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.