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.

On ``Open Relationships''

Each time I read about an ``open relationship'', I just shake my head first in utter confusion, and then in disgust.

I simply cannot understand it.

It's worse when the proposer is the man in the heterosexual relationship. I mean, what was he thinking? That he was some kind of reproductive stud that could get lots of sex when he opens up his relationship?

That somehow the woman in that relationship is chopped liver?

Need I be Captain Obvious and point out that it is supremely easy for women to find sexual partners than men---in fact, they don't really need to look that far, for most men are horny to begin with, and a vagina is a vagina, especially if the owner of said vagina provides consent.

There's a good reason why prostitution is known as ``the oldest profession'', and most of the purveyors are women, while the consumers are largely men.

Even the ``fugly ones'' can get sexual partners relatively easily compared to the average man through the magic of make-up, a good enough dress sense, and just displaying the slightest interest in the man they might want to sleep with.

If a man in the heterosexual relationship chooses to open up the said relationship, the only outcome is just regret.

While I first cannot understand it, I also have a certain amount of disgust about such ``open relationships''.

I am a jealous lover. I do not like to share my partner with anyone, especially our most intimate moments, be it emotional or sexual. While I am jealous, I'm not possessive---she is still her, but ``us'' is us---we stand together as one unit against the world, together.

No sharing of that with anyone, emotionally or sexually. And that includes the hypothetical her (at this time) sharing with her girl-friends our most intimate moments.

In some sense, the idea of a ``work spouse'' also disgusts me at some level. We can have close working colleagues, but calling them (especially if they are of the opposite sex) a ``work spouse'' is a type of emotional cheating that I just do not want to be involved in.

I work well with them, I am not married to them at work. I do not have a codependency issue with said person to be considered as though we have some kind of ``platonic intimacy''.

Whoever came up with that term needs to be taken to task. Whoever decided to propagate that term, ought to be shot.

``MT, why are you so conservative? Get on with the times man... sexual freedom! Emotional freedom!''

Sorry, I never claimed to be a liberal---if anything, I'm at best a progressive. I believe that everyone has their freedom of choice, with the usual caveat of accepting all consequences of their choices.

Spousal relationships (and any relationships that lead to that) are special---it's the type of relationship where one literally is at one's most vulnerable with another, with the deepest of trust being placed in the other person's hand, in reciprocation reciprocity, just so that the spousal couple thus formed is stronger than each individual, hopefully making living the rest of this banal existence a little more meaningful, lively, and stimulating. Any one who cannot fulfil this role just isn't worth it, no matter how sexy that person is, or how good a listener that person is---if they do not build up, but instead tear down, or manipulate, then that person is not worth it, ever. And naturally, reciprocation reciprocity is key---to have someone like that as a spouse implies that you need to exemplify the same qualities as well---the relationship is then ``equally yoked''.

With all that I said, bear in mind that while I make a judgement in what I say, I do not believe that it is my place to enforce my values on others---they live how they want, and deal with the consequences, be they good or bad. It is, however, my place to enforce my own rules on myself, and the relationships that I may get involved in, with the word ``may'' doing a whole lot of heavy-lifting.

Because as at now, I remain unconvinced that I am going to start a new relationship, let alone get married.

I'd write more, but it's getting depressing. Time for some Suntory Whisky---I've not had a drink in a while, and the upcoming week is prime time for drinking [my pain away], if my bank account allows for it.

Till the next update.

P.S.: There's this someone from Singapore who is zealously loading the mobile version of the main page of this blog. Hi there, I see you, though I have no fucking clue who you are. Did you know that you can use the Atom feed available from the desktop version to have an RSS feed-based notification of when a new post comes up?

National Day Grab-bag

Okay, it's a public holiday today celebrating SIN city's independence. That's excellent.

Naturally, most denizens in SIN city that are able, have found ways to head out of country to enjoy the ``free'' long weekend. As for me, I have an even longer weekend due to the extra days of leave that I took for yesterday, and the upcoming Monday.

``But MT, aren't you in the middle of a high-key period? Why the sudden long leave?''

The leave... was planned before any of these things went bananas. And it was roughly when I first learnt that Cat Quest III is released on 2024-08-08. Naturally I had to take leave to play it!

So far, Cat Quest III hasn't been disappointing. True, it is no Elden Ring, but notice that I've given up on Elden Ring, whereas I am still having fun with Cat Quest III.

The primary purpose of a game is to be fun, so as to encourage the key reason for its existence---play. Any game that doesn't encourage play isn't really a game anymore, and should be called something else altogether. And what constitutes as fun is highly subjective, which is absolutely fine---everyone's life circumstances are different. Some things that one finds fun (like playing a musical instrument or programming a computer) might be a job/chore for another (think professional musician/music teacher, and software engineer), but that's diversity and freedom of choice right there.

Speaking of games, I finally completed the last two achievements of Faerie Solitaire, which involved:

1. Raising all 32 pets to adult forms; and
2. Completing all Challenges.

It only took me ten years to finish up those two, and after that is done, I promptly installed Faerie Solitaire (Remastered) to have this little game with the updated features (graphics and general quality-of-life updates) set up.

Talk about addictive.

And while we are talking about old games, Jupiter Hell Classic was recently announced to be available on Steam soon. It's really DoomRL v0.9.9.8 in disguise, reskinned heavily to avoid the ZeniMedia Doom IP. I stopped caring about ChaosForge after realising the KK was now beholden to his shareholders instead of the fans, and have not looked into the ChaosForge Forum ever since that day back in 2022.

And no, I haven't really gone back there. And I don't think I will head back there. I never wish KK ill, and sincerely hope that he will continue to succeed. It's just that I will no longer play an active part in his endeavours.

Will I get Jupiter Hell Classic when it is released? Maybe... for old time's sake. It'd be nice to see Nyarlaptoptep's Boots once more, as well as the Mother-In-Law, two items that I have had a hand in naming in one way or another.

