``And I Felt That in My Kokoro''

Yeah, I know it's stupid o'clock. But so what? Aren't you, the reader, here because you are somehow a little interested in what I have to say, otherwise why would you be here in the first place?

Perhaps you are concerned and just want to keep an eye out on me. Or perhaps you are a troll, seeking an opportunity to stick it in when you find that I am down. Or perhaps you're one of the few humans left who stumble around random blogs to read things.

Or most likely, you are a web-crawling bot.

Anyway, this entry really isn't about you, the reader, even though it is written for you, the reader.

It's been an odd day. I felt mostly alright, playing me some Amid Evil (and finally completing it) while having Ninomae Ina'nis's 2-part sponsored drawing stream running the background as the comfy background setting.

But some time in the middle of the day, I did get hit with a somewhat unexpected feeling of just sheer tiredness. It's a strange type of tiredness, partly induced from staying up a tad late (I've been sleeping past 0100hrs for the past few days), and partly from the atrociously hot and humid weather.

I also had this intrusive thought of just walking away from all the usual communication platforms that I am available on and not return.

Because what's the point [of staying on these platforms]? I am a disembodied symbol with associated aggravated text, a damn symbol, not even an avatar or even a [recent?] photograph of myself, a damn symbol.

Needless to say, those whom I have been communicating with are merely text appearing next to some picture avatar too small to be recognisable as a person other than the rough pattern of colours that I cannot easily say to be of a person's face.

Nothing feels real anymore. I can't easily tell if people who have been interacting with me are really caring (or even enjoying the interaction) or is it just from some social obligation they feel from a vestigal sense of responsibility from once being friends. To be fair, it is not a criticism on their actions, but of my own increasing inability to want to engage.

The increasing amounts of disengagement (or equivalently, the increasing levels of hermiting up) puzzles one side of me that is still trying to explain things and reassure the rest of me. It is frustrating because it has revealed a still undefined problem that I was hoping that the sabbatical could also help define (and thus lead to a solution): what was it I wanted out of my interactions with people? So far, I have only succeeded in figuring out two preferences:

1. No children from me;
2. Spouse is optional, which really is a muddy-ass decision---a straightforward ``no need'' or ``sure let's find one'' would have made goals much easier to set.

But I haven't figured out what it means for the varying levels of friendship I have tried to maintain (with varying levels of success) over the years and continents.

I suppose at some fundamental level, I had lost my best friend for more than a year, and the lack of actual human contact from COVID-19 has made it hard to recover from that hole, since the more usual forms of socialisation is gone. Technology can only get that far, and even then, I am not the only person to be affected [negatively] by all the nonsense that is COVID-19.

Perhaps part of the problem is that it is already hard to engage with me to begin with, and that is with all the usual social structures/interactions in play; it's hard, but not impossible, thanks to the role that social cues play. But with all these isolation, disinformation, fear-mongering, uncertainty, and doubt, all those useful social cues have gone away, leaving behind the generally hard engagement.

I am not contrary for the sake of being contrary; I just have different interests from the mainstream. I am bookish, I like to talk about stuff that I like passionately. I can be opinionated (but have mellowed out significantly over the past 20 years), and I can learn to be empathetic, though my tolerance to fools and arrogant people isn't particularly high. But I don't share that common ground called ``pop culture'' that helps grease the wheels of interaction.

In short, I am scary on a good day, though much of that scariness can be considered self-inflicted. On a bad day, I can be really mean.

Where was I going with all that rant? I have no idea---I plead the stupid o'clock defense.

``Go seek professional help MT! You already know that it can help, and you have been given some tips on where to seek them in SIN, so why aren't you doing it?'' To that, I don't have much of a response other than ``What's the use when I literally just need to keep alive until my parents are done with their time on earth? It's not like I am ambitious and have some kind of dream that I need to achieve or something---to not be prematurely dead seems good enough for me. I may be feeling miserable, but it really hasn't been a nett negative to my quality of life, so is there really a need to do so and face the stigma, the additional financial burden, and their associated amplified ramifications when I can get away with just being content with what I have, despite the crazy.''

The system has failed us, the only question is what are we going to do about it. The important question for me is, what am I going to do about it?

All I know is that I'm going to go sleep now, and when I awaken tomorrow, I will feel better. Not every day is a bad day; there are still small victories to look forward to. The world can crash and burn while we are powerless to affect it, but we can totally and completely affect our own sphere of influence. So it is better to just do what I can for myself, and let God deal with the rest in His time.

Till the next update.

Morning Posts Being a New Norm?

It would seem that a recent trend of mine is to have my writing ``quota'' of the day done in the morning. It's not something that I was actively trying to do; it just turned out that way.

Perhaps it is related to how I have a morning shower, and the whole ``shower thoughts'' concept kicking in. To be fair though, my showers tend to be very fast, think navy shower style---quick wetting with fixed ``high'' shower head, soaping up, then rinse off. So the time available for those ``shower thoughts'' is much lower than what most people would regularly think of.

However, sometimes even with a short period of time like that, it is possible to have some interesting thoughts that I would like to think further afterwards, which may lead to either a conversation of sorts with mum or end up as some kind of entry here.

That said, this entry isn't reflective of that particular process though.

Anyway, I recently read the translated version of Siddhartha: An Indian Tale by Hermann Hesse while simultaneously watching Pavolia Reine's Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors playthrough in the background. Siddhartha was alright, and I could relate to the protagonist's mental struggles about his spirituality, but I'm not sure if it is something that others may find easy to relate to. Being originally put on a path of safety before deciding that it was more important to head out to learn for oneself only to find that the original orthodox path was unfulfilling and that the originally ``bad'' paths had more to offer, before realising that both paths are limiting in their own ways the way any form of distilled knowledge being incomplete and then heading out into the world only with one's self is just a life-path that is strangely familiar to me.

Too strangely familiar to the point that it actively scares me a little.

A-hem.

The weather yesterday was surprisingly less hot, with the internal temperature not really extending 32 °C. No fear though, the next couple of weeks are projected to still be warm and humid. I am rather excited nonetheless though, because some of the stuff that I have ordered [online] should be arriving from July onwards; always a treat.

I am contemplating getting a meshed camping chair with arm rests to act as a kind of collapsible reading chair so that it is more comfortable for me to read dead-tree books. But I'll need to do a bit more research on that.

Alright, I don't have anything else to add for now. Till the next update.

Coffee & Shahnameh

The more astute would have discovered an anomaly for yesterday.

There were two ``normal lengthed'' rants instead of one.

The reason for that is simple. Drug-fueled frenzy, or more specifically, caffeine infused righteous anger.

I think I drank too strong a coffee yesterday. No wait, I meant to say, two too strong cups of coffee.

My single cup of coffee has the same amount of caffeine as a mug [and change] of coffee.

It is a lot, though not as much as that time a long time ago when I accidentally shoved eight table spoons of instant coffee into my body through a single mug of water.

That was bad.

------

I recently read The Epic of Kings or Shahname by Ferdowsi (translated by Helen Zimmern). It's kind of like that Mahabharata of the Iranians in the sense that it is legendary in nature, with heroes of might and magic. The style of story telling is a mix between that of the Old Testament and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night---there were epic fights with the intervention of ORMUZD against AHRIMAN, and there were the obeisance rituals that were more similar to that of the mythological projection of Arabic culture, though with a much stronger Iranian slant.

It's a pity that like the Mahabharata, I can only read the translated version, which is in prose (as compared to their source materials of being epic poetry), and likely to be severely abridged to fit into the sub-500 pages. That said though, it is still definitely worth a read, if only to learn more about the legendary beginnings of another culture.

I don't know why I like epics of old that much. It's not like their stories are of a complicated nature---recall that writing and mass distribution of such works was not a thing before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 CE. So stories with bloody complicated intertwined storylines (or what I would call ``of high Kolmogorov complexity'') prior to 1440 CE are unlikely (not impossible!) to be widespread by word of mouth, the main means of information broadcast back in the day. It was not that writing didn't exist, but that writing was often too burdensome to be spent on banal things that didn't involve taxation and the gods.

But I suppose epics are fascinating because they demonstrate a highly developed sense of imagination and fearlessness in exercising that imagination. I mean, it's not like we don't have any epics these days, but it's more like the more we know, the more constrained we feel to have things grounded into reality. We have the benefit of the [digitally] printed word, and rabid fan-bases that create entire knowledge bases/wikis to document every scrap of information, making worldbuilding more cognitively tiring due to the need to ensure that any intricately created feature/gimmick is sufficiently consistent with the rest of the canon of the world. Old school epics have worlds that are built ``simpler''---they use several big ideas and keep the fancy things to that level, relying on the fallibility of mortal nature to provide the dramatic movement that is necessary for the narrative. In many ways, the old school epics, by virtue of being first, define what will eventually become clichés for future work.

