys a certain smugness indicating that I somehow believe that I know more than what the other person is saying.
Thus, any form of interaction will deem me as arrogant. Perhaps then the only right move is to walk away and not interact at all.
🤔
Maybe.
Or alternatively, stop engaging in what I like to do (like reading, writing, or making music), and partake in what the ``normal people'' do---be a consumer and buy all the latest gadgets, watch lots of television, have passive hobbies waiting for people to tell me what to think, engage in work that everyone can do/understand, attempt to get married, raise children, be a wage slave paying off everything until I am dead. Without the heretical thoughts put in place through all these reading and thinking, my arrogance will be curbed because I will be like everyone else.
Maybe if I fry my brain enough with different drugs, I can do that---but as it is now, I cannot see how I can change in character so drastically.
Ultimately though, I think that people are just putting up with me because they are gracious enough to. And I'm a terrible person for just living in my own little world, as done by a person who has enough privilege to do so.
Geez... just kill me already.
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Nicer Separators for Read List
I'm satisfied with a little change that I managed to enact.
In my read list, I had evolved it over time to have little separators in between the list items to mark out the different years. As at today, I have finally evolved it to exactly how I'd want it:
Here's a list of the evolutions over time that I had done:
Apart from fixing the separators from my read list, I also did a little house-keeping in collapsing the style-related issues of nested cite, em, and i elements through using the :is() CSS3 pseudo-class to generate the relevant Cartesian products. So now, any nested combinations of these three primarily italicised contents are consistent: un-nested, they get italicised; the next nesting adds underline effects; the next, bold; and the final converts the text to small-caps. Superb!
Anyway, that's all I want to write for now. I'm just happy that I have put to bed one of the more annoying styling issues for a while.
Till the next update... some other time.
In my read list, I had evolved it over time to have little separators in between the list items to mark out the different years. As at today, I have finally evolved it to exactly how I'd want it:
- The first incarnation of the separator came about as a border at the top of the last entry of the year.
- One minor adjustment I did after that was to have the right side show a border as well to make the demarcation a little more obvious. I wasn't happy that the horizontal separator did not extend into the space where the numbers were though.
- I added more space to the separator to make it more obvious, and was starting to get annoyed at the right border being uneven---it was heavily reliant on the vertical space taken up by the list item. I also didn't like that it was impossible to know what year the separator encompassed.
- On a whim, I switched up the list element that I was using for the separator, and the [re-]discovery of the ::after CSS3 pseudo-element allowed me to add the year through some attribute grabbing.
- I also remembered about the whole negative margins trick and used it to set up the separator into the form that you see in the screenshot above.
Apart from fixing the separators from my read list, I also did a little house-keeping in collapsing the style-related issues of nested cite, em, and i elements through using the :is() CSS3 pseudo-class to generate the relevant Cartesian products. So now, any nested combinations of these three primarily italicised contents are consistent: un-nested, they get italicised; the next nesting adds underline effects; the next, bold; and the final converts the text to small-caps. Superb!
Anyway, that's all I want to write for now. I'm just happy that I have put to bed one of the more annoying styling issues for a while.
Till the next update... some other time.
Monday, May 16, 2022
Marking Time
With a blink of an eye, the 3-day long weekend is about to be over.
I completed The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars, & Kurt Kohlstedt. It's a guilty pleasure type of book, and in this particular case, is a survey of many of the design decisions that were made with respect to the urban city, be it organic or otherwise. It's a fun book, and the illustrations really give it that chic that made me glad that I got the dead-tree version.
Apart from that... I just played more Minecraft. This time, I decided to build an exploratory over-land rail trail in the southward direction with an initial detour to avoid crossing over my industrial square. Nearly six full shulker boxes of smooth stone were consumed, with about half a shulker box full of Jack O Lanterns to provide illumination to avoid mob spawns. I finally found one of those lush caves and grabbed some Azalea and Glow Berries---worthy additions to my farms. I also found a few more rare biomes, like the various ocean variants, the Taiga, and eventually ending at a Woodland Mansion. I'll probably lay out the rails to get me there first before attempting to subdue the Mansion---this can be a fairly long-ish project in Minecraft.
I think that's all that I care to write. I'm actually quite tired now, and am going to take a shower before turning in for the night.
Till the next update.
I completed The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars, & Kurt Kohlstedt. It's a guilty pleasure type of book, and in this particular case, is a survey of many of the design decisions that were made with respect to the urban city, be it organic or otherwise. It's a fun book, and the illustrations really give it that chic that made me glad that I got the dead-tree version.
Apart from that... I just played more Minecraft. This time, I decided to build an exploratory over-land rail trail in the southward direction with an initial detour to avoid crossing over my industrial square. Nearly six full shulker boxes of smooth stone were consumed, with about half a shulker box full of Jack O Lanterns to provide illumination to avoid mob spawns. I finally found one of those lush caves and grabbed some Azalea and Glow Berries---worthy additions to my farms. I also found a few more rare biomes, like the various ocean variants, the Taiga, and eventually ending at a Woodland Mansion. I'll probably lay out the rails to get me there first before attempting to subdue the Mansion---this can be a fairly long-ish project in Minecraft.
I think that's all that I care to write. I'm actually quite tired now, and am going to take a shower before turning in for the night.
Till the next update.
Saturday, May 14, 2022
The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety
``Oh no! He used a bad word in his title! Let's cancel him!''
Yeah... fuck that. Who cares?
🤷♂️
Okay, that aside, this week has been a doozy. Very little down time, a little bout with some half-assed cold that I suspect is due to the massive temperature/humidity changes of the week and the like.
Still alive though.
So about that title. ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety`` is an obvious poke at The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson, the same guy who also wrote Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, and Compatibility and Chemistry in Relationships. He is [hopefully] not the same as Marilyn Manson, nor Charles Manson---too man-y man-sons around these days. Easy to get confused.
The book, the book is alright. It codifies what I believe any rational adult will eventually figure out on their own, that choices are what governs our journey through life (the destination being death, though what happens after is determined by whether one's a believer or otherwise), and that no matter what choices we make, it inadvertently discriminates and closes off a whole series of choices/things that we cannot reach out to. That's the high level abstract summary that holds true.
Of course, reading something like that would be as fun as having a root canal done (this is a borrowed simile---I thank God that I have a well-taken care of set of pearly whites), so it is couched in more familiar terms of ``giving a fuck'' to something. One of the important lessons within the book is to develop more intrinsic measures of progress (i.e. character development) over extrinsic ones, the reason being that intrinsic measures are under more of our own control as compared to the extrinsic ones, and with more control, the satisfaction of attaining them tends to be more complete than the extrinsic ones that are effectively some kind of luck of the draw.
Or as Saitama of One Punch Man puts it: ensuring that the You of today can beat the You of yesterday---that's progress.
