Physically Exhausted, but Mentally Fulfilled

I'm physically exhausted, but mentally fulfilled. There's something about physical exertions that help clear the mind.

Wangki swung by SIN city between 2023-03-09 and today to visit us former Illinites whom had once shared a moment in history co-existing in the same geographical region through a period of life that was both challenging and defining, before heading off to his next great adventure.

That great adventure is a story for him to tell---I will not rob him of that opportunity.

Meanwhile, I will just list down what we did over the past few days with little description:

• Ate at the Burger King at the airport;
• Drove from airport to hostel;
• Dinner with Joel out in Beach Rd (parking was a bitch as always);
• Visit to Tiong Bahru market and hawker centre for walk and breakfast;
• Met up with BC and ZD for lunch out in University Town;
• Climbed Bukit Timah Hill;
• Walked both Bukit Timah Shopping Centre, and Beauty World Centre;
• Visited the Singapore Zoo;
• Rehearsals at TGCO;
• After-rehearsal supper of prata;
• Lunch of sashimi, sushi, udon, and don;
• Touring of JEWEL.

It's abbreviated, but it sort of captures in broad strokes what we did.

...we walked, a lot. My sedentary lifestyle is catching up with me---I can keep up on the days themselves, but I am paying the price now with the tight muscles, and the delayed onset of soreness.

But damn is it the good kind of pain. I really should be doing more of these, and perhaps I will.

Lots of good conversation were made, as were new jokes, and some rather serious discussions about our present and our futures in general. When I finally sent Wangki off to the check-in counter (the line was too long, me being exhausted and having work tomorrow meant I just couldn't sit around to wait before being somewhat impaired for driving), I left feeling a little sad, not because it would be a long time before I met my friend and ex-roommate again, but that our lives are truly reaching the point where Things Were Getting Rather Serious.

I suppose that's what middle age does to one. Unavoidable.

------

Amazon has announced that it is basically terminating the ability to receive subscribed magazines and newspapers over the Kindle. It's a damn shame... considering that I juuuuuust bought Eirian-V specifically for this feature.

What am I to do for my dose of The Economist?

Till the next time, I suppose.

Getting Regulation Over Materials Used to Make Flute?

In response to a forum post asking if there should be FDA oversight over the materials used in making flutes, considering that it is in close contact with the mouth area, with a trend of experimenting on newer materials, and having a tendency to cause bad allergic reactions:

I know where you are coming from, but getting these FDA approved seems a bit of a stretch, considering that no one is really using flutes to work with food, nor is it related to medicine/drugs in general.

CPSC seems like a better fit, though all these regulations are only applicable to the US.

That said, considering that the flute purchasing population is vastly smaller compared to regular consumer products, perhaps such regulatory control might be too much to ask for in general.

From some of the anecdotes here (as in the forum at large), it seems that the underlying problem is incomplete/incorrect knowledge on allied fields not directly related to music-making. From material safety, mitigations to such materials, sustainability of certain exotic organic materials, to the care/maintenance, folklore often passes as facts, with emotional reactions often dominating.

I'm not asking for musicians to be expert physicists/chemists/biologists, but to at least know when to put aside the qualities that make them excellent musicians and to bring out the other "hard" side to examine the material (heheh) realities with a more critical eye to better educate themselves in the fields that are periphery to their primary world of music-making.

It is sort of the same reason why we make STEM-field students study humanities as well. We don't expect the same level of excellence in these periphery fields as compared to their primary concerns, but to at least be at a level where they can apply critical thinking to assess and decide on things that can directly affect their primary concerns.

Singapore Flute Fair 2023, and What I Did There

A week ago today was the Singapore Flute Fair 2023 hosted by MusicGear, with her sister companies. The draw of the Flute Fair was the assembly of flute and accessories sellers/distributors from around the region, together with the appearance of Muramatsu and Miyazawa flute technicians to do light servicing on concert flutes, either in-brand for the respective company flute technicians, or out-brand, as long as the flute itself is not made of inferior materials. That last bit might sound a little elitist, but the reality is the these light services are more akin to fine-tuning than performing major correction, and many of the lower-valued flutes are made of materials that do not subject themselves to fine adjustments, and more importantly, do not keep said fine adjustments should they be somehow applied.

There was also a recital, but since it was to happen in the evening of Saturday when I had my rehearsals with the TGCO, I bowed out from attending it.

This year was the first time in as many years of COVID-19 being the obsession of the world that it has been held. The scale was small-ish, but it still managed to attract a healthy number of participants, based solely on my now third-party observation.

I had fun over the two-day exhibition, trying all kinds of piccolos, and playing with various flutes. I'm not really in the market for buying a new flute (Aurelia is my End Flute anyway), but I am definitely scouting around to learn more on getting a better piccolo. I've tried a Powell Signature, the Burkart Resona and Elite samples, one Bulgheroni Piccolo, and a couple of Haynes piccolos.

Conclusion thus far: the traditional embouchure cut is excellent for wailing like I wanna completely emulate the dizi, but trying to get soft dynamics out of it for the high notes tend to be tougher, compared to wave cut. The wave cut ensured that the air stream was well targetted to provide that sweet sweet pianissimo dynamics for concert pitch G7 and higher. As for low notes, both cuts across all the piccolos were alright---that old problem I faced with a somewhat non-projecting concert pitch D5 was due to me not angling enough of the air-stream towards the embouchure hole to bring it out. There are some slight differences in the timbre, but they tend to be a bit more minor compared to just getting the fullness of the right-hand low notes (i.e. concert pitch F♯5 and lower) out in the first place. Again, the wave cut has a tendency to bring out a more centred (i.e. purer) tone, while the traditional cut allowed a little more noise surrounding it, which does make the tone seem fuller without necessarily contributing to the harmonic content.

Piccolo trying aside, I met a few new people, as well as caught up with some old ones. It was definitely different from before---I was running around as myself, as compared to the past flute fairs where I was running around essentially as her plus one. She was there at the fair, unexpected but unsurprising to me, helping out with being the minder of the Muramatsu technicians and generally being involved with the logistics of the light repair service. That is my guess, based on what I saw.

We exchanged no words. What was there to say, anyway?

Two days of standing about, talking to many people, playing piccolo using dizi repertoire to tease out the compatibility between me and the instrument while keeping the dynamics soft enough to not incur a warning from Brando... it was a very tiring yet very fulfilling weekend. Musospace, the location for this year's edition of the Flute Fair, was an interesting location, to say the least. Good to learn of yet another cool place that I may end up wanting to consider, should I ever decide to put together a personal recital as a private celebration of more than three decades of actively playing on the dizi.

A man can dream, can't he?

Eirian-V Has Arrived!