And while we are on the old stuff, WordStar 7 has seen a release by science-fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, as noted in his blog entry. WordStar is among the OG of word processing---they came at a time just between the typewriter, and the advent of WYSIWYG word processing, roughly when people were looking for more out of their text processing beyond full-screen text editors.

I sadly never had the need to work with WordStar, but I do enjoy me a good text-mode word processor as a concept. I'm part of that ``weird'' group of people who prefer writing in as distraction free a manner as possible, which was why something as arcane as TeX or the much better successor LaTeX appeals more strongly to me than good ol' MSWord (or these days on Eileen-III, LibreOffice Writer). My writing tool of preference these days is either good old vim, or Q10 on Windows.

There's just something about the 80-character wide monospace font form factor that makes the writing feel more fluid than trying to bang something out in a GUI with proportional fonts, and twiddling with formatting every which way, even though almost all word processors actually have semantic styling defined from the get-go.

But back to WordStar. The modern user may be put off by the need to run this old DOS program in one of several DOS emulators (Sawyer's 680MB package has all these sorted out, while I already have a DOSBox-X set up on Eileen-III), but I think they will be really put off by the entire keyboard interface. The semantics are quite foreign to the modern user as the interface was designed for a time where the keyboard standards weren't standard yet.

The ``WordStar Diamond`` is easy enough to get used to---it's like WASD, except it is ESXD, with control held. It is slightly less arcane than vi's hjkl movement, and thus more tolerable.

The problematic part is text selection (``marking blocks'' in WordStar lingo) is persistent. This means that the text can be marked [in a block], and other things can happen, while the marked block remains marked. So, if one wants to replace the selected text, it is important to execute a block-cut or block-delete before typing in the new text, otherwise the outcome is... not as expected.

I've had my fill of this back in the old days of working with the IDE of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C/C++ from Borland International. They followed the WordStar semantics, and it was usually a pain to turn that option off, mostly because of my scenarios of using them at programming competitions where the hardware and environment are provided for by the organiser.

It's not hard to get used to it, but it does get old pretty quickly.

Old software aside, Beyond Compare 5 has been out for about a month now. I love this file comparison tool---it's multiplatform, it's fast, it can compare stuff over the network, and the price is always reasonable for the functionality it has. The big thing for me to upgrade (for free in my case since I bought Beyond Compare 4 within the window for it) is the ability to have word-wrap enabled when doing text comparison. Oh, it can also handle table comparisons better than before---no more single-sheet preparation like before.

There's also the last bit of switching back to Mozilla Firefox from Google Chrome for my ``serious'' web applications (i.e. logged in stuff that companies would love to use tracking on) due to the shitstorm that is Manifest V3 and how it nerfs ad-blocking. The modern web is not usable without ad-blocking---everyone seems to want to load as many advertisements as they can on their puny web sites. On its own, it's not a problem per se, if these advertisements are tastefully done. But that has not been the case for the better part of a decade now. Apart from the technical problems of increasing the attack surface area, these advertisements (full-blown multimedia extravanganza too, for some of them!) consume precious network bandwidth, making that gigabit Internet connection trudge along slower than the bad old days of dial-up.

Do I recommend switching? Sure... it's pretty painless. But it's still up to individual choice whether to do so.

And anyway, I think that's about it for now. Back to Cat Quest III for me.

Till the next update.

Bus Ride Thought

It's stupid o'clock now.

As I was riding the bus to the office this morning, this thought came to mind:

The seeking of validation of oneself through another person is simultaneously the most romantic and the most depressing thing.

It came to mind as I was just daydreaming a little, wondering whether I am ever ready to even consider accepting another person into my life as a partner, or forever forfeit that opportunity through the rapidly closing window of whatever is left of my ``dating years''.

Look, in a few months, I'm forty. That's not young.

I'm never going to start a family with children, for sure.

But maybe, just maybe, I'd be with someone who is willing to be an equal partner with me, to be there so that we can support each other as we grow old.

And then I was thinking about how sometimes we all ``need'' to talk to someone as a way of sharing our thoughts, to have some kind of sanity checking, and you know, get validation.

And if that person is the closest person in one's life (i.e. partner/spouse), then it is probably one of those types of gestures that is considered ``romantic''.

But if that person is not some closest person, but it just happens to be whoever is within striking distance (think acquaintances), then it's pretty depressing. It is an indication of just how starved of human contact and empathy one is that they are trying to establish some kind of rapport, any kind of rapport, just to feel like a human.

It is a rather sad kind of existence.

I wonder if I'll just end up like that...

``Mental Wellness'' Came and Went

The ``mental wellness'' long weekend came, and went, and for a glorious 12 hours, I felt mentally well.

Then everything of course spiralled back to the usual tired comment of being tired as I watch myself having to return to the office to deal with... whatever it is I have to deal with.

But by now, you must be tired reading about how tired I am, so I'm not going to belabour the point.

------

Friday was a replay of a similar 48-mi cycling route that I took on 2024-06-14. Still Road --> East Coast Park --> Tanah Merah Coast Road --> Changi Beach Park, and then a backtrack. I somehow managed to be a bit faster (06:18 min/mi vs 06:23 min/mi) despite the weather being way hotter (the rain came much later, and only in a short burst).

I claim that it was due to the introduction of a homemade quasi-isotonic drink that I was using this time around. 1 tsp of table salt, 1 flat tsp of citric acid, and 2 tbsp of sugar, mixed in 1 dm³ of tap water, and I quaffed the equivalent of 4 L throughout the entire ride, compared to just about 4 L of water previously.

I was significantly less delirious towards the two-thirds mark of the ride, and there was no cramping in my muscles, though I was damn sure that one of the stabiliser muscles on my lower left lateral part of my leg was hurting due to overcompensation, but that began fairly early into the ride.

I think I will just continue with this concept for the next long ride. I doubt it will be over the National Day weekend in August, mostly because that's when Cat Quest III is in full release, and I would like to play it.

I mean, who wouldn't? It's a nice game, staring cartoon cats, and is made by a Singapore game studio.