I like another aphorism that complements what Manson is trying to get at in this book.
Speaking of ``you do you'', I did wonder what the fundamental difference between [political] liberalism and [political] conservatism. One working definition that struck me was this:
Comparatively, [political] conservatism's ideological boundaries always begin bounded, with new decision planes being allowed to push the boundaries outward only if it is [somewhat] consistent with existing assertions. But with a bounded system like [political] conservatism, there are few ways in which the boundaries may be pushed outward---the existing axioms within the reasoning system comprises a closed set no matter how complex the new consequences are generated. So it would seem that new candidate boundary assertions need to come from outside of the [political] conservatism's ideological boundary, i.e. from the [political] liberalism camp.
In short, neither side can exist on their own---[political] conservatism alone leads to static and staleness, while [political] liberalism in extremis leads to anarchy with no shared sense of values. It is the creative tension of boundaries between these two that allows the civil society to flourish.
``Eh MT, you talk so much cock about conservatism and liberalism. You're a Christian right? How does that fit into the picture? Isn't Christianity conservative by definition?''
A low blow indeed. In many ways, the fact that Christianity is biblically defined (i.e. from the canon) makes it a poster child of conservatism due to the rules/principles at present within the biblical canon. A central premise is that God is good, and God is all-knowing, and so the rules/principles that He set is indeed good and ought to be followed.
That part is true. But is Christianity's conservatism the same as the political conservatism we see around? That is debatable, because of a difference of opinion of biblical interpretation through suitable amounts of cherry-picking---this is the flaw of humanity, especially for those who claim their political conservatism as stemming from the Bible. Recall that the Bible has both Old and New Testaments---the New Testaments are part of the New Covenant with Jesus from which us believers derive our identity of ``Christians'' from. So, I'm not saying that the Old Testament is wrong, but I am saying that the Old Testament teachings need to be interpreted according to the New Testament in order to be of a Christian teaching; otherwise it is no different from Judaism.
Another point of note is that just because something appears in the Bible, it does not mean that it is a God-approved action. There are many different genres of writings within the Bible, and each should be interpreted and understood according to what they are. Thus, reading say 1 Samuel and claiming that it represents the rules and ordinances that God set upon us is just dumb, dangerously dumb no less.
Again, as Christians, we believe in Christ. Loving the Lord is foremost, then loving one's neighbours is next---I didn't say this, a lawyer who was thinking of tricking Jesus did (Luke 10:27), to which Jesus affirmed in the next verse (``And he said to him, `You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.' ''). The other thing is that it is not up to us to exact judgement---that role is up to the Lord Himself. Our role on Earth is to exemplify the transformation we had undergone when we declared our faith publicly, and to evangelise the lost. But evangelism does not mean forcing our beliefs upon people---we show them how our belief has changed us for the better, and God will work upon their hearts in due course.
So... long story short, Christianity's conservatism has little to do with political conservatism---the former is about conservatism of human behaviour to avoid sinning after being saved, while the latter is about enacting human rules to keep to an arbitrarily chosen set of rules that may be cherry-picked from the Bible to borrow the prestige of God's word to legitimise their agenda.
If one were a true believer, one would realise that this world is fallen, and that accruing power and wealth in this world is antithetical to what Jesus had been teaching; if anything, those who cling on mindlessly to strange notions of political conservatism act more like Pharisees than disciples of Christ.
But who am I to judge?
------
Going back to the title of this post ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety''---that's sort of how I generally operate. I have no subtlety---life's too short to molly-coddle everyone we meet. For the most part, there's no need to engage---I don't know them, they don't know me, there's no need to give unsolicited... anything. For those who know me, I suppose they begrudgingly appreciate the unsubtley that I have, though I know that just because they can appreciate it is no pretext to keep on doing that.
And hence the modifier of ``fucked art''. Do not be unsubtle all the time---a light touch is the way to go. Observe, orient, decide, and then act.
Till the next update.
Yeah... fuck that. Who cares?
🤷♂️
Okay, that aside, this week has been a doozy. Very little down time, a little bout with some half-assed cold that I suspect is due to the massive temperature/humidity changes of the week and the like.
Still alive though.
So about that title. ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety`` is an obvious poke at The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson, the same guy who also wrote Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, and Compatibility and Chemistry in Relationships. He is [hopefully] not the same as Marilyn Manson, nor Charles Manson---too man-y man-sons around these days. Easy to get confused.
The book, the book is alright. It codifies what I believe any rational adult will eventually figure out on their own, that choices are what governs our journey through life (the destination being death, though what happens after is determined by whether one's a believer or otherwise), and that no matter what choices we make, it inadvertently discriminates and closes off a whole series of choices/things that we cannot reach out to. That's the high level abstract summary that holds true.
Of course, reading something like that would be as fun as having a root canal done (this is a borrowed simile---I thank God that I have a well-taken care of set of pearly whites), so it is couched in more familiar terms of ``giving a fuck'' to something. One of the important lessons within the book is to develop more intrinsic measures of progress (i.e. character development) over extrinsic ones, the reason being that intrinsic measures are under more of our own control as compared to the extrinsic ones, and with more control, the satisfaction of attaining them tends to be more complete than the extrinsic ones that are effectively some kind of luck of the draw.
Or as Saitama of One Punch Man puts it: ensuring that the You of today can beat the You of yesterday---that's progress.
I like another aphorism that complements what Manson is trying to get at in this book.
Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.In short, it's a case of ``you do you'', subjected to the usual civic-mindedness of not infringing on other people's choices as much as possible.
Speaking of ``you do you'', I did wonder what the fundamental difference between [political] liberalism and [political] conservatism. One working definition that struck me was this:
In [political] liberalism, the ideology is defined by what they don't do, while in [political] conservatism, the ideology is defined by what the do do.In short, it seems to me that [political] liberalism's boundaries begin unbounded, and where they exist, they are defined by a decision plane that states what lies outside of the ideology's existing ideological space. So, one such boundary might be ``we do not discriminate people by their skin colour''---it means that anyone who discriminates people by their skin colour (i.e. a positive assertion of action) is outside of the [political] liberalism ideology, while those who do not, whether because they never thought of it, or if they once used to but has since decided not to, they are inside of the [political] liberalism ideology.
Comparatively, [political] conservatism's ideological boundaries always begin bounded, with new decision planes being allowed to push the boundaries outward only if it is [somewhat] consistent with existing assertions. But with a bounded system like [political] conservatism, there are few ways in which the boundaries may be pushed outward---the existing axioms within the reasoning system comprises a closed set no matter how complex the new consequences are generated. So it would seem that new candidate boundary assertions need to come from outside of the [political] conservatism's ideological boundary, i.e. from the [political] liberalism camp.
