Getting High in Church, and Elden Ring

Whew... that was something.

So let's start from the beginning. Back in April this year, I got Stella. There were some logistic issues and what-not in getting her, but those were eventually settled. In that same entry, I talked about serving in the Music Ministry. I played a simple hymn in a quick audition on Aurelia, and had a quick chat with the music coordinator, her husband, and the deacon in charge of the music ministry. It was a very casual chat, and they were just trying to see how I could fit in with the current structure of the ensemble, seeing that I was bringing in a flute to a piano-[electric-]organ-violin ensemble. I started playing every other week, then building up towards playing every week. I came in earlier to rehearse with music coordinator to get a better sense of the play style and the repertoire of the hymnals, and that was before we had the usual rehearsal with the playing group before the service itself.

I built up confidence over time with the ``feel'' of the hymns, and got used to the keys that I had not played much of since my Kiltie Band days (hi A♭-major, E♭-major, and D♭-major) on Aurelia. My goal was to play good enough to blend in with the ensemble---the music works with the congregational singing to praise the Lord, and therefore it was not necessary to stand out in any way.

That changed for these couple of days, namely for the Christmas eve service and the Christmas service. I pulled out Stella, and for the carols, just went high as needed, going 15ma as opposed to the usual 8va that I would play with Aurelia (hymns tend to stick within the grand staff, with the main melody staying completely within the treble clef, but largely having middle-C and lower, making it impractical for the concert flute to play as is without the 8va).

Stella was wonderful. I didn't play everything at 15ma---much of the carols were played at the usual 8va, but since Stella is 8va higher than Aurelia, it means playing in the first register. This is where Stella's access to B4 was amazing. I would sneakily play Stella at how I would play Aurelia, before bursting into full technicolour 15ma for that added sparkle and sweetness.

The feedback for the two days' playing this way was positive; the congregation apparently loved it, and had fedback to the music coordinator about it. Even Paul, who is self-declared not musically-inclined, finally made a comment of hearing me play and liking the lilting sparkle that Stella imparted.

Was it vindication? Vindication of what though... that I could control myself and sound sweet at 2 kHz range? That the MINI (not really a piccolo, but I just called it that to avoid a looooooooong discussion point) is the perfect instrument for this range?

Nah... I mean, my personal bar for myself is kinda high. While I have about 12 years of piccolo experience (damn it has been 12 years?!), it is the 31 years of 笛子 playing that is pulling much of the weight. I go ridiculously high all the time with my dizi playing, and I think it has conditioned me to handle the 2 kHz range with greater control than I would normally have without having done that.

But, at the risk of being smug, it is nice to be appreciated.

------

In tangential news, the bag that holds my special music stand finally ripped the seams beyond the 50% mark. I spent part of yesterday afternoon sewing that stitch back, before using fabric glue and some spare fabric salvaged from an old T-shirt to strengthen the seam more. It held out well today, but only time will tell.

Part of the reason why the bag gets ripped at the seam was the way that I'm carrying it. Previously, I would sling it on my right shoulder like normal, but I didn't like it. With the backpack gig-bag, it was always in the way whenever I had to switch the backpack to the front before sitting down at a seat on public transport. So I started to cross sling the music stand bag in the front, with the left shoulder being the higher holding part. And this is where additional stress from the poke-y bits of the folded up stand act on the seam on the bag, which is already supporting the entire mass of the stand (it's heavy) due to the position and design.

Having the bag slung in front allows me to just quickly switch my backpack between the front and back.

------

Aaaaaanyway, I talked about waiting to see if Elden Ring was on sale.

It was.

It had a 40% price drop, which was pretty large. I took the opportunity to get the Deluxe edition just so that I would have the soundtrack as well.

And since I was already buying something, I bought a few more other games from the Steam sale. But you probably don't care about this.

Elden Ring. Oh yes, fucker's hard... but it is actually still fun. There's just so much to see and do, and each fight is like a timed puzzle.

Don't get me wrong, this fucking game is hard, and there were some bullshit moments [when fighting the Tree Sentinel in the beginning area] that I thought was unfair (got trapped in the scenery, for crying out loud). Runes are used for everything, and dying does make one drop it all. Hollow Knight does that as well, but what Elden Ring made better was to allow that dropped runes be persistent between gaming sessions until either one picks up their dropped runes, or when one dies again.

The routing to the Boss that one died to in Elden Ring also tends to be straightforward, allowing resets to happen faster and not overly punishing the player to redo the entire dungeon to get back there.

The levelling up system is slow as molasses, but then I realised that it would be exactly like how I would want to create a game that tried its best to mimic reality while keeping the fantasy moments. The action RPG nature of Elden Ring means that apart from just the numbers, there is still that meta-game of actually being skilled at the mechanics.

And I like it. It scratches the kind of itch that rogue-likes have, but without the perma-death that can frustrate one who is a little more time-sensitive. The use of the numbers to replace the skill meta-game is interesting without taking the fun of mastering a gamme completely, and I like it.

A lot.

And anyway, that's enough for now. Till the next update.

Am Getting Drinks

Another [work] day has ended. And this year, this 2023 CE, is now in its penultimate week.

I finally left last.fm after being there for nearly twenty years. The reason was simple: they were withholding interesting information based on my submitted data... yeah, fuck'em. My only regret was that it took me this many years to finally pull the trigger and leave.

Moving on, I've recently been introduced to the solo hotpot & BBQ concept by YT. The hotpot part, I am used to, while that BBQ bit was something new. I think that calling it a BBQ is a bit of a misnomer---it was much closer to having a hot plate as opposed to a barbeque grill in terms of execution. But that aside, the concept was interesting, and it awakened that latent caveman that had been hiding within me all these while; there was just something that was so satisfying about watching (and smelling) what was originally red raw meat turning into a delicious brown cooked form.

Magnifique.

Recently, I have finally achieved something cool---I have managed to obtain good quality playable representatives for all usable keys of the 笛子. Was that always my intention? Not really... but ever since I discovered a contact who had makers willing to be commissioned to build the so-called odd key 笛子, it was something that did not stray too far from my mind.

``But MT, why do you need so many 笛子 in the first place?''

It's about extending the possibilities of expression. Each and every 笛子 has its own specific timbre, and armed with all the 27 possible representatives as at now, it is possible to tackle anything, including the possibility of ``going rogue'' in the sense of moving away from traditional Chinese music and into band (concert/marching/five-man) and beyond.

And that 倍大 C♯笛子 is a special one too. I won't brag about it (not worth it), but if you know, you know. It also plays beautifully.

So a while back, Peace Centre was sold. The twist was that after the original tenants had moved out, the entire place was given a year of partial anarchy, where graffiti was allowed, and various pop-up stalls appeared. I checked it out with YT that day, and I found it pretty cool. It reminded me a little of the old New Year events in Pittsburgh City back in the day for some reason, even though I might not share the same kind of jive as the much younger folk were.

Hmmm. What else is there to say for today's entry?

Ah, perhaps a little Minecraft news. I continued clearing out the forests nearest to my hill-top base, and replaced the haphazardly placed torches on the ground with the four-iron-bar-one-lantern ``lamp-post'' that I came up with. It looks so much neater. I cleaned up my mob farm a little, removing the original chunk-delimiter ring of blocks, replaced the ground blocks for the sea-level entry-way while adding detailing in the form of cobblestone wall ``pillars'' that drove down to some kind of hard-rock on the sea floor. I also patched up some of the ravine/rifts that were in the land around my hill-top base, using smooth stone as a shovel-resistant stop-block, before laying on stacks of dirt to make the patch look like it was part of the original landscape.

This weekend will see me get involved in quite a few pieces as part of the music ministry. I'll have to practise the pieces beforehand (as always), and am looking forward to it.

I am also waiting for 2023-12-22T02:00+08 to see if Elden Ring would be on sale. Something about the SGD80.00 price point just did not sit right with me, even though I would hardly blink spending that amount at a single meal of just having myself. I suppose if there was no sale, I'd probably just buy it at full price---I had finally convinced myself that it was time to try it.

Ah. What else to say, what else to say?

I suppose that's about it for now. I think I have a rant or two, but I have been drinking like a fish over the weekend for two weekends now, hanging out with different friends. There's one more session coming up this weekend, and I suppose that I can get all my ranting going, thus leaving almost nothing for here.

But then again, why would that ever be a problem?

Damn I Need a Drink

I would have said ``damn I need a drink'', but I actually had like six of those babies on Friday, and that doesn't count the two I had the day before. But the sentiment still holds though.

Damn I need a drink.

