Recovering from Missing Beyond Compare 5 UI

Just a quick note on how to resolve an oddity.

I used Beyond Compare 5 to compare two 2.8 GB files, and when I was done, I closed the application.

Then later on, when I tried opening the application again, it ran due to the process being seen in Task Manager, but the UI was nowhere to be found.

I tried rebooting Windows 11, didn't fix it.

I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling Beyond Compare 5, didn't fix it.

What helped with the recovery was this:

1. Pull up a command line prompt from within where Beyond Compare 5 was installed.
2. Execute:

   BCompare.exe /solo /edit

   This pulls up the text edit window of Beyond Compare 5.
3. From the opened window, pull up a new session.
4. Save the workspace (name it anything), and then close the application.

Subsequently, activating Beyond Compare 5 was like normal.

Why this happened in the first place? No idea---might be a corrupted state of the UI when it was dealing with the difference of two rather large files [in binary].

Why this could fix? No idea too---but most likely the built-in text editor is a different code path that bypasses that corrupted state processing that stopped the loading of the UI, which allowed the corrupted state to be fixed through the series of arcane steps.

Hopefully this is useful, but I doubt it. Unlike the era of the Neverwinter Nights 2 Texture Bug, modern incarnations of search engines are more like ad-generating machines with additional AI slop (gasp!).

In other words, this is likely to be buried.

And that's the quick note.

Walking Reset My Mind

``Wow MT, another entry in near-quick succession?''

Yeah... I declared a ``mental well-being day'' for today and went outside to touch grasswalk like an idiot, doing 19+ km in less than 4 h. The route wasn't anything exotic like Windsor Park or Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, but just the humble Northeast Riverine Loop that I usually cycle during lunch hour on days that I work from home. Taking nearly four times as long to walk the route really makes me appreciative of the speed that one gets from a bicycle.

My pinky toes are lightly blistered, my knees feel wrecked (yes, I was walking on flat ground, but unlike the paths in the other more exotic areas, these are almost all concrete), but my mind feels so much more at ease. I feel ready to face the world again, and thus to deal with whatever is coming my way.

And that is a good thing.

As I walked through the stupid heat (with sunglasses on!), I started to do lots of thinking. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 [again], and one of the key themes within the game is that of transhumanism in the form of ``chroming up'', i.e. to use cyberware implants as a means of enhancing and sometimes even outright replacing various functionalities of the person. It's a milder form of what Battle Angel Alita, since much of the implants still leave the people more-or-less human-shaped, while in Battle Angel Alita, more exotic physical forms take hold, even as the brains are kept roughly as what they were supposed to be.

All that thought of transhumanism made me think: if given the opportunity, would I be interested in cyberware implants?

I.. don't think I'd be interested in such cyberware implants. It's weird, considering that I'm a technologist, but hear me out. My work/day job are heavily mental in nature (thinking abstract stuff, and implementing systems that run off such abstract stuff in the form of computers). In that context, the cyberware implants might be fine.

But I don't live for work---I live for the stuff that I do outside of work, and strangely enough, I find that the things that I enjoy outside of work, they are quite physical in nature.

Take music-making for example. There was a moment where I tried composition, but in the end, I found that I preferred just playing the flutes, saxophones, and dizi over the mental process of putting together a piece. There's just something about the need to regulate my breathing, coordinating it with my fingers and eyes in a skillful way that makes it very satisfying.

Then there's the whole cycling/walking (I daren't call it ``hiking'' when I know of hard core hiking that Brian does) thing---it's also very physical. The feel of the sun on my skin, the sweat off my brow, the cajoling of the muscles to move despite their reluctance from exertion after being sedentary for too long, the eventual aches and soreness that come, followed by a deep, relaxing sleep with a refreshed mind---these are what makes life worth living [without having to rely on another person to ``provide'' that kind of proof-of-living].

It is that literal visceral feeling that I seek outside of work, and having enough body parts replaced via cyberware implants seem to remove quite a bit of what makes me, well me.

