Goodbye hololive's #1 Detective!

Ah...

So I spoke about hololive English -Myth-'s fourth anniversary recently, and said:

I'll miss this group of amazing ladies the day that they decide to retire from being HoloEN Myth.

Well, it happened.
Amelia Watson just announced that she was leaving in a ``not forever'' sort of way.

How do I feel?

Well, the usual sense of loss, which really shouldn't be anything new nowadays---God knows how many different times I have lost people. Not the dead, mind you, but the kind of loss where they were a big part of one's [daily] life for quite a while, and then suddenly they are no longer a part of one's life any more.

Like eulogies, praise of Ame's innovation and hard-headedness in hard-carrying HoloEN Myth (especially from the early years) have come out once more from all corners of the fandom. When that announcement was first made, many thought she she was transferring into a more managerial role, but within a few hours, Ame put rest to that and pointed out that she was indeed leaving her full-time streaming duties, and not becoming staff.

If anything, the official hololive Production announcement in Japanese makes it very clear (to the extent that it can be made clear) that Ame will remain as a talent, as compared to the vague-ass render in the English announcement, where the phrase ``an affiliate of hololive production'' raised more questions than answers.

The thing about getting older that no one will tell you, is that mortality and impermanence will forever dog you, intensifying themselves through ever increasing frequencies of appearance as one's experiences increases through the ever larger number of people we meet and interact with. And even though we always soothe ourselves by saying that ``we'll get used to it'', the truth is, we never do.

We just end up increasingly broken or numb at each loss.

If that is considered getting used to it, it is of little wonder why the older generations are almost always more jaded than the young.

But that is also the reason why as we age, we need to know how to temper our sharing of our life experiences to those who are coming after us. Yes, we know the world is heading to ruin, if it already hasn't, but amongst that narrow perspective that each of us has, there are unseeable alternatives that can either lead away from the current path of ruin, or even more optimistically take us towards something that is more wholesome and nurturing.

The young, who are fearless through freshness and a lack of enough setbacks, are the ones who take the charge to see these unseeable alternatives for us.

We, the old, ought to shield the young from the shit-fest that we can see, but we should also give them the room to explore a different path, let them learn through making mistakes, and providing them with a safety net to recover from.

It's not even about the old cliché about how a society is at its best when the old plant trees that they will never get to experience the shade of---it's about helping the young plant some new-fangled genetically modified heat-resistant AI-powered tree-hybrid that they come up with, despite us not knowing everything that goes into that, and knowing that there's a chance for them to fail, without discouraging them to try.

That is a much harder thing to pull off.

But back to Ame. She'll definitely make her mark in ways that will surprise us---I'm sure of it. After all, one of the reasons that she's leaving is to go do things that only she can do alone.

To use yet another cliché whose origins are murky as fuck, the way such things usually go:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Amelia Watson is an explorer by nature, and after going far with what she has for now, there are new avenues to explore that she want to do, to fail/succeed fast so to speak.

Godspeed hololive's #1 detective! o7

HoloEN Myth: 4th Anniversary

HoloEN Myth. 4th Anniversary. Don't wait---check it out:
These ladies, though they operate behind an anime façade, helped me through some rough times.

I don't know if I had told the story of how I learnt about VTubers. It was this Trash Taste video; I cannot remember when I first saw it, but that was when I found out about VTubers. Reddit loved dumping hololive on the popular thread ever so often, so I had on-and-off heard of them, but not exactly the HoloEN Myth crew.

My usual content creators were having their own troubles, and so their content creation was on the down, my own relationship was shit, the global pandemic became a thing, and I was on a sabbatical (or a self-social isolation, to be precise) for a year.

HoloEN Myth was an escape from the nonsense that was there. Of course, there was also Pavolia Reine of holoro eventually with her Zero Escape playthroughs, and a slightly more relatable SEA culture references (in English), but the point that I wanted to make was that in the midst of hell on earth, a fairly wholesome entertainment started up, and became part of my media consumption habit ever since.

Three more generations have come since then (CouncilRyS/Promise, Advent, and then Justice), but Myth has been the OG. They were the least put together, the rawest, the pioneers, the most heartfelt, the ones who trail-blazed when few knew what they could be, just so that the later generations can soar from the get-go. Ina's comfy art streams, Ame's brute-force attempts at bringing some form of normalcy for the Myth ladies to match up what their JP senpais in hololive had, Gura for general entertainment, Kiara for being the heart, and Calli for music (that I didn't really got into, but it grew on me---check out End of A life, also the cover by Inamesame in the 4th Annivesary show), and of course the special magic that happens when the five got together each time for their anniversaries or for Halloween.

I can never watch their major collaborations without bawling---I was there when they were going through it all. Each group song they sang, each anniversary they went through... I was there.

We were there.

We all shared in their frustrations as the global pandemic fucked normalcy up, we all shared their triumph when things finally came to a head, and they could finally be what they were meant to be.

I'll miss this group of amazing ladies the day that they decide to retire from being HoloEN Myth.

But in the mean time, I will still watch them, and enjoy the time we have with them.

From a wiki on Hololive talents:

The core concept of this hololive English group is VTubers who hail from worlds of legend.

Legends indeed.

🐙🔎🔱💀🐔

Part One of Pain: Done

And that's part one of pain mostly done---there's still one more thing that technically happens right smack in the first of the next month, but the build up to it is close enough proximity to this month that it might as well be a part of it; hence the ``mostly done'' qualifier.

The thing about technology demonstrations, is that everyone expects things to run smooth. That is normally the case, especially when one controls all the inputs to the said technology demonstration.

But what happens if a critical component is dependent on a reluctant contributor whose technical chops are not completely under one's control?

Well, there are two ways to play it.

1. Be strict and demand code reviews before we even bother with integration; or
2. Be lenient and just integrate what is provided.

On hindsight, I should have played the bully card harder---I don't mind dying on my sword [proverbially] if it is my team that cocks up, but I mind a bit when I'm doing so because of a third party whose stuff we are integrating who cocked up network resource programmming 101.

The onus is still on me though---I take full responsibility for not instituting the first of the two options which led to the technology demonstration failures. Thankfully, that issue could be worked around with some tight timing of restarting the components and getting the crowd worked up to interact with the demo, so I didn't actually die completely (still lost some reputation, but at this point in my life, considering that I have no intention in climbing the corporate ladder, I don't give too much a shit).

All in all, the technology demonstration was a qualified success---the overall vibes was positive despite the initial failure.

Being a manager is hard---everything that one does and decides are exercises of balances. On the one hand, one wants to ensure absolute control in order to bring the variances down to improve quality, and on the other hand, there is a need to let people make mistakes to learn from to better build up their capabilities, be it team members [whom I'm more willing to ``tank damage'' for] or even third party contributors. The need to balance between these two is mostly the reason that I am driven crazy more than half the time.

The temptation to take everything into one's hands is always strong, but it is important to realise that by doing so, it defeats the purpose of building a team in the first place. The reason we put a team together, is to leverage on the extra brains & hands to achieve greater parallelism, thus allowing the total effort in work-days to be fitted into a much shorter effective calendar-day count. Pulling everything back to oneself does nothing to allow projects to be delivered faster, and in the worst case, can cause bigger issues in general due to the increased cognitive load required to deal with the nitty-gritty [that the team members should be able to handle] while still maintaining a view of the big picture [that only the manager/leader can do].

I think that is the biggest lesson to learn when transiting from being an individual contributor into a manager/leader.

