April Lah

Ah. It has been a while. Feels funny/good to be writing out here again.

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.

------

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.

------

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.

------

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).

------

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.

Ball x Pit

Well, at least the bots are not hiding themselves, and are being honest about where they are from.

I still don't like the crawling though. But what can one do when one is using a ``free'' almost-always available tool for blogging?

Anyway, it's finally November. NaNoWriMo the organisation has imploded, so NaNoWriMo the event is kind of dead, at least officially. Personally, I probably should continue with the whole ``writing a novel in a month'' deal, but realistically, it's a nice change to do something a little different.

Last month was a doozy. Much happened at work (I won't talk about it other than pointing out that all the waiting for details is exhausting), and even more happened in not-work. The Great Yamaha has arrived! It's a maple great bass recorder from Yamaha (YRGB-61), and according to Wee Aik, it's the first time he's ever heard/seen anyone order it. Mind you, he's a Yamaha products veteran for nearly two decades, so that statement has way more heft to it than expected.

First impressions of The Great Yamaha are good---the tone is sweet, the range is similar to that of the bass flute. I had a brain fart in my excitement at receiving The Great Yamaha that I forgot that the recorder is tuned by moving the headjoint away from the body---we were trying to tune by adjusting the adjustable boccal.

🤦‍♂️

There is a minor issue that I'll need Sean to help remedy---the felt on one of the bumpers seemed to be a little too thin, making it a little harder to hold down the lever that ought to cover the two linked holes. But that's something for the upcoming Friday.

------

I went and played with Atelier Flute Ensemble (AFE) JB over the previous weekend at the auditorium of Afiniti Medini in Medini Iskandar (it's ``across the road'' from Malaysia's Legoland). It's a nice space, but as an auditorium, it meant that it was better at absorbing sound than acoustically bouncing stuff nicely the way some recital spaces do. I spent two nights over at Yong Kang's mum's place, with Friday and Saturday almost fully locked in on the rehearsal and performance respectively. Yong Kang was a good host, but I think that my ``rock bottom'' expectations from living a mostly monk-ish lifestyle probably threw him off by a lot, giving him some serious anxiety of whether his hosting was adequate.

It was more than adequate, for sure. But let's be real:

• I sleep on a mattress on a floor at home;
• The apartment I live in has no air-conditioner;
• I average about one-and-change meals a day;
• My philosophy to food is usually ``eat to live'';
• Armed with Eirian-VI, I can kill time better than most people; and
• I don't really have this urge to buy random junk.

All in all, my expectations are really ``rock bottom'' due to the way I have chosen to live my life, and not because I was trying to be polite or anything.

I think it really throws people off because there really isn't any other obvious indicator that in addition to acting like a weirdo, I actually do live like one [apparently].

Ah well.

The concert itself was fun---I thoroughly enjoyed playing the repertoire that was put together. Going nuts on the articulation with Davie was something that I had not expected myself to do, but considering some of the crazier dynamics that are written for the low flutes, I think it fully justified. One interesting thing to note was the use of direct amplification on the contrabass flute, as well as us bass flutes---it served as a good alternative to the KFC way of having another friendly low instrument player (contrabass or bass clarinet) to join in. They even had me play something for the demo when they were introducing the flute family---I started with a fragment from 《平湖秋月》 to feature the low-B at the penultimate rehearsal but was told it was too short, so I switched to a transposed version of 《瑶族舞曲》, but then someone made a comment about it being played in an orchestra, so I finally just played a transposed version of 《草原的思念》, all to show off that low-B on the bass flute. I think they liked it.

At the end of the concert was a whole series of photo-taking sessions. I was a part of the main groups, but as everyone else had their friends and families coming up to them for a photo in memory of the event, hardly anyone came to me, and I just sat there and absorbed the environment.

It felt a little melancholic, but it was fine---I felt contented from having played more [bass] flute. The location was not in SIN city, and therefore I never really felt comfortable trying to get folks from within SIN city to get tickets to travel waaaaaaaaaaay out of the way just to hear me play the bass line. No matter how I swing it, it just sounds ludicrous.

That said, if AFE JB were to have another concert, I would happily join in and play with them, should they still want me.