Or perhaps a heavy blow to the head---who knows?

I have been feeling under the weather for the past couple of days, lapsing into multi-hour long naps in the day time, and waking up feeling better than before I slept, but still in the kind of ennui that often accompanies me during this time of the year.

Am I really depressed? If I were in the US, I would not have hesitated to go look for professional help, but as I am still in SIN city, it is just not worth the trouble.

Yes, trouble. I chose the word ``trouble'', not ``effort''. This place is downright toxic when it comes to mental health, and I don't mean the legion of lay people who know fuck all about what mental health entails. I am also referring to the over-worked and under-paid workers in the industry, that is regulated by a ministry that is, shall we say nicely, a representative of the type of public it serves.

I would rather kill myself than to go through the trouble to seek help here, should that need ever arise.

The irony of course is that I live within striking distance of the Institute of Mental Health, which means that it barely takes any actual logistical effort to haul my ass there. And yet I still refuse to.

But then again in the grand scheme of things, I've more or less subscribed to the philosophy of ``if I die, I die'', i.e. I really cannot be bothered to take any more corrective action in my life just to prolong it for no good reason. I have been thinking semi-seriously about drafting a ``do not resuscitate'' legal order, but am a little hung up on how to specify the conditions within it. Questions like ``will the [fucking] doctors actually respect my legal orders, or will they ignore it for whatever damned reason?''.

And no, I don't want to talk about this with anyone. The last time I raised this with anyone, I was rudely told to go fuck myself for being an ingrate for not cherishing the life that was given to me by God (not the exact words for sure, but the sentiments are accurate). And people in my age group don't understand nor care, since their lives are going nicely with their own families and other objects of anchoring them into this reality. And forget about the younger ones---their minds are too blasted by instant gratification to think beyond anything, really.

``But MT, if you don't open yourself up, how are you going to find help or understanding?''

Yeah, fuck off. I opened myself up to people whom I trusted, and what happened each time? I get stabbed. If you want an example of emotional abuse, there's your Exhibit A---it doesn't need some domestic altercation or anything of that sort. Insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different outcomes. Hell, I'd happily accept that God wants me to suffer for His purposes than to trust another person that deeply again.

``MT, that's not very Christian of you.''

And you'd be right. It's not very Christian of me. I'm too world weary to be that trusting. I have trust issues at a personal level---I just don't trust people much any more. I cannot trust people who have no attention span---please explain how I can trust a person who, when I am talking with them, is consistently looking at their smartphones, not necessarily doomscrolling, but having another conversation with someone else.

Tell me, if I were to continue trusting this person, am I not just a fool? Did God not give me a damn brain and a mind with wisdom to make my own judgement?

Trust issues.

It gets worse as one ages, as I am starting to discover. That naive trusting nature when one was younger gets burnt out of the system over time, and even among my age group, no one gets involved with anyone without any ulterior motives.

So it's all an act. A mask. The friendly nature of MT that goes out there is all of those, and then some. It's not a fake act, nor a fake mask---it is what I would have been had I not lose the spark to keep it real. So it's no longer my default state, but just something that I retrieve to keep people from thinking that I am some of psychopath/sociopath, just so that things can get moving along in a way that does not devolve to violence.

Some might call it ``adulting''. I have no proper names for it, nor do I care enough to come up with one.

Not gonna lie, just kinda waiting for society to give me some pretty good reasons to off myself at this point, but God has been kind enough to have me play some useful roles in this society for now, thus allowing me to put these thoughts away.

But they are always there, always lurking. And these trust issues are what will prevent me from seeking a mate to ``settle down''.

Damn I need a drink.

End of Another Week... Yay...

Ah... another week is over. And we're now officially in December. Last twelfth of the year to go before the pseudo-cycle begins anew.

Am I officially ``done'' with 2023? That's an interesting question... what does it mean to be ``done'' with a year? Does it mean that when the pseudo-cycle begins anew, it somehow is a reset of some sorts, that some of the old problems go away in the sense of the reset, while new opportunities show themselves?

If that's what it means to be ``done'' with any particular year... then I suppose not. Just because an arbitrary time-centric odometer increases by one integer step does not mean that it is truly ``anew''---that's just something we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. The truth is, the problems we had are still around, the issues we wanted to resolve still await us, and the future is still as far away as before, unless we have some specific quantifiable goal in mind.

That said, I've been living on borrowed time anyway. I move projects forward, hoping that these projects benefit their target audiences, while I sort of reached the point in life where if I suddenly were to die now, I'd go quietly with no regrets.

I mean, what's there to regret? All in all, I think I've lived a pretty full life. So what if I'm not married with children... being single doesn't mean that one cannot live a full life. So what if I'm not some wealthy fellow, or a business owner, or famed anyone---why would anyone need to be in any of those states to be considered living a life without regrets? I mean, sure, money is useful, but it's still mostly a means to an end, and shouldn't be an end to itself, for therein lies madness and great evil.

``MT, why're you getting all maudlin again?''

It's the end of the year; it is a confluence of Christmas, New Year's, My birthday, and Chinese New Year. Naturally, it's when I just age hard like a mofo.

Aaaaaaanyway, end of the week. I'm down with something again, and I'm just plain angry. I'm still chalking it to just some kind of cold, and am going to run with that. My strategy of getting through this is to literally be too angry to be sick, so that's that.

I think that's all I feel like writing now. Till the next update I suppose.

Out of Spoons/Empathy

Okay, it's the time of the year where I'm prone to getting maudlin. I could say, ``Wait, I can explain!'' but after nearly eighteen years here, just read the damn archives.

Grumpiness aside, I was assaulted on all fronts by the many sub-twelve children. It was... annoying, to put it mildly. As clichéd as it sounds, I blame the parents. These children were screeching, talking rather loudly, and all without much control by their parents.

``But MT, taking care of children is hard! Have some empathy!''

I'm shit out of empathy after two days of classes relating to being a manager. And honestly, I was a little disappointed. The content was fine; there were some interesting things to think about. But man, the contextualisation of it all was sooo typically gaslighting. Again, it is consistent with the brand in terms of where the classes were offered and the background of the instructor, but it doesn't mean that it felt right. Naturally, work must dominate the reason of existence of one's life, and ``work-life balance'' is some woke shit that is terrible for everything, and it should be ``work-life integration''.

🤦‍♂️

As I said, it's on brand, as disappointing as it was. But I'm always of the opinion that something good can almost always be gleaned from any circumstance, no matter how good or fucked up they are, and in that sense, I was not disappointed. The other participants of the class naturally made me realise that there is much of the world that does not revolve around [infocom] technology, and also everyone seemingly thinks of AI as some kind of magic genie.

🤦‍♂️

Thus, I am absolutely out of fucks left to give. Having young children screeching about on public transport is just terrible, and this is coming from someone who was already shoving well-fitted ear plugs in their ears. Yeah, it was not pleasant.

In my previous post, I briefly talked about this year's NaNoWriMo entry. I won't talk more about my entry specifically (go check it out from the usual place), but talk a little bit about a controversy that had been brewing in the background. Apparently there had been some moderators on the forums who were doing some shady stuff with respect to the Young Writers' Programme (YWP). Complaints were raised, nothing was done, the Board was activated, the Panic Button was smashed, and much of the forums came to a stand still during one of the most high key periods of its use as the Board figures out what their reaction should be over the American Thanksgiving week.

Naturally, other grievances got tossed into the mix as well, and I frankly do not know what to say about them. Some of these grievances included things about inclusivity, and about how the Code of Conduct (CoC) should be updated to reflect that, as well as to ``other'' (my terminology) groups that are ``generally known to be discriminative for one reason or another''. It's a clusterfuck.

I can sort of start to see why the older one gets, the less liberal one's tendencies get, with a general shift towards conservatism. Some of the stuff said by the liberal-minded is batshit insane, as though they had forgotten about the fact that humans are gonna human, exploiting any and all rules that they can to their advantage. Now this does not mean that the conservative-minded are sinless---they are batshit insane, but for wholly different reasons.

The only thing I will say to these all is: what the fuck, man!?

But I digress. I'm seriously contemplating whether to continue with NaNoWriMo next year. It's not so much as I'm running out of stories to tell (this is but a small reason), but that NaNoWriMo is starting to lose what is fun about it. I'm sure I wrote some time back when they did their website and forums update a few years back, and it wasn't good. And now, software aside, the people are starting to get weird too. If this all gets to a head with all the fun gone, why should I continue to expend energies on it?

That all said, this will be a question that I will only need to answer next year, so I'll just leave it for now.