Feels a bit off sitting in the proverbial saddle, but hey, gotta keep on writing if you know what I mean. Morbidly this blog has a much higher chance of out-living me long after I am dead, and that sort of terrifies me.

Just a little.

To begin with, it is a happy belated birthday to me. Something about the long weekend over Chinese New Year just screams ``don't feel like writing'' to me in a way that was hard to ignore. That long weekend passed on by quite quickly, and I have nothing much to report, other than a delightful long walk with YT on Monday exploring a bit of the western neighbourhood that I had always wondered how it looked like, followed by a reclimbing the old faithful Bukit Timah Hill, and some well-wishers from the few who still remembered when it was the anniversary of my birth.

Moving on, I mentioned some time back about getting the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, and finally did. Eirian-V arrived in the last week of January, and I have been using it for nearly two weeks on the single charge, clocking about 1.5 hours of reading per day.

And it's ``only'' at 55% left, which is pretty cool, considering that I was reading the higher power draw situations of full-page manga spreads generated using kcc on some CBZ/CBR collections I have lying about. That extra 0.8" of screen space (6.0" vs 6.8"), combined with much thinner bevels in general meant a greatly increased view space for very little actual increase in dimensions of the device. In English, this means that I can still hold it single-handed, and wiggle my ring finger to advance the page, albeit with only my left hand since there are no dedicated ``page advance'' tactile buttons that allow ambidextrous use the way Eirian-IV had.

I think that's about it for now. It's just a short entry to show that I'm alive, and to mark the arrival of Eirian-V. Till the next update.

Thursday/Friday---Who's Keeping Track Again?

Okay, it's stupid o'clock once again. And I feel a little compelled to write a little drivel here.

It's fine---I've been on leave for the whole of today (well, Friday), and the lunar new year public holidays mean an already extended long weekend that ends on Tuesday (i.e. I return to work on Wednesday).

My birthday collides head on with that of the first day of the lunar new year. As such, this entry is probably all that I will use to talk about it.

After the tumultous three years that passed on by, I finally found back a bit of my mojo, and to my confusion, it was almost as though the past seven years did not occur. There's this unknown source of energy---I know I'm closer to being middle-aged, but I feel closer to being on the wrong side of twenty-five than thirty-five.

I can't really tell why though; there seems to be no good reason why I should be feeling this way. And frankly, as long as it puts me in a generally good mood, I don't see any reason why I should question it and take it all away. Now, if it were something that was causing me distress, then perhaps I ought to do something about it.

All those intrusive thoughts that I had been harbouring on and off for the past two years have receded into the background noise once more; they are still there and occasionally emerge, but for the most part they have been quite silent, which is a good thing.

Again, not sure where all these goodness are coming from, but I'm not going to question it. If it is God's plan for me to experience these now, so be it---His will, not mine.

Work has started a whole new vortex of change, but that is always to be expected anyways. When one works in a field where innovation and change are the name of the game, the associated manner of management has to be non-static just to keep up. That is what I see to be the lessons that I need to learn in this upcoming year.

But back to the collision between my birthday and the first day of the lunar new year. For once I do not need to age ``three times''---just the regular New Year, then the lunar new year, instead of the more usual New Year-birthday-lunar new year trifecta. But there were other slight complications---it also meant that I could not actually do anything remotely fun for my birthday then. It was of little matter as I could just arrange for a nice meal at my favourite sushi place before the lunar new year festivities confuddle things, and it was exactly what I did on Thursday evening.

I honestly am not expecting anyone to remember, let alone send their well-wishes to me---that friend circle was small to begin with, and is getting smaller as the years go by. My church sent me a nice card that was handwritten by the senior pastor, which is nice, and I suppose that's about it for now.

I have no idea what to get for myself for a present this year. It usually ends up being something relating to music making (mostly because I needed a nice way of justifying/rationalising the putting down of Serious Money for these intermediate to high quality instruments), but I have no idea what to go for, considering that I had almost all of the instruments that I thought I wanted to continue playing on by now. Rehearsals at my Chinese Orchestra are slowly restarting, and we are now at the build-up phase, which means that the numbers are lean, and that I am the only dizi player. That solo fort-holding means that I have no reason to be trying to bring in other instruments to expand the timbre, which extends to me not having a reason to find and purchase some new instrument.

And at this stage, the stuff I'm looking at are hitting Really Serious Money levels, with prices estimated to be in the ballpark of 10-grand, not because of any particularly exotic material costs, but that these stuff are considered less mainstream from the rest, and should be taken to be the equivalent of commissioned instruments.

And I still don't know how to justify the costs yet, and so I don't---this is immaterial of whether I am capable of paying it now or after a few more months of saving into a pre-calculated budget.

But let's put those thoughts away for the moment.

------

Recently I have been playing some Borderlands 3. I have resisted playing that for quite a while, mostly because I was put off by the many hijinks that were related to that particular game release. Near the end of last year, Steam had a sale (of course they do) of the game complete with the DLCs for a reasonable-enough price, and I purchased it.

100 GiB of download later, I continued on my journey through the Borderlands world, continuing my tradition of playing a Siren character (Amara). After 70+ hours, I agree with what Kishore told me that time when I asked him about his thoughts about Borderlands 3: the gunplay and the quality of life surrounding the main game loop was quite sound and fun, but the storyline was just meh.

I'm not sure if there was ever a need to spread out the action across multiple planets as opposed to sticking to just Pandora---for such a mechanic, the storyline did seem rather weak and it felt like they were trying too hard to make it more epic than it was. The point of reference here is, of course, against the storyline of Borderlands 2. The new villains were obvious caricatures, but they did not demonstrate any more depth, acting more like Macguffins rather than true characters. The quality of life and gunplay were definitely improvements over Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for the most part, but I found their requirement of charging of the elemental-heavy Maliwan weapons to do it a disservice. The dual-mode mechanic for some weapons is interesting and it gave me some incentive to make use of the other keys that have been present on my mouse for a long time.

At the pace I am going, I just might complete the main story by the end of this long weekend. I doubt I can complete the VLCs immediately after though.

Okay, I can feel my eyes drooping---I should stop here, take a shower, and turn in for the night.

Till the next update.

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2022:

1. 0 poems posted here
2. 76 essays/rants posted here
3. 0 prose/stories posted here
4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
5. 0 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
   

And thus the grand total here is 77 articles, down from the 414 articles in 2021.

That's an average of 0.211 pieces of writing a day, compared to 1.134 last year. 2021 was an anomaly, and so having 2022's rate at whatever it is falls in the ``back to normal'' category more than anything else.

As always, much happened in 2022. The world was still reeling from the whole nonsense that was COVID-19, but the second half of the year in SIN city started to become increasingly lax and almost to the point of returning to something that resembled normal. The only big things that would give things away were the mask mandate for public transport use, and for those who dealt with food and beverages. Those in the hospital were also required to wear masks beyond that of regular medical interventions, but they were less likely to be seen out in public that way anyway.