------

shapez 2 has been my new diversion from the vagaries of pain. It all started with this video from one of my favourite YouTubers:

Now, Josh's a mad man who captures the same kind of energy as Zisteau (he's more a Twitch streamer these days than a YouTube video maker, while having his Twitch streams archived here). I love games like Factorio, but what I like about them aren't the survival aspects(!), but on the factory aspect. And shapez 2 scratches that itch.

Of course, the first thing I did was to look for the original shapez. I could have bought the Steam version as part of the pack, or I could buy from GoG.com which was at 90% discount. And so I was pushing through last week while spending some time here and there on shapez after hours to chill out, even as I was drilling the music that was for the upcoming performance with the King's Flute Choir on 2024-09-01 on Davie.

Now that I'm mostly done with the major upgrades in shapez, it was time to start on shapez 2, and start on it I did.

It is definitely as fun as Josh made it in his video---having come from shapez, there are quite a few quality of life improvements that I enjoyed. The 3D-render of the game space took a little getting used to (shapez was laid out on a 2D-grid similar to Factorio), but that was not a problem. The key difference between shapez and shapez 2 lies in a few new ``meta'' levels of building. All things in shapez are single units of machinery, be it extractor, or belt, or stacker. shapez 2 has all the stuff in shapez, but has space platforms, which are like their own self-contained modules that are made up of the shapez elements, as well as layers, which brings extra expressivity even at the shapez component level through effectively doubling and then tripling the original 2D grid space.

Oh, and it's really colourful and cool.

Pillars of Eternity is currently seeing my party in the city, which is a slow part of the game; I do go back to it every now and then. I've since completed The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures some time back, and am likely to start on its sequel, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve soon.

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

Marching On...

Urgh. This is probably the fourth time I opened up Q10 with the intention of writing a blog post. The first three times, I wrote like three paragraphs, before closing the editor in frustration.

I just couldn't put together what it was that I wanted to say without sounding like a twat.

So instead, let's try to talk about something else.

My Eddington Number was recently raised to E16. This means that I had at least 16 days where I cycled at least 16 mi. My usual North-East Riverine Loop averaged to nearly 12 mi, so I just did the obvious-but-dumb-thing of just cycling in both directions, leading to a nice 24 mi, with some sketchy actions to actually bring it up to the 24 mi. I had to do it twice just so that I could reach E16, and it was all done over the past week.

In short, I destroyed my legs in a fun way cycling about 79+ km just to reach a new milestone. Of course, the real secret is that I am just one ride away from reaching E17, but I won't be doing that soon because my left calf is already showing signs of being overworked---it was starting to cramp up during my return leg of ride number two today.

In other news, I have started on the LEGO Bugatti Chiron. I know that the web-site says ``Retired Product'', but they can still be found in the LEGO shops in SIN city. I am also well aware that there are Amazon.com versions that are cheaper than the retail price of nearly SGD600, some by nearly SGD150+. But there's always something magical about holding the box in one's hand as directly purchased from the brick-and-mortar shop, and considering my recent trauma from a lost Amazon.sg parcel (allegedly ``delivered'' by Ninjavan), I was not about to tempt fate again, especially with something this pricey.

I had known of the Bugatti Veyron for years---it was always that wonderful feat of German engineering that just made me go ``oooo''. The Top Gear episode was also the first time that I saw the Veyron go vroom:
And James May's response from his experience just sealed the idea that the Veyron was the best car in my book.

``But MT, the Chiron isn't the Veyron?''

Yes, and no. It's a refresh of the Veyron, but for the purposes of the LEGO model, it's basically the same. The LEGO Bugatti Chiron is a large build, probably the largest in the LEGO Technic series (but not necessarily the largest physical build). I have no idea where to put the finished assembly, but that will be a problem for future MT to handle. I am definitely taking my time to put it together, partly because in any LEGO assembly, the journey is usually more fun than the outcome. Moreover, I had to go slower---all these stupid heat is making it hard to exist, let alone think or manipulate all these tiny LEGO.

------

Minecraft. I had been spending time after work in my solo world digging out the strip-mines that I had started way back in 1.17+, just as a way to decompress.

Then a thought came to me. How about ``Digging Straight Down''? The idea was to find some interesting location off my hill-top base, figure out the chunk boundaries, and dig out the entire column, while encasing the dug out chunk with glass. I knew from my early recce for a deep ocean biome to build my mob farm that there was a nice patch of ocean off the main desert that I had not explored before. So I went out that way via my overland minecart line, and promptly found what I was looking for.

And then I felt that one chunk was kinda small, so I expanded it to a 3×3 chunk grid in the middle of the ocean. I had some sponges that I had bought from some wandering traveller from long ago, and coupled that with the ``gravity blocks'' strategy of creating dikes to form the ```Dig Straight Down'' polder. Now I'm in the process of doing the actual digging, and replacing the walls with glass just for containment.

------

I think that's about all I want to write about for now. Looks like I managed to avoid talking about anything involving pain, discomfort of being vulnerable with another, the realisation that people are just generally terrible, and other stuff that made me rage-close the Q10 editor three times before.

Till the next update, I suppose.

The First Stupid O'Clock of the Year

Well well well... it's stupid o'clock. Whatever should I do?

Ideally, I should go sleep. But as the season for feeling old rolls about, I cannot help but think about feeling old.

This year is special though. The time duration between regular New Year's, ulang tahunku, and 春节 is probably at its shortest of about a month between the earliest event and the latest event (citation needed). That makes the profound aging effect hit me a little harder than expected.

I'm not in anyway depressed, as far as I know. A little melancholous perhaps, but definitely not to the level where I am actively sulking. I mean, I am already considered a middle-aged man for all purposes and intents---give me another few years and I would soon be in the age demographic of the neither here nor there, the so-called 不惑之年.

Melancholy strikes me because I realise that in many ways, I'm kind of a failure for not accepting/following society's expectations. I was supposed to head on to get a PhD and return as some kind of research hero for SIN city, but at best I was just some weird software engineer who helped build a system that could never reach the full potential of scale and use because of where it was designed and built in---the constant posturing for ``strategic reasons'' was never fully backed by the resources and management oversight needed to truly bring the system up to fulfill its namesake.

Peers of my age group have already gotten married, with some of them having their second or even their third child. Yet here I am, having spent five years in a long term relationship with nothing left to show of it, and my heart numb enough from the experience that the phrase ``我心已打烊'' makes perfect sense, even though I truly haven't committed myself to the single life just yet.



For the confused, that video (assuming it remains up) is the earworm that has been stuck for nearly thirty years that I only managed to find today---《我心已打烊》 by 叶瑷菱. The lyrics, as obtained from MyMusic, is as follows:

我曾有过那么一段
背着阳光横过沙漠
只为了找寻爱神的梦幻
爱神的模样
我曾有过那么一段
踏着星河奔向穹苍
只为了逃避死神的追寻
死神的挑战

岁月带着微笑
又将春天吹干
而我只有茫茫然
无奈的回头望
挥别了梦幻挥别了忧伤
我心已打烊我心已打烊
我心已打烊
我心已打烊我心已打烊
我心已打烊

It's by no means a comforting piece of music, but it does seem to capture that melancholous feel that I have.

A while ago, I had put away Twinkletoes, my emperor penguin plushie. I was at home, not on-site at the customer's place, and most definitely not under all kinds of unreasonable pressures both implicit and explicit that I needed Twinkletoes for that reassuring hug.

I found myself retrieving him from my wardrobe two days ago, and giving him a tight squeeze for a short while, before carefully putting him back.



Watching the first serious original song from the HololiveEN -Myth- crew also brought out more of those melancholous thoughts due to the heartfelt lyrics that encompassed the hopes of Myth through their ups and downs being the pioneer gamble of a Japanese technology-turned-entertainment company to break out of the typecast and head into the wider world.