Mmmm...

Ah well. The wheels of time continue to grind in spite of our efforts to push against it some times---it's just the way it is.

And so, I shall stop this entry here.

Till the next update.

Defeatist Thinking from ``Social Media''

Defeatist thinking is a very easy trap to fall into, especially in this age of hyperconnectedness. It's not even about the selective projection of only the good things that one has going in one's life, but the sheer numbers of them that is the main cause of defeatist thinking.

I have, on many different occasions, taken breaks from the so-called social media, not because I have shitty friends (that's uhhh... a different story for a different day), but because all that deluge off ``good vibes'' (or ``how fucked are we from a scale of 1 to ${insert-villain-of-the-week}'') keeps appearing and appearing and appearing like some broken record that either makes me feel like I have failed completely (because I'm not doing as well in comparison with my ``peers''), or that there is no point in trying to put one's best foot forward because the world is going to all the different hells simultaneously anyway.

It's easy to blame it on the nefarious ``algorithms'' without further qualification, but I will do an iota better than that by explaining how the ``algorithms'' are to be blamed.

Remember my rant on agenda? The summary of that post is, corporate entities make the choices they do because they are ``good for business''. Social media, for all their original lofty goals of ``connecting people'' and ``expanding people's connectivity with others'', have devolved into yet another way of mass marketing/advertising, with the key difference of people voluntarily offering themselves to be advertised to.

Businesses thrive on maintaining some kind of relationship that is more than transactional. There are many business books that begin with talking about how having a so-called die-hard hard-core ``whale'' customer group is important in ensuring that the business can thrive. In many ways, this concept is sound---a business that chooses a sufficiently general niched area to operate in can net nearly 100% of the market by serving the needs of their customers as compared to one who tries to over-expand into multiple not necessarily related markets.

The pre-Internet days of businesses relied largely on informal networks that are maintained by influential people in an unaccountable (as in, not recorded formally anywhere) manner. Thus, all that business networking was actually important, as was interacting with middlemen whose sole purpose was to act as the matchmakers between service/product providers and consumers.

Nowadays the idea of a business networking session is considered quaint, and only because its highly localised reach is deemed to be less useful as compared to the globalised nature of the matchmaking that is provided for by the social network. Part of the reason why social networks are of such a great draw come from the fact that those old-school informal networks that were originally unaccountable are now quantifiable in some manner.

And anything that is quantifiable can be worked with using data mining and machine learning processes. This shouldn't be new to anyone living in the second decade of the twenty-first century---data mining and machine learning uses lots of statistics, and statistics are the OG of making sense out of quantifiable things. This is, of course, where the nefarious and nebulous ``algorithms'' come in.

See, the problem is that algorithms are, by definition, deterministic. The input are well-defined, the inner operation are also well-defined (human readablility/understandability notwithstanding), and their output are also well-defined. All these well-definedness means that for the same input and same model, we expect the same output. The main reason why it sometimes is stochastic instead of being deterministic is only because of the relaxation of the computation technique used to ensure that a good enough answer is produced in the limited time instead of the perfect answer being produced some impractical amount of time later---such relaxation of computation methods often rely on stochastic outcomes over a deterministic one.

Now the reason for raising all that is to point out that for most purposes and contexts, these ``algorithms'' are not innovative at all, no matter the hype. This means that they can only interpolate, and never extrapolate. Now to be fair, there are ways to break out of this through the use of more stochastic techniques to explore areas of the search space that are not well-spanned by the training/observed data, but from the business perspective, these are generally not good investments from the ROI perspective.

Relating the behaviour of such ``algorithms'' back to my earliest observation, it means that what we see in our social media feed [in its default non-reverse chronological state] is based on strong association of so-called related topics as opposed to being an actual objective temporal snapshot. And this acts as a type of bootstrap to a loop where reactions to these related topics are further related, which lead to other reactions to these related topics... which ends up drowning out anything else that isn't related to the topics at all.

It helps the companies running the platform for that social media because now they can specify a nice demographic to talk to investors/their customers (not the participants of the social media platform, mind you) and get money. And money is often really good for corporate entities, especially when they are large enough that they literally cannot afford to not get more money.

And so, the cycle repeats itself, and as a low-level individual, one just keeps on seeing the same bloody thing again and again. ``Good vibes'' stories like being married/pregnant/x-month age of child keep appearing, and general anger against the ``big bad world'' keep appearing as well.

God I sound more depressed than usual.

As I mentioned in the beginning, it is very easy to fall into such defeatist thinking traps. And funny enough, the way out of it is to stay away from such biased systems, ideally for good. But the value proposition of pre-corporate-centric nature of social media platforms [of providing a means of connection/communication with friends across a wider area] still hold, so it becomes a case of balancing between one's sanity of being repeatedly hit with marketing/advertising friendly materials or to cut off communication forever.

It is a hard choice to make.

Anyway, till the next update.

Ranting on Agenda

Everyone has an agenda; there are no exceptions.

agenda

1. A list of things to be discussed in a meeting.
2. A programme of things to be done or considered.

In the usual way of a contingency table along the axes of ``self: known''/``self: unknown'' against ``others: known''/``others: unknown'', there are four possible outcomes for each pairing.

I am...	Self: Known	Self: Unknown
Others: Known	Predictable	Manipulable
Others: Unknown	Manipulative	Unpredictable

The outcomes are to be interpreted as an evaluation of the state of the epynomous ``I'' with respect to the pairwise comparisons of the [objective] knowledge of the pair's agenda.

I bring this up due to more recent thoughts on hypocrisy and its newest buzz phrase of virtue signalling, and their interactions with regular capitalism.

At an individual level, perhaps there is less hypocrisy, since any and all actions that are taken by an individual can be taken up to scrutiny by that person's peers, and can easily be identified to be accountable and therefore be taken to task or praised according to whatever need arises. This is little to no difference between the ``I'' persona that I project to others, and the ``I'' that is ``the true me'' within. In short, I cannot be split away from my outward facing persona---any such attempts will immediately be called attention to with the single disdainful application of the word of ``hypocrisy''.

However, the moment we move from a singular/individual level to an organisational-type entity that is made up of more than one person, things get very fuzzy thanks to the collective [legal] fiction that is made up to support the existence of such an entity. A corporate entity is simultaneously ``one'' (able to for example, possess capital of all sorts) and ``many'' (different semi-autonomous arms operating under the same name that is believed [legally] to be of the same entity). Many people can be part of a corporate entity---each of them are simultaneously ``the corporate entity'' and ``not the corporate entity''. This means that the play of how each individual's agenda interacts with each other become quite important in determining the actual agenda of the corporate entity itself.

Remember, the corporate entity is not standalone---it has no will of its own. Its existence is owed to the sentient beings that make it up, which in this time and age, includes the regular humans, the processes as stipulated in its corporate rules, regulations that define the framework of the [legal] fiction, and any other decisions made by anything that is [legally] recognised as a part of the corporate entity itself (yes, I'm talking about artificial intelligence and machine-learnt models).

Thus, it is wholly possible for any single corporate entity to simultaneously support both a cause and an anti-cause, simply because one active arm of the corporate entity supports the cause [for some reason] and another active arm of the corporate entity supports the anti-cause [for another reason]. The hardliners will straight up call this ``hypocrisy'' without batting an eyelid, not realising that there is nothing within the [legal] fiction that the corporate entity has to be consistent with its actions.

Actually, there isn't a hard rule that stops any individual from being consistent with its actions, just many soft social rules that show displeasure to the individual for acting hypocritical. The soft social rules work for individual people because of the impossibility of separating the persona from the person, but they fail dramatically for corporate entities due to its naturally amorphous nature.

That said, while the corporate entity's final agenda is affected by the pair-wise plays of its member's agenda, there is usually one final overriding agenda item that comes from the fact that the corporate entity's purpose is based on one obvious capitalistic principle: amass more capital, or in simple terms, ``it must be good for business''. When the actions taken by a corporate entity are analysed from this aspect, all the hypocrisy and layers of redirection/deceit become easy.

Sadly, this is part of the reason why the tragedy of the commons exist. Economists have it partly correct in that the problem is correctly identified, but the part that is not quite right is the assumption that regular people are rational. No, I posit that the individual person is not rational by default, but corporate entities are the actual rational ones in practice. Moreover, the tragedy of the commons is much magnified by corporate entities simply because they are capable of amassing capitals at scale that break a single person's understanding, and are capable of bending the wills of governments. That last feature isn't new, see also the Dutch East India Company.

