It Be Rough

This past week... was rough.

The receipts are being called in, and I find myself drifting in and out of mania and a sense of depression.

No, I'm not manic-depressive; it's just the natural shifts of energy states as I burn energy in times of need, and then space out in ennui while waiting for the batteries to recharge.

Is there anything else I want to add to this narrative?

Probably nothing else other than: June is two thirds of the way through, and more ``fun'' is incoming.

Totally Failing Rate

So, about that total fertility rate (TFR) thing...

I won't degrade into some kind of misogynistic/misandristic argument, because that's both pointless and wrong.

I will stand by my thesis that if something matters enough to someone (where ``one'' can be a person, a corporation, a government), then plans will be made to get that thing done right.

For instance, if I value a friendship enough, I will make time to nurture said friendship. And lest anyone goes ``hur hur time isn't the same as other resources'', that's where they are wrong.

Recall that time is a very interesting non-renewable resource that all other resources take their indexing from. We try our best to bank time through the conversion [via a convoluted process of reasoning] into some form of money. We then use the said money to trade (or buy, same thing) for other things that we could not have easily/directly gotten through the expenditure of our own time.

So far, so good.

But the problem comes in when we start talking about priorities. In the bid to amass enough money, we sort of forget what basis it stems from. And so, at a personal level, people complain about children being costly to raise, and therefore aren't interested.

They get villified, and castigated---``You dishonour your family!'' levels too, were we to live in an age where [geographical] mobility were not as great as now.

However, all the complaints of the people at their own personal levels are but a highlight of the symptoms.

You see, there is a much larger influence cycle that is happening beyond the individual level. Roughly, the individual's choices bubble up, with the majority setting the social-level trend, and then the representative government takes heed on what the trends are like, put in their own ``big picture'' planning elements, before percolating the final trend down to the individuals, which affect their choices, ad infinitum.

Of the two, it is without doubt that the government's choices weigh the heavier, for the sole reason that they have a monopoly on the most powerful arbiter of ``truth''---force, or more bluntly, violence.

So, as clichéd as it sounds, TFR issues are government policy issues, and the blame should not be pushed back down to the individual citizens. We can argue about how improved access to education has liberated women to pursue a life beyond ``being stuck as a homemaker'', or how that improved education for women led to a greater imbalance between the number of highly educated women against that of highly educated men that led to less marriages in general (hypothesis that women are hypergamous while men are generally adverse to hypogamy), but those are just deflecting the blame around.

If the TFR were really a problem that is large enough for concern, then the government policies should reflect that. Instead, we see that a vast majority of the policies address more of the short-term economic issues, as opposed to the slow but steady re-architecture of the social fabric to support a better TFR.

``But MT, TFR is just the capitalistic idea of a Ponzi scheme, where societies rely more on the next generation to pay for the living for the previous one!''

If that were the case, then shouldn't it be motivating enough to adjust policies to address the TFR? After all, it does contribute to the economy, right?

And no, consistent immigration isn't a permanent solution. It's a bit like trying to write plug-ins for various third party software for a piece of core software that one uses (say a text editor). No matter how good the plug-ins are written, there will be incompatibility issues, since we are literally trying to create an interpretation of the third party's framework that ``makes sense'' within the framework of the core. And as long as the third party software remains as a plug-in, it is never truly a part of the core; and as long as migrants keep within the confines of their self-created enclave and never truly venture out to integrate with the country that they migrated to, their mentality will forever be that of a migrant, and not a citizen, no matter what their official immigration status is with the government.

Crucially though, consistent immigration is a zero-sum game that trades off on comparative advantage. To ensure that it can continue to work, is to assume that the places where they have more people who want to leave will continue to do so, and in the worst case scenario, steps may even be considered/taken to ensure that they remain so (i.e. removing/stunting any of the social advances that we know that leads to decreased TFR).

We like to talk about ``whole-of-government'' approaches. I think that TFR itself is an excellent problem to tackle with that. Moreover, it also involves a time horizon much longer than that of a single election cycle.

Perhaps it is truly time for the government to show that long-term planning of doing what is right that it has boldly claim before.

Blasphemous---Done!

I have not looked forward to the end of the week as much as this one.

It's not because there's something special planned for this weekend (that's like a maybe for next week's über-long weekend), but that I'm glad that I can drop whatever was happening over the work week to just... chill out.

