Freestylin' dizi

Wow. I've not had that much fun at a performance for a long time.

Yesterday, I was part of the TGCO crew playing at a wushu/taiji exhibition event organised by Hui Taiji Training Centre out at Heartbeat@Bedok. The main event was 《师傅出马》, where different taiji masters went on stage to demonstrate their kata (yes, I'm mixing terminology). Our role from TGCO was to play accompaniment music so that their demonstration wouldn't be too dry.

Traditionally, I think they would be playing some pre-selected music over the PA system like some kind of dance set up, with the sound engineer doing the necessary fade out at the end.

This time round though, we had quite a few pieces (several brand new!) prepared beforehand. We had roughly six weeks or so to get ready, and even then, the process was more harrowing than normal, mostly because of the need to match the durations of the pieces that we were playing against the estimated time of the kata for each of the twenty or so masters. It was pretty messy as the original score had to be deconstructed into parts that could be repeated ad nauseam in case of overruns, and even with all the preparatory work, we still ended up being lost in the woods for some of the pieces, with just the bass and rhythm marching forward while all the melodists were confused. That wasn't helped with confusing signals put forth by the conductor during the actual run itself, since even she sometimes messed up where we were repeating from, due to having to actually pay attention to the goings-on of the kata on stage in order to control both the beat as well as when to do a roll cut off.

Overall, we did fine.

While much of all the preparatory work wasn't surprising to me, having done project-based performances before, it was something that the rest of the orchestra were not used to. The cadence in which the piece needed to be quickly understood and rehearsed, lots of adjustments as the pieces were recorded, timed, and reworked to figure out how to match the actual kata durations, and not to mention the even more pressing need for folks to actually pay close attention to the conductor for once---these were definitely new for many of the players because they were used to a more social-style rehearsal, where we'd spend the 2 hours of rehearsals going through just one or two pieces. I have nothing against that social-style rehearsal, but having the orchestra stretch their experiences through this more frenetic pace was definitely a good plus for them. Maybe this might inspire them to actually pay more attention to the conductor, and to perhaps build up their foundational musicianship skills.

The actual fun part of the performance that I had was the execution. It was messy, it was hilarious broken with us being lost in the woods, but it all worked out well. There were three points in the performance where there was nothing but the on-stage overseas master whom we never really interacted with doing his kata, then Justinn on the drums, and me on some dizi. And that was it---the master did his thing, Justinn kept time and rhythm on the drums, while I freestyled on the dizi based on what I was seeing on stage, and what Justinn was providing as the beat. I was so locked in that the 3 minutes, and later on 4 minutes simply passed on by in a blink. I think it was the first time that the orchestra witnessed one of us (me in this case) actually freestyling at a performance ``live'', and they were impressed. Someone even made a wry comment on how ``it was obvious who had been practising and who hadn't''.

Just don't ask me to re-play what I played---I have absolutely no idea. All I remembered was the first piece was an energtic and fast piece in F-minor for the halberd demonstration, while the second is in C-minor with lower and longer notes for the fists demonstration, all improvised on an E♭ bangdi, with the first using C-major fingering, and the second using G-major fingering (flute fingering nomenclature).

``But MT, you said three? There were only two being mentioned!''

The last one was sort of a scam. The item was definitely on the schedule, and it involved ``chi sau'' or ``kokyu ho'' for two people, but there was no indication of what music to play. Then Justinn jumped in to drum, and then she started staring at me from her vantage point in front.

Ah hell, I had to play. So I just grabbed my D beidadi and improvised something in B-minor, with lots of low and long notes.

Successful performance aside, the location was hot and humid being located outdoors. I was sweating like crazy, and thankfully I always had my trusty 1/2-inch Micropore surgical tape. The Micropore tape is carefully stuck near the embouchure hole of the dizi where the upper chin/bottom of the lower lip rests to reduce slippage that can happen due to excessive amounts of sweat. This is an old trick I learnt from working with concert flutes.

All in all, I had a lot of fun at this performance. All I could remember in the build up to the event while travelling there on the chartered bus was this exchange in one of the John Wick movies:

John: Last words, Winston?
Winston: Just have fun out there.

And yes, I had fun out there.

Till the next update.

Keeping EOL Python3.9 Alive in Vim for Black

I'm a bit torn about this entry. Is it considered ``retro'' if we're talking about a system that is on the edge of being abandoned but not wholly yet?

Leaving that thought aside for the moment, let's jump in.

For autoformatting Python source code, my autoformatter of choice is Black, with the only modification of setting the maximum width to 80 instead of whatever number they set.

