A Short Blurb

I'm always a little confused on what Sunday symbolises: is it the start of the week, or is it the end?

Traditionally, it is considered the start. But I found it mentally a little easier to consider it as part of the end of the week instead, mostly because the start of the week is considered when I need to start working on work things.

These days (for quite a while, actually) work starts on Monday for me, so it feels logically more correct to consider the week as begining on Monday.

Perhaps.

The reason I'm bringing up this rather subjective experience here is from how with each passing week since the relaxation of the COVID-19 control measures in SIN city, there's that unacknowledged urge to return to a sense of familiarity through the types of rituals and conditions that once dominated our lives before everything went side ways for more than 2 years. Whether it is due to fatigue from being on the alert for too long, or the fear of a future with greater uncertainty, it is the general sense that one gets just from existing around.

I can tell because as the one who more often than not lives as an interloper, the tolerance of my presence in general has started to wear thin.

Anyway... the weekend has passed on by quickly. I dug up more teracotta in Minecraft, replaced the signboards with item frames for my mini-productivity factory, added a glow berry farm to my industrial platform, and spent time just AFK-ing at my mob farm to get more gunpowder.

I also finished getting the latest goodies from the recent update for Vampire Survivors, which I still maintain as well worth the SGD 3.25 price tag. I mean, according to Steam, I have sunk in 55 hours into it so far, which works out to about SGD 0.06/hr. That's roughly the order of magnitude of play-time for a more regular AA/AAA game, though to be fair those are more for a one-time play through while this is an accumulation of multiple 30-minute bouts.

The heat and humidity is starting to get to me, and I'm feeling a need to crash out for the night. So that's about it for now, and till the next update then.

My Typical Day is Boring

It's yet another Friday.

I don't really have much to say. I mean, what is there to say? I wake up at 0500hrs in the morning, spend some time with God, catch up on the news over the RSS feed, do the short set of exercises from The Hacker's Diet to maintain my muscle mass, take a cold shower, brush my teeth, chug a cup of weak instant coffee to take my antihistamine, head into my room to check out other news sources online (hello /., and Reddit), start getting dressed by 0610hrs, leave the apartment by 0625hrs, take the bus between 0630hrs to 0645hrs (napping for the first 20 min and then proceeding with reading), change to the next bus at around 0730hrs to 0745hrs (mostly reading), alight at the bus stop between 0800hrs to 0810hrs, march up the hill and set up my work laptop between 0810hrs to 0825hrs while making my next mug of coffee, work till 1130hrs, hide somewhere far from my work space for one hour (spent mostly reading, unless I feel knackered, in which case I'd begin with a short nap of 15 min), make my last mug of coffee before continuing my next bout of work till 1750hrs, do my daily document back up, lock away everything except the LAN cable and monitor into the puny pedestal drawer, leave by 1815hrs, hop on the bus en route to Harbourfront (reading all the way), decide to have dinner there or otherwise, and eventually make my way home by 2030hrs, shower, chill in front of Eileen-II either reading or doing something in Minecraft or write some program or write something else (like a blog entry) or catching up on more news while simultaneously watching/listening to Hololive archives at speeds between 2.0× to 3.0× depending on the streamer and content, grab my other antihistamine and a multivitamin pill by 2330hrs, set up my mattress on the floor, set my alarm to 0500hrs the next day (0515hrs on the device, because I purposely run it 15 min faster than real-time), spend some time with God while in seiza, do my squats, do my hamstring and adductor stretches, do my crunches, then crash out by 0000hrs.

That is literally my typical day. There is hardly time for anything or anyone else.

Is this living? I don't know... what is living for a middle-aged Asian man in Singapore with a middle-of-the-line income like me anyway?

🤷‍♂️

If you know the answer, do write a comment and let me know. Because I really don't know.

------

SumatraPDF recently updated to v3.4.1 (as at writing). While it supposed to have improved features from the updated components, I do not recommend its widespread use just yet. There are two deal-breakers for me that preclude its use:

1. The F12 key to show the bookmark side panel has bad focus after, which means that after showing the bookmark side panel, one can no longer press F12 to toggle the side panel away again. As noted in the link, it will be addressed in the next release, either v3.4.2, or the pre-release of v3.5.
2. The removal of FontName and FontSize options (compare the help file on settings for v3.3.1 against the one for v3.4.1). It's a deal breaker because the default font for Ebooks (that I can't seem to change/patch directly) is Georgia, while my preferred reading font these days is Atkinson Hyperlegible just for the much better readability. I'm not a fan of the E-book format (i.e. Mobi or EPUB) that isn't PDF anyway, but the SCP Foundation tomes are necessarily in those formats due to the sheer size and unwieldiness otherwise. Reading these 3k+ pages with Georgia instead of Atkinson Hyperlegible is eye-strain city, and is a hard-pass from me.