Work week wasn't bad per se, but it sure had quite a few things that threw in some spanners that gummed up the [routineness] of work. I know that being a ``manager'' meant that work was expected to be anything but routine, I'm still an engineer at heart. Needless to say, I just ran out of spoons near Thursday after a whole bunch of meetings with new people, and sometimes in new locations.

But no one wants to hear about the work week---it's just what we all do to ensure that bills are paid, and hobbies can be fed.

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I completed Blasphemous last night, getting all three endings following the plan laid out in this Reddit post. There was a bug where the ``Wound of Abnegation'' was obtained from Crisanta in the Mea Culpa Chapel, but was not properly reflected in the inventory of quest items.

Actually, there were quite a few bugs in Blasphemous. They weren't really game-breaking, but it was still annoying.

All in all, I enjoyed Blasphemous. It was exactly as I had mentioned earlier---not as punishing as Hollow Knight, nor as clunky as Feudal Alloy. Blasphemous had some interesting boss fights (that second phase of the Cristanta fight was full on impossible had I not mastered the timing of the parry after the very gruelling Isidora fight that took me a few days of trying to fight it straight before cheesing it with ``Romance to the Crimson Mist'' prayer, and even that took me several tries to get right), and cool-ish traversal options that did not include an air dash nor a double jump.

The currency (Tears of Atonement) was not exactly easy to farm nearer the beginning where their impact was greatest (but I still did, 50+ at a time, near Albero, just so to get the first tier of Mea Culpa upgrades, which cost about 5k with buffer), but towards the end-game I found myself simply rolling with them, especially as I was attempting and re-attempting the Crisanta fight. Of the entire skill tree, I found myself using the Lunge attacks the most, after of course the Combo attacks. Charged strikes are too costly in time to pull off, but I suppose a more skilled player can get better mileage out of it than I.

The key thing that I learnt from completing Blasphemous was how much I preferred to do major actions with the ABXY buttons over that of the R1/RT/L1/LT set up (I'm staring at you, Elden Ring that I gave up trying to complete). The thumbs just work much faster than the index fingers, and this is true even for Blasphemous, where I face-tanked any an attack that I failed to dodge simply because the eye-brain-index-finger axis had a slow reaction.

Pressing A to jump and then X multiple times to smack some idiot with a sword? Yes please. R1, R1, L1 to do a weapon combo? Yeah, fuck off.

And so, that's that for Blasphemous for now. I didn't bother with the other [free] DLC, except for the ``Wounds of Eventide'' one that allowed me to obtain the final ``true'' ending of the game. The ``Strife & Run'' DLC with Bloodstained cross-over content was basically a series of timed challenge platform puzzles, which I didn't like because precision movement in Blasphemous is a bear. As mentioned earlier, there is no air dash, and double jump---verticality is largely obtained either through a wall jump technique that required using the attack action to ``stab'' into the wall instead of just wall-kicking a la Megaman X, or using an arcane dash-attack aerial combo (fixed from direction-attack aerial) on a strikable object to do an ``Air Impulse'' instead of an unconstrained double jump. The 8-bit area was Nintendo-hard for no good reason, and the rest of the DLC was for NG+ which I was uninterested in.

``But MT, what about the `movement progression' items like `Blood Perpetuated in Sand', `Linen of Golden Thread', `Nail Uprooted from Dirt', `Silvered Lung of Dolphos', and `Three Gnarled Tongues'?''

Those act more like keys to areas than actual movement progression, since they affect the stage itself rather than grant new abilities for the player character.

Okay, maaaaybe the ``Nail Uprooted from Dirt'' can count since it makes the marsh that was previously unjumpable suddenly operate as though it isn't there, jumping-wise.

Maybe I'll get back to Shovel Knight, trying to at least complete the base game.

Maybe.

I'm more likely to start getting into Cassette Beasts though...

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I've gotten No Man's Sky recently due to it being half-off. I started with the controller, and found that I hated it (aiming with the right stick is annoying). So it's back to the venerable keyboard+mouse combo.

First impressions so far are fine. It's a bit like Minecraft, but with less free-form building. I'm still quite early into the game (no where near the 50 h mark yet), so it's hard to say. I don't think it expands into something as crazy as Satisfactory or Factorio, but as at now, I'm not completely bored about it yet, which is a good thing.

I'm kinda procrastinating a little on fixing up my Nether rail system in Minecraft, and a recent Reine Minecraft adventure video showed an interesting in-place rail switching mechanism has given me some ideas on how I might want to set up the nether rail. But I'm lazy and don't want to think... for now.