I suppose that's all for now. Till the next update then.

NaNoWriMo 2023 and Other Stuff

And now that I'm finally done with NaNoWriMo 2023, let's talk about stuff here.

First off, I'm feeling bloody sick. I think my days (or was it nights?) of not having enough sleep are catching up to me, that and perhaps a messing up of my body chemistry due to the period of anti-histamine change/non-use. So let's unpack this sentence for a bit.

After one bloody long-ass loop, I should have just gone back to my usual pharmacy instead of trying to bank on the ``closer to my office'' ones. All the cock and bull story about supplier issues and what-not... my usual pharmacy still had what I needed in stock at a price point that does not make me want to kill myself. Only caveat is the need to go a bit more out of the way, but I'm learning. For a 10× difference in price, yeah, I should have just gone out of the way.

Not having enough sleep... not sure why. Might be a combination of general restlessness from reaching our first major system deployment while still having no access to the funds to actually deploy(!), other preparatory work for the upcoming year, where I need to also feed the pipeline that my team draws upon for work to do, and maybe also the upcoming two-day course that I have to attend.

Moving back to NaNoWriMo 2023, the core concept for this year's entry is about the apartment block, and its neighbours (sort of), framed under the context of the funeral of the key person who provides the linkages. Why this particular setting, I don't know---I have done much less planning for this year's entry as compared to other years.

Writing it was tough mostly due to all the other competing items for attention, as well as trying to make sure I don't end up completely out of action due to illness. But it is damn hard to stay healthy.

------

In other news, I have done some upgrades to my Minecraft world. I'll list them loosely here:

• Updated the world to 1.20.2, which includes updating the major mods I used as well;
• Fixed my iron farm to take into account the forced day/night life-cycle for the villagers (i.e. they need to sleep so that the iron golem can be spawned periodically);
• Fixed my mob farm's killing/collecting system to channel experience orbs more efficiently instead of getting trapped in hoppers;
• Freed up space in the item collection sub-level by pushing the auto-trash disposal and item elevator to a new sub-level;
• Finished the nether rail system to connect to the newly discovered Sakura tree containing biome;
• Clearing out trees near to my industrial complex to reduce vandalism by the damned Endermen;
• Changed up the map that was placed in my hill-top base's bedroom to show the actual hilltop base;
• Farmed up more packed ice and blue ice from the ice spikes biome near my guardian temple area; and
• Upgraded my archery range set up to have a higher resolution target indicator.

I think that's about all I can write now.

I'm going to collapse for a bit. Till the next time then.

I Promised An Update On Inks...

Okay, I promised to write a bit more when the inks arrive.

Well, they arrived today while I was at work.

The packing was immaculate---bubble wrapped padding in the box of the iroshizuku ink to prevent movement, ziplock bag around the box of the ink itself, followed by bubble wrapping, then an additional box, followed by more bubble wrap, before having both boxes (one containing both asa-gao bottles, and one for the fuyu-gaki one) sealed in a bubble-wrap based envelope.

Yeah, those bottles did not go anywhere. Kudos to Cityluxe.

As to the inks themselves, well asa-gao is as expected, so nothing new to add. But the fuyu-gaki, it looks more vibrant than the Pelikan 4001 Brilliant-Red ink.

And that's a wrap. All in all, it was a good [online] shopping experience with Cityluxe---definitely will go back to them for more stuff in the future.

Till the next update.

I'm So... Tired...

I really should be working on NaNoWriMo instead of writing a blog post, but you know, I think I can afford a bit of leeway here.

I am so tired. I cannot tell which subset of the following possible reasons matter:

1. Stresses from work (can't tell if it's distress or eustress);
2. Symptoms of long COVID;
3. Cranking up of creative output for music ministry work (we're planning a special item for Chinese New Year, which involved writing some new music); or
4. NaNoWriMo itself.

The fact is, I am so tired.

I was so tired that I actually took a day off on Wednesday, just to sleep. And I slept in on Saturday morning, and later on for this morning.

Thankfully, this upcoming week is going to segue into a partially manufactured long weekend---there's the usual ``because Sunday is a public holiday so the following Monday is one as well'' for Deepavali, but there was also another one gazetted for Friday itself. There's a big-ish meeting tomorrow afternoon, and perhaps I might feel better after that.

Perhaps.

But let's talk about yesterday. TGCO had another performance, and it was alright. I'm still tired though.

Oh, and some dumbfuck using Amazon.com is crawling my blog again. Suuuuper irritating.

I talked about my hunt for inks before, and there's a small update. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on ordering bottles of iroshizuku ink from Cityluxe. Two bottles of asa-gao, and one fuyu-gaki. They are apparently on the way through the courier service, and I will probably talk a little bit more when they finally arrive.

The fuyu-gaki is to replace my red pelikan ink. That bottle of ink was starting to show weird chunks in it, and I didn't want to deal with that crap. And so, out it goes, and the new one will be in. I've rinsed out my LAMY Safari pen for the red ink, and even as I am writing, the parts are now being quietly air-dried.

I have talked about how my black ink [fountain] pens were not showing up as dark as they were before, looking like some kind of weird-ass gray. As it turned out, the Noodler's bullet proof ink that I had required frequent shaking to ensure that the ink particles are well dissolved in the water solvent. Once I figured that out, I shook up the bottle of ink that I was using in the ``travel package'' form (basically a small amount of ink poured into the Pelikan ink bottle form factor due to its leak-proof nature), mixed it in the drying/dried out first small 3 oz bottle, shook the whole bottle hard, and topped it up more with my newer larger 4.5 oz bottle, before shaking both bottles hard.

And the result... was amazing. I got back the deep black that I had missed for a few years.

(sigh)

Sorry, I'm just so... tired. Till the next update, I suppose.

Start of November... Go!

Another short one.

I'm on leave for today---just one day. I was just so... tired for some damn reason, and thus made the decision yesterday to just take today off.

I slept in. I started on my NaNoWriMo 2023 entry. I watched a few more YouTube videos from some of my favourite channels. And now I'm thinking of what active gaming to do, maybe.

Who knows?

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

Chop Chop

Ah Friday once more. This is actually take two of my attempt at writing this entry---the previous one was a little too off.

I'll keep it short. The weather's hokey, October's ending, am looking forward to NaNoWriMo, December's Christmas Eve and Christmas services require me to start working through all the possible hymns/carols from Hymns of Praise, and beyond that, I have no idea what is going on in my life any more.

There. Back to reading and doing other stuff.

Till the next update.

position: sticky;

I'm on leave! Yay!

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk something serious: the need to curb the irrational urge of taking sides in any conflict, be it personal, local, regional, or international.

For some unfathomable reason, it seems that people are compulsively declaring their support for this faction or that faction, rational or otherwise.

My personal [professional] take on things is, if one is not in a position where such a decision is of immediate relevance, just shut the hell up and say absolutely nothing. It is a no-win scenario in most cases, because it is almost always the case that the situation is often more messy than it is expected.

``But MT, the politicians are declaring this and that! So why shouldn't I?''

My reply is simply: are you really involved in international politics? If not, why make any statements at all? In some cases, I would go as far as to say that the politicians who made those declarations could have done better with shutting up instead of trying to virtue signal with some declaration or another.

The thing about making statements/declarations is that each new statement made acts as a partitioning of the people, separating them into at least three cohorts---those who agree with your declaration/statement, those who disagree with your declaration/statement, and those who don't give a damn either way. As a private citizen, there is hardly any advantage to force such a partition---the number of people we end up seeing/working with on a personal basis isn't large enough that allows us a substantial number of people left to work with in the event that our declaration/statement is a polarising minority statement.

Moreover, much of personal declarations/statements are reliant on what the media reports (mainstream or otherwise), and the problem with that is that these media reports aren't always correct at the time of publication. This means that the stance that one declares may seem to be safely in the majority, but may be [quickly] shifted to that of the minority when new information appears.

In short, personal declarations/statements of stances [in any conflict] has a pretty sizable risk of going in the ``wrong'' direction, especially if the purpose is that of virtue signalling.

Thus, it is better to just shut the hell up.

------

In other news, I've discovered about position: sticky; in CSS, in relation to having the header of the table to be floating at the top. The need for this came about when I was messing around with my instrument ambitus experimental tool. The list was too damn long, and it was hard to see what the ambitus us once the header information is scrolled off the screen. Having the thead tag set with position: sticky; meant that the complicated header row that highlights the actual notes selected was visible once more.