------

Speaking of games, I got my first freighter in No Man's Sky. At around 88.5 h of play time (wait, it has been nearly 90 hours?!), I'm fast approaching the point where the grind will prove to be annoying. Since I only play solo, it was time to bring out the ``play it my way to make it fun'' mode, and I suspect that I would have exhausted all my patience to play this in a few sessions, from which I might just drop it and go back to my regular programming (as in, gaming programme, not computer programming).

No Man's Sky has been fun. But the Anomaly and the base-building side quest roughly run into each other with their overlap of quest rewards. Not sure what to expect though.

I may get back to The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles once I'm ``sick'' of No Man's Sky, just to complete that series. Or maybe start on Disco Elysium, or maybe even the long-ignored Pillars of Eternity (before all the Divinity: Origin Sin and Baldur's Gate 3 hype).

My problem with these games is that they are narrative focused, which funny enough, is something that I have a slight aversion to as I watch my favourite VTubers at 2.5× speed in the background as I game.

First world problems, huh?

I think that's about it for today. Nothing really much to say, except for random belly-aching about heading back into the fray.

Till the next update.

Pathological Liar

Ah... that was rough.

``Hey MT, we're sick of you complaining in a cryptic way that `that was rough'. Move on damnit!''

Sure voice-in-my-head.

So I was doing some thinking on and off the past couple of weeks. The question on my mind was, how does one deal with a pathologic liar?

Take the latest ah... US presidential election fiasco. Two geriatric men slugging it out. One's gaffe-prone but is generally a tad more gentlemanly, and the other is a pathologically lying cad.

Frankly, neither are good choices, but due to the way the US's politics is structured, it is now the race of ``the lesser of two evils''.

That's not my problem though---I cannot vote in the US by virtue of the fact that I'm not a US citizen.

The part that nerdsniped me is the observation that despite the pathological lying, somehow that person is still ``in the race''.

How?

The usual way to get someone to drop out of a political race is to demonstrate that the said person has some major [character] flaw that impinges on their ability to serve in said political office, and that often involves either fact-checking, or mud-slinging.

Fact-checking has been applied consistently at the pathological liar, and yet he bounces back from each one, stronger than before. And this includes both the regular ``inconsequential'' fact-checking to the stuff that the court of law rules---somehow that has done nothing to knock that person off his feet.

How?

Mud-slinging has been attempted, amateurishly in many ways since the other major political party that isn't supporting the pathologically lying person hasn't decided to stoop that low to play gutter politics just yet. Insinuations on character, on actual illegal and immoral behaviour have done nothing to dampen the zealous support of that person, even among those whose religious teachings were supposed to tell them that those illegal and immoral behaviours were wrong.

How?

Just how does one defeat a pathological liar? The orthodox ways that I just described don't seem to work. Maybe it is time to bring in the playground tactics, like out-louding the pathological liar, or resort to the age-old solution to all problems in life---extreme violence.

But either technique seems rather... inelegant. Perhaps there really isn't any other way that can achieve the outcome through elegance---elegance on its own suggests a certain level of self-awareness, and the willingness to cooperate, neither of which the pathological liar has.

So maybe the more primeval approach is the best. But are people willing to stoop that low?

Edit: Unfortunately, yes. There are some who are willing to stoop that low. That news article first came on 2024-07-14T06:48+08, and as at the time of this edit, was updated at 2024-07-14T14:45+08.

Argh...

Aaaaarghhhh...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

------

What a week. Or was it a fortnight? Or three weeks?

I don't know---time's starting to merge with each other to the point that I no longer have a good sense of what is going on, except for the obvious dichotomies of work-time versus off-time, day versus night, and that's about it.

Things are moving along, slowly, with the kind of ``three steps forward, two steps back'' type of progression that I am starting to accept as the new norm.

I am not exactly a patient fellow, but I am doing my best to keep whatever patience I left about me.

------

I recently read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. It's a non-fiction book talking about the 1996 disaster from the climb up Mount Everest. It's a short read, but gripping and carrying the air of the old adventure story that had not been the genre in vogue for quite a while.

Is it worth reading? Sure. Not many high-mountain climbing books out there.

------

In other news, I've started on No Man's Sky, a game that had its redemption arc after a disastrous launch. So far I'm having fun with it, treating it largely as a souped up version of Minecraft that prioritises exploration & trade over infrastructure/monument building.

SGDQ 2024 is live too, so that's a treat.

And that's about it. I think I'm going to go lie down and catch up on rest.

It Be Rough

This past week... was rough.

The receipts are being called in, and I find myself drifting in and out of mania and a sense of depression.

No, I'm not manic-depressive; it's just the natural shifts of energy states as I burn energy in times of need, and then space out in ennui while waiting for the batteries to recharge.

Is there anything else I want to add to this narrative?

Probably nothing else other than: June is two thirds of the way through, and more ``fun'' is incoming.

Totally Failing Rate

So, about that total fertility rate (TFR) thing...

I won't degrade into some kind of misogynistic/misandristic argument, because that's both pointless and wrong.

I will stand by my thesis that if something matters enough to someone (where ``one'' can be a person, a corporation, a government), then plans will be made to get that thing done right.

For instance, if I value a friendship enough, I will make time to nurture said friendship. And lest anyone goes ``hur hur time isn't the same as other resources'', that's where they are wrong.

Recall that time is a very interesting non-renewable resource that all other resources take their indexing from. We try our best to bank time through the conversion [via a convoluted process of reasoning] into some form of money. We then use the said money to trade (or buy, same thing) for other things that we could not have easily/directly gotten through the expenditure of our own time.

So far, so good.

But the problem comes in when we start talking about priorities. In the bid to amass enough money, we sort of forget what basis it stems from. And so, at a personal level, people complain about children being costly to raise, and therefore aren't interested.

They get villified, and castigated---``You dishonour your family!'' levels too, were we to live in an age where [geographical] mobility were not as great as now.

However, all the complaints of the people at their own personal levels are but a highlight of the symptoms.