As for me, I'd been steadily getting back into the groove of working. It was almost as though the years between 2015 and 2021 never really existed. As the year went on, I felt almost as spry as when I returned from my studies in the US for the second time, though inexplicably armed with experience that seemingly came from nowhere.

The sourness from the abrupt end to what I thought was my ``forever'' relationship is at most a passing memory---there have been many days that nothing of that sort passed through my mind.

And almost like what happened back before 2015, my skin had started acting up again. It is a blessing in some ways---with shitty skin that cracked and felt extremely uncomfortable, the last thing I felt was being all sexy and confident in wanting to date and/or settle down with someone. So it helped me deal with the social isolation and other related weirdness in an off-beat sort of way.

In many ways, 2022 was like an extension to the personal break I took in 2021, except this time I was being paid by someone else instead of me. That said, it did not mean that I was grifting my way through---real work with real pain was done to justify getting paid. Unlike some people, I simply cannot just take money without actually doing anything---it feels wrong, and I do not like that.

2023 has already started, and with it comes yet another new season. Let's see what the future holds. I have not abandoned any of my writing, nor have I abandoned my life, but definitely things have gone on a completely different trajectory than what 2015 me would have thought/imagined.

As a parting shot to 2022, fuck you COVID-19, fuck you and the pestilential horse you came on. May the likes of you never return again in my life-time and other life-times to come, and may the lessons that you teach us to simultaneously curb our hubris and to celebrate our incredible good fortune in planting the seeds of your demise through decades of exploratory scientific work resonate throughout the generations as a counterbalance to the absolute shit-show of short-termism as modern-day capitalism demands.

Amen.

Get Off Yer Damn Phone When Yer Talkin' With Me, You Cretin!

The last day of the year in this time zone---let's write some thing, and no, it will not be a retrospective, as retrospectives are usually reserved for the quick summary posts that I do some time on/after the first day of the new year.

It'll be a good old fashioned rant.

So there's a group of people that I really dislike---the ``I am stuck to a phone'' type of people. They may be articulate, they may be pleasant, but when they aren't talking, they seem to plaster their faces onto the screens of their smartphones, doing God knows what ``important'' thing.

Friend, whatever's on the phone can usually wait. I am here, I am now, and I am here, now. Talk to me, communicate with me damnit, not stare at your God-damned phone for Christ's sake.

If the phone rings, sure it is urgent; go for it, with an apologetic grin---this I understand. When the phone buzzes, maybe a quick check; not a faux pas if it occurs infrequently in our encounter.

Flipping through the phone when it was doing absolutely nothing, that disrespects the me who has come out to meet up with you. Seriously.

``Don't worry, I can multi-task'' doesn't cut it because while you think you can multi-task, the reality of it all is that we are generally conditioned to handle active thinking in a serial manner. Perhaps if we did not think in words in our heads that such multi-tasking is possible, but I sincerely do not believe this to be true for the vast majority of people.

It angers me a great deal because of the blatant disrespect of the other party who took the time to come out. Recall once more that time is the most expensive resource that one can make use of, for once that second is gone, it is gone, and no amount of conversion to and fro money can replace it. If there were any substitution used, it would at best be an imperfect one, since time is not exactly fungible---that day you missed when you were five years old means something significantly different from the day that you just missed some thirty years later.

``MT, why are you so butthurt about all these? Live with the times man!''

No, fuck you. An advancement in technology (i.e. improving/providing the ability to do something) is not equivalent to an advancement in our social behaviours (i.e. deciding if an action/ability ought to be used given a context). Just because it can be done doesn't imply that it ought to be done [given a context].

Recast into our current terms, it means that just because the smartphone makes it easy to connect to external information sources does not mean that one should be doing that all the time.

As for why I am ``butthurt'', it's because I have seen one too many of such behaviours just within this year alone. It makes me sad; me, a misanthrope, realising that somehow I was the least misanthropic person among those who claim to be more of a ``people-person'', all because of this anti-social behaviour of frequently digging into one's smartphone while still being in the presence of others.

Anyway, that's the rant for now. Till the next update.

Slow Entry

Okay, we're in the end stretch for 2022. What better thing to do than to write something here now?

It's been one interesting ride for the past two weeks. My team had been a cosy small number of full-timers until our numbers suddenly swelled up by fifty percent due to the new staff finally coming in.

I'm excited at what we can achieve. I'm fearful of the mis-steps I might take being their leader.

Moving on, I've been reading The Science of Nutrition (4th Edition) by Janice L. Thompson, Melinda M. Manore, & Linda A. Vaughan, and a thought came to me.

Just what is the power rating of an ``average'' human?

Using the 2000 kcal per day requirement, that's about 8.368 MJ (1 kcal being equivalent to 4.184 kJ). A day has 86.4 ks, so the average power of a human (assuming no nett change in mass) is around... 96.9 W. Combining this terrible estimate against the around 20% of energy use of brain (as seen from the table in this Wikipedia entry), we're looking at a crude estimate of 19.4 W for thinking, on average.

What does it mean? No idea. Just a random thought.

I have been mulling over getting a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (32 GB) for the next iteration of the Eirian series of e-ink readers, mostly because Eirian-IV has been with me since January 2016, nearly seven years. But Eirian-IV is still generally in good operating form, battery-wise. I'm still running close to the 4 GB space limit, but it is not that big a problem for the most part.

Ah well.

Anyway, it's a short entry. I lost a lot of momentum while writing this---it is getting a bit late, and I really ought to go turn in earlier.

Till the next update then.

4 Busy Day(s)

And so concludes another 4-day long weekend that is completely of my own devising through strategic deployment of paid time off on a Friday and a Monday.

What did I do over these four days?

Frankly, nothing much, which is completely as intended.

Looking back, I...

• Finished the third and final volume of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes series;
• Caught up on Hololive/Holostars EN folks;
• Chat with Brian and Wangki for a bit;
• Restarted rehearsals for TGCO;
• Restocked my medication;
• Ate a nice unagi meal at 鰻満;
• Tried the new tater-tots at McDonald's;
• Had century egg lean meat porridge from Sin Heng Kee Porridge;
• Bought a 70 cL bottle of Nikka Black Clear Whisky from Don Don Donki;
• Started to get used to playing concert G-major on my alto saxophone;
• Took said saxophone to WindWorks to fix a cork bumper that fell off near the G♯-key;
• Wrote a PDF generator that combined the NKJV summaries that I typed out with the ESV text into a single easy-to-refer-to 2-column compendium using my favourite Atkinson Hyperlegible font all typeset with LaTeX;
• Started laying out the foundation of the central castle within the walls of my Minecraft single player world;
• Tried out the Silent in Slay the Spire; and
• Curated a small part of my reading list.