There was a catch though: for some reason, combining position: sticky; with border-collapse: collapse; messed up the border information for the cells that make up the header. It is highly likely to be a bug, but it isn't going to be solved any time soon by the major browsers. To mitigate that, I went the whole extreme of defining the entire table to have border: none;, while setting each individual td tag have their own borders. This gave a more consistent looking feel for the header information (borderless) and looks pretty okay.

And I suppose that's it for now. Till the next update then.

Solving the `m'-Key Problem?

So, sometime back I mentioned about how the `m'-key was reporting double triggering. I had a hunch that perhaps there was something that was trapped under the key that caused it to press on the underlying bubble membrane more than once when the angle of the key itself varied.

But I never really took any specific actions to take care of it. Or rather, I tried to take care of things without taking the obvious action that I ought to be taking.

Today, I finally got angered enough to do it. I pried open the key cap for the `m'-key, and used my electric blower to blow the crap out of it, before reassembling it all over again. I'll admit that I saw nothing out of the ordinary before nor after the blow out process.

But once I put the keycap back on and typed on it, the doubling problem went away.

Go figure.

------

I completed the main story of Chronicon using my Magic Find (MF) build. It was a fun diversion, like a cross between old school Diablo in gameplay but with Grim Dawn levels of quality of life updates. I am taking a break from it now because the DLC that I tried a little of was a bit too hard for my current MF-build. Plus I was basically pushing hard through the last act, where there were just so many enemies, even on the normal difficulty.

I'll definitely come back to it later.

Games wise, I've not played any in a few days. I might continue on the System Shock remake in a bit, but for the moment, I'm in the middle of doing quite a few transcriptions of hymns that need to be played over the upcoming fortnight. There are two reasons why I do the transcriptions:

1. To fit the score maximally within a single portrait laid-out A4 paper; and
2. To have a quick preview of how the piece sounds like.

The third unspoken reason is to further improve my Lilypond wrangling skills.

I've recently completed the book Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and loved it. It gave me strong Dragon's Egg vibes, with the narrative of an alien civilisation (jumping spiders and lovable amoeba (Cheela)), as well as their struggles, both the alien civilisations as well as the human ones. It also gave me strong Speaker for the Dead vibes as well, and as such, scratched my sci-fi itch in all the right places.

And I think that's it for this entry. The paucity of updates this month is largely due to the general lethargy I am feeling from having to deal with this unbearable consistent heat and humidity. Till the next one.

Paying for a Moment's Folly

One more day, and it will be the weekend.

Meanwhile though, I'm paying the price of a moment's folly. So it is not really a secret that I have bad skin, and part of the badness of my skin comes from some allergic reactions to certain types of food. The actual list is confusing, but it can be easily reduced to this list:

• No crustaceans;
• No cephalopods except for octopus;
• No peanuts.

So the moment's folly was to accept the soup-of-the-day from the Swensen's at Junction 8 where I had gone to for dinner on Tuesday.

Oh yes I'm paying for it. I'm getting rashes, and it itches like hell. It also doesn't help that the [ambient] temperature is going up as well---last I checked, the indoor wall temperature at around this time is still a toasty 31 °C.

Mind you, this is at 2319hrs local time, also known as ``roughly reaching stupid o'clock''.

I have my ways of mitigating this mess, but damn it will it take a while and lots of metaphorical bullet-biting discipline to keep things going.

That's all I really want to write; just a small note to remind myself that I cannot let up even for a moment when it comes to matters like this.

Till the next update.

Control and Another Experiment

So I completed the main story of Control. The end-run was a little unexpected---I thought there was going to be a major fight with some end-boss, but it ended up being a gauntlet followed by another gauntlet instead.

Don't get me wrong---the bosses in Control are bullet sponges, but judicious use of a maxed out Launch skill trivialises many (not all!) of them. In many ways, the gauntlet fights of the Hiss are much more aggravating, with each type of Hiss having their own ways of defeating them over and beyond just blasting away at them with Shatter (Control's name for the shotgun). It doesn't matter if the Launch skill is maxed out---some of the mobs have enough dodge that the Launch skill is completely mitigated, requiring some careful gun play to take them out.

But perhaps Control's true end isn't at the end of the main story; I have started on the other DLC, aptly titled Foundation (I've completed the other DLC ``by accident'' as part of the exploration phase before advancing the latter parts of the main story). I'll probably continue that some time later this week as I have other things that I'd like to work on in the meanwhile.

------

Today it was cool and humid, well, cooler than what one might expect from what SIN city has to offer. It rained heavily in the morning as I was making my way to PPCC, and it rained intermittently thereafter. I find that it really isn't the temperature that annoys me, but the humidity.

In other words, cool but humid is still terrible. It took me a good 15 minutes just to cool off enough to stop perspiring all over Aurelia and screwing up my embouchure.

I ran another experiment today---instead of keeping Aurelia fully assembled on the stand and waiting for 45 minutes (or however long it takes for the sermon to complete before the closing hymn is needed), I took the headjoint off when I went to sit among the pews, having it wrapped up on the microfibre cloth and held it close to me to keep the whole headjoint warm. The reason for this odd behaviour was to reduce the amount of condensation that would gather within the headjoint when my humid and warm breath contacts the cold metal walls when playing that last hymn after having Aurelia sitting out in the cold. Condensation within the headjoint near the embouchure hole made controlling the intonation at least twice as hard, and that was something I didn't want to have to deal with.

The experiment was a success---the condensation occurred nearer the C♯ vent hole, and I found that I retained control of the intonation much better than when I didn't do that.

So that's something new that I learnt.

I suppose that's about all for now. Till the next update.

Saaaaaaaaaaturday~!

Ah... it's a nice-ish Saturday once more, and I'm mildly annoyed at how Eileen-III's keyboard is always doubling the letter `m' as pressed ever so often.

Is it something to do with the timing from my change in typematic rate (I've since set it to 168 ms delay with 8 ms of repeat)? I don't think so---I suspect it is more likely to be related to how I conduct myself on the keyboard, i.e. my index finger when going for the `m' key on the keyboard isn't retracting fast enough for some reason. Recall that the keyboard of Eileen-III isn't quite as centred as I would like, due to the extra column of utility functions that are available on the right side.

It's not completely detrimental yet, but it is definitely rather irritating when it does occur. Funny enough, the letter `m' doesn't really appear all that of often enough like any of ``etaoin shrdlu'' characters that it becomes a massive deal-breaker.

In short, I should ``git gud''.

That minor annoyance aside, let's talk about what happened this week in retrospection. My final team member has finally started on the second week of their tenure, and the team's first big deployment for a project is coming within 7 weeks. It's exciting, it's scary, and it's a trial-by-fire moment. I have a healthy level of expectations of the team that has been put together, and I sincerely hope that they rise up to the occasion and build up sufficient expertise and esprit de corps to pull through as a team to be ready for the larger and more scarier projects to come. As a first time manager working with more than a handful of subordinates, I am definitely full of trepidation, with a healthy dose of fear that my ineptness will let the team and subsequently the entire department/pillar down.

It's that scary thought that keeps me up on some nights.

But that aside, the week marked the end of the parts of the annual appraisal process that were relevant to me. All my subordinates' appraisals have been reviewed and sent in for calibration, while my own with my reporting manager has also been done and fired off. All that is left now on this front is the waiting, and since I'm not really in this job for the purposes of BEEEEEEEEEG MONEY, as long as the outcome is sufficiently fair enough, I'd be happy.

No girlfriend, no wife, no car, no apartment means no matter how shitty the cost of public transport goes up, or how high the CPF ceiling is being pushed up, or how fucked the two-step GST hike will increase the number and magnitude of unscrupulous price increases using the GST hike as a fig leaf, my actual cost of living is low enough relative to what I'm paid that I will come out generally fine.

Not great, not luxurious. Just fine. I dare not go as far as saying comfortable, for the sole reason that I'm still living in an apartment with no air conditioning even as SIN city's mean temperature keeps rising over the years.

But I didn't come here to rant about those things (or did I?). I just wanted to sling some thoughts about here for a bit, even as that thrice damned Amazon.com bot is still scraping my blog.

To that shithead: why?

``But MT, you could always walk away!''

For what? It's not exactly harmful, nor illegal, but is definitely being a shithead. I don't walk away from legal harmless shitheads---I just get mildly annoyed at their audacity, and just move on with life.

I mean, if I didn't want to quietly share my thoughts, I wouldn't be keeping a blog (or three) in the first place, let alone having this one kept alive since 2006.

