Big Badda Bang of Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, the official e-book sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it finally arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The incantation used looks like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliana's First Proper Gig

That was... confusing.

So, despite having Eliana since 2021, I have never really taken her out on an ``official'' gig---I play on her a lot in between as part of the long-standing principle of ``cross-training'' that sifu has taught me nearly two decades ago. But for a proper gig, that has never happened.

The reason is much simpler: alto flutes need their score to be transposed a perfect fourth lower from concert pitch. The reason for this is practical---unlike the crazy recorder players (with all due respect of course), flute players tend to like playing using their ``instrument'' keys, mostly because the music for the flute tends to be very technical, and thus writing in the same ``fingering pattern'' (i.e. the instrument keys) makes it much easier for the regular concert flute (or C-flute) player to adapt accordingly.

But most music isn't transposed, so it becomes hard to just grab an alto flute out to play to scores originally written for concert flute. There's also the issue of ambitus, but that is usually more obvious---the highly technical stuff will span the full three octaves and thus cannot be easily transposed for playing, while most ``singable'' things stay within two octaves.

Which brings us to today.

Aurelia and Stella have traded places with Davie, and are now at MusicGearWindWorks undergoing their annual servicing (clean, oil, & adjust). I could bring out Azumi, and I was trying her out again last night as part of preparation for serving at the music ministry. But I sounded poor on her---and there was something clacky about her keys that made me draw pause. I dropped in some heavy key oil (probably too high a viscosity), and it helped a bit, but that was when I had a thought.

Why not bring out Eliana?

The pieces were in D-key, B♭-key, A♭-key, and C-key. The tempi weren't too drastic (they were hymns, and therefore needed to match up to what your regular church-goer can sing), and were therefore the best pieces to pick up transposing on-the-fly on Eliana.

It all worked fine, except when times I was confused with concert high-C, concert high-D♭ and concert high-E♭.

Oh, and a surprise hymn requested by senior pastor that was in G-key.

The trick, it seems, is to forget all the rubbish theory that people tell you ``oh, it's like reading the bass clef's top space onwards'' and just play the damn thing, remembering that the default scale runs with F♯ that needs to be taken care of. It's about reassociating where in the [treble clef] scale the fingering patterns are located, and just going without thinking too hard.

With enough repetition, it becomes easier. I dare not say that it becomes ``second nature'' until I can hot-swap between C-flutes and alto flute within the same gig without going nuts.

And that's all I wanted to talk about to day. Am still recovering from whatever the hell I had caught on Friday.

Till the next update.

SMS Musing #16

In between lucidity:

If I claim that I'm a musician foremost, then what is it that I stand for? Or rather, what have I done to further that direction that is my self assigned identity?

I have refused to get the necessary grading as a matter of principle, yet that is the bare minimum for entry to the music making fraternity. I don't cultivate a strong online presence that is effectively mandatory for the modern musician for self promotion. I'm not racing to the most prestigious competitions or performance venues to establish the kind of street cred that is expected. And I don't even do the most important thing that many musicians do---teach.

So what am I doing then?

Marching primarily to my own beat, playing music that is somewhat incomprehensible to many because it has "too many styles", like the kind of poly-linguistic potpourri that Finnegans Wake epitomises. I think I mentioned how my dizi dealer was telling me in an off-handed comment that I was playing to many different kinds of music to the point that I seem to have lost my roots (context is from the noodling that I was doing with the new pieces of dizi that I was picking up from him).

But do I really care? I somehow don't think so. As time goes by, I find myself being drawn towards using music to express myself, a short of sonic expression of the writing that I do ever do often. For the past few months, I find myself just noodling free style during the half hour before rehearsal time for Chinese Orchestra, as opposed to playing through the various solo pieces that were notated for the dizi. I still run through etudes every now and then, but the freestyling is more dominant.

It's so dominant to the point that I wonder if I'm missing something without realising. It's hard to say, really. In the old days, I can at least ask Chara, but now, who can I ask? Perhaps only others will know---I sure as hell don't.

Windsor Again!

Ah, here we are once again, nearing stupid o'clock, and itching to write something.

Recently, I went back to Windsor Nature Park, this time with friends from TGCO. I like walks, and this was no exception. Unlike a a similar trip nearly 4 years to the month, we didn't really circum-navigate all the trails that Windsor Nature Park had to offer, but sort of bee-lined towards the Tree Top Walk trail.

Oh, and our starting point wasn't at the main entrance at Venus Dr, but at Thomson Plaza itself.

The walk was fairly uneventful, except for more than my personally acceptable quantity of people due to it being a public holiday---I almost always prefer going for long walks (or cycles!) at ``odd hours'' where there were few people around. Part of the reason is to better enjoy the recreation area without having to deal with clueless ``casuals'' who are obviously transplanted so hard from their usual place that they act thoughtlessly and carelessly (for example, not keeping to the left of the fucking path), and part of the reason is that I just don't like being in places with too many people as a whole.

Seriously, the ``filthy casuals'' we passed by spanned from singing out loud to playing music on some bloody radio, all in a nature park, even when it is stated up front that these were not the right kinds of behaviours at the big-ass notice board at the entrance of the park proper.

But like everything in life, rules/regulations/laws that aren't enforced are basically worthless, and as long as there were no enforcement, bad behaviours like that are expected to continue, courtesy and public conscientiously be damned.

And people wonder why society is on the downhill...

And that's about what I wanted to write about. There's nothing else that is worth talking about for the moment. Just wanted to make a note that I had been to Windsor Nature Park again slightly four years since I was last there. Thomson Plaza itself is hella different, with many new shops, a new sense of vibrancy. I didn't actually walk through the place partly due to the company I was with, and partly because after merely walking for some 7+km, my legs were sore, and I just wanted to go home, which is damn funny considering that I can ``easily'' (for very loose definitions of ``easily'') cycle some 60+km before I feel like my legs are dead.

And I do prefer cycling more than walking, and only because it allows me to go farther, faster. The key drawback of cycling? I still need to move my damn bicycle with me at the end of the day, which is still a pain even if it is a foldable.

Till the next update then.

``MT, You've Got... Issues''

This week... was a different kind of hell. Thank God it wasn't work related, or I think I'd flip. I'll leave out the stuff involving other people, and just talk about myself.

I was in a sort of existential dread for much of the week. Couldn't tell what was wrong---just this weird sense of foreboding.

``But MT, you're always feeling like that. What's the difference this time?''

Prescient observation---at first, I had no idea. But as I took the long-ass way home today (i.e. by using the buses alone), I slowly realised what it was. So let me reconstruct it all.

It began with me thinking (on a Wednesday?) about how are we certain about who we are, considering that we don't really remember anything prior to three years old. And while we, in theory, have lived through the time from the past till now, there really isn't any other indicator that it was ``real'' and not some simulated [false] memory (a.k.a. last Thursdayism). Everything that we think we know is based on some interpretation from the electro-chemical patterns of the neurotransmitters---the classic mindfuck is the realisation that the fovea of the eye actually has the image upside-down, yet our brain manages to ``see'' it right-side up, and have all our actions coordinated somewhat correctly.

``But MT, you lived through it! Couldn't you trust the time that passed?''