In short, neither side can exist on their own---[political] conservatism alone leads to static and staleness, while [political] liberalism in extremis leads to anarchy with no shared sense of values. It is the creative tension of boundaries between these two that allows the civil society to flourish.
``Eh MT, you talk so much cock about conservatism and liberalism. You're a Christian right? How does that fit into the picture? Isn't Christianity conservative by definition?''
A low blow indeed. In many ways, the fact that Christianity is biblically defined (i.e. from the canon) makes it a poster child of conservatism due to the rules/principles at present within the biblical canon. A central premise is that God is good, and God is all-knowing, and so the rules/principles that He set is indeed good and ought to be followed.
That part is true. But is Christianity's conservatism the same as the political conservatism we see around? That is debatable, because of a difference of opinion of biblical interpretation through suitable amounts of cherry-picking---this is the flaw of humanity, especially for those who claim their political conservatism as stemming from the Bible. Recall that the Bible has both Old and New Testaments---the New Testaments are part of the New Covenant with Jesus from which us believers derive our identity of ``Christians'' from. So, I'm not saying that the Old Testament is wrong, but I am saying that the Old Testament teachings need to be interpreted according to the New Testament in order to be of a Christian teaching; otherwise it is no different from Judaism.
Another point of note is that just because something appears in the Bible, it does not mean that it is a God-approved action. There are many different genres of writings within the Bible, and each should be interpreted and understood according to what they are. Thus, reading say 1 Samuel and claiming that it represents the rules and ordinances that God set upon us is just dumb, dangerously dumb no less.
Again, as Christians, we believe in Christ. Loving the Lord is foremost, then loving one's neighbours is next---I didn't say this, a lawyer who was thinking of tricking Jesus did (Luke 10:27), to which Jesus affirmed in the next verse (``And he said to him, `You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.' ''). The other thing is that it is not up to us to exact judgement---that role is up to the Lord Himself. Our role on Earth is to exemplify the transformation we had undergone when we declared our faith publicly, and to evangelise the lost. But evangelism does not mean forcing our beliefs upon people---we show them how our belief has changed us for the better, and God will work upon their hearts in due course.
So... long story short, Christianity's conservatism has little to do with political conservatism---the former is about conservatism of human behaviour to avoid sinning after being saved, while the latter is about enacting human rules to keep to an arbitrarily chosen set of rules that may be cherry-picked from the Bible to borrow the prestige of God's word to legitimise their agenda.
If one were a true believer, one would realise that this world is fallen, and that accruing power and wealth in this world is antithetical to what Jesus had been teaching; if anything, those who cling on mindlessly to strange notions of political conservatism act more like Pharisees than disciples of Christ.
But who am I to judge?
------
Going back to the title of this post ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety''---that's sort of how I generally operate. I have no subtlety---life's too short to molly-coddle everyone we meet. For the most part, there's no need to engage---I don't know them, they don't know me, there's no need to give unsolicited... anything. For those who know me, I suppose they begrudgingly appreciate the unsubtley that I have, though I know that just because they can appreciate it is no pretext to keep on doing that.
And hence the modifier of ``fucked art''. Do not be unsubtle all the time---a light touch is the way to go. Observe, orient, decide, and then act.
Till the next update.
Sunday, May 08, 2022
Uncharacterised Restlessness and a Mob Farm Fix
A certain restlessness is within me that I cannot describe because I cannot characterise the why.
The weekend has come, and is almost gone. I spent yesterday in a type of mental fog, just sitting in front of Eileen-II in a mostly ``head empty, no thoughts'' sort of way. Just thinking back to what I did right now, I realise that I cannot remember anything about it. Evening church service was attended, and rehearsals at TGCO were done, and the day ended.
Today, I spent the morning finishing up the bible study that was due later on in the week, and then just sat there for quite a while just stoning listlessly. I tried a bit of Hyper Light Drifter, but my heart really wasn't in it. I will say that it does play a little like another game that I had completed before, namely Hob, the last game by Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II, two of my favourite games for quite a while. It's mostly wordless, with an almost minimalistic aesthetic to it.
What I did do was to tweak my mob farm once more. The previous upgrade I did for it had a major issue: while the dual layers gave more space for mobs to spawn, the alternating checker board pattern, combined with the use of slabs to prevent the spawning of hole-clogging spiders meant that after running the farm for long enough, mobs were being trapped on top of these slabs while being blocked by the full-sized blocks in the second level. This meant that eventually, the mobs would all be trapped instead of fall freely down the delivery shaft, leading to the mob cap being reached while not having any mobs for annihilation at the AFK area.
🤦♂️
That was bad, of course. The fix I did was to tear out both levels, clear out the mob collection floor of water, and rebuild them to use the more traditional four water-channel mob farm schema. The idea is to have four 2-wide water channels with a single source block on the farthest end to push mobs that fall into them down the shaft. Spawning platforms are built in the quadrants created by the water channels. I built the second layer above it using slabs set in the upper half of the height, with an additional platform over the central drop shaft to prevent mobs that spawned on the second floor from getting too much fall damage from direct fall. I wired up the red stone lamps that I ran on the outside of the second layer previously such that when I pulled the lever to turn on the maintenance lights for the first layer, it also turned on the second one. ``Maintenance mode'' was basically activated through turning on the red stone lamps to light the interior, followed by me falling straight into the ocean to put about 128+ blocks difference to force a de-spawning of all the existing mobs. This would clear out the spawn chambers, allowing safe entry for maintenance.
Anyway, I had to do some adjustments. In order to build the water channels, and to make it a little more spider-clog proof, I had to raise the effective height by one block, which mean that I had to raise the floor of the drop shaft by one block also to ensure that fall damage was insufficient to kill any mobs that fell. That was quite easy to enact---I just shifted the apparatus up by one block while adding another layer of hoppers. There was some minor tweaking of the surrounding access point to make it easy to still reach in to whack at the mobs' feet, but it was just using stairs correctly.
After all those changes, the mob farm was tested, and I'm happy to report that it works well. The spawn rate does feel high enough, and it had the advantage of also allowing spiders to fall to the auto-kill lava layer as well. This meant that I could harvest string for free, or have spider eyes if I decide to do some manual killing. To be had though, spider mobs are still quite rare when it comes to falling through the drop shaft---this is purely due to the passive mob farm design. I was contemplating if I should build an active mob farm design instead, but did not follow through because it involved an almost completely inverted design (the AFK spot is above the body of the mob farm). It was way to drastic for something that I absolutely didn't really need to have in the most efficient ways since I am playing my map as a mostly Survival mode, switching over to Creative mode once in a while to handle stuff that would be fun but would require too much busy work [that I didn't feel like engaging in] to get.
Having the working canal-design mob farm with spiders meant that I did not have to build that other spider-only mob farm next to it. I spent some time taking that edifice down to reclaim the materials, and it was nice.