But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves and go back to the source concept of ``agenda''. The key observation here is that corporate entities are [legal] fiction---their existence relies on a sufficiently large number of people believing that they exist. They are an example of the emergence behaviour that I talked about in the past. So it is actually technically possible to steer the corporate entities's agenda so that some form of ``greater good'' may be arrived at.

However, just because it is technically possible doesn't mean that it is plausible. I mean, assuming a quantum mechanical interpretation of the world, the wave-particle duality's idea of the matter wave predicts that it is technically possible for a thing as massive as a human to be diffracted like a wave, but the crunching of numbers reduces it to something that is practically implausible.

Similarly, just because it is technically possible to adjust corporate entities' agenda to be less destructive for the individuals doesn't mean that it is plausible to be carried out, especially if the rate of change is bounded in any way. There are reasons why in many cases some form of revolutionary ``violence'' (physical or otherwise) needs to take place to force a change. And in most cases, such revolutions will first cause the most harm to those whose power is kept/enhanced by the framework before the revolution, before harming collaterally as the deconstructed framework is rebuilt [organically] by the victors.

It's a bloody mess, most of the time. So there's a tendency to avoid that through adjusting the agenda [of the corporate entity] over time.

The balance of power between the individual and the corporation has always been lop-sided, and those who control the corporation have learnt many ways to stay in control while simultaneously nerfing the ability of the individuals from organising enough to act as a countervailing force. No one is God, and so all the best plans by any individual must fail at some point---as to whose plans will fail and when is part of the mysteries that are unknowable by us.

But in the mean time, take into account the contingency table of how agenda relate to each other, and always seek to be more informed through high quality information to better understand motives. Then decide.

God may know all, but we still need to play out the events through our free will. And ignorance of the rules of the game is not a valid excuse.

Till the next update.

Extending the Streak

Yeah, it's an early blog entry; so what?

It's been a long while since I have headed out to chill, and I kinda miss it a little. It's about that slight exhilaration one gets from leaving the apartment to experience ``the outside'', a change of view and a bit of a change of environment. It's sort of related to heading out for a cycle, except that it is more tranquil and passive compared to the always active seeking that is necessary in cycling.

I've been ``supplementing'' the hermit life through consuming a somewhat unhealthy amount of potato chips, beer, and super spicy flavoured instant noodles. And yes, I am getting fat. It's not good.

I keep telling myself that I will get back on the OMAD bandwagon. Let me just make a public statement here and say that when this day next week begins, it will be true---I still have some of those spicy flavoured instant noodles to get on with.

Hmm... I don't actually have anything else to say for now. I just felt like quickly continuing my streak before I head off to do... other things.

Till the next update then.

Working Through My Steam Library

I feel like I've been writing about some pretty heavy stuff recently, so let's switch gears a little and talk about something more trivial.

I've been clearing some games off my Steam backlog recently. The ones that I have completed recently include DARQ, and A Short Hike. I've also tried the demo of Ageless. I've also started on The Mummy Demastered, and played some Amid Evil and Halo 2. I'll just talk a little about each of them today.

DARQ is a small indie puzzle that I learnt about from Reddit quite a while back. It features an interesting geometry for the environment, with rooms sometimes offering up to four different ways to traverse, with each surface acting as a walkable floor. The puzzles are not particularly hard, the art style has a strong Tim Burton feel to it, and the game is quite short. I didn't try to 100% it, just calling it a day after completing the main quest line. Would I recommend it? Hmm... to support a new indie developer, sure. But beware, it is a short game, and to be fair, some aspects of the strange geometry can cause a little motion sickness---might be easy to want to rage quit at that point.

A Short Hike is a colourful puzzle-lite uhh ``walking simulator'', though I'm not using that term in a derogatory way at all. I think that despite its simplicity, its main strong point is that of a game offering an uplifting experience, hence the colourful palette and cute [animal] characters with interesting dialogue that contain some rather straightforward quests. There is no combat, and items provide improvements to mobility. It's a fun game. I didn't 100% it either, but did complete the main storyline and some side quests. Would I recommend it? Sure... but more for the casual uplifting aspect than anything else. Dialogue is simple but fun, and will put a smile to anyone's face.

The Ageless demo I tried, I didn't like. The biggest issue I had was the control scheme with the controller---holding the RT button while trying to aim with the right control stick is very uncomfortable and finicky. I went through about ten to twenty screens before I couldn't stand it any more, and thus ended up deciding to not get the full game, despite it being the work of an indie developer. Not recommended by me.

I just started a bit of The Mummy Demastered, another metroidvania game, and find that it is somewhere between Hollow Knight and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It's still too early to tell, but the mechanics seem interesting, with eight-directional ranged combat as the main focus as compared to the mostly melee nature of Hollow Knight and the hybrid one that is Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

Amid Evil is getting tougher now as I am in the last two of the seven episodes. It's starting to reach Serious Sam levels of enemies, and requires quite a bit of concentration. If I'm persistent, I'm likely to complete it by the end of this week.

Halo 2 is a Halo game. I've completed chapter 12/15, and it is definitely ramping up in the difficulty as the climax of the game is being reached. As a first-person shooter [that I play with mouse and keyboard], it definitely plays ``slower'' than Amid Evil and Doom 2016/Doom Eternal, and it shows. Because the Master Chief's reactions are at least three times slower than Doomguy, and it does take me a while to get back the right tempo. It'll be completed, and then I can work on the remaining 2 Halo games (Halo 3 and Halo 4) that are part of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Halo 3: ODST is a part of the collection, but is not really a part of the main storyline involving the Master Chief, so I'm happy to skip it. This is unlike Halo: Reach, which is a prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved that does not involve the Master Chief.

So that's that with respect to clearing out the backlog of games in my Steam library. I kinda miss the point-and-click type action RPGs, so I may get back into Grim Dawn again.

------

In other news, I am making slow and steady progress through the mental math drilling software that I talked about earlier. The core gameplay loop is done, and I have added ways to store the problem sets, responses, and associated metrics into data files that can be used for analysis/additional review later on. Soon it will be ready to for me to train myself.

Mwahahaha...

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

普通 Stupid O'Clock 话

凌晨一点钟左右——这是我俗称的 stupid o'clock。据我所知，好像从来都没有以中文编写一篇在 stupid o'clock 时间的博客文章。

凡事都有第一次，就顺其自然咯。

最近脑袋里的琐事繁多，有时想着过去的事情，有时想着以后的打算。COVID-19 所带来的一大堆垃圾情况真是令人担忧。狮城内地的科技公司趋向也有其中的吝啬与怪癖。我朝思暮想，始终想不出放长假后是否要为别人的科技公司效劳。道德问题、工作要求、生活平衡、薪金不足等都是为科技公司打工的问题因素。如果要自己闯天下，也要想想如何对抗他国的价格优势与如何教育顾客做出比较合理的要求。

但是狮城的顾客往往都贪得无厌，什么都要便宜、快、又好：也就是典型的得寸进尺的态度。问题在于现代工作与旧式工作的不一之处：智讯业的初期资本比创造业的来得比较大，但复制成本会比创造业来的低。智讯业的核心是以创意和系统分析为主，而这两者是比创造业的核心来得更加抽象。我已在这博客中探讨了人们是如何对待抽象事业，所以在此就不多说了。

放长假的目的是为了让思维扩大以便为未来进行新的打算。可是当我很认真地看着目前的情景，心中只有“不乐观”三个字。我看真的要准备投入清洁工人或巴士司机的行业了。

是悲观的主意也好，或者是现实的主意也罢，真的看不出未来有什么好期待的。

也就这样草草的又写了一个 stupid o'clock 的文章。等下回的文章吧。

New Social Rules Needed for New Social Interactions at Scale

Vicarious entertainment; parasocial relationships. These have got me thinking a little today, triggered off with the recent event of one of Hololive Production's biggest VTuber's (short for ``Virtual YouTuber'') announcement of ``graduation''.

Why do people have that sense of attachment to someone whom they only know through the persona that they play? Why do people feel similar grief as though a friend is about to go away, even though said person probably hasn't met these people and have any form of deep connection other than what technology provides through vicarious interaction.

I guess an answer to that would be in the similar vein as explaining why people get so involved in celebrities in the other side of the [entertainment] world. In many ways, VTubers are not really that different from celebrities in general, they both keep a persona that they use with their respective audience, and have a private/personal life that is often of the curiosity of their fans, but is usually well-guarded. The only difference is that the persona of the celebrity wears the same physical ``face'' as their normal person, while the VTubers wear an animated avatar/model for theirs.

In terms of the depth of the interaction, it tends to be extremely one-sided, where the adoring audience observes their celebrity/VTuber, occasionally sending some short messages/fan mail to their celebrity/VTuber, who may (or more often, may not) answer in short, using language and register that is more of a platitude than a well-thought out advice.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that, as long as the fans remember that it is just one avenue of maintaining some superficial kind of human contact. In pandemic times, when getting trapped at home is the norm, we takae what we can in terms of socialisation to ensure that we do not kill ourselves psychologically through a lack of support. Even I, a sometime self-proclaimed hermit, need to go talk with someone at some level just to ensure that I do not go completely insane from being isolated. Humans are social beings; they've always been social beings. Call it will of God, call it evolutionary advantage, the conclusions are still the same.

I suppose the main difference between a VTuber and a celebrity is the perceived closeness. Messages to a VTuber may be reacted upon nearly immediately by the VTuber on the livestream, while that to a celebrity may take a while, if it ever happens at all. That short turn around time naturally increases the perception of closeness with a VTuber as compared to a more conventional celebrity.

For now, VTubers are a little more close than celebrities to their audience. But what happens when the VTubers start to have more live viewers than what they are acccustomed to? Will the larger number of live viewers who may want that kind of attention/interaction eventually be the downfall of the intimate environment that the VTuber had? Will the VTubers be able to maintain their successes as they scale up larger?

To answer that will require a little bit of history from the speedrunning community. Back in the early days of the Games Done Quick series of speedruns, events were small, initially literally being held in the basement of someone's house [in Utah] for a week. Interaction over IRC was the norm, with good conversation and commentary. ``Chat'' (the Internet streamer's equivalent term for the audience) was well-behaved, and it was cosy. But as the Games Done Quick series of speedruns get increasingly popular (attracting more than a million US dollars of donations per AGDQ/SGDQ event), ``chat'' became more and more relegated to the background, partly because ``chat'' was getting too large (messages flew at rates exceeding one per second) and unruly (trolls and spammers started to rear their ugly heads to disrupt the chat). A wall was built and maintained between the speedrunners and the chat at the event. There was little cosiness left; everything was very corporatised, with strong rules, structures, and with them, increasing impersonality as the relationship transformed to that of one that is more transactional in nature.

Will that happen to the VTubers, whose increasing popularity comes from the parasocial aspect that allows the audience to feel as though someone cares, even if a little? Will the trolls/spammers eventually make things unpleasant enough that the entire VTubing experience just becomes an increasingly one-sided ``improv performance'' affair no different from how one turns up at a ticketed show to sit quietly and watch the performer/VTuber do their thing?

Is the corporatisation mechanism that (say) Games Done Quick have done the only way to tame the entropy that naturally arises from popularity?

For better or worse, Hololive Productions/Cover Corp (and other VTuber agencies/companies for that matter) will need to figure this out for themselves, because they are rapidly reaching that threshold where their policies can make/break how they can grow/maintain their offering.

Actually, on a more strategic note, all companies/organisations need to consider how they need to manage change and scaling. The way to manage a small and tight community/company is very different from managing a large one where it is more likely that people do not know each other than know each other, and of course there is the morass of the medium sized community/company where it is not quite here nor there.

Marc MacYoung shared a quote from Heinlein's Time Enough for Love:

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty", "meaningless", or "dishonest", and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

I begrudingly have to agree with this particular observation. Here's a scenario: I meet someone for the first time in a formal setting. Without a common understanding of titles and associated etiquette, no one can make any move safely; at best a faux pas is made, at worst an enemy is made because of a perceived ``disrepect''.

Painfully, this means that it is somewhat important to not create unfathomable titles like ``Technoking of Tesla'', and it is also as important to not partake in job title inflation. I mean, there is apparently an International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). According to that list, my field/domain of expertise is either 251 (software and applications developers and analysts), 252 (database and network professionals), or borderline 212 (mathematicians, actuaries, and statisticians).

The lesson to take away here is that if we want to interact with people beyond a certain small [enough] size, there exist social rules that need to be followed. For new types of social situations beyond the traditional face-to-face one (like the ``chat'' of VTubers/speedrunners/other livestreamers), new rules need to be created to ensure that faux pas cannot be easily committed; however what rules work and what don't are still in development, and depending on how the direction goes, may even affect the draw of such new social situations in the first place.

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

Vaccination Slots Locked In

Well, I mumbled about how my age demographic has been pushed back for vaccination. Funnily, news have been released that my age demographic can finally register for vaccination.

And so I have registered for it.

The main criterion that I used was ``which vaccination centre is the closest'' as opposed to picking which of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Sinovac that I want to go for. With that in mind, it took two tries to actually register for a vaccination slot---the availability of the slots moved really quickly.

Thanks to being on sabbatical, I was basically open for any date, and on my second try, I just threw caution to the wind and just speed-round the vaccination. It led to my first dose occurring some time the week after, and my last dose before mid-August.

Not exactly as early as I want, but it is early enough.

Referring back to the news release though, I raised my eyebrow a little when I saw this quote attributed to the minister (emphasis mine):

SINGAPORE: Singapore citizens aged 12 to 39 can register online for their COVID-19 vaccinations from Friday (Jun 11), the Ministry of Health (MOH) announced on Thursday.

"This is a big group of 1.5 million people who have yet to be vaccinated," Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said at a COVID-19 multi-ministry task force press conference on Thursday.

I mean, no shit minister---incidentally, this is also the group of people who are actively part of SIN city's present and future. That's roughly 1.5M/5.7M~26% of the population of SIN city. The economy is liable to tank if this particular age demographic gets wiped out for whatever reason, a definite existential problem as compared to say having the 40+ demographic getting hypothetically wiped out.

And that's all I will say about it. =)

I'm just glad that the opportunity to get vaccinated has finally arrived. Speaking of vaccination, an interesting question was raised about the difference among ``vaccination'', ``inoculation'', and ``immunisation''.

vaccination

Innoculation with a vaccine in order to protect against a particular disease.

inoculation

The act or an instance of inoculating (to introduce a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into the body of a person/animal, especially to produce or boost immunity to a specific disease), especially the introduction of an antigenic substance or vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.

immunisation

The act of making immune (especially by inoculation).

So I suppose ``vaccination'' is a more specific version of the act of inoculating, ``inoculation'' itself being an action of introducing substances that can improve immunity, and ``immunisation'' is a more general term about activities that improve immunity in general.

What a mess. English is really non-trivial; no wonder non-native speakers go nuts and create very strange versions of it that seems to ``make more sense''.

It's a short entry today---still kinda reeling from the graduation announcement of Kiryu Coco, mostly due to trying to make sense from the various talk streams that she put up after the main announcement stream talking about the situation and [very tangentially] hinting about what is to come after she leaves Hololive Production.

It's still hot as hell out here, though I have found that there is a stall that sells traditional ice-shaved desserts that is just out in Hougang Village---I've never remembered any of the coffeeshops having that particular type of food over the past 30+ years of staying here. A godsend in many ways in dealing with the heat, from both the physical aspect (shaved ice is wonderful) and the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) aspect (get some ``cooling'' 清汤).

Till the next update.

Clichés

Hmmm... Thursday it is.

Still a hot day. I will probably say this a few more times before stopping completely because any statement, no matter how new or interesting, will eventually get overused and become a bloody boring cliché.

Clichés. A long time ago when I first got hooked onto the writing bug, my English teacher of the day warned us all to not resort to writing clichés. Thus, even though I was in primary six at that point (twelve years old), I tried my best to come up with interesting story lines, seeking inspiration from books that were more of the ``young adult'' genre instead of the children one (whatever that means). While the standard requirement was at least 150 words [for primary five/six], I was easily writing 800+ words in cursive with the ballpoint pen. Considering that the GCE A-levels General Paper writing requirement is 800+ words, I was capable of writing beyond my level at that point. It got to the point that I pretty much brushed aside secondary school English, but that's a story for another day. On another short tangent though, 800--1000 words is roughly the essay length that is still somewhat pleasant to write/read---that's why much of my blog entries here tend to stay close to that range and rarely go beyond that.

Anyway, the point is, it is important to avoid clichés---that was the lesson to learn. Except that as time went by, I had less time and inclination to think up new story lines, considering that I had discovered the wonderful world of computer programming, and was deeply involved in reading and learning about mathematics, physics, and computer science in general. Then there was the whole ``the more one reads, the more one sees, and the more one fears about writing something novel'' syndrome. I mean, when there's an entire website dedicated to documenting such clichés, it is almost impossible to come up with something new. It's sort of the creative writing version of how science is about learning more and more about less and less as the easier to test and formulate ``big ideas'' have been found.