Hopefully these will be resolved eventually.

In other news, Frescobaldi finally released a Windows build for v3.2, some 22 days after the Linux builds were released.

``MT, I thought you worked with Linux? What's with the Windows daddy-o?''

Linux is for work stuff---for not-work stuff, I use a mix of Windows+Cygwin to get things done, with a side of Linux command-line from a VM when there is absolutely no other [easy] way of doing it.

That said though, Frescobaldi in the new 22.04 LTS release of Ubuntu is broken for the same reason why v3.2 exists---Frescobaldi v3.1.3 cannot run with the Python 3.10 interpreter due to some increased strictness involving types (see Issue #1433 for an example of the class of errors). I'm not sure when the package maintainer will fix this, but that also slows/stops me from setting up a 22.04 update on machines under my control.

Anyway, that's it. It's 2315hrs as I write this sentence, and I'm just going to push this out and call it a night.

Till the next update, whenever it might be.

Thank You for Your Graciousness in Putting Up with Me

Well, the day started off nice enough.

And I think I never learn because of my obstinacy and arrogance. Not ``perceived arrogance'' or ``alleged arrogance'', but just plain ``arrogance''. I do not ``choose'' to be arrogant---it is something that appears in the way I carry myself.

It's funny because here's the definition of arrogance:

arrogant

1. exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner
2. showing an offensive attitude of superiority; proceeding from or characterised by arrogance

I say it is funny because I do not think of myself as being particularly worthy, nor do I think of myself as being particularly important. Remember that I am happy to be dead at any time, as long as it does not inconvenience other people too much, though I am too much of a coward to willingly walk towards my own death, currently preferring the more ``hopeful'' type of death that involves waiting for the natural expiry at an unknown date/time.

Probably the only thing that applies that rubs people wrongly is being of an overbearing/offensive/obnoxious attitude. So-called being ``intense''.

I cannot open my mouth: if I do so, whatever I say is considered arrogant because I try my best to reason it out based on what I have read up/learnt. I cannot keep my mouth shut: if I do so, my expression conveys a certain smugness indicating that I somehow believe that I know more than what the other person is saying.

Thus, any form of interaction will deem me as arrogant. Perhaps then the only right move is to walk away and not interact at all.

🤔

Maybe.

Or alternatively, stop engaging in what I like to do (like reading, writing, or making music), and partake in what the ``normal people'' do---be a consumer and buy all the latest gadgets, watch lots of television, have passive hobbies waiting for people to tell me what to think, engage in work that everyone can do/understand, attempt to get married, raise children, be a wage slave paying off everything until I am dead. Without the heretical thoughts put in place through all these reading and thinking, my arrogance will be curbed because I will be like everyone else.

Maybe if I fry my brain enough with different drugs, I can do that---but as it is now, I cannot see how I can change in character so drastically.

Ultimately though, I think that people are just putting up with me because they are gracious enough to. And I'm a terrible person for just living in my own little world, as done by a person who has enough privilege to do so.

Geez... just kill me already.

Nicer Separators for Read List

I'm satisfied with a little change that I managed to enact.

In my read list, I had evolved it over time to have little separators in between the list items to mark out the different years. As at today, I have finally evolved it to exactly how I'd want it:

Here's a list of the evolutions over time that I had done:

1. The first incarnation of the separator came about as a border at the top of the last entry of the year.
2. One minor adjustment I did after that was to have the right side show a border as well to make the demarcation a little more obvious. I wasn't happy that the horizontal separator did not extend into the space where the numbers were though.
3. I added more space to the separator to make it more obvious, and was starting to get annoyed at the right border being uneven---it was heavily reliant on the vertical space taken up by the list item. I also didn't like that it was impossible to know what year the separator encompassed.
4. On a whim, I switched up the list element that I was using for the separator, and the [re-]discovery of the ::after CSS3 pseudo-element allowed me to add the year through some attribute grabbing.
5. I also remembered about the whole negative margins trick and used it to set up the separator into the form that you see in the screenshot above.

