Ramblings of a Tired Old Man

Thank God the week is done. I am so fucking done with the week.

So much stupidity, so much drama, so little reprieve.

Sadly, not even today.

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I like drawing the line between personal time, and work time. Part of the reason of this is the [gradual] realisation of several points of reality:

• Workers sell their availability for the price of the compensation;
• No one is truly indispensable;
• There is rarely any [uncompensated] work that requires ``instant'' responses to; and
• Power trippers are gonna power trip.

As a result, I really hate it when people want to use one of the many informal direct-communication tools (like WhatsApp, Telegram) as their primary means of conducting business.

Apart from the sheer disruption to personal time if one is dumb enough in this age to not have a separate cellphone number for work, there are also other important business reasons why this is a bad idea. The most important of which is the difficulty of maintaining a paper trail of events/decisions that were made---many of these communication tools lack an easy to export log, and even if they do, the fact that they border on the informal register makes the meandering conversation hard to distill down to the actual important point.

Not to mention the false narrative of how email-spam is annoying while somehow getting random notifications from these chatting programs isn't, especially since how one can actually set up filters to channel unimportant emails into different folders for most of the email clients/providers but cannot do the same for chat logs.

``MT why are you bringing this up here?''

No reason.

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Previously, I talked about doing ``arts and crafts'' in the form of restoring the colour of the carvings on my dizi. I used the gold Pentel acrylic paint, and it had good results.

What I didn't mention was that I had bought a neon(?) green one (also Pentel acrylic) too, for some of the carvings that were filled with green. I tried using that, and the results were disappointing.

The green one didn't go into the crevices well, and even when they did, they looked nothing like the colour that they held when squeezed out. I don't know if it is because the green one was less viscous than the gold one (it didn't feel that way), or that the green just isn't as opaque as the gold one when spread thin enough [into the crevices], or that the particular formulation for green wasn't as ``sticky'' to stay in the crevices of the carvings.

In other words, the green was a failure, and a SGD 2.50 lesson.

Ah well.

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The Summer Steam sale is in full swing, and I was angry for quite a while when I couldn't purchase the stuff I wanted to.

After ding-donging with Steam Support (yes, they exist and actually work, unlike Grab that stiffed me out of SGD 15.00 voucher use because their stupid app allowed me to apply it after the ride was booked and not before by trapping me in AI chatbot hell), the problem was found: Command & Conquer™ The Ultimate Collection (sale price of SGD 11.48). Take that off, and it works.

Of course, ``today'' I got Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection for SGD 6.22, but bearing in mind that it doesn't have... I don't know what.

The main purpose is to play some C&C, having not really played it before, for cheap.

Aaanyway, the thing I want to gush over is not C&C nor Steam Support, but Hades.

How could I have missed out on this?

Maybe it's because of my dissatisfaction with a similar game like Hyper Light Drifter. I like rogue-likes, but I prefer it when I have time to think. Same reason why Crypt of the NecroDancer didn't jive well with me (maybe I'll revisit it again...).

But Hades... it is actually fun! There is some meta-progression that helps nullify some of the pain from the real-time gameplay (I'm looking at you, Binding of Isaac!), and there's an actual story. I've been having too much fun just romping around thrashing the underworld in Hades.

``MT, what changed your mind?''

Reine played Hades, she had fun, and it looked fun.

That said, I also pulled the trigger and get Blue Prince, for the same reason, despite the whole ``dynamic puzzles rogue-like urrghhhh'' pain.

And that pretty much summarises my Summer Steam sale adventures.

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Lastly, officially I'm fat. I've slacked off my mass-tracking for three months, and am 80 kg now.

It sucks.

Back to OMAD and the control measures again.

Till the next update.