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I spent this morning checking out a stand-up comedy special by Russell Peters. This guy was hot years ago, with this show that made its rounds on the 'net.

It's alright. He's similar to he was back then, though he does lay it on thick with the F-bombs, which is fine by me.

That's about it for this update I suppose. Till the next time.

``I'm Alive!''

Today, when I saw an acquaintance that I hadn't met in a while, and when said acquaintance greeted me with ``How are you?'', I replied unhesitatingly with ``I'm alive!''.

I never said that before. My usual reply was ``I'm not dead yet!'', so I suppose this can be seen as a breakthrough?

Maybe things are turning for the better. Who knows?

Only God, for sure.

Orcish ACM Behaviours In Re ORCID Demandment

What a week.

Work side had lots of drama, most of which was external. It was unfortunate, but in many ways, not exactly out of my estimation. I suppose it just comes with the territory of doing non-trivial projects.

Still on work, but at a personal level, I felt sad that I had to volunteer to remove my name from a paper that was to be published under a journal/conference hosted by the ACM, due to the organisation's hard-headed enforcement of every contributing author to provide their ORCID. According to the submission process, anyone who does not have an ORCID cannot be an author to the paper.

ORCID is a supranational entity that maintains a list of unique identifiers for people who self-register/identify in their system, a process that is free as in no payment [from these people] is required. It is, however, acceptance of money from [research] funding organisations, publications, and other such groups of people who are involved in the research process but are not the researchers themselves.

I volunteered to remove my name from the paper to prevent its non-publication---my co-authors relied on publications to get their key performance indicators necessary for their work, while as an engineer, any and all papers published with my name on it are, at best, a good to have in terms of bragging rights only.

``But MT, ORCID is free to use! Why don't you just create an account [with your work email] and run with it?''

It's not [just] about the ``freeness'' of the service; it's the fact that ACM decided to prioritise perfection in their metadata over having proper attribution through not making ORCID optional.

The whole idea of ORCID also turns my stomach. I lived through the age when Facebook and LinkedIn were nascent, before they turned into the current cesspools. Thus, I am well aware of the usual life cycle of such identity-centric systems that aren't state-run/legally mandated and enforced.

They always begin with good intentions; the idea of a centrally managed identity broker to ensure that the MT you are speaking with is the ``real'' MT. And the usual modus operandi is to have as many people sign on as possible.

But real money is needed to run the infrastructure for these information systems. Some funds are usually available in the beginning to get things off the ground and into the ``people'' acquisition phase, but eventually these systems will need to find some revenue streams.

Partnerships of all sorts will be forged with those who have money, who won't give money without getting something of value [to them] in return. Network efforts increasing the popularity of a particular network happen, with the biggest ones getting even bigger, requiring more resources to keep going, while simultaneously becoming a natural monopoly.

Then a critical size is hit, the business people start swarming and taking over governance subtly or otherwise, enshittificating the experience with increasingly intrusive business-friendly behaviours that do not benefit the original group of people who were promised a centrally managed identity broker.

Meanwhile, the monopolising effect from sheer size gives so much clout to the identity broker that there is effectively no more choices, and anyone who wants to play/work in the mainstream are coerced into giving up more and more of their choices just to stay within the said mainstream, lest they be pariahs and lose their work-related social networks.

I do not like that.

I am not a researcher by trade, so I do not need to play the game.

I can give a big middle finger to the game and make my stand.

And that I did.

Do I feel good about it? Frankly, I am a little disappointed that I cannot put my name on the paper even though I had contributed ideas here and there to make things work out, not to mention the final round of reviewing/suggestions to make the paper flow better. But it is rare that one gets to make a stand for their principles unhindered, and I think that it is important for me to do so. Law and justice are not the same---the Bible teaches us to follow the law, but to leave God to deal justice by not seeking vengeance on our own. In this case, ACM's requirement is technically not a law a la backed by the state, but is an arbitrary rule by an arbitrary organisation.

That makes resistance to it so much simpler.

To be fair, ORCID does provide a solution for the ``Wang Wei'' problem---disambiguating researchers who share the same name for whatever purposes. It is a workable solution, even if I do not agree with how it will eventually become the gatekeeper of who is considered a researcher (must have ORCID) and who isn't. Because that gives ORCID a tremendous amount of power over who lives or dies (metaphorically) while keeping these people disenfranchised.

But I do not need to play that game.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got me some Blasphemous to play a bit, before having to practise some pieces needed for music ministry tomorrow.