So at some point between then and now, I finally concluded that I needed to live again. This meant taking control of my life once more, instead of just floating about with the proverbial tides, and allowing my meat-body to rot away due to a distinct lack of care---the loss of the one day work-from-home per week is not an excuse to stop any form of physical activity that is necessary for ensuring that my meat-body is in fine working form.
For the moment, we'll just leave that heart thing alone; I mean the whole ``relation/date-ship-thing'', not cardio.
I went for a comprehensive health screening after not having done one for nearly six years. The results... are as expected. High LDL, high BMI, raised eosinophil counts---the usual markers of a fat fuck and a guy with chronic atopic dermatitis. Since it has been so long, I also added extra stuff for screening, including a resting ECG, an abdominal ultrasound, and a treadmill cardio-stress test.
Everything except the cardio-stress test has shown things that are within range. Nothing wrong with the cardio-stress test; results aren't released as at time of this post.
The whole experience was sub-par. The group that ran it was Minmed Group, and it made everything operate out of its mobile app. And the mobile app is terrible. It informed me that that for my first location for the screening, fasting was unnecessary unless I had the abdominal ultrasound. So, cool, I just did my usual of not eating breakfast and showed up.
No ultrasound. Strike one.
Okay... I was then briefed on site that I needed to book a location off-site to get the rest of my screening packages on the app. Alright, I pulled up the mobile app, and saw that it was either Minmed at Paragon, or Minmed at Jewel.
Jewel was a little closer to me, so I chose that to do the tests. Picked a day where I had a leave applied too.
And on the day I arrived, I was told that I could not do the treadmill test because there was no registered nurse present to do it.
I blinked. Hard.
``I know I'm early, did you mean you don't have a Registered Nurse now, or today?''
``I mean today.''
Stupid app allowed me to book the location despite this... limitation. Strike two.
I did all the other tests, and wrangled with the customer service rep at Minmed Jewel to book that last treadmill test. It was eventually done, and I had to choose yet another day that I had originally taken leave to do other stuff. And when I finally went for the treadmill test, the sonographer on duty told me that this whole ordeal that I had underwent was not uncommon.
So, here's my semi-public rant about it.
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On 2026-03-28, I went for my first hololive Production concert, dressed in the TAKOD.EX hoodie that I had gotten some time back. This one was Drawn to Dawn, and features two of my favourite VTubers Ninomae Ina'nis, and Takanashi Kiara, both of hololive English -Myth-. I didn't fly all the way to LA just to see them, but instead took part in the cinema live-streaming event that was made available. I could only go on the day 1 concert of the 2-day concert, but it was a WAHnderful experience. I met some dude who was chilling there early, and we talked about hololive excitedly while waiting for the doors of Golden Village Suntec to open. We were given a button as an official souvenir from the cinema live-stream event, and a couple of other roaming hololive fans were giving out stickers and keychains of holo-natsu key chains of the Myth ladies.
I managed to ``6--7'' some folks because the halls for the event were Hall 6 and Hall 7. 😏 Then I did it again by asking about the "rocking grandma", which was just ``roku nana'' in Japanese. 😏
The concert experience in the cinema was amazing! The weeb crowd came out in full force, with their light sticks, chants, singalongs with the pieces, among other things. Singing along, chanting along, screaming along with everyone was a great experience, and it did feel like I was out there in LA together with the rest of them. The KFP and Takodachis of SIN city came out in full force, and a WAHnderful time was had by all.
If they did more concert watch-alongs like this for other hololive Production events, I think I can find myself coming along for them.
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I completed Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, choosing the ``full cure'' ending for my male-V streetkid run. It was a bittersweet ending, but it felt more right than the other available endings. V is no longer the ace-mercenary in this ending, but keeps his life, in a sort of back cycling back to the beginning way. As what Misty said in this ending, we just fade into the background once more, joining the multitude who never even got a foothold towards being the kind of Legend that V had underwent.
After all, what else can one seek after reaching the pinnacle, eh?
In some ways, that is the general sense of what I am personally facing in the real world these days. I vaguely remembered someone saying something to the effect of:
Being an adult is about slowly losing all the dreams and goals that one might once have, upon realising that limitations and restrictions are as real as they are numerous.And this is true even for someone who never really had a major ambition like me.
``MT, you have no ambition? Surely you kid!''
No I'm not. Thus far, much of the ``magic'' that I pulled off was out of spite and not ambition---some dickhead said something nasty to me, effectively declaring that I was incapable in some way of doing something, which ended up pissing me off enough just to do the said thing out of spite, to not only succeed, but to do so superlatively.
There isn't a bone of ambition in me; I was not born in the right family to have that, and never sought the types of environment that would foster that. And even when I was in CMU doing my undergraduate studies, probably the most competitive place that I had been personally, I never really sought to be the number one; just being there among folks of a similar predilection was already good enough for me to be in a new happy place, and that's also knowing that there were wizards there who were at least ten times more potent than I am, and of course never really acknowledging whether I was even potent to begin with.
Even my GP tutor who wrote one of my recommendation letters was giving me the stink eye about how I could have been better off in a more competitive place like RJC instead of the VJC that I was in. I just shrugged at her---competition has its place; retrospectively, I think that I preferred a more harmonious and cooperative approach over competition, preferring to raise everyone up instead of forging ahead whilst leaving others behind in the dust.
If I run ahead, I'd be alone, and will have to face everything alone. Truly I will be faster, but I cannot go as far as when I run together with everyone else, with each person supporting one another and boosting each other, complementing our weaknesses so that as a group, we can run the full marathon in tandem, since eventually even the best of us will face scenarios where their skills are outmatched by the environment, and not necessarily because we are unskilled, but that there are too many skilled tasks that need to be done that a single person is physically unable to keep up with.
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In other news, Eirian-VI has her firmware updated to 5.19.2. 😫 You gain some, you lose some.
Biggest gain: colours in PDFs are finally rendered in full colour instead of some grayscale thing, while still having that auto-margin cropping thing going on. Biggest loss: E-books now have weirder margin issues and stranger rendering outcomes, like excessively wide line heights and what-not.
This meant that the old workflow of converting CBR/CBZ comics to .mobi for viewing on Eirian-VI needs to be rejigged to convert into PDFs instead, and even then, PDFs that are limited to be no more than 200 MB to avoid breaking things.
There was allegedly a 5.19.3 release that addresses some of the losses (including a battery drain issue that I don't seem to have noticed), but that release was bug-ridden to the point of it having to be recalled. Unfortunately, the Kindle series does not have the ability to restore previous firmware releases, and so the early birds who had installed 5.19.3 will find themselves stuck with it till a fix is released.
Word through the grapevine is that Amazon has been ``vibe-coding'' these firmware updates, which resulted in all these issues. How true, I don't know, but it does sound plausible, given all the other information that has been coming out of the company as a whole (job cuts all over the place, and massive pushing of AI for everything).
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I think that's about what I want to talk about for today. I'm in the middle of Kingdoms of the Dump, which I am enjoying very much, but word on the street is that the last Act was not very well-done.
I might bail out at that point---we'll see. So far it is still charming.
Till the next update, I suppose.
