Had I Chosen Wrong?

So here's a quandary. To have people empathise with one on something, one needs to share/talk about the said something. In contrapositive terms, if one does not share/talk about the said something, then people will not [have a reason to] empathesize with one on the something.

The quandary comes when the said something either cannot be easily talked about because of a lack of the appropriate concretisation of the said thing, or because it is something that is bound by other rules/regulations akin to omertà. At that point, what can one do?

Of course, the easiest recourse is to pray---to speak to God. Prayer is good, prayer is necessary. The most pious will also say that prayer is sufficient, but I'm more base, and therefore am unsure. Yes, we are but sojourners through this world, with our Lord holding our places for the next world once He raises us from the death that we all undergo having lived out our lives in this world.

Meanwhile though, there is this pesky situation where we're still living in this world, with all its sin-sickness, and while our mortal bodies slowly age out and decay.

How then is one to live?

Personally, I just suck it up, and at various times, shout in to the void that is the 'net through this blog, and others. But I know the limits of the medium---I can keep on shouting into it forever, even as the bot-masters try to squeeze out whatever bits of originality they can from a source that is still untainted by generative AI output, but nothing ever happens from all these shouting, at least not directly.

The best that I can hope for is that with enough expunging of the negativity that is within my immediate thought-space, I can generate enough capacity to take on more of the new negativity that is out there that is coming straight at me, without completely losing all my marbles.

``But MT, that's sounds stupid---why do you even put yourself in the position where absorbing negativity is a thing in the first place?''

Not a day passes by where I do not ask myself this question. There were two moments in my life that I could have changed paths, one back in 2009, and one back in 2021, and in either, I came back to the same one of operating in the ICT/AI space in Singapore.

Had I chosen wrong?

Ass

Ass. A royal pain in the ass.

Okay, since the last entry where I called out the bot-masters who have been unsympathetically hopping IP addresses but still with the same spoofed user agent information of ``Chrome 125.0/OS X/800×600'', things have been going all over the place for me.

The most recent pain in the ass (literally), is getting hit with gastroenteritis. Not fun, and not sure why I even got hit with this, but I am assuming that it has something to do with the increased stress levels that have muted my immune response, which resulted in the rise of the effects of the nasty-ass bugs that have always been lurking within the body, ready to strike when the forces that usually keep them at bay have lowered their vigilance.

The previous two nights with respect to gastroenteritis wasn't pleasant. The first night (Thursday night), I had very fitful sleep, having to sprint out of ``bed'' to evacuate my bowels. Then I messed up, having the foresight to wear more pants ``just in case'', but forgetting to realise that I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor (hence ``bed''). So when I finally got into some semblence of deep sleep, a bad leak occurred, and I ended up having to do late night washing, and subsequent sunning of the very lightly soiled (just fluids that made it through the four layers of cloth) mattress.

Last night, I just slept on the floor hard core, no mattress. Drugged up with the right types of meds, I slept fine, without any embarrassing leakages and what-not. The day between the nights was spent sleeping fitfully on the same floor, in a bid to try and recover whatever missing sleep that I had from the night prior, and to just avoid having to think/be conscious about the bloatedness and discomfort that came from gastroenteritis.

Today, I feel better. Gassy as one can get, burping and farting (I don't trust anything that comes out of that orifice!). Head's feeling less woozy to the point that I can sit here and start writing about the nonsense that I had undergone. It also meant that I had to forego the penultimate rehearsal that was held this week for the upcoming concert on 2025-10-25. That is fine---there's one more rehearsal this upcoming Friday, just before the performance. And considering that I'm playing on Davie, a bass flute, we're good, especially since I had fixed the compacted score for one of the pieces---I had missed out an entire row, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that.

------

If one had checked out my domain recently, one would notice that there's a new field that is located in the lower right corner that talks about when the page was ``created''. And a closer look at the usual ``updated'' field on the lower left corner would also reveal that its form has changed somewhat. If the dates look like some ISO-8601 nonsense, it means that the underlying Javascript file is still the very old cached version---it is best to force refresh without using the cache to get the updated version.