I also found myself just thinking about various futures like the way the Myth crew did, but those thoughts never truly got far because of the fog of uncertainty partly due to the management-by-committee approach of handling the pandemic, and partly because the already present ills of society have finally showed up in their true form when the usual fig leaves are blown askew due to the very same pandemic itself.

I turned to my God, and He gave me some comfort. He is close, yet there is still a distance between He and I. I have comfort knowing that my far future is certain with the salvation that came about through Jesus, but my near future is less so. Each day is just a careful movement from one state to another, until I am exhausted and turn in for the night, just to repeat it all again the next day, if God is willing.

And that is why I merely have that melancholous feel, as opposed to an outright depressive episode. I have no expectations on what can/will happen on ulang tuhanku---like the New Year's, it's just another day that needs to be gone through. Is there anything in particular that I am looking forward to?

Sadly, not really---none of the things that used to spark joy are present any more.

Anyway, that's all I have for this instalment of stupid o'clock. Before I finally get some sleep, I'll just leave Jude 17-22 as my parting thought.

Peace.

The Baddest Myth or Treat

It rained. Got 3 short stories going for NaNoWriMo. I don't have much else to write though, so I'll leave these two banger tunes.


A Hololive English -Myth- original, Myth Or Treat:


And a cover of The Baddest:


And that's it from me today. Till the next update.

Meandering Updates

Ha! I wouldn't skip out on a proper entry for the day despite having already ``fulfilled'' the goal with an out-of-band ``stupid o'clock'' entry, even if I had almost nothing to write about.

Sadly, that's the case for today. I have almost nothing to write about.

It isn't because there isn't anything to grumble about. The ``old faithful'' of complaints is the consistent rise of COVID-19 cases with a fairly large (in proportion) number of unlinked cases in SIN city, but what's the fun in that? It's not novel; it's the same reason I cited before on not reporting on page counts and other tracking information for whatever I am currently reading.

I could talk a bit of the latest happenings in the Olympics, but I follow up on it even less than I am keeping up with the SIN city COVID-19 numbers, so talking about that is even more phoney.

I can complain about the weather, but at this point even I am sick of reporting that the weather is too damn bloody hot with inner ambient temperature heading northwards of 30°C (it was somewhere between 29°C at night to about 31°C in the day).

In short, the day has been pretty uneventful as far as my life is concerned. That's not to say that I did not observe anything hilarious/eventful---it's just that writing about that feels like someone trying to explain the latest joke in the most recent episode of a variety show. I sure as heck don't want to read that, so I don't think I'm going to subject someone else to that through writing about it just to pad up the day's words.

After all, this isn't NaNoWriMo. And even then, it is a strictly-in-November kind of deal for me.

I could write about my thoughts on Romans 13, but considering that I'm not baptised, nor am I seasoned in the study of the Word of God, it feels pretentious. Sort of like how I ended up not writing anything on my thoughts on martial arts in general, despite picking up quite a few interesting perspectives along the way that I would like to share.

However, I don't feel pretentious at all writing about dizi stuff on my personal blog, since I have played the instrument for a very long time at a decent enough level. Still needs some diagrams drawn though, and I am still lazy. Maybe I should really just finish that part---the writing is more or less in its final form anyway, with all the things that I want to say having said.

Perhaps I should write a bit about what I am expecting for next week. My second dose of the Comirnaty vaccine is coming up. Considering that I did feel a little off after the first dose some time back, I'm totally expecting getting slugged deep in the head with this upcoming one. I just hope that it doesn't affect me bad enough to miss out on celebrating the full release of Jupiter Hell. The trailer made by HyperStrange for ChaosForge can be seen here:



I've talked with KK about it, and he's basically reassured me that just because it was the full release didn't mean that the dev-team wouldn't honour all that was promised in the Kickstarter campaign. It was important to get a working game out of the door first before filling in the enhancement blanks.

Speaking of Kickstarter campaigns, I'm excited for Mini Rogue---it should be shipping soon. Awesome!

Alright, that's about it. I'm gonna watch another Hololive collaboration video while grinding a little bit of Grim Dawn. Till the next update.

Stuuuuuuuupid O'Clock Again?!

Ah, the true stupid o'clock timing. I can't say that I miss it.

I'm getting old. I don't miss staying up late doing whatever.

I was listening to various covers and originals from the Hololive crew as I was trying to level a mountain in a new Minecraft 1.17.1 world that I spun up.

``But MT, Minecraft is more fun to play with others! And also, why the heck are you levelling a mountain? Isn't it stupid?''

Okay, you got me there. Minecraft is more fun to play with others, but there's a catch---to start playing with others on a server is to continue playing on the same server relatively consistently, otherwise two things will happen.

1. Folks on the server might think you as some kind of weird-ass free-loader not contributing to the barter economy; and
2. Your gear and access to materials will be supremely outclassed by those who put in more consistent time in the game.

It's not unlike some kind of MMORPG, except it is closer to olden-times self-driven goals and some kind of rudimentary economy. It's single-player EVE Online, or Factorio with ``automation'' based on in-game duping mechanics.

Or as I would call it, a full-time job.

Okay, that explains the single player part, sort of. I mean, I play single player so that I can play at my own pace, and do what I want, when I want, without being beholden to any community.

As for the levelling of a mountain, it was because I wanted to keep my cobblestone shack on the higher (and a little levelled) part of my mountain along the range free from spawns from the other less lit part of the mountain [that I am levelling].

Besides, it's cathartic to dig imaginary cobblestone/dirt while listening to awesome music, after having binged quite a bit on SCP Foundation Tome 5: SCP2000--2499 today. I'd like to complete Tome 5 before I go on to read other things for no other reason other than to just... complete it.

Heh. Stupid o'clock is finally living up to its name. Anyway, this was one of the pieces that I was listening to, a cover of 乙女解剖 by Nekomata Okayu (猫又おかゆ):



The original was by DECO*27 and here it is:



Between the two, I prefer Okayu's version by a whole lot more---that silky low voice really sounds much better than the higher Hatsune Miku vocaloid voice.

Incidentally, I ran into this very macabre relyric version in Cantonese:



The relyric changed the tone from a girl who was playing games with other people's hearts suddenly getting hit with a dose of reality to one that was messed with and had some rather gory thoughts.

Still prefer Okayu's version though. Something about high pitch not working as well for this piece. Or maybe I have been influenced over time to enjoy the smooth feel of a mellow voice. I still like my sopranos (I still have to mentally project like one to play 笛子/flute/piccolo well), but maybe for something that is more high-energy? This piece feels more ``cool'' than ``high energy''.

Ah... what's missing from this stupid o'clock entry is being buzzed from booze, either whiskey or whisky. Officially, I'm out of those and haven't replenished stock, for the simple reason that I don't seem to have enough good reasons to keep them in stock any more. I still like me some strong spirits on occasion, but those occasions are getting lesser and lesser over [recent] time. Practically though, I still have a couple of tasters and smaller flash-sized whiskeys lying about that I could sip if I wanted to.

But the urge to drink whiskey hasn't been strong. I have been drinking some lager recently, and that's only because the weather is bloody hot, and I wanted to cool off with something that isn't soda. Thanks to the P2HAHAHA... no wait, P2HA ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'', I can't even head to my favourite bar to just drink stout and read for a whole afternoon; buying the equivalent to sit at home to read/drink just feels different and really not worth it, even though it is cheaper.

In truth, what I really wanted was a change of environment. The drinking was incidental.