See, normally I would say yes, but then I realised that the two times I underwent general anesthesia, I literally ``lost'' time, and yet there was still some sense of continuity of my brain state from before the GA, and after it. A more mundane version is sleeping and then waking up---did I truly exist when I was not really consciously aware of it?

I had wanted to write something about that here that day, but was just bloody tired due to... other reasons, and therefore didn't. Then I was reading Kimagure Orange Road, and suddenly found myself reacting very strongly to the manga. I didn't hate it, but I found myself having to put it down each time Kyōsuke mistook Madoka as being involved with someone else---it triggered a whole lot of really uncomfortable dread within me. Once that feeling passed, I could continue to read, but then at some point later, I just had to stop for a quite a bit more, because this time, I realise that I never really had the kind of childhood that allowed me the chance to explore such relationships (characters are in middle school, so about secondary school or between fifteen to seventeen years old).

That had a few reasons:

1. I had/have bad skin, and at my worst, look like a monster;
2. SIN city's culture is fucked up in that they actively discourage all school-going children (this includes university!) from dating, and then once they graduate, start demanding where the fuck is their grandchildren(?!); and
3. The secondary school I went to was repressive as fuck, while I was a meganerd while in junior college.

Looking back, the only non-trivial relationships that were deep enough to hurt me when they ended were those that I could have once my skin was less shitty.

As I sat in the bus and mulled over all these nonsense (and getting irritated by a BO-laden fat fuck who decided it was fun to try and squash me in---I exited the bus at the earliest opportunity that allowed me to switch over to another bus that could get me nearer my home than the bus interchange), I was getting restless. I wanted to cry badly for some damn reason, and did tear up here and there.

I won't say that I was distraught, but when I got home, I just dumped my work bag, closed the room door, and pulled out my dizi, and started playing solo pieces for a solid hour. These were not etudes---they were actual solo pieces that I love playing, and they had their own technical difficulties, and their associated voice. I played them as though it was part of a set---one run per piece, at the actual pace and expression needed.

That hour later, I felt so much better, and I remembered who I am.

I'm a musician whose first love is the dizi. I started on dizi before I even started on writing, and definitely before I started on computer programming/system design, or even cycling. After so many years, after so many divergences, I still come back to the dizi as my comfort zone.

The dizi is my voice, my anchor back into reality. And each time when I was feeling frustrated, annoyed, or restless, out came the dizi, and after it all, everything would be right again.

Yes, writing can be cathartic, but it doesn't have the kind of physicality the way playing hard pieces on dizi has. No, not even if I were to be writing things out in cursive---it's still different. When playing the dizi, I have to control my breathing, I have to control the movement of my fingers, and I have to pay attention to the score to see what notes and ornamentation I'm playing. I play the concert flute too, but it's a bit like speaking in a second language---the dizi is still my voice.

``MT, what about God?''

God's no slouch. Prayer's important and all, but I still need to take care of the meat bag that is run by the soul. I'm not that saintly enough that prayer alone is sufficient to lift my soul, my mind, and my body all at once.

I think I still have some remnant... issues (I don't dare to use the technical term of ``trauma'' because I don't know how to use it). Not sure if I'd be ready by August for a possible chance of another relationship.

Maybe I'll never be ready. But it's okay---I do what I can, live the best life I can through refinement towards Christ-likeness, and let God do what He wills.

If it's meant to be, it will be. If it isn't, it won't. And in either case, it'll be God's plan, not mine.

Amen.

Fear of the Future

I fear for the future, and not in the typical ``AI singularity is taking over the world!'' sort of way.

I fear for the future because of the amount of hand-holding and retraining that we veterans of the workforce need to do due to all the traumatic nonsense that has come from ``the COVID years''.

Let's math it out, shall we?

COVID-19 may begin in 2019, but let's make it easier on ourselves by starting in 2020, where much of the real pain truly began. The entire global epidemic lasted for roughly 2+ years (let's say 3 for an ``absolute range''). So folks in their formative years are affected if the said formative years are between 2020 and 2022 (inclusive). Let's also take into account the access to ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs), which is end of 2022 (more specifically, 2022-12 onwards).

The 95% confidence interval for freshmen ages is [18,21] (non-scientific), and if we consider the earliest entries (18 years old at 2020) and the latest entries (21 years old at 2022), we'll find that the graduates will start streaming out from 2023 to 2025, which is about now. The few fresh graduates that I did manage to hire during this period were bright, could work well enough via quasi-remote settings (i.e. via text messaging systems and teleconferencing mechanisms), but had some minor deficiencies here and there with respect to social interactions in meatspace, which feels funny to declare considering that (1) I'm not exactly a paragon of social interaction, and (2) I'm not exactly someone who has a statistically significant number of subordinates to make a meaningful statement on this.

I would say that with respect to the COVID-19 impact, it's probably minor. Social cues are things that folks will eventually learn when they are out and about in the working world, mostly because there is still a larger number of old fogeys out there establishing/maintaining the norms that anyone with even a small amount of emotional intelligence can pick up on their own, or have their social norms forcefully recalibrated through someone 讲-ing them.

That's the easy part.

The bigger problem is the rise and abuse of ChatGPT/LLM systems. Using a similar methodology as before (95% confidence interval for freshmen ages being [18,21] (non-scientific)), we see that the earliest graduates are coming out into the working world at around 2026, or next year. They are probably not as problematic, as their abuse of ChatGPT-esque tools is limited to the last three years of their formal education, though to be fair, the intensity of those three years may make the effective qualitative outcome ``bad enough''.

The bigger problem is the one where we are talking about secondary school children (i.e. 13 years old at 2023). They are more apt to abuse ChatGPT-esque systems more, and for longer, and since the teenage epoch is usually a formative one that determines one's future outlook, it means that this generation (and possibly successive ones) is likely to have the most problems with respect to actually thinking and solving problems on their own without the abuse of ChatGPT-esque systems.

This is problematic because these folks are supposed to graduate into the working world (assuming college attendance) some time in 2032. That's seven whole years of possibly abusing ChatGPT-esque systems, where the long term cognitive effects are not known at this stage.

Seven years is an eternity in that space, especially when considering the so-called ``Moore's Law of AI'' that is a 7-month duration between the doubling of the human-task duration-equivalent metric of AI performance.

I'd be nearing my sixth decade by then, and hopefully on the path to retirement (I'm kidding---in SIN city, I don't think we're allowed to retire, what with the pathological perversion of seeing ``numbers go up'' while the quality of life hits a stagnation point).

``MT, you keep saying `abuse of ChatGPT-esque systems'. What do you mean?''

It's about delegating the reading, understanding, and critical response aspects of what an intelligent human is supposed to do to some AI model that touts to be good at all those under some very restrictive interpretatons. I like tools that help me work faster and more productively, but I only use the tools to take the short-cuts only after I have developed a deep enough understanding of the underlying matter to make the short-cuts meaningful. I like to think of this as how we all have to ``earn our way'' towards using calculators by demonstrating understanding of basic arithmetic at first, and basic differential/integral calculus next. The tools that make our life easier presents either an algorithmic short-cut or a data-driven short-cut that is best understood as what I said---a short-cut. Using these short-cuts without any form of deep understanding is dangerous in the future economy because the future is not powered by the ability to replicate without thought---the true value has always been about a new form of intellectual property. If all the ideas and outcomes that one creates is based purely on the output of such ChatGPT-esque models, then one loses the ability to actually create, which is dangerous.