------
Today's Mother's Day. I had pre-ordered 4× regular-sized pizzas from the venerable Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza to celebrate the occasion with family at home. As stated in their story, they have been around since 1995 in SIN city, which translates to being around during much of my teenage years and into my adult ones. Their pizzas are delicious, and are good value for money most of the time. We always love their pizzas.
I also liked their new ordering system. Throughout the years, I have experienced about 3 of their systems. The first was the usual hotline method with their catchy number, namely 241--0--241 (before 2002), and then 6--241--0--241, all the while referring to their menu which someone would have lying about as a pamphlet/flyer. Then there was the time when they were using Foodpanda to handle their orders. And now, it was back to using their own internal system.
As long as they don't stoop to demanding that I install some weird-ass app on my phone (or elsewehere) just to order pizza, I figure that I'll continue to support them. They are my go-to for home delivery pizza after all.
Anyway I'm beat. I should go get a shower and then prepare to turn in for the night. The long weekend week is segueing into a more regular work-week, and there are things that are coming this week that does require some level of concentration that I may not be looking forward to. The things we do to earn our coin.
On another note, the sheer stupidity of this new plan of effectively holding citizens hostage to the government through only issuing digital certificates of birth and death is something that I cannot comprehend. The excuse that was put up sounds great in theory---everything is authenticated and directly from source, reducing data loss/theft, where ``...government agencies and private entities, such as industry associations and financial institutions, can use QR codes included on all digital certificates to verify their authenticity''.
But I take offense to that. Here's why. The servers that control access to these digital data are government owned, and by virtue of the design of information systems, any access of them via URLs (implied through the QR code) will be logged. This means that if someone were to be doing any sort of business with any entity that requires the use of the birth certificate (there are very few reasons for these, the most prominent being emigration), the SIN city government will know about it, whether they ought to know it or not. Sure they can say things like the law exists to protect the information and not for surveillence of the citizenry... but we all know that laws are only as good as they are actively enforced, and even then, laws can and are often changed. See also the latest brouhaha over the US Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.
People will also throw about the ``I have nothing to hide from the government, so why should I care about this?'' excuse to claim that I am over-reacting.
In an extreme scenario, anyone whom the government has a beef with and needing asylum elsewhere can, in theory, be fucked over by having the access to the digital version blocked through a ``technical issue'', real or manufactured, i.e. the said person can be made into an unperson with no effort on the part of the government. This is undesirable for individual liberties. It does not matter if you have ``nothing to hide''---in the face of power, if any one of us in the minority is not safe, then none of us are safe for the sole reason that we will never know when we might end up being in the minority.
A more prosaic scenario is that the reliance of a highly complex and expensive device like a laptop or mobile phone with associated high dependencies of network connection and associated working infrastructure is just begging to be taken down---all the benefits of centralisation are also weaknesses in times where these very documents are needed the most, in crises where complex supply chains and infocomm infrastructures are strained to their limits. It also places an undue amount of pressure on the economically less able to pay more indirect taxes through having to fund for all these devices/services just to exercise their rights and privileges as citizens. That is not right either.
It is also much easier [relatively speaking] to preserve a physical document over a digital one. The skeptical can be asked to do a simple exercise: can you easily retrieve the file that you saved into your 3½ ″ floppy disk? And no, this is not a fake problem---``bit rot'' is a real issue for modern day archivists who are trying to preserve the digital history. The rule allows people to download the digital certificate for safe-keeping in their physical device, but considering how the average person operates, the digital copy is bound to end up in some third-party cloud storage provider...
...which totally nullifies all the argument about having a centralised system for security purposes.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
This does not affect me directly---I'm so old that my birth certificate will never be affected by this new rule. But it does make me think even harder of having a child in the first place, not that I want to have children.
Each day that passes by just keeps reinforcing the fallenness of this world, and how we are all really just slaves. The only difference is that the figleaf that was keeping us from this realisation is starting to get increasingly transparent the more the polities start applying their traditional skulduggery using infocomm technology.
*sigh*
Till the next update.
The weekend has come, and is almost gone. I spent yesterday in a type of mental fog, just sitting in front of Eileen-II in a mostly ``head empty, no thoughts'' sort of way. Just thinking back to what I did right now, I realise that I cannot remember anything about it. Evening church service was attended, and rehearsals at TGCO were done, and the day ended.
Today, I spent the morning finishing up the bible study that was due later on in the week, and then just sat there for quite a while just stoning listlessly. I tried a bit of Hyper Light Drifter, but my heart really wasn't in it. I will say that it does play a little like another game that I had completed before, namely Hob, the last game by Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II, two of my favourite games for quite a while. It's mostly wordless, with an almost minimalistic aesthetic to it.
What I did do was to tweak my mob farm once more. The previous upgrade I did for it had a major issue: while the dual layers gave more space for mobs to spawn, the alternating checker board pattern, combined with the use of slabs to prevent the spawning of hole-clogging spiders meant that after running the farm for long enough, mobs were being trapped on top of these slabs while being blocked by the full-sized blocks in the second level. This meant that eventually, the mobs would all be trapped instead of fall freely down the delivery shaft, leading to the mob cap being reached while not having any mobs for annihilation at the AFK area.
🤦♂️
That was bad, of course. The fix I did was to tear out both levels, clear out the mob collection floor of water, and rebuild them to use the more traditional four water-channel mob farm schema. The idea is to have four 2-wide water channels with a single source block on the farthest end to push mobs that fall into them down the shaft. Spawning platforms are built in the quadrants created by the water channels. I built the second layer above it using slabs set in the upper half of the height, with an additional platform over the central drop shaft to prevent mobs that spawned on the second floor from getting too much fall damage from direct fall. I wired up the red stone lamps that I ran on the outside of the second layer previously such that when I pulled the lever to turn on the maintenance lights for the first layer, it also turned on the second one. ``Maintenance mode'' was basically activated through turning on the red stone lamps to light the interior, followed by me falling straight into the ocean to put about 128+ blocks difference to force a de-spawning of all the existing mobs. This would clear out the spawn chambers, allowing safe entry for maintenance.
Anyway, I had to do some adjustments. In order to build the water channels, and to make it a little more spider-clog proof, I had to raise the effective height by one block, which mean that I had to raise the floor of the drop shaft by one block also to ensure that fall damage was insufficient to kill any mobs that fell. That was quite easy to enact---I just shifted the apparatus up by one block while adding another layer of hoppers. There was some minor tweaking of the surrounding access point to make it easy to still reach in to whack at the mobs' feet, but it was just using stairs correctly.