You see, there is a much larger influence cycle that is happening beyond the individual level. Roughly, the individual's choices bubble up, with the majority setting the social-level trend, and then the representative government takes heed on what the trends are like, put in their own ``big picture'' planning elements, before percolating the final trend down to the individuals, which affect their choices, ad infinitum.

Of the two, it is without doubt that the government's choices weigh the heavier, for the sole reason that they have a monopoly on the most powerful arbiter of ``truth''---force, or more bluntly, violence.

So, as clichéd as it sounds, TFR issues are government policy issues, and the blame should not be pushed back down to the individual citizens. We can argue about how improved access to education has liberated women to pursue a life beyond ``being stuck as a homemaker'', or how that improved education for women led to a greater imbalance between the number of highly educated women against that of highly educated men that led to less marriages in general (hypothesis that women are hypergamous while men are generally adverse to hypogamy), but those are just deflecting the blame around.

If the TFR were really a problem that is large enough for concern, then the government policies should reflect that. Instead, we see that a vast majority of the policies address more of the short-term economic issues, as opposed to the slow but steady re-architecture of the social fabric to support a better TFR.

``But MT, TFR is just the capitalistic idea of a Ponzi scheme, where societies rely more on the next generation to pay for the living for the previous one!''

If that were the case, then shouldn't it be motivating enough to adjust policies to address the TFR? After all, it does contribute to the economy, right?

And no, consistent immigration isn't a permanent solution. It's a bit like trying to write plug-ins for various third party software for a piece of core software that one uses (say a text editor). No matter how good the plug-ins are written, there will be incompatibility issues, since we are literally trying to create an interpretation of the third party's framework that ``makes sense'' within the framework of the core. And as long as the third party software remains as a plug-in, it is never truly a part of the core; and as long as migrants keep within the confines of their self-created enclave and never truly venture out to integrate with the country that they migrated to, their mentality will forever be that of a migrant, and not a citizen, no matter what their official immigration status is with the government.

Crucially though, consistent immigration is a zero-sum game that trades off on comparative advantage. To ensure that it can continue to work, is to assume that the places where they have more people who want to leave will continue to do so, and in the worst case scenario, steps may even be considered/taken to ensure that they remain so (i.e. removing/stunting any of the social advances that we know that leads to decreased TFR).

We like to talk about ``whole-of-government'' approaches. I think that TFR itself is an excellent problem to tackle with that. Moreover, it also involves a time horizon much longer than that of a single election cycle.

Perhaps it is truly time for the government to show that long-term planning of doing what is right that it has boldly claim before.

Blasphemous---Done!

I have not looked forward to the end of the week as much as this one.

It's not because there's something special planned for this weekend (that's like a maybe for next week's über-long weekend), but that I'm glad that I can drop whatever was happening over the work week to just... chill out.

Work week wasn't bad per se, but it sure had quite a few things that threw in some spanners that gummed up the [routineness] of work. I know that being a ``manager'' meant that work was expected to be anything but routine, I'm still an engineer at heart. Needless to say, I just ran out of spoons near Thursday after a whole bunch of meetings with new people, and sometimes in new locations.

But no one wants to hear about the work week---it's just what we all do to ensure that bills are paid, and hobbies can be fed.

------

I completed Blasphemous last night, getting all three endings following the plan laid out in this Reddit post. There was a bug where the ``Wound of Abnegation'' was obtained from Crisanta in the Mea Culpa Chapel, but was not properly reflected in the inventory of quest items.

Actually, there were quite a few bugs in Blasphemous. They weren't really game-breaking, but it was still annoying.

All in all, I enjoyed Blasphemous. It was exactly as I had mentioned earlier---not as punishing as Hollow Knight, nor as clunky as Feudal Alloy. Blasphemous had some interesting boss fights (that second phase of the Cristanta fight was full on impossible had I not mastered the timing of the parry after the very gruelling Isidora fight that took me a few days of trying to fight it straight before cheesing it with ``Romance to the Crimson Mist'' prayer, and even that took me several tries to get right), and cool-ish traversal options that did not include an air dash nor a double jump.

The currency (Tears of Atonement) was not exactly easy to farm nearer the beginning where their impact was greatest (but I still did, 50+ at a time, near Albero, just so to get the first tier of Mea Culpa upgrades, which cost about 5k with buffer), but towards the end-game I found myself simply rolling with them, especially as I was attempting and re-attempting the Crisanta fight. Of the entire skill tree, I found myself using the Lunge attacks the most, after of course the Combo attacks. Charged strikes are too costly in time to pull off, but I suppose a more skilled player can get better mileage out of it than I.

The key thing that I learnt from completing Blasphemous was how much I preferred to do major actions with the ABXY buttons over that of the R1/RT/L1/LT set up (I'm staring at you, Elden Ring that I gave up trying to complete). The thumbs just work much faster than the index fingers, and this is true even for Blasphemous, where I face-tanked any an attack that I failed to dodge simply because the eye-brain-index-finger axis had a slow reaction.

Pressing A to jump and then X multiple times to smack some idiot with a sword? Yes please. R1, R1, L1 to do a weapon combo? Yeah, fuck off.

And so, that's that for Blasphemous for now. I didn't bother with the other [free] DLC, except for the ``Wounds of Eventide'' one that allowed me to obtain the final ``true'' ending of the game. The ``Strife & Run'' DLC with Bloodstained cross-over content was basically a series of timed challenge platform puzzles, which I didn't like because precision movement in Blasphemous is a bear. As mentioned earlier, there is no air dash, and double jump---verticality is largely obtained either through a wall jump technique that required using the attack action to ``stab'' into the wall instead of just wall-kicking a la Megaman X, or using an arcane dash-attack aerial combo (fixed from direction-attack aerial) on a strikable object to do an ``Air Impulse'' instead of an unconstrained double jump. The 8-bit area was Nintendo-hard for no good reason, and the rest of the DLC was for NG+ which I was uninterested in.