So for now, if cyberware implants were made available, I might not want to partake in them.

``MT, what if they are prostheses for replacing damaged body parts?''

I don't know. Considering that I've already been more or less ``looking forward to being dead'', perhaps the natural outcome is to ignore such prostheses. But that does not mirror what is happening in real life---otherwise why would I go through the process of taking care of my weirded out left eyeball through observation duty, or for that matter, attempt to take care of whatever nonsense my skin decides to throw at me?

Contradiction.

I think that while I am ``looking forward to being dead'', I'm not looking forward to suffering before I am dead, and as a result, have been taking actions somewhat consistent with that kind of behaviour.

``But MT, what about health screening? Why aren't you doing anything about that?''

Good question on that one---no real answer. Why screen for things that I already have a good sense of (I know I'm fat), and for things that I have little to no reason to take care of (e.g. cancer---if I'm hit with it, I think I'm more likely than not to refuse treatment and just die from it, at least, as at now)?

The time hasn't come for me to off myself, so I'm not going to do so just yet.

Anyway, those are just matter-of-fact discussions---I'm feeling much better from the released endorphins from that long-ass walk earlier in the day.

I'll end this post for now to turn in early. It'll be a good night's sleep ahead.

Week Made Me Weak

Man, that was rough. Be prepared---this is going to be the theme for the foreseeable future.

I mentioned that I was on observation duty. The good news is that the ophthalmologist agrees, and wanted to see me again in three weeks. I counter-offered with two instead, and so that will be it. The neutral news is that I'm still on observation duty, but at least I'm out of the most dangerous period for now, and it ought to be a nothingburger soon enough.

Two other things happened as well; one of them is work-related, the other is family-related. For the work-related, just know that it is bureaucracy-related, and is just plain annoying. For the family-related, it involves not-me, and it's more tiring with some light uncooperativeness with not-me, and the doctors calling at odd hours to the apartment for updates on status. I am not directly handling this bit, but I am getting exhausted being the brains of the outfit, keeping track of information from the doctors, and making sense of the technical terms they are saying in order to provide the necessary reassurances and advice to the rest of the family.

I'm tired from both, and that's all I want to talk about them.

I've also finally done the final processing needed to return my personal equipment from the SAF due to my reaching my statutary age. That... took a while. The alibaba bag of stuff is heavy, and had to be extracted from the deeper part of my storage area. At the same time, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust that had accumulated on the exhaust fan and grill, as well as to get rid of the three music instrument-like objects (one guitar that I never use that has unknown provenance, and two saxophones that could never be re-sold). The bin out at SAFRA Punggol for the disposal was another bugbear, like a final challenge to see if one was truly a former NSMan---the hopper was high up, and opened up to a height that was higher than my shoulders, necessitating an over-the-shoulder lift of the heavy alibaba bag in order to feed it in. But it was dealt with without any new injuries, which means that this part of my life is now truly over.

Time to segue to other things.

------

Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum is a very fun official Picross game by Jupiter Corporation with hololive Production's Juufuutei Raden voice-acting in it. The premise uses Raden's museum curator background to provide nonogram puzzles around various museum-related art themes. The puzzles are fun, Raden's explanations of the significance of the art that the puzzles are based on are instructive (she voice acts in Japanese, with subtitles in English), and for about SGD20.00, it's a fair price.

Love it.

------

I'm back in playthrough three of Cyberpunk 2077, this time opting for a Male-Streetkid V and going for a Netrunner-esque build. Like the other two playthroughs, the tech-tree has drastically changed, and eventually I'll be in the DLC space of Phantom Liberty. Clothes are primarily for looks, with very modest statistics improvements, with the bulk of such things (like reload speed, armour, and the like) being provided for by Cyberware instead. Night City feels a bit different from before, and with the new transformer-architecture DLSS, the frames are smoother still even though I haven't really moved on from Eileen-III just yet.