There is only one draw back from this set up---if the element anchor is used, the mini-animation from accessing it highlights the entire block which includes the separator. In theory, I could cheat with using a single span element to simulate that, but it feels a bit dirty considering that span elements shouldn't really appear as children for the ol element.

Apart from fixing the separators from my read list, I also did a little house-keeping in collapsing the style-related issues of nested cite, em, and i elements through using the :is() CSS3 pseudo-class to generate the relevant Cartesian products. So now, any nested combinations of these three primarily italicised contents are consistent: un-nested, they get italicised; the next nesting adds underline effects; the next, bold; and the final converts the text to small-caps. Superb!

Anyway, that's all I want to write for now. I'm just happy that I have put to bed one of the more annoying styling issues for a while.

Till the next update... some other time.

Marking Time

With a blink of an eye, the 3-day long weekend is about to be over.

I completed The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars, & Kurt Kohlstedt. It's a guilty pleasure type of book, and in this particular case, is a survey of many of the design decisions that were made with respect to the urban city, be it organic or otherwise. It's a fun book, and the illustrations really give it that chic that made me glad that I got the dead-tree version.

Apart from that... I just played more Minecraft. This time, I decided to build an exploratory over-land rail trail in the southward direction with an initial detour to avoid crossing over my industrial square. Nearly six full shulker boxes of smooth stone were consumed, with about half a shulker box full of Jack O Lanterns to provide illumination to avoid mob spawns. I finally found one of those lush caves and grabbed some Azalea and Glow Berries---worthy additions to my farms. I also found a few more rare biomes, like the various ocean variants, the Taiga, and eventually ending at a Woodland Mansion. I'll probably lay out the rails to get me there first before attempting to subdue the Mansion---this can be a fairly long-ish project in Minecraft.

I think that's all that I care to write. I'm actually quite tired now, and am going to take a shower before turning in for the night.

Till the next update.

The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety

``Oh no! He used a bad word in his title! Let's cancel him!''

Yeah... fuck that. Who cares?

🤷‍♂️

Okay, that aside, this week has been a doozy. Very little down time, a little bout with some half-assed cold that I suspect is due to the massive temperature/humidity changes of the week and the like.

Still alive though.

So about that title. ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety`` is an obvious poke at The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson, the same guy who also wrote Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, and Compatibility and Chemistry in Relationships. He is [hopefully] not the same as Marilyn Manson, nor Charles Manson---too man-y man-sons around these days. Easy to get confused.

The book, the book is alright. It codifies what I believe any rational adult will eventually figure out on their own, that choices are what governs our journey through life (the destination being death, though what happens after is determined by whether one's a believer or otherwise), and that no matter what choices we make, it inadvertently discriminates and closes off a whole series of choices/things that we cannot reach out to. That's the high level abstract summary that holds true.

Of course, reading something like that would be as fun as having a root canal done (this is a borrowed simile---I thank God that I have a well-taken care of set of pearly whites), so it is couched in more familiar terms of ``giving a fuck'' to something. One of the important lessons within the book is to develop more intrinsic measures of progress (i.e. character development) over extrinsic ones, the reason being that intrinsic measures are under more of our own control as compared to the extrinsic ones, and with more control, the satisfaction of attaining them tends to be more complete than the extrinsic ones that are effectively some kind of luck of the draw.

Or as Saitama of One Punch Man puts it: ensuring that the You of today can beat the You of yesterday---that's progress.

I like another aphorism that complements what Manson is trying to get at in this book.

Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

In short, it's a case of ``you do you'', subjected to the usual civic-mindedness of not infringing on other people's choices as much as possible.

Speaking of ``you do you'', I did wonder what the fundamental difference between [political] liberalism and [political] conservatism. One working definition that struck me was this:

In [political] liberalism, the ideology is defined by what they don't do, while in [political] conservatism, the ideology is defined by what the do do.

In short, it seems to me that [political] liberalism's boundaries begin unbounded, and where they exist, they are defined by a decision plane that states what lies outside of the ideology's existing ideological space. So, one such boundary might be ``we do not discriminate people by their skin colour''---it means that anyone who discriminates people by their skin colour (i.e. a positive assertion of action) is outside of the [political] liberalism ideology, while those who do not, whether because they never thought of it, or if they once used to but has since decided not to, they are inside of the [political] liberalism ideology.