It is the same form of argument I have against automated driving systems. We always assume that the automated driving systems should have a human ``in the loop'' who can take over the handling should the environment exceed the normal circumstances in which the automated driving system is trained on, but if everyone uses the automated driving systems from the get-go, the quality of skill/decision-making needed to handle the exceptional situation paradoxically degrades drastically instead, all because people took short-cuts and never really internalised the foundational information.

``So MT, what's your point at the end of it all?''

I'm just scared. I don't know what kind of people we will get when 2032 comes around. I may be one of the few ``crazy old man engineers'' left who are strongly straddling between the old ways and the new, and I pray that I have enough strength and determination left to train the newbies in the old ways so that they can harvest the effects of both worlds to truly shine.

Because the effects of a failure to do so are too catastrophic for me to even start thinking about.

EDF! EDF! EDF!

Okay okay... let's speak of things calmly.

I'm on leave, and this time, I'm not completely sick (but still feel bad enough that I'd probably crash out after writing this entry). The ``why'' is simple---Labour Day is on a Thursday, which begs for Friday to be a leave day, which then begets the idea of ``well... it's already two days, and we're in a quasi-lull period now anyway, so...'', ending with this fine Wednesday being a leave day as well.

I had originally wanted to go on yet another long-ass cycling trip, but with the recent bouts of colds and other nonsense, thought better. So I was confirmed to be confined to quarters for the most part.

I would have considered playing Oblivion: Remastered, if not for a few things:

1. A recent update made the performance of the game more suspect than before;
2. The price tag of SGD70-ish was a bit steep (though not insurmountable); and
3. EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5 was 70% off (sub-SGD15).

One might say that it is clearly a no-brainer.

EDF! EDF! EDF!

And so I found myself playing EDF 5 for much of the day.

My introduction to the series is via a playthrough by IRyS on it, and of course, her spiel in the collaboration with the publisher:


``But MT, that is for EDF 6!''

No, her playthrough of EDF 5:

It looked fun then, and now when I finally got to play it, it is definitely fun! It's also the first time [in a damn long while] that I'm actively playing a shooter-type game but with a controller. The reason for the parenthesis is that I vaguely remembered playing Halo: Combat Evolved on an Xbox, but I cannot remember where it was that I played it at.

The funny thing about playing 3D environment games on the controller is that the ``aim'' or ``camera'' analogue stick is almost always vertically inverted---it just feels more comfortable for me. This is not the same when it comes to mouse-look---moving up on a mouse must correspond to up movement, otherwise my brain goes weird.

Which makes using the mouse as a controller for a 6-DOF game like Sublevel Zero Redux a damn pain in the ass. In fact, the control scheme being a right pain in the ass is a big reason why that game is filed under the ``Don't Bother'' category in my Steam library.

There is some thought when doing the missions in EDF 5, but the execution is more forgiving than a game like Elden Ring, at least, for the Ranger class. And the stupid number of bugs to kill reminds me too much of Ninety-Nine Nights, a beautiful on-screen kill-fest that never saw a PC release that I had always wanted to play, but never had the chance to.

EDF! EDF! EDF!

And so ends the day. I've putzed about enough for the day, and should really turn in for the night. Any and all General Election campaigning in SIN city will come to a head tomorrow, and then a ``cooling-off day'' where any and all discourse on the politics relating to the General Election are forbidden for reasons [of law] before citizens vote on Saturday.

Till the next update.

Henson Shaving: Titanium Double-Edged Razor (Ti22 Medium)

Okay, I'm going to be a shill, sort of. But mind you, I didn't get paid, and moreover, paid for the product in turn, and got stuck waiting for more than two weeks before they finally delivered it.

I rocked a ``Duck Saves Earth'' double edged razor with bamboo handle since... a damn long time ago. A quick check showed that a company with that name in SIN city lived and died within 2018. It looks something like this. And a quick search yielding more suggests that it is, in reality, an OEM product with the option to engrave whatever company's name into the handle.

And mine was ``Duck Saves Earth''.

Don't get me wrong---it was a damn good razor. It had mass, it lasted me a stupid amount of time, but it had one flaw that showed up recently---the chrome plating was starting to flake off, especially the part nearest the blade edge.

Mind you, it hadn't actually completely flaked off yet, but the signs were there.

And meanwhile, some of the content creators I follow on YouTube (like Xyla Foxlin, Veritasium, and The Slow Mo Guys) were talking about Henson Shaving. The gimmick of Henson Shaving's razors was how it was precision machined out of Aluminium, and thus had tighter tolerances. The angles of attack were also fine tuned to reduce the amount of razor burn.

They also had a titanium version, which cost ten times what I paid for back when I got my ``Duck Saves Earth'' razor at a pop-up shop in the atrium of Fusionpolis back in the day (SGD400 versus SGD40, in case the prices changed).

``MT, why?''

Why not? Unlike then, when I was just shaving off the chin fur once every other day, I am actually doing full head shaves now because male pattern baldness with receding hairline is a bitch. I read their prospectus---the machined titanium seemed like a great idea to avoid the kinds of spalling that I was seeing with my current razor. I could go with the machined aluminium, but titanium is the harder material that is also denser than aluminium for the same machined shape [of a razor]. That second factor is important for a double-edge razor because you don't really want to be ``dragging'' or ``pressing'' the damn blade into the skin just so that it can cut the hair---the mass of the razor drives the blade at a more controlled manner, thus leaving the hand wielding it to merely guide its movements as opposed to applying inconsistent forces.

Besides, it's bloody titanium. I have a titanium spork, a titanium straw, a titanium french coffee press, and my spectacle frames are also titanium. Why not my razor too?

The purchase was straightforward---I used Xyla's affiliate code for the free 100 blades (but you can easily get others---just watch their videos and they can hook you up, though be warned that they aren't stackable), grabbed the medium ``aggression'' of the Ti22 razor, and splurged extra for the machined aluminium stand (why is it not made of titanium?).

It took 24 days before my order was delivered. That was long, but support was responsive and informative when I contacted them to check in on things. What I didn't like was the automated ``newsletters''/advertising that were sent out to me---they had the tone of ``hey, now that you've gotten your razor, here's how to take care, and also maybe refer friends?'', which was inappropriate because (1) I didn't have my razor yet, and (2) damn shipping issues. Eventually that was resolved by the fulfilling partner (there were some stock issues, as well as other unmentioned stuff that I don't know nor do I need to know), and my order reached me today.

I switched over the new-ish blade from my old razor to the Ti22 medium, and proceeded with a test whiskers shave.

It felt... different. The angle was definitely different from what I was used to, and I think the best way to describe it is that it feels like a cartridge razor, without actually being in a cartridge. The medium aggression was much milder than what I was used to, which was fine since I could just make more smaller passes with higher precision that reduced irritation on my skin as compared to the kind of crazy things that I was doing with my other razor. Once I felt comfortable, I extended it to do my full head shave.

The angle though... it needed some getting used to. The biting point was quite obvious---the angle is correct when you can feel the blade gently biting into the hair, as though it was on the verge of getting caught, only to effortlessly slice it down. I felt more fearless wielding the Ti22 medium compared to my regular razor, even using my non-dominant hand on some other parts of my head. I used to have trouble with the really thin Feather brand blades, but now I suspect that I can probably get away with that on the Ti22 medium due to how mild it was compared to the previous razors.