------

In other news, Ball x Pit is taking time from Silksong, Persona 5, and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 2.

It's Arkanoid combined with Vampire Survivors for the action part, and then there's a bit of Tetris with Plinko for the city-building part (which is a slightly more convoluted mechanism for unlocking new characters and get bonus stat increases---now they involve skill, and feature additional resource gathering/management).

It's fun, and I'm still really new in it. Stay tuned for more information as I [slowly] unlock stuff.

If there's a reason to get a portable hand-held, it might be this one.

------

I've restarted on some digital signal processing work involving the FFT once again. Reason: I needed a better way to extract the chords from sample music files, and I didn't want to rely on some dodgy third party website to do that.

The last time I was experimenting with FFT, I ended up needing scipy and other random-ass Python packages to install. On a Cygwin set up, this is a royal pain in the ass.

The solution is to grab FFTW and libsndfile, and write my own C++ program to do the expensive part of running the FFT, before using Python to do the processing after.

The FFT part is done, and I'm now working on the bucketing of the resultant Discrete Fourier Transform to propose the associated pitches for examination.

But Ball x Pit awaits me!

I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.

First Win in Hades

I feel rotten. A damn headache has been throbbing on and off over the weekend, and I feel rotten about it. Damnation!

Recently, I finished reading Ouran High School Host Club. I think that the manga is much stronger than the anime. The dynamics of Tamaki with his family (father, and grandmother) are much more complex than whatever was portrayed in the anime. I call this the ``Hellsing effect''---where the anime is called into production before the manga has its main story arcs fully resolved, leading to some make-believe storylines just so that the anime can end its run at the correct episode count. The most blatant of this is the comparison of the Hellsing anime against the newer Hellsing OVA---``Incognito'' as the big bad in the anime made no sense to the narrative build up as compared to the final near-pornographic bloodfest showdown between the Major and Sir Integra Hellsing, as their underlings thrash London to fight the war that the washed up ghoul-Nazis of the Major had planned for fifty plus years after the second world war.

``But MT, the source material is almost always richer than the adaptation.''

Yes, that's the point. Which is why we should not be in a rush to make adaptations of stories without knowing how the major arcs' trajectories are heading. I'm not saying that the adaptors are bad---I'm saying that without having the original creator's direction, there will be a jarring change in direction when the plot holes from unresolved story arcs start showing up. Sometimes, even if the original creator is involved, they may not even know where they are heading since they are ``making things up as they go along'' at times (recall that much of the serialised works are paid by some set contract period, in which case the stories need to be crafted at a consistent-enough pace, with sufficient material to ``keep on going'' for the length of the contract). But at least the original creator's general direction can be sought and the plot holes may be resolved amicably within the adaptation.

Ouran High School Host Club is definitely a romantic-comedy, kind of like Kimagure Orange Road, but unlike the latter, I could actually stomach the former without going through hiatuses from reading. I think it's because of the near-surreal comedy that comes from the over-the-top nature of the clash between the high-class society of Ouran High School and the ``commoners' common sense'' deadpan nature of Haruhi/Ranka---it definitely feels more funny than jealousy inducing, even when Hikaru/Kaoru were showing actual jealousy against Tamaki.

All in all, I like the manga. And thanks to Eirian-VI, I can now tackle the offline version of Questionable Content, all 5.6k pages of them as at the crawl. I'm saying this now because The Adventures of Dr McNinja is no longer available at its original form due to the site being attacked. I have my own offline copy (of course), but for those who want to read this masterpiece of 2010s webcomic storytelling, a kind soul has uploaded it to The Internet Archive.

In short, what I mean is this: if there's something on the 'net that you enjoy, and would like to revisit it again in the future, there is no shame to find a way to make a copy of it. Because the adage of ``what goes on the 'net stays there forever'' is patently false.

``MT, what about DRM?''

Heh. What is morally/ethically the right thing to do sometimes has no support in law---in which case the law is not just and needs to be amended. The law is a set of rules that a particular society has agreed to abide by, and if they are created by humans, they can be amended by humans. Whereas morality and ethics are based on stronger absolute values that may only be judged by God---no one save God can change them.