------

Microsoft recently released their homage to the venerable edit.com from the MS-DOS era with the Rust-rewritten version of Edit. I tried the first version, and it sucked hard with very broken dialogue box semantics (it was clear the author did not live through that era of Text-based UI elements). The current version as at writing, 1.2, isn't too bad, and is quite an upgrade from old school edit.com. With Notepad getting fitted with increasingly useless amounts of unwanted and uncalled for features (like seriously, who asked for ``copilot'' and formatting?!), and the removal of the under-used Wordpad (most people just go straight for MSWord, or LibreOffice Writer on a new machine anyway), the new homage version of Edit seems like a much better replacement.

It works well in the terminal, handling UTF-8 like a champ, and works with terminals of various geometries. My only true complaint is the waste of space on the left margin for the line numbers (in my arrogant opinion, a simple integer on the status bar to indicate what line number one is on is a better use of screen real estate), and perhaps a trifling coent on the inability to customise the colours. Other than that, Edit is a solid recommendation now.

Does this mean that I abandon Vim? Nah... Vim is still my workhorse text editor---hjkl navigation is still unbeatable from a muscle memory perspective.

------

As a result of what happened throughout the week, I find myself utterly drained. I try to get sleep, and usually got enough of it in hours, but the quality is quite suspicious. Combining that with the inability to get enough sunlight/sweat from cycling due to having to avoid jarring my eyeballs, I just ran out of spoons.

And so, tomorrow is yet another ``mental well-being day'' type leave that I take, just to go out there and sweat it out through walking in the sun for a long distance, to get the heart pumping, the muscles moving, and the sweat pouring.

Hopefully that will give some life back into me. There are other [dark] thoughts flowing through me, but I don't think I'm ready to face them now, let alone talk about them publicly here.

Till the next update.

A Short Update

(sigh)

Yet another downer of a post, I'm afraid.

This week has been rough on the psyche. World's in a mess, and each time I try to catch up on current affairs, I just feel helpless with a dose of headache.

And the rotten-ass weather combined with my inability to go out and burn excess energy due to being on observation duty means I can't use my usual means of getting anti-depressant-like mitigation in.

Let's get the the biggest bugbear out of the way---how observation duty went.

Thankfully, uneventfully. I was looking out for changes to the new baseline, and haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary that required immediate action to be taken. That's a good thing.

As for the ``world's a mess'' bit, just the realisation that the only reason why we as a whole haven't killed each other completely lies only on the restraint that we exercise through the respect of some abstract idea that is written down on ``a piece of paper'', i.e. the observation of laws, or the type of legal fiction that mere words could hold back bad behaviour.

It's terrifying because the success of a lawful society is contingent on the simultaneous respect of the sovereignty of the law by everyone (or at least, the majority), with bad actors actively being called out through either the law enforcement apparatus, or at the very least, being shamed by enough of society that they self-correct.

But the past five years of this decade have shown that this idea of law is fast eroding. Bad faith actors have discovered that if they were to strike at the enforcement portion of the law fast enough, they can overwhelm the entire system so thoroughly to the point that they can concurrently stall enforcement activities, push through their agenda, and generally get away with literal murder if they are quick about it.

There is no easy way to counteract this due to the original premise of ``innocent before guilty''. The way that legal systems are enforced are based around the concept of being sufficiently meticulous in order to reduce the false positive rate (i.e. an innocent person being wrongfully found guilty). But to add a bit more real-world detail, the finding of the guilt of a person is often the last step of the entire legal enforcement process, with lots of waiting in between. That waiting process often involves the restriction of personal liberties of the parties that are involved, and should they eventually be found innocent, don't often have restitution from the period in which their restriction of personal liberties had occurred.

In other words, if one is poor, the legal system, no matter how just, can be manipulated to put one deeper into the hole of poverty. Conversely, the richer one is, the easier it is to get a better outcome in general from the legal system.

