EDF! EDF! EDF!

Okay okay... let's speak of things calmly.

I'm on leave, and this time, I'm not completely sick (but still feel bad enough that I'd probably crash out after writing this entry). The ``why'' is simple---Labour Day is on a Thursday, which begs for Friday to be a leave day, which then begets the idea of ``well... it's already two days, and we're in a quasi-lull period now anyway, so...'', ending with this fine Wednesday being a leave day as well.

I had originally wanted to go on yet another long-ass cycling trip, but with the recent bouts of colds and other nonsense, thought better. So I was confirmed to be confined to quarters for the most part.

I would have considered playing Oblivion: Remastered, if not for a few things:

1. A recent update made the performance of the game more suspect than before;
2. The price tag of SGD70-ish was a bit steep (though not insurmountable); and
3. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5 was 70% off (sub-SGD15).

One might say that it is clearly a no-brainer.

EDF! EDF! EDF!

And so I found myself playing EDF 5 for much of the day.

My introduction to the series is via a playthrough by IRyS on it, and of course, her spiel in the collaboration with the publisher:


``But MT, that is for EDF 6!''

No, her playthrough of EDF 5:

It looked fun then, and now when I finally got to play it, it is definitely fun! It's also the first time [in a damn long while] that I'm actively playing a shooter-type game but with a controller. The reason for the parenthesis is that I vaguely remembered playing Halo: Combat Evolved on an Xbox, but I cannot remember where it was that I played it at.

The funny thing about playing 3D environment games on the controller is that the ``aim'' or ``camera'' analogue stick is almost always vertically inverted---it just feels more comfortable for me. This is not the same when it comes to mouse-look---moving up on a mouse must correspond to up movement, otherwise my brain goes weird.

Which makes using the mouse as a controller for a 6-DOF game like Sublevel Zero Redux a damn pain in the ass. In fact, the control scheme being a right pain in the ass is a big reason why that game is filed under the ``Don't Bother'' category in my Steam library.

There is some thought when doing the missions in EDF 5, but the execution is more forgiving than a game like Elden Ring, at least, for the Ranger class. And the stupid number of bugs to kill reminds me too much of Ninety-Nine Nights, a beautiful on-screen kill-fest that never saw a PC release that I had always wanted to play, but never had the chance to.

EDF! EDF! EDF!

And so ends the day. I've putzed about enough for the day, and should really turn in for the night. Any and all General Election campaigning in SIN city will come to a head tomorrow, and then a ``cooling-off day'' where any and all discourse on the politics relating to the General Election are forbidden for reasons [of law] before citizens vote on Saturday.

Till the next update.

Henson Shaving: Titanium Double-Edged Razor (Ti22 Medium)

Okay, I'm going to be a shill, sort of. But mind you, I didn't get paid, and moreover, paid for the product in turn, and got stuck waiting for more than two weeks before they finally delivered it.

I rocked a ``Duck Saves Earth'' double edged razor with bamboo handle since... a damn long time ago. A quick check showed that a company with that name in SIN city lived and died within 2018. It looks something like this. And a quick search yielding more suggests that it is, in reality, an OEM product with the option to engrave whatever company's name into the handle.

And mine was ``Duck Saves Earth''.

Don't get me wrong---it was a damn good razor. It had mass, it lasted me a stupid amount of time, but it had one flaw that showed up recently---the chrome plating was starting to flake off, especially the part nearest the blade edge.

Mind you, it hadn't actually completely flaked off yet, but the signs were there.

And meanwhile, some of the content creators I follow on YouTube (like Xyla Foxlin, Veritasium, and The Slow Mo Guys) were talking about Henson Shaving. The gimmick of Henson Shaving's razors was how it was precision machined out of Aluminium, and thus had tighter tolerances. The angles of attack were also fine tuned to reduce the amount of razor burn.

They also had a titanium version, which cost ten times what I paid for back when I got my ``Duck Saves Earth'' razor at a pop-up shop in the atrium of Fusionpolis back in the day (SGD400 versus SGD40, in case the prices changed).

``MT, why?''

Why not? Unlike then, when I was just shaving off the chin fur once every other day, I am actually doing full head shaves now because male pattern baldness with receding hairline is a bitch. I read their prospectus---the machined titanium seemed like a great idea to avoid the kinds of spalling that I was seeing with my current razor. I could go with the machined aluminium, but titanium is the harder material that is also denser than aluminium for the same machined shape [of a razor]. That second factor is important for a double-edge razor because you don't really want to be ``dragging'' or ``pressing'' the damn blade into the skin just so that it can cut the hair---the mass of the razor drives the blade at a more controlled manner, thus leaving the hand wielding it to merely guide its movements as opposed to applying inconsistent forces.