Yes, that's a plural---I have another razor prior to the ``Duck Saves Earth'' one. I'm too lazy to bring it out, but it is smaller, and bought from one of the travelling night markets. That's my first double-edged razor, and I didn't like it because it did not have enough mass, and its handle was a bit on the short side. But it was portable as hell though, and I digress.

So, Ti22 medium from Henson Shaving. I did say I was going to shill, even though I'm not paid for it, and have to pay for it myself. It has not disappointed me (and not because I paid a lot of money), and I can see myself using it for a very very long time.

Till the next update then.

Arakawa Under the Bridge My Dress-Up Darling

surreal

Having an oddly dreamlike quality

That's what Arakawa Under the Bridge is cited as in Wikipedia, though technically it is a surreal comedy.

I marathoned the last twenty-five chapters last night, and I feel wistful. But I am ahead of myself.

Arakawa Under the Bridge brings back memories of a bygone past. The first time I heard of this was near the end of my PhD-turned-Masters programme out in UIUC. I was hanging out with Alisa and loliponi, and she invited me to watch this anime with them. I liked the premise---it had that kind of whimsical quality that I enjoyed. We didn't manage to finish the season (or did we?), but I knew that whatever it was, it was not the end of the story, and I just had to know how it turned out, what with all the world-building.

Fast forward about a decade and change later, and here I am, finally reading the manga that inspired it all.

I like Arakawa Under the Bridge. It has that balance between slice-of-life (love it!), surrealism (confused but normalised in my head), with eventual resolutions that make one question whether the surrealism was only because I had chosen to view the manga for the most part from the lens of a normal person. The resolution of all the major events and plot points was satisfactory given the ludicrity of the initial premise, and it does serve as a warm and fuzzy ending that made me yearn for someone like a Nino in my life, as opposed to the flawed real people where one can never tell when they will take the love and trust you eventually feel comfortable enough to yield and throw it back in your face like some cosmic joke, making you question whether you can trust anyone that deeply ever again.

Totally not projecting. Absolutely not. No way. Nuh-uh.

Arakawa Under the Bridge---it's been out long enough. Here's the loveliest coloured 2-page spread that I absolutely love:

If you have no idea who everyone is, don't fret: go read it here.

------

Another manga series that I had finished reading recently (for a very loose definition of ``recently'') is My Dress-Up Darling. I love love love Marin Kitagawa's smile---just look at the cover in the manga's Wikipedia page. And just in case you think this is only possible for a drawn character, think again:

That's the singer of the anime theme cosplaying as Marin. And she has the same damn smile too!

And no, I didn't follow the anime, nor do I have any intention to. These days, I find that the manga of an anime series tends to be a much better read/expenditure of my time.

I bring up My Dress-Up Darling here because of its apparently abrupt conclusion, where there seem to be new story arcs that are being set up that can easily bring on more adventures for Marin and Wakana. Real world issues on the mangaka's health/schedule aside, I think that for slice-of-life type stories, there's hardly ever a good place to stop, for the simple reason that life simply doesn't just stop there once an arc is over. It just keeps on going, with new arcs slipstreaming in even as other story arcs are resolved.

At some point, the creator of the slice-of-life needs to decide when they are done with the stories they want to tell. And in this case, moving on from the confession in the penultimate chapter into a time-skip where Marin and Wakana are married, with a hint of how their lives are successful and still wonderful together feels like the right kind of end for a slice-of-life.

Yes, there are new big story arcs that never got ``resolved'' (did they ever find out that it was Marin who was Haniel?), side characters whose stories seemed to have gone nowhere (but they are side characters?), and it did feel rushed. But I think it is important to trust in the creative process---not everything must follow a standardised template. The templates are just guides---once one has mastered the lessons on what the guides are trying to teach, it is time to ditch them and find one's own creative voice.

I know I hardly ever talk about manga and what-not, or even review books that I read in general, but I suppose some of these things have created enough of a disturbance/resonance that I feel like saying something about it.

Till the next update then.

Long Breaks == Sick Days 😩

I think that I'm this close to just simply hating taking leave to make long weekends longer.

Only because each time that I take an extra day off, I end up ``wasting it'' by actually falling ill and having to spend that time just sleeping in just so that my body can recover from whatever the hell it was that took me out.

It is, to put it mildly, getting annoying.

And now, that aside, time to put other things into perspective.

I talked recently about how Gawr Gura of hololive English Myth has decided to call it quits, and mentioned about how it was really not something that was unexpected, considering the duration in which she had worked, comparing the nearly five years that she had with that of a software engineer making senior level by then.

I stand by that. Five years is a long time, particularly if one's under thirty. It is, to put it really stupidly, more than 16% of one's life span at that point in time, and if one were fifty, it would be barely 10% only, and only after another twenty years of perspective. Put that way, things seem to make much more sense, and perhaps even the tourists can accept it at face value without stirring more unnecessary drama.

Speaking of tourists, 4chan was finally hacked pretty thoroughly after being around for nearly twenty years. The relevance here is that it usually is the containment zone for the kind of doom-posting of the naysayers of hololive under the /vt/ board, and with 4chan down as the English-speaking world's largest VTuber resigning, it just means that the spill over becomes more troublesome than usual.

I think that Gura's feelings on the matter can be surmised in the ``last'' music video that she just released on her channel:

It's angsty, it's raw, it's not what one would expect from the cutesy avatar that Gura is known for.

As I mentioned, I know of Gura, but I don't follow her as closely as say Ina or even Reine. Take it for all it is worth.

------

Neither Civil Nor Servant was a book that I had been wanting to read for quite a while now, and it was only recently that I had managed to borrow it from a colleague who happened to have it. For those who are not in the know, it is a biography of Philip Yeo, a rather polarising person who is/was well-known within the public sector of SIN city.

In many ways, it does read as a hagiography than a biography---all actions that the subject took had their rationalisations and justifications spelt out, with many of their ``allowedness'' (not legality!) coming from a mix of ``it was the right thing to do'' or that a powerful political patron ``understood and required the job be done''.

I am a bit torn. I think that the actions that were taken, together with their justifications/rationalisations/effectiveness were a product of their times, and should not be seen as something to be emulated in the modern era. SIN city between the 1960s and 1980s was in a literal existential crisis, where there were no real rules other than the singular word of ``Survive!''. In that sense, the kinds of sketchy behaviours could be tolerated, though not necessarily officially condoned. It was also well that there was only ``one'' (that we know of) person who was running around doing such sketchy things, and as such, with a powerful enough patron, the evils of precedence-setting can be culled almost totally through a political whitewashing of a mandarin.

Yet I find that with the modern day SIN city, where the rules are there precisely because the wild days are over, makes the kind of sleights of hand that were pulled by the subject before unconscionable today. We are now a much diverse population, where the fate of the city-state is no longer just in the hands of the dynastic family like back then. No thanks to the large influx of immigrants, the nature of the population now has changed too, with no group of people being ``safe enough'' to have the assumption of unquestioned loyalty as compared to the very first generations of SIN city citizens.