Anyway, since the quick summary of the experiment in the last post, I've been tracking for about 17.5 hours at −78.1 mV across the board with the new Intel graphics drivers, and things seem stable. No strange video playback issues from YouTube, average temperatures were comfortable enough (sub-80°C), and the lowest recorded Core VID was 0.485 V. One thing I forgot to add to the summary was the setting of the FPS limit in the Nvidia control panel to about 142 FPS, 3 shy of the main monitor's refresh rate of 144 Hz. It has led to much lower peak GPU temperatures of roughly 70.3°C for the hot spot sensor, as compared to the previous 88.6°C earlier when I kept the FPS limit to 288 FPS instead.

Anyway, I'll continue to run the experiment, and we'll see if it survives the ``idle'' mode.

That's all for stupid o'clock. Thank you for joining in.

Fansa and Affirmation?

I started reading Failure is Not An Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz today. It's an autobiographical book by Kranz on the evolution of the operations control team(s) in the US space programmes. I'm about a quarter of the way through, and it has been quite a ride. While it isn't push the usual leadership/management guidebook spiel, it has some interesting nuggets of knowledge and experience hidden among the narration.

As an aside, I find myself keep returning to this video by Kiryu Coco before she graduated, the cover for ``Fansa'':



There's something about it that speaks out, and it isn't just the beautiful execution nor the events surrounding her graduation. It definitely is the lyrics, but more than that, it is the feeling that is conveyed by the lyrics, not in the sense of the ``idol feel'' but something more fundamental, the idea of connection between people and wanting to matter in someone else's life.

Yes, there is that attention-seeking aspect of being an idol that shows up within the lyrics, but realistically, aren't we all a little attention-seeking in our own ways? The type of attention we seek need not be at the scale of that of an entertainer, but in the form of having attention from one's parents, one's siblings, one's peers, and even one's bosses. The attention isn't about pride but as a form of affirmation of one's existence, a way of external validation. It's as basic a need as food and water, since the affirmation of one's existence by another is the start of creating a social fabric.

Mutual affirmation---I think this core feeling is what is largely missing these days in the hyper-connected world. Self-selection of images to promulgate combined with the echo effect from The Algorithm perpetuates a strong sense of being ignored, with various insecurities amplified within the like-minded. So the in-group affirms the shared insecurities, but the out-group seems to fail to acknowledge them, let alone address them.

Perhaps that is why we see the rather strong push-back from various subsets of societies in attempting to change the narrative, justifying their actions through whatever means necessary, to the point that an unaffected third party observer can only conclude that it is all delusional.

Eh, not sure if this is some ``deep'' thing---I might have an important idea here, but it may not be well-represented with what I have written. I could do more research to fix it, but it isn't a high priority.

Turning the observational lens back to myself though, am I also seeking attention then?

In a way, I would be lying if I said no. Obviously, if I weren't seeking attention, I wouldn't be updating this obviously public blog.

But from a different angle, the answer is more nuanced. Outright winning some popularity contest isn't my intention---if it were, I would be doing some rather drastic things, and even so, use other media that are more easily accessible and welcome over the blog medium. I'd like for people who care enough to read what I have written here, since sometimes it is easier to understand what I am thinking through sifting through what I said as opposed to listening to me say it out loud, not because I'm shy, but because I have a tendency to not talk about myself if I can help it in meatspace. But I'm not too anxious if there are really few (if any) people who read my blog entries; maybe a little disappointment, and that's probably it.

After all, my blogs are mostly ways for me to vent whatever is eating away at me, a type of catharsis where I can safely put away what I would like to think about, but not obsess over.

It seems to be working well for me so far.

Hmm... seems like I have indeed run out of things that I would like to say here for now. Okay, in that case, I'll just leave it till the next update then.

Pops on Rocks

Honestly, I never really enjoyed reading anything by Dr. Seuss out loud. I mean, I will not deny his brilliance in wordsmithing, writing Green Eggs and Ham on a bet of constrained writing.

But he is still a twisted bugger, especially if you realise that he is writing for children. Let me emphasise that: he is writing for children. The words may be simple for them, but man, the execution is just heinous for sanity, and is basically trauma-inducing. To be fair though, massive amounts of repetition is just the way that children learn best from (I'm too lazy to find citations), but it gets really old really quickly if one is already half-way decent at reading.

Anyway, I bring up Dr. Seuss due to this masterpiece by Holo Bass featuring voice samples from Amelia Watson of Hololive-EN during her reading of Dr. Seuss's Fox in Socks:



This has a very smooth vibe to it, very ``comfy'' feel. Compare this mix the original (unprocessed) reading session:



A quick comparison will show that while the source material already has quite a bit of the feel except that it was not executed with the intention to be anything more than an ad hoc reading of a piece of tongue twister from Dr. Seuss; there is some strong creative input by Holo Bass to bring out that smoothness in the final mix that made it a [niched] cult classic. Very good work, I would say.

My PTSD-induced misgivings of Dr. Seuss aside, I just want to point out that poetry as an art form isn't some obsolete has-been confined to William Shakespeare's Sonnets---it is very much alive. The more refined gibberish can be seen in popular music lyrics, while the actual wordsmiths are ironically coming out of the 'hood in the form of raps and spoken words.

Poetry is an art form, while the contents are determined by what one has grown up in. It is the counterpart to music since it provides the verbal content as opposed to just the pitch, and co-contributes to the overall rhythm.

So, nerdcore's existence shouldn't be a surprise. I have been following nerdcore raps on and off over the past ten years or so, downloading and listening to the Rhyme Torrents series of nerdcore over BitTorrent (Internet Archive duplicate in case rhymetorrents.org goes away again---it had happened before). They are as intense as some of the material from the 'hood, but of course the source material is more relevant to me than shooting up gangsters and chasing druglords.

I think that as a practical musician, it is important to be made aware of the other styles of music that are available just so that we know what units of expression are there, and how other people have chosen their subset of units of expression to form a cohesive style, and to personally determine if they are successful in conveying what they were trying to convey with their choices. That's the kind of diversity that those who have mastered the basics of the art need to get used to so as to reach out for the next level.

After all, in all forms of human knowledge, the edge can actually be reached, and when that happens, there is literally no master available to guide one beyond---the ability to learn how to explore and define one's own path for progress is literally part of what being called a master is. And that is why the rank of ``doctor of philosophy'' exists in academia---once one has proven mastery over their art, they need to start developing their own philosophy, or associated introspective extrapolation of their art to push the outer edge.

It feels like a weird segue, but I assure you, there is some logic in the madness of the transitions that isn't just an elaborate non-sequitor. There is a fine line separating arrogance from being assertive due to actually knowing what is right, and how this fine line ought to be tread requires a skill in reading people, and the associated patience in navigating and convincing them. Those two skills, I need to practise them more often.

I think that all this while, I have not been willing to stand my ground and push back, i.e. not living up to the standards that are part of the ``rights and privileges'' associated with having a Masters degree. I spent time to work on my craft, so why should I allow myself to be pushed around by clueless people who have no fucking clue what is going on?

I think also that I have sub-consciously taken a step in the direction of standing my ground when I called for a sabbatical to re-orient myself. I mean (somewhat tangentially) everyone likes to quote Bruce Lee on being water, right?

Ever remembered how old he was when he said all that?

He was less than 34 years old. And he didn't put up with anyone's bullshit---in the end, everyone treated him like some kind of martial arts sage and quoted his philosophy and ways like some kind of mantra for the next fifty or so years.

Perhaps the real mistake that I made was thinking that I was to start a family and become a ``family man'' or whatever the hell that means. This is SIN city---only fools choose to live here and start a family. They can afford it because they are content with what they have now forever---that is literally all I meant by being fools.