Comparatively, [political] conservatism's ideological boundaries always begin bounded, with new decision planes being allowed to push the boundaries outward only if it is [somewhat] consistent with existing assertions. But with a bounded system like [political] conservatism, there are few ways in which the boundaries may be pushed outward---the existing axioms within the reasoning system comprises a closed set no matter how complex the new consequences are generated. So it would seem that new candidate boundary assertions need to come from outside of the [political] conservatism's ideological boundary, i.e. from the [political] liberalism camp.

In short, neither side can exist on their own---[political] conservatism alone leads to static and staleness, while [political] liberalism in extremis leads to anarchy with no shared sense of values. It is the creative tension of boundaries between these two that allows the civil society to flourish.

``Eh MT, you talk so much cock about conservatism and liberalism. You're a Christian right? How does that fit into the picture? Isn't Christianity conservative by definition?''

A low blow indeed. In many ways, the fact that Christianity is biblically defined (i.e. from the canon) makes it a poster child of conservatism due to the rules/principles at present within the biblical canon. A central premise is that God is good, and God is all-knowing, and so the rules/principles that He set is indeed good and ought to be followed.

That part is true. But is Christianity's conservatism the same as the political conservatism we see around? That is debatable, because of a difference of opinion of biblical interpretation through suitable amounts of cherry-picking---this is the flaw of humanity, especially for those who claim their political conservatism as stemming from the Bible. Recall that the Bible has both Old and New Testaments---the New Testaments are part of the New Covenant with Jesus from which us believers derive our identity of ``Christians'' from. So, I'm not saying that the Old Testament is wrong, but I am saying that the Old Testament teachings need to be interpreted according to the New Testament in order to be of a Christian teaching; otherwise it is no different from Judaism.

Another point of note is that just because something appears in the Bible, it does not mean that it is a God-approved action. There are many different genres of writings within the Bible, and each should be interpreted and understood according to what they are. Thus, reading say 1 Samuel and claiming that it represents the rules and ordinances that God set upon us is just dumb, dangerously dumb no less.

Again, as Christians, we believe in Christ. Loving the Lord is foremost, then loving one's neighbours is next---I didn't say this, a lawyer who was thinking of tricking Jesus did (Luke 10:27), to which Jesus affirmed in the next verse (``And he said to him, `You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.' ''). The other thing is that it is not up to us to exact judgement---that role is up to the Lord Himself. Our role on Earth is to exemplify the transformation we had undergone when we declared our faith publicly, and to evangelise the lost. But evangelism does not mean forcing our beliefs upon people---we show them how our belief has changed us for the better, and God will work upon their hearts in due course.

So... long story short, Christianity's conservatism has little to do with political conservatism---the former is about conservatism of human behaviour to avoid sinning after being saved, while the latter is about enacting human rules to keep to an arbitrarily chosen set of rules that may be cherry-picked from the Bible to borrow the prestige of God's word to legitimise their agenda.

If one were a true believer, one would realise that this world is fallen, and that accruing power and wealth in this world is antithetical to what Jesus had been teaching; if anything, those who cling on mindlessly to strange notions of political conservatism act more like Pharisees than disciples of Christ.

But who am I to judge?

------

Going back to the title of this post ``The Fucked Art of Not Giving Subtlety''---that's sort of how I generally operate. I have no subtlety---life's too short to molly-coddle everyone we meet. For the most part, there's no need to engage---I don't know them, they don't know me, there's no need to give unsolicited... anything. For those who know me, I suppose they begrudgingly appreciate the unsubtley that I have, though I know that just because they can appreciate it is no pretext to keep on doing that.

And hence the modifier of ``fucked art''. Do not be unsubtle all the time---a light touch is the way to go. Observe, orient, decide, and then act.

Till the next update.

Uncharacterised Restlessness and a Mob Farm Fix

A certain restlessness is within me that I cannot describe because I cannot characterise the why.

The weekend has come, and is almost gone. I spent yesterday in a type of mental fog, just sitting in front of Eileen-II in a mostly ``head empty, no thoughts'' sort of way. Just thinking back to what I did right now, I realise that I cannot remember anything about it. Evening church service was attended, and rehearsals at TGCO were done, and the day ended.