So I turned to life's more original source of all plots: uhh... life itself, or more specifically, my life's experiences. I mean, just go read my first ever NaNoWriMo entry, my second one, my third one, my eighth one, and my twelfth one. They all draw ideas from things that I had lived through. Now, don't be fooled---they are still fiction, but their source material came from things that I have experienced in one form or another.

And as twisted and masochistic as it sounds, the more fucked up a life I have, the more material to start from and work with. It's not just me nor writing though, almost all forms of art seem to benefit more from having a life experience that is sufficiently deviating from the norm to be worth memorialising in the particular art form. There's a reason why archaeologists get very excited when they discover some artefact that happens to record the really mundane---those are rare solely because they are so mundane that no one ever goes through any thought about attempting to replicate and preserve them. We have literally lost whole languages because people then did not bother to keep enough records of how their languages are to be used.

So what goes ``on record'' as an expenditure of effort is not about the mundane (and by extension, boring) but the more... exciting aspects. I mean, I cannot see myself sitting down to write the daily goings on that just keep... going on, like how I wake up, I brush my teeth, wash up, take a shower, walk around and so on. Just take a look at my blog entries here for the past year where I have been trying to keep up my routine during this sabbatical year. There were some threads that I had written before that I dropped because they got too mundane to be included here---one prominent example is my no longer talking much about the reading progress that I have done.

Thus, at some level, clichés kill the content creator's output. Yet one cannot be wholly without any form of structure/familiarity; that is a good way of scaring people away. Content creators of any sort that would like to be successful need to have some kind of audience, and [most] people like certain things for the way they are and are more resistant to change because having something that is low-surprise is quite comforting, particularly in the current state of the world where everyday is a [bad] surprise since no one can tell if the existing pandemic is going to throw up a new curve ball that will further derail any plans, hopes, and dreams that anyone has. Having structure [in the form of clichés] also ensure that the content creator can spend less time figuring out what needs to be done and can instead focus on filling in the rest of the content.

The unfortunate thing is that if a content creator follows too closely to that modus operandi, they would effectively be considered as having sold out as compared to being a bonafide artist who is always seeking to expand his/her media of expression.

Now that all said and done, I don't see myself as a content creator in that sense. I am an amateur hobbyist, and there's a big difference. This big difference is in the intent behind the action. As an amateur hobbyist, my priority is self contentment and sense of achievement, some kind of personal growth in something that is skilled based, or something that I can point to and proclaim ``hey check it out---I made that!''. The compensation I get from what I do comes largely from my sense of having achieved something from what I had wanted to do, with a secondary feeling of humble pride when there is an appreciative audience.

The last priority is getting paid for it. Amateur hobbyist basically means that I am not doing it for the money, literally. However, it doesn't mean that I can't push it as far as I want to go, even to a level that might impinging into the space of the professional. To be fair though, I would not do things that would undermine the professionals' work---they are doing it as their livelihood, and I respect that, especially since as an amateur hobbyist who wants to excel too, I know just how difficult the going can be. But the biggest difference here is that I can take as much time as I like to get from one level to the next, while the professionals do not have such a choice---they have to remain relevant or they must find a way to make themselves relevant, most possibly through setting themselves up to be in a niche area of very appreciative audiences who can make up the shortfall from lacking mass appeal.

All these go back to clichés because the ever-changing requirements of the landscape means that while clichés aren't preferred, they are still here to stay. Because they work at the level of the masses. They don't help if one is attempting to create a masterpiece, but they can be there to help with ``grinding out the XP'' through incremental improvement.

And that's enough yammering from me. Till the next update.

Goodbye Kiryu Coco

Everything that has a beginning, must have an end. For things that we do not know of the end, it either has no beginning (unlikely), or more likely, has a beginning that we do not comprehend given our assumption of how the world operates as sequences.

Anyway, before people get confused and worried, no, it's not about me killing myself---remember that that isn't going to happen.

It's about the recent news of a Hololive Productions talent ``graduating''. I'm always tickled about the word ``graduating'' as used by the Japanese idol industry to talk about when a talent leaves/quits. I'm too lazy to find the actual source word in Japanese to do an in-depth analysis, but I am seriously diverging onto another tangent.

I will keep kayfabe. Honestly, I initially found Kiryu Coco to be a little too foul-mouthed for my liking. But I got over that rather quickly when I found her content and presentation to be rather interesting in spite of the... choice words. Reminds me a little of the stylings of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, except more wholesome.

Naturally people are upset, because a much-loved talent is leaving. I am a little upset myself mostly because I mentioned that I don't do endings well. She'll be missed, and as far as I know about Hololive lore, she is the reason why Hololive English even exists in the first place, being the first bridge between Japan to the English-speaking world.

o7

------

In other news, I've been spending time working on some text-based mental math drilling software written in Python3. I've done the problem generator, and a quality points calculation formula that handles both speed and accuracy. Maybe I cann have something working soon, and can then play it.

Eventually I would like to port it to run in the browser as a client-side tool as an exercise to use window.localStorage. I'll release more details when I am at the point where I am ready to port it---the Python3 version can be considered as a prototype.

It's still a hot-ass day, but I think I want to head out to cycle. The last time I did that was too long ago. And so I shall stop this short entry here.

Till the next update.

A Sortie to Restock

I had to head out today to restock on my meds, and I took the opportunity to settle my burrito/sushi/sashmi/cheesecake cravings.

To say that the ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'' is bad for a lot of food places is like saying that a decapitation is just a flesh wound. It's a bloody massacre out there. As I walked by, I saw many small stalls closed, with some of them looking more than just being closed for the month as all their stainless steel kitchen equipment are absent, and some with who have put up an explicit sign that stated that they were permanently closed.

A damn shame.

It's a little bit of beating the dead horse here, but after being listed as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO, there is a very real risk of our hawker culture dying out thanks to both the pandemic and the strong control measures applied.

Not sure what I want to say to that. So I won't.

Till the next update.

SMS Musing #13

While in the shower:

A realisation:

doughty

Hardy; resolute.

doughy

Resembling dough, as in being soft, pale or flabby.

Both words can be used to describe people, and with a change of a single letter (the letter `t'), it means something completely antonymous. Funny how words work out like that sometimes. I don't really see the word ``doughty'' being used much these days though; I run into them mostly when I am reading some translated works from before the 1960s. Perhaps there is less reason these days for doughty men and women since [physical] wars and battles are fewer and more impersonal than before.

Cool Night Thinking vs Stupid O'Clock Retardation

Despite trying to avoid stupid o'clock, I find myself drawn back to it once more. But in defence, I want to say that it is just that much cooler now than when the day-star is out and about.

So it becomes an interesting experiment of the which being the more dominant, the cooling effect of the night that helps thinking, or the arrival of stupid o'clock that retards thinking.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide.

------

I have been lamenting about the heat for the past few days, so I won't continue on that slant. I feel relatively well-rested with my mind slowly having more distance away from the past that was hurting, and that is also a good thing. Naturally, bits and pieces of future planning start creeping into my attention once more.

But what is out there though? Almost everyone is looking for some impossible set of criteria with a non-commensurate level of pay; basically looking for so-called ``rockstars'' at less than fresh graduate pay. I have a less pretty word for it: slaves. Almost everyone is looking for slaves. I have mentioned about this partly before, and today, nearly two months later, I have not changed my evaluation of the situation. What has changed though is my own perspective---if I choose to really lead a life apart from what society expects without devolving into actually harming the existing social order, then it is possible to do what I want without killing myself nor betraying my own morals/values/conscience.

I have already decided earlier that I cannot in good conscience bring new children into this fucked up world. Now I am starting to reach a quiet internal agreement that there are too few good reasons to actually have a spouse. The only good reasons that I can think of are:

• Someone having my back in the event that I am somehow incapacitated either temporarily or permanently;
• Uh...

Okay, only one good reason. No, sex is not a good enough reason to be looking for a spouse. And having someone to interact with just sounds like some loser who cannot figure out how to be comfortable in his/her own damn skin.

I'm not needy. There are many different levels of survival, and the less luxury-bound I am, the more content and easier life can be, even in this Mammon-mad society that is SIN city. Didn't they always say 知足常乐? Then why is capitalism always demanding that we must strive to do more and more while we are also simultaneously told that?

The path that I am likely to be going on is one that isn't likely to be paying the big bucks. It is likely to be fraught with frustrations in a good way, and making just enough to keep both myself and my future-self from dying prematurely. Having the LORD with me as my strength is good enough---I will just need to start preparing for the event that my physical body accidentally dies when there isn't any kin left to dispose of it; I am frankly not expecting my sister to deal with it.

It's good that I have some concrete things to plan about. That does help matters.

I think that it is better to fortify oneself with the LORD and what He has provided than to seek out another flawed human being. As clichéd as it sounds, if it were meant to be, it would be---no one but the LORD knows if there is going to be a spouse in one's life. If there is anything that one should place hope in, it isn't in such uncertainties, but in the certainties that scripture guarantees us, and the actions that we ought to be taking to demonstrate that we are truly followers of the LORD.

I am not getting any younger. Seeking out another human as a spouse-candidate is but the first step of a multi-year project. And in my age demographic, society does not see the matrimonial union as a fruitful one, because it is a marriage that does not contribute to the total fertility rate, the other thing that capitalism worries about, because it does not have a solution to a scenario where labour is no longer abundant enough [locally] to have surplus to be used. Capitalism's ``solution'' to this is to always migrate the production to places where labour is sufficiently abundant that large amounts of surplus labour may be obtained. But considering that most people are less mobile, this ``solution'', while having large-scale benefits to capital, have local scale penalties as people find all sorts of jobs drying up, or finding their ability to provide maintenance to their labour impinged by the severe undercutting of wages due to country-level currency arbitrage.

Anyway, the point is, while we shouldn't let our past dictate who we become in the future, there are certain deep-set traits/ways that simply cannot be altered in major ways---this is what we call ``personality'', and I need to get used to that and not be apologetic about it. Sure, I can ``change'' my personality---all well-socialised matured adults know and often do adapt their personalities according to the situation, but keeping it up for extended periods of time is no different from keeping an elastic band stretched; it needs work done against the natural regression to the original personality.

I am not the most sociable person on the planet. I have never really been into girls/women ``that way'' for the most part (the few relationships that I managed to have when I was between twenty-four and thirty-five should be considered flukes of nature), and I was mostly happy then, feeling ``sad'' for myself only because I wasn't yet comfortable with walking on my own (with the LORD, but I didn't know Him then) and felt that perhaps walking with someone else would be better.

Just read the old posts on this blog for a sense about that old fear. I mean, I had/have shitty skin, so having a bad general external appearance is the norm for a very long time, and thus missing out on physical closeness is a real thing.

The big difference between now and then is that I've experienced more, much more, and have learnt that it wasn't some magical bed of roses that I had imagined in the past. It's bad, and can actually get worse, because while all that vulnerability can draw people closer, they can simultaneously hurt us a fuck-ton when things go south. And they often do go south. Even a relationship between believers can go waaaaaay south if they aren't in tune with Christ and each other the same way.

It's the human condition.

I think I'm done living as a human. It's so much easier living in my own fortress, entertaining myself, and doing enough to not get actively excoriated by society. Just like how it used to be all those many years ago, only this time, it's just counting down till it is time to go back to the LORD.

Reputation is a strange thing. Seeking a high reputation is much harder than simply avoiding a bad one, and that is definitely the main goal for me always: to avoid getting a bad reputation. So I should pay attention to that and stray little from it.

To most people, I'm just some kind of curiosity that they put up with, either because they have a need for me, or they don't know how to get rid of me. Chara used to call me ``intense'', but I think she's only partly right.

I'm not just intense. I'm also shallow as fuck. Because I only ``know'' impersonal knowledge and facts, and fuck-all about personal relationships with other people. And when people meet and talk, they don't give a rat's ass about impersonal knowledge and facts; they want to listen to stories. And I lost my stories a long time ago.

Somehow, I don't think I've ever been a proper human, not because I am emotionless, but because I am sufficiently selfish enough to see myself as the protagonist of my own life, and that everyone else is some NPC, and that when they are out of sight, they are mostly out of mind. All that talk about being better behind the scenes, being the thinker to look at all possible angles and articulating the associated reasoning for a chosen course of action is just hiding the painfully obvious fact that I am not a proper human.

I didn't abandon society. Society cast me out first. I just quietly climbed back in to play along, but we never really were BFF.

Till the next update.

Bayonetta the PC Port on Steam is a Disappointment

I gave up on Bayonetta. The input lag is too unpredictable, and I'm sick of dying repeatedly for no good reason. I mean, I installed Devil May Cry 4 from Steam to test it out, and I nailed every combo easily with the same controller plugged into the same port.

Inputs in Bayonetta were getting dropped, and there was a rough 0.3 s delay that was very variable. In short, even though I muscled my way through about half-way through the game, it was starting to get frustrating. I could, in theory, use the keyboard to play it like how I first played Devil May Cry 4, but that kinda defeats the purpose of the game.

So, I just dropped Bayonetta. I've gotten my money's worth give or take, so I'm satisfied.

It's still a hot-ish day today, though we've not really hit the hottest time of the day, which is usually around 1300hrs local time. Interestingly, based purely on longitude values, SIN's 103°50'E suggests a true time zone of UTC+0700hrs, but thanks to various economico-politics reasons, we are at UTC+0800hrs instead. I mean, just check out this time zone map on Wikipedia. If it were some kind of world-democracy polity, it would spell ``gerrymander'' faster than a green snake up a sugar cane.

So the sun is technically at its highest at 1200hrs based on longitude, which happens to be 1300hrs at the given local time.

Staring at the time zone map, I just realised a few other things:

• The whole of China shares a single time zone of UTC+0800hrs despite spanning 4 physical ones;
• SIN and Vietnam share the same physical time zone despite SIN being ahead by one hour---trippy;
• The international dateline is wonky and horrific; and
• Russia is more willing to stick with the physical time zones than attempting to unify their 8 physical time zones with one that will make no sense at the extremes.

That's roughly it.

This is the last week of the so-called ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)''. Will there be an extension? I kind of doubt it, though if they are following the additive increase/multiplicative decrease strategy, they will only relax the conditions every so slowly after this restriction lifts. It's generally alright for me, since I'm flying solo these days---doing things while alone is generally much faster, though it may not be as fun as someone else is present sometimes.

I'll probably spend the rest of the day either binge reading more of the Animorphs series, or play some other games that I have on backlog in Steam.

Till the next update.

Too Hot to be Thinking

Mmm... Sunday. Jun 06.

Bloody hot day. So hot, I took the opportunity to just lop off whatever remains of the crop of hair I have on my head with my trusty hair clippers. Now I have a fuzz of no more than 0.125" on my head---it's the length that is shorter than the so-called #1 shears guard.

I did some reading today, but I won't talk about it here. Call it self-censorship, or call it needing time to digest what I have read, it does not matter much. The thing is, the book that I read has raised some points that I think are worth thinking about in more detail, personally.

In other news, the video I referenced in a previous post has been nuked from orbit by the creator. I don't know much about the why, but I do know about the how---it was self-inflicted.

It's a shame; that piece of music was pretty cool.

Man, this heat is really making it hard for me to actually think. And so, I have to just stop here and move on to something else.

It's a short update that borders on being a non-update; I'm well aware of that. But well, we'll just have to take what we can.

Till the next one then.

Negative Swab Test and Other Matters

I talked at stupid o'clock about being bamboozled into thinking that Animorphs Series: The Discovery as being ``self-contained'' and speculated it was at least a two-parter.

I was not wrong. It was at least a two-parter. Because that arc spanned three books instead. And the arc ended in a rather satisfying sort of way for the added complication that the eponymous found themselves in. I could, in theory, write out the spoilers since this book series has been concluded since May 2001 (or Sep 2012 is we are looking at the re-issue), but I won't.

In other news, the results from the voluntary COVID-19 swab test that I took yesterday has returned negative results. I'm not jaded, but I remain unfazed, simply because it was to be expected. I don't take unnecessary risks, have been quite fastidious with the masking up, and am generally asocial in general. It would have been either a false positive or a true fluke to actually have a virus load of SARS-CoV-2; it's not about bragging after the fact, it's just the way how risk management works in general. The idea is that there is always an unknown number of the population that can transmit the disease, and as long as we condition the probabilities carefully (i.e. via limiting the sample population we are attempting to calculate the probabilities from), we can reduce the actual probability of a true positive down to nearly zero in this case, especially when the baseline probability of meeting a person with COVID-19 without any conditioning is less than 60k/5.7M or around 1% (it's an upper bound based on the order of magnitude estimate total known cases so far divided by the total population of SIN).

I still feel bloody hot though. The weather has been nasty, and the short rain in the morning did not provide much respite. Such is the life in SIN city without any form of air-conditioning. I have been binge-eating for the past few weeks out of quasi-boredom, and it is has been showing up on the scales as I regain all the mass that I had lost previously. Not to the level of hitting the original starting point of 85 kg, but it is getting close.

Damn man. I need better motivation to get back on the bandwagon.