I am always disappointed with what I see, wherever I have been. And when I had been successful, I was pushing back against the stupidity that was present to change what I found disappointment in---it is when the stupidity still remains after my best efforts that I end up being despondent and give things up. I am more competitive than I give myself credit for, even though I prefer the type of competition where everyone actually improves/progresses so that we all win against our past selves. So instead of the zero-sum type of game that capitalism likes to play, I seem to want to bat for a team that wants humanity to win against all the evil forces that are out there against us.

I simply cannot operate like as though I'm some average person when I have never really been an average person. I don't know why this breakthrough came at the time it did, but I am glad that it has. Thank God for the timing---the path ahead is a little less fuzzy from before.

There is still time in my sabbatical to plan, observe, and pray. And that will be how it will be.

Till the next update then.

Take Me Home, Country Roads

So I started the day with a rude discovery that this blog could not load in Firefox for Android. I did a quick check with Xiaxue's blog (she's re-enabled it), and was hit with the same thing.

A red warning about how there was a ``Deceptive site ahead'', with no recourse whatsoever to override/ignore/head back.

That my own blog(s) were not accessible made me wonder if there was something wrong with what I did, what with the many tweaks that I had been doing recently. That even Xiaxue's blog was hit made me think that there was some kind of weird intermittent issue relating to Firefox's built-in anti-phishing and malware protection.

Strangely, using Google Chrome for Android on the same phone did not yield the problem. So maybe there was some intermittent API-related issue that I was unaware of that was likely to fix itself given enough time.

Nevertheless, I didn't want to take any chances, and quickly reported the false negative for my blog using the provided form.

Several hours later, I found that things were back to working form again. Whether it was the false negative update, or the restoration of whatever magic that was not working to cause the foul up, I don't know. As long as it works, I'm good.

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Today HoloEN released their first cover music, Take Me Home, Country Roads. Check out the music video:



Frankly, I was expecting something more kitschy, but was surprised at the quality of it. It's not great, but it was heartfelt. Gura really rallied and carried the song with her clean, high vocals. That rendition of ``I belong'' is sooooo good, especially when she is singing it solo at one of her karaoke streams that was clipped out by this YouTuber:



The word on the street for the cover is the word ``scuffed'', with criticism on the mixing. Throughout the videos of the HoloEN VTubers, ``scuffed'' seems to be the order of the business anyway---there's a certain down-to-earth camaraderie among the girls. I mean, it certainly does not fit the mould of a corporation-managed idol group, so if that is kept in mind, then having such collaborations that are not as well-produced as say the more professional EPs as released by Takanashi Kiara or Mori Calliope may make sense.

In fact, I would say that the HoloEN aesthetic is closer to that of an artist collective as opposed to that of an idol group when they are doing things together. And that is why I think I like them---it's all about that kind of spontaneity and realness that is hard to get these days.

I mean, they drop F-bombs appropriately in their live-streams, at the appropriate time, context, and even intonation. Doesn't sound forced, doesn't sound deliberately self-censoring to keep with the corpo image. I won't call it wholesome, but I will call it being earnest.

The VODs of some of their longer streams do serve as a nice background while I do other things, like the reading in between the sit-down naps I was taking thanks to the stupid headache and feverish feel. No, I still don't have an actual physical fever, and I can still taste things. It might just be due to the weather and one too many stupid o'clock shenanigans.

Anyway, I've done page 1003/1321 of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, and completed Animorphs Series: The Alien. The Animorphs series are quite bite-sized, with each book at about 60+ pages, and advancing the bigger plot ever so slowly. In the grand scheme of things, I would probably classify each book as a ``proper'' chapter, and eschew the 20+ chapters that each book would have. However, to be fair, these books were written/marketed as ``children series'', so it is understandable for the really choppy carving out of the chapters in each book.

It's a guilty pleasure, and I am not complaining, just merely pointing out.

I think that's it for this entry. Till the next update.

``Kitty''

No visit to Night City today---it is mostly a reading sort of day.

I finally finished OpenStax College: Organisational Behaviour, and have started on Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. Tools of Titans weighs in at 872 pages, but the going seems to be quite fast---I think I will actually leverage on my large reading screen at home to make some progress on Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition) and leave Tools of Titans to be handled on Eirian-IV.

I think I will head out tomorrow for a change of scenery to do some reading on Eirian-IV instead of sitting at home.

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I am not a follower of The Masked Singer (Wikipedia link in case the project site dies years from now), but Season 3 had caught my eye. It was a (or should it be ``the''?) season that was also broadcast in Singapore as it was unfolding. What caught my eye was ``Kitty''. She had bounce in the trailers, her costume looked so lush and fabulous, and I was intrigued.

Mind you, I never followed the show at all.

It was near the start of this year that I went back to find out more about who ``Kitty'' was. I found a couple of video compilations of all her singing at the show, and oh my, how pleasantly surprised I was at it all! Her voice is amazing! The costume was, of course, captivating, but her pantomiming skills were also on par to bring the mask/costume to live as well.



And yes, I learnt that she was Jackie Evancho. This line in her post-reveal video is the most touching to me.



I agree with her, it's not stupid... I think sometimes we just need to have the chance to shed away the baggages/identities of the past so that whoever/whatever it is within us can be looked at independently of any prior contexts/biases.

That is perhaps what I am seeking out of my sabbatical.

Till the next update.

Clarke Quay, Bras Basah Complex, and Back from the Edge

Today's blog entry is a little more flavourful, seeing that I have actually gone out of the apartment.

I resurrected an old tag, sms-musing, that tags posts that were conceived in the field while I was doing something else, which in today's case, was waiting for the bus. I might just keep using this tag if I have such epiphanies each time I'm out in the field, probably as a way of capturing those in-the-moment thoughts that come from doing something more stimulating.

Speaking of stimulating, I went to grab my favourite sushi for lunch today. I have been following them since a long time ago since their first stall in VivoCity, and their aburi nigiri is to die for (get the assorted one---comes in stacks of 10 and is borderline omakase). The rest of the menu items are generally good as well because of Chef Johnson's consistent use of fresh ingredients.

My record was eating 40 pieces of those delicious assorted aburi nigiri sushi. I've stopped doing that for a while now because I wanted to lose weight. Sushi, delicious they may be, still has lots of carbs in the form of the rice after all.

I used to be a little less loud about this place, because the more people realise how tasty their food is, the harder it may be for me to find a place to sit there when I head down to dine in. However, times have changed, maybe I won't live long enough to keep supporting them I mean thanks to COVID-19, the F&B businesses are getting quite badly hit, and I would be sad if JJ.com Fish Mart goes away completely. They are located at 6 Eu Tong Sen Street, The Central #01-68/69, Singapore 059817. If you are reading this blog entry, and are in Singapore, please head on down and support them. =)

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After my comfort food, I went on for a walk along the river and headed towards Clarke Quay proper. Seeing the tear down of Liang Court brought out some sadness in me. Liang Court was, back in the day, the place to go for anything that is of the Japanese culture. Recently, I had spent some time there prior to its demolition, and loved the Kinokuniya book store that was there. There were also a craft beer place, and it was also the place where I went to for my slim hip flask.

All these have gone down the path of history now, like all things in Singapore. This is in contrast with Melaka---going there with a fifteen-year separation revealed almost no changes whatsoever.

Not sure what to feel there, but it is just a thing I suppose.

The walk was supposed to take me from Clarke Quay Central through Clarke Quay, follow Hill St up north before ending at Peace Centre.

But I got side tracked. A while back, I talked about Seng Yew Book Store, and claimed that it was still alive. But that was based on Internet pictures. So I thought to myself, `hey, since Bras Basah Complex is sort of along the way, why not check out the place to confirm it?'.