Thus, the ``trust me, Bro'' method of operating is no longer viable---it is too easy to be corrupted, and with the population make-up we have now, the temptation to corrupt/be corrupted is much higher than before.

I see the work not as a recipe to combat against the plague of yes-men that all bureaucracies eventually face, but as a fable of how one man avoided death of groupthink through applying his own way of looking at the world, and managing to have the support of someone strong enough to shield him so that he can get on with solving the problems that were easy to be kept in stasis by bureaucratic processes because no one dared to take the calculated risk.

The heart of the subject is what we should learn, though the manner of execution needs to be sought out by ourselves that befits the times and environment that we currently face.

------

In between sleep to rest up, I had to take mandatory ``stay awake'' moments, and in those moments, I had been grinding out some of the achievements of HoloCure---Save the Fans!. It's been fun, and as it is both good and free, I highly recommend folks to play it.

That's about it for now.

Bye Bye Gawr Gura of hololive EN

I wasn't intending to write a post. But I had to.

The time has finally come.

Gawr Gura, one of the OG hololive English -Myth- ladies, has finally decided to graduate and cease her activities as Gawr Gura.

And now, Myth is down to just the three: 🐙💀🐔

Recalling the last big anniversary collaboration from back then is bittersweet. Gura isn't exactly the first on my list to watch from Myth (it's Ina!), but she is still a big face of hololive English.

She's big enough that she has her own Wikipedia page for notability.

And it is because of that that she has finally decided to go.

Sometimes, being that big does one no favours.

As many have noted across the 'net, this marks a distinct break of the early era of hololive English from the new one, where jank is replaced with much better production and management, where off-line idol activities of dancing and singing are given a much higher weightage when compared to before, where the dreams seem more geared towards something more traditional than the frontier of what a purely digital/virtual environment can bring.

Do I feel sad? Yes.

Do I feel bad? No.

She's been at it for nearly five years... five years! In five years, one can get promoted from junior to senior role in the land of software engineering. In entertainment circles, five years is effectively F-O-R-E-V-E-R, and that's not even counting the acclerated rate that Internet entertainers feel with the hyper-competitive nature of the unfettered access to the global audience/market.

I hope she finds what she is looking for after leaving.

Bye bye stinky---we'll miss you.

Viewing Actions

A thought came to mind as the recent ``smack everyone with tariffs'' kicked off---do we really know the difference between

1. Good outcomes from some action; and
2. Good outcomes in spite of some action?

Because it seems to me that most people seem to conflate the two, and end up attributing the wrong cause, therefore learning the wrong lessons, only to be doomed to repeat the same wrong cause once more.

It's hard to know from the get-go which of the two is happening, for the simple reason that all these action/consequences are neither isolated, nor static. Not isolated in the sense that there are always run-on effects that cause a web (not a chain!) of other decisions to be made, with their own consequent action/consequences, and not static in that just because a decision is currently made for a particular thing does not mean that it is the final decision to be made for the said thing as the web of consequences returns as a form of feedback, positive or otherwise.

In other words, I think that it is hard to claim that a certain action A (or in this example, ``smack everyone with tariffs'') is a ``good'' one or a ``bad'' one. It isn't something that relates to directly to morality and ethics, in which case God's Word is silent, and even considered from an indirect perspective, it primarily involves the allocation of resources rather than as a moral quandary. At most, it can be made into an argument about whether proper stewardship of resources was exercised, but then again, as long as it does not involve spreading the Gospel, it technically ``belongs to Caesar'' and is out of the ambit of God's Word.

So where does this leave us?

I would say that it is best to not pass judgement on whether it is good or if it is not good right now, especially if it is about something which is not within our locus of control. While cathartic to bitch about the situation, it is also important to think more about how it can affect one, and how one should adapt to the situation, privilege notwithstanding. This broadly means the need for one to make up their own damn mind, and more importantly, to take action according to their decision, to effect a consequence they are more happy with, while also be willing to take the risk to get there.

The notionally successful are so because they have been willing to take the risks needed through their actions, and despite failing more than many who have tried, they have eventually succeeded through being in the right place at the right time.

Musician Earplugs

Response to a post on Flute Forum about visiting an ENT for hearing test & exam, and asking about suggestions/thoughts on earplugs:

Since you are going to the ENT, I suggest getting a referral to an audiologist to do a proper mould of your ear canal for your earplugs. At least in my part of the world, the person making those moulds for earplugs and the doctor are not the same people.

Consider getting one where you can change the flat-frequency response filters. I use the -25dB ones when playing piccolo and high dizi, and they work well. I think there's also -10dB and -15dB as well, but I've not used them personally.

Usually only the right ear needs the heavier protection, and that changeable filter set up means that you can tweak what you use on your left ear if you are finding it tough to hear through it with the same -25dB filters.

Speech is always a little harder to understand when people speak normally, because you are attenuating them by at least 10dB, roughly the same difference between whispering and talking normally (apparent loudness).

Hope these help!

That last part is something that I only realised recently, when Elicia (who plays the sheng) was trying to talk to me in a whisper when I had both ears shoved in with my -25dB musician ear plugs---I couldn't hear shit. Because a 25dB difference is akin to the difference between a whisper and a shouting match, and so when she was whispering, I definitely couldn't hear shit.

Interesting how it sometimes takes a little real-world experience and thinking in order to realise something.

Bye Bye NaNoWriMo, and Nanashi Mumei of hololive EN

NaNoWriMo is now truly dead. The news was to have been sent out via email with an attached YouTube video, but I never did receive that email, and I will not watch the video that is said to be 27+ minutes of ranting by the last and acting Executive Director.

The implosion that led to the collapse of NaNoWriMo is well-documented, and if you are reading this in the far future where the link is dead, know that it was a pathetic fall from grace that could be saved at every step of the way, should the management pay attention to what the community is saying. Not that the community knows best, but that the community that was formed around the NaNoWriMo concept as the rallying call, and thus the community is not just some filthy casual tourist who cares not about the direction and enjoyability of NaNoWriMo.

To be had, NaNoWriMo had a good run. Founded back in 1999 on a whim by Chris Baty who wanted to challenge the concept of novel-writing as a one day event (as in, ``one day I will write a novel''), it survived twenty-five years. And of those twenty-five years, I had winning entries for fifteen of them. For a hobbyist programme, that is a damn good run.

So many nice memories from the past. I remembered first meeting Dylan and Mint back in one of the TGIO (Thank God It's Over!) parties, and then there's of course Joelyn, Max, Sarahcoldheart, Raven Silvers, Shermine, and quite a few others whom I would recognise by face but almost never by name. Almost always winning the early bird prize (for being early on venue at the Kick-off and the TGIO parties), and then having all kinds of discussions with them; the write-ins on Saturdays at various parts of the CBD that I would never have gone on my own; the different rooms at different National Libraries that our Municipal Liaisons (MLs) Sarahcoldheart/Raven Silvers/Joelyn would book for the two main parties; meeting and chatting with random irregulars who wrote at one or two of the NaNoWriMos (Valdimire---you're remembered and hope you are doing well!); inspirations from a now-forgotten writer after the forums were ``updated'' (but made worse) who would consistently churn out 1 Mwords per NaNoWriMo; word wars with the different sections of SIN city; convincing folks like Chara to join in the writing mess; the 2 kword lunch hour sprints during November, and being well-known at where I work for doing it; and of course, fourteen publicly available first draft manuscripts of stories from different settings (one of them is not quite right, and so I didn't release it).