------

I talked about Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum in a post from last month, and I am proud to say that I have finally finished all the 300+ puzzles. The nonogram puzzles were fun, but I preferred those that were associated with the artifacts than the ones that were part of Raden's memories---the former had interesting patterns, while the latter, being some selected part of some pictures that depicted an event Raden was in, seemed to be simpler ones based around basic geometric patterns instead.

So effectively, the memories section felt like filler, and the game would be stronger if they were taken out. But then again, taking them out might reduce the effect of the game as a soft introduction for the casual nonogram lover to the very learned/cultured (literally, not the ironic form of ``cultured'') VTuber that is Juufuutei Raden.

Overall, still loved the game, and am glad that I finished all the puzzles.

------

Ah Hades. I last talked about it nearer the start of the month, and I'm proud to announce my first win of the game.

It took me 60 previous runs to get my first win on the 61st, and it was with a weapon that I never thought I could ever win easily with (the Bow).

I was expecting my first win to be with the Spear---ah well.

The Bow was not easy to fight with---there was long-ish charge time before the attack can be made, and the AOE was quite shit. The damage from the Bow was also bad (but not as terrible as the Rifle I mean Exagryph I mean Adamant Rail). What made this win possible was largely through the power of the RNGod.

Heartbreak Strike gave me more damage with Weak as a curse, which was cool.

Explosive Shot changed the single-shot into a small AOE, but it slowed down the charging rate. This was rectified somewhat with Swift Strike that added back 30% attack rate.

Companion Battie helped me save one Death Defiance that I was about to lose at the boss fight of Elysium (that 2.5k damage against the solo Theseus meant that I could finish him off with one more shot even as my HP was inching to 0).

I could consistently best the Furies (bosses of the first biome of Tartarus), reaching near consistency against Lernie (boss of the second biome of Asphodel), and am inconsistent with Theseus and Asterius (bosses of the third biome of Elysium). Big bossman Hades (boss of Styx) was always hard, and I was only starting to reach his second stage.

The true MVP for the win is Smoldering Air with Aphrodite's Aid. This combination allowed me to spam Aphrodite's Aid consistently about once every 5 s, and the Charm that comes from the boon effectively interrupts Hades' laser attacks. That gave me more opportunities to land hits more often, needing 3/4 less hits than without the effects of Explosive Shot, and avoid damage as I fumble my way through.

And as you can tell in the screenshot of the victory, I got through the barest of my skin right there.

Honourable mention goes to Festive Fog boosted by Scintillating Feast---it added some additional AOE, and gave enough curses with Weak to allow Privileged Status to proc, giving an additional 40% of damage.

To think that I was contemplating whether to turn on God Mode for that 20% damage reduction that would increase by 2 percentage points for each death... there's no real penalty for using God Mode, but it does store the records separately from non-God Mode. I think I'm fine without God Mode, as shown through this first win. I did a meme run with all the Pact of Punishment conditions at Max, and didn't survive for more than one chamber. Bummer. I suppose it's back to the regular mode for now.

This first win is also special because I think this is the first time I actually had a successful run of some rogue-lite in a long while. I don't usually do well in rogue-lites because they tend to get a tad twitchy, and my reflexes are no longer what they were. Meta-progression in Hades is fun compared to say Rogue Legacy because it is so much easier to control, particularly with the meta-progression currency being separate and persistent as compared to in-run currency for in-run progression items.

And now, another 9 more wins to unlock the rest of the story. 💀

------

I wrote a new short story over at my prose blog, and I think that it caught some aspects of a narrative that I was hallucinating about that day. Not sure if it truly achieved what I wanted to say, but I think it is good that I'm writing things other than work reports, slide decks, and rants out here.

I suppose that's about it for now. July is fast reaching an end, and soon, it will be August with all the craziness that the appraisal period brings.

Oh and SIN city celebrates its GOTH BIRTHDAY.

...

I mean 60TH BIRTHDAY. Who the hell capitalises the ordinal suffix letters?

Till the next update.

Big Badda Bang of Words

Ah... end of the week. Final-fucking-ly. The week has been long, for a variety of reasons that I will not go into, because it is (1) boring for most people; and (2) involves too any ``other people'' that it really isn't about me any more.