------

I went back to trying Halls of Torment again, and it wasn't too bad after the fixes. That Agony system still felt really rough to me, and I've not really decided if I liked it or not. HoloCure is still the best execution of the quasi-twin shooter variant of the formula that Vampire Survivors popularised, even though that Stardew Valley-esque ``HoloHouse'' bit is a confusing addition---on the one hand, why a farm simulator in the middle of a reverse-bullet hell game; on the other hand, it does help with the gold meta due to a half-decent ``passive income'' set up through the ``hiring'' of gold miners that need to be fed with either fish or farm-grown produce.

I think I'll try to push Control as far as I can today, and once that is done, I might go back to my solo-world Minecraft to build yet more railways, this time to one of the new biomes having sakura that comes from release 1.20. I know that version 2.0 of Cyberpunk 2077 has released, but it's still a bit too close to my last playthrough for me to be interested in going for it again. I do have one last life-path (Streetkid) left to try, which can justify playthrough number 3, but I have other games in my stable to play through as well.

And I suppose there's that for now.

Whelp, the 1.5× coffee (3× for regular folk) is finally kicking in. Time for some Control, then some practice for the hymns for tomorrow's worship, perhaps on one-key flute (I haven't decided), then TGCO rehearsal in the evening.

Till the next update.

Experiment: Success!

The scraper that lives on Amazon is back, and there's nothing that I can do about that. I just hope that they aren't using what they scraped for nefarious reasons.

Anyway, I ran an experiment earlier today while playing during worship service. Instead of playing Aurelia, I switched over to the AF-1 Grenser one-key traverso. Three of the hymns we played were ``simple'' keys (C, & F), with the only problematic one being A♭. Since its a one-key flute, the single toughest note on the simple flute system, E♭/D♯, is easily handled with the single key. As for the other chromatic notes (A♭, B♭, and D♭) are ``easily'' handled with cross-fingering patterns similar to the ones I put up for the AF-3 Stanesby Jr.

Note that the word is ``similar'', not the same. Have a look at the PDF of the fingering chart. Due to the different tuning (A440 vs A415) and possibly different geometry (AF-1 is based on the Grenser, hence the name, while AF-3 is based on the Stanesby Jr., hence that name), the cross-fingering patterns for the AF-1 Grenser is much simpler and systematic as compared to the AF-3 Stanesby Jr. I actually derived quite a bit of inspiration from the one-key flute fingering patterns while building my own 12-tone fingering chart for the 笛子.

Now, the reason to raise all that allegedly diversionary tangents is just to point out that I was really in my element when doing all the funny chromatic stuff on my AF-1 Grenser, even for the A♭-key hymn.

The experiment was a success. No one complained about intonation and other issues, and I found that even without the much louder set up that was Aurelia (and other modern concert flutes), I could still play the upper envelope without being drowned out by the four violins, one piano, and one electic organ. I suspect that was due to the other instruments staying out of the upper octave that I was in than how the AF-1 Grenser was ``loud enough''. In fact, the music coordinator remarked that when I was doing my runs for warm-up before the quick group rehearsal sounded much smoother than when I was with Aurelia.

I think that smoothness just came about because the reaction time of a simple system flute was always faster than that of any keyed ones.

I was really afraid of intonation, but thanks to what I have realised to be non-broken ears, that was within control. And therein lies on of the reasons why the one-key flute isn't as well used these days as compared to the concert flute. The music ministry group that is playing at the worship service is sufficiently small that I could still control the intonation carefully, and I can see how it can get progressively harder to do so as the number of players increase.

All in all, this just means that I have other options to bring to the table whenever I'm rostered to play.

Till the next update.

3rd Day ART Positive---So It's 7 Days Now

So I retook the ART once more at the stupid o'clock of Thursday. It was still positive, though the T-line was so faint that even under lower light (with HDR enabled) conditions, and colour inversion, it took some serious effort to see it.

I then had to make the call: to accept that it was a positive result and therefore keep myself confined to quarters for the full 7 days (ending with my return to office on Tuesday), or not. The pamphlet that explained the use of the ART was very clear that any line, no matter how faint, that showed up at the T-sector, when the line at the C-sector is also present, must be considered a positive result. On technical grounds, there was nothing to make the call on, but on personal grounds, I did feel like I wanted to pretend that it was negative just so that I could carry on with my life and do the things that were lined up/scheduled for it.

In the end, following the technical outcome prevailed, and I am now still on a 7-day home isolation. This meant working from home for both Friday and the upcoming Monday, where I have a new staff coming on board.

Today, it is Saturday. I'm still at home, and going a little stir crazy. I had to head on out to run quick errands of food and supplies (masked up, mostly), but other than that, I had been quite obedient at staying at home, in my room even. Both parents are doing better from their bouts of COVID-19, though there was a drug allergy scare yesterday that had since been rectified.

Here's to hoping that no other stupid thing happens in the meanwhile.

Con Plague? But It Was I, COVID-19!

So, that con plague? Turns out that it was probably COVID-19 with high probability. And I only knew it after the fact when I tested positive on the ART near stupid o'clock of Monday, or 0000hrs-ish on Tuesday.

And I only did that ART only because Mum got all uncomfortable, and tested positive on the ART.

While technically today is the third day of the 72-hour self-isolation from first positive ART, it probably isn't the third day of actually being afflicted with COVID-19.

Because all I'm left with is just a shitty cough that comes at a variable rate of between 12--300 mHz. The cough had been moderately productive for the past couple of days, but it has gotten on the shitty side today, with very little phlegm to show for it. Thankfully though, the rate did fall closer to 300 mHz, but if it is going to continue being unproductive, I'd rather it stop, just so that I can move on with life.

Rate of coughing aside, I suspect that the hell I went through on Wednesday night all the way through Friday morning was the actual COVID-19 attack. There was fever, delusions, some headaches, running nose, cough---the works.

Thus, despite all the hermiting I had done to stay away from the damn SARS-CoV-2 virus, I got done in by the mandatory course that HR sent me.

(shakes fist mockingly at HR for breaking my evasion streak)

No sick leave for me though---I was just working from home. I hadn't been in a state of ``too sick to think'', and that's just fine for me.

``But MT, if you're working from home, why are you writing a blog entry in the middle of the work day, today?''

Couple of things. One, when I post a blog entry isn't necessarily strongly linked to when I wrote it---one will need to demonstrate causality in a strong enough way first. Two, I'm actually on leave today, and the leave was originally taken to bum about at home, and so it was apt.

Actually, the leave was supposed to be taken in preparation for a performance that was originally supposed to happen in the evening, but it didn't pan out for a whole variety of reasons out of my control, and I just kept the date.

☝🤓️ Ackstually the leave was supposed to be for two days, but I had to cancel the second day to be on the waiting list of another course, which itself was a re-application of an alternative date for the same course that I originally waitlisted for August 31, which itself was originally planned then due to a change in the schedule the original schedule of the 3-day course that spanned August 29--30, then September 01, which was, of course an amendment of the original original 3-day course span of August 29--31 due to the trainer's unavailability, which was all moot when the Presidential Election was declared for September 01, causing the 3-day course's schedule to revert to the original August 29--31, but with different trainers.

Confused? Yeah, that was how fucked up the scheduling was. And I'm probably not going to play for worship this Sunday. Whether or not I'm going for rehearsal on Saturday, or even just to the office tomorrow will depend on what the post-72 hours of self-isolation yield.

Long story short, I'm on leave today, and decided to write a little about the recent nonsense on ART positive tests. That's about it.

------

Halls of Torment underwent two patches in the mean time, after I had completed the 201 achievements that were available then. Three big boo-boos happened:

1. The first new patch that came up made the game significantly harder and less fun, through over-powering the enemies while nerfing too much of the tools that the player had at hand.
2. The patch that came after that tried to address the issue by rescaling the enemies a bit more, but had a day-0 bug of destroying the save file and giving all 243 achievements.
3. A hot patch after that fixed the save file problem and restored the in-game achievements, but could not/did not restore the Steam achievements, to many people's dismay.

There has been some talk in the forums for Halls of Torment that the patch now swerved in the other extreme, in that the game was too easy.

As for me, I'm going to wait a bit before I go back to Halls of Torment. I do have Control to complete after all, and I am enjoying every moment of it. It doesn't have the same level of [destructive] satisfaction the way [Prototype] and [Prototype 2] have, but it still has a similar type of fun. The powers are not over-powering, but they are empowering, and the world itself is just as compelling.

Oh, and the ray-tracing crap makes Control look way better than it should.

I can keep gushing, but I want to go play me some games---just spent the morning taking Dad to see the doctor due to he getting tested positive on the ART.

Ah well.