Anyway, this is actually part of the mild adjustment of how I handle the ``fuzzification'' of dates, and the realisation that despite having the timestamp of when I updated a page, the provenance (particularly on when the page first came about) was missing. This is something that I had been thinking of doing for some time, but before the changes that I did to conform to the ``new'' security headers, I had no natural space to put that information. With the external validation links for the page with respect to its HTML5/CSS standards conformity having to be retired, I now have the space to put that information, and thus that's where the ``created'' timestamp (with suitable fuzzification) is located.

``But MT, how'd you get these information? Isn't it hard to track when the page is first created?''

See, this is where having my entire website hosted on my own source code repository comes into play. Each page has their own history stored across the commits/revisions/time, and it was just a boring case of finding timestamp of the earliest incarnation of the file. I did that over an evening, and slapped it all together, and finally have what you see today.

And yes, I have this website for at least 17 years as at today. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me on the 'net really hasn't tried hard enough. Hell, this blog has been in existence since 2006, so there's really no excuse whatsoever.

It is the same with finding me by cellphone number---that stupid number has not changed since 2003. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me... haven't really tried.

------

``So MT, you were talking about wanting to cry in some recent post, and yet you cannot. How's that going?''

Oh... I still want to cry, don't get me wrong. But it's getting less terrible, at least for now. Some semblence of a direction has been provided, with some form of assurance being made by someone whom we have little reason to distrust. The gears of bureaucracy have finally started grinding, and it is still a matter of time before we truly see what/where we are heading.

Incidentally, I wrote an extractor specifically to pull out Psalms from ESV, and have been reading through it. Psalms is an interesting form of wisdom literature---they are songs that teach us, songs that show the entire range of emotion of the human condition, while at the same time, reminding us of who/how God is to us.

It is comforting in many ways, and I would like to think of Psalms as being less studied as compared to say Isaiah, Luke or even Romans.

Because how does one go about studying 150 seemingly disparate poems that have crappy meter due to the translation from the original Hebrew to English?

And I think that's all that I want to yammer about for today. This weekend is a long one that is supposed to be relaxing, and I fully intend to try and relax in it, despite the ongoing troubles with gastroenteritis.

May God allow me to heal before the next segment where I need to run hard once more. Amen.

👀

Hey bots.

I see you. Don't be a dick.

I Feel Like Crying

Now, I feel like crying. But somehow, I can only cry inside, just not outside, even though I can feel every inch of myself wanting to cry.

You know how one knows that bad news is coming, and then one readies oneself to receive it, and when the harbinger claims that the bad news release has been postponed, and more specifically, that fucked up feeling of pressure, sadness, depression, and listlessness that comes from that?

That's how I'm feeling now.

That's how I've been feeling for the past few months.

I wanna kill myself. I wanna kill everyone around me first, then kill myself. I wanna kill everyone who had been ``playing'' around with important shit first, then maybe everyone around me, before myself.

That's how I have been feeling for the past few months.

I can't wallow in a corner---for some reason, everyone needs me to be strong for them.

But who becomes strong for me?

If there is any reason why I envy folks who are married, is that like Jaeger pilots in Pacific Rim, they can share the neural load.

I have to eat all the shit myself, and smile while doing so. Because everyone is relying on me.

``But MT, don't you have God on your side?''

If you said that mockingly, fuck you and the horse you came on. If you said that in earnest, I'll just add that if I went the way that God intends, then everyone who relies on me will get fucked, for we are mere sojourners on this plane of existence---we live in the world, but we are not of the world.

To [mis]quote Paul the Apostle, to go the way that God wants is for my gain, but it does not edify those around me. And that isn't exactly a good thing.

``MT, seek help.''

The problems do not go away if I talk to someone---everyone has their own pile, and frankly I feel like a phoney just sharing what I am going through even as I hear what others are. Real people are really dying and/or suffering, while all I am going through is ``in my head''.

All the news that are coming out about SIN city are not helping matters---day in and day out, all we are seeing is the proclamation that everything is going to shit. I put out a brave front, but the more I hear/read/see what's being reported, the more I get depressed and just want to be home with the Lord and say fuck it to this sin-sick world.

This feels like when I was nearing twenty-one, and thinking about how I couldn't see past twenty-five, except probably worse since the size and amount of responsibilities that I have now are greater than before.

``MT, just chill.''

Why do you think I'm saying things here then, if not to try and expunge stuff from my head?

Still can't cry though.