And that was why when I was already at the vicinity of the National Museum of Singapore, I decided to switch over and walk towards Bras Basah Complex instead. It took me a while, but I got there...

...and promptly got suck into 书城音乐书局, or more affectionately known as 书城 for short. They have an English name (``Music Book Room''), but I have never heard of anyone calling it by that name. I bought two books, one on 笛子 techniques (and associated training pieces), and one on 箫. I was tempted by the melodica by Suzuki music, as well as two 膜孔-less 笛子 (it was a G-梆笛 and a D-曲笛). The melodicas (``melodions'' using Suzuki Music's branding) were easy to not be too tempted by because they were in the hundreds for price.

But those two 膜孔-less 笛子 were sub-fifty each. So tempting... but I remembered that I have a Grenaditte piccolo and a Grenaditte treble flute that covers the range of the G-梆笛 and D-曲笛 respectively. They were also chromatic in nature, and actually had a wider compass than the two 膜孔-less 笛子. And so the temptation was gently pushed away.

I spent the next couple of hours just walking about Bras Basah Complex, exploring various stores, staying clear of bookstores (and Artfriend) in general. I did enter Swee Lee though, and found that their renovated premises to be more stylish than before.

As I wend my way through, I finally reached the top of the commercial part of Bras Basah Complex, and sat down to this interesting panorama:

It was just this strange juxtaposition of a public housing residential apartment [behind me and atop Bras Basah Complex] while the buildings around were obviously non-residential in nature, with the National Libray clearly within a stone's throw away.

I would've sat there longer had the rain not start to pick up and scatter me away from the open air ``roof-top''.

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I think that my urge to revisit many places again might be related to the concept of transactive memory. Mumbo-jumbo aside, the premise is that when we remember things, we tend to build strong associations as part of the encoding of the memory. Association is a very strong mechanism in the reinforcement of a memory, it is part of how the method of loci can be used to memorise stupidly long lists of things.

More mundanely, it also means that if one's memory of a place was when one was with someone else doing something, it often is the strongest memory of that place.

This is bad for me because it means that I do not have another way of looking at the [objective] reality, which means that I will keep getting reminded of a reality that is no longer true. This constant reminder from an old memory is a great way to develop more and more ``down'' episodes.

As I mentioned in my earlier SMS-musing, life's experiences (as both mental and physical ones) have hysteresis loops involved---even when we ``go back to a previous state'', we don't actually go back to a previous state verbatim since we have already been conditioned with whatever that has happened in between visits. Memories cannot be erased, but they can be put into a different context, the so-called ``time will heal'' effect. And the fastest way to put memories into a different context (thus dulling the one causing a stronger [negative] affect) is just to build new ones.

So visiting Bras Basah Complex alone today doing similar enough but different things compared to the time that I was here with someone else helps to recontextualise the memory and reduce the pain that it will cause.

Am I just rationalising things to myself, or is there another purpose behind this?

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In other news, I have a new ear worm.
I first heard it while I was at my favourite bar.

What drew me to the song was the repeated refrain:

Back from the edge
Back from the dead
Back before demons took control of my head
Back to the start
Back to my heart
Back to the boy who would reach for the stars
Oh, back from the edge
Back from the dead
Back from the tears that were too easily shed
Back to the start
Back to my heart
Back to the boy who would reach for the stars
Who would reach for the stars, yeah

(Lyrics sub-texted from Musixmatch.) It's not that the lyrics are particularly deep, but that the delivery of the lines just resonated with me. It's a mix of wistful, anger (especially from the line beginning ``Oh, back from the edge''), and a certain victorious feel to it.

That's about all I have for now. Till the next update.

《羞答答的玫瑰静悄悄的开》

Another day another entry.

``Why?'' You may ask.

``Documenting intrusive thoughts,'' is my answer.

The last time I talked about intrusive thoughts, they involved suicide ideation. Thankfully, those have more or less gone away, to be replaced with something somewhat different.

It involves selling away or getting rid of all of my music instruments, basically more or less permanently quitting making music. I mean, the whole purpose of making music for me was to have some form of relaxation away from the world.

But the world has robbed me of that pleasure. Combine that with all the heavier and heavier politics I have to slowly start to deal with, making music feels more of a chore than fun.

It's a seductive intrusive thought, a very perverse one too, if I stop to give it more attention. There was also this other really extreme one---since I'm not getting married any time soon, and with each passing year going to seal my fate as a permanent bachelor, there really is no point keeping all the money that I have been saving to start a life with a significant other. Maybe I'll just do a meaningless spending of it on a platinum flute to play for a while before I off myself, or just donate it all away.

Yeah it's fucked up. You don't have to tell me that.

In case you were a sadist and thought that I would action on those intrusive thoughts, well too bad. I'm not too far gone yet to realise their nature and arrest them. I thank the Lord for the wisdom to see that.

But on a somewhat more sombre note, I really do feel like I want to isolate and hermit up. There really isn't anything to look forward to any more... I wasn't kidding when I said that if I were to be called home to the Lord now, I wouldn't mind. Only problem is that I still have an intern to supervise, so I'll at least hold on till after he is done with his internship---no point traumatising him unnecessarily. I had contemplated setting up a new web page (tentatively called ``death-clock'') that tracked when was the earliest I could off myself given my conditions. But it wasn't going to be a good idea anyway, since I had to wait till at least both my parents had passed, which honestly, isn't likely to happen in the next ten years.

So, I have to live till at least forty-five years old.

I honestly don't know what to make of that.

Anyway, I have a couple of social events to attend to this week, but after that, I think I'll just go hide away.

No one needs to deal with a basket case like me.

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In other news, I finally found another earworm.



The title is 《羞答答的玫瑰静悄悄的开》, sung by 孟庭苇. Seriously, the phrases used were no where near common, no wonder it took me so long to actually find it. I only succeeded due to using midomi and have a somewhat decent pitch in singing, and having the luck to have the song indexed.

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That's all for today. Hopefully I don't have more things to clear from my mind. It is really depressing.

La Loca, 傻女, and 傻女的爱

Remember La Loca and 《傻女》? I've finally found the Chinese version of 《傻女》 (it is called 《傻女的爱》).

《傻女的爱》——陈慧娴

今夜再度想起那被遗忘的故事
去年此时的相遇 为何依然清晰
仿佛一种神秘的气息 带我走回那过去
你我曾共舞的那一夜 已消失在爱的边缘

把脸颊轻轻贴在你温暖的心上
让长发像夜温柔 覆盖你的胸堂
炬火在眼中荡漾 泪水无意中滑落
爱上你是痴狂 爱过像梦一场
啊 阳光不要叫我起床 冰凉的枕上

我不断回想你曾经怎么讲
缠绵一生只是荒谬的幻想
独自一人才是人生的真相
何不把爱当作是游戏一场

我不断回想那段爱的时光
笑里掩住多少心碎和感伤
美丽的故事已是褪色模样
我踩着孤独的脚步直到天亮

Lyrics courtesy baidu.com

But wait, there's more!

Someone actually took the time to splice them all together to make it more obvious that they are related:

There's another song that I am currently obsessing, but I will leave it for another post for another time. Back to work I go!

May-Jan

It is now May.

I wanted to write something before, but could never convince myself that there was something substantial enough to warrant the effort needed to write a post like this one.

Long time readers might have realised that I hadn't written the customary rant that occurs whenever the annual ``celebration'' of my birth rolls around. It isn't so much as me deliberately forgetting to write anything, but that I was actually waiting for something to happen before I wrote anything. The said thing happened a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't bring myself to write anything until now.