``But MT, what about the `movement progression' items like `Blood Perpetuated in Sand', `Linen of Golden Thread', `Nail Uprooted from Dirt', `Silvered Lung of Dolphos', and `Three Gnarled Tongues'?''

Those act more like keys to areas than actual movement progression, since they affect the stage itself rather than grant new abilities for the player character.

Okay, maaaaybe the ``Nail Uprooted from Dirt'' can count since it makes the marsh that was previously unjumpable suddenly operate as though it isn't there, jumping-wise.

Maybe I'll get back to Shovel Knight, trying to at least complete the base game.

Maybe.

I'm more likely to start getting into Cassette Beasts though...

------

I've gotten No Man's Sky recently due to it being half-off. I started with the controller, and found that I hated it (aiming with the right stick is annoying). So it's back to the venerable keyboard+mouse combo.

First impressions so far are fine. It's a bit like Minecraft, but with less free-form building. I'm still quite early into the game (no where near the 50 h mark yet), so it's hard to say. I don't think it expands into something as crazy as Satisfactory or Factorio, but as at now, I'm not completely bored about it yet, which is a good thing.

I'm kinda procrastinating a little on fixing up my Nether rail system in Minecraft, and a recent Reine Minecraft adventure video showed an interesting in-place rail switching mechanism has given me some ideas on how I might want to set up the nether rail. But I'm lazy and don't want to think... for now.

------

I spent this morning checking out a stand-up comedy special by Russell Peters. This guy was hot years ago, with this show that made its rounds on the 'net.

It's alright. He's similar to he was back then, though he does lay it on thick with the F-bombs, which is fine by me.

That's about it for this update I suppose. Till the next time.

``I'm Alive!''

Today, when I saw an acquaintance that I hadn't met in a while, and when said acquaintance greeted me with ``How are you?'', I replied unhesitatingly with ``I'm alive!''.

I never said that before. My usual reply was ``I'm not dead yet!'', so I suppose this can be seen as a breakthrough?

Maybe things are turning for the better. Who knows?

Only God, for sure.

Orcish ACM Behaviours In Re ORCID Demandment

What a week.

Work side had lots of drama, most of which was external. It was unfortunate, but in many ways, not exactly out of my estimation. I suppose it just comes with the territory of doing non-trivial projects.

Still on work, but at a personal level, I felt sad that I had to volunteer to remove my name from a paper that was to be published under a journal/conference hosted by the ACM, due to the organisation's hard-headed enforcement of every contributing author to provide their ORCID. According to the submission process, anyone who does not have an ORCID cannot be an author to the paper.

ORCID is a supranational entity that maintains a list of unique identifiers for people who self-register/identify in their system, a process that is free as in no payment [from these people] is required. It is, however, acceptance of money from [research] funding organisations, publications, and other such groups of people who are involved in the research process but are not the researchers themselves.

I volunteered to remove my name from the paper to prevent its non-publication---my co-authors relied on publications to get their key performance indicators necessary for their work, while as an engineer, any and all papers published with my name on it are, at best, a good to have in terms of bragging rights only.

``But MT, ORCID is free to use! Why don't you just create an account [with your work email] and run with it?''

It's not [just] about the ``freeness'' of the service; it's the fact that ACM decided to prioritise perfection in their metadata over having proper attribution through not making ORCID optional.

The whole idea of ORCID also turns my stomach. I lived through the age when Facebook and LinkedIn were nascent, before they turned into the current cesspools. Thus, I am well aware of the usual life cycle of such identity-centric systems that aren't state-run/legally mandated and enforced.

They always begin with good intentions; the idea of a centrally managed identity broker to ensure that the MT you are speaking with is the ``real'' MT. And the usual modus operandi is to have as many people sign on as possible.

But real money is needed to run the infrastructure for these information systems. Some funds are usually available in the beginning to get things off the ground and into the ``people'' acquisition phase, but eventually these systems will need to find some revenue streams.

Partnerships of all sorts will be forged with those who have money, who won't give money without getting something of value [to them] in return. Network efforts increasing the popularity of a particular network happen, with the biggest ones getting even bigger, requiring more resources to keep going, while simultaneously becoming a natural monopoly.

Then a critical size is hit, the business people start swarming and taking over governance subtly or otherwise, enshittificating the experience with increasingly intrusive business-friendly behaviours that do not benefit the original group of people who were promised a centrally managed identity broker.

Meanwhile, the monopolising effect from sheer size gives so much clout to the identity broker that there is effectively no more choices, and anyone who wants to play/work in the mainstream are coerced into giving up more and more of their choices just to stay within the said mainstream, lest they be pariahs and lose their work-related social networks.

I do not like that.

I am not a researcher by trade, so I do not need to play the game.

I can give a big middle finger to the game and make my stand.

And that I did.

Do I feel good about it? Frankly, I am a little disappointed that I cannot put my name on the paper even though I had contributed ideas here and there to make things work out, not to mention the final round of reviewing/suggestions to make the paper flow better. But it is rare that one gets to make a stand for their principles unhindered, and I think that it is important for me to do so. Law and justice are not the same---the Bible teaches us to follow the law, but to leave God to deal justice by not seeking vengeance on our own. In this case, ACM's requirement is technically not a law a la backed by the state, but is an arbitrary rule by an arbitrary organisation.

That makes resistance to it so much simpler.

To be fair, ORCID does provide a solution for the ``Wang Wei'' problem---disambiguating researchers who share the same name for whatever purposes. It is a workable solution, even if I do not agree with how it will eventually become the gatekeeper of who is considered a researcher (must have ORCID) and who isn't. Because that gives ORCID a tremendous amount of power over who lives or dies (metaphorically) while keeping these people disenfranchised.

But I do not need to play that game.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got me some Blasphemous to play a bit, before having to practise some pieces needed for music ministry tomorrow.

Cleaning dizi

Damn that was tiring, but fulfilling.