Instead, let's talk about some accumulated things that I had done.

Not too long ago, I learnt about some new HTTP headers needed for security, along with an online tool to test them. The idea behind these ``security headers'' is to provide server-centric instructions to the client browser to ``know'' what kinds of content (static or executable) are to be considered legitimate from the perspective of the server that the client is connecting to. This is the missing information link that is needed to prevent the class of exploits that starts with a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which includes drive-by malware downloads, page hijacking to siphon off user input (and therefore information). It is an explicit white-list to the client on what the server knows as resources/actions that it needs that the client should pay attention to, ignoring/stopping any that do not follow that whitelist.

Intrigued, I tried setting it up on my personal domain. The HTTP headers were created in a no-brainer way, but the behaviours that they created... broke lots of things.

For starters, there is now a strict segregation of the presentation layer (i.e. the HTML and CSS stuff) from the controller layer (i.e. any executable code, often in the form of JavaScript). One can no longer use the on* family of attributes within the HTML tags to create callbacks for specific actions (notably in my case, the onClick, onChange, and onLoad actions).

That broke enough stuff that I had to rewrite my website to do that, and boy did that take a while.

Also, even in the presentation layer, there was a strict enforcement of splitting out the semi-structured layer from the styling layer (i.e. HTML files cannot have embedded CSS styles, no matter how small, nor when they were inserted (like in original HTML file, or as part of some DOM-tree shenanigans)). It wasn't difficult; it was more annoying than anything else.

But after all that effort, my website works well now, and you can verify the Security Headers with the link.

The eagle-eyed will notice that the new pages no longer have referrals to the CSS/HTML validation links. That's because one of the security headers basically blocks the passing of the forwarding page's URL to the forwarded to URL, which made such validation links impossible to operate in the client browser.

My chief constraint is that I have very little control over how to configure the website server program, so I had to do what I had to do just to keep the 'net gatekeepers happy. Like how I ended up creating a damn sitemap, and having to do up an entire toolchain that minifies and GZips individual pages, all because the damn gatekeeprs of the 'net these days state that all websites are clearly meant for machine-to-machine communication, so the sources of the pages themselves should be mangled for efficient machine-to-machine communication, as opposed to something that is human readable (and therefore learnable from).

Man, the ways of the 'net have changed drastically over the past 25 years.

------

I have the ESV Study Bible in hard copy for a few years now, and have wanted to grind through it slowly but surely as part of my own education on my faith. It's not my first time through the Bible (according to my own loose tracking, I've covered the Bible end-to-end two full times by now). But one of the biggest problems was that the book was an inch thick, and has terrible portability, despite it being the ``personal edition'' and having the general dimensions (not counting the thickness) of an A5 sheet of paper.

An e-book version would work wonders on the portability front.

Crossway has it. Unfortunately, it is terrible to use.

You see, unlike the deadtree version where the ESV text sits in the upper half of the page, and the extensive study notes sit as end notes in the bottom half, the official e-book version treats it like a hypertext document with oversized text, where the footnotes are replaced with links that jump to a completely different part of the binary file, and after a few such jumps, being lost becomes the regular state of things, made worse by being on an e-reader like the Kindle [Colorsoft].

In short, the official e-book sucks.

I had been patiently looking to see if there was a version of the ESV Study Bible that was just a straightforward digitisation of the printed version, with all the information where they are, without having to jump all over the place like a punch drunk monkey.

Let's just say my patience paid off and I got ahold of such a version. There was a problem with the images that made up each scanned page---there was a very strong unsaturated red tinge that made the text contrast terrible.

Ignoring lots of [necessary] intermediate steps, I managed to fix the contrast problem at the image level with the following ImageMagick miniscript/command:

find -type f -iname '*.jpg' \
  -exec magick {} -separate -contrast-stretch 0.5%x66% \
  -combine {}_out.jpg \;

So what this does is that it uses the find command to locate all the image files, and then apply the ``auto-leveller'' on each channel separately, allowing up to 0.5% of the pixels to go ``black'', and up to 66% of the pixels to go ``white''. The 66% is empirically determined through checking the output---the idea is that we want the ``background'' colour of the page to have its unsaturated red plus bleedthrough from the other side's text to ``go away'' (the actual paper is thin enough that there is some bleedthrough in real-life, which of course meant that the scan would yield the same problem, decreasing legibility).