This is true in most places that practise some form of justice in the form of a legal system. Vigilante justice works on a different form, and is usually heavily frowned upon in places where there regular legal system exists and is working ``well enough''.

Notice though, how I tried to separate the difference between ``justice'' and ``the law''. Justice is a more fundamental concept that most people can understand, of which the use of, and enforcement of ``the law'' is but one way of enacting justice. It is not the only way, and it is definitely not guaranteed to deliver justice, though it is often hoped that it is the case.

But I digress.

With the rise of bad faith actors, the degradation of the service/duty sense of law enforcement officials to being stricter with the letter of the law instead of the intent for whatever reasons, what can the average citizen/resident do?

I don't know. It's not like SIN city is free of such issues---the ever-increasing use of complaints over social media to get justice served while the original manner of official channels have failed initially is disturbing as well.

(sigh)

I think I've lost the plot. I'm going to stop here for now.

I am on Observation Duty

(sigh)

It's official---I am on observation duty.

It was supposed to be a day where I would laze about, figuring out what to do on this off-in-lieu that I took on a whim because I didn't want to have too many leaves to clear. I woke up, and when I moved my eyes, I saw flashes of light at the peripheries of the lower left quadrant and upper right quadrant of my left eye.

Uh-oh.

See, I've been a high myope (defined as having <−6.00 dioptres of refraction error), which is a high risk factor for retinal detachment, a non-lethal but sure-as-hell-will-fuck-up-your-quality-of-life condition. Combine that with age and the symptoms (not going to link to it directly---just read off the Wikipedia page), I was suitably concerned.

I dallied a little, wondering if it was something intermittent. I chilled out in front of Eileen-III, thinking about what to have for dinner, and when it was nearer the middle of the day, decided to do a quick check on the light flashing situation---I could replicate it, easily.

Uh-oh.

I knew something was up, and brain kicked into overdrive. I was told before to seek immediate medical attention when I saw these symptoms (and was ready for it), but never quite worked out where to head to for this.

General Practitioners would be useless since they don't have the slit lamp that was necessary to accurately see what was going on at the back of my eyeball, and the Emergency Department felt a little too overkill for what I deemed to be Urgent Care at most (I was not actively going blind in the eye, and was thus not an emergency). Calling SNEC put me on hold for too long, and HealthHub told me that they'd get back to me with an appointment in two working days---mind you, it wasn't an appointment in two working days, but the notice of an appointment in two working days.

(sigh)

I ended up back to where I last went more than a decade ago for eye issues---Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist. I went as a walk-in, had my basic eye performance measured out, pupils dilated, and waited for more than an hour (out of the projected three) before I was looked at by the doctor.

Age-related posterior virtreous detachment. Apparently, apart from the increased risk of being a high myope, that I had shitty skin contributed to an increase in risk too, leading to today's episode and eventual diagnosis. Lattice degeneration was not sighted, and prognosis is good.

Generally, we're on official observation duty for the next six to eight weeks to watch out for any retinal tears that come from the shrinking of the vitreous humour due to age-related degeneration, so that we can fix them up pronto before it gets into retinal detachment territory.

The risk of any nonsense happening is highest in this first week, and thus my vigilance for anything novel beyond the new baseline set this morning. More importantly, I know where to head to when things go south---back to the doctor at Eastern Hougang Eye Specialist.

There is nothing else to be done other than observing if any repairs to retinal tears are needed---the general idea is that after the six to eight weeks, the vitreous humour would have stabilised to its new shape/size, thus reducing the amount of mechanical stimulation it is doing to the retina when it jiggles in the loosened up space.

Am I afraid? Not really. As I said, this is something that I had been told would happen a long time ago, and so, I'm quite prepared for it from most fronts, except for the ``how the hell do I kickstart the process'' bit that has since been resolved. That bit on eczema raising the risk factor was the only new thing that didn't know about, but it does make some sense---the origin cells for the retina are similar to that of the epidermis, the very same layer [of cells] that I am having shit-tier inflammation control over.

