Maintenance...?

And so, this weekend is about to end.

It's the weekend of maintenance. Aurelia, Stella, and Picc are off to Windworks for COA; my bicycle went to B-Spokes for maintenance, and one of my longest run geocache needed some maintenance [from me] as well.

In theory, things would have been peachy by Saturday, but there was something innately wrong with the rear-shifter for my bicycle that necessitated my bringing it back today for rectification, which resulted in me having to skip out on church today.

``But MT, why must it be today? Couldn't it wait?''

No, not really. It was just after a major maintenance---had I waited for longer, it would have been a bigger mess than it really is now.

Sadly though, a new line of dead pixels have started showing up on Eirian-V. Why and how that happened, I have no idea. But as at now, it isn't completely annoying just yet, so I might just live with it; sort of like my Brother laser printer showing random low-toner density (I think the drum is kaput, but haven't had enough wherewithal to pull up the money to buy a replacement to test the hypothesis).

I also took the chance to use my air-blower to clear out the dust on Eileen-III, as well as my work laptop, something that I had been neglecting to do for about five months now.

Then of course, there is some self-maintenance. I finally chopped my hair down to the right length [of stupid short] with the hair clippers, and am relying on occlusive treatment to force the weepy and inflamed skin on my fingers and palms to calm down. I also replaced my toothbrush, which was at least two months overdue.

Mentally though... I think I might not have done well there. Feeling a little overwhelmed with the barrage of new ``fun'' that came in from the work side. It's not bad, it's just... a lot to take in at once. Not to mention the whole set of loss of spoons from being involved in two large gatherings of people.

I probably should just turn in earlier tonight, after re-packing my backpack to set it up for work, as opposed to errand-running mode.

Sorry this is a short entry---till the next time.

Slept for 12 Hours...

Ah Monday. Public holiday in lieu of the second Chinese New Year public holiday falling on a Sunday.

A break day. A possibly ``true'' break day.

The special item that was presented yesterday at both the Chinese worship session in the early morning and the English worship session in the late morning was a hit. I listened through the playback for both renditions, and it does sound much better than I thought it would. The G 梆笛 soared without sounding like a dick, and I honestly cannot tell if it's because of my skill (what skill?), or the fact that I'm using some top-grade 笛膜 that keeps the sound clean. Feedback has been pretty positive to me, from those who actually knew me in church, and apparently even those who didn't know me had positive things to say to the music coordinator, who played with me in the item on the piano.

A win perhaps. Glory to God.

Now that that is done and dusted, I'll need to listen carefully to the various recordings to write it down. I'll probably publish it at my compositions page.

One item down, another two or three more to go. 😬

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Special item aside, I just crashed out for twelve hours straight once eight o'clock came, waking up every three hours just to use the toilet. Woke up at around eight o'clock this morning, give or take an hour, and just chilled out for a bit, pondering about nothing even as I am catching up on stuff on YouTube that I have missed out from the past week.

I discovered a new tool: KLOGG. It's a log explorer, designed apparently to load and search through extremely large files the way computer logs tend to be. I've not really deployed it anywhere yet, but it is definitely something to try. My only complaint is that it runs a GUI, and there's no TUI for it, but that's really minor, considering that I use Beyond Compare from Scooter Software, which is also GUI-centric with no TUI.

I have tried my best to make vim play nice with extremely large files, but it's still a crapshoot after all these years. There are other tricks that allow one to work with extremely large files, but they often involve messing around with less, grep, tail, and head.

Apart from that, I've been roaming about from one game to another on Steam, switching between Boltgun, trying out the Turbo Overkill demo, a bit of Vampire Survivors, and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles.

I'm also half-tempted to finish up the last bits of math to complete the really really simple LED-1 remake in PICO-8. But... urgh... math when I'm trying to chill the fuck out. Eww... (hahaha)

Aaaaaaaaanyway, I suppose that's all for today. I'll go... do something... I think. Maybe game more...

Till the next update.

T's The Eve of The Lunar New Year

Okay, this is take three.

I had wanted to write an entry today, but the start always revolved around the sentient of ``yeah yeah it's the lunar new year, which supposedly represents some kind of togetherness, but that's the last thing I feel''.