I had tried ImageMagick's -auto-level option before, but it did nothing to the contrast. Using the alternative of

magick {} -colorspace Lab -channel 0 \
  -auto-level +channel -colorspace sRGB {}_out.jpg

brightened the contrast, but did not remove the unsaturated red tinge much. It was only after applying the final incantation I specified in the beginning that I saw results.

And the results were dramatic (I'm not showing them here for obvious reasons), and after running the images through an older version of KCC (I used 7.2.0 instead of whatever is there now because the 7.3.x series broke many things), I had something that worked wonderfully on Eirian-VI, my Kindle Colorsoft. In this case, I needed the colour ability of Eirian-VI since colour is used quite extensively as highlights, and for specific diagrams/illustrations within the ESV Study Bible to explain core concepts.

I said that I left out some necessary intermediate steps. They weren't the focus of this discovery, but were needed because magick could not work on the source file directly to generate the type of output needed. I used an updated version of pypdf that needed pillow, which demanded that one does not update one's Cygwin Python3 installation to 3.12, because it messes the hell out of the dependency availability from the mish-mash of libraries under the default 3.9 and newer 3.12.

------

The stupid thing I bought finally showed up yesterday. It was, as they say in Chinese, 又贵又重. Shipping was a bitch, and product delivery took a while.

But it finally arrived.

First impressions: yep, it is as it says on the box---a fucking heavy cup. To ensure that it could have the 10 kg mass, the cup's diameter was large enough to quality as a mug, but its depth was shallow enough that the total volume was still cup-sized. In essence, it was like a bowl with a really extended and heavy-af bassbase. I currently cannot lift it one-handed, and am not expected to do this any time soon. I can also see a litany of overuse injuries in the near future as my deltoids and parts of my pectorals get continually hurt from moving this even as they are healing from their own weakness.

It was as stupid as it gets, and I love it.

I also got the 0.5 lb stainless steel shotglasses (are they still considered shotglasses despite being made of not-glass?), originally three (one for me, two for CP/Elain), but they upped it to four when my order was delayed enough that they graciously upgraded it to their 4-for-3 promotion.

That shotglass(?) felt nice to hold and drink from. There was no ``metallic'' flavour that one might think something like this would have, but then again, after having eaten out of stainless steel plates and cutlery, there was never a real ``metallic'' flavour to begin with.

For both, I would suggest scrubbing the interior a little more thoroughly before using them as a matter of course.

------

I watch lots of VTubers, so many to the point that 8 regular hours a day cannot be enough. So I watch them at 2.5× speed, which is a speed that the observant will realise to be impossible from both the network bandwidth, and web-client viewer perspective.

The answer is yt-dlp. That's all I'll say about this part.

The other parts start with the statement that for the sake of my network, I don't usually need to watch things at 1080+p, for the reason that the video often runs on the vertically aligned screen.

This means that the maximum width of the video that I will be watching, tends to be limited by 1080 px horizontally.

Mathing it with the usual 16:9 ratio of today, this works out to something like 608 px vertically.

YouTube doesn't have anything at 608p, but they do have 480p, which is the resolution that I often watch my videos in. Automatically upscaling it in VLC media player has some blurriness, but throwing in small amount of sharpen filter, it works well enough.

That is, until the game that the VTuber is playing has lots of words (not a secret: am referring to Blue Prince). The encoding at 480p from YouTube tends not to do well with text, and it was getting a little... more frustrating to follow.

The magic is to recode it to 480p using better settings than whatever was used when YouTube was transcoding the source to the different bitrates.

The incantation used looks like:

ffmpeg -i inputfile \
  -vf "scale=-1:480" -c:v h264_nvenc -crf 23 \
  -c:a copy \
  outputfile_480p.mp4

The only reason why I thought this was viable was that the encoder could make use of the NVIDIA graphics card that Eileen-III had (RTX 4090). I didn't try to encode without the h264_nvenc option, seeing that using it meant that it still took time to re-encode the video part.

``Why not just use the source resolution/bit rate and downsample?''

