First Grab Bag of 2024

(No, I did not write this at the time that this was published. I deliberately delayed the publication to ensure that the quick summary stood alone.)

So the first thing that was on my mind was the realisation and general thankfulness that space is as big as it was. I know that there's a common Internet saying that goes something like:

Born too late for the age of discovery; born too early for the age of space travel.

And to be fair, I used to think like that as well.

Until I actually took the time to sit down and contemplate about the underlying reality.

Space is stupendously large. It's stupendously large to the point that the fastest known object, the photon, still takes a fucking long-ass time to get places. Space is also expanding.

But space has some terrifying as fuck objects that can, as best as we can understand it, obliterate us in as instant as it gets. The only way in which we are safe enough to observe these objects, let alone have the time and wherewithal contemplate about them, is from the sole fact that we are also magnificently far away from them.

Yeah, I'll just be thankful that space is stupid big, and that we don't have a good way of travelling all that distance within a life-time. Considering the amount of stupidity that the average person has given access to technology (see the car, the aeroplane, the computer, the Internet, and the peace engineered from strong international collaboration to actually preserving said peace), I shudder to think what will happen should we ever have such a capability.

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In other news, Elden Ring was as frustrating as I thought it was, but paradoxically, it was also fairly fun. I suppose the ability to run through most dangers just to do sight-seeing is one of the plus points.

That, and the mindless grinding that one can do to farm enough runes other standard upgrade materials to ensure overwhelming power when going for boss fights. It's a FromSoftware game---I feel no guilt in being over-levelled to take on various big mobs and boss mobs. The world is gorgeous even though it is often quite twisted---there's that sense of forlorness without invoking the weird biomechanical style that is the speciality of H.R. Giger.

I think I have sunk quite a few hours in Elden Ring at this point, and I may switch over to something else just for variety. Maybe a bit of the new DLC for Vampire Survivors, which is still a damn fun game even after so long. HoloCure might be the best in breed, but that is technically a twin-stick auto-shooter, while Vampire Survivors is a single-stick auto-shooter, which means a different kind of fun.

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I binged-watch the second season of SPY×FAMILY. I liked it. Unlike in the first season, this time the focus is more on Yor's alter-ego than that of Loid's. There was little to no emphasis on Anya's antics in school, which is fine from a pacing perspective. I wonder how the third season (should it come, but let's be real---SPY×FAMILY is too popular to not have a third season, especially when the source materials isn't exhausted yet) will go, and more importantly, I wonder if SPY×FAMILY has an actual ending instead of going on f-o-r-e-v-e-r the way One Piece or DragonBall does.

On another tangent, after delaying for so long, I finally started on Parks and Recreation. I'm still somewhere in the middle of season 2, and while Amy Poehler's character of Leslie Knope can be quite cringeworthy at times, the series sort of started to grow on me. No idea why.

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In yet another tangent, I spent a couple of hours during stupid o'clock a couple of days ago updating all my Lilypond composition source files to 2.24.3. The astute would realise that Lilypond 2.24.3 has been out since 2023-11-19, so the natural question would be, why the delay?

Well, because the Cygwin version was only available rather recently. While the actual conversion was ``just'' an exercise of loading the relevant files into Frescobaldi and then running the conversion there, I needed the Cygwin version to make it scalable.

It's just much faster to go

find -type f -iname '*.ly' -print0 | xargs -0 convert-ly -e

followed by any manual adjustments needed (like fixing the format function to have #f as the second parameter) than to manually traverse the entire compositions directory and load each file by hand. It is also less error-prone.

Besides, I also have another Python script that allows me to auto-rebuild the output PDF just so that I can update the files available at my compositions page.

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And I think I'm done with what I want to say for now. Till the next update, and oh, have a happy and blessed 2024.