And now, the era is over.

I've honestly done all my grieving last year, when I decided to not take part in NaNoWriMo. The writing's been on the wall for quite a while---just read the linked to document for a concise summary of the downfall of NaNoWriMo the organisation. It's just that I always feel a little wistful when something comes to a close.

...just like how Nanashi Mumei of hololive English has announced her graduation.

While I'm more selective about watching what Mumei puts up as compared to Ina/Fauna/Vesper, she does have a lovely voice. And her original music has got that interesting mix of wonder and power behind it that is hard to explain. It is sad that she has to leave hololive primarily due to her health issues, and more specifically, the fact that her voice is in trouble.

One cannot be a streamer/content creator with an avatar with voice troubles---that is literally the most important part of being a VTuber, the other being a generally acceptable avatar to work with.

I can keep going on, but damnit it is April already---the months of being maudlin are more in January for crying out loud!

(sigh)

We cannot keep looking back and wondering how to go back---moving forwards is already hard as it is. We should allow ourselves to look back every now and then as a means of reminding us of how we got to where we are, to give thanks to those who helped us along the way, and to pray for the very same souls who helped us then, but whom we have lost touch since.

But we can never go back to how things were. No matter what we try.

Till the next update.

Bye Bye Long Weekend

And so, this long weekend comes to a close.

I spent part of my time preparing for and eventually performing at the concert on Sunday, and other parts of it were spent just being away from work-related matters. I caught up on sleep; played some HoloCure to unlock more weapons, collabs, and items; did some reading; day-dream/rant; complete Fallout 4 to be ready for Fallout: London (I couldn't get Fallout: London to work, so I'm just going to bail out for now); and sort out some more new music from either game OSTs or stuff from the various VTubers.

Other than that... I don't really recall doing particularly productive, as it should be.

There was an intention to go for yet another long-ass cycling trip on the Friday that was ``Wellness Day'' by the organisation that is hosting my work place, but I ended up just chilling at home to avoid giving my body additional physical stress before the concert on Sunday.

And today being a public holiday meant that most parts of the cycling route are going to be flooded with ``tourists'' (i.e. park connector network users who are so casual to the point that they become a nuisance due to not doing the bare minimum of keeping to the left).

I don't think there's anything else I want to talk about. I do feel a bit more rested from before the long weekend, but there will be new things/pains that are coming up that need to be dealt with.

So I suppose I'll just stop here and call it a day for now.

Flow

And so, the end is near---

Wait, this is not a lyric post. Anyway, I just completed yet another performance with the King's Flute Choir today, this time as a guest player on The Big Flute for a concert under the Emerging Flutists programme. And now, after everything is over, I sit in front of Eileen-III, contemplating about how I'm intending to spend my day for tomorrow's public holiday, and hitting upon a rather simple question.

Why is it that we perform music in front of a live audience?

I mean, for many (not necessarily of the King's Flute Choir), it's their livelihood as entertainers/musicians. But what about us hobbyists, the kind who spend lots of money on gear, lessons, travel, just so that we can perform in front of a live audience?

I think I might have found an answer: the addiction to the feeling of being in a flow state.

For those who are unfamiliar, the ``flow state'' is a moment where one is simultaneously hyper-focused yet hyper-relaxed, with information coming in fast and furious, yet without any form of chaos, as though one is, at that moment, literally One With The Universe, with near omnipotence, capable of handling anything and everything that is coming in, and to deliver the necessary actions/activities/outcomes that go out, all without falling into fear, uncertainty and doubt. One is ``in the moment'', yet with enough cognizance to have an objective perspective on all that is happening, and thus keeping the ability to make quick and accurate decisions even as the rest of the self continues on with the actions that are needed within the flow state itself.

``MT, you sound like you're high.''

No, I'm not; it's hard to explain without using metaphors. It is one of those things that one must experience at least once in their lives, and hopefully be able to regain that feeling in the future when the stakes are high enough, just so that the outward outcomes are not jeopardise by fear, uncertainty, or doubt.

More concretely, I find that when I am playing on my musical instrument on stage and in front of a live audience, I tend to be in the flow state, which leads to outcomes that are better than what I might expect.

And I felt that today, with some verbal confirmation from a third party too. There are a couple of pieces in the setlist that required one to do flute beatboxing, something that I had (1) never done before, and (2) found it quite hard to pull off on The Big Flute due to the need for even more breath to cover for the larger inner diameter. Throughout all the rehearsals, and even during my own practices, I just couldn't do it well enough to sound, let alone be ``correct''. It was to the point that I had to work something out with one of the other players to help with the percussive beatboxing sounds on the regular concert flute.

Yet at the actual concert, somehow I managed to scrabble through, as was the other bass flute player. That player who was helping us with the additional beatboxing support was the one who pointed out that it was the first time that he had managed to hear the beatboxing stuff from the bass-line flutes.

And I know that it was due to being the flow state because if you asked me to replicate it right now, just after the concert, I would likely fail.

Now that we have ``flow state'' defined and understood, let me explain why it is an addictive feeling.

To paraphrase from 《巨婴国》 again, all of us have an innate omnipotent narcissism that some of us eventually learn to acknowledge and tame, bringing us the kind of psychological stability that makes us appear the more matured one. Many of us don't really learn about this, and end up being the kind of self-entitled jerk that everyone loves to hate on the 'net.

But who can blame the for not wanting to acknowledge and tame this innate omnipotent narcissism? It's seductive, it makes one feel powerful. But it is also very unhealthy in the long run, since it becomes the default state of being, which can contradict what the real world may have to offer in return.

Conversely, acknowledging that omnipotent narcissism, and then correcting one's behaviour to avoid triggering that means that one is more comfortable with the world's non-determinism. But acknowledgement and taming is not the same as complete nullification---latent remnants still exist, and as something from the Id, it has a tendency to continuously lurk in the parts of the mind that we aren't paying too much attention to.

Which is why when one is in the flow state, it becomes addictive. Because it is a safe way to satisfy that latent omnipotent narcissism without the negative effects. It is a type of power that is summoned only on occasion, and is therefore considered superior in terms of reactions compared to just living out the omnipotent narcissism fantasy.

But that said, being in flow state from performing on stage and in front of a live audience is not the same as being attention-seeking---the flow state describes an internal state of being of the person, which does not deal with the externalities directly. Thus, when one is in a flow state, one might not even notice the audience, especially if they are the passive sort and are therefore irrelevant anyway. By nature, attention-seeking demands an active audience, and with that, the need to use feedback loops to control one's behaviour to control that of the audience.

And I think that's about it for now. I'm tired---playing The Big Flute ``seriously'' has a tendency of knocking me out because of the need for deep belly-level breathing, which causes too much relaxation despite the obvious efforts needed to actually perform on the music instruments.

Till the next update then.

Homo Rationalis?

(sighs)

Principles, loyalties, looking out for oneself, looking out for one's loved ones---where do all these lie?

Are we living in a world where even the alleged rationality of a transactional relationship gets usurped by the ritualistic chanting and chest-thumping of the loudest person in the room?

Why do people make decisions that, with just a little bit of thought, will end up with them being in a worse position than before?