Well... it's slow and doesn't do as good a job as re-encoding. There's also the side issue of avoiding the integrated graphics card [doing the decoding when I'm watching it] from grinding through too many pixels only to discard more than two thirds of them to fit into 1080×608, and end up with a blurry mess due to the lack of access to the kinds of advanced filters that re-encoding can provide.

------

The last thing to bitchtalk about is the trend of ``oh if you see em-dashes in a text, it is 100% AI generated''. Related to that is ``if the AI detector detects that a paragraph of text is AI generated, it is 100% correct''.

On item 1, that's just a lazy way of looking at things. I mean, come on---if you look at this blog, almost all my posts have em-dashes rendered in. I use them extensively, though to be fair, I don't actually type the emdash as is---I type it out LaTeX style as ---, and rely on my pretty-printer to render it as an em-dash.

Which segues into item 2. It seems that ``AI detectors'' these days seem better at estimating the quality of a piece of writing with respect to grammar and diction than to truly ``detect'' the use of [generative] AI.

What I am trying to get at is, just because ``you'' suck at writing doesn't mean that any piece of writing that doesn't suck is ``generative AI'' just because ``you'' cannot write well enough. And if life in the modern world is anything to live by, is that anyone who points fingers and claims that someone else is displaying the qualities consistent with some thing of meta-variable-X, it is more likely than not a projection of the accuser who actually is the thing of meta-variable-X.

And that's about it for this update. Till the next one.

Unbotched(?)

Ah... okay, let's start with the good news: Ma's machine is finally working. The updated bill of parts:

Description	Price
Gigabyte B760M DS3H AX DDR4 + Core i5-14400 (μATX) bundle	SGD 492
Seasonic PRIME GX-650, 650W 80+ Gold	SGD 250
Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB	SGD 159
Total	SGD 901

In short, I hardly saved any money compared to what I previously spent to build the previous version. What I didn't save in money, I saved in some time with data migration. And the amount stated here didn't take into account the taxi fare, and the additional thumb drive that I had to get for Xubuntu installation because my old ones were broken.

So, what went wrong?

I think that m.2 slot with the ``thermal guard'' is borked. In a previous post, I talked about how I broke the NVMe drive that held the operating system of the previous machine. This time, I was smart enough to remove the stickers and what not before slotting it in. It all worked, that is, until I assembled it back together and put it into its stand.

In which case it did not work.

That was back in 2025-01-24, the same day I bought the new SSD.

Due to Chinese New Year nonsense, the machine had to be put away during the visitation season, and it is only today that I could bring myself to do something about it. I tried turning it on as is, hoping that it settled long enough to self-fix---no luck. I reopened everything up, and switched out the SSD to the other m.2 slot without the ``thermal guard'', and what do you know, the fucking thing worked.

Hallelujah!

There's one other oddity left though---the machine can handle cold boots. But throw in a reboot, and it gets stuck in POST.

Why is it so, I haven't the foggiest clue, and am honestly tired af to deal with that shit. I'm just happy that Ma's got a machine back where she can use to watch her streaming video, where the whole privacy situation is more controlled than the household ``smart TV''.

------

Grim Dawn has had quite a big mechanics update---there is a new innate ability to dash in the direction of facing via a key press (defaults to the spacebar with the keyboard+mouse control scheme), and the mana/health potions have been replaced with spells that have time-out instead.

Oh, and they have a new expansion planned too.

I just want to point out that Grim Dawn has been around since 2016, and they are probably rivalling Terraria (2011), and Minecraft (2011) for ``labour of love'' status.

The funny thing about Grim Dawn is that each time after the first playthrough that I look at Path of Exile or more recently at the early access of Path of Exile 2 and wonder if I want to get onto that bandwagon, I just turn back to Grim Dawn instead.

Now, prior to this, my guilty pleasure was Torchlight II. According to Steam, the last time I played it was back in 2018. I suppose I did play the crap out of the game, even buying it for folks too. No idea why I stopped---am going to load it up again to give it a go.