Incidentally, I found another interesting YouTube channel: Caitlin Doughty---Ask a Mortician. I've always wanted to learn more about how people deal with death. I mean, yes I have read stuff, but it's different compared to hearing what a funeral industry professional has to say. Death isn't really much of a taboo to me; I mean, Death of the Endless is basically my phone/tablet wallpaper in forever:

But artistic cuteness aside, death really isn't that much of a taboo to me. Everything that has life must have it end at some point---none of is are God after all, and so are mortal. Spiritual life is one thing that I cannot prove/disprove beyond my own personal belief system, so I will not attempt to talk about it here; but as for physical life, everyone's more or less in agreement that death ends it.

There's usually enough evidence about physical death in the form of putrescence that can convince even the die-hard crank to begrudgingly accept that there is some threshold that causes a change from living to not living---for simplicity, let's just call it ``death''.

Death isn't pretty. There are a lot of chemical processes and associated antagonistic chemical processes in our bodies that ensure that we are able to operate [while still alive]. Calling our bodies a walking bag of chemical reactions is not an incorrect description---yes, some might want to add the electrical system as well, but considering that they are largely chemically induced, it is still not wrong to term them as being chemical in nature. These chemical processes are usually in some form of carefully balanced equilibrium that we loosely call homeostasis---on death, the chemical processes are no longer kept within the narrow band of operation that supports life and thus end up going haywire. There are many very reactive chemical processes that go on in our bodies, mostly because we operate at very short time scales (this is a hypothesis of mine), hence the breakdown of our bodies from these reactive processes can come very quickly when we die.

As a result, instead of looking like a sleeping person at death, we end up with someone who has most likely loosened his/her bowels, soiling themselves, and given enough time, may have all kinds of bloating from excess gases from runaway chemical reactions from both internal enzymatic reactions and gut flora digesting the host body due to a non-functioning immune system, strange bruises from blood clots due to non-moving blood and general haemoglobin breakdown, muscle stiffness from imbalanced ions that screw up the looseness of the muscle fibres... well you get the idea.

Death really isn't pretty.

Yet there is still the business of dealing with death. And this is where it gets into taboo land. Because people really dislike talking about death. Part of it is visceral in nature---death has its own set of sights and smells that have been evolutionary ingrained as being alarming and anxiety inducing to warn our ancestors away from the dead, and part of it is the entire mythos built around a concept that does not have information readily available to dispel any misconceptions.

And Doughty's YouTube channel seems to provide that information to explain how a select group of people help deal with the other [unspoken] waste problem in any society---dealing with the dead.

Anyway, that's about all I have for now. I'm kind of debating internally whether I should take yet another shower (the third for the day) and then head straight off to sleep, or chill for another hour doing something else first.

That'll be for future-me to think about. I will let future-me handle that in a bit.

Till the next update then.

Stupid O'Clock is a State of Mind, and Not a Physical Time

I should really be sleeping, but hey, what's the fun of being on sabbatical if I don't make use of opportunities of stupid o'clock?

The day has been atrociously hot. Even with a fan blowing away at full speed, I still find myself covered in that thin layer of cloying sweat that is just annoyingly sticky. It is at times like this that I really contemplate if it is really worth it to get some kind of air-conditioning, not necessarily for the entire apartment, but at the very least for my room.

But that would be selfish and energy inefficient, especially since I live in those older-styled apartments where are no mounting areas for the compressor/radiator for one side of the apartment, and in this case, it happens to be my side.

The heat and humidity---I end up taking at least two showers at a minimum (once in the morning, and once before sleeping), but have done three yesterday (once in the morning, once near dinner, and once before sleeping). It looks like it's going to be four today---once in the morning, once after the voluntary swab test, once before dinner, and one more time before I sleep later on.

Unbelievable. I am really starting to be worried about how this upcoming ``summer'' is going to be like.

I talked in the previous post about just wrapping up the game through completely visiting all the rooms in the map, but I ended up actually completing all the available Steam achievements instead by accident. The key factor to success was the high ROI gold farming strategy. Using the build and strategy, combined with watching Amelia Watson ripping and tearing in Doom (2016) made the farming relatively painless.

I amassed some 2M gold with around 20 Ayamur for breaking down with Alkahest for the Gold. The Gold was then used to augment the Alchemic Bounty shard, which provides a means of duplicating hard-to-obtain crafting materials through disassembl. Combining that with 2M gold, and farming a little of the 8-Bit Overlord for the 8-Bit Nightmare crafting item meant that I could then finish up the most difficult part of the Steam achievements, which was item (weapon) completion, specifically of the ``8-bit weaponry'' category. The 8-Bit Nightmare is quite annoying to farm for, and is used for all the highest tier weapons in the ``8-bit weaponry'' category.

Anyway, to avoid over-nerding out, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is completely done (with Miriam), and I am happy to set it down and put it aside.

Not sure if I want to play some more controller games for now (looking at Bayonetta with that remark), or heading back to keyboard and mouse (about two episodes out of seven for Amid Evil left), or ``mostly keyboard'' (think Jupiter Hell runs or Desktop Dungeon runs). Realistically though, I'll probably end up doing a stint of reading, having just finished reading Animorphs Series: The Discovery, which is a mild gotcha because it is not a single story but a two-parter [at least]. Ah well, I just have to look at it tomorrow.

Ah tomorrow. That's when the swab test results are completed too. I just pray that they have got a good sample from me so that the test results are conclusive enough for them to decide. Whether I am an asymptomatic (I keep saying it as ``asymptotic'' for some weird reason) infected or clear, it'll be fine.

There's a reason why they have pushed back the vaccination of the 20--39 years old demographics. Because we don't die that quickly from COVID-19. I am a bit hazy on whether we suffer the aftermath of surviving COVID-19 less too... but with our better understanding of the virus' effects after battling it for more than 18 months, the suffering is probably minimised.

And that's about it for now; I can feel myself getting sleepier. Time for another shower, and then knocking out for the night.

Till the next update.

Had a Long Cotton Swab Shoved [Gently] Up My Nostril

Well, it happened.

My neighbourhood is now entangled in the ever-increasing cluster(s), mostly because of the nexus that is bordered by Hougang Street 61, Hougang Avenue 8, and Hougang Avenue 4, the so-called ``Hougang Village'' (who comes up with these names?). That's the main shopping district for the surrounding areas for daily necessities as well as food in both their raw and cooked forms.

The problem is sufficiently big enough that they have set up a large [temporary] swab test centre for the region at the Neighbourhood 6 Park overnight for the week beginning today to get both mandatory testing (stall owners within the Hougang Village region) and voluntary ones (visitors of Hougang Village).

I had mine done just this morning after camping overnight for the update of the booking site. The process was relatively straightforward from booking to the actual test.

1. Head to the relevant registration form based on the testing site;
2. Fill in relevant information that can be obtained from the NRIC, using the dd mmm yyyy format for entering the date of birth to avoid clicking like an idiot to the correct birth year;
3. Enter and validate the mobile phone number with the OTP---this is needed for the SMS information;
4. Pick relevant date for test;
5. Submit and wait for SMS confirmation of time slot for the given date and test centre.
6. Arrive 10--15 min before allocated time to get into queue;
7. Report for registration with NRIC;
8. Get a cotton swab shoved [gently] up a nostril;
9. Done.

And that was it; done.

While queueing, there were quite a few disgruntled talks among the residents about how it was all ``the fault of those old people who don't wear their masks and are always spitting everywhere'', and how some of them were going to have to miss work. The [mainstream] media had also swooped down to film and interview random people to fulfil their quota.

I just shut my trap and got on with the whole exercise before heading off for home later on. It's just a swab test---go in quick, get out fast, and then wait for the results. There was nothing else to talk about really---it's not like we are medical professionals trained in epidemiology and thus know how to accurately weigh the risks and manage them accordingly.

We're all just following the orders for public health as well as we can. And if the calculus failed due to the uncertainty, it's just the luck of the draw and nothing could have been done about it since it is strongly implied that any and all public policies are made with [sufficiently] careful consideration of possibilities.

------

I've more or less completed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and I enjoyed it. It's a metroidvania like Hollow Knight, but unlike Hollow Knight, I do end up feeling mighty near the end of the game, as opposed to always feeling like I am two hits away from being obliterated no matter what I do. I think I'll just wrap up the game through finding all the remaining unvisited rooms (probably one or two left), and then I will be done. There are other characters to play (Zangetsu and Bloodless), but I think I am fine with the 55 hours that I have put in so far for Miriam.

I still have Bayonetta to complete, and would like to do so soon so that I can go play something else.

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

Fan Cleaning

I took Eileen-II apart partially to clean out the fans. It's been nearly a year since I unboxed Eileen-II, and given the really open [hot and humid] nature of where I operate Eileen-II, I would say that it is a little long overdue.