It's definitely not a lot, but it is fulfilling in many ways.

The realisation that Calvin and Hobbes had its run ended about 3 years before I first heard of it in secondary school came as a shock. But then again, it did have a great run since 1985, and the whole late 80s to mid 90s feel was very strong and nostalgic in it. It ended at roughly the time when the Internet (that's with the capital `I') was starting to become a big thing, and I suppose it was just about right. I cannot think of how Calvin and Hobbes might succeed with its original formula with an increasing base of children and young adults who never really understood what it meant to have a childhood that did not involve electronic devices more personalised than the family television.

In fact, I would say that Hobbes would probably be forgotten rather quickly when the Calvin-equivalent had his first net-enabled phone/tablet. The story would have gone a completely different way, and it may not even be good, for much of the fun of Calvin and Hobbes lies in the ironic observations of a smart but isolated six-year-old with his tiger who may or may not be a figment of his imagination (there had always been evidence that worked either way). I wonder if Watterson stopped when he did when he realised what I have now realised, more than twenty years on.

The new whisky (notice the lack of an `e'---this is deliberate because that's why Nikka calls it) is deceptively smooth. It lacked the rough edges of the Suntory that I grabbed from the nearly 7-eleven that demanded it drunk on the rocks. It reminded me much of a VSOP, or even XO. An interesting whisky indeed. While researching for the proper URL to reference the whisky, I learnt that many Japanese distilleries have discontinued some of their longer aged whiskeys because of too much demand---the new batches of the old stuff seem to be coming out only from 2030 onwards.

I suppose that is something to look forward to?

Anyway, that's all for the planned breaks for now. The next one is on Dec 30---not sure why I took it because I'm too lazy to pull up the calendar, but I suppose it is just to have another 4-day long weekend?

That's about it for now. Till the next update then.

Dig It All Realisation---Done!

Ah... I've not seen the interior of Q10 for 3 days---the last time I used Q10 was to fill in the last 2.8k to my NaNoWriMo entry for 2022. Weighing in at 50127 words, Dig It All Realisation is a play on a break down of the word ``digitalisation''. Now, this should not be confused with ``digitisation''.

If we use what SAP says, the gist of their definitions can be understood as thus:

digitisation

Process of converting analogue data into digital form.

digitalisation

The processing of digitised using advanced information technologies to improve/change fundamental processes.

Hence the title break down of dig ([data] mining), it (quantification, i.e. making everything into an object, an ``it''), all (everything), and realisation (the combination of all the steps leading to a system).

And that's the basic story line behind this year's entry.

I would rate this year's attempt as being average---there was no point in time where I was particularly inspired to sprint harder than the usual 2k words per day, nor did it got so difficult that I could not come up with enough words to cover the day. A nice difficulty curve.

That's all I want to write about this on this off-day I took leave for no other reason than to have an off day. I've put it on my personal domain, so download and read it if you'd like.

Till the next update.

Mini Stupid O'Clock

O-kay, let's write a little something here that isn't NaNoWriMo.

I had wanted to write a spiel on ``Does the end justify the means?'' but my brain is starting to get woozy from the anti-histamines, so I need to change tact.

Welcome to pre-stupid o'clock, I suppose.

Last time I wrote here, we were talking about bad coping mechanisms, bad skin, and other bad thoughts.

You would be horribly deluded to believe that after two weeks, things have changed.

Skin is still bad, coping mechanisms are still bad (I'm still picking away at said skin... urgh), and thoughts are also still bad (not the point of suicidal, but definitely not in a completely ``safe'' positive space).

What happened?

Life... life happened. Not a specific grumble, just a general observation. In many other ways, I live a blessed life, but like all things involving life, what we gain in blessings in one area of life, we trade-off with something less blessed in this life.

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Theologically, it's because God is in complete control, and being in complete control while also un-knowable means that while we may observe such inequities or even inequalities, we can never really judge if the observations are a net good or net bad, leastways not at the same time scales that God sees.

So putting it in the extreme case, to be dead on earth is probably a bad thing for most of us, while it is actually a good thing from God's perspective, especially if we have reconciled our relationship with Him---no more flesh body for you to sin in.

If we can define some state function per person that returns a real number measuring the amount of blessedness after taking in the current state of the person, then we can characterise a few interesting observations:

1. People tend to live peak to peak---they either remember most of the good stuff, most of the bad stuff, or more commonly, a mixture of the good stuff and bad stuff. Most people do not remember anything else that are not extrema in this function.
2. A cultish superstition occurs whenever these people start approaching an extrema---they will either keep some ritualistic activities to either bring in the good omens or to ward off the ill ones, or start slinging praises or condemnation at whichever god is to their fancy.
3. In expanding upon the cultish superstition, this is more related to the fact that people believe that whatever they do strongly influences the amount of blessedness or dastardliness, which is a roundabout way of saying ``justification by works, not faith''.

Now I'm not saying that we just lie down and let things happen because ``God is in control''---I'm saying that because we have free will, we should exercise whatever we can within our locus of control, but be ready to accept that there are interdependencies and other related things completely outside of our control.

The sooner one realises that, I suppose the better it is for one's mood.

Anyway, I'm less than 10k-words away from this year's NaNoWriMo entry. Insasmuch as I love NaNoWriMo, I feel that every story thus begun should end, and am looking forward to completing this novel by the end of the upcoming week. It'll be a soft grind, but it will be done. And then at that point, perhaps I will treat myself to some fancy sushi. Mmmm mmm!

And that's about it. A short entry. I can feel myself nodding off---it's time to go. Till the next update.

Compressed and Distressed

I know that writing here like this is wasted words, considering that it is NaNoWriMo now. But I suppose it is nice to write something not relating to work nor my NaNoWriMo entry ever so often.

The end of the year is fast coming upon us. Even as I write, we are already passed the first week (i.e. seven days) of the month, and by the end of this week, the first third would have been gone. And then December will arrive, and 2023 will begin it all anew again.

This upcoming season is much more compressed than usual. Work-wise, things are heating up in strange ways. We are trying to hire, so interview season is in. Some other stuff is also increasing in activity as folks are in a rush to expend the tranch of funding, and it impacts me through the quasi-official support of a tool that these folks use.

Then there's the actual holiday season. Christmas, New Year, and Chinese New Year are all happening within a tight 33-day window. Not to mention the loss of my birthday throughout the messed mass of holidays---perhaps it is the first (and only?) year that I ``age'' only twice in one year as opposed to thrice?

Perhaps that's why I am in some form of distress, and it does show. My skin's getting worse, obviously. I find myself scraping away at various parts of my skin almost compulsively to the point of breaking skin and what-not.