And no, I am not referring to the US. There are many out there who have bled enough words to criticise, and to complain, and to call for action. I am just thinking out loud about the situation throughout the world, of which the US is just one of the more recent examples.

In many ways, the idea of homo rationalis ought to be considered dead by now. No one, not even me, can truly make decisions that are rational (defensible, logical, consistent). I would go as far as to misquote The Matrix and claim that we've already made our damn decisions---the difficulty then is to understand why we made them.

I have no answers. I never do---not smart enough, and not wise enough to provide answers, and perhaps not even to myself.

One point of solace is that this too, shall pass. For this world is not my world---I'm just passing through before I hopefully end up in God's Kingdom. But instead of the easy inaction that some might advocate, I try my best to steward what has been given to me by God to steward, be it talent, resources, or even relationships with other people.

It is not fatalism; I like to think of it as a type of realism, one that has outcomes consistently grounded in reality, with the actual aims/goals going much further beyond reality.

I suppose this is what philosophers like to call ``hope''.

If we place our hope in the material world, the fact the material world is one that everyone can access means that the same hope that we place can also be touched, and perhaps destroyed, with or without malice.

If we place our hope beyond the material world, then it is less clear who can touch it. The believers of course believe that they can reach that world beyond this one, while the non-believers are a little more heterogenous in thought, with some of the more vociferous ones declaring that since such a world is ``beyond'' the material world, it must therefore not exist, and is a complete delusion that people use to escape the current one where they are losers.

Which in some ways is both funny and sad. Funny in that these folks are themselves deluded enough into discarding a concept that isn't provable within the generally accepted framework of empiricism built around falsification, with the use of the scientific method. Sad because they cannot accept that they may be wrong, for if they were, they would look much dumber than the losers that they decried.

I don't condemn them; I just pray that they find their own peace. I cannot hope to help anyone beyond myself, and even then, I can barely help myself in this messed up world.

All I can do, is to do my best given my locus of control, and let God handle the rest. What I do in this material world, both God and society can see; what I intend in this material world, only God knows, and He will judge me the way He will.

But back to the point (was there a point in the first place?).

I have trust issues. Not sure if I have talked about it before, but I will talk about it now. I have trust issues. If I choose to trust someone, I trust wholeheartedly, considering them as part of the axiomatic inner circle within the context of the trust, where there is little to no boundaries of what we can/cannot say. If I choose to not trust someone, they will know nothing more than what I am required to state by statute.

At work, I trust my folks to do what they are supposed to do. I trust my bosses to make the best damn decisions they can with the information that we provide, and I trust my subordinates to deliver what they say they will. I trust my clients in terms of what they want, but not in the way that they want it. I trust my organisation to follow the law and deal with us fairly, and I trust my infrastructure partners to be the same.

So far, that has gone great.

Away from work, I feel less inclined to trust people as much nowadays.

Primarily because at a personal level, agenda are less structured (as compared to the professional setting), time horizons are less constrained, and few are ready to think/act like the adults they are.

That last point is what is most depressing. For some damn reason, people seem to develop this... immaturity when it comes to things unrelated to the professional setting. It is as though they put their best foot forward ``for the Company!'' but are shoddy when it comes to ``themselves''. The hard-driving business person who makes millions for a company is the same one who is stuck in a divorce proceeding; the caring nurse at the hospital is the same one who shows neglect for their own child at home.

``MT, that's vague af.''

Okay. Here's something similar in concept: personal projects are often managed much more shittily compared to stuff for work, even though there is no functional difference between the two. A project is a project, and formal project management is a solid framework for ensuring timely delivery of a project with good stewardship of resources. Yet the same people whose day job is a project manager, are failing to handle their own projects at home.

Similarly, a line manager is more willing to fire subordinates that are under-performing despite counselling, yet the same line manager somehow refuses to acknowledge that their parents are providing a toxic environment at home.

In that sense, I have trust issues. How can I bring myself to trust someone at a personal level, if statistically, most people are just plain bad at honouring that trust at a personal level?

``MT, statistics is a population thing; you're not a population but an individual.''

Fair statement, but without any evidence/measurement, the a priori assumption of using what the descriptive statistics are saying is as good as any (hello Bayesian inference!). Naturally, once enough evidence/measurement (in the form of interacting with said someone(s)) happens, the a posteriori distribution must change, and that is when the true inference of whether to trust someone or not ought to be made.

But that takes time and/or greater cadence (i.e. intensity) of interactions. I'm middle-aged now, and am not getting any younger. Sometimes, it just feels like too much effort for too little pay-off.

And now that I have bitched about what I think/believe the situation is out there, and how bad it is, I am going to make sure that I live up to my own expectations, and apply the kind of thinking that I think is so sorely missing out there.

``Cool MT... so what's the point of this blog entry again?''

Since when did my nearly sixteen-hundred blog entries had any point other than me dumping my armchair observations/thoughts?

``It All Begins with a Teacher.''

``It all begins with a teacher.''

The line that I saw stencilled on the back of the internal shuttle bus that triggered an innate rage that prompted this entire tirade that you're about to read.

The words ``honourable'' and ``noble'' floated in my head. That somehow, everything in life is due to the nobleness of the teacher who taught, the ones who made a difference in the lives of many so that they too can be productive members of society.

Sounds wonderful, right? Except it deceptively downplays several important realities.

Firstly, I just finished reading 《巨婴国》, and as a result, I have a slightly stronger sensitivity to actions that feed into the narcissistic self-importance construct. Call it recency bias.

Secondly, not to disparage teaching as a whole, but there isn't truly any specifically ``honourable'' or ``noble'' jobs out there, for the simple reason that society as a whole is a game where all who are a part of it, play their individual parts to uphold it as a whole. Calling any particular job ``essential'' or even with weasel words like ``noble'' dampens this team-play aspect of society that I suspect is an important contribution towards the increased number of class warfare activities that we are observing. The irony is that we all knew and deeply understood this from the very tender years of our lives, what with all the silly (in the eyes of an adult) declarations of children wanting to be soldiers, trashmen, postmen, and the like, only to be ``corrected'' in our thinking later on.

And finally, while the sentiment of teaching being noble in context is implied, many who teach do so for the same reasons why we do whatever we do for our day job---to get paid to pay the bills as part of being in a society. Thus, inasmuch as we have folks who do the [bare] minimum to fulfil their job's requirements, the vast majority of teachers are just doing the bare minimum to be considered as doing their job of teaching. This means less of that emotional labour of being inspirational, or to act as a surrogate parent when the ``true'' parents of the child have failed in their basic duty of care and values inculcation. Therefore, to market that ``nobility'' of being a teacher, is false advertising at best, and a fig leaf to cover for abuse practices of squeezing additional [emotional] labour without the commensurate compensation, a most disingenuous thinking.

``But MT, why so butt-hurt over a single line of advertising on a role that you don't even play a part in?''

It's less about that ``single line of advertising'' but the realisation that we are all proponents of various propaganda without our own realisation, spreading misinformation and disinformation without a care. As I age out, I seem to be gaining an increased awareness of the kinds of narratives that we are taking for granted and spreading as through they were fact, without ever stopping to question ourselves about the veracity, and definitely without considering if the buck should stop with us. Many have said that the rise of the globally accessible Internet would herald a new age of enlightenment, where anyone can learn anything with a much lower barrier of entry as compared to before.