My text editor of choice is vim, which is Vi Improved.

My POSIX-y environment of choice on Windows is Cygwin.

The problem is that Cygwin has been odiously slow in updating packages. Perhaps it is due to a lack of maintainers, or a maybe a lack of interest ever since Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) became a more reliable thing.

For instance, the system-Python version is more or less stuck at 3.9, which resulted in my Python on Cygwin patches list to bring in later versions of Python 3 to allow more modern tooling to run. This remains true even when the Cygwin installer is now attempting to auto-install Python 3.12.

Moving backwards, due to the end-of-life of Python 3.9, Black has moved on too, which made my favourite text editor in Cygwin (i.e. vim) flip out when it tries to run Black.

There are several steps to the fix.

1. Use only the vim scripts available for 25.11.0;
2. Ensure that pip is around 25.3;
3. Update .vimrc to have the line let g:black_use_virtualenv=0;
4. Do a pip install black using that version and then run Black in vim for the first time.

Once all those are done, the pip version can be safely updated to whatever may work.

The reasons are multi-fold. vim for Cygwin is compiled with the Python 3.9 ABI in place, which means that changing the default Python 3 environment leads to nothing but crashes. pip beyond version 26 drops support for Python 3.9 too, and that crash is even more ridiculous---dataclass suddenly appears with the slots named argument, which doesn't exist in Python 3.9.

So that's about it.

What a bloody mess...

``Do Not Outthink the Room''

``Do not outthink the room.''

I have been feeding a controlled GPT-5.5 model with all kinds of writings that I have done, and despite the rather stochastic and sycophantic nature, one thing that stood out to me was the phrase that I started this post on. The context here is about me floating the thought of seeking therapy as a way of making sense of some of the nonsense in my head, and asking the model what are some things that I should be paying attention to.

Do I really think that much?

Maybe it's just one of those over-correction things, where ``I feel'' is considered less rational than ``I think'', and it has become some kind of core mantra that powers how I operate, at least in the perception of others.

The truth is, I don't think that I'm defaulting to thinking these days. Many times, I actually rely a little more heavily on my ``feelings'', especially the times when I start going ``My inner-Cassandra says...''. It is not an abandonment of thought process, but a manifestation of internalised experience and thinking that ends up as an intuition-driven process instead.

But that's just the side topic that I found interesting to share here. The real meat and potatoes on why I was even contemplating therapy is what the stupid GPT-5.5 has helped me to finally articulate it better: am I at peace, or am I resigned?

In the old days where I was still part of an active care group in church, there was always a sharing session once a month. I always felt bad during those times; while everyone was sharing about how their lives were getting wrecked by one calamity or another, I just had nothing to share. It felt embarrassing. Folks were thinking that I was lying or hiding something, a type of emotion vampire that sucked out everyone's vulnerabilities, and returned nothing.

But... I just didn't have bad things happen to me. I was so embarrassed by the whole affair that eventually I just let everything else overwhelm me and just withdraw from the care group. Sure, some part of me was always wary of talking about myself, but in earnestness, I didn't face any of the troubles that the rest of the care group was facing. I wasn't suffering from some incurable disease, my parents were doing okay, job was fine for the most part, I had no relationships to have problems with, and since I liked lots of solitary activities like reading, writing, and playing some single player video games, I lived in a very ``safe'' way with literally nothing to talk about, or at least, nothing of the ``human interest'' nature to talk about.

Deviation aside, the question of whether I was being at peace, or being resigned is an interesting question that the GPT-5.5 brought up. At some fundamental level, I have a type of contentment with how life has turned out, more or less. The ``deep wound'' that GPT-5.5 suggested I have revolved around my re-building of high and deep defences against being open to anybody ever since the break up of more than half a decade ago? It claims that I was being resigned rather than being at peace, since apparently I'm still talking about that shit some donkey years later.

This is where I scratch my head and seriously consider if therapy is the right approach. (It's a rhetorical question---it should be the right approach, if I can find the right therapist, and more importantly, not outthink the room, i.e. unconciously evading questions through seemingly generating piles of insights through sheer brute force thinking without internalising.)

But is it really a problem? Granted, the GPT-5.5 model sees nothing other than the writing that I have done, and even then, it is likely to be an abysmally small subset of all the writing I've done. It knows nothing about the actual life I'm living (yes, I do have some friends whom I meet up here and there, and yes I do spontaneous shit ever so often, and yes I actively partake in creative endeavours instead of just doing ``doom and gloom'' writing in this bloody vent/rant blog of mine).