It's terrible.

With shit skin and even shittier coping mechanisms like that, the last thing I feel is that of being desirable, let alone to be desired. Perhaps at the end of the day, this is truly what will make me decide to commit towards a no-spouse route, as opposed to ``only'' a no-children route. Ain't wanna be in a relationship to be ``taken care of'' by someone else.

Also, it isn't easy to be ``loved'' by someone with such shitty skin. As they say, those who look attractive win at life, and those who don't need to make do with wealth or power. And since I have little of the two, it's better to just live through this life quietly and then move on.

A rant? A cry for help? You decide; or not---it matters little.

Till the next update.

Recalling the Last Four Days

As I write here, the day is ending.

A trite observation in some sense, but then again, this is one of two ``mandated'' long weekends for this year from my employer due to the addition of a gazetted break day to the government declared one.

So four days. Across these four days I...

• Finished re-reading The Sandman;
• Caught up on the latest for One-Punch Man manga adaptation;
• Caught up on Komi Can't Communicate manga;
• Completed A Hat in Time;
• Completed version 1.0 of Vampire Survivors;
• Replaced my 12-year-old mattress with a new one;
• Finally started on The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: Book One (1985--1988);
• Completed the perimeter wall shape for my castle project in Minecraft;
• Hung out with some friends old and new playing games (Singapore Dream, Splendor, and Unstable Unicorns);
• Finally picked up Aurelia to doodle on---I've been meaning to do so, but kept being distracted on other instruments like Eliana, and Mio;
• Accidentally partook in the Deepavali lighting festivities out in Little India while on the last bus heading home (the police presence was heavy with deployed riot police command centres);
• Continued with a summoning build that I started quite a long time ago in Grim Dawn; and
• Catch up on some of the Hololive/Holostars EN folks.

It was definitely a feature-filled four days, coupled with generally adequate amounts of sleep (that is going to go awry when the work week begins anew).

Head is comfortably empty; I feel fairly relaxed. With that new mattress, there is definitely a break between before this four-day break, and the last quarter of the year.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo is coming up. I've a rough idea of my new novel, currently titled Dig It All Realisation. Still needs to have the draft structure set up though... which I think I will do some time later this week.

I think that's about it. It's a really short post as these posts go. Just wanted to make a note of it here so that perhaps some time in the future, I can look back on this date and summon up the memories that I didn't write in here.

Till the next update.

lang-aware Domain

Yeah yeah, I know. No word from me for a while, and then suddenly two posts in quick order.

🤷‍♂️

I finished reading The Sandman series once again. The last time I read it was back nearly 10 years ago, from way back when. To say that The Sandman was influential to me is an understatement---I have previously written about how Death of the Endless is my handphone wallpaper, as evidenced from 2015, and once again in 2013. That was roughly when I started to fear less about Death and think of Death not necessarily as a cute goth chick, but as an inevitable old friend who will come visit in time to come.

Dream though, he's too bloody moody in his Morpheus aspect. Reading the CBRs in the full glory of my vertical monitor is a much different feel from reading it off the puny tablets and even punier phone.

But I didn't come here to write about reading The Sandman, and catching up on Komi Can't Communicate (till Chapter 376) and One-Punch Man (till Chapter 172), though they are tangentially related.

I recently updated the Unifont version from 13.0.04 to the more recent 15.0.01. While doing that, I observed that I was having a Variant Chinese character problem (this is where the tangential relatedness occurs).

First, have a look at this simulated screenshot (font used is Unifont):

Look carefully at the third CJK character after the punctuation parentheses in the second line for each (underlined in red).

Do you see a difference?

You should. The first one is the 素 glyph, rendered in 素 in Chinese, and then later on, rendered in 素 in Japanese. They are of the same Unicode codepoint---32032---but have different forms as determined solely by the context of the language that is used.

If you do not or cannot see a difference in what I wrote in this entry (as opposed to the screenshot), it is likely that you are viewing this on a set up that do not have the correct fallback fonts installed, leading to some strange glyph being rendered instead.

In any case, the screenshot shows the outcome of the quality of life improvement I did. In updating my hosted copy of Unifont, I also uploaded another version of Unifont that is tuned for Japanese text. I also replaced the TrueType format with the OpenType format where applicable, solely to transfer less bytes overall when these fallback versions of the fonts are used to handle combining character algorithms (about 4.8 MiB compared to around 15 MiB).

Now that the outcome is demonstrated, let me talk about what exactly I did.

I went through my entire website and added lang attributes to all text fragments that deviate from standard English. For each of the lang attributes used, I defined a list of fonts (most likely to appear on the Big 3 operating systems) and styles to best represent it. These included:

• ``fonipa'' for International Phonetic Alphabet;
• ``zh-Latn'' for the romanised pinyin (think dizi and the like);
• ``zh'' for regular Chinese; and
• ``ja'' for Japanese.

These language tags also allow anyone else who have different settings for rendering different languages (see this old rant about CJK font sizes).

I know that it is a short blurb of what I did, but it involved quite a bit of digging and updating through all the files. But all of these are worth it as it helps improve the readability of my personal domain.

And that's about all I want to talk about for this for now, I suppose.

Till the next update.

Tension Headaches... Again

This week... was a bust.

I was hit with a nasty tension headache that was ameliorated only through a few days of mandated rest and orphenadrine-infused paracetamol from the doctor.

In addition, I was also hit with random bouts of low grade fever (the so-called febricula).

The combination of it all meant intense brain fog that made thinking hard to impossible.

I absolutely hate that. That's why as part of my own thought experiments, I think I'd rather euthanise myself when I eventually get diagnosed with dementia---I'd rather leave the mortal coil on my own terms while I am still mentally competent than to lose what is essentially me, leaving behind a husk of a body. But part of that difficulty is defining where the boundary of the point of no return should be---should it be at the moment where I am diagnosed as having dementia, or should it be when I realise that I am losing it, diagnosed or otherwise, or should it be left to the consensus of the people whom I interact with?

Each has its pros and cons, and I have not figured out the best strategy yet. Which is why there is still no page on my own domain that leaves behind explicit instructions on how to handle me when I am no longer competent. Whatever I may end up putting up needs to be sufficiently ironclad that no one can collude and harm me, while at the same time, not prolong my own suffering---a difficult trade-off.

Anyway, thanks to all that, this week is a bust. Thankfully there's yet another mandated ``wellness day'' thing that is a declared day-off on Friday, which when combined with Deepavali on Monday, leads to an excessively long four-day weekend.

Whatever shall I do with all that time?

Not completely sure. There are some partial plans that I am not at liberty to reveal here till perhaps after the fact, and apart from that, I don't have much else in mind.