------

Well, apart from that, I must add that I have been having fun with Eirian-VI. Some important points that I learnt:

1. Colour mode works only for native e-book formats (the one I used was .mobi);
2. Comics purchased from Amazon that refused to be installable on the grayscale Kindles could be downloaded to the Colorsoft;
3. PDFs, when converted by Calibre directly to .mobi, look like shit unless each page is rasterised;
4. Use pdfcrop, then use -sDevice=pdfimage24 in Ghostscript before converting to .mobi via Calibre yields the best viewing result (metadata is still shit).

So with all these in mind, do I recommend the Kindle Colorsoft?

Sure, why not? The fast refresh rate, and generally improved responses are always a plus, as is the high resolution that is available. Colour availability is a bonus, and for the most part, shouldn't really be an issue. Most people do not follow my predilection of using PDFs for readables---they tend to use EPUB, and rely heavily on the Kindle ecosystem (i.e. using ``Send to Kindle'' to do the necessary conversions as opposed to man-handling stuff with Calibre). So for them, they are less likely to face the kind of issues that I am.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Edit: So I found out why I stopped playing Torchlight II---I literally ran out of things to do. The gameplay was fun for its time, but eventually the strategic depth was just insufficient to sustain more than the 315+hrs that I had put in across the 4 different classes. Grim Dawn will have nearly 45 different classes that come from pairwise combinations of soon-to-be 10 masteries, and then there's the whole sub-field of Devotion.

Eirian-VI is Here!

Eirian-VI has arrived.

After about two weeks, my Kindle Colorsoft has finally made its way to SIN city, as have all the other things that I had purchased on either amazon.com or amazon.sg.

And lemme tell you, Eirian-VI is gorgeous.

So, using SCP Series 4 volume 1 as a sample, you can tell that the colours are there, and are fairly soft/subtle. While most people complain (and also have pictures!) about how the Colorsoft was ``blue-er'' than previous black and white Kindles, you can tell that it isn't so in this case---that's because I can tune the ``warmth'' slider to make it as red as I want to. To be fair, this is at warmth level 3 on colour level standard (as opposed to vivid), compared against to zero warmth change in Eirian-V.

Do I have complaints? Just one---colour is only available on ``native'' Kindle file types, which in this case is Mobi. I only realised it when I tried loading up a PDF that is scanned (and with colours), and it showed only the regular monochrome set up.

Is that a deal breaker? Not really... I am completely fine with reading most of my material in black and white anyway, and thanks to Calibre, conversion of the PDF to Mobi is but a click or two away.

Not ideal, but a perfectly serviceable solution.

That yellow line thing that many are complaining about? I do not see it, so it's fine.

And that's a wrap for now. Till the next update.

Official Start to ``i'm-forty-bitches'' Week!

Well, that was a fine mess. As noted previously, I got hit with some messed up upper respiratory tract infection, which led to some messed up blocked nose with yellow/orange phlegm, and other ``goodies''.

I spent most of yesterday sedated and sleeping, to the point where when I woke up this morning at 4 o'clock, I felt like I should be up and running about due to just how long I had been knocked out. I didn't though---I just rolled back to sleep to wait out till around 8 o'clock or so before I got up.

A fever started near 10 o'clock last night, and broke finally at 2 after I had wrapped myself in a hoodie to let it burn out whatever bugs were hitting me. My skin did not like all that, and is now a mish-mash of messed up macerated skin. My brain had been hallucinating between the lyrics of Die with a Smile and whatever passes as a flashback of time past, remixed into whatever nonsense my fever allowed it to be.

But all that aside, I'm feeling much better this morning. The nose is still somewhat blocked, but it isn't actively being chewed on by whatever nonsense bug (I'm sticking with the ``bug'' moniker because I have no idea if it is a virus or bacterium, and it honestly doesn't matter). I've started on Glenfiddich 15 years, and am likely keep going on throughout the whole week.

Not an alcoholic for sure, by the way.

Before I crashed out hard yesterday, I finally sorted out the pay-day stuff. There were some performance bonus too, and they were all squared properly away. Eirian-VI is en route to the trans-shipment warehouse, and I've started to prepare the requisition of a Great Bass Recorder in C to sort of wrap up the recorder family, having finally saved enough to trigger it.

This upcoming week is going to be a fun one for sure, as I indulge in activities that bring me joy. And the best part is, not all of it will involve other people, which is absolutely fine.