Today, I spent the morning finishing up the bible study that was due later on in the week, and then just sat there for quite a while just stoning listlessly. I tried a bit of Hyper Light Drifter, but my heart really wasn't in it. I will say that it does play a little like another game that I had completed before, namely Hob, the last game by Runic Games, the makers of Torchlight and Torchlight II, two of my favourite games for quite a while. It's mostly wordless, with an almost minimalistic aesthetic to it.

What I did do was to tweak my mob farm once more. The previous upgrade I did for it had a major issue: while the dual layers gave more space for mobs to spawn, the alternating checker board pattern, combined with the use of slabs to prevent the spawning of hole-clogging spiders meant that after running the farm for long enough, mobs were being trapped on top of these slabs while being blocked by the full-sized blocks in the second level. This meant that eventually, the mobs would all be trapped instead of fall freely down the delivery shaft, leading to the mob cap being reached while not having any mobs for annihilation at the AFK area.

🤦‍♂️

That was bad, of course. The fix I did was to tear out both levels, clear out the mob collection floor of water, and rebuild them to use the more traditional four water-channel mob farm schema. The idea is to have four 2-wide water channels with a single source block on the farthest end to push mobs that fall into them down the shaft. Spawning platforms are built in the quadrants created by the water channels. I built the second layer above it using slabs set in the upper half of the height, with an additional platform over the central drop shaft to prevent mobs that spawned on the second floor from getting too much fall damage from direct fall. I wired up the red stone lamps that I ran on the outside of the second layer previously such that when I pulled the lever to turn on the maintenance lights for the first layer, it also turned on the second one. ``Maintenance mode'' was basically activated through turning on the red stone lamps to light the interior, followed by me falling straight into the ocean to put about 128+ blocks difference to force a de-spawning of all the existing mobs. This would clear out the spawn chambers, allowing safe entry for maintenance.

Anyway, I had to do some adjustments. In order to build the water channels, and to make it a little more spider-clog proof, I had to raise the effective height by one block, which mean that I had to raise the floor of the drop shaft by one block also to ensure that fall damage was insufficient to kill any mobs that fell. That was quite easy to enact---I just shifted the apparatus up by one block while adding another layer of hoppers. There was some minor tweaking of the surrounding access point to make it easy to still reach in to whack at the mobs' feet, but it was just using stairs correctly.

After all those changes, the mob farm was tested, and I'm happy to report that it works well. The spawn rate does feel high enough, and it had the advantage of also allowing spiders to fall to the auto-kill lava layer as well. This meant that I could harvest string for free, or have spider eyes if I decide to do some manual killing. To be had though, spider mobs are still quite rare when it comes to falling through the drop shaft---this is purely due to the passive mob farm design. I was contemplating if I should build an active mob farm design instead, but did not follow through because it involved an almost completely inverted design (the AFK spot is above the body of the mob farm). It was way to drastic for something that I absolutely didn't really need to have in the most efficient ways since I am playing my map as a mostly Survival mode, switching over to Creative mode once in a while to handle stuff that would be fun but would require too much busy work [that I didn't feel like engaging in] to get.

Having the working canal-design mob farm with spiders meant that I did not have to build that other spider-only mob farm next to it. I spent some time taking that edifice down to reclaim the materials, and it was nice.

------

Today's Mother's Day. I had pre-ordered 4× regular-sized pizzas from the venerable Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza to celebrate the occasion with family at home. As stated in their story, they have been around since 1995 in SIN city, which translates to being around during much of my teenage years and into my adult ones. Their pizzas are delicious, and are good value for money most of the time. We always love their pizzas.

I also liked their new ordering system. Throughout the years, I have experienced about 3  of their systems. The first was the usual hotline method with their catchy number, namely 241--0--241 (before 2002), and then 6--241--0--241, all the while referring to their menu which someone would have lying about as a pamphlet/flyer. Then there was the time when they were using Foodpanda to handle their orders. And now, it was back to using their own internal system.

As long as they don't stoop to demanding that I install some weird-ass app on my phone (or elsewehere) just to order pizza, I figure that I'll continue to support them. They are my go-to for home delivery pizza after all.

Anyway I'm beat. I should go get a shower and then prepare to turn in for the night. The long weekend week is segueing into a more regular work-week, and there are things that are coming this week that does require some level of concentration that I may not be looking forward to. The things we do to earn our coin.

