Counter Tweaking 5×10 and Font Releases

I think by now, a theme be emerging, especially those who have been reading my blog entries.

I mentioned before on how I didn't manage to do the counter tweaking I did for my 7×13 font for my 5×10 font, and how I have no plans for it?

Well, I've gone done it.

I was not wrong before---tweaking the counter the same way that I did for my 7×13 font did look like crap because of the much smaller horizontal extent. The trick then was to be more careful in choice, and tweak no more than one of the junctions. As for b and d, I didn't even bother to do anything with them, which gives enough variation to make things look interesting and sufficiently different.

And speaking of tweaking, I finally decided to just release my pixel fonts for download at my personal domain. I've re-organised that ``computer stuff'' page a little, creating a new section for these pixel fonts, and putting my old console slim font in it as well.

Naturally, both the featured fonts have their associated glyph sheets, while I didn't bother for the console slim font because the code page that it supports (code page 858) isn't really well supported in not the [Linux] console. I did try to set it up as a Windows font the way I did for 5×10 and 7×13, but it was poor, so I've put it aside for now.

I think that's all I care to write about for now. I'm tired, even after having just taken a mid-lengthed break of nearly a week.

Till the next update then.

Saturday...

Ah... Saturday.

I love Saturdays.

I love Saturdays because they are mostly the days where I actually get to relax, on leave or otherwise.

Generally speaking, I spend my Saturdays just sitting about the room, reading, playing some games, or rehearsing some music. If I'm slated to play for church service on that Sunday, then the Saturday before was often when I spent some time rehearsing the pieces, annotating [in pencil] on the score problematic areas that I need to pay closer attention to. That occurs often for Hymns of Praise for rhythm because for some reason, none of the eighth/sixteenth notes have connecting beams. This meant that the usual visual cues of how the rhythm look like are pretty wonky. Thankfully, there's 简谱 at the top, and it allowed me to ``cheat'' and grok the necessary rhythms as needed. As for The Wilds Songbook, the problematic areas proved to be some of the more unfamiliar interval progressions that seemingly defied what my inner music voice was telling me, where I ``knew'' that the next note should be this, but the score laughs at me with a ``Nope!'' and makes it that.

There's TGCO rehearsal in the evening, and I usually turn up about 30 min earlier to ``warm up'' outside of the music room, mostly because my 笛子 is literally powerful enough that warming up indoors while the other folks may want to do their warm up is not a good idea.

Well, I call it ``warm up'', but it really depends on my mood in terms of what I would play. Most times it was an actual warm up in the sense of playing etudes to set up my embouchure and limber up my fingers. Sometimes I would take the time to play through some repertoire pieces. Or maybe I would do like what I did earlier today, where I sight-read a new piece (《月夜》by 胡结续). There are also times where I just noodled on my 笛子 in a ``head empty no thoughts'' sort of way.

Today's rehearsal was fun in a couple of ways. We finally have something that resembles a proper 二胡 section, which is remarkable because our 二胡 section had been decimated when most of the regulars disappeared after COVID-19 (some got married, some developed different interests; it's the usual attrition issues that got accelerated by the pandemic nonsense). Granted, the section was made up of really new and really green players, it was definitely better than nothing. Hopefully this first performance gives them enough of an interest to stay around, level up their skills, and continue playing.

The other fun thing was that I finally had a reason to learn the E₇ fingering on the concert flute. I mean, I have consistently used D₇ on Aurelia before (it's basically the 5′ in 筒音 as 5͵ for when I'm playing the part of the 梆笛 while on concert flute), but have not really had the need to go for E₇ until today (because I needed to play a 6′ in 筒音 as 5͵).

Of course Aurelia can have that note appear---she's a well-made Muramatsu flute after all. It's really more on my getting used to the specific embouchure, air stream direction, and the amount of force to push, transiting smoothly from the prior B₆ to the E₇.

And that's about all I want to talk about for now. The other thing that happened this day was more progression in Halls of Torment, but I suppose it's getting a little too repetitive to keep talking about that.

Till the next update then.

Counter Tweaking

Ah Thursday, the day after National Day, and when I'm [still] on leave.

What a day.

First off, after ranting past stupid o'clock and crashing out shortly after, I found myself awake at 1000hrs later in the morning. Some time was spent catching up on the ESA Summer 2023 VODs, before I worked a little bit more on my 7×13 bitmap font.

``MT, didn't you say last time you were basically done?''

So I did, sort of. There was one last tweak that I was considering, and it involved how the counters were presented in characters like abdgpq. If you looked closely at the [corrected] character map from the previous post, you'll find that the counters of such characters can be roughly described as having parallel lines connected up with the vertical spans where they exist, as opposed to a more rounded feel the way one might normally print it out.

It's a minor shift of literally two pixels, but I think it was important, partly because of how Atkinson Hyperlegible shows how such rounded off counters do present a clearer profile that can be more strongly differentiated from the capital equivalents. I did the change, tested it out, and liked what I saw:

It's subtle, but it does look much nicer and less synthetic. I am thinking about doing something similar for the 5×10 font, but smaller horizontal extent used to define the counter made the application of the same pixel trick did not work as well, if at all. So no plans for that for now.

Apart from tweaking my 7×13 font yet again, I also got more runs in for Halls of Torment, unlocking even more characters, and having enough progression in the meta that my toons do not generally die easily any more.

I also made some progression in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the in-game progression estimate hitting 90%.

Hmm... I think that's about it for now. I'll probably go do one more run of Halls of Torment, then turn in for the night---I've got places I need to be tomorrow, and I really don't want to run around half-cocked/asleep.

Till the next update then.

Past Stupid O'Clock?

Okay, it's past stupid o'clock, but I'm annoyed, so I'm gonna vent.

Eileen-III runs Windows 11---this is an incontrovertible fact; the new CPU architecture demands an updated kernel that only Windows 11 provides, as long as I want to use Eileen-III to play games as opposed to doing work.

Windows 11, for some asinine reason, does not allow anyone to put the taskbar to the top of the screen.

I had used a workaround for this for quite a while (ExplorerPatcher). It's free, and relatively straightforward to use. It had a bit of funkiness to it (while the taskbar is indeed moved to the top, accessing the start menu brings it back to the bottom), but it got the job done.

That is, until the latest Windows 11 update clobbered the shit out of it.

It's a live issue as at now, and there doesn't seem to be a solution to it just yet.

I've switched over to StartAllBack, but really, who knows if these will still work in the future? It does solve the funkiness that ExplorerPatcher had, so I suppose this is a step up.

And that's it. It's almost 0400hrs in the morning, but I'm on leave, so I kind of don't really care.

Till the next update.

One Sixth-ish Through August

Okay, it's Sunday, and we're about halfway through the first third of the month.

Bram Moolenaar passed away just a few days ago. For the confused, he is the creator and maintainer of vim, my favourite text editor, though ironically it is not the one I use for writing blog/NaNoWriMo entries (I use Q10 for that). I didn't know him personally, and was therefore quite surprised to learn that he was 60+ years old and had passed away.

In my mind, he was always some middle-aged dude, like almost all imaginations I have of computer scientists/programmers. But then again, I'm middle-aged now, and this would naturally make them... much older now.

Mortality really does make one think.

I've not really feared death before, even before being saved. Then, death to me was just the ceasing of existence, and I was strangely fine with that. I would not deliberately seek my own death (suicide ideation notwithstanding), but if death were to come, I would probably just quietly go into the dark night.

Now after being saved, I know that my death is just leaving the mortal coil and heading into the presence of God. Still not much fear, perhaps having a little bit of hope in it instead, seeing that I would be in the presence of my Creator.

But until I am dead, I'm still here, and therefore I will try to make the best of my existence here. Many say that the advancement of the Kingdom is of the highest priority, and I do not deny that. But I do wonder if the direct and somewhat unsolicited approaches are indeed the right way to proceed.