So, as per normal, I used the birthday celebration as an excuse to buy myself some cool stuff. One of them is a brand-new Kindle Voyage reader with the origami cover, nicknamed ``Eirian-IV''. She's a compact replacement of Eirian-II, whom was actually replaced with Eirian-III, my Nexus 10 tablet. The thing is, I've always liked to do my heaviest text-reading over e-ink, but as noted before, Eirian-II was fast fading away. I had used Eirian-III for a while, but the brightness that comes from staring at an LCD display was starting to annoy me. What convinced me to get the Kindle Voyage was the stupendous resolution. At 300ppi, it rivals that of the Nexus 10 (also around 300ppi), is more than 4× better than the Kindle DX (~150ppi---we're looking at area here), and has an amazing battery life. That high resolution made the 6-inch form factor tolerable, and so I got one. Eirian-IV is thus procured and is now part of my daily carry.

I got Eirian-IV a couple of months or so before my actual birthday, but didn't really write anything about her till now.

The main thing why it took me so long to write this was my Grenaditte bass flute, or Mio. An order for Mio was placed a while back, but due to a variety of reasons (some staff changes, Chinese New Year, probable company restructuring etc) it took GUO nearly 3 months before they delivered it to the shop. And when Mio finally arrived, I was right in the middle of my annual trip to the US to meet up and hang out with friends, as well as to go walk around to find geocaches.

It is of no secret that I am starting to explore the lower extremes of sound generation. I have been quite decent with messing around with the really high-pitched stuff (see also my picc, the new Garklein recorder that I got during my US trip, which superceded the sopranino recorder that I had since my days at UIUC), failing only with the highest of the high notes, i.e. everything from A7 and higher. But there is only that much one can go with the high pitched notes---they tend to get a little too annoying on the ears (anything at around 1kHz does that, and when it gets to 4kHz it gets stupid worse---try listening to the screams of a toddler for an idea on how annoying it gets). It may be super impressive and fun, but as I mentioned, it gets annoying. Now the lower extreme, that's not as well explored as that of the middle and high range. Partly because of the skill and resources required. Small instruments need some level of skill to construct, and a relatively iron will to actually play it. but larger instruments require quite a bit of actual material to build, and a fair bit of physiological conditioning to even make a sound out of it, let alone play it well. They also tend to sound way more pleasing to the ear, and in the grand scale (hur hur) of things, more octaves of them for playing with than the high stuff (around 5 octaves of low notes versus the commonly used 3 for the high ones).

So yes, a bass flute. The cheapest metal bass flute costs nearly USD10k, and weigh practically a ton (more like 2kg or so). Mio is made of Grenaditte, the same material as my picc, and weighs less, nearer 1.5kg. She also costs around half the price of the cheapest metal bass flute, while still sounding pretty solid for the price point. In short, a real steal. Of course she can't beat the well-crafted professional silver bass flute, but she is definitely a cost effective way to explore the beginning of the lower reaches of the flute family. In comparison, the standard ``bass'' dizi is only at the range of an alto flute, not counting the scary weird 巨笛 (or ``giant dizi'') that spans nearly 3m in length.Waiting for Mio was the reason why I didn't write this post any earlier.

The more astute among you will know why my Grenaditte bass flute is called Mio. I shall end on this note for now. Till the next update.

Cryptogram Tools, 6-hole dizi Fingering Charts, Earworm

I have seen many people that I know get married over the past few years. Of which, only one invited me to join in their joyous occasion, an invitation that I was, unfortunately, unable to reply favourably because I was in the middle of fighting for my sanity. It made me wonder a little in terms of just how people perceive me, friend or acquaintance: I am either such a serious person in their eyes that I am seemingly unable to share in their joy, or that I'm such a volatile person that they'd rather I not be there to make everyone think that they are not ``normal'' for having known a person like me.

Meh. I don't really think it matters. Some might even say that it is a blessing in disguise, since I am ``blessed'' in avoiding the dreaded ``red bomb''. If marriages are to be celebrated, and as a friend I'm not there, how do you think I feel?

Or do you really think that I do not feel at all?

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In other news, I have managed to port enough of the cute-sy cryptogram tools from my old web site to my new one. Their landing page can be found here. Instead of a thousand-and-one different scripts implementing the various cipher systems, I had just one minified and compacted file instead. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with JavaScript's notion of objects, particularly how inheritance is implemented (hint: it is not the same as in C++ or Java). So that's that.

Another rather hidden change is the re-release of my 6-hole dizi fingering charts. The basic one can be obtained from this URL while the complete one can be obtained from this other URL. The biggest difference of these new fingering charts from the the old is the removal of our dependence on MSWord to provide the layout. Both files are constructed from UTF-8 text files with little to no trickery, using this little tool that I had featured before to produce the PostScript file that gets converted into a PDF via ps2pdf. That little tool has been updated to include the glyphs from the SMP (plane 1 of the Unicode; plane 0 is regular BMP), but I had refrained from using those in the documents because there was no easy way to read the entire document at once since there is no font in the world now that can have more than 65535 glyphs at once.

But no matter. The stuff from the SMP are more useful for generating jianpu documents than fingering charts.

The more complete chart of the two has a whole bunch of new fingerings for notes that are higher than the E'-fingering using Boehm fingering notation. I have tested them on my NTS G-bangdi and have certified them as reachable, albeit stupidly. It remains for me to test those out on a qudi for additional verification, and then there's of course the translation of that to the dadi, which, having one more hole in between F♯ and E, meant that it has the chance to achieve a more precise hold on the various harmonics necessary to hit the super high notes.

What I was most proud of for the lists was discovering the G'♯ fingering that works. It works, but is excessively breathy on the bangdi---I will need to refine that a bit more, as well as confirm it on a qudi of some sort where the higher harmonics tend to be easier to reach.

All these and more will be described in fuller detail when I get about towards writing the dizi pedagogy pages.

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Finally, I have finally found the bloody ear worm that was stuck since 2012. Here it is:And in case that video gets taken down, ``The Way Back Into Love''. And this:Maybe neither will get tossed out.

And that's all for today.

September

It's a Saturday once again, and we are now nearing the midpoint of September.

There were at least two other occasions where I felt the urge to write an update of some kind, but didn't, as you can plainly see. It wasn't for a lack of updates -- there are plenty to talk about, really -- but that I was feeling a little under the weather.

You see, the haze is back. Not as vengeful as two years ago, but enough to cause an annoyance. I feel generally lethargic, with little to no incentive to actually get up and do anything physical. And that's why I just stay at home, but that is not anything particularly abnormal, to be had.

What's abnormal[ish] is that I haven't actually gamed in a while.

For some reason, I don't feel a strong need to muck around with the pretend worlds that the games provide. Not something as immersive as Skyrim/Minecraft, or something as abstract as DoomRL. Just didn't feel that urge... at all.

Perhaps it's because my attentions are currently occupied elsewhere, like the two upcoming SG50-related performances in this month. They have a way of diverting my attention from playing games to thinking about my handling of my dizi.

I think I spent most of the past month or so thinking really hard about things that I never really bothered before, things like proper intonation on my dizi and other woodwind instruments that I was messing around with (like the fife and piccolo), articulation (when to tongue each note and when to slur -- jianpu doesn't usually make a difference between ties and phrasing ties), and ornamentation (when vibrato is needed, when notes ought to be ``clean'', when leading notes should be applied). I think it is a sign that I'm starting to level-up again, having more or less stayed at a mild plateau of sorts. Stimulation has a way of really aiding in the rewiring of one's perspective on even the familiar, and I think that the exposure to a new group (Di-Capella) with new folks has given me the jolt necessary for me to do all these thinking.