After all those changes, the mob farm was tested, and I'm happy to report that it works well. The spawn rate does feel high enough, and it had the advantage of also allowing spiders to fall to the auto-kill lava layer as well. This meant that I could harvest string for free, or have spider eyes if I decide to do some manual killing. To be had though, spider mobs are still quite rare when it comes to falling through the drop shaft---this is purely due to the passive mob farm design. I was contemplating if I should build an active mob farm design instead, but did not follow through because it involved an almost completely inverted design (the AFK spot is above the body of the mob farm). It was way to drastic for something that I absolutely didn't really need to have in the most efficient ways since I am playing my map as a mostly Survival mode, switching over to Creative mode once in a while to handle stuff that would be fun but would require too much busy work [that I didn't feel like engaging in] to get.
Having the working canal-design mob farm with spiders meant that I did not have to build that other spider-only mob farm next to it. I spent some time taking that edifice down to reclaim the materials, and it was nice.
------
Today's Mother's Day. I had pre-ordered 4× regular-sized pizzas from the venerable Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza to celebrate the occasion with family at home. As stated in their story, they have been around since 1995 in SIN city, which translates to being around during much of my teenage years and into my adult ones. Their pizzas are delicious, and are good value for money most of the time. We always love their pizzas.
I also liked their new ordering system. Throughout the years, I have experienced about 3 of their systems. The first was the usual hotline method with their catchy number, namely 241--0--241 (before 2002), and then 6--241--0--241, all the while referring to their menu which someone would have lying about as a pamphlet/flyer. Then there was the time when they were using Foodpanda to handle their orders. And now, it was back to using their own internal system.
As long as they don't stoop to demanding that I install some weird-ass app on my phone (or elsewehere) just to order pizza, I figure that I'll continue to support them. They are my go-to for home delivery pizza after all.
Anyway I'm beat. I should go get a shower and then prepare to turn in for the night. The long weekend week is segueing into a more regular work-week, and there are things that are coming this week that does require some level of concentration that I may not be looking forward to. The things we do to earn our coin.
On another note, the sheer stupidity of this new plan of effectively holding citizens hostage to the government through only issuing digital certificates of birth and death is something that I cannot comprehend. The excuse that was put up sounds great in theory---everything is authenticated and directly from source, reducing data loss/theft, where ``...government agencies and private entities, such as industry associations and financial institutions, can use QR codes included on all digital certificates to verify their authenticity''.
But I take offense to that. Here's why. The servers that control access to these digital data are government owned, and by virtue of the design of information systems, any access of them via URLs (implied through the QR code) will be logged. This means that if someone were to be doing any sort of business with any entity that requires the use of the birth certificate (there are very few reasons for these, the most prominent being emigration), the SIN city government will know about it, whether they ought to know it or not. Sure they can say things like the law exists to protect the information and not for surveillence of the citizenry... but we all know that laws are only as good as they are actively enforced, and even then, laws can and are often changed. See also the latest brouhaha over the US Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.
People will also throw about the ``I have nothing to hide from the government, so why should I care about this?'' excuse to claim that I am over-reacting.
In an extreme scenario, anyone whom the government has a beef with and needing asylum elsewhere can, in theory, be fucked over by having the access to the digital version blocked through a ``technical issue'', real or manufactured, i.e. the said person can be made into an unperson with no effort on the part of the government. This is undesirable for individual liberties. It does not matter if you have ``nothing to hide''---in the face of power, if any one of us in the minority is not safe, then none of us are safe for the sole reason that we will never know when we might end up being in the minority.
A more prosaic scenario is that the reliance of a highly complex and expensive device like a laptop or mobile phone with associated high dependencies of network connection and associated working infrastructure is just begging to be taken down---all the benefits of centralisation are also weaknesses in times where these very documents are needed the most, in crises where complex supply chains and infocomm infrastructures are strained to their limits. It also places an undue amount of pressure on the economically less able to pay more indirect taxes through having to fund for all these devices/services just to exercise their rights and privileges as citizens. That is not right either.
It is also much easier [relatively speaking] to preserve a physical document over a digital one. The skeptical can be asked to do a simple exercise: can you easily retrieve the file that you saved into your 3½ ″ floppy disk? And no, this is not a fake problem---``bit rot'' is a real issue for modern day archivists who are trying to preserve the digital history. The rule allows people to download the digital certificate for safe-keeping in their physical device, but considering how the average person operates, the digital copy is bound to end up in some third-party cloud storage provider...
...which totally nullifies all the argument about having a centralised system for security purposes.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
This does not affect me directly---I'm so old that my birth certificate will never be affected by this new rule. But it does make me think even harder of having a child in the first place, not that I want to have children.
Each day that passes by just keeps reinforcing the fallenness of this world, and how we are all really just slaves. The only difference is that the figleaf that was keeping us from this realisation is starting to get increasingly transparent the more the polities start applying their traditional skulduggery using infocomm technology.
*sigh*
Till the next update.
Thursday, May 05, 2022
NEW FONE WHO DIS? Season 2
Oof. New phone, new contract, pay 29% more, but gain 15× more mobile data, 4× more storage, 2× more RAM, and a whole host of other benefits.
Eh, just check out this comparison between my old work horse of the Pixel 2 XL versus my new Xiaomi 12.
If I had a choice, I wouldn't be upgrading. But there is little choice to be made. The old super-grandfathered plan was really too pricey for what it was providing, and I am getting concerned over the fate of my Pixel 2 XL, considering its age. I've had it since 2018-08-22, and today is 2022-05-05... that makes it roughly 3.7 years. That's a pretty long time for a daily carry device.
But who am I kidding? I just wanted a new start.
Let's see... new EZ-Link card (qvssref sebz bar gung V tbg sbe fbzrbar ryfr orsber), new ink (qvssref sebz gur bar V hfrq gb jevgr yrggref jvgu orsber), new phone (n qvssrerag qrivpr sebz gur bar V hfrq gb fraq fubeg zrffntrf qnvyl jvgu orsber), new gig bag (qvssref sebz gur bar gung unq cngpurf znqr ol fbzrbar orsber), and of course, a new job.
Almost all the utilitarian things that have undergone their associated wear and tear have been replaced, their sentimentality pushed aside.
Stuffie though... Stuffie is still the same. I love Stuffie---Stuffie is irrevocably mine, a gift for me to keep. Stuffie reminds me of the good times, and reminds me that happiness sometimes do come in small packages, and is what you want to make of it. My new work place (it's not really new considering that I've worked there for four months now) does not have enough table space to set up my takoyarnie army, but remember that I only started bringing out more and more critters to keep my sanity when things started to go sideways for whatever reason.
Anyway... yes. A new start, in many ways.
One can keep telling oneself that one has moved on, but one never has truly moved on until one has taken actions to demonstrate that one has moved on. And the more I keep thinking/talking about this, the more narcissistic this all feels.
Not sure what to feel about that.
There are strange stirrings from the US, and I'm not comfortable about it. I had said some time back that it would be years before I was comfortable to visit the US, and it seems that what I had said then holds true even today. There are also other odd rumblings elsewhere, and overall the vibes I'm getting from the world at large Is Not Good. I think too many people who are in power have gotten too drunk with their power, and that many have convinced themselves that they have subjugated the very people that they were supposed to lead (not rule over, mind you) to be completely pliant.
I fear that there might have been some rather serious miscalculations, and that the masses are slowly building up in their restlessness against what they believe to be injustices. It does not matter if they are politically conservative or liberal---the voices of dissent are rising from the quiet background noise to something that is metaphorically audible as whispers. Soon it will reach talking, and then shouting, before an invisible level is breached and outright violence breaks out.
Oh, I didn't mean just the US for that matter; I do mean it for places all over where there is seemingly no good trade-off from the oppression. People are willing to accept some oppression if whatever they get in return is considered to be of greater value. I am not declaring that they are wrong/right---I am merely making an observation.
Well... there's not much that I can do except to pray. Not to pray for world peace, but to pray that I fulfill God's purpose for me here and then fuck off to Judgement Day before reaching into eternity.
Fallen world is fallen. We can fight entropy, but it will always win in the end.
Always.
Eh, just check out this comparison between my old work horse of the Pixel 2 XL versus my new Xiaomi 12.
If I had a choice, I wouldn't be upgrading. But there is little choice to be made. The old super-grandfathered plan was really too pricey for what it was providing, and I am getting concerned over the fate of my Pixel 2 XL, considering its age. I've had it since 2018-08-22, and today is 2022-05-05... that makes it roughly 3.7 years. That's a pretty long time for a daily carry device.
But who am I kidding? I just wanted a new start.
Let's see... new EZ-Link card (qvssref sebz bar gung V tbg sbe fbzrbar ryfr orsber), new ink (qvssref sebz gur bar V hfrq gb jevgr yrggref jvgu orsber), new phone (n qvssrerag qrivpr sebz gur bar V hfrq gb fraq fubeg zrffntrf qnvyl jvgu orsber), new gig bag (qvssref sebz gur bar gung unq cngpurf znqr ol fbzrbar orsber), and of course, a new job.
Almost all the utilitarian things that have undergone their associated wear and tear have been replaced, their sentimentality pushed aside.
Stuffie though... Stuffie is still the same. I love Stuffie---Stuffie is irrevocably mine, a gift for me to keep. Stuffie reminds me of the good times, and reminds me that happiness sometimes do come in small packages, and is what you want to make of it. My new work place (it's not really new considering that I've worked there for four months now) does not have enough table space to set up my takoyarnie army, but remember that I only started bringing out more and more critters to keep my sanity when things started to go sideways for whatever reason.
Anyway... yes. A new start, in many ways.
One can keep telling oneself that one has moved on, but one never has truly moved on until one has taken actions to demonstrate that one has moved on. And the more I keep thinking/talking about this, the more narcissistic this all feels.
Not sure what to feel about that.
There are strange stirrings from the US, and I'm not comfortable about it. I had said some time back that it would be years before I was comfortable to visit the US, and it seems that what I had said then holds true even today. There are also other odd rumblings elsewhere, and overall the vibes I'm getting from the world at large Is Not Good. I think too many people who are in power have gotten too drunk with their power, and that many have convinced themselves that they have subjugated the very people that they were supposed to lead (not rule over, mind you) to be completely pliant.
I fear that there might have been some rather serious miscalculations, and that the masses are slowly building up in their restlessness against what they believe to be injustices. It does not matter if they are politically conservative or liberal---the voices of dissent are rising from the quiet background noise to something that is metaphorically audible as whispers. Soon it will reach talking, and then shouting, before an invisible level is breached and outright violence breaks out.
Oh, I didn't mean just the US for that matter; I do mean it for places all over where there is seemingly no good trade-off from the oppression. People are willing to accept some oppression if whatever they get in return is considered to be of greater value. I am not declaring that they are wrong/right---I am merely making an observation.
Well... there's not much that I can do except to pray. Not to pray for world peace, but to pray that I fulfill God's purpose for me here and then fuck off to Judgement Day before reaching into eternity.
Fallen world is fallen. We can fight entropy, but it will always win in the end.
Always.
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
朝顔の伝説
Okay, it's stupid o'clock, but lemme tell you a story.
A story of how I got hold of my bottle of asa-gao iroshizuku ink.
For a long time, I was using the Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black (packed in 62.5 mℓ bottles). This was a relative cheap and wonderful work horse ink that I used for my Pelikan Souverän M400. As seen in the sample scribbles from nearly 13 years ago, the colour is lovely.
But the recent years of using the same make of ink saw a general degradation. Gone was the blue---what was left behind was some ugly fading gray mess that I found to be utterly disgusting and unreflective of what it used to be. It might have been due to an exceptionally old batch of ink (the bottle was white capped instead of black), or it could be due to my changing taste, I just didn't like what I saw.
It also didn't help that the new Pelikan inks were more complicated. While Pelikan 4001 inks are available now (albeit in smaller than 62.5 mℓ bottles after their rebranding), they were much harder to find in SIN city. Much of the Pelikan ink series revolved around their ``Edelstein'' series, which all had wonderfully misleading colour names, super high price point (we're talking SGD30 vs SGD4 here), and in smaller quantities (50 mℓ vs 62.5 mℓ, resulting in a comparisong of 0.60 SGD/mℓ compared to 0.064 SGD/mℓ) during a time where I was more price conscious.
Which brings me to today (or thereabouts). I was running very low on my blue-black ink, and decided to finally look for a replacement. I didn't bother with trying to hunt down the Pelikan stuff, but instead turned to the iroshizuku series of inks from Pilot. The price point was similar to that of the Pelikan Edelstein series, and had similar wacky abstract names. But there was one big difference that swayed me towards going for the iroshizuku inks.
I knew I could find them easily.
I saw them in Tokyu Hands before, and I was pretty sure that I had seen them in Books Kinokuniya as well; a prior search online also revealed CityLuxe as another potential source with physical presence (I've not physically checked them out). As a brand presence, Japan's Pilot was definitely more visible compared to Germany's Pelikan in SIN city.
And so I found myself en route via bus to Jewel Changi, where a larger Tokyu Hands branch was at. The trip was not worthy of mention, other than the observation that there were still people in this time and age who would watch videos at full volume in a public but enclosed area with no headphones. I zoomed in to the store, and went to where I remembered they stored the inks (second store floor), and checked out the asa-gao labelled drawer.
Wait a minute---that's no asa-gao! It was a yama-guri for some reason. That made no sense... and so I looked about. There were 15 mℓ bottles of asa-gao next to the transparent drawers for the 50 mℓ bottles, but those were sold more dear with stranger requirements (need to purchase 3 at once for a grand total of about SGD33, which works out to 0.73 SGD/mℓ, compared to the 0.44 SGD/mℓ for the 50 mℓ bottle at about SGD22), and there was no way to tell if one could buy three of the same colour in the first place. I looked about as much as I could, and was going to settle for a tsuki-yo (sort of a more blue type of blue-black) instead. As I walked about, I made a side discovery of the black 4.0--8.5mm uniPAINT marker PX-30 was from Tokyu Hands instead of Popular, and picked two up.
Then I went over to the fountain pens corner and just browsed the display drawers. And there, tucked in a little unnoticed corner, was a 50 mℓ bottle of asa-gao just sitting there, without its gray string necktie.
I was... shocked, to put it mildly. It fuelled my hopes, and so I boldly asked the staff member who was operating the automated engraving machine if there were any more asa-gao stocks left as I could not find any among the drawers. He acknowledged my question and told me to wait a little as he was servicing the other customer's engraving requests. I nodded in assent, and watched him multitask on the controlling computer to pull up their internal stock take. After settling the other customer's needs, he turned to me and informed me that the system said that they still had stock, and that he would head out to the stacks to find it for me.
I waited eagerly.
He came back after a while with an ashen look on his face, apologetically telling me that he could not locate the stock.
This was when I pointed out that bottle in the corner of the display drawer, and asked him if that counted as being part of the stock as well. There was a chance that it was part of the display and not for sale---it was a display drawer for fountain pens after all, possibly with the ink wells surrounding them as a kind of decoration.
He was a bit stunned, did a double-take, and realised that the bottle was indeed of asa-gao after removing it from the drawer to examine it. And he said that yes it was that stock that the system said they had---he hadn't realised that they would put a bottle so far away from the rest of the bottles.
I thanked him profusely, and headed off to the cashier's on the first store floor and paid for my purchase.
To say I was delighted is probably a severe understatement. I could only thank God quietly for having such good fortune. I ended my time in Jewel Changi by heading off to NY Verdan Bar and Grill, where I enjoyed a lovely steak, tater tots, apple cider, and a tiramisu.
The bus trip home was also not very noteworthy, other than the further observation of people still watching videos on their phones at full volume in public, coupled with singing(?!) in the bus.
🤦♂️
I changed the ink on my Pelikan Souverän M400, and wrote a new dead-tree journal entry. The colour difference was literal night and day (asa-gao literally means ``Morning Glory''). Since it is my dead-tree journal, I can't really post any samples here. Take my word that it is a much brighter blue than the blue-black from the scribble samples from before.
This entry is starting to run a little too long, so I'll just add one last point before posting it: I could have gone through this entire purchasing process online, but I don't see a need to do so when I live in a place as accessible as SIN city. Besides, it's yet another 4-day weekend---I do need to get out of the apartment to do something just to ensure I don't get a fat ass.
Anyway, it's getting real late. It's still a public holiday... today (Tue), and I would like to do some stuff later on too. And thus, sleep is still needed, remembering that I generally do not sleep past sun-up.
Till the next update then.
Edit: Here's a small scan of the sample after I have had some sleep:
Lovely colour, ain't it?
A story of how I got hold of my bottle of asa-gao iroshizuku ink.
For a long time, I was using the Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black (packed in 62.5 mℓ bottles). This was a relative cheap and wonderful work horse ink that I used for my Pelikan Souverän M400. As seen in the sample scribbles from nearly 13 years ago, the colour is lovely.
But the recent years of using the same make of ink saw a general degradation. Gone was the blue---what was left behind was some ugly fading gray mess that I found to be utterly disgusting and unreflective of what it used to be. It might have been due to an exceptionally old batch of ink (the bottle was white capped instead of black), or it could be due to my changing taste, I just didn't like what I saw.
It also didn't help that the new Pelikan inks were more complicated. While Pelikan 4001 inks are available now (albeit in smaller than 62.5 mℓ bottles after their rebranding), they were much harder to find in SIN city. Much of the Pelikan ink series revolved around their ``Edelstein'' series, which all had wonderfully misleading colour names, super high price point (we're talking SGD30 vs SGD4 here), and in smaller quantities (50 mℓ vs 62.5 mℓ, resulting in a comparisong of 0.60 SGD/mℓ compared to 0.064 SGD/mℓ) during a time where I was more price conscious.
Which brings me to today (or thereabouts). I was running very low on my blue-black ink, and decided to finally look for a replacement. I didn't bother with trying to hunt down the Pelikan stuff, but instead turned to the iroshizuku series of inks from Pilot. The price point was similar to that of the Pelikan Edelstein series, and had similar wacky abstract names. But there was one big difference that swayed me towards going for the iroshizuku inks.
I knew I could find them easily.
I saw them in Tokyu Hands before, and I was pretty sure that I had seen them in Books Kinokuniya as well; a prior search online also revealed CityLuxe as another potential source with physical presence (I've not physically checked them out). As a brand presence, Japan's Pilot was definitely more visible compared to Germany's Pelikan in SIN city.
And so I found myself en route via bus to Jewel Changi, where a larger Tokyu Hands branch was at. The trip was not worthy of mention, other than the observation that there were still people in this time and age who would watch videos at full volume in a public but enclosed area with no headphones. I zoomed in to the store, and went to where I remembered they stored the inks (second store floor), and checked out the asa-gao labelled drawer.
Wait a minute---that's no asa-gao! It was a yama-guri for some reason. That made no sense... and so I looked about. There were 15 mℓ bottles of asa-gao next to the transparent drawers for the 50 mℓ bottles, but those were sold more dear with stranger requirements (need to purchase 3 at once for a grand total of about SGD33, which works out to 0.73 SGD/mℓ, compared to the 0.44 SGD/mℓ for the 50 mℓ bottle at about SGD22), and there was no way to tell if one could buy three of the same colour in the first place. I looked about as much as I could, and was going to settle for a tsuki-yo (sort of a more blue type of blue-black) instead. As I walked about, I made a side discovery of the black 4.0--8.5mm uniPAINT marker PX-30 was from Tokyu Hands instead of Popular, and picked two up.
Then I went over to the fountain pens corner and just browsed the display drawers. And there, tucked in a little unnoticed corner, was a 50 mℓ bottle of asa-gao just sitting there, without its gray string necktie.
I was... shocked, to put it mildly. It fuelled my hopes, and so I boldly asked the staff member who was operating the automated engraving machine if there were any more asa-gao stocks left as I could not find any among the drawers. He acknowledged my question and told me to wait a little as he was servicing the other customer's engraving requests. I nodded in assent, and watched him multitask on the controlling computer to pull up their internal stock take. After settling the other customer's needs, he turned to me and informed me that the system said that they still had stock, and that he would head out to the stacks to find it for me.
I waited eagerly.
He came back after a while with an ashen look on his face, apologetically telling me that he could not locate the stock.