It's a bit like being a super-fan of something---most people that one approaches won't really enjoy being bombarded with one's otaku-esque behaviour, no matter the subject matter. I suppose with the large reach of Christianity, the evangelical behaviour has been observed by the world at large for a couple of thousand years, and with it comes the larger [over-]reaction when being evangelised at in an unsolicited manner. I do not reject how some of my fellow Christians might choose to share the gospel, but I do not think it the best way to do so, as a personal preference.

I believe that salvation is important, but I also strongly believe that if it is God's Will for someone to be saved, that person will find their way to God in one form or another---any machinations that us human disciples can come up with pale in comparison. The best thing that we ought to do is to live as good examples of a person who has accepted Christ in their life, and to show the fruits of that salvation to act as a beacon to draw the unsaved to come forth on their own free will to hear and heed the gospel.

(sigh)

Anyway, I was thinking about the whole ``get married'' bit recently. And I really cannot convince myself it is a good idea. It's about putting too much of oneself into another in the form of trust. And to say that I have trust issues, is like saying that the Atlantic Ocean has some water.

How many times have my relationships failed due to the other party violating the trust that I had implicitly placed in her?

I'm getting old. I don't have that kind of intrepid nature like before; in short, I cannot afford to put myself out there again, just to be fucked over for one reason or another.

Okay, that's enough depressing shit. On to something slightly better.

Some time back, I mentioned about Vampire Survivors, Magic Survival, and HoloCure (the Steam release is happening on 2023-08-17). Thanks to a certain gaming Kirin's live stream, I learnt of a cool new twist to the genre: Halls of Torment. It is, as Fauna's video title suggests, a cross between Vampire Survivors and Diablo IV.

Now, I've not played any Diablo games after Diablo II, but after having tried out the awesome demo version, I agree wholeheartedly with Fauna. The way I would describe it would be a bite-sized mouse-click saving version of action-RPGs. Imagine Torchlight, Diablo, or Grim Dark, but with the individual acts kept to a duration of no more than 30 minutes, and with no need to click anything to auto-proc the auto-attacks and skills. There is still progression a la Vampire Surivors (thus technically making Halls of Torment a rogue-lite instead of a rogue-like the way Jupiter Hell is). The aesthetics is also much akin to the gothic style that these action-RPGs are like, and the boss fights are hard compared to what Vampire Survivors have.

All in all, a cool twist. I'm sure I'll have many hours of fun playing it.

Speaking of many hours, I'm about 79% through the Shadow of the Tomb Raider, according to the in-game counter. Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been scratching that exploration itch that I had been having for aa while. Maybe after I've completed this, I might really start on The Long Dark.

But we'll see.

I'm feeling tired now, so I guess I'll stop. Till the next update.

The One About the 盐酥鸡

August: here we go!

I hate being right on things. So, remember this recent post on hero worship? Well, as if on cue, we have this little bit of news on Lizzo. Now, being sued doesn't imply guilt (that's for the courts to decide), but usually people do not sue another person unless there is some perception of grievance.

``MT, why are you picking on Lizzo?''

I'm not. She just happened to be a recent example. She's a media darling, with many from Flute Forum actively idolising her outright as a hero.

She's alright as a flute person. But it's okay to just appreciate it without going into hero worship.

But on to different things.

August is a month that promises lots of things. First up is an engineered long weekend starting from National Day. Then after that, actual courses/training on Manager 101.

Am I excited? ``Trepid'' might be a better word. It's definitely going to be a start of some rather harrowing work, what with my first annual appraisal exercise for the six under my charge. But it is something that needs to be done, and the we are doing important work; projects that need to be moved forward to ensure that we help with SIN city's future.

It is unfortunate [for me] that I'm just the most senior engineer among the group, and is therefore de facto manager/leader.

Work stuff aside, TGCO is likely to see its first performance in a long while. We're not as big as we were, possibly even smaller than our smallest so far as some of the married members start having children, so this performance is going to be a good morale booster.

I'm also starting to get the hang of the hymns that we are playing for worship service, and am slowly making my way to being a more regular player in the ensemble on Aurelia. I did mention to the coordinator of the possibility of bringing out Davie (my vertical bass flute) to play the tenor parts with the cellist whenever he may be available, and it would seem that it was likely to be in November.

The only caveat is that I need to brush up my ability to read the bass clef. I'm getting much better at it now, having to ``count'' only every time the pitch skips larger than a fourth or so. But that can be a rather interesting skill to develop.

There's also a pasar malam that is running along the street, and I am getting severely addicted to the 盐酥鸡 from one of the stalls. It's deep-fried chicken bits in light batter, dusted with sour plum powder, and paprika(?) powder.

Apart from that... I suppose there isn't anything else to talk about for the moment. And so, till the next time.

Tweaks and Adjustments to 5×10 and 7×13 Bitmap Fonts

Oof, that took me a while, but I think that I'm much more satisfied with what I have now than before.

Continuing what I began back in the day for the 5×10 bitmap font, with a more recent set up with the 7×13 bitmap font, comes a new iteration of both bitmapped fonts.

The gist for this iterative update is about following fixing the fonts to fit some of the readability requirements that Atkinson Hyperlegible and Intel One Mono Typeface have stipulated.

``But MT, you're trying to do readability adjustments, on fonts that are so small that everyone (who isn't you) who sees it complains about it?''

Yeah... shut up. (=

Without ado, I'll just unceremoniously put in the 5×10 font here:

And here is the 7×13 one:

And of course, after doing this for a while, it is only now that I realise that the mapping of the grid to the glyphs displayed [under CP-1252] is wrong---all the ``funny'' whitespace/undefined glyphs remain undisplayed.

🤦

I'm keeping the original versions as uploaded above just so that it is easier to visually/automatically do a comparison between the new and old forms.

So anyway, here's the corrected versions for 5×10:

And here's the corrected version for 7×13:

The main changes on the ASCII portion of the fonts is is about fixing how the 8 looks to make it more distinct from B, and adjusting how { and } looks so that they are super distinct from the other three types of enclosing parentheses/brackets/``angle'' brackets. There were also some alignment problems earlier that I corrected in this round. I also did a sweep on the upper-ASCII portions, just to make sure that they are sort-of consistent and less broken (see character 0xf7 for the 5×10 font, and characters 0xa9, 0xae for the 7×13 font).

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the result. The next step is figuring out how to generate the associated fonts so that they are usable in Xfce.

Till the next update.

A Day Off? A Day Off!

It's a Friday! And I'm on leave! It is therefore a most excellent Friday!

Curbing my exuberance a little, I'm only on leave because of the planning ahead by past-me---July has no gazetted public holidays, and thus I decided to just take some paid time off to create a random long weekend. It's not just for July, there were a couple of other months where this was going to be a problem, and a similar set up was made.

After all, what's the point of amassing paid time off when I have no intention of travelling overseas for quite a while yet?

But back to today. I had the best run for Gunfire Reborn yet, reaching about the half-way point in the third of four acts. This run saw me use a weapon that operated like a shotgun, and it got me thinking about why I was more successful with this run as compared to all the others that failed much earlier.

I think it has got to do with my personal reflex coordination between my left-hand keyboard movement and right hand mouse-aiming. Shotguns in most games involved a shoot-and-scoot method---fire the weapon, and as one was undergoing the [long] reload animation, strafe to the side to dodge attacks until the reload is complete, then aim and repeat. It was something that I learnt/got comfortable with from the old days of Doom and Doom 2, where the shotgun/super shotgun ruled supreme, complete with the Alt-key strafing when one used the default keyboard-only configuration (arrow keys controlled movement, there was no vertical looking, and holding alt-left/alt-right strafed left and right respectively, like the modern day use of A/D keys under the WASD-scheme).

For rapid-fire weapons like rifles/chainguns/pistols, circle strafing was needed. This required good relative motion coordination between the strafing movement from the left hand, while keeping the reticle aimed at the target at all times. The room for error in terms of dodging attacks was much tighter, since one was not maximising the distance that one could dodge through moving orthogonal to the shot fired by the enemy, but was instead moving on a curved route that far shortened the effective orthogonal distance.

I think I'm bad at that. Moreover, shotgun-type weapons were much more effective in dealing with a large group of mobs---literally fire into the throng, and strafe-left/right to dodge, with aim mostly optional. Single shot/rapid fire guns still require good aiming and thus some kind of lock-on, and as a result, requires a much higher reaction time than what I'm used to.

Ah well.

Gunfire Reborn scratches that itch of a first-person shooter rogue-like. I mean, I played Ziggurat but found the maps too square/limiting, wanted to complete Rogue Shooter: The FPS Roguelike, but that game was effectively abandonware. I do have Tower of Guns hiding around somewhere, but have no real reason why I didn't play it.

But to be fair, I only learnt of Gunfire Reborn from this years SGDQ run. It looked fun, was sufficiently fast paced (quick to start, short enough runs), and yet without the kind of boxing-in claustrophobia from allied games like The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

Some time back, I accidentally started Firewatch that I had installed on Eileen-III via the GOG Galaxy launcher. I was naturally quite confused, but just went ``eh fuck it'' and played it. The game was not particularly long, but it had lovely scenery that was antithetical to what The Long Dark had (think forest in summer compared to the Canadian tundra). And yes, I have The Long Dark, and love what it represented, having watched quite a few playthroughs by Zisteau, including his latest advanced tutorial series, but that's a sidetrack.

Firewatch. I didn't know what I was expecting, but for the 3--5 hours of gameplay, I found myself having a kind of fun that I have missed for quite a while. I know it's a ``walking simulator'', but really, sometimes all I want is just a relatively relaxing game to help me walk away from the walls that define what what my current life is like. And Firewatch does that wonderfully. No regrets for that discovery that I had accidentally ran that game some how.

In some ways, due to Firewatch, I've also started on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the last of the trilogy of the modern Tomb Raider series. The thing about the new reboot (it's been about 10 years since the reboot) is that it was a much grittier and realistic depiction of Lara Croft. The graphics saw a big boost in quality compared to their predecessors, but this was more of a product of the times than anything, but also the shifting of the more whimsical and ``friendlier'' style of the past into something a bit more realistic. I remembered seeing my first death of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider---she was very graphically impaled. I didn't remember any of the Tomb Raider games showing death so brutally, and was fairly shocked.

And here's the thing, I'm not the only one.

Brutality aside, the new Tomb Raider series does have lovely scenery at a higher fidelity than the stylised stuff of Firewatch or even The Long Dark (I'll play it soon! I promise!). And playing the latest edition (a circa 2018 game(!)) on Eileen-III is definitely a treat.

Okay, I think I've exhausted what I wanted to write. Going to grab a bit more whiskey (it's still my day off, despite having been summoned for 1.5 h to solve a small-ish PRODuction issue (sighs)), and continue on my adventure in Shadow of the Tome Raider, even as I listen/half-watch some the latest hijinks from the Hololive members.

Till the next update.

7×13 Font?

This entry is an extension to a theme that I started from some time ago about bitmap fonts.

So, if you recall, I recently got ahold of Eileen-III. With her 2560×1600 resolution on a 16″ screen, using the 5×10 fonts is a great way to migraine central.

I had been using Unifont adjusted to be monospace-friendly set to scale down from the default 8×16 to 7×13 just so that I can have at least 81×2=162 horizontal characters under a half-screen set up (the math works out to be 1280/162∼7.9=7 pels per character width).

It worked fine, but man it looked ugly. This is generally true for regular vector fonts when we scale it down to the point the mechnical scaling/anti-aliasing starts to destroy the font due to how there is no good way for the text renderers to correctly position pixel-equivalents at pixel scale without losing contrast. When the width of a stroke is down to the width of a single pixel, contrast starts taking on a much outsized role, and that's why some of the best small/tiny fonts are hand-crafted instead of relying on auto-scaling via math.

And in this case, the Unifont version is just ugly.

Just look at it: broken 0 and }, X and Y are suddenly spouting umlauts, and all the glyphs that are supposed to be round at the x-height have a sharp corner or two.

Since I was sick of it, I started to look at the small stash of hand-crafted bitmap fonts that I had lying around. The 6×11 font looked pretty good for the display set up that Eileen-III had, but there was just not enough spacing in it. On a lower resolution (but with comparable physical dimensions) display, a single pixel space was adequate, but for the particular display that Eileen-III had, it was just too small.

So, starting with the 6×11, I expanded it to 7×13 by adding one more column of blank pixels on the left, thus centering all the glyphs (the original 6 pel width used only the first 5 pixel columns for the glyph art work), and added two more rows of blank pixels on the top. I then tweaked some of the oddities that I missed from the 6×11 font, including adjusting how my 6 and 9 look, as well as adjusting the positions of the different types of brackets/pseudo brackets to better fit the larger cell. I also adjusted the overall shape of the glyphs to better match my 5×10 font, in the sense that they looked much closer to how I would envision a good high-resolution super-scaling of my 5×10 font to 7×13 would look like. And here it is:

There are still some things that I could tweak more still, but I think it is excellent for now.

There was one negative side effect of using this 7×13 bitmap font instead of the weirdly scaled down Unifont---CJK characters under this font look much worse than that of Unifont. Unifont will scale its 16×16 CJK fonts to fit into 13×13, which looks remarkably good considering that its complexity meant that any form of approximation looked better than the approximation one saw with the simpler Latin-1 glyphs.

With this font, the CJK characters made the text renderer pull up some other fallback vector font, which again had weird (in this case, worse) scaling and contrast issues that made them illegible.

Is this a problem? Yes. Is this a big problem? Eh... not really. I don't usually need to operate on stuff with CJK when I'm using my ``optimised'' text mode---at that point I will literally pull out my full-scale Unifont set up instead (i.e. 8×16 for single characters, and 16×16 for CJK characters).

And that's it for this post. Till the next one then.

Hero Worship: Don't

Hero worship. One word: don't.

Inspired in part by the litany of recently reported wrong-doings by high-fliers in SIN city, combined with my own experiences lurking about the rich and the powerful, I just think that hero worship is unhealthy.

Now, I could easily invoke my beliefs as to why hero worship isn't a good idea, but I won't. Let's go via a more secular and rational route to convince instead of relying on faith.

So the thing is, when we idolise some person, we often do so in some particular context. Someone might idolise a specific musician because of that musician's musical abilities (it doesn't matter if it's some rock band person, or a more ``traditional'' classical musician). Some might idolise a particular rich person because of their wealth/business acumen, or a powerful person due to their political/authoritative prowess. We call these people our idols because they have some quality that we strongly acknowledge and enjoy.

That's generally fine and dandy. The problem comes when these start reaching into the realm of putting these completely human people on pedestals, and starting to see them as paragons beyond their field. In the eyes of the people then, these idols of theirs can do no wrong.

But here's the thing, just because someone has stellar skill/outcomes from a specific domain is no indication that they have an overall stellar skill/outlook on other domains, adjacent or not. In fact, I would go as far as to claim without rigorous proof that anyone who shows superlative achievements in one field is probably balanced by a flabbergasting flaw that can cause one to literally facepalm in absolute disbelief.

There's nothing mystical about the existence of such a balance---everyone passes time at the same rate [of one second per second]. Assuming that any outward demonstration of skill/talent is a literal product of hard work and effective practice means that there will always be a trade off between what someone excels at and what they ignore; something that the table-top role players will understand as a ``dump stat''.

There are of course exceptions in the form of truly gifted individuals who can reach prodigy-levels of achievement in a truly polymathic manner---but they are sufficiently rare that we do not need to worry about their existence.

What I'm getting at then is that for every hero, there is a dark side. We can acknowledge their achievements, but we should not lionise them beyond what we can see---a great musician may be a completely abusive spouse, and I think that it is fine to accept their great musicality, but condemn their abusiveness to their spouse, without breaking stride or running into a contradiction.

The problem with most people is that this type of nuanced thinking is just too much to bear. To many, life must be split completely into black and white. A hero must be worshipped thoroughly---their heroes can never do harm. And the prideful one being worshipped as a hero will often get high from all the accolades often enough that they truly start believing in themselves the way their fans believe in them, and thus lose their grounding.

And that is when the hero is most vulnerable to fall a fall that is as dramatic as it is traumatic.

Then again, maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe I am too cynical about the world, and see it not in the wonderfully vibrant colours the way those who hero-worship can. Maybe to me, everything is a shade of gray, with some being darker than others, while almost none are blindingly bright.

Maybe.

But I still stand by my words: hero worship---just don't.

favicon, and Some Annoying Bot

Ah Friday. Nice!

Favicons---not so nice. Just look at how bloody complicated this mess is! For those who are somehow too lazy to click through to the Wikipedia page, allow me to quickly summarise why this is a bloody mess:

• The original de facto standard made use of a proprietary-esque Microsoft icon file format;
• The favicon was quickly co-opted for use as the default logo/emblem for the page when added to the Android screen as a bookmark;
• Apple has, of course, its own version of what it wants to do that is incompatible with the Android interpretation;
• Microsoft has their own weirdness in the form of tiles, with even more obscure dimensions that are unrelated to the published dimensions of the constructed image;
• And of course Apple needs to top it up with more nonsense with their new standard for ``pinned tabs'', which switches up from:
  1. Raster representation to vector representation; and
  2. Full colour to pure monochrome with a single colour shade

Like, seriously.

Here, check out the FAQ of a tool that attempts to handle all these. I'm not even kidding.

``MT, why do you care about favicons?''

Well, I do run my own domain, and as part of my regular maintenance checks, I was seeing evidence that favicons of all other flavours were being requested when I wasn't doing it.

That little rabbit hole revealed the depth of the insanity, and while there was a tool that allegedly could tame the whole shebang with only a small upload of the source, I didn't want to do that.

Who knows what people can/will do with the stuff that was uploaded for processing?

And so, I spent some time working on my own fixes to get my personal domain to match up as much of the requirements of the ``modern day'' favicon nonsense. In doing so, I learnt even more about ImageMagick, among which included the ability to create the proprietary ico format, and that at some point their default invocation changed from convert (which clashed with a Microsoft Windows tool that changed a disk's file system by naming convention) to magick.

Apart from ``fixing'' the favicon, I did some other tweaks. The more astute will realise that I have switched from the Inconsolata font to something new---the Intel One Mono Typeface. My main draw to this font over the old Inconsolata was on how it was designed with input from users with poor vision, the same reason why I decided to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible as my primary font in the first place.

Readability and unambiguity of the glyphs are very important to me. I hate wasting time trying to make out if something is 1Iil, or B8, or aGbgrpqu. This is doubly so for when I'm looking at code fragments. The Intel One Mono Typeface scratches this itch for the monospace font-face, and I set it up accordingly for my main domain.

I'm a little too tired to try and set it up for this [or any of the other] blogs, which may be more impactful when compared to my domain, because I use more monospace text here than there.

Yeah, I know I'm starting to sound trite. I can't help it---it's fast reaching stupid o'clock. And I've spent a better part of this week trying to recover from some non-specific and undiagnosed illness.

The last thing left to say is my observation that there is some badly written bot that has been crawling this blog for nearly a month. It's bloody irritating and annoyinng, and I hope they either fix their bot, or just to leave me alone.

So much pain.

And that's about it for now, I suppose. Bed time for me.

So Long CentOS, and Thanks For All the Fish!

So, I managed my own unnamed and generally unreferenced Linux server running CentOS (the astute might recall me talking about this little server and the whys of its existence from this old post). It had been alive since 2016 since I made that switch over, and was doing its job perfectly well on the CentOS 7 Linux distribution.

That is, until Red Hat basically told all of us CentOS users to go pound sand and be their beta testers, the same way Microsoft is making Windows 10+ as a continuously beta-tested platform.

It was not ideal for my situation. I wouldn't have minded too much in shifting up to the CentOS Stream build, if not for the fact that the upgrade path required going through CentOS 8 first, which ironically had reached its end-of-life in 2021-12-31, even as CentOS 7 was reaching its end-of-life in 2024-06-some day.

🤦

And so, I went back to the old faithful.

No, not Slackware, but good old Debian.

``But MT, why Debian? You've not used that sucker in years/at all, and isn't Ubuntu like the more updated downstream version?''

Well... yes. All that is true. But I don't need this little server to run the latest geegaws like Docker containers, GPU computations, or even a damn GUI desktop---it just needs to run Apache Subversion, and run it well.

That's literally it. And Debian is the granddaddy of being the most rocksteady Linux distribution out there, so what more can I ask for, after this confusing debacle that surrounds CentOS?

It took me a while to bring my old configuration over, but it was finally done, mostly without much incident. Running Debian 12 had the side effect of finally bringing my subversion server version up to 1.14.2, which gave me a chance to update the longest running repository of mine to a more compact and performant format. I also took the opportunity to switch over from the old RSA keys for HTTPS to something based on elliptic curves, with the key benefit of shrinking the key size by 16× without losing actual effective security.

All in all, it was not as harrowing as I thought it would be, and I was glad.

I've updated all the local repository references to point to this new server, and have decommissioned the original CentOS 7 one. Here's to a less painful maintenance process for the future.

Till the next update.

It's July Already?

Woah, the second of July is upon us. As at noon-ish, literal halfway point of 2023.

Not sure how/what to feel about this. On the one hand, we're getting closer the end of the year, and with it perhaps we will get to cast the dark shadows that came from the COVID-19 pandemic away from our collective trauma, to redevelop a new sense of optimism.

That new sense of optimism is important in this time and age. The doom-saying has been on overdrive for the past three to five years, and it really does show, at least for me.

I cannot seem to live the day without getting blasted with information on global warming, some new development in the spats that come from geo-political posturing/brinkmanship, ever-increasing threats to the livelihood of the vast majority of the white-collar workers through ``AI'', uncontrollable price increases ``due to inflation'', and all the associated over-corrective behaviours that some of these events trigger.

No wonder I'm feeling down more than half the time.

I personally cannot tell how some people can maintain their optimism. Everything just looks so... bleak. The ``Me! Me! Me!'' world that we have today is just such a cavernous echo chamber that there are many times where I cannot even hear myself think.

One might say that I can always walk away. And the truth is, I have been doing so.

Of the few [online] communities that I have been a part of, I've more or less walked away from them all. Some I left because the members became too militant and extreme in their desperation of defining their own safe space, which often times end up creating a similar toxic environment as the one they are acutely hurting from. Some I left because the nature of the community has changed---from an indie passion-project where I could interact nearly personally with and willing to support with whatever I have, to a complete commercial entity that only cares about their shareholders, who incidentally prefer using an unpaid-for third-party ``community'' environment that I didn't agree with.

But these are all about the past---thinking about them isn't bad per se, but if all they are giving are these bad vibes, I really shouldn't be thinking about them, if possible.

(sigh)

With the next half of the year coming up, what should I be looking forward to?

Well, there's always NaNoWriMo in November. It'll be the fifteenth year I'm a part of it (URL will point to the correct place some time in November 2023, so don't fret). The community there was always fractured along the axes of old-bird versus newbie, professional writers versus amateur writers, the non-students versus the students. It's... not a bad thing, but just something to take note of. I'm an old-bird amateur writer who is not a student, and am probably one of the few old-birds that have not done fiction writing professionally (i.e. getting paid to publish).

There are couple of engineered long weekends here and there through careful set up of my leave, so that's always nice. I'm steadily building back my stamina and strength in cycling, and am slowly incorporating cycling back into my set of activities. Nothing hardcore with the road cycles and what-not---just me, my Brompton from November 2017, and wherever I can go, depending on the time of day/week. So some longer trips during the off-peak periods from the engineered long weekends are going to be a part of what's happening.

We're probably going to get a couple of [small] performances coming in for TGCO, which is always a treat---I've always felt it weird if a performing arts group... doesn't perform. Aside from TGCO, I'm starting to prepare my way towards being a more regular musician (with Aurelia) for worship as a part of the music ministry of PPCC.

Aside from all that, more reading, I suppose, and more games to be played on Eileen-III. Nothing on the horizon for the dating front, because honestly, I don't have a good feeling about dating and getting in a relationship. At my age, it feels like... the pros of being with someone are no longer as superlative as the cons. When young, one's future is much more vague, making it easier to meld/remodel it according to the shared expectations of one's partner.

When one gets older and more set in their ways, there is almost no room for negotiations---the keyword being ``almost''. So... the odds aren't good.

As I might have mentioned before, when it's my time to go, it'll be my time, and I'll just... go. I don't expect to be remembered, so it's okay to be alone in the end.

I just kinda pity whomever is going to do the final clean up because I probably won't be able to settle things properly before my time's up. Sorry in advance to whomever that is.

Anyway, I ran out of momentum with what to write. Just wanted to rant a little at the half-year mark for 2023, before I become completely dejected at the prospects of life in general.

Till the next update.

Eileen-III

Alright, it's been a while. Time to write something here.

So, Eileen-II has more or less run her course. It's not that she has broken down, but let's face it---I didn't plonk down serious cash all those years ago ``just'' to use her for web-browsing only.

It has been about the games; it has always been about the games. This time though, there was no COVID-19 lock down to justify getting yet another laptop form-factor, but it was basically a simpler statement: space is premium that is worth paying extra for.

I could rebuild Elysie-II completely, but where would I put her? I've more or less compacted myself into a single room of my childhood apartment home, as things got a little weird with the whole ``study room'' affair, and my general dislike of basically occupying ``public space'' by sleeping in the living room. The day that I discovered that I didn't really need the high-powered ceiling fan in the living room to cool me off was the day that I decided to set up base in the bedroom that I had once shared with my sister before she moved out after getting married, some four to five years ago. I don't remember if I wrote anything about that entire set up phase, but the gist of it was a complete rework of the bedroom---all my books were finally unwrapped and sorted out into the massive shelf that houses that and more.

But that's history. I'm here to talk about Eileen-III.

Eileen-III is an Alienware m16 R1, with an Intel i9-13900HX (24-core (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores), 36 MB cache, up to 5.40 GHz with Turbo Boost), 64 GB DDR5 RAM at 4800 MHz, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 16 GB GDDR6 discrete graphics card. Her screen is 16″ (2560×1600) with a refresh rate of 240 Hz with G-SYNC, and her storage are 2× 2 TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs in RAID-0 configuration.

In short, she's an absolute beast. Her graphics card is equivalent to the desktop version of the RTX 3080 Ti, but with less power consumption and no over-sized form factor, and her CPU is also doing much, much more while consuming much, much less power.

She also has 4 cooling fans, which is 2 more than what most laptops will have. For operating such a machine in a non-air-conditioned place in SIN city the way I am, having excellent cooling cannot be overstated.

She's superlative to Eileen-II in almost any way, though the keyboard layout is a bit janky---the right shift key does not fully extend to the bottom of the enter key, with the up-arrow key occupying that last sliver. The reason for this jank is the decision to create a new right column of convenience keys for the volume up, down, mute, and microphone mute buttons. They made it such that the right arrow key is now part of that column, instead of being flush with the rest of the main typing area.

It's not bad per se, but considering how the keyboard layouts of my as at then two most commonly used machines' layout are exactly the same as what I had described, the muscle memory kept screwing the crap out of it.

And oh, I had to run Windows 11 for Eileen-III---it was the only [gaming] operating system that could ``understand'' and therefore properly schedule tasks for the heterogenous CPU set up with the P-cores and E-cores.

So, how does she perform?

Like a damn dream. Seriously. Cyberpunk 2077 running at 2560×1600 at an average of 110+ fps. My ``industrial complex'' of farms in Minecraft (link is to the old version) with all the bells and whistles of full-shadow shaders was performing at least 50% better in terms of frames per second than when it was running on Eileen-II (there was severe lag that dropped things to around 40 fps), considering also that we are rendering things at 2560×1600 instead of 1920×1080, a good 97.5% more pixels to draw.

And Grim Dawn did not have a moment of lag while rendering all the fancy effects when procc-ing things.

In short, Eileen-III is a true beast.

Am I happy with the upgrade? Hell yes. It married super-powered graphics power, with fantastic memory/general processing power, with tiny pixels, while keeping the keyboard at a comfortable enough temperature. What's there to not like?

Alright, I think I've gushed enough for now. Yesterday was the public holiday, and today was an additional leave day that I took to just sit around and do nothing.

Till next time.

What I Learnt From Working in Offices

Caveat: This entry was not written at when it was published.

When I was serving my National Service back in 2003--2006, there were some things that I learnt that has served me pretty well throughout my time in the working world.

``MT, that's cool and all, why talk about it now?''

Let's just say that after being made a manager with more than a handful of souls under my charge, I start to get a little introspective in thinking about what enables me to be a good manager, and what can enable them to be good subordinates.

I also need to remind myself that the proper term for people under a manager is ``subordinates'', not the more expressively dramatic version of ``Minions!''.

So anyway, National Service. I enlisted on Boxing Day of 2023, and was promptly sent to Pl. Tekong for Basic Military Training. I went through the course as best as I could, even with shitty skin, and passed through impressing my Officer Commanding with my positive attitude despite being excused from all field activities, and having to take hospitalisation leave at some point due to abscesses. I was then sent to a Unit populated by senior officers in a heavily office setting.

That's where I learnt those useful lessons.

I'll just summarise it roughly here, in no specific order:

• Always strive to make your Boss to look good by feeding them with good data;
• Debate all that is needed, but once the decision is made by the Boss, it will be what will be done;
• Relating to the previous point, respect the chain of command and associated Standard Operating Procedures/General Orders/established work processes;
• The clerks and the secretaries---they are gatekeepers, so treat them well, no matter how inferior their nominal rank may seem;
• When a phone call comes in, pick it up within three rings; and
• Pay attention to any and all documentation generated---if it is not documented, it did not happen.

The thing about my time working in that office as an ``augmented'' administrative support assistant (i.e. ``project executive'') was that it was much closer to how the real world office was like, sans the ease of simply leaving any toxic environment (National Service is compulsory---it was not possible to just ``quit'' before the stipulated full-time service was up).

That kind of environment allowed my headstrong self to learn how to bite my tongue and survive, before finally thriving in whatever small way that I can.

After my time from National Service though, I learnt a few more lessons, again listed in no specific order, and in a rough way:

• Not you, not here, not now---any forms of challenge against the processes/procedures should be done later, and not whilst in the midst of trying to execute the process;
• Redress seeking should follow the chain of command, even in the civil world---it is not the case that the Biggest Boss will always resolve things according to one's way, since it is more likely than not that the said Biggest Boss will still bounce everything back down the chain of command to the appropriate level to be resolved;
• Be firm, assertive, but not rude, and respect the command decision if the Boss has already decided; and
• It's just a job, and don't take it too personally.

Corporate life is strange, and the people that make up the corporate body, I will readily admit that some of them are ``lifers'' who will happily sit in their role for twenty years without any intention of doing anything more than being automata following the procedures/processes as strictly as possible. But that doesn't make them innately ``bad''---it just means that one needs to be a little more patient and creative in engaging them in ways such that their actions end up helping instead of hindering our agenda.

I think that's all I want to write for now. Till the next update.

Dead Tired

So ends yet another Monday.

My left shoulder is busted up... again. I suspect it's a mix of sleeping badly, and possibly twisting it one too many times when moving my [heavy] backpack between the front and back carrying orientations. I can lift my arm normally, but trying to reach my back is where the pain kicks in and causes me grief.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day [for this busted up arm].

------

Yesterday was the second time that I was playing Aurelia at PPCC as part of the music ministry during the worship service. It was still a pleasant experience. I am starting to get used to the hymnal repertoire. Part of the difficulty that I was facing was that the lead sheets were often written with STAB-chorale in mind, which meant that the soprano and alto parts, though still in the treble clef, tended to cluster near the lower ledger lines.

For a flautist, that's quite an unnatural thing to look at, considering that we were more used to staring at stuff on the upper ledger lines. I obviously cannot play all those low notes (only the clarinettists can pull that off), but instead just played it an octave higher. So many of the cock-ups from me came about when I misread a low B as something else.

Generally though, it was easy to avoid the cock-ups by practising enough, pencilling notes at the problematic areas, and actually paying attention when playing.

Slowly I will be part of the regular crew playing the worship music. But we'll let time take care of that.

------

I recently bought quite a few items from both Amazon Singapore and regular Amazon. It matters little in terms of what I ordered, but it does bother me a little in terms of how they got delivered.

The long story short is that the Ninja Van lived up to its name of being a ninja---delivering the packagess at the door step, before disappearing almost immediately the way a ninja supposedly operates. It's not bad per se, but it's still a little annoying that they don't at least ring the bell to indicate that they had stopped by.

------

And that's about it for now. I'm dead tired---the wave of psychic damage hasn't quite completed yet. Till the next update.

Empathy is in Short Supply---Psychopaths Abound

So I just finished reading How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber, & Elaine Mazlish. And a thought came to me.

If such techniques of acknowledging the feelings of a child can help them not ``act out'', why can't these techniques be applicable to the adult in the real world? After all, we do have many adults who ``act out'' in various [often times destructive] ways when their feelings are somehow wounded/unacknowledged.

Then I realised that most people, once they get beyond a certain group size, will tend to prefer treating everyone else in a transactional manner as opposed to a relational one. And that comes about because of a side effect of the preferred manner of thinking---keeping things transactional as opposed to relational short circuits the types of thinking that needs to be done to achieve the same [short-term] results.

After all, that is the very definition of transactional---our relationship is only as good as it needs to get whatever [short-term] results we require, your feelings be damned; after all, feelings are irrational, and therefore unscientific (i.e. 不科学), and thus have no place in any of the calculus involved.

Transactional relationships make extremely large groups of people function in a manner that is more efficient (in terms of getting results) than one that is more relational in nature. Each time one adds another person to the group that currently has N members, there is an increase of N − 1 interactions to take note of---this means that the number of interactions to worry about in a relational manner of treating people requires the ability to reason about O(N²) interactions.

Compare this to the transactional one, where it is strictly linear in the number of transactions to be performed.

This is perhaps a type of uncodified natural law that can explain why there exists a life cycle of sorts for the formation of groups: they start off with aggregation of the like-minded, and then when they hit some critical size, end up splitting up into smaller groups due to schisms, after which the aggregative phase begins anew for each of the smaller groups.

This critical size is probably really small, as my arm-chair first-principles type analysis suggests, but it gets artificially amplified when the soapbox of social media comes into play, leading to people who happily(?) mouth and ape all that they heard, without necessarily stopping to think about the consequences those things they said might do with the relationships with other people.

Think ``cancel culture''. Think of the rise in extremism from both the left and right. Think of unmitigated political correctness that is basically sycophancy.

That's about what I have. Sorry if it is incoherent. Till the next update then.

Psychic Damage

Caveat: This was not written near when this was posted.

This week was rough. Too many ``psychic damage'' that came in, and it overwhelmed me a little---not enough to put me out of commission, but enough to numb me hard.

I would love to write about all the stuff that happened, but the unfortunate thing is that they all involve people other than just me.

In all the circumstances, I act as the sponge, listening to what has happened, nodding my head in solidarity and understanding, and then feeling the pain/sorrow that transpired.

And now, I need a way to wick it all away. I can't keep bad juju like this internally.

And unfortunately for me, I don't have an escape valve for these things; the best that I can do is to have it slowly diffuse out over time as I process it internally.

------

In other news, I finally claimed a victory for Angel of Shotgunnery (AoSh) on Hard difficulty level for Jupiter Hell. The Jackhammer and the duramesh scout armour made a whole lot of difference, especially under the power of the old-reliable that is the Army of Darkness mastery.

I need to remember the following:

• Dodge + movement speed is king;
• The damage type order is pierce > plasma > impact, with slash only being good for unarmoured biological beings;
• Each transition point to the next ``episode'' location has new sub-bosses; and
• AoSh converts all ammo to 12Ga shells.

I think I might [re]try Angel of Marksmanship (AoMr) on Hard difficulty to start accumulating more Gold Badges to level up to the Captain rank.

I don't think I've ever talked about Nova Drift, so here it is. It's a rogue-like Asteroids re-think, mostly through bringing in more active enemy waves, combined with a levelling system that allowed various ``mods'' to be applied to the player character to change behaviour.

I've always been a sucker for space-shooting games, and Nova Drift scratches the itch at the right places. I'm only wondering if they will introduce some kind of adaptation of the enemies the way Warning Forever does it for its boss rush gameplay.

That would be a whole new level of insane gameplay though.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update, even as I try to diffuse away the ``psychic damage'' that I took over the week.

Hot AF

To say that the past few days were hot in SIN city is like saying that the Atlantic Ocean had some water.

It was too hot. It was so hot that, it created yet another new record.

I'm currently on leave for the weekend, one that started on Friday, and will extend into Monday. It was mostly for a sort of reset for me, pre-planned as part of the overall strategy of taking more frequent short-ish breaks due to the self-imposed moratorium of not travelling around the world.

So far, I'm more than half way through Suzuka, and have started on a bit of the Grim Fandango. ONE just dropped chapter 142 for the One-Punch Man original web-comic, but I think I will re-read that entire series as part of exercising Eirian-V.

I've also played a little more Jupiter Hell here and there. It's not a bad game, by any measure, but it seems to have lost a bit of the magic that was from the old DoomRL that I played a stupid amount of before. Perhaps it was the change in the community---a mass migration towards Reddit, Discord, and Steam ``forums'' over the original official ChaosForge forums.

I don't like the new Reddit/Discord/Steam ``forums''. Apart from having to create new accounts (not that big a deal, realistically), these platforms are not owned by ChaosForge, and therefore when they go, they are gone. The form factors of these new quasi-social media set ups are also terrible for actual discussions, which is one of the more practical factors that make me refuse to join them.

Oh, I had left the forums since the beginning of last year. It was depressing to be a custodian of what was basically a dead place where only the bots hung out. Chaosforge is no longer the one-man labour of love of yesteryear---it is a commercial entity that is taking real investment, and having to deliver real results. I can't be a part of that, and so I'm gone. It was a good run with them, for me.

Anyway, that's too much depressing stuff. I'll just end here for now. Wanted to make a note of the hottest recorded period/day [so far].

Till the next update.

NieR: Automata and ESV-KJV-CUV

And here we go, Sunday once more. The week flitted on by, hardly registering more than a blip in my psyche.

Why so? Who knows...

Anyway, I finally finished NieR: Automata. It was a nice romp, a little less punishing than the likes of the Devil May Cry series, but it does leave behind that strange aftertaste of existential dread. I'll be honest, this is not the first time that I had seen the gameplay of NieR: Automata---it shows up on and off for GDQ and ESA events. Even Ina played this ``live'' without speedrunning it.

So I'm no stranger to the main storyline. But that doesn't mean that there is no effect on me.

The existence of the androids... was predicated upon a lie. They were supposed to be there to help win the planet back for the humans in exile from the rampaging machines, but the truth is, gur uhznaf unir orra rkgvapg sbe n srj gubhfnaq lrnef, naq gur gehr ernfba sbe gur naqebvqf' rkvfgrapr vf gb tngure rabhtu qngn gb perngr na ribyirq irefvba bs gurzfryirf va n gjvfgrq sbez bs frys-crecrghngvba. Vg vf abg vebal gung bar bs punenpgref vf anzrq Cnfpny, nsgre gur jntre gung ur znqr nobhg orggvat ba Tbq'f rkvfgrapr.

All I know is that there are things that I don't know, and if I were to strictly go with a Bayesian interpretation, then it would make more sense to bet with the majority, even for things that we do not necessarily have proof for/against, especially for outcomes that we have no way of knowing beforehand.

That's what one would normally call ``faith''.

But back to NieR: Automata. It's a fun game, though the colour scheme is kinda drab and clinical. The only places where there was more colour was in the amusement park, and even then it was still dreary. Combat was heavier on the button-mashing, and that includes dodging. I didn't like the hacking parts, since it involved playing some neutered version of a bullet-hell, but it was still alright.