Ah... to be forced to reconsider strange positions due to the musings of a statistically trained machine model. I'm still trying to figure out how much of the generated stuff I should accept as good analysis, and how much of it is just bullshit sycophancy; hard to tell these days, and it is getting ever so much harder. The irony is that now, I am starting to find understanding people to be much easier than understanding what the heck these generative AI models mean.

In some loose sense, I think that all these uncertainty is the price to pay for eschewing the opinion of the majority, and to live as free as one can within the confines of the society that one is embedded in. As long as I don't feel any of the social pressures, I think it is fine to be the way I am. After rall, something is abnormal/requires ``correction'' if there is a corresponding decreased quality of life from the particular characteristic/activity. Yes, I get damned tired most of the time, but such is life---while most people run on tracks that others have already set for them, I'm literally carving my own path among the unknown forests that few tread; par for the course.

That said, I should still be careful that I don't end up going astray. I'm not too fearful for that because my old Super-Ego was never too weak to begin with, and ever since I've been a believer, knowing that God is there for me through Jesus his Son just gives me a certain kind of inexplicable comfort, even though I'm not the ``Jesus adventures hug everyone in sight!'' type of Christian. Did that old relationship that went away hurt me badly? Now, many donkey years later, I'll say, yes, it did hurt me pretty badly. It hurt me badly enough that it turned me into a completely different person. I know I'm not as hurt now as I was a few years ago, because I'm not falling as deeply into that limerance. That phase of my life has closed, and I should really let sleeping dogs lie.

The real question for me now is, what counts as ``moving on''? Jryy fbzrbar unf boivbhfyl zbirq ba ol orvat gur frys-fnpevsvpvat zvffvbanel va n sbervta ynaq, qvgpuvat nyzbfg rirel bgure pbaarpgvba gung pbhyq unir orra unq. Naq gur rkphfr jbhyq or gung vg jnf ubj gurl jrer oebhtug hc, naq gurersber gurer jnf ab fhecevfr gung vg jbhyq or gurve jnl bs yvsr, ``Tbq yrnqvat gur jnl'' ernfbaf abgjvgufgnaqvat. Nz V ovggre ng gung? Bs pbhefr V nz---gurl zbirq ba, naq yrsg zr va gur shpxvat qvgpu nyy uheg. Rnpu gvzr gurl ernpu bhg, V unir nyjnlf unir n zvaq gb whfg gryy gurz gb shpx bss... ohg V pnaabg sbe fbzr ernfba. Pnyy vg jrnxarff, pnyy vg sbetvirarff, pnyy vg jungrire---gur jbeqf qb abg zrna nf zhpu nf bar zvtug guvax.

But what about me? What is ``moving on''? Climbing the dumb-as-rocks corporate ladder based on whatever ``skills'' that I have amassed through both formal training, and work experience of being a manager? Branch out into the land of the non-profit where the intentions are great but the governance are at times sketchy, and the pay is non-commensurate to the market rate in the emotional blackmail? Get deeper into church work when my personality is that of an aloof loner who left his care group because he couldn't feel like he connected with them due to his apparent ``no issues in life'' outlook? Joining a political party to help make the change that he has always been bitching about, even though he knows full well that he'll never be electable due to his aloof and potentially acerbic nature that screams elitism even though he is really none of those things?

Maybe talking to a therapist might be the best answer after all. I don't think I have enough information to break through this stale mate, and a new perspective might be what is needed. Therapists are nothing to be fearful of after all---I had gone to them to set my head straight before when I was still studying as a means of coping with all the new stressors that I had never dealt with.

Time to go hunt me a therapist then. Till the next update.

P.S.: I don't even know if anyone else other than bot-scrapers are reading this blog nowadays. It's been 20 years man...

Funereal #4

Ahem.

I'm lying in a donated coffin. There's hardly anyone else who is there in the small viewing gallery, again donated. The donors are the church that I have spent most of my adult life in since I was saved. Many know of me, but hardly anyone knows me, because I had never really tried to reach out---the pastor once told me how, and it was easy, but I never knew what to do after that because there was always a wall of intellectual nonsense that separated me from them. God knows I could care and love, but not in the way that any normal person would recognise---maybe it was better called service than love. I was always at church, serving quietly in a not-so-quiet way as a musician in the music ministry. But no one ever knew me, and perhaps even myself as well. The pastor is there, maybe out of obligation, maybe out of pity. He says a few unimportant words, and I get cremated. And that was all there was with my earthly body.