It's now December. Like everything in life, nothing happens for a long time, and then many things just surge within a short period of time.
That is basically what happened at work. I won't talk about it here though. Instead, I will muse about the things that had been floating in my head on and off over the past few days.
Also, this was started sometime late last night, before I got completely side-tracked chasing down various rabbit holes (like changing the default system font of Windows 11, a process that was in-built, and easy), and deciding at stupid o'clock that it was the perfect time to rename more of my music files so that they don't eat up the 260-character path length limit while also satisfying some sequencing constraints from the dumbness of music players (yes, it's you, Foobar2000, for some damn reason).
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How does an all out psychotic break down feel like? I sort of understand that being in psychosis effectively means that one has lost connection with reality, but what went through my mind was, what is that supposed to mean?
Is it a scenario where the regular implicit understanding of physics just goes awry? Or is it ``only'' just hallucinations and delusions that are akin to a ``day-time'' version of some messed up dreams?
No, it's not about me trying to get into a state of psychosis, but more of how do I know that I am currently not in a state of psychosis in the first place.
That last bit came about because I was having some rather strange-ish dreams... that felt more real than the reality that I am currently in.
They weren't bad dreams---they seemed to present the ``could have been''. A different kind of future, whether a hypothetical one from the past where the ``timelines diverged'', or of a future that is yet to come should I choose differently now.
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There was a day where I saw a dude who showed an MRI of his brain. What immediately struck me was just how close the brain-stem was to... the parts that one would normally be aware of (throat, and tongue). It's obvious that the brain-stem needs to pass close to these other commonly ``sensed'' body parts since we have not developed wireless connections to the rest of the body, but the realisation of the close proximity (all within 2 inches) was mind-boggling.
Imagine that as you are swallowing that bolus of macerated food, that the nerve bundle that links up to the rest of your body is just behind all that, under protection from the bones that make up the spinal column. Then imagine that if you slam your tongue backwards hard enough, you can probably slam the nerve bundle against the bones too.
Food going down in front of the dangling spinal cord bundle.
Trippy.
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I think that the recent few years saw me massing more music than I had done since my undergraduate days. I was collecting music from my childhood (yes, very clichéd), mostly a mixed bag of 1980s and 1990s mando-pop music that originates primarily from Taiwan and Singapore-Malaysia, as well as various English oldies (between the 1950s to 1990s) of the pop-genre. Then I kind of slowed down hard after that---there just wasn't anything worth looking for(?).
Now, some twenty odd years later, I find myself hunting out the vintage stuff (think Prince, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson), and new things (like The Hu, a whole stack of hololive Production materials, Bruno Mars, Sabrina Carpenter, Zara Larsson). I've also taken the opportunity to tweak the naming conventions of the files to deal simultaneously with the limited path length, as well as the sequencing problem of the tracks---I know I blamed Foobar2000 above, but considering that I like loading entire directory trees into a single playlist, it is not even wrong that the playback order is governed by the lexicographic order of the file names as opposed to the sort order of the track number.
What really cheesed me off is that the mobile version of Foobar2000 does not handle sorting the playlist by any criteria after it is loaded. I suppose they are expecting users to use the Media Library for all these finagling, but I don't (the Media Library is objectively more useless for anything other than answering queries on ``which music was that with this fragment of a title'', and even then it is still hampered by the IME that is needed---this is true for both the deskop and mobile versions of Foobar2000).
But new music! Cornering the heavy tail of the music from my childhood stuff is getting much easier, since I do not need to rifle through shady music CD sellers with various ``compilation'' CDs that have no clear provenance---as long as I can remember some unique-ish sub-string of the lyrics, the search engine can get me close enough.
Then it becomes a case of how well I can recall and render the lyrics (quality-wise, we're hardly going to find anything better than OPUS sampled at 48 kHz for 128 kbps unless we put on our tricorn hat and sail the seven seas). And I tell you, trying to recall stuff when one's barely trying to actively memorise said stuff back in the day for future recall is hard.
Till date, there are still lost music that I don't know until I hear it and go ``That's it! That's the piece! Damn!''. See 《羞答答的玫瑰静悄悄地开》 as an example---it took me a damn long time to figure out that this is the piece.
But old stuff aside, the new stuff from the land of VTubers is astounding. hololive Productions is a music powerhouse, and to fully embrace it... lies madness. Here's the official stuff that they sell (primarily original music), and here's a fan wiki of original songs.
Chuck in covers, and the madness is going to set it.
But hololive Productions aside, here's a great indie-ish VTuber singer to follow: Alpha Betta. She does frequent karaokes, and she sounds wonderful too. And she probably needs the love from new viewers compared to the larger and more established folks.
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And that's about it. I'm not apologetic about all the non-sequitur---despite what it may seem, it has been a hard week that just passed.
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