But reality has proven otherwise, and my cynical self is feeling exasperated at the ever-record-breaking levels of stupidity that are occurring. How much of it is just an exposure the so-called background rate of stupidity, and how much of it is due to deliberate agent provocateurs, no one truly knows.

What I do know is that we are truly fucked in this timeline.

Mumble Mumble

So π-day came and went---Classic Pecan Pies and a Banana Almond Brittle pie was obtained from Windowsill Pies, and everyone loved it.

I'm playing with the King's Flute Choir again, and this time it is a concert that is happening at the end of the month. Rehearsals are happening, and I've discovered that given the gruelling work week, my body simply refuses to handle the non-stop flute/dizi action that starts from 1800hrs on a Saturday and ending at around 1600hrs on the Sunday following as it physically needs rest/activities that are less... cranial in nature.

And I think that's about that on ``updates from the life of MT''.

------

As I was sitting in a taxi moving from church to the rehearsal space with The Big Flute, I realised with a new level of clarity and appreciation on just how each of us are a part of the society that we live in, no matter how isolated we may feel at times. All the rules and laws are arbitrary, and we all contribute our part to society because it is only through the actions of the individuals who do something (hopefully productive/useful) that allows the society to exist in the first place.

There aren't any ``universal'' rules that are set down in stone for the average person---when we are first introduced into the society, we do so from our parents, be they the birth ones, or the foster-equivalent. We accept tacitly the roles that need to be played to keep things working well enough for everyone, and then as time evolves, we develop our own sense of what is right, what is wrong, what should be banished, and what should be preserved. And at the end of our [working] lives, our job as direct contributors to the running of society is done, and society thanks us through the retirement process, where the burdens and responsibilities are lessened for us to allow some time and space to cherish the moments made possible through the effort we expended for the forty to fifty years of [working] life that we put in.

That is, until greed kicks in, and some people realise that with everyone conforming to the rules of society (both written and unwritten), they can be non-conformant to extract some benefit. Some might even realise that the more preposterous their actions taken to be non-conforming, the more likely they are to get away with it, for the simple reason that society as a whole has no idea how to correct for deviations beyond the small, where regular censure and perhaps incarceration (i.e. adult time-out) are sufficient for the vast majority of people.

And that is the problem we are facing worldwide.

The US might just be a more... recent and highly visible version of it, but throughout history, we see these behaviours popping out here and there. Society is seemingly tolerant of the aberrant behaviour... until it suddenly doesn't, leading to an uprising from the masses, either in the form of large amounts of disruptive civil disobedience (i.e. the intentional stoppage of playing their roles in society), or even violent confrontation like revolutions/guerilla attacks/assassinations.

The old me would be more pro-establishment and think that all these people who went on strikes, or demonstrated civil disobedience in general, or even go for armed uprising are just not seeing the big picture---in terms of utilitarianism, they are causing vast negative expected values due to grinding the machinery of society to a halt. The old me would say that the establishment may have its faults, but really it is all that stands between the the chaos of anarchy, and the order of society that allows it to function properly.

Present-MT thinks otherwise---the establishment is no better nor worse than the people that they are meant to help instil order. The establishment is yet another role that is being played by people who want to help society set up order, to make the rules of society a little more explicit to better integrate the much larger population sizes we see now than in the past, all without degrading into a bureacratic navel-gazing exercise.

In other words, the establishment exists because the population wills it into existence, and not the other way around. This is what it means when sayings like ``the government serves the people'' and ``servant-leader'' comes into play.

``MT, what about feudal systems where the feudal lords rule over the people?''

The feudal lords only ruled over the people because the latter allowed them to do so, either implicitly by allowing matters of state (i.e. wrangling territorial boundaries, defense) to be handled by the lords, or explicitly by joining the lords' establishment to contribute labour of any sort (like clerical duties, soldiering, diplomats). If and when the feudal lords fail in their primary role of establishing safety and stability of the territories, the people under them do eventually overthrow said lords, sometimes with drastic outcomes.

But that's deviating a little from what I was grokking on that taxi ride.

The thing is, society is. What it is is largely dependent on what the people want it to be. Our more recent versions of democracy (and democratic processes) are attempts to capture this concept of ``what the people want it to be'' in a way that scales out to the millions of people that make up that society that caters to both the lizard brain (via simplicity), and the human brain (via a reasoning about the sense of fairness).

So when the outcome is different from what ``you'' want from these processes, it does not mean that the other people have ``made a mistake''. It is perhaps that they want something else, and perhaps they value that more than you value that.

``But MT, in the long run---''

In the long run, we're all dead, and believers join God. What is this ``long run'' that everyone likes to appeal to? Five years? Ten? Twenty? One hundred?

Who the hell thinks that far? Who the hell can think that far? Any plans that one can make are bound to require a revisit ever so often, especially at that time scale, since needs and wants always change.

But this is not fatalism. While the society's general direction and wants are guided heavily by those who live/contribute to it, there is still the individual choices that can be made. One does not abdicate one's exercise of free will just because ``the other side made a mistake''. Decide what you want, and then take the necessary action. Live your life the way you want to live it, and bear the consequences of such choices.

Just don't go around doing personal attacks for the different things that others may want.

Marching On

Ah... here we go.

It's March now. Life goes on, work goes on, everything marches according to the metronome, even if it is 66 bpm on the minim with semiquavers floating about on The Big Flute.

Aaaanyway, just felt like mouthing off a bit. Because frankly, the ``interesting times'' we are living in are a tad too interesting. I don't wade into geopolitics because it is messy, but I will say that the time of ``gentlemen's agreements'' is effectively over at this point, no matter what the EU and friends intend to do.

Trust is a very fragile thing---the moment it is broken, it can never really be recovered to a form close to its original, even if all the people who were involved in its breakage in the first place are literally no longer in the picture (i.e. everyone's dead). SIN city and other non-superpowers are always at the mercy of the mighty, and it was with the UN that there was some semblence of mutual respect of sovereignty for each self-declared independent nation-state. Before it all, the one with the greater might could declare suzerainty over some puny city/state, and there was little else that can be done---even if allies were to exist, realpolitik dictated that everyone was always looking out for number one.

If you have eyes to see for yourself, ears to hear for your own, and a brain to come to some conclusion based on information from as objective a source as you can get, you might understand what I am driving at.

------

I find my general predilection towards active entertainment to be dwindling as time goes on. Apart from the Nether-rail project in Minecraft, and some random short games here and there, I have hardly thrown myself back into actively playing video games.

And yes, I still remember that I have Persona 5 Royal, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Pillars of Eternity, and Sixty Four to clear.

I just prefer reading for now. No idea why.

In other news, I'm just going to force myself to take time to go back to cycling. I need something physical to help burn off the anxiety that comes from the many different roles that I play, just to ensure that I can keep my cool---I have found that I had been increasingly unhinged, and am running the real risk of going amok. I restarted it today after the false start in January, and thoroughly enjoyed the Northeast Riverine Loop, now that one of the major diversions that required an unnecessary hill climb has gone away.

I think that's really all I want to talk about for now. I'm exhausted in spirit, and am going to go curl up in a ball for a bit, after I shower.

Till the next update or something. Who cares?