Besides, it's bloody titanium. I have a titanium spork, a titanium straw, a titanium french coffee press, and my spectacle frames are also titanium. Why not my razor too?

The purchase was straightforward---I used Xyla's affiliate code for the free 100 blades (but you can easily get others---just watch their videos and they can hook you up, though be warned that they aren't stackable), grabbed the medium ``aggression'' of the Ti22 razor, and splurged extra for the machined aluminium stand (why is it not made of titanium?).

It took 24 days before my order was delivered. That was long, but support was responsive and informative when I contacted them to check in on things. What I didn't like was the automated ``newsletters''/advertising that were sent out to me---they had the tone of ``hey, now that you've gotten your razor, here's how to take care, and also maybe refer friends?'', which was inappropriate because (1) I didn't have my razor yet, and (2) damn shipping issues. Eventually that was resolved by the fulfilling partner (there were some stock issues, as well as other unmentioned stuff that I don't know nor do I need to know), and my order reached me today.

I switched over the new-ish blade from my old razor to the Ti22 medium, and proceeded with a test whiskers shave.

It felt... different. The angle was definitely different from what I was used to, and I think the best way to describe it is that it feels like a cartridge razor, without actually being in a cartridge. The medium aggression was much milder than what I was used to, which was fine since I could just make more smaller passes with higher precision that reduced irritation on my skin as compared to the kind of crazy things that I was doing with my other razor. Once I felt comfortable, I extended it to do my full head shave.

The angle though... it needed some getting used to. The biting point was quite obvious---the angle is correct when you can feel the blade gently biting into the hair, as though it was on the verge of getting caught, only to effortlessly slice it down. I felt more fearless wielding the Ti22 medium compared to my regular razor, even using my non-dominant hand on some other parts of my head. I used to have trouble with the really thin Feather brand blades, but now I suspect that I can probably get away with that on the Ti22 medium due to how mild it was compared to the previous razors.

Yes, that's a plural---I have another razor prior to the ``Duck Saves Earth'' one. I'm too lazy to bring it out, but it is smaller, and bought from one of the travelling night markets. That's my first double-edged razor, and I didn't like it because it did not have enough mass, and its handle was a bit on the short side. But it was portable as hell though, and I digress.

So, Ti22 medium from Henson Shaving. I did say I was going to shill, even though I'm not paid for it, and have to pay for it myself. It has not disappointed me (and not because I paid a lot of money), and I can see myself using it for a very very long time.

Till the next update then.

Arakawa Under the Bridge My Dress-Up Darling

surreal

Having an oddly dreamlike quality

That's what Arakawa Under the Bridge is cited as in Wikipedia, though technically it is a surreal comedy.

I marathoned the last twenty-five chapters last night, and I feel wistful. But I am ahead of myself.

Arakawa Under the Bridge brings back memories of a bygone past. The first time I heard of this was near the end of my PhD-turned-Masters programme out in UIUC. I was hanging out with Alisa and loliponi, and she invited me to watch this anime with them. I liked the premise---it had that kind of whimsical quality that I enjoyed. We didn't manage to finish the season (or did we?), but I knew that whatever it was, it was not the end of the story, and I just had to know how it turned out, what with all the world-building.

Fast forward about a decade and change later, and here I am, finally reading the manga that inspired it all.

I like Arakawa Under the Bridge. It has that balance between slice-of-life (love it!), surrealism (confused but normalised in my head), with eventual resolutions that make one question whether the surrealism was only because I had chosen to view the manga for the most part from the lens of a normal person. The resolution of all the major events and plot points was satisfactory given the ludicrity of the initial premise, and it does serve as a warm and fuzzy ending that made me yearn for someone like a Nino in my life, as opposed to the flawed real people where one can never tell when they will take the love and trust you eventually feel comfortable enough to yield and throw it back in your face like some cosmic joke, making you question whether you can trust anyone that deeply ever again.

Totally not projecting. Absolutely not. No way. Nuh-uh.

Arakawa Under the Bridge---it's been out long enough. Here's the loveliest coloured 2-page spread that I absolutely love:

If you have no idea who everyone is, don't fret: go read it here.