And that's one more game completed. I wonder what I would like to work through next. Maybe Fallout: New Vegas before I completely lose the plot? Or perhaps something more narrative-heavy, like Disco Elysium or Grim Fandango?

Who knows?

------

In other news, I created a new monster. I took the book-summaries from NKJV, the text, footnotes, and section annotations from ESV, and combined them with the text of KJV and CUV to create a three-column ESV-KJV-CUV parallel text Bible with NKJV summaries per book.

``MT, why do you need to do this?!''

So, here's the thing. I prefer NKJV's presentation of the usual two-column with centre reference set-up. But PPCC has switched over to ESV as being the primary preaching Bible version from KJV (note that it's not the new version). ESV is fine, but the version I have is not in a nice 2-column format---I rectified this previously, and created a 2-column ESV with NKJV summaries. For some verses though, KJV presents a more poetic form, and the KJV I had was... well just see for yourself. I didn't want to cross-reference between these two documents through swapping to and fro the PDF readers, and thus decided to combine them into one, which I did through extending on my previous work.

Then of course, CUV had to come into the picture. It is the official Chinese version that PPCC uses for the Chinese congregation, and frankly, I've always felt that there were many times when the Chinese translation of something ended up being more elucidative than expected.

But doing Chinese (or CJK in general, really) in LaTeX was a pain. It involved the following:

• Using the CJK LaTeX package;
• Preparing the magic environment of \begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gkai}{...}\end{CJK};
• Realising that creating too many of those CJK environments consumes all available memory in LaTeX, causing a crash;
• Wrestling with the multicol package to create 3 parallel columns, but not letting any longer column to overflow into the next and screw everything up (I just used set up of \begin{multicols}{3}[some_title][1.5in] ... to give enough end space to avoid this altogether).

But it was all done. Here's how the three columns look like, citing from John 3:16--21:

And that's about it I suppose. I now know how to incorporate large amounts of Chinese writing into LaTeX.

And with that, I conclude this entry. Till the next update.

May Too?

I could, in theory, have taken my off-in-lieu for previous Saturday's Hari Raya Puasa some other day.

But I chose to take it today, the day immediately after Labour Day, for the sole reason that it will be a day off on a day that isn't a day off for most people.

I would have spent it at MusicGear just putsing about, but since I already did that last Saturday when I took some of my ladies (Stella, Aurelia, and Eliana) in for a look-see at WindWorks. Stella was due for her tune-up after the first month of playing, Aurelia was in for a worn out bumper for the B♭ lever, and Eliana was in for... too many clacky sounds due to worn out bumpers and imperfect regulation to begin with. And Sean has brought in something interesting that I play tested---not sure if I would buy it since it involves electronics and I'm not particularly kitted out for that, but it definitely does bring some rather interesting possibilities. The other classically trained woodwind players in the shop found that interesting thing a little tough to work with though, possibly because they operated from the absolute pitch world of music, as opposed to the relative pitch one that I worked with most of the time.

That and probably because the interesting thing used the simple system as opposed to the keyed systems that most woodwind instruments these days have.

Anyway, an additional day off, and I went cycling along the North East Riverine Loop once more. The Loop... each time I go cycle on it, it shows changes. This time round, some parts of the tarmac were converted into pure concrete, and damn it was hot when I went over it in the morning on my bicycle---I could feel the infra-red energy just blasting at me; it was not at all comfortable.

But cycling is fun. I should do more cycling. I used to cycle to my office, but thanks to all the constructions now, that is not possible any more, and so the next best thing is to actually make an effort to cycle around my side of the island.

Cycling made me think of an old acquaintance with an unusual name, and as such, I shall simply call her ``E''. I met E back when I was still active in Aikido, and she was a fun person to train and hang out with. She got married (of course), and while I don't actively chat with her, I still follow her adventures of cycling all over the world with her husband.

It's interesting because that whole cycling persona was something that she developed much later, after her short foray into Aikido, and her longer one in outdoor adventures in general.

I did muse to myself if there was some new persona that I would like to take up, not with the intention of getting hitched of course, but as a different means of living yet another type of life.

No answer to that now. I suppose one dependency on it was whether I wanted to run my own household. I'm past the age in which the government gives a crap with respect to housing, i.e. I can, if I wanted to, get ahold of some brand new one-room/two-room apartment, be chained to a multi-decade mortgage, and have all the space that I need to run all the interests that I have.

But it also means that some fifteen or so years later, I will need to somehow come back to my childhood apartment to take care of matters after my parents have passed on. Not to mention my quiet worry of my parents living alone without some kind of alert observational supervision the way that I am doing now---they aren't dumb people, but sometimes they are so set in their ways that they need a proverbial bonk in the head to wake up a bit more and look at the world for what it is.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. The mark of an adult, especially when the decisions matter. And when the decisions start to matter for more than just oneself, be it family or subordinates, maaaaaaaan it starts to be Serious Business---the mark of an adult in middle age.

Anyway, that's enough for today. Tomorrow, I'm back to the office, and there are things that need to be done. Meanwhile, playthrough two of Nier: Automata awaits.

Till the next update.

Keep On Keeping On!

Ah Labour Day.

And that's all I'll say about Labour Day, because there's little I can put into words that others before me have with respect to the importance of labour, and the protection of labour against unreasonable exploitation by the capital-holding classes.

------

On three or so separate occasions, when it comes to my playing of the dizi, it has been remarked that it was a good thing, and that I should not give it up (emphasis mine).

I'm not sure why people think it necessary to highlight that I should not give up what I obviously enjoy doing (i.e. playing on the dizi). I mean, sure I can play it fine, and since it is a hobby, I'm not playing it ``for keeps'' the way professional musicians are doing, and yes, I'll admit that as a balding middle-aged man, that me being involved still in a performance art like playing the dizi is a little peculiar.

But why highlight that ``I should not give it up''? Was there some vibe that they were getting from me that I was somehow getting increasingly restless/dissatisfied with what I was doing? Granted, I've not played ``seriously'' for a concert for nearly three years now (thank you COVID-19), and I'm not going balls-out hard-core training the way I was some eight years ago when I was planning to get my ``end flute'' and was also simultaneously given access to more exciting ways of obtaining dizi and other woodwind instruments to play with, but I never had any intention of stopping.

After all, music-making has always been about the process for me than anything else. If I had wanted to scale the heights of... whatever it was relating to music, I would have gone full competitive from the get-go, chionging the whole SYF she-bang from secondary school onwards, and going all gung-ho with the various grading exams when I learnt of it in late 2006 when I was first introduced to people who were actually taking grading exams for the dizi, and/or joining the music competitions hosted by the National Arts Council since 1998.

The SNYCO was formed only in 2017, and I was too old for it, so that was not an avenue for the massive CCA-point boosting during my school days.

And the reality of it all is, had I gone down that path, I think I would not be as free as I am, since I would be a part of the system, and having to play it just to ensure that my livelihood [of being a serious musician] isn't at stake. It would be likely that I would not go down the path of messing around with flutes of all sorts, saxophones, and even the recorder---such is the type of chauvinism that comes from being within the system.

In short, there's no fear that I'll stop. I figure I'll always find something new to mess around with for music-making, whether or not if there's someone else out there to listen. I suppose there was this one period in my life where I thought I could intertwine my music-making with another person's, but since she left, I'd been rediscovering my own voice and personality once again.

Not sure what kind of fucked up conclusion it is, but that's all this post is going to have. I would have written this some time ago, but I was just too damn tired and incoherent, not that it is any coherent now. Just had to expel it from my system, and here we are.

Till the next update then.

On Hitting the Top Notes on the Piccolo

In response to a post on Flute Forum where the OP wanted some tips on hitting high B♭ and other notes higher than high G for a show next week:

Well, next week can mean anything from three to seven days. Your window to get successful is very small. Just want to ground you a little before helping.

To start with, is your piccolo's headjoint pulled out very far? If yes, you may want to consider pushing it back in more and adjust how you are covering the embouchure hole/blowing to play in tune. Reason: the sizes of the tone holes are way smaller than a flute, so that extra 3mm that you pull out does make a very big difference in comparison with the concert flute. The inner taper of the piccolo is very different from the concert flute, which makes this extra length a bigger problem than you might expect.