Today's a public holiday, and I spent a few hours in the morning till the early afternoon cleaning my dizi. I used a damp microfibre cloth to clean the exterior, then used damped cotton buds to clean the embouchure, tone, and vent holes. For those dizi that had joints, I took them apart at their joints, and cleaned out the old cork grease that I had put on before, rotated the connecting point repeatedly enough for the joints to grind out their non-round parts, cleaned that out, before replacing with a new thin layer of cork grease [from Yamaha].

``But MT, why did you purposefully made the joint grind itself smooth when we don't even do that for any other joints for concert flutes and the like?''

See, the problem with the dizi is that unlike the concert flute, the tolerances of the joints are not as tight. There is also an innate eccentricity due to these joints being attached completely separately from the boring through of the bamboo. These joints are also well-known for seizing up partly due to the eccentricity, and partly due to the corrosion. So, what I just did was to use the joint against itself to attain a more smooth/rounded outcome.

Of course, the proper way is to have a mandrel and shape things up carefully, but considering how many different sized dizi I was working with (around 27), that would be impractical.

As for the [Yamaha] cork grease, I found that it had the right balance of tack (i.e. stickiness), and lubrication that allowed the metallic parts of the joints to smoothly slide past each other. A smooth joint movement is important because it allows ease of performing fine-tuning at the 0.5 mm resolution.

If the joint sticks, tuning is hard, and there may also be leaks, which is bad.

My older dizi had much cleaner joints, since I had done the first deep clean before, while the newer ones had to undergo quite a bit of that grind-clean-repeat process. But the results are often so much worth it, especially that whole ``joints not seizing and are butter smooth for tuning purposes'' aspect.

After I had packed them away, I realised that I didn't do the same for the two or three xiao that I have lying around. Ah well.

The last thing to add about this is that I found that my latex glove size is apparently an S (85±10 mm). In-teresting. The context for the latex glove was for me to protect the broken skin that my fingers have from the occasions where I needed to use 70% Isopropyl Alcohol while doing the joint cleaning.

------

In other news, I got my head shaved again. It was nice.

I restarted Blasphemous from the beginning again, and was doing much better with the rough guide on the sequence of areas to go through, as opposed to the breadth-first search method that I was using earlier, where I did not commit enough to an area to actually clear it completely and gain the necessary benefits.

Cannot remember what I last talked about for my Minecraft adventures, but I have built up a larger platform for my nether hub. I've figured out where the general places of interest in the overworld should be, and need to lay out the new starting points for the rails to follow that. The walls have been built up, but I haven't capped it with a proper roof, which resulted in many zombie pigmen piglins falling in and causing havoc.

I think that's about it for now. I'll probably play a bit more of Blasphemous before turning in for the night.

After all, tomorrow's a work day.

...and Before OP Trashes The [Troll] Post

In re a post on Flute Forum about the difference between the concert flute and the Chinese flute (笛子):

Okay, assuming you are not trolling, both concert flutes and the dizi are from the same general family of edge-blown aerophones.

I won't talk about the concert flute because we're in the [Concert] Flute Forum.

The dizi is a member of the simple system flute, where pitch is controlled through tone holes that are covered by the fingers. Unlike most simple system flutes, the dizi stands out with the addition of a membrane hole that is affixed with a membrane derived from the interior of the reed using a water soluble adhesive.

This membrane, when affixed with the right tension, adds a characteristic buzz to the tone that gives the dizi its robust character as compared to other flutes of comparable size.

The dizi's relative tuning with itself by the tone holes have two main families, one being the diatonic scale, and the other being the traditional one, which is differentiated by the position and size of the fifth tone hole as counted from embouchure hole end first (diatonic has it shifted slightly closer embouchure hole-ward, while traditional has a more even spacing).

Dizi are often made of bamboo, and can come in a wide variety of sizes/pitch ranges, from around alto flute range all the way to garklein recorder range.

No matter the size, the dizi's effective range is usually 2 octaves and a second, and sometimes hitting 2 octaves and a sixth.

The most commonly seen dizi are usually nearer the piccolo range, or the alto recorder range. More modern [Chinese orchestral] pieces may use additional dizi nearer the concert flute range.

The function of the dizi is usually quite different from that of the concert flute -- its strident but sweet tone usually means that it is often one of the leading melody lines in musical pieces.

All flute techniques are applicable to the dizi, with chromatic runs being among the harder things to pull off on the dizi.

Some advanced techniques on the dizi are impossible to play on the concert flute -- like 飞指 (rapid sliding of the the fingers up and down along the tone holes), and using the closest tone hole as an embouchure hole for a haunting effect while using the rest of the tone holes for pitching.

Even though the dizi is usually cheaper than a concert flute by monetary value, finding a high quality concert flute is ironically much eaiser than finding a high quality dizi.

That's because a high quality dizi requires bamboo of high density, and that material is getting increasingly harder to get due to increased global temperatures.

Bamboo is a fast-growing grass, and the higher the overall ambient temperature, the faster it grows, leading to decreased density.

Hope this helps!

...and Then The Body Says ``No''

What a fustercluck.

I fixed my mental wellness issue with an urgent leave on Friday, only to be slammed with an acute upper respiratory tract infection from Sunday to Tuesday, necessitating the visiting of a GP to get some meds and an appropriate amount of sick leave to sleep it off.

And of course, today's Hack Day is nullified, since I need to catch up on the stuff that had occurred between the previous two days.

But then again, I am belly-aching a little. Things are tight in terms of timing, but as usual, some preparation on my end, and the Providence of God meant that things will all turn out right in the end.

Frankly, there isn't much to write today, except for that little bit of complaining about how I basically lost some time due to the failure of my meat body.

Till the next update.

P.S.: You. The one running the bots that are based on AWS scraping my blog. I see you there. Don't be a dick.

Urgent Leave---Mental Wellness Day

Urgent one-day leave taken today---a ``mental well-ness day'' if you will. Work has been rather insufferable to the point where my ``brain no worky'' (official reason submitted to my reporting manager, by the way). It was insufferable not because it was tough (it was tough), but that there were just too many things going on that I was context switching way too much, and way too hard.

Couple that with an abysmal sleep cycle, and you have ``brain no worky'' syndrome.

And so, a day of rest was taken.

``But MT, tomorrow is Saturday! Couldn't you have waited till then to have a rest?''

Eh, not really---we have a performance in the evening, so it is less of the usual ``rest day'' (it's never a rest day) and more ``go-time!'' instead.

Anyway, what I then did with the day was just something that I was thinking of doing for quite a while: do a cycling trip to East Coast Park.

And so, I did. Going down Still Road, then East Coast Park towards the City, then backtracking up the entire park towards the Tanah Merah Coast Road, through Changi Beach, before finally ending in Changi Village for ``dinner''. It worked out to something like 27 mi, which brought my Eddington Number up to E17.

It's been a while since I went up the Tanah Merah Coast Road towards Changi Village. It has changed a whole lot---there was heavy fencing everywhere with major constructions. The trees that grew next to the road/path were allowed to overgrow into the cycle path itself, which made it fairly dangerous to stick with the ``keep left unless overtaking'' rule.

The other major change was the forced switching over to the Changi Bay Park Connector at the end of Tanah Merah Coast Road which connects over to Aviation Park Road. Aviation Park Road itself had a whole lot of construction going on, which made it impossible to pass through (this is going to be a common theme today). Changi Bay Park Connector was within a stone's throw from the coast line, and it was gorgeous as it was quiet [at about one o'clock on a Friday].

The rest of the route up to Changi Village was scenic. Quite a few old trees were chopped down for some reason, with bits of their trunks left lying about.

I severely underestimated just how fast I could go without any other people blocking my way, and as a result, ended up having ``dinner'' at around 1500hrs at Changi Village itself.

Heading home from Changi Village via bus... was an experience. Loyang was a fucking mess from all the construction, as was Pasir Ris. I'm just glad that I had already planned ahead to just take the bus home as opposed to attempting to ride back---there were simply no viable cycling routes through those two neighbourhoods at all.

And so, now as I write this up, I feel my legs be tired, and my brain yearning for sleep. I suppose this is the best outcome for dealing with mental wellness day.

Till the next update then.

It's May

It's May.

April was one helluva month, for sure. Many things were moving, fast, and the weather was downright atrocious, leading to many a time where I was just left physically out of it.

And this month, May, is likely to be just as hectic, if not more so.

(sigh)

Damn I'm tired.

I did manage to finish up my LEGO Bugatti Chiron build, which was exciting. The detailing part of the build (second booklet) was just a smidgen more interesting than the base frame build (differential gearing, simulated gear box, and simulated W16 engine). I would take pictures, but just not today---am just tired.

After nearly four whole months, The Great Negotiator finally arrived. It's the BAHCO 87, a rather large adjustable wrench, 30 in long, and coming in at a mass of 5.7 kg.

``MT, why the hell do you need a large wrench like that?''

Well... it's ludicrous. It's the embodiment of ``speak softly but carry a big stick'', but put into a slightly more plausible context of being a Crazy Old Man Engineer. No one expects the satisfying ``thunk'' of a 5.7 kg single-piece high performance alloyed steel on a table over a rather mundane discussion; hence the epithet of The Great Negotiator. It is also a rather visceral demonstration of an engineer, and is thus why I got it, despite it costing quite a fair bit of money, and taking so long to make its way over.

I will attest to the quality of the build though---the tolerances are pretty tight for the size, with a full clamp of 0.0 mm on the span-scale having no room to slip a thin sheet of 80 gsm paper through.

------

My reading has taken me back to the era of the old WOWIO---an online storefront for digital graphic novels/comics, just at about the time the first Amazon Kindle was released. They released lots of free digital graphic novels/comics then, and it was only up till now that I have a chance to really read them. Many of the graphic novels stopped at issue #1, with their stories never completed, their artists being lost in the mist of time. But there were still some gems among them that I wished could have continued, like the Lullaby series.

Unfortunately, to get them working on Eirian-V required me using Ghostscript to remove the ``sponsored by'' pages---they were full page sized URLs that made turning pages on Eirian-V impossible due to Eirian-V relying completely on touch screen for all interactions as opposed to the external buttons from all the other Eirians before.

Ah well.

I'm abandoning Elden Ring even though I didn't complete the game---I think I've derived all the fun that I want out of it. That's probably the first and last Fromsoft game that I'll play this lifetime, mostly because I'm really getting to the point in life where I can't just sit there for hours on end just to ``git gud'' on a game.

I watched Kronii's playthrough of Blasphemous, and got interested in the game. It's yet another metroidvania, but it did not appear as punishing as [say] Hollow Knight nor as clunky as Feudal Alloy. I think it scratches that metroidvania itch adequately.

And then there's The Talos Principle II that I uh... need to complete. It's a puzzle solving game, so I think I was just puzzled out for a bit. I'll get back to it.

------

I think that's all I care to talk about for now. Till the next update, I suppose.

Who Owes Whom?

As a rule of thumb, no one owes anyone anything, short of what is promised within the confines of a contract, either explicit or implicit.

In terms of an explicit contract, I am referring to stuff that is usually backed by legal means, or at least, backed with enough ``force'' behind it that everyone agrees with when the construct and content of the contract is being explicitly delineated.

In terms of an implicit contract, I am referring to the more wooly concepts of ``social contracts'', or the use of a legal term to explain the kinds of implied expectations that people have when they exist within the society.

Most of the time, the explicit contracts are ``easy'' to define, and fairly straightforward to enforce---just follow the terms that have been spelt out within the body of the contract itself.

It is the implicit contracts that make things rather... divisive at times.

See, because the contracts are implicit, there is never an artefact that properly spells out all the rights, privileges, mores, and norms that are expected. Instead, these implicit contracts rely on a sufficiently vocal majority to educate, and to enforce.

There are four terms there that need explanation.

``Sufficiently vocal'' means that the people who follow the implicit contract must be willing to stand their ground and hold the righteousness of the implicit contract in a manner that makes their stance unambiguous and understandable.