------

Another manga series that I had finished reading recently (for a very loose definition of ``recently'') is My Dress-Up Darling. I love love love Marin Kitagawa's smile---just look at the cover in the manga's Wikipedia page. And just in case you think this is only possible for a drawn character, think again:

That's the singer of the anime theme cosplaying as Marin. And she has the same damn smile too!

And no, I didn't follow the anime, nor do I have any intention to. These days, I find that the manga of an anime series tends to be a much better read/expenditure of my time.

I bring up My Dress-Up Darling here because of its apparently abrupt conclusion, where there seem to be new story arcs that are being set up that can easily bring on more adventures for Marin and Wakana. Real world issues on the mangaka's health/schedule aside, I think that for slice-of-life type stories, there's hardly ever a good place to stop, for the simple reason that life simply doesn't just stop there once an arc is over. It just keeps on going, with new arcs slipstreaming in even as other story arcs are resolved.

At some point, the creator of the slice-of-life needs to decide when they are done with the stories they want to tell. And in this case, moving on from the confession in the penultimate chapter into a time-skip where Marin and Wakana are married, with a hint of how their lives are successful and still wonderful together feels like the right kind of end for a slice-of-life.

Yes, there are new big story arcs that never got ``resolved'' (did they ever find out that it was Marin who was Haniel?), side characters whose stories seemed to have gone nowhere (but they are side characters?), and it did feel rushed. But I think it is important to trust in the creative process---not everything must follow a standardised template. The templates are just guides---once one has mastered the lessons on what the guides are trying to teach, it is time to ditch them and find one's own creative voice.

I know I hardly ever talk about manga and what-not, or even review books that I read in general, but I suppose some of these things have created enough of a disturbance/resonance that I feel like saying something about it.

Till the next update then.

Long Breaks == Sick Days 😩

I think that I'm this close to just simply hating taking leave to make long weekends longer.

Only because each time that I take an extra day off, I end up ``wasting it'' by actually falling ill and having to spend that time just sleeping in just so that my body can recover from whatever the hell it was that took me out.

It is, to put it mildly, getting annoying.

And now, that aside, time to put other things into perspective.

I talked recently about how Gawr Gura of hololive English Myth has decided to call it quits, and mentioned about how it was really not something that was unexpected, considering the duration in which she had worked, comparing the nearly five years that she had with that of a software engineer making senior level by then.

I stand by that. Five years is a long time, particularly if one's under thirty. It is, to put it really stupidly, more than 16% of one's life span at that point in time, and if one were fifty, it would be barely 10% only, and only after another twenty years of perspective. Put that way, things seem to make much more sense, and perhaps even the tourists can accept it at face value without stirring more unnecessary drama.

Speaking of tourists, 4chan was finally hacked pretty thoroughly after being around for nearly twenty years. The relevance here is that it usually is the containment zone for the kind of doom-posting of the naysayers of hololive under the /vt/ board, and with 4chan down as the English-speaking world's largest VTuber resigning, it just means that the spill over becomes more troublesome than usual.

I think that Gura's feelings on the matter can be surmised in the ``last'' music video that she just released on her channel:

It's angsty, it's raw, it's not what one would expect from the cutesy avatar that Gura is known for.

As I mentioned, I know of Gura, but I don't follow her as closely as say Ina or even Reine. Take it for all it is worth.

------

Neither Civil Nor Servant was a book that I had been wanting to read for quite a while now, and it was only recently that I had managed to borrow it from a colleague who happened to have it. For those who are not in the know, it is a biography of Philip Yeo, a rather polarising person who is/was well-known within the public sector of SIN city.

In many ways, it does read as a hagiography than a biography---all actions that the subject took had their rationalisations and justifications spelt out, with many of their ``allowedness'' (not legality!) coming from a mix of ``it was the right thing to do'' or that a powerful political patron ``understood and required the job be done''.

I am a bit torn. I think that the actions that were taken, together with their justifications/rationalisations/effectiveness were a product of their times, and should not be seen as something to be emulated in the modern era. SIN city between the 1960s and 1980s was in a literal existential crisis, where there were no real rules other than the singular word of ``Survive!''. In that sense, the kinds of sketchy behaviours could be tolerated, though not necessarily officially condoned. It was also well that there was only ``one'' (that we know of) person who was running around doing such sketchy things, and as such, with a powerful enough patron, the evils of precedence-setting can be culled almost totally through a political whitewashing of a mandarin.

Yet I find that with the modern day SIN city, where the rules are there precisely because the wild days are over, makes the kind of sleights of hand that were pulled by the subject before unconscionable today. We are now a much diverse population, where the fate of the city-state is no longer just in the hands of the dynastic family like back then. No thanks to the large influx of immigrants, the nature of the population now has changed too, with no group of people being ``safe enough'' to have the assumption of unquestioned loyalty as compared to the very first generations of SIN city citizens.