In terms of music, I think I've reached the age where few will say that I'm a neophyte, even when I'm working on an instrument that isn't my main. Seeing and hearing how other folks (professionals and certified amateurs) handle their instruments provides a kind of external benchmark for me to determine how the outside world has evolved, and helped me determine just what I was missing in my own education of the process.

And yes, despite what folks may say about how I play, I know that I'm missing some stuff in the completeness of my skill set. I am sufficiently inspired to actually work on that, though I will still refuse to subject myself to the formal certification process -- I'm happy to be who I am with regards to music.

That said though, it is hard to want to learn more/express while still keeping a low profile. We'll see what I can do there...

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Software architecting is a very interesting topic, and I find myself working increasingly in that regard instead of just bashing code to get things to work. I have found that over the years, as I work on more and more systems, I tend to write less and less actual code, even to the point that I'm not actually designing new algorithms from scratch the way I used to do maybe some fifteen years ago.

Software architects are the prototypal ``master programmers'' -- they provide the abstract framework of a system, defining the types of component partitioning discipline required to get a system going. There is a strong business aspect to it, as I am starting to learn, because the most efficacious architecture isn't necessarily the one that gets deployed simply because the business resources and decisions do not support it -- cost (time and money) are very important factors towards architecting that the hacker-class programmer will not care too much about.

In some sense, understanding the process behind good software architecting has made me moderate my hacker-sense into something that is more realistic -- I don't feel the kind of invincibility and immortality that I had back when I was fourteen and trouncing my seniors in competitive programming. It's a good thing, since sustainability (maintainability) is a very important aspect of system design that isn't really thought of much by the self-thought hacker-programmer.

Anyway, I think that's all I care to write for now. Here's something mildly related:

Bloody Long !@#$ Weekend

I probably should be grateful for the long weekend that is SIN city's golden jubilee celebration, but frankly, I feel anything but grateful.

If anything, I feel restless and completely pissed off, that such a long period of procrastination is allowed to manifest itself at all in the city where not working time beyond office hours is termed a sin.

The weekend has been too long, I think. Four whole days. Maybe it's because I have no one to actually go hang out with and do other stuff, or maybe because I am just irritated after barely recovering from a nasty bout of flu. Maybe it's because I'm staying in an apartment that is not air-conditioned, and am still living with my parents when my sister has just moved out completely to her new place with her husband. Or maybe it is the forced realisation of some manner of loneliness from rewatching K-On!, K-On!! and the K-On! movie, an affect that I naturally develop each time I watch anime like that. It reminds me of a kind of nostalgia that I never truly felt completely, having been mostly a sideline character at most of the clubs and societies that I had been a part of.

Camaraderie. I feel that of course, fleetingly at times, but never truly immersed in it. Maybe because there have been few places where I felt as though I truly belong, even from the very beginning. In spite of my seemingly gregarious nature, I'm more of a conflicted hermit.

Aiyah, it's frustrating to articulate just what is bothering the crap out of me.

Maybe it's the phoneyness of the whole jubilee celebration. Engineered, one might say if one were trying to keep in theme with the way how SIN city is run. The hilarious part is that despite being the person who lampoons this whole... PR stunt, I think I can safely say that I have taken part in more of such... activities as a performer than most people have as an audience. Maybe ``irony'' is the better word here, but I'm not in the mood to be pedantic today.

I wrote a micro-story yesterday, entitled Hold On To Your Love. Unsurprisingly, it is named after one of my favourite OSTs from K-On!, that you can hopefully watch here.That guitar... is to die for. A-hem. Anyway, I felt like I needed to vent something from the restlessness last night, and hence that particular micro-story.

I've also made yet another small progress through the William Russo book, by composing something a given pitch restriction. Maybe I'll work on the next exercise later this evening---composition with a rhythm restriction on C-major. Felt too irritated to work on that yesterday.

Today though... so much restlessness. I was tempted to head out to find a café to just sit down, have a cup of coffee and do some reading, work related and otherwise (am working through Othello). When lunch was done though, reality set in: it was nearly two in the afternoon. By the time I headed out, it would be time to return, not to mention the general impossibility to find a quiet place to sit around since most of the kids are taking over cafés and what-not for their studying needs. So I felt more irritation.

I couldn't/shouldn't play on my flutes and/or dizis though---my the lateral side of my thumbs'interphalangeal ligaments were starting to show some form of swelling that seemed consistent with calluses. I suspect it's because I've been playing too much of my 大G dizi---it weighs quite a bit more than what I usually play, and I have been giving it around two to three hours of practice on Friday and Saturday itself. I didn't want to introduce a new range of RSI, so am taking it easier.

That of course helped to add to my restlessness. My usual outlet of letting out such irritation is to wail away on whatever musical instrument I have my hands on. Since that is sort of not available, I just feel all the more annoyed.

At this point, I think I have run out of things to bitch about, and have diverged quite significantly in terms of the content, so I suppose I'll just stop here.

Till the next update.

Be Professional

Well, I was about to write a ranty piece on how discrimination is innate in human nature, and how we as an advanced society (as compared to the past anyway) just learn how to downplay that natural reaction just so we can get along with each other, but seeing these couple of videos made me decide to write something altogether different. First, watch the videos I have in mind:Notice that they are from the same group. No I have no affiliation with them.

The thing is, it is important to treat everyone with the same basic attitude, and to never be condescending. Just because it's the first time you meet someone doesn't mean that the first impression you get is the actual behaviour of the person. It is much better (some might even say professional) to keep an open mind, a neutral stance, and defer judgement till later. Just because she looks like a cute stereotypical ``nerdy'' girl doesn't mean that she isn't in the top class of her art. While the videos were made largely with pranking in mind, they do convey a much deeper lesson to the instructors involved, and it is exactly what I said earlier. The monkey brain in us will naturally condescend others perceived to be physically unintimidating, but the human brain in us must be disciplined enough to override that sentiment and apply the cold hard truth of logic, that sometimes that unassuming exterior hides something superior and thus more dangerous.

What the videos do not show is the other end of the spectrum, where people get all subservient and obsequious in the face of ``authority''. See this next video, which does:Again, it's the monkey brain at work. ``Oh it's a motorcade with important-looking people; I should be as nice as I can because there's someone important in it and important people do not like to get stopped.'' Again, it's a failure of professionalism, where the trained human brain does not triumph over the monkey brain within. Don't get me wrong, the ability to immediately sense authority and adjust one's role accordingly is a useful skill for survival, but when one has a job to do, that job's requirements overrule any of these instinctual habits, particularly when the instinctual habits contradict what the job requires.

Here's a slightly different example on that concept. Take your regular soldier. After filtering out all the fancy euphemisms, a soldier's roles can be reduced to two principles: to kill on demand, to follow orders even if it means their total annihilation. The first goes against our usual social notions of ``acceptable'' behaviour, and the second goes against our innate monkey brain notion of fight/flight. If you run off without following orders to hold the ground and be overrun, you're a deserter---it's unprofessional, and more importantly, it jeopardises other plans that aid in the larger scheme of things.

The crux of it all is merely this: if you are taking up a job, be it a professional driving instructor, martial arts trainer, security personnel, or a soldier, do your job according to what your profession requires and do not let your monkey brain take over. Modern society has little place for monkey brain thinking under the highly specialised job structure we have, but it is an unfortunate trend that is going on now. Much of the cop problems brought up in the US are due to police officers not being professional on their job.

Before we can evolve to the next phase of human society, I think we need to rethink and relook how to be professional all over again. Otherwise that twentieth century notion of ``division of labour'' is no longer applicable and we'll need to come up with something better.