Naturally I couldn't continue the entries, because it was just too negative, even by my ``standards''.

So in this take, after finishing one can of Sapporo, and well in my second one, after having some Suntory Whisky, I shall avoid all that depression-talk crap, but do bear in mind the unspoken background of that.

I finally finished watching the final AGDQ'2024 speedrun of Final Fantasy V, and the part when Garulf died hit me in ways I did not quite understand. I played Final Fantasy V before, and it is probably the only Final Fantasy game I actually completed. So Garulf's death was not unknown to me, but I was surprised to be affected enough to just cry for a little when I was watching the speedrun.

A side news that was hitting up the VTuber world was the termination of Selen Tatsuki from Nijisanji, the other large corpo-VTuber agency that is not Hololive (actual company is ANYCOLOR, kind of how COVER Corp is the company for Hololive Productions). It was a fustercluck, with implied bullying, gaslighting, suicide attempts, and the associated consequences that are still unfolding now.

I don't really follow much of Nijisanji, and even less of Selen. I only know of her from the genesis of the name TSB (Team Snakebite). But to be terminated like that, and under those circumstances, it's bad.

I'm no corpo-sympathiser. I'm no liberal leftist anarchist either. I'm more of a pragmatist---if a corporation is meant to be a money-making machine, then it is important for the corporation to invest in their money-making methods well. In the case of an entertainment company then, it is their talents that they should be investing/supporting well, since the talents' labour are what helps to bring in the initial revenue and generate the kind of intangible accounting ``goodwill'' that generates powerful virtuous cycles for recurring income and what-not.

Dropping the ball like that on their own talent like that is not just uncool, it probably is bad for business as well, no matter how much denial they put up.

And that's about all I want to say about that.

------

The past week was rough for the team and I. Thanks to red tape, our access to the production-like environment was delayed for about a month, and we were just cramming as much as we could done to reach the deadline in as functional a way as possible. It's a pretty public system meant for an international audience, so we are naturally striving to do a good enough job.

I think we pulled through despite the nonsense, but it's hard to tell till the upcoming Tuesday after the long weekend. But even before that, I just feel very drained. I took leave for today, refusing even to work the usual half-day that I would normally do. Part of the reason was also because a policy change that was revealed in month three of my first year where I am at now stipulated that one only needed to use a half-day leave for certain eves of public holidays instead of the more traditional whole day.

And thus I ended up taking today off, just to sleep in, and upon waking up, just chill about with booze and in a ``head empty; no thoughts'' sort of way.

I suppose that's all I want to write for now---I probably cannot practice the set list for this Sunday's worship service tomorrow, so I probably should do that now. This is, of course, in addition to checking up on my special item that I'm presenting with the music coordinator for both the early morning Chinese worship service, and the regular English one later on.

Till the next time then.

It's February Now!

Oh hey, would you look at that? It's February now!

What a mess this month is going to be... so many major milestones coming up for work, TGCO, and even for music ministry in PPCC. If we do pull it off, it will be quite satisfying.

On the subject of music, I realise that after playing in the music ministry for nearly a year, I've improved upon my ability to read the grand staff, but my ability to read the ``regular'' flute upper ledger lines is getting iffy---I can handle up to high-F, but the ledger lines start to merge when we reach the high-G all the way to the C.

It's literally a skill issue, and it will take me some time to sort it out. I'd love to get that fixed, just so that I can do the Marcel Moyse Exercises Journaliers, which unironically has very good interval patterns to properly master and raise my flute technical handling to a higher level.

In other news, I've started on the throne room for my castle build in Minecraft, though the more I think I about it, the more it should be thought of as the keep within the castle build (the castle includes the surrounding wall, while the keep is the inner building). The main building material is diorite and polished diorite, with the use of iron blocks for accents. The throne itself is made of cherry planks, and now I'm building the second floor.

I think that I'm building at least four storeys for the throne room. The ground floor is the throne room proper, the second floor is the conference room, the third floor is probably the armoury (with enchanting?), then the bed room.

Next to the throne room, I'll build a red brick tavern/inn combo.

And... I think that's about it for now. Sorry for the short entry---it's been a hell of a week.

Till the next update.