Got a nice list of things to do, and will do as many as I can during ``i'm-forty-bitches'' week.

A colleague had pointed out the importance of the application of the comma in that, but honestly, after being a pedant of the English language at work, I think I can take a little liberty in doing whatever the hell I want when I am forty. Booyah!

I think that's about it for now. Will be watching me some VODs for AGDQ 2025, while doing some recreational programming and/or playing some video games, followed by some errands that need doing during this time period.

Till the next update.

You Never Truly Realise How Much You are Loved

It's sad to know that one never really truly realises how much one is loved, even when they are dead.

``MT, getting all sentimental?''

Joke's on you---I'm always sentimental. This is literally the biggest oxymoron that makes up much of my character. I know that I can push through anything if I choose to do so, but time has just made me a little more selective on things that I choose to expend effort for. But this is a major digression and not the objective of today's rant.

The reason why one never truly realises how much one is loved, is due to how hardly anyone knows how to show that they love someone without being all weird and/or awkward. Or sometimes, as is the regular excuse from SIN city, it is a ``cultural thing'' to not show emotion, as any form of emotion is a demonstration of weakness.

Unfortunately for me, I never really grew up in an environment where I could emote properly. My folks never emoted, though there is no doubt that all my immediate family members would go through hell and back for each other.

We just never emoted with each other.

And that was one thing that I could never quite grasp when I was dating and meeting my date's folks, whether it was the first time, or the last. And that is also why I feel oddly uncomfortable when people start coming close to me the way normal people come close to others, you know, by talking.

And that is probably why I stay within my rebuilt walls, avoiding my inner peace from being ``disturbed'' by women whom I may have a chance to be a partner with for this life.

I would rather quietly hug someone tight to show them I love them, than to say the words ``I love you''. I would rather sit next to them in quiet content, physically close, than to gossip about what other people are doing. I would rather talk about the future with them, than to mull about my past and present.

I think many people know that about me, and thus they have all kept their distance as a form of respecting my preferences, all without saying anything out loud in acknowledgement. It only took me nearly forty years to realise and acknowledge this in public.

Of course, the alternate way of thinking about things is that no one really gives a shit about me, but somehow I do not think this to be true of those whom I have interacted with on a consistent basis. Inasmuch as they have affected my life through interacting with me, I'm sure that I have affected their lives (hopefully for the better) through my interacting with them.

But you'll hardly ever catch me going up to them and telling them ``I love you''. I just simply cannot do that.

I think the number of people whom I had ever done that in my life can be counted on a single hand.

That one time when I was really, exceptionally down, people from the woodwork started to pour out and remind me that in some small way, I'm still loved by them, even if we don't do many of the usual things that people who love another do.

Some people might think that MT has a commitment problem. I think they are both right and wrong. They are right in thinking that I have a commitment problem; they are wrong in thinking that it means I cannot commit.

If anything, I'm damn good at meeting my commitments. If I give my word, it will be an extreme circumstance in which I would have to break it.

Perhaps that is why I'm uncomfortable telling people I love them---the honesty's too much for me, and perhaps for the them who are receiving it from me.

And mayhaps the manner in which I deliver such heartfelt words is just sub-par from the absolute lack of practice on the whole.

If there's ever a resolution that I ought to be making, it will be to be more open about my feelings to others. I've started through affirming my appreciation (it's still awkward as fuck), but to those whom I love, maybe I should have the courage to tell them so, before it is too late.

------

In other news, I have decided to pull the trigger on the Kindle Colorsoft Signature, or as I would like to call it, Eirian-VI.

``But MT, you just got Eirian-V barely 2 years ago! Why are you wasting money?!''

Well, it's not like there was no precedent. I mean, Eirian-VI is going to come with colour, much like how Eirian-III had colour (as a tablet) compared to Eirian-II.

The purchase is through a forwarder (vPOST), so we'll see how it all turns out. I'm not expecting any trouble, but for these things, one never really knows.

The upcoming week is what I call ``i'm-forty-bitches'' week. It's a week where I choose to do things to mark the end of my fourth decade walking this earth, and the start of my fifth decade.

It's okay because I'm on leave.

I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.