Maybe restarting my more ``hard-core'' practising of flute/dizi. Or building more of my Minecraft castle. Or grind through the Son of Sparda difficulty of Devil May Cry 5, the ``true'' starting difficulty of the game.

Who knows?

This post is fairly short... just wanted to note that I'm still not dead yet, and that the days are still bloody hot and muggy.

Till the next update then.

AI Art?

Ah, October, the oddly named tenth month of the year. Probably the month where the on-rush of inertia towards the end of this year and the start of the next is the strongest. After the last entry involving tiny fonts, I didn't really feel a need to say anything. Until now.

The recent release of DALL·E for unfettered public use combined with how an artist winning top honours at a fine arts competition with AI generated image has fanned flames of arguments for and against the recognition of AI generated images as art.

I won't list the arguments down here, but instead share my perspective on this and on related aspects of this in general.

See, scientific and technological progress leaves an indelible mark on the overall psyche of the human race. In many cases, the belief that something is possible has proven to be enough of an impetus to drive someone to make that belief a reality. If they can explain it, we get new science. If they can replicate it consistently, we get new technology. In that sense, the progress of science and technology cannot be halted.

In the case of having faster computational hardware, or the ability to make more money with less labour in the world of manufacturing and business, almost everyone is in agreement that such progress is beneficial. And the near optimism of the ingenuity of humanity to solve problems in the future (especially the problems that the solutions of today have created) creates this self-feeding and self-expanding loop of advancement.

Due to the generally dehumanised aspects of manufacturing, business, and computation, most people do not see a threat of sorts. There were once those who fought against the rise of the machines in industrialisation, but their fight was more about how the former labourers were ill-treated in the rise of higher productivity tools than how the tools were of higher productivity, despite their group (the ``Luddites'') being used these days to mean an opposition to industrialisation/automation.

So, why the brouhaha over AI generated images as art?

It's not just an issue about labour the way the original Luddites were fighting against (though I suspect that this will eventually become the real argument in time to come), but it seems to, at some level, impinge upon what some claim to be a quality of what is essentially human---art. ``Art'' is a loaded term, and with the post-modern movement being a thing, is even more loaded than ever before.

At the risk of oversimplification, ``art'' can be thought of as the outcome from the sum total of an expression of qualities that have not been adequately expressed/explained in a quantitative manner that permits a consistently deterministic and predictable outcome. You know, the thematic opposite of ``science''.

Art is older than science---we have been expressing/creating things long before we knew how to characterise, explain, and replicate them at scale. Despite all the new gadgets that we have created over time, art still exists, though to be fair, art has also evolved.

Evolved to make use of the newest gadgets to assist in the expression.

Finger painting was among the first forms of visual art. Then different pigments were discovered, and other media to use them were also created. Art evolved from depicting the past to depicting the future, from symbolisms of reality to abstractions to hyper-realism, from the still to the animated to full multimedia extravaganza---you name it, art has and will continue to explore it.

AI generated images is just another gadget that is created that incumbents have not gotten used to. After all, no one seems to bat an eyelid when the ``clone stamp'' is used in art, or even more dumbly, when three-point perspective is used---both of the cited examples are gadgets/technological tools that artists have accepted as part of their toolkit of expression.

AI generated images are going to be that, eventually. There is no running away from it, and I am sure that many artists know this.

But what they are angry about is the same as what the Luddites are angry about back in the day: the ill-treatment of the specialists of the art by the Johnny-come-lately wielders of the latest geegaw brashly proclaiming deceptively that they were also artists without acknowledging that their apparent powers came about through the use of a new high-productivity tool as opposed to walking the hard path that the specialists of old used to get to where they were.

Thus, it is about the deception that are ruffling the feathers of the naysayers against AI generated images as art, and not necessarily the AI itself. There are some arguments about how the AI model is somehow stealing intellectual property through amassing the images of artists to train from, but I do not see how this argument can be fought comfortably, considering that even the regular training of a human artist involves studying the artwork of other artists.

As someone from tech-land, I want to point out that the representation of something does not make it that something, i.e. ``a map is not the territory''. If the representation used in the AI model is a literal copy of the image, then there are strong grounds for how the AI model is truly a copying-plagiarist. However, if the representation used is an abstracted form of the image, then the argument is severely weakened---even in the case of human-land, when an artist is sued for copyright infringement through what is claimed to be a derivative work, the burden of proof for the actual copying aspect is subtle enough that a lawsuit in front of a judge is needed to sort it out, because factors other than the representation in the head of the allegedly infringing artist will come into play to determine culpability.

There may be strong arguments about attribution of the training data source images, especially if they are digital in nature, mostly because in the land of the discrete, a map of the territory is the cheapest when it can be a literal copy of the territory itself. For the confused, this means that if I want a ``map'' (i.e. representation) of the digital ``territory'' (say an image, or a video, or even a plain text document), it will cost me negligible amounts to simply copy bit-for-bit of the digital ``territory'' than to re-create a ``map'' of it (through transcoding for example).

Other than that though, it is probably best to dissuade deception by making it clear when a work is made from these AI tools, at least until their use are so ubiquitous that it seems a bit silly to do so (no one ever declares their use of three-point perspective for example).

And when will that be? Who knows... I've written a fairly long and rambling post, and it is time to head back into Minecraft to prepare the perimeter for my traditional stone brick castle.

Till the next update then.

Prototype 5×10 Font Arrives!

Ooo... buckle up. This is a sequel to Stupid O'Clock is the Font of Stupidity.

Our sequel begins where the math was grokked. To wit:

For those, I can bring the terminal screen to use the full extent of the 1920 horizontal pixels. Easy. And without going that far, Vim has no text decoration that eats up cells, which gives us the full 80 characters (I refuse to use line numbers on the side of the simple reason that the ruler in my status already shows the line number of the cursor). Zipf's Law suggests that very long lines are rare, and thus as long as I can find a font for my terminal emulator to handle about 161 characters for half the screen (math says that each character needs to have about 1920/2/161=5.962 pixels), I'm gold.

That 6×11 font that I put together is displayed here:

In comparison, this is the 6×10 font of Opti Small:

Thus, the last time we ended that post, it was decided that I would stick with Opti Small because I figured that interpreting the width of 5.962 pixels as 6 pixels was good enough to support the vertical split screen with the 80-character line length limit.

Well, after nearly a week of using that set up, the answer was a resounding no.

Even a simple vertical split would leave one screen be good at showing only 79 characters for some reason, and with the word-delimiter soft-wrapping option that I use in Vim, it made everything very misleading.

Thus I had to choose the next best width, that of 5 pixels. There were, unfortunately, some problems. I mentioned in my previous post that CG Mono had some problems. Specifically, this was what I said:

It was fine, but still looked a bit off because the `>' glyph was bogus---it lacked the crispness that came from bitmap fonts, and looked like some other font was chosen to render it instead.