A basic cleaning of the fans is straightforward enough. Remove the relevant screws on the backplate, pop out the backplate, and go to town (gently) on the dust that has been collecting on the fins of the two puny high-efficiency fans. It gets a little tricky because these high-efficiency fans have very small fins, and they are tightly packed as well. I would normally use a can of compressed air to blow them out, but that is out of the question for today. So it's just careful cleaning as much as I can with cotton-buds soaked in 70% isopropyl alcohol, removing as much of the dust on the inlet side of the vents as I can.

Ideally the heat sink fins should also be de-dusted, since the dust there interferes with the heat exchange with the moving air. However, the heatsinks of laptops are usually quite embedded, making any form of more thorough cleaning a tricky and potentially warranty-voiding exercise.

With the cleaning, I'm hoping that the at-load temperatures wouldn't get too high. It doesn't mean that I will relax all the restrictions that I have put in place on CPU though. The hot temperatures are expected to persist till September, with maximum temperatures estimated to hit 35 °C on some days.

I just want to point out that is just 2 °C off the average human body's temperature. If high humidity is taken into account, the associated heat index may make it hard even for the human to cool down, let alone a machine.

This means that there may come a day some time in this upcoming months that I have to not run Eileen-II and do something else instead, if the cooling mechanisms cannot keep up.

Ah well. We'll deal with it when we need to deal with it.

Till the next update.

[Girls'] Last Tour

So let's talk a little bit about Girls' Last Tour. It's a manga about a dead world, with two girls making the literal last tour amongst the ruins of civilisation. It explores a little bit of what makes a person alive, and ruminates a little about what life can mean.

Spoiler: Ab bar yvirf va gur raq, abg rira gur tveyf jub jrag ba gurve ``ynfg gbhe''. Gur tveyf furq gurve rdhvczrag bar ol bar gbjneqf gur raq, fgnegvat sebz gur oernxntr bs gurve zbqr bs genafcbeg, gur Xrggraxenq, gura gur qebccvat bs Lhh'f evsyr, gura Puvv'f obbxf, naq gura gur ynfg bs gurve sbbqf.
Gur gjb (guerr vs lbh vapyhqr Ahxb/Xrg) crbcyr gurl zrg riraghnyyl qvrq gbb, qbvat jung unq tvira gurz gurve frafr bs checbfr bs yvivat (pnegbtencuvat sbe Xnanmnjn, naq nrebcynar ohvyqvat gb syl njnl sbe Vfuvv).

A dead world with two travellers through it; a twist on the ``last man on Earth'' trope. I enjoyed the style from the world-building sense; it talks about the world that was through the eyes of a literal observer, though I don't quite enjoy the world that was portrayed. The world in ruins... it is getting a little too close to home, though the manner of destruction depicted isn't likely to be how this world ends, I think. Wars are the most obvious ways of mass destruction, but as time goes on in this current era, we are discovering new ways to enact destruction on a scale that is comparable with that of raw military power, but not necessarily with the type of collateral damage that destroys infrastructure. In some sense, this is a superior weapon of mass destruction, because it seemingly targets only the people and not the infrastructure.

Maybe that's why there is an increase in experimentation and exploitation of such misinformation/disinformation schemes. I would say that this is probably the type of ``social virus'' that I talked about yesterday in passing.

It does make me think back to the Total Defense concept of SIN. There used to be five pillars, namely:

1. Military defence;
2. Civil defence;
3. Economic defence;
4. Social defence; and
5. Psychological defence.

Then there's the new one that I've not seen before: digital defence, with the targetting of ``online security threats''. Personally, I can understand why that is deliberately highlighted even though I think that it should be lumped under social and psychological defence---with hyper-connectivity comes closer contact with attack elements that used to only be faced by the ``border defence crew''. By creating a separate category, it is much easier to focus efforts in the overall message.

Which brings me to think about the roles each person plays in society. Some roles are highly isolated like ``leaders'' and ``defenders'', while many others are more general. Hyper-connectivity ensures that these roles can easily get blurred because of the higher dynamism in creating populations. So we have situations where people who are not used to being leaders end up being leaders, and sometimes making a hash out of it (I'm looking at ``influencers''), while all of us are suddenly playing the roles of ``defenders'' as we navigate online eco-systems as individuals instead of being behind the protection of the national bloc.

The reason why different roles in society exist is largely due to personal inclinations, and training. Each of us tend to gravitate to a few roles in our lifetimes, sometimes to the exclusion of others. The separation between a society that respects freedom from one that doesn't lies in how we are ``assigned'' to our society roles. Those that prescribe the roles that one must be in with no recourse in changing such roles has a lower respect for freedom, while one that technically allows the changing of roles respects freedom a little more, and the more practical that changing of roles is, the better that particular society respects freedom. Unsaid though, is the implicit assumption that free will ought to be backed by some form of non-ignorance, and that with free will and freedom of choice comes the acceptance of consequences.

But we are fast seeing how people revolt against having to deal with the consequences of their choices, the reasons for these can be largely attributed to an over-inflated sense of self-entitlement, and the mob-speak from being part of a vocal group (minority or majority).

I don't know how to solve this problem.

I don't know why I went on such a long-ass tangent.

Anyway, that's all the logorrhea I have for now. Till the next update.

Pre-emptive Mass-Testing via Wastewater Analysis?

You know, I'm not really happy at this article: Residents at 2 more HDB blocks in Hougang to undergo mandatory COVID-19 testing. Here's the relevant part that I'm not happy with:

SINGAPORE: Residents at two more blocks at Hougang Avenue 8 will have to undergo mandatory COVID-19 tests, after traces of the virus were found in wastewater samples taken from those blocks.

There have not been any confirmed COVID-19 cases at those blocks, said the Ministry of Health (MOH) on Monday (May 31).

The first time this wastewater sampling was talked about was back in Jun 19, 2020, with a subsequent follow up report on Jul 22, 2020. In both cases, they were referencing the use of such testing to detect COVID-19 latent cases in the foreign worker dormitories.

So when did this surveillance technology get deployed into residential areas unto the citizens?

Well, an article released today (Jun 01, 2021) made a point to confirm a chain of events that put suspicion before [additional] surveillance. To wit (emphasis mine):

Residents of Block 745 Yishun Street 72 were being tested after the Ministry of Health (MOH) said on Monday that there was "likely COVID-19 transmission" in the block.

Six COVID-19 cases have been identified in the block, spread over two different households. Subsequent wastewater testing detected COVID-19 viral fragments in the block, said the ministry.

As for the case of two blocks in Hougang where the surveillance was activated before any cases were discovered, the article published on May 23, 2021 suggests that perhaps it was incidental due to the discovery of cases at block 506 (the two other blocks referred to are blocks 501 and 507).

A quick glance at the vicinity of Blk 506, Hougang Ave 8 shows that block 507 is to the south of block 506, and block 501 is to the south-west of block 506, which does provide some credence to the whole vicinity check thing for wastewater.

Good for pandemic control, am I right?

Now, let me flip the lens the other way around and be worried. I don't know what the laws are regarding the taking of action from such wastewater surveillance technologies. I think we, as a whole, have been quite flippant about the erosion of [the already few] checks and balances with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the very late post-facto execution of the spelling out of the restrictions of TraceTogether data in Feb 02, 2021, even though the explicit restrictions still allows the expanded use case of using the TraceTogether information for ``serious criminal cases'' as specified in the Criminal Procedure Code. Not having any laws governing actions taken after wastewater surveillance (or even when wastewater surveillance is applicable) can be dangerous, because it can potentially start a drag-net type of action just by the declaration of the detection of trace amounts of some illegal substances as a reason to demand that an entire apartment block of people be subjected to mandatory drug tests or other types of highly invasive searches without the involvement of a [specific] search warrant.

We ought to be explicit about who can initiate wastewater analysis/surveillance procedures, what circumstances and tests are allowed to have such wastewater analysed, and specific questions that the wastewater analysis is supposed to answer. But frankly, I'm not going to hold my breath. It is the norm for new powers to be grabbed and fully exploited to their full extent until there is some kind of determined push-back to curtail their use, and as long as the push-back isn't determined enough, nothing will come out of it. This is true for all governments, and not just the one in SIN. And with SIN, the only bloc strong enough to push-back is sadly not the citizens, but the businesses and the often-times unidentified upper echelons of society, and in this day and age, everyone wants a slice of the surveillance capitalism pie.

Soon the diversity inherent in societies that make them resilient will fade away as everyone is coerced into conformity due to the outliers sticking out more obviously through cheap application of large-scale surveillance and brainwashing. And then the social equivalent of a virus will come and exploit this homogeneity and wipe out the entire society.

That's one scenario in which humanity can kill itself out.

And now, I'm sad. Till the next update.