Meanwhile, nothing that involves knocking the vitreous humour about within my eyeball during this period for me.

And I need to find a new day to clear that off-in-lieu, now that I have a medical certificate to cover for today. 🤦‍♂️

Hopefully, the next visit is next week as planned, and not earlier because something stupid has happened in between.

Till the next update.

...the Sequel to the Gorram List

It's stupid o'clock once more---let's go!

The first thing to note is that I am clearing that off-in-lieu for Saturday's public holiday on Monday. Which means that in theory, I can stay up for as long as I want.

In practice, I'll just crash out after writing and posting this entry. Because I'm too old to trash my sleep schedule for any reason any more.

With that out of the way, let us continue the rant that I started ``yesterday''.

Consider what I said about ``the most valuable thing'' that someone can give is time, it should be pretty obvious what is an instant turn-off for me: poor time discipline, and more generally, an air of irresponsibility (or worse still, actual irresponsibility).

Now, I know that there is a fundamental difference between controlling the timeline for work, and doing stuff on one's personal time---the former has much stricter requirements, and tends to affect more strangers (or at least, acquaintances), while the latter is usually more fluid, with higher chances of spontaneity, coupled with possibilities of outright procrastination. I am well aware of that, and do not demand the kind of professionalism that one would be at if it were part of a job.

But at some point, it just gets fucking ridiculous. I have called off a date with an ex aeons ago primarily because she was (1) late for more than 15 min while I was trying to pick her up in a car that I had access to at a place where waiting for long was A Bad Idea; (2) and decided to change the destination willy-nilly. I was annoyed at another ex when a pair of tickets to a show that I was intending to go with her, I let her have both because her sister was visiting and they wanted to go together, only to have their plans changed at the last minute, and having the tickets wasted. I was also upset at another ex because she mis-planned some things, and ended up with me just sitting around trying to kill time, even when it was meant to be ``us-time''.

The common point here isn't that plans change---plans always change when they come in contact with reality. The point is that the communication of the said situation was either not done in a ``us versus the problem'' way (i.e. unilaterally), or that there was no communication on the thing in the first place.

That really grinds my gears.

So, the first time I meet someone, if they suck hard at being punctual, or fuck up meeting locations through random-ass re-statements (and not a case of being genuinely lost due to unfamiliarity with the place), I get really annoyed. Yes, I have some friends who are just bad at being punctual, but I'm hardly ever planning anything critical with them for the most part (or throwing enough slack into the mix for when things are critical), thus rendering their tardiness irrelevant; I just spend the extra time I have catching up on my reading.

For someone I barely even know, and they pull such a stunt, it is already a red flag to me---it's a bit like how if someone treats the wait-staff poorly they are walking red flags, no matter how sweet/polite they are treating ``me'', since the apparent personality is to treat everything as transactional and discriminative along the axis of the apparent level of power.

``MT, getting awfully specific now, aren't we?''

Yes, of course. Why argue about hypotheticals when I have actual examples to draw upon? When I said that I sit and think, I didn't mean just running through hypotheticals in compulsion, nor did I mean overly ruminating over what has already passed continuously to seek meaning. I meant thinking through what happened, what I can learn from it, and then dropping the whole issue once I have filed the lessons away somewhere in my mind.

Last time, I said I hated people. That isn't wrong, but it wasn't quite complete: I hate people a priori only because your average person is effectively a numskull in the context of modern society. It's not about how smart they are (though that plays a role), but it is about how they interact with the world, and how they treat others who are not them. Most people treat others pretty poorly, though not necessarily in a blatantly obvious way. And yes, I think that I am guilty of such behaviours as well, particularly when I have run out of spoons for the day, and am running on fumes just to race through to the end where I can hide, and then rest/recharge my social batteries.

Thus, demonstrating gonk behaviour that reinforces this innate hatred is not helpful, everything else be damned.