More specifically, this is how CG Mono looks like when it is at 7pt (or 6×10):

Notice that weirdness in the `>' glyph---I didn't do anything. All the screenshots are directly taken from whatever was rendered in mintty.

The only font that I had lying around that had 5 pixels of width was CG Mono at 6pt (or 5×9):

See, the problem with this font is that the parts where it is used most often (i.e. the characters between 0x20 to 0x7f) have instances where they are smushed into each other in the bid to preserve some of the fine detail (like the tines in `M', `w', and the like). Compare this against the sample of Opti Small above---Opti Small is so much more readable with the enforced vertical pixel of spacing.

The only problem was that Opti Small was not 5 pixels wide---it was 6.

And so, I decided to take Opti Small as the starting point, and make my own 5×10 font.

Why 5×10 and not 5×9 like the one in CG Mono? It's about the verticality (108 lines versus 120 lines) with the overall need for spacing, and the reduction of the number of dimensions of downsampling I needed to worry about (I only needed to eliminate one column of pixels as opposed to one column and one row of pixels).

The general observation here is that while the Opti Small font has each character sitting in a 6×10 cell, the actual character is designed to keep within a 5×7 grid, not counting descenders and ascenders. This means that Opti Small actually has a rough 3-pixel of whitespace that separates each line. Comparatively, CG Mono at 6pt (or 5×9) had only a 2-pixel of whitespace that separates each line. It doesn't sound like much, but at these scales, that's a huge difference between quickly deciphering what the character is from developing a headache.

Thus my real task is to approximate a 4×7 character out of the 5×7 that Opti Small uses. It was mostly quite straightforward---I followed these rules of thumb that I came up with:

• Eliminate the third column of pixels if possible;
• If a key feature of the glyph requires pixels in the centre, offset it such that we eliminate pixels to the left of it;
• When in doubt, eyeball and trust what the eyeball says.

That led to this current version of my cobbled-together 5×10 font:

The eagle-eyed might ask: how did I manage to do this so fast considering that I had mentioned that I was test running the set up for the week before deciding to change things up more?

More pertinently, how did I begin with a bitmap of Opti Small that was accurate and without excessive amounts of labour?

The answer lies in FontForge, and the use of the BitmapFont section of the SFD file format. I loaded the .FON file of Opti Small into FontForge, and exported an SFD file. Then I extracted out the BitmapFont section, and wrote a simple parser in Python3 that looked out for each BDFChar command before using base64.a85decode() to decode the bitmap string and write it out in a file format that was compatible with Simon Tatham's font tools.

From that generated file, it was just a straightforward exercise in adjusting it so that it becomes a 5×10 font that I built into a .FON file, giving the result as shown above.

There are some things I'm still unhappy with this new 5×10 font, but it is mostly to do with the characters of the range 0x80 to 0xff, ranges that I rarely use. I suppose I could iteratively refine them over time.

One other thing that I forgot to mention is that in the bid to keep the vertical columns of whitespace to make individual character recognition easier, I had to decide how I was to deal with the ``high contrast'' tines that appear in glyphs like `M', `W', and the like. Using my experience of working in the text editor of the Pico-8 Fantasy Console, I've learnt of/and gotten used to the rather tiny and stylised font of the Pico-8---the idea of using thicker lines to represent implicit high-contrast vertical lines was no longer abhorrent.

And now, with a font that is 5 pixels wide, my half-screen set up permits 1920/2/5=192 characters across. It's wonderful. The ample amount of unused pixels in both the horizontal and vertical directions made reading with such a font surprisingly comfortable and no less different from reading something in Opti Small.

Will I be releasing this 5×10 font? I'm not sure. Like I said, there are still things that I need to tweak and fix. In addition, the original author of Opti Small, Nicolas Botti, left behind a little confusing bit of copyright:

Copyright: Nicolas Botti 2004. Use it, distribute it, change it.

I'm no lawyer, so I don't know how best to interpret this. I suppose it is fairly safe to release the 5×10 font, but it'll be ``when it's done'', perhaps even when I figured out how to generate a version of the font that can be directly used in the Linux terminal emulator in the desktop GUI.

Anyway, that's all I have for today. Till the next update then.

Stupid O'Clock is the Font of Stupidity. Who'd Thunk?

Man, I slept at 0230hrs this morning and woke up at 0825hrs.

The reason is quite banal---I was creating my own 6×11 bitmap font for use in my terminal emulator when I realised that the one I was using had a bad render of the `>' glyph. What ate much of the time was trying to figure out why the blazes my terminal emulator (mintty for the curious---it's from Cygwin) was still rendering that font as 6×13 instead.

Spoiler alert: semi-hidden option of AutoLeading was screwing up the vertical pixel count. 🤦‍♂️ But more on that later.

I need to begin the story where it will make more sense. I had thought long and hard, and have decided to move away from my default maximum character width of 76 characters for source files to that of 80 characters instead, especially for Python.

The reasons were as follows:

1. That missing 4 characters was enough to cause an unnecessary break for a line that would fit exactly within 80 characters;
2. By Zipf's Law, most of the code lines aren't ever going to be that long anyway, which means that it was usually safe to keep it at 80 characters as opposed to 76;
3. My old comment on needing the extra columns to allow the additional decoration for TUI editors hasn't been applicable for more than two decades now.

By ``additional decoration'', I mean the following (text editor is Multi-Edit Lite running in DOSBox-X, originally shareware from Multi-Edit Software, but the company seems dead as at time of writing):

Notice how line-drawing characters are used to define the borders of the text window, together with the old school representation of scroll bars and the like? Those take up character cells, and with a starting point of 80, the left and right window edges immediately take it down to 78 characters being the maximum amount of visible text without scrolling. The 76 was derived from the observation that if one reaches the end of the line through any regular cursor movement, it will often end up one character beyond the last character, which can trigger a horizontal scroll.

In short, it is annoying to use the full complement of 80 characters, and it was better to use something like 76.

But I'm using Vim now---I've been using Vim for a long time now. That shouldn't matter any more.

The only thing that can matter is the idea of vertical split screens, either from looking at differences between two files, or three in the event of a three-way merge.

For those, I can bring the terminal screen to use the full extent of the 1920 horizontal pixels. Easy. And without going that far, Vim has no text decoration that eats up cells, which gives us the full 80 characters (I refuse to use line numbers on the side of the simple reason that the ruler in my status already shows the line number of the cursor). Zipf's Law suggests that very long lines are rare, and thus as long as I can find a font for my terminal emulator to handle about 161 characters for half the screen (math says that each character needs to have about 1920/2/161=5.962 pixels), I'm gold.