This was when I pointed out that bottle in the corner of the display drawer, and asked him if that counted as being part of the stock as well. There was a chance that it was part of the display and not for sale---it was a display drawer for fountain pens after all, possibly with the ink wells surrounding them as a kind of decoration.
He was a bit stunned, did a double-take, and realised that the bottle was indeed of asa-gao after removing it from the drawer to examine it. And he said that yes it was that stock that the system said they had---he hadn't realised that they would put a bottle so far away from the rest of the bottles.
I thanked him profusely, and headed off to the cashier's on the first store floor and paid for my purchase.
To say I was delighted is probably a severe understatement. I could only thank God quietly for having such good fortune. I ended my time in Jewel Changi by heading off to NY Verdan Bar and Grill, where I enjoyed a lovely steak, tater tots, apple cider, and a tiramisu.
The bus trip home was also not very noteworthy, other than the further observation of people still watching videos on their phones at full volume in public, coupled with singing(?!) in the bus.
🤦♂️
I changed the ink on my Pelikan Souverän M400, and wrote a new dead-tree journal entry. The colour difference was literal night and day (asa-gao literally means ``Morning Glory''). Since it is my dead-tree journal, I can't really post any samples here. Take my word that it is a much brighter blue than the blue-black from the scribble samples from before.
This entry is starting to run a little too long, so I'll just add one last point before posting it: I could have gone through this entire purchasing process online, but I don't see a need to do so when I live in a place as accessible as SIN city. Besides, it's yet another 4-day weekend---I do need to get out of the apartment to do something just to ensure I don't get a fat ass.
Anyway, it's getting real late. It's still a public holiday... today (Tue), and I would like to do some stuff later on too. And thus, sleep is still needed, remembering that I generally do not sleep past sun-up.
Till the next update then.
Edit: Here's a small scan of the sample after I have had some sleep:
Sunday, May 01, 2022
May Day May Day May Day...?
It's the First of May. Jonathan Coulton has some choice words for this date (and season). Before you go crazy, I just want to point out the lyrics are NSFW, so don't listen this in public with no earphones.
One really shouldn't be listening to music with no earphones as a general rule of thumb anyway...
There are just some phrases that auto-trigger some memories. ``First of May'' is one of those, ``I'm on a Boat'' is another, ``Long long time ago...'' is yet one more.
Songs that I grew up to? Close... more like songs I aged into adult-hood to. Those were some fun times.
Diversions aside, the past two days of the weekend was on a different level of comfiness. I overdid Hack Day last Wednesday among other things, and I paid the price with some really messed up head space. But despite all that tiredness and weirdness, I came to a startling realisation.
I honestly do not know how to be a husband of any sort, godly or otherwise.
For some reason, when I started to picture myself in a domestic relationship, I suddenly came to a blank. A literal blank. I just... couldn't see it happening.
It wasn't even the case of ``oh I'm out of a relationship and thus cannot picture who my wife would be''. It was literally a ``I just cannot see myself living in a domestic arrangement''.
And I don't know why.
Does it terrify me? A little... not enough to be unduly worried, but enough to realise that eternal singleness might be the true life path of mine.
I mean, I've been readying myself for that for quite a while.
It's okay---people are terrifying. Trust is not something to be given freely---look where I ended up each time I decided to trust someone. Anyone who claims otherwise has been exceedingly lucky, or has managed to block every single bad memory of trust that has failed.
------
In other news, I've started on SanctuaryRPG (Black Edition). I have mine on GOG.com for a while, and I must say, it has that ``head empty---no thoughts'' type of fun that I crave after working my head too hard. It is reminiscent of some MUDs that I played before, and is related to an old idea I had about a text-based duelling system. I still haven't finished a run, but this is to be expected.
Anyway, the weather conditions are starting to get ridiculous once more. Night time interior temperatures are at 30 °C, with humidity in the 60% to 70% range. Without air-conditioning, it's just going to be a grind to get enough sleep.
Tomorrow and the day after are both public holidays, one being the extension of today's Labour Day holiday (being on a Sunday and what-not), the other being Hari Raya Puasa. In calendars that were printed much earlier, the two gazetted day-offs were swapped because Hari Raya Puasa was originally slated to be on Monday, which pushed the day off-in-lieu for Labour Day to a Tuesday. This was eventually rectified through the various religious authorities who did their usual computations/observations to reach their associated declarations.
Urgh... I think that's all I can write for now. It's getting muggy.
Till the next update then.
One really shouldn't be listening to music with no earphones as a general rule of thumb anyway...
There are just some phrases that auto-trigger some memories. ``First of May'' is one of those, ``I'm on a Boat'' is another, ``Long long time ago...'' is yet one more.
Songs that I grew up to? Close... more like songs I aged into adult-hood to. Those were some fun times.
Diversions aside, the past two days of the weekend was on a different level of comfiness. I overdid Hack Day last Wednesday among other things, and I paid the price with some really messed up head space. But despite all that tiredness and weirdness, I came to a startling realisation.
I honestly do not know how to be a husband of any sort, godly or otherwise.
For some reason, when I started to picture myself in a domestic relationship, I suddenly came to a blank. A literal blank. I just... couldn't see it happening.
It wasn't even the case of ``oh I'm out of a relationship and thus cannot picture who my wife would be''. It was literally a ``I just cannot see myself living in a domestic arrangement''.
And I don't know why.
Does it terrify me? A little... not enough to be unduly worried, but enough to realise that eternal singleness might be the true life path of mine.
I mean, I've been readying myself for that for quite a while.
It's okay---people are terrifying. Trust is not something to be given freely---look where I ended up each time I decided to trust someone. Anyone who claims otherwise has been exceedingly lucky, or has managed to block every single bad memory of trust that has failed.
------
In other news, I've started on SanctuaryRPG (Black Edition). I have mine on GOG.com for a while, and I must say, it has that ``head empty---no thoughts'' type of fun that I crave after working my head too hard. It is reminiscent of some MUDs that I played before, and is related to an old idea I had about a text-based duelling system. I still haven't finished a run, but this is to be expected.
Anyway, the weather conditions are starting to get ridiculous once more. Night time interior temperatures are at 30 °C, with humidity in the 60% to 70% range. Without air-conditioning, it's just going to be a grind to get enough sleep.
Tomorrow and the day after are both public holidays, one being the extension of today's Labour Day holiday (being on a Sunday and what-not), the other being Hari Raya Puasa. In calendars that were printed much earlier, the two gazetted day-offs were swapped because Hari Raya Puasa was originally slated to be on Monday, which pushed the day off-in-lieu for Labour Day to a Tuesday. This was eventually rectified through the various religious authorities who did their usual computations/observations to reach their associated declarations.
Urgh... I think that's all I can write for now. It's getting muggy.
Till the next update then.
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