Next, assuming you have the headjoint at the right place, start with a high G and see how you are playing it. Are your lips feeling tight? Are your cheeks squished? You need a smaller embouchure, yes, but your lips shouldn't be strained that badly -- you should open up your mouth cavity more. Higher notes does not mean ever shrinking embouchures -- it does mean faster moving air, which can be done without squeezing the lips tighter and tighter.

By the time you reach this paragraph, the only other thing to try is look for a website for piccolo fingering charts, and try the alternate fingerings for the notes that you need above that high G. Again due to the tapering, tone hole sizes, and a myriad of other things, high A, B♭, B, and C may respond better to some fingering patterns than others, and this includes even the "standard" flute fingerings. Try them all out and note which ones are firstly more responsive, then in tune -- I'm assuming that it is more important for your playing to "hit" the high notes as a transient than to do anything particularly harmonic up there.

Oh, have plenty of rest in between to relax those lip muscles, and good luck!

That first point was a personal revelation when I was messing with the GUO Grenaditte piccolo---for a long time, the high B was not sounding at all, before I finally realised that I had pulled the headjoint out for just a tad too much at around 3 mm. Once I did not bother pulling out the headjoint and just adjust the way I blow to keep things in tune, the high B miraculously showed up, clean and beautiful.

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

Lust?

A little unbelievable that it was barely a week since I last wrote something here. Time truly and surely does fly.

Today's Good Friday (or yesterday, if this entry takes longer than an hour to put together). It is the day that we remember our saviour who was crucified in lieu of us for our sins, to make good our relationship with God the Father.

It is also the day that I completed reading The Pearl, a nineteen volume old timey smut extravaganza.

``MT! Why do you admit such things out loud! Aren't you ashamed?''

What's there to be ashamed? There is a difference between reading something versus acting on something---only a fool/immature person cannot examine an opposing viewpoint/different idea regardless of their level of agreement. And I tell you, the thought that reading erotica somehow makes one more susceptible to wanting to fall into the featured debauchery is, in my case at least, largely illusionary.

If anything, I get even more turned off by the whole idea of sexual intercourse than anything else---the acts of lust as depicted in The Pearl are as immoral as one might imagine, and are generally distasteful with twenty-first century moral and ethical understanding.

The smut, it debases all the people involved, both male and female, into mindless sex addicts that are worse than animals. Super-saturating myself with this hunk of smut just enhances my overall understanding of myself that ``lust'' really isn't something that I'm into.

Again, I'm no morally upstanding individual---I too have my sins that I need to repent. But my negative reaction to lust solidifies my realisation that I need to rationalise the act of sexual intercourse to actually have some interest in it; there seems to be something missing in the way my mind is put together with respect to basic human nature.

I mean, I can sort of see how many people can have lustful thoughts ``by instinct'', but for me, I seem to need to actively will myself to do so. Don't know why, and as far as everything is concerned, don't really care since being un-lustful by nature seems to be the kind of trait that society seems to love.

🤷‍♂️

I could have stopped reading The Pearl after the first volume, but truth be told, I'm kind of running low in the number of named items in my read list, and The Pearl contributes a nice 200+ such named items.

I'm just glad that I'm done with the smut. The anonymous writers weren't particularly imaginative fellows, and there was only that many times of seeing the word ``gamahuche'' before it gets exceedingly boring---no wonder Sade wrote what he wrote, though Sade did write his infamous work before 1800s but was only published in the 1900s.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Programmed reading will go back to some non-fiction soon enough---I still have 500+ chapters of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine to go, among other things.

Till the next update.

Stella [Nagahara]

It has been a while since the last entry. Things are progressing well enough in life, and I thank the Lord for that. That said though, with this month (and thus the second quarter) finally starting, the road ahead is likely to see even more things that are happening that will strain and stress every fabric of my being.

But first, for something happy. After thinking and saving for nearly eight years, I finally got ahold of a Nagahara MINI in African blackwood, with the basic M1 headjoint.

I call her ``Stella [Nagahara]'', named after Stella Chang, better known as 张清芳, a Taiwanese songstress active in the 1980s/1990s who is well-known for her clear vocals and ability to hit the high notes. She is contemporaneous with Teresa Teng, but I decided to name my new MINI after her instead of Teresa because I find that Stella uses high notes more frequently than Teresa does, and that they always sound so clear.

That's what my MINI's timbre is like.

I will just copy wholesale what I had written in my email correspondence with Nagahara Flutes:

In terms of first impressions for the sound, it sits between the conical bore set up of a regular piccolo, and the cylindrical bore set up of the all-metal ``marching'' piccolo. For the repertoire I play (more relating to the Chinese orchestra than regular piccolo/flute music), it is of the right timbre. The added range on the low side definitely helps, though I definitely need to get used to the different resistance needed for the high notes -- almost all my flutes (used generally here to include the piccolo and dizi) vent out much earlier than the extended tube. General responsiveness across the three main registers are quite high, and the mechanisms were nimble enough to make me forget that I was playing a keyed flute as opposed to the simple one often found in the dizi (my primary instrument).

After taking Stella into rehearsal on Saturday, I have a bit more to add: she can really go high without sounding shrill, hitting concert C8 and C♯8 quite nicely, and not displaying any of the usual problems of intonation for piccolo with respect to the concert B7 note.

I would say that Master Kanichi Nagahara has achieved his exact aim of making a miniature flute with the MINI, as opposed to ``just'' a piccolo with extensions for concert C♯5, C5, and B4. The resistance (used here as a catch-all for amount of effort required to change the embouchure + air stream to sound a note at mf) is very consistent, similar to that of my S.O.S., which shares a similar geometry as it is an Armstrong 204 that has a cylindrical body bore. It is actually easier to play on Stella than the equivalent G 梆笛 for the same set of high notes, but this is hardly new since almost all piccolos play easier for the high notes once one goes beyond concert C6.

``But MT, why did you suddenly decide to pull the trigger and buy now? I thought you were `scouting around to learn more on getting a better piccolo'. What changed?''

It's hard to really say what was the big trigger. Part of it was definitely about the recollection of a statement that Sean made some time back about how Kanichi isn't exactly getting any younger, and my realisation that throughout these eight years, there was still only Nagahara Flutes that made an instrument just like the MINI. My shopping list did posit the option of either the MINI or the Braun ``small flute''. I had tried the Braun small flute and liked it, but it went down to concert C4 only. It's subtle, but if I really wanted a viable option to cover the 梆笛 range comfortably, it had to go do the concert B4 (this is the lowest note of the lowest dizi that ``counts'' as a 梆笛---the E 梆笛).

And thank the Lord for that quick thought of just pulling the trigger---I initiated the email conversation near the end of February 2023, and managed to commit to an order before the most recent price revision that saw an increase in prices across the board.

That said, I should really remove all the other piccolo options now that I have my End Piccolo, but I'll just leave them there for now as a record of high-end piccolo makers/marks.

------

With the something happy said, we'll progress to something a bit more serious. After two plus years of following Christ, and a year and change after baptism, it's finally time to actually serve instead of just being served. I don't have the kind of easy-friendliness that many long-time Christians have (I wonder if I still have trauma that I haven't sorted out, or if I'm just not good enough yet), and therefore can serve only in capacities that deal with people but in an abstract way. I have indicated interest in serving the music ministry at church, and will be going for a simple audition and a chat with the deacon in charge soon. I did send the music ministry folks my battered-ass performance resume---I'm no professional by any measure, and much of my experience comes from the Chinese orchestra tradition at an amateur level.

If God is willing, I will pass the audition and serve as a musician in the music ministry. That's the least that I can do to contribute back to the church community, seeing that I'm not good/willing to work with children, not friendly enough to be part of the greeters' ministry, and not street-wise/savvy enough to support any of the many professional skills-related ministries (why would the church want a computer scientist who has machine learning background serve using the aforementioned ``professional skill''?).

I could write more, but I suppose some 900+ words are sufficient for now. Till the next update then.