``Majority'' refers to a large enough number of people that fulfil the level of a quorum, i.e. they are representative of the intent of the implicit contract through numbers alone.

``Educate'' refers to the promulgation and teaching of the intent of the implicit contract to those who are unfamiliar with it, either because of a lack of experience due to age, or a lack of experience due to being a transplant from a different cultural norm.

``Enforce'' refers to the actions that need to be taken to demonstrate the consequences of a violation of the terms of the implicit contract. Enforcement differs from education in that it refers purely to the demonstration of the consequences of violation---to properly rehabilitate the offender, education of the intent of the implicit contract to which the offender has violated needs to be made.

Part of the reason why people these days start having that entitled behaviour with respect to the implicit contract (and therefore coming to the conclusion that society somehow ``owes'' them various things) is due to the violation of one or more of the four terms set out.

The lack of the ``sufficiently vocal'' has resulted in the intent of the implicit contract being increasingly wooly and subjected to unjustifiable interpretations, not all of them necessarily following the proper intent.

The lack of the ``majority'' has resulted in smaller numbers of people dictating the terms of the implicit contract over the quiet voices of the larger quorum, with the additional side effect of acting as though these minority are indeed the majority, which further increases the fuzziness of the boundaries of the implicit contract.

The lack of ``education'' means that there is no consensus on what the intent of the implicit contract, which again feeds back into each person deciding to interpret things their own way regardless of the original intent.

The lack of ``enforcement'' further emboldens the offenders to continue on their path of heresy, further destabilising the social fabric that was based on the implicit contract.

Combine these with the increased isolation that many are practising from living in an increasingly urbanised landscape with more interesting broadcast-level virtual connections than a highly localised and personal connection just increases the level of entitlement to the level of angst of ``the world owes me!''.

``MT, what's the point here?''

Since when did my rants ever have a point? 🤷‍♂️

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.

Never Reach Your [Hobby] Goals

Never reach your goals, especially if they are for your hobbies.

Before you go thinking that I'm nuts, hear me out. Goals are often things that we set out to achieve, and they serve as the inspiration to keep on striving through the path that we had set towards getting to them. With a goal in mind, one has the beacon to walk towards, a thing to focus on.

Now, what if you've reached your goal? What happens next?

In a work/career setting, the answer is usually quite straightforward---go lateral. Put in a different way, it means branching out into a related domain, or develop ``soft skills'' into the so-called T-shaped person. As a career option, it makes sense, since there really isn't a peak with respect to the means of making a living---having more tools in one's arsenal is almost always an asset with respect to the work environment, though there is usually a hidden cost of having too many useful tools; but that's a problem for a different day.

Most people will not have any issues about developing laterally once they have reached their goals at work, especially if they have run out of ``vertical'' goals to achieve. At some point, the challenge will be too great, and one will eventually revert to a level where one is more comfortable and competent, while still earning enough to pay the bills and power any other side stuff.

Hobbies are things that we do ``for fun''. It's what we do to pass the time when we aren't doing things to enhance survival and/or reproduction. If the hobby is no longer ``fun'', it becomes highly likely that we drop it in favour of something else.

Since hobbies are ``for fun'', we tend to not take it as ``seriously'' the way we do for what we do for work (I'm discounting anyone who uses their hobbies as a ``side hustle''---I think of that as going semi-professional). So, when one reaches the goals of one's hobbies, especially the ultimate-type of goal, what happens next?

Going lateral means that we are taking the hobbies seriously, which defeats the whole idea of a hobby. Not going lateral and leaving it goalless is akin to acknowledging that there is no longer anything else that one wants to achieve within the hobby, which can lead to stagnation and eventual disinterest.

Hence, it probably is better to never reach one's goals, especially if they are for one's hobbies, particularly if one wants to keep doing the hobby for a very long time without killing off the fun.

Instead of interpreting what I'm saying as The Truth, think of it as a cautionary tale from personal experience. I love Geocaching; I've been doing it from way back in 2009(?) when Jason first introduced me to my first geocache in Singapore, as well as my first trackable.

Fast forward to today, in 2024. I've not gone out to find a geocache in years, with much of the momentum killed after I've taken part in a Mega-Event, visited Geocaching headquarters in Seattle, and completed a D5/T5 geocache. These were ``ultimate''-type goals, and once they were met, my interest in the hobby of Geocaching just started dying out.

On a more scary note, my dizi playing. I recently completed my set of all 27 possible dizi, and having played a Grade 9 piece (《山村迎亲人》) in concert, I find myself staring out into the void going ``What's next?''. I have been expanding myself laterally with trying to do composition, and even playing in the Music Ministry on the concert flute, but at times some of these things just feel like I'm really taking things too seriously. I still derive fun, but the marginal amount of fun per effort is seemingly getting smaller. My first love here is still the dizi, and I'm at the level where unless I go semi-professional, I think I'm dooming myself to some kind of stagnation, which scares me.

``MT, you could like, go fusion music, or jazz?''

Sure, true. But that's going lateral, see? And it involves me making the decision of actually wanting to go down that path, which I have already asserted as ``being serious''. I do wonder though... part of me probably knows that it'll be something that I must do (or give up dizi playing), but how to do this is something that I will need to come to grips with.

After all, we only evolve as effectively as the environment allows us to. If the environment is stagnating, then there is no incentive to evolve; conversely, if the environment is too competitive, then one needs to be sufficiently serious in order to evolve fast enough to not die. In either case, ``fun'' seems to be reduced.

Tough calls for me for now.

As a side project, I am working on shakuhachi now. I've the Bell Shakuhachi from Jon Krypos (he renamed himself to Josen), and recently got some Kinko-ryu study material (the most obvious is the use of ロツレチリ for the notation of the notes DFGAC). It's a much tougher instrument than even the 洞箫 because of the way the embouchure cut is made---the angle required is very precise, and there is very little lipping involved as compared to the other edge-blown flutes. Only time will tell what will become of this.

Anyway, this is starting to get a bit long, so I'll stop here. Till the next update then.