Till the next update then.

Con Plague

Con plague. Got hit by it.

It was... inevitable.

You see, I was on course for three days. It was held in the Lifelong Learning Institute, in a small air-conditioned room that was pretty cold amidst 17 other strangers. It was therefore natural that con plague would strike.

I won't talk much about the course, other than point out that it was:

• Mandatory for us new managers;
• Surprisingly practical and not brainwashing; and
• Taught by a seasoned-executive-turned-coach, which meant that every anecdote was a much deeper view on how senior/upper management operates.

In sum, it was very fruitful, and once I am done recovering from con plague, I will process these more deeply later on.

Con plague does affect me in a few negative ways. I'm having doubts if I can go for rehearsal on Saturday, and more importantly, if I can play on Sunday as part of worship service. The fever is broken by now, the sore throat is under some control, but the cough is still going on, with thick phlegm being hacked out ever so often.

I'm giving myself till tomorrow morning to make the final call---everyone who's affected has been given a heads up already.

``But MT, if you were on course for three days, and you are barely recovering from con plague, how the heck did you fever break?''

See, the timing is a bit off because the course was from Tuesday to Thursday, while today (being Friday), is a day off.

And it's a day off only because it is the Presidential Election in SIN city.

I don't really want to talk about it---it's farcical at best, disingenuous at worst, not to mention that I've said all I wanted to in my previous post, and my views have not changed much since then.

Then, apart from con plague, what was I intending to write here on?

Honestly, no clue. I could write about the updated Halls of Torment, and how it nerfed quite a lot of what made it fun, making it a much tougher game. I could also talk about Trepang2, and how I tried the demo but it crashed halfway.

But that's about all. It's a short entry. Till the next one.

Oh, and happy September.

Gauntlet Ran

This week, it was rough. Appraisal season is upon us, and so there were many sessions of discussing with my subordinates on what to put into their self-appraisal form just to ensure that when it was my turn at filling in comments that we were all singing the same tune and presenting the strongest and most honest appraisal we can put together.

That means lots of talking with folks.

There was also a big [external] meeting nearer the beginning of the week that we needed to handle. That went well.

To cap the week off, TGCO had its first in-person public performance since the COVID-19 lockdown at the National Day Celebration Dinner. Granted, it was just a small segment (about 2 pieces), but the fact that we, as a performing arts group, finally performed was a damn big deal. The group suffered some serious attrition when most of our 二胡 players effectively went on their own lives after the COVID-19 lockdown---those that got married did so, and got pregnant along the way, while those that were in school drifted back towards the orbit of solving their own academic challenges from 2 lost years of lockdown, while the retired decided to remain retired and not return. For this performance (and hopefully future ones too), we were joined by the 二胡 class students that Justinn were teaching as part of the TGCC CCG activities. The stage is no stranger to me, but to see a whole batch of newbie players getting all excited at their first on-stage performance (most of them adults trying out a new instrument) was a refreshing change of pace.

I think I scared them a little with the fact that I had been playing the 笛子 for thirty-something years, not to mention the little fact that one puny 梆笛 was sufficient to rise above the cacophony that 12+ 二胡 players could conjure up.

The performance was successful. We did play a piece that I composed back in 2016 when life was much more peaceful and my future was a little different, which was cool. It was definitely not the ``world premiere'' since we first played it back in 2019, an aeon ago. The other piece we played was an arrangement of 《茉莉花》 that was put together to allow the newbie 二胡 players to play with us.

I rested up for most of Sunday, staying away from church and other people---I've had my fill of people for quite a while. In fact, I have deliberately applied for leave for tomorrow just to ensure that I could stay isolated for a day more before I went off for three days of ``new manager course'' with strangers.

Oh, and then there's a Presidential Election after that come Friday, an election that is fast turning farcical the closer it is to the day itself. A three-corner fight among men who had been linked to the establishment in one way or another over the past decades, each trying to dissociate themselves sufficiently to convince the voting block that they were definitely not partisan, and at least one partaking in antics that seemed to suggest that this Presidential Election was being fought as a General Election, where the role of the President had more executive powers akin to Head of Government, as opposed to the constitutionally defined [ceremonial] Head of State (compare the chapter on the President against that of the Executive).

I suppose it is slightly less farcical from the last Presidential Election, which was at least somewhat more serious than the four-corner fight of the four Tans.

And I'll stop right there, since there is nothing inherently worthy about writing on this right now---there's always the danger that my opinions get taken as fact, and more insidiously, since it is technically ``published'' the moment I hit the post button on this blog entry, I am actually liable for getting censure, whether or not it is warranted.

And so, no thank you.

------

Halls of Torment---I finally completed all the 201 available achievements in the game. The last few were rough as they relied too heavily on what the RNG allows one to proc. After sinking 40+ hours into the game, I will admit that it is pretty fun. The content isn't stupid large varied, but I'll argue that it is a strong point instead of a weak one as at this moment---each of the characters plays fairly differently from each other, and I do find the damage/XP race thrilling in some ways.

But then, there's HoloCure, which is effectively Halls of Torment, but less grittier, and filled with well-known Hololive Production members as seen by both the holomems and through the eyes of a loving fandom. I can see this easily eating 100+ hours if I'm not careful.

But who said I wanted to be careful on this？

In other news, I've started on Control. It's basically a game loosely around the idea of The SCP Foundation. I'm not too deep into it yet, but early signs seem promising.

And with that, I'm done with this entry. I'm tired---will make good use of my day off to really rest up more.

Till the next time then.

Stupid O'Clock Word Salad Time

Rough week? Much talking? De-escalation? Outcome hopeful, but never certain? Much paperwork? External? Internal? Sore throat? Food therapy? HoloCure? Time War? Grampire graduation? Shadow of the Tomb Raider completed? Upcoming performance? Upcoming training? Upcoming defogging leave? Deadlines? Newcomer? Contracts? Bad skin? Thinking dark-ish thoughts? Tiredness? Social empathy levels low? Appraisal? Reports? Performative work? Forever alone? Smog? Missing eyedrops? Packed shuttle bus? Non-weight loss? Broken light? Unstable weather? Bleeding? Bass flute? Cor anglais? Synthetic cor anglais reed? New book? Investigator? Random altar set ups? Clueless pedestrians? More clueless commuters? Extremely clueless cyclists? Cycling? Higher Eddington number? Effort? Heat? Time? Sweat? Pain? Stretch? Renewal? Uncontrollable outcomes? People? Night markets? Rich food? Wasabi peas? Nim jiom herbal candy? Ricola? Melted Vicks honey candy? Dentist? Confusion? Good presenter? Good grammarian? Good advice? Fancy Sushi? Fancy Steak? Missing cheap food? God? Driving? Greenwashing? Whitewashing? Gaslighting? Open communication? Gentleness in receiving/giving comments? Word salad? Stupid o'clock?

Who knows what else?

Counter Tweaking 5×10 and Font Releases

I think by now, a theme be emerging, especially those who have been reading my blog entries.

I mentioned before on how I didn't manage to do the counter tweaking I did for my 7×13 font for my 5×10 font, and how I have no plans for it?

Well, I've gone done it.

I was not wrong before---tweaking the counter the same way that I did for my 7×13 font did look like crap because of the much smaller horizontal extent. The trick then was to be more careful in choice, and tweak no more than one of the junctions. As for b and d, I didn't even bother to do anything with them, which gives enough variation to make things look interesting and sufficiently different.

And speaking of tweaking, I finally decided to just release my pixel fonts for download at my personal domain. I've re-organised that ``computer stuff'' page a little, creating a new section for these pixel fonts, and putting my old console slim font in it as well.

Naturally, both the featured fonts have their associated glyph sheets, while I didn't bother for the console slim font because the code page that it supports (code page 858) isn't really well supported in not the [Linux] console. I did try to set it up as a Windows font the way I did for 5×10 and 7×13, but it was poor, so I've put it aside for now.

I think that's all I care to write about for now. I'm tired, even after having just taken a mid-lengthed break of nearly a week.

Till the next update then.

Saturday...

Ah... Saturday.

I love Saturdays.

I love Saturdays because they are mostly the days where I actually get to relax, on leave or otherwise.

Generally speaking, I spend my Saturdays just sitting about the room, reading, playing some games, or rehearsing some music. If I'm slated to play for church service on that Sunday, then the Saturday before was often when I spent some time rehearsing the pieces, annotating [in pencil] on the score problematic areas that I need to pay closer attention to. That occurs often for Hymns of Praise for rhythm because for some reason, none of the eighth/sixteenth notes have connecting beams. This meant that the usual visual cues of how the rhythm look like are pretty wonky. Thankfully, there's 简谱 at the top, and it allowed me to ``cheat'' and grok the necessary rhythms as needed. As for The Wilds Songbook, the problematic areas proved to be some of the more unfamiliar interval progressions that seemingly defied what my inner music voice was telling me, where I ``knew'' that the next note should be this, but the score laughs at me with a ``Nope!'' and makes it that.

There's TGCO rehearsal in the evening, and I usually turn up about 30 min earlier to ``warm up'' outside of the music room, mostly because my 笛子 is literally powerful enough that warming up indoors while the other folks may want to do their warm up is not a good idea.

Well, I call it ``warm up'', but it really depends on my mood in terms of what I would play. Most times it was an actual warm up in the sense of playing etudes to set up my embouchure and limber up my fingers. Sometimes I would take the time to play through some repertoire pieces. Or maybe I would do like what I did earlier today, where I sight-read a new piece (《月夜》by 胡结续). There are also times where I just noodled on my 笛子 in a ``head empty no thoughts'' sort of way.

Today's rehearsal was fun in a couple of ways. We finally have something that resembles a proper 二胡 section, which is remarkable because our 二胡 section had been decimated when most of the regulars disappeared after COVID-19 (some got married, some developed different interests; it's the usual attrition issues that got accelerated by the pandemic nonsense). Granted, the section was made up of really new and really green players, it was definitely better than nothing. Hopefully this first performance gives them enough of an interest to stay around, level up their skills, and continue playing.

The other fun thing was that I finally had a reason to learn the E₇ fingering on the concert flute. I mean, I have consistently used D₇ on Aurelia before (it's basically the 5′ in 筒音 as 5͵ for when I'm playing the part of the 梆笛 while on concert flute), but have not really had the need to go for E₇ until today (because I needed to play a 6′ in 筒音 as 5͵).

Of course Aurelia can have that note appear---she's a well-made Muramatsu flute after all. It's really more on my getting used to the specific embouchure, air stream direction, and the amount of force to push, transiting smoothly from the prior B₆ to the E₇.

And that's about all I want to talk about for now. The other thing that happened this day was more progression in Halls of Torment, but I suppose it's getting a little too repetitive to keep talking about that.

Till the next update then.

Counter Tweaking

Ah Thursday, the day after National Day, and when I'm [still] on leave.

What a day.

First off, after ranting past stupid o'clock and crashing out shortly after, I found myself awake at 1000hrs later in the morning. Some time was spent catching up on the ESA Summer 2023 VODs, before I worked a little bit more on my 7×13 bitmap font.

``MT, didn't you say last time you were basically done?''

So I did, sort of. There was one last tweak that I was considering, and it involved how the counters were presented in characters like abdgpq. If you looked closely at the [corrected] character map from the previous post, you'll find that the counters of such characters can be roughly described as having parallel lines connected up with the vertical spans where they exist, as opposed to a more rounded feel the way one might normally print it out.

It's a minor shift of literally two pixels, but I think it was important, partly because of how Atkinson Hyperlegible shows how such rounded off counters do present a clearer profile that can be more strongly differentiated from the capital equivalents. I did the change, tested it out, and liked what I saw:

It's subtle, but it does look much nicer and less synthetic. I am thinking about doing something similar for the 5×10 font, but smaller horizontal extent used to define the counter made the application of the same pixel trick did not work as well, if at all. So no plans for that for now.

Apart from tweaking my 7×13 font yet again, I also got more runs in for Halls of Torment, unlocking even more characters, and having enough progression in the meta that my toons do not generally die easily any more.

I also made some progression in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the in-game progression estimate hitting 90%.

Hmm... I think that's about it for now. I'll probably go do one more run of Halls of Torment, then turn in for the night---I've got places I need to be tomorrow, and I really don't want to run around half-cocked/asleep.

Till the next update then.

Past Stupid O'Clock?

Okay, it's past stupid o'clock, but I'm annoyed, so I'm gonna vent.

Eileen-III runs Windows 11---this is an incontrovertible fact; the new CPU architecture demands an updated kernel that only Windows 11 provides, as long as I want to use Eileen-III to play games as opposed to doing work.

Windows 11, for some asinine reason, does not allow anyone to put the taskbar to the top of the screen.

I had used a workaround for this for quite a while (ExplorerPatcher). It's free, and relatively straightforward to use. It had a bit of funkiness to it (while the taskbar is indeed moved to the top, accessing the start menu brings it back to the bottom), but it got the job done.

That is, until the latest Windows 11 update clobbered the shit out of it.

It's a live issue as at now, and there doesn't seem to be a solution to it just yet.

I've switched over to StartAllBack, but really, who knows if these will still work in the future? It does solve the funkiness that ExplorerPatcher had, so I suppose this is a step up.

And that's it. It's almost 0400hrs in the morning, but I'm on leave, so I kind of don't really care.

Till the next update.

One Sixth-ish Through August

Okay, it's Sunday, and we're about halfway through the first third of the month.

Bram Moolenaar passed away just a few days ago. For the confused, he is the creator and maintainer of vim, my favourite text editor, though ironically it is not the one I use for writing blog/NaNoWriMo entries (I use Q10 for that). I didn't know him personally, and was therefore quite surprised to learn that he was 60+ years old and had passed away.

In my mind, he was always some middle-aged dude, like almost all imaginations I have of computer scientists/programmers. But then again, I'm middle-aged now, and this would naturally make them... much older now.

Mortality really does make one think.

I've not really feared death before, even before being saved. Then, death to me was just the ceasing of existence, and I was strangely fine with that. I would not deliberately seek my own death (suicide ideation notwithstanding), but if death were to come, I would probably just quietly go into the dark night.

Now after being saved, I know that my death is just leaving the mortal coil and heading into the presence of God. Still not much fear, perhaps having a little bit of hope in it instead, seeing that I would be in the presence of my Creator.

But until I am dead, I'm still here, and therefore I will try to make the best of my existence here. Many say that the advancement of the Kingdom is of the highest priority, and I do not deny that. But I do wonder if the direct and somewhat unsolicited approaches are indeed the right way to proceed.

It's a bit like being a super-fan of something---most people that one approaches won't really enjoy being bombarded with one's otaku-esque behaviour, no matter the subject matter. I suppose with the large reach of Christianity, the evangelical behaviour has been observed by the world at large for a couple of thousand years, and with it comes the larger [over-]reaction when being evangelised at in an unsolicited manner. I do not reject how some of my fellow Christians might choose to share the gospel, but I do not think it the best way to do so, as a personal preference.

I believe that salvation is important, but I also strongly believe that if it is God's Will for someone to be saved, that person will find their way to God in one form or another---any machinations that us human disciples can come up with pale in comparison. The best thing that we ought to do is to live as good examples of a person who has accepted Christ in their life, and to show the fruits of that salvation to act as a beacon to draw the unsaved to come forth on their own free will to hear and heed the gospel.

(sigh)

Anyway, I was thinking about the whole ``get married'' bit recently. And I really cannot convince myself it is a good idea. It's about putting too much of oneself into another in the form of trust. And to say that I have trust issues, is like saying that the Atlantic Ocean has some water.

How many times have my relationships failed due to the other party violating the trust that I had implicitly placed in her?

I'm getting old. I don't have that kind of intrepid nature like before; in short, I cannot afford to put myself out there again, just to be fucked over for one reason or another.

Okay, that's enough depressing shit. On to something slightly better.

Some time back, I mentioned about Vampire Survivors, Magic Survival, and HoloCure (the Steam release is happening on 2023-08-17). Thanks to a certain gaming Kirin's live stream, I learnt of a cool new twist to the genre: Halls of Torment. It is, as Fauna's video title suggests, a cross between Vampire Survivors and Diablo IV.

Now, I've not played any Diablo games after Diablo II, but after having tried out the awesome demo version, I agree wholeheartedly with Fauna. The way I would describe it would be a bite-sized mouse-click saving version of action-RPGs. Imagine Torchlight, Diablo, or Grim Dark, but with the individual acts kept to a duration of no more than 30 minutes, and with no need to click anything to auto-proc the auto-attacks and skills. There is still progression a la Vampire Surivors (thus technically making Halls of Torment a rogue-lite instead of a rogue-like the way Jupiter Hell is). The aesthetics is also much akin to the gothic style that these action-RPGs are like, and the boss fights are hard compared to what Vampire Survivors have.

All in all, a cool twist. I'm sure I'll have many hours of fun playing it.

Speaking of many hours, I'm about 79% through the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, according to the in-game counter. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been scratching that exploration itch that I had been having for aa while. Maybe after I've completed this, I might really start on The Long Dark.

But we'll see.

I'm feeling tired now, so I guess I'll stop. Till the next update.

The One About the 盐酥鸡

August: here we go!

I hate being right on things. So, remember this recent post on hero worship? Well, as if on cue, we have this little bit of news on Lizzo. Now, being sued doesn't imply guilt (that's for the courts to decide), but usually people do not sue another person unless there is some perception of grievance.

``MT, why are you picking on Lizzo?''

I'm not. She just happened to be a recent example. She's a media darling, with many from Flute Forum actively idolising her outright as a hero.

She's alright as a flute person. But it's okay to just appreciate it without going into hero worship.

But on to different things.

August is a month that promises lots of things. First up is an engineered long weekend starting from National Day. Then after that, actual courses/training on Manager 101.

Am I excited? ``Trepid'' might be a better word. It's definitely going to be a start of some rather harrowing work, what with my first annual appraisal exercise for the six under my charge. But it is something that needs to be done, and the we are doing important work; projects that need to be moved forward to ensure that we help with SIN city's future.

It is unfortunate [for me] that I'm just the most senior engineer among the group, and is therefore de facto manager/leader.

Work stuff aside, TGCO is likely to see its first performance in a long while. We're not as big as we were, possibly even smaller than our smallest so far as some of the married members start having children, so this performance is going to be a good morale booster.

I'm also starting to get the hang of the hymns that we are playing for worship service, and am slowly making my way to being a more regular player in the ensemble on Aurelia. I did mention to the coordinator of the possibility of bringing out Davie (my vertical bass flute) to play the tenor parts with the cellist whenever he may be available, and it would seem that it was likely to be in November.

The only caveat is that I need to brush up my ability to read the bass clef. I'm getting much better at it now, having to ``count'' only every time the pitch skips larger than a fourth or so. But that can be a rather interesting skill to develop.

There's also a pasar malam that is running along the street, and I am getting severely addicted to the 盐酥鸡 from one of the stalls. It's deep-fried chicken bits in light batter, dusted with sour plum powder, and paprika(?) powder.

Apart from that... I suppose there isn't anything else to talk about for the moment. And so, till the next time.

Tweaks and Ajustments to 5×10 and 7×13 Bitmap Fonts

Oof, that took me a while, but I think that I'm much more satisfied with what I have now than before.

Continuing what I began back in the day for the 5×10 bitmap font, with a more recent set up with the 7×13 bitmap font, comes a new iteration of both bitmapped fonts.

The gist for this iterative update is about following fixing the fonts to fit some of the readability requirements that Atkinson Hyperlegible and Intel One Mono Typeface have stipulated.

``But MT, you're trying to do readability adjustments, on fonts that are so small that everyone (who isn't you) who sees it complains about it?''

Yeah... shut up. (=

Without ado, I'll just unceremoniously put in the 5×10 font here:

And here is the 7×13 one:

And of course, after doing this for a while, it is only now that I realise that the mapping of the grid to the glyphs displayed [under CP-1252] is wrong---all the ``funny'' whitespace/undefined glyphs remain undisplayed.

🤦

I'm keeping the original versions as uploaded above just so that it is easier to visually/automatically do a comparison between the new and old forms.

So anyway, here's the corrected versions for 5×10:

And here's the corrected version for 7×13:

The main changes on the ASCII portion of the fonts is is about fixing how the 8 looks to make it more distinct from B, and adjusting how { and } looks so that they are super distinct from the other three types of enclosing parentheses/brackets/``angle'' brackets. There were also some alignment problems earlier that I corrected in this round. I also did a sweep on the upper-ASCII portions, just to make sure that they are sort-of consistent and less broken (see character 0xf7 for the 5×10 font, and characters 0xa9, 0xae for the 7×13 font).

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the result. The next step is figuring out how to generate the associated fonts so that they are usable in Xfce.

Till the next update.

A Day Off? A Day Off!

It's a Friday! And I'm on leave! It is therefore a most excellent Friday!

Curbing my exuberance a little, I'm only on leave because of the planning ahead by past-me---July has no gazetted public holidays, and thus I decided to just take some paid time off to create a random long weekend. It's not just for July, there were a couple of other months where this was going to be a problem, and a similar set up was made.

After all, what's the point of amassing paid time off when I have no intention of travelling overseas for quite a while yet?

But back to today. I had the best run for Gunfire Reborn yet, reaching about the half-way point in the third of four acts. This run saw me use a weapon that operated like a shotgun, and it got me thinking about why I was more successful with this run as compared to all the others that failed much earlier.

I think it has got to do with my personal reflex coordination between my left-hand keyboard movement and right hand mouse-aiming. Shotguns in most games involved a shoot-and-scoot method---fire the weapon, and as one was undergoing the [long] reload animation, strafe to the side to dodge attacks until the reload is complete, then aim and repeat. It was something that I learnt/got comfortable with from the old days of Doom and Doom 2, where the shotgun/super shotgun ruled supreme, complete with the Alt-key strafing when one used the default keyboard-only configuration (arrow keys controlled movement, there was no vertical looking, and holding alt-left/alt-right strafed left and right respectively, like the modern day use of A/D keys under the WASD-scheme).

For rapid-fire weapons like rifles/chainguns/pistols, circle strafing was needed. This required good relative motion coordination between the strafing movement from the left hand, while keeping the reticle aimed at the target at all times. The room for error in terms of dodging attacks was much tighter, since one was not maximising the distance that one could dodge through moving orthogonal to the shot fired by the enemy, but was instead moving on a curved route that far shortened the effective orthogonal distance.

I think I'm bad at that. Moreover, shotgun-type weapons were much more effective in dealing with a large group of mobs---literally fire into the throng, and strafe-left/right to dodge, with aim mostly optional. Single shot/rapid fire guns still require good aiming and thus some kind of lock-on, and as a result, requires a much higher reaction time than what I'm used to.

Ah well.

Gunfire Reborn scratches that itch of a first-person shooter rogue-like. I mean, I played Ziggurat but found the maps too square/limiting, wanted to complete Rogue Shooter: The FPS Roguelike, but that game was effectively abandonware. I do have Tower of Guns hiding around somewhere, but have no real reason why I didn't play it.

But to be fair, I only learnt of Gunfire Reborn from this years SGDQ run. It looked fun, was sufficiently fast paced (quick to start, short enough runs), and yet without the kind of boxing-in claustrophobia from allied games like The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

Some time back, I accidentally started Firewatch that I had installed on Eileen-III via the GOG Galaxy launcher. I was naturally quite confused, but just went ``eh fuck it'' and played it. The game was not particularly long, but it had lovely scenery that was antithetical to what The Long Dark had (think forest in summer compared to the Canadian tundra). And yes, I have The Long Dark, and love what it represented, having watched quite a few playthroughs by Zisteau, including his latest advanced tutorial series, but that's a sidetrack.

Firewatch. I didn't know what I was expecting, but for the 3--5 hours of gameplay, I found myself having a kind of fun that I have missed for quite a while. I know it's a ``walking simulator'', but really, sometimes all I want is just a relatively relaxing game to help me walk away from the walls that define what what my current life is like. And Firewatch does that wonderfully. No regrets for that discovery that I had accidentally ran that game some how.

In some ways, due to Firewatch, I've also started on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the last of the trilogy of the modern Tomb Raider series. The thing about the new reboot (it's been about 10 years since the reboot) is that it was a much grittier and realistic depiction of Lara Croft. The graphics saw a big boost in quality compared to their predecessors, but this was more of a product of the times than anything, but also the shifting of the more whimsical and ``friendlier'' style of the past into something a bit more realistic. I remembered seeing my first death of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider---she was very graphically impaled. I didn't remember any of the Tomb Raider games showing death so brutally, and was fairly shocked.

And here's the thing, I'm not the only one.

Brutality aside, the new Tomb Raider series does have lovely scenery at a higher fidelity than the stylised stuff of Firewatch or even The Long Dark (I'll play it soon! I promise!). And playing the latest edition (a circa 2018 game(!)) on Eileen-III is definitely a treat.

Okay, I think I've exhausted what I wanted to write. Going to grab a bit more whiskey (it's still my day off, despite having been summoned for 1.5 h to solve a small-ish PRODuction issue (sighs)), and continue on my adventure in Shadow of the Tome Raider, even as I listen/half-watch some the latest hijinks from the Hololive members.

Till the next update.