Vaguely, this means a font that has about 6 pixels of width. My go-to of Proggyfonts (or more specifically, Opti Small is already 6 pixels wide, but thanks to some fuckery from mintty, it looked off to me. That, and I wanted something that yielded more than 161 characters at the half-screen mark to have more room for other niceties.

I then started looking into using CG Mono instead. It was fine, but still looked a bit off because the `>' glyph was bogus---it lacked the crispness that came from bitmap fonts, and looked like some other font was chosen to render it instead.

Why? I don't know. Looking at it through FontForge showed nothing out of the ordinary. The time was about 2300hrs or so. And that's when I went to Simon Tatham's Fonts Page to grab his scripts and samples to build my own 6×11 font to fix this issue.

I completed the font, but when I tested it, it was... very off. The vertical extent as compared through the gridded version of MSPaint showed that it was consistently 2 pixels larger than what was stated. I read through Simon's code to see if he was doing anything strange, and found nothing.

It was then that I decided to go read the fine manual of mintty, to see if there was something I was missing.

Oh yeah, I was missing something all right---the completely inaccessible via configuration screen option of AutoLeading. It defaulted to 2 for some damn reason, and there was no way to change it in the pop-up configuration menu. Mangling the associated .minttyrc file allowed me to set it to 0, and everything worked well once more.

At that point, I switched away from CG Mono and back to my usual font, and it looks peachy.

🤦‍♂️

So what's the moral of the story then?

Don't do weird shit at stupid o'clock---one really ends up doing stupid things at stupid o'clock. I mean, redesigning an entire bitmap font when all that was needed was a tiny configuration change in some semi-obscure file? What an ``excellent'' use of 3 hours.

Till the next update.

I Can Haz Steam Deck Plz?

Okay, it's getting late, so I will keep this short.

This week is going to be a short week for me due to me taking leave on Friday for no other reason than to take a day off. After all, that's what paid time off or ``annual leave'' is for.

It's not a privilege but an entitlement. It's good to have a small break ever so often just to keep the burn-out monster at bay.

I'm waiting on the Steam Deck to be released in SIN city. So far, there is no indication that it will make its way here, though many signs are pointing towards that, considering how the availability blurb refers to Komodo making it available to South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, in addition to the originating country of Japan.

Okay, maybe not just SIN city, but SEA countries.

I'd love to have the Steam Deck. I used to have a Dingoo from way back when and enjoyed the times that I played it. It was mostly emulator-heavy, which was not a problem. Eventually I stopped playing on it because let's face it, many old games need to remain in the past because their interface was just atrocious as compared to what we have now, and that it was actually possible to exhaust the number of retro-games I wanted to play. I had to junk it a few months ago because the lithium battery pack was swollen.

But a Steam Deck? I can see myself playing/grinding games from my Steam library on it. The ability to carry a game's progress between systems over Steam is a big part of why the Steam Deck is so appealling despite my earlier lost of interest in the Dingoo. This means that I could [say] grind games of Binding of Isaac on either PC or the Steam Deck without worrying about having to replicate the feats to unlock features, nor do I have to worry about doing the synchronisation manually.

I'm not expecting to use the Steam Deck for long gaming periods---that's what Eileen-II is for, and also why I didn't get on board with the Nintendo portables, up to and including the Switch. Small 30-minute plays in commute are the most likely use cases---I can't keep reading forever. There are other handhelds similar to the Steam Deck (like the Aya Neo, or offerings from GPD), but they cost at least 50% more than the most pricey variant of the Steam Deck, and are Windows exclusive machines.

That latter part is a bit off-putting. For what is to be a dedicated gaming portable, running a two-ton gorilla like Windows as opposed to the gaming-centric SteamOS feels like a lot of the precious battery juice will get lost somewhere.

Anyway, as I said, this is short. Till the next time then.

Consigning Ramblings to Records

To feel loved is something that comes naturally to humanity. Hell, even I cannot run away from it sometimes, as misanthropic as I claim to be.

But what does it mean to ``feel loved''? Is it the same as ``being loved''? Does ``feel loved'' actively require an other entity outside of the soul/consciousness that is currently piloting this meat body? Is it something purely bio-chemical that we attach more signficance to due to our insatiable need to derive meaning and symbology? If so, do animals other than humans ``feel loved'' as well?

I've been walking about the past couple of weeks in a semi-trance, in the sense that while I am fully aware and present wherever I am, I cannot help but notice that there is nothing inherently ``real'' about the world. All the physical sensations that we have, be they sight, sound, taste, and all others, are merely emergent behaviour built upon the interactions of unfathomably large numbers of primal components that are smaller than the atoms that we sort of understand.

Much of the world is emptiness, literally. Atomic structure itself is mostly space, though what is that space is something that I don't think we have an answer to. Feelings of friction, Newton's Third Law observations, and other human-scale phenomena are interactions of invisible electromagnetic fields as the atoms repel each other. Smaller-than-human-scale phenomenon that allow us to ``run'' a consciousness in the form of biochemistry is even more difficult to comprehend---stupendously large numbers of chemicals are synthesised, interacted with, and broken down, all without necessarily having awareness of the larger ``I'' that has emerged from their collective behaviour.

Where then does ``I'' begin? And if I cannot tell where ``I'' begins, where then can I start talking about ``feeling loved''?

God is unknowable because He isn't one of us even as we are made in the image of Him. Yet we are reminded to know God relationally, to bear in mind of His sovereign will over reality, of His Perfect Plan, and of His indescribable power in influencing and changing things according to the said Plan.

Is this what it means to ``feel loved''? That, despite how every other human may not give a rat's ass about us, we have a Creator God out there beyond our ken who made us through His cunning ways of manipulating extremely complex behavioural systems of remarkably simple axioms who cares enough about us that it does not matter if the rest of the world hates us.

Is ``feeling loved'' something that is bound by time, or in other words, is the existence of a specific direction of time necessary to allow one to ``feel loved''? Time is necessary for cause and effect---the very definition of cause and effect demands that a certain sequence occurs, and from such a sequence, a direction of time may be inferred.

If the house of God is beyond the observable universe, does it also mean that it has no direction of time the way we innately experience and ``know''? If so, when we are in the house of God in the end days, are we still loved, if ``feeling loved'' is indeed dependent on a cause and effect? We have hints in Scripture about the timeless nature of things, at least from the definition as derived from cause and effect, in that our salvation (and thus our reconnection with God the Father) comes not from works but from faith---it defies what we understand as a regular cause and effect.

If that is the purest and best form of love, does it mean that all other earthly emotions of ``feeling loved'' is just a shadow that we need to learn to disregard and discard?

The confused might ask ``MT, where are you going with this?''

And I reply, ``Like hell I know. Not every blog post is about making a point that makes sense.''

Till the next update.