On another note, the sheer stupidity of this new plan of effectively holding citizens hostage to the government through only issuing digital certificates of birth and death is something that I cannot comprehend. The excuse that was put up sounds great in theory---everything is authenticated and directly from source, reducing data loss/theft, where ``...government agencies and private entities, such as industry associations and financial institutions, can use QR codes included on all digital certificates to verify their authenticity''.

But I take offense to that. Here's why. The servers that control access to these digital data are government owned, and by virtue of the design of information systems, any access of them via URLs (implied through the QR code) will be logged. This means that if someone were to be doing any sort of business with any entity that requires the use of the birth certificate (there are very few reasons for these, the most prominent being emigration), the SIN city government will know about it, whether they ought to know it or not. Sure they can say things like the law exists to protect the information and not for surveillence of the citizenry... but we all know that laws are only as good as they are actively enforced, and even then, laws can and are often changed. See also the latest brouhaha over the US Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade.

People will also throw about the ``I have nothing to hide from the government, so why should I care about this?'' excuse to claim that I am over-reacting.

In an extreme scenario, anyone whom the government has a beef with and needing asylum elsewhere can, in theory, be fucked over by having the access to the digital version blocked through a ``technical issue'', real or manufactured, i.e. the said person can be made into an unperson with no effort on the part of the government. This is undesirable for individual liberties. It does not matter if you have ``nothing to hide''---in the face of power, if any one of us in the minority is not safe, then none of us are safe for the sole reason that we will never know when we might end up being in the minority.

A more prosaic scenario is that the reliance of a highly complex and expensive device like a laptop or mobile phone with associated high dependencies of network connection and associated working infrastructure is just begging to be taken down---all the benefits of centralisation are also weaknesses in times where these very documents are needed the most, in crises where complex supply chains and infocomm infrastructures are strained to their limits. It also places an undue amount of pressure on the economically less able to pay more indirect taxes through having to fund for all these devices/services just to exercise their rights and privileges as citizens. That is not right either.

It is also much easier [relatively speaking] to preserve a physical document over a digital one. The skeptical can be asked to do a simple exercise: can you easily retrieve the file that you saved into your 3½ ″ floppy disk? And no, this is not a fake problem---``bit rot'' is a real issue for modern day archivists who are trying to preserve the digital history. The rule allows people to download the digital certificate for safe-keeping in their physical device, but considering how the average person operates, the digital copy is bound to end up in some third-party cloud storage provider...

...which totally nullifies all the argument about having a centralised system for security purposes.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

This does not affect me directly---I'm so old that my birth certificate will never be affected by this new rule. But it does make me think even harder of having a child in the first place, not that I want to have children.

Each day that passes by just keeps reinforcing the fallenness of this world, and how we are all really just slaves. The only difference is that the figleaf that was keeping us from this realisation is starting to get increasingly transparent the more the polities start applying their traditional skulduggery using infocomm technology.

*sigh*

Till the next update.

NEW FONE WHO DIS? Season 2

Oof. New phone, new contract, pay 29% more, but gain 15× more mobile data, 4× more storage, 2× more RAM, and a whole host of other benefits.

Eh, just check out this comparison between my old work horse of the Pixel 2 XL versus my new Xiaomi 12.

If I had a choice, I wouldn't be upgrading. But there is little choice to be made. The old super-grandfathered plan was really too pricey for what it was providing, and I am getting concerned over the fate of my Pixel 2 XL, considering its age. I've had it since 2018-08-22, and today is 2022-05-05... that makes it roughly 3.7 years. That's a pretty long time for a daily carry device.

But who am I kidding? I just wanted a new start.

Let's see... new EZ-Link card (qvssref sebz bar gung V tbg sbe fbzrbar ryfr orsber), new ink (qvssref sebz gur bar V hfrq gb jevgr yrggref jvgu orsber), new phone (n qvssrerag qrivpr sebz gur bar V hfrq gb fraq fubeg zrffntrf qnvyl jvgu orsber), new gig bag (qvssref sebz gur bar gung unq cngpurf znqr ol fbzrbar orsber), and of course, a new job.

Almost all the utilitarian things that have undergone their associated wear and tear have been replaced, their sentimentality pushed aside.

Stuffie though... Stuffie is still the same. I love Stