Okay, it's stupid o'clock once again. And I feel a little compelled to write a little drivel here.
It's fine---I've been on leave for the whole of today (well, Friday), and the lunar new year public holidays mean an already extended long weekend that ends on Tuesday (i.e. I return to work on Wednesday).
My birthday collides head on with that of the first day of the lunar new year. As such, this entry is probably all that I will use to talk about it.
After the tumultous three years that passed on by, I finally found back a bit of my mojo, and to my confusion, it was almost as though the past seven years did not occur. There's this unknown source of energy---I know I'm closer to being middle-aged, but I feel closer to being on the wrong side of twenty-five than thirty-five.
I can't really tell why though; there seems to be no good reason why I should be feeling this way. And frankly, as long as it puts me in a generally good mood, I don't see any reason why I should question it and take it all away. Now, if it were something that was causing me distress, then perhaps I ought to do something about it.
All those intrusive thoughts that I had been harbouring on and off for the past two years have receded into the background noise once more; they are still there and occasionally emerge, but for the most part they have been quite silent, which is a good thing.
Again, not sure where all these goodness are coming from, but I'm not going to question it. If it is God's plan for me to experience these now, so be it---His will, not mine.
Work has started a whole new vortex of change, but that is always to be expected anyways. When one works in a field where innovation and change are the name of the game, the associated manner of management has to be non-static just to keep up. That is what I see to be the lessons that I need to learn in this upcoming year.
But back to the collision between my birthday and the first day of the lunar new year. For once I do not need to age ``three times''---just the regular New Year, then the lunar new year, instead of the more usual New Year-birthday-lunar new year trifecta. But there were other slight complications---it also meant that I could not actually do anything remotely fun for my birthday then. It was of little matter as I could just arrange for a nice meal at my favourite sushi place before the lunar new year festivities confuddle things, and it was exactly what I did on Thursday evening.
I honestly am not expecting anyone to remember, let alone send their well-wishes to me---that friend circle was small to begin with, and is getting smaller as the years go by. My church sent me a nice card that was handwritten by the senior pastor, which is nice, and I suppose that's about it for now.
I have no idea what to get for myself for a present this year. It usually ends up being something relating to music making (mostly because I needed a nice way of justifying/rationalising the putting down of Serious Money for these intermediate to high quality instruments), but I have no idea what to go for, considering that I had almost all of the instruments that I thought I wanted to continue playing on by now. Rehearsals at my Chinese Orchestra are slowly restarting, and we are now at the build-up phase, which means that the numbers are lean, and that I am the only dizi player. That solo fort-holding means that I have no reason to be trying to bring in other instruments to expand the timbre, which extends to me not having a reason to find and purchase some new instrument.
And at this stage, the stuff I'm looking at are hitting Really Serious Money levels, with prices estimated to be in the ballpark of 10-grand, not because of any particularly exotic material costs, but that these stuff are considered less mainstream from the rest, and should be taken to be the equivalent of commissioned instruments.
And I still don't know how to justify the costs yet, and so I don't---this is immaterial of whether I am capable of paying it now or after a few more months of saving into a pre-calculated budget.
But let's put those thoughts away for the moment.
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Recently I have been playing some Borderlands 3. I have resisted playing that for quite a while, mostly because I was put off by the many hijinks that were related to that particular game release. Near the end of last year, Steam had a sale (of course they do) of the game complete with the DLCs for a reasonable-enough price, and I purchased it.
100 GiB of download later, I continued on my journey through the Borderlands world, continuing my tradition of playing a Siren character (Amara). After 70+ hours, I agree with what Kishore told me that time when I asked him about his thoughts about Borderlands 3: the gunplay and the quality of life surrounding the main game loop was quite sound and fun, but the storyline was just meh.
I'm not sure if there was ever a need to spread out the action across multiple planets as opposed to sticking to just Pandora---for such a mechanic, the storyline did seem rather weak and it felt like they were trying too hard to make it more epic than it was. The point of reference here is, of course, against the storyline of Borderlands 2. The new villains were obvious caricatures, but they did not demonstrate any more depth, acting more like Macguffins rather than true characters. The quality of life and gunplay were definitely improvements over Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for the most part, but I found their requirement of charging of the elemental-heavy Maliwan weapons to do it a disservice. The dual-mode mechanic for some weapons is interesting and it gave me some incentive to make use of the other keys that have been present on my mouse for a long time.
At the pace I am going, I just might complete the main story by the end of this long weekend. I doubt I can complete the VLCs immediately after though.
Okay, I can feel my eyes drooping---I should stop here, take a shower, and turn in for the night.
Till the next update.
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