Going back to the main point, irresponsibility irks me in a way that borders upon the irrational. Again, I am well aware that no one runs a gorram Gantt chart to run their personal life, but come the fuck on, have some kind of plan, and then remember to communicate it out early enough so that folks have enough time to figure things out and get it done. And considering how marriage is ``us against the problem/world'', having an irresponsible partner is just the worst thing that one can do.

And now, for something tangentially related, and borderline controversial.

The reason for this sequel to the rant is based on what I heard at the sermon today. Much of the church is elsewhere for church camp, and I did not go because I do not have a valid passport (technical reason), and did not feel close enough to folks to want to be at a camp of any sort (the ``it's not you; it's me'' reason). I like my church family---a couple of brothers had reached out quietly and tentatively to thank me for serving in the music ministry with Aurelia, and while they don't necessarily get the terminology right (some called Aurelia a Chinese flute for whatever reason), their heart is in the right place. I don't know how to take compliments well, so I just smiled, thanked them, and try not to think of myself as a good flautist/musician.

So the sermon was on 1 Timothy 3:14--16. The crux of the sermon was ``what was the church?''. The pastor preaching talked about how 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus were basically the manual for how to run a church, of which one of the things was that the church preachers were not meant to be women (1 Timothy 2:12), with subsequent verses calling back to Genesis to explain why that was so. That made me think back to Genesis as a whole, and how (at least up to Ch 15 which is roughly where I am at now with the ESV Study Bible) in many cases, the men in the stories were doing their own stuff, but ended up fucking up bad because they decided to follow what their womenfolk said (Adam eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from following Eve; Abram fucking Hagar to make a child according to Sarai's suggestion).

The point that I am awakened to here isn't about misogyny (biblically defined gender roles are about division of labour; Eve was flesh of Adam's flesh, and was a helper, not a slave), but the realisation that if God gave a command to be completed to me, I shouldn't go round listening to other people's interpretation and rationalisation of the command, for as they are not God, the chances of them corrupting the meaning with faulty memory/reasoning is high. Or the more diplomatic way is to still listen to what they say, but make up my own damn mind about what needs to be done based on what I know about God/the situation, and weighing the provided evidence accordingly, Bayes style.

Therefore, it behooves me to choose wisely. On preferences, we can agree to disagree (or ``compromise'' naively so that no one is happy), but on the truly important matters, we must stay firm to our convictions. Biblical or secular, being an irresponsible sort is never something that is well-tolerated, and thus it makes sense to ditch that kind of turd and move on.

``MT, are you so upset about what happened on Friday that you are coming up with excuses to rationalise things?''

No, not really. In fact, I am glad that it happened in such a polarising way---no more of that melodramatic draggy bullshit that is an absolute time waster and emotion grinder.

I'm not a horndog that is willing to trade in hard-learnt standards for a competent adult/partner against the world/problems for tail.

Looks like this entry is getting long too, so no other updates for this for now. Till the next update then.

It Became a Gorram List...

It's stupid o'clock. Time to be stupid.

There is something that I have been mulling for a long time, and it more or less came to a head last night---I have now developed a stronger sense that perhaps instead of just the not-having children sort, I am also not the marrying sort.

Here's a litany of reasons:

• I speak too much to myself in my head to the point that I cannot stand trying to explain things to others when there's no ``important reason'' to (like for work purposes, or for a service);
• At my age, the pool is non-existent---any [women] that are still available have their own issues, and requires some kind of compromise that I am increasingly unwilling to get into;
• I've already missed the ``golden period'' for dating on at least two counts: not being in SIN city during my university years, and now entering my fifth decade of existence (aka being middle aged);
• While I do not have a death wish, I am not exactly keen on doing anything out of the ordinary to prolong my life because there really isn't much to look forward to in the first place---just suffering after suffering, mission after mission with no end in sight;
• I hate people as a whole---for some individuals, I think there's some mutual tolerance, but that's about it;
• SIN city's cost of living and general environment is absolutely shit for anything that isn't related to making money;
• I hardly ever see the need to conform, and from my past, ``compromises'' brought me nothing but misery at the end on anything relating to personal relationships;
• I don't get instantly turned on just because someone is a woman, no matter how sexy she is trying to look---it doesn't work that way for me;
• Call it whatever, but I am extremely comfortable living in my own skin nowadays than who I was nearly twenty years before, much to my surprise---I still need some human contact to avoid becoming a psychopath, but that can be easily satisfied just through the normal interactions one gets while in a professional work relationship;
• I have opinions that I come to after thinking a lot about them, thus compromising on them without an associated debate (or at least a factual comparison) is being unfair to me and my time;
• The most valuable thing that someone can give isn't their virginity, but their time---since time spent is time that cannot return, so I truly treasure the time that people choose to spend with me...
• ...but not all time are of equal quality---this is where a general compatibility of minds is important: sharing thoughts and discussions about something that they are passionate about is wonderful, talking about something that seems to not invoke a deeper thought/appreciation is a turn-off;
• To me, there is no difference between a person who is at home, versus a person who is outside---it should always be the same pendejo in either case, subjected to differing standards of decorum according to context: this is the ``personality'' we are talking about; too much deviation casts aspersions on who the person really is; and
• This is the modern world where the institution of marriage is largely reduced to tax and inheritance benefits, and perhaps a more socially acceptable construct for sexual intercourse that may/may not bear children---considering where I am coming from, none of those points seem applicable to me.

``But MT, aren't you lonely?''

No. Why am I lonely? There are friends, and I've also made peace with the notion that the set ``friends'' isn't some immutable one---there will always be someone that I am ``very gum'' with today that will just be gone forever. Friendship works both ways---I cannot always be the fucking instigator, only to be ignored. If I try to initiate a contact, and the other side fails to reciprocate, the state of the friendship is clear, and I again should not try to ``compromise'' or ``be the bigger person'', whatever the hell that means.

And again, I am not lonely because I am quite comfortable living with myself. This stems from the realisation that (1) I'm the only person who will always be with me till the end of me, and (2) people suck, have their own agenda, and in most cases the types of relationships they would rather have with you are transactional. Or it could be that my own personal upbringing is so full of mal-relationships that I have a warped and fucked up sense of what a healthy one is to the point that I find isolation preferable than trying to reach out.

In either case, I don't give a fuck at all.

My life, my choices, my cross to bear; my God sees all, He guides, He chides, He rewards. Everyone else can go fuck themselves for all I care.

If there's anything I dare to be proud of, is that I am honest as honest gets. I don't mince words, I don't carry balls, I don't deliberately sabotage/harm people. I know when to shut up, and have learnt over time that if I see something that isn't right, there are at least another three who do too, but none of them will dare to draw attention to what they see, for it is the SIN city way of docility that is oh-so-popular with the capitalist class.

Now, if that honesty drives people away, perhaps they aren't worth being with in the first place.

It's like the moustache that I sport. I have ``friends'' who told me to shave it off because it was offputting [to them]. Result: the moustache stays, while those ``friends'' are now gone. Reason: the moustache is there for two reasons: (1) prevention of the skin from getting inflamed from nose rubbing due to allergic rhinitis reactions, (2) a polarising filter to sift out the superficial conformists from my life.

And since it works for both reasons, why should I do anything about it?

``MT, that's a helluva long rant!''

Yes, yes it is. I'm forty-fucking-years old---I'm pretty sure I have a damn good idea of what I want and do not want out of life by now. Hell, in five more years I'd start qualifying for random programmes designed for older people who haven't quite gotten their silver card yet.

So, stop with the fucking infantilisation or about ``doing what is best for you''---I did not live till forty, read thousands of books, ponder over hours just to be belittled with a lecture on how my preference was wrong.

``MT, are you targeting any specific person(s) with your rant?''

No, I'm not. It's a tired tirade against an amalgamated person-composite of many folks who could have triggered this rant.

And with that, I'm done for this entry. Till the next update.