Thus, the ``trust me, Bro'' method of operating is no longer viable---it is too easy to be corrupted, and with the population make-up we have now, the temptation to corrupt/be corrupted is much higher than before.

I see the work not as a recipe to combat against the plague of yes-men that all bureaucracies eventually face, but as a fable of how one man avoided death of groupthink through applying his own way of looking at the world, and managing to have the support of someone strong enough to shield him so that he can get on with solving the problems that were easy to be kept in stasis by bureaucratic processes because no one dared to take the calculated risk.

The heart of the subject is what we should learn, though the manner of execution needs to be sought out by ourselves that befits the times and environment that we currently face.

------

In between sleep to rest up, I had to take mandatory ``stay awake'' moments, and in those moments, I had been grinding out some of the achievements of HoloCure---Save the Fans!. It's been fun, and as it is both good and free, I highly recommend folks to play it.

That's about it for now.

Bye Bye Gawr Gura of hololive EN

I wasn't intending to write a post. But I had to.

The time has finally come.

Gawr Gura, one of the OG hololive English -Myth- ladies, has finally decided to graduate and cease her activities as Gawr Gura.

And now, Myth is down to just the three: 🐙💀🐔

Recalling the last big anniversary collaboration from back then is bittersweet. Gura isn't exactly the first on my list to watch from Myth (it's Ina!), but she is still a big face of hololive English.

She's big enough that she has her own Wikipedia page for notability.

And it is because of that that she has finally decided to go.

Sometimes, being that big does one no favours.

As many have noted across the 'net, this marks a distinct break of the early era of hololive English from the new one, where jank is replaced with much better production and management, where off-line idol activities of dancing and singing are given a much higher weightage when compared to before, where the dreams seem more geared towards something more traditional than the frontier of what a purely digital/virtual environment can bring.

Do I feel sad? Yes.

Do I feel bad? No.

She's been at it for nearly five years... five years! In five years, one can get promoted from junior to senior role in the land of software engineering. In entertainment circles, five years is effectively F-O-R-E-V-E-R, and that's not even counting the acclerated rate that Internet entertainers feel with the hyper-competitive nature of the unfettered access to the global audience/market.

I hope she finds what she is looking for after leaving.

Bye bye stinky---we'll miss you.

Viewing Actions

A thought came to mind as the recent ``smack everyone with tariffs'' kicked off---do we really know the difference between

1. Good outcomes from some action; and
2. Good outcomes in spite of some action?

Because it seems to me that most people seem to conflate the two, and end up attributing the wrong cause, therefore learning the wrong lessons, only to be doomed to repeat the same wrong cause once more.

It's hard to know from the get-go which of the two is happening, for the simple reason that all these action/consequences are neither isolated, nor static. Not isolated in the sense that there are always run-on effects that cause a web (not a chain!) of other decisions to be made, with their own consequent action/consequences, and not static in that just because a decision is currently made for a particular thing does not mean that it is the final decision to be made for the said thing as the web of consequences returns as a form of feedback, positive or otherwise.

In other words, I think that it is hard to claim that a certain action A (or in this example, ``smack everyone with tariffs'') is a ``good'' one or a ``bad'' one. It isn't something that relates to directly to morality and ethics, in which case God's Word is silent, and even considered from an indirect perspective, it primarily involves the allocation of resources rather than as a moral quandary. At most, it can be made into an argument about whether proper stewardship of resources was exercised, but then again, as long as it does not involve spreading the Gospel, it technically ``belongs to Caesar'' and is out of the ambit of God's Word.

So where does this leave us?

I would say that it is best to not pass judgement on whether it is good or if it is not good right now, especially if it is about something which is not within our locus of control. While cathartic to bitch about the situation, it is also important to think more about how it can affect one, and how one should adapt to the situation, privilege notwithstanding. This broadly means the need for one to make up their own damn mind, and more importantly, to take action according to their decision, to effect a consequence they are more happy with, while also be willing to take the risk to get there.

The notionally successful are so because they have been willing to take the risks needed through their actions, and despite failing more than many who have tried, they have eventually succeeded through being in the right place at the right time.

Musician Earplugs

Response to a post on Flute Forum about visiting an ENT for hearing test & exam, and asking about suggestions/thoughts on earplugs:

Since you are going to the ENT, I suggest getting a referral to an audiologist to do a proper mould of your ear canal for your earplugs. At least in my part of the world, the person making those moulds for earplugs and the doctor are not the same people.

Consider getting one where you can change the flat-frequency response filters. I use the -25dB ones when playing piccolo and high dizi, and they work well. I think there's also -10dB and -15dB as well, but I've not used them personally.

Usually only the right ear needs the heavier protection, and that changeable filter set up means that you can tweak what you use on your left ear if you are finding it tough to hear through it with the same -25dB filters.

Speech is always a little harder to understand when people speak normally, because you are attenuating them by at least 10dB, roughly the same difference between whispering and talking normally (apparent loudness).

Hope these help!

That last part is something that I only realised recently, when Elicia (who plays the sheng) was trying to talk to me in a whisper when I had both ears shoved in with my -25dB musician ear plugs---I couldn't hear shit. Because a 25dB difference is akin to the difference between a whisper and a shouting match, and so when she was whispering, I definitely couldn't hear shit.

Interesting how it sometimes takes a little real-world experience and thinking in order to realise something.

Bye Bye NaNoWriMo, and Nanashi Mumei of hololive EN

NaNoWriMo is now truly dead. The news was to have been sent out via email with an attached YouTube video, but I never did receive that email, and I will not watch the video that is said to be 27+ minutes of ranting by the last and acting Executive Director.

The implosion that led to the collapse of NaNoWriMo is well-documented, and if you are reading this in the far future where the link is dead, know that it was a pathetic fall from grace that could be saved at every step of the way, should the management pay attention to what the community is saying. Not that the community knows best, but that the community that was formed around the NaNoWriMo concept as the rallying call, and thus the community is not just some filthy casual tourist who cares not about the direction and enjoyability of NaNoWriMo.

To be had, NaNoWriMo had a good run. Founded back in 1999 on a whim by Chris Baty who wanted to challenge the concept of novel-writing as a one day event (as in, ``one day I will write a novel''), it survived twenty-five years. And of those twenty-five years, I had winning entries for fifteen of them. For a hobbyist programme, that is a damn good run.

So many nice memories from the past. I remembered first meeting Dylan and Mint back in one of the TGIO (Thank God It's Over!) parties, and then there's of course Joelyn, Max, Sarahcoldheart, Raven Silvers, Shermine, and quite a few others whom I would recognise by face but almost never by name. Almost always winning the early bird prize (for being early on venue at the Kick-off and the TGIO parties), and then having all kinds of discussions with them; the write-ins on Saturdays at various parts of the CBD that I would never have gone on my own; the different rooms at different National Libraries that our Municipal Liaisons (MLs) Sarahcoldheart/Raven Silvers/Joelyn would book for the two main parties; meeting and chatting with random irregulars who wrote at one or two of the NaNoWriMos (Valdimire---you're remembered and hope you are doing well!); inspirations from a now-forgotten writer after the forums were ``updated'' (but made worse) who would consistently churn out 1 Mwords per NaNoWriMo; word wars with the different sections of SIN city; convincing folks like Chara to join in the writing mess; the 2 kword lunch hour sprints during November, and being well-known at where I work for doing it; and of course, fourteen publicly available first draft manuscripts of stories from different settings (one of them is not quite right, and so I didn't release it).

And now, the era is over.

I've honestly done all my grieving last year, when I decided to not take part in NaNoWriMo. The writing's been on the wall for quite a while---just read the linked to document for a concise summary of the downfall of NaNoWriMo the organisation. It's just that I always feel a little wistful when something comes to a close.

...just like how Nanashi Mumei of hololive English has announced her graduation.

While I'm more selective about watching what Mumei puts up as compared to Ina/Fauna/Vesper, she does have a lovely voice. And her original music has got that interesting mix of wonder and power behind it that is hard to explain. It is sad that she has to leave hololive primarily due to her health issues, and more specifically, the fact that her voice is in trouble.

One cannot be a streamer/content creator with an avatar with voice troubles---that is literally the most important part of being a VTuber, the other being a generally acceptable avatar to work with.

I can keep going on, but damnit it is April already---the months of being maudlin are more in January for crying out loud!

(sigh)

We cannot keep looking back and wondering how to go back---moving forwards is already hard as it is. We should allow ourselves to look back every now and then as a means of reminding us of how we got to where we are, to give thanks to those who helped us along the way, and to pray for the very same souls who helped us then, but whom we have lost touch since.

But we can never go back to how things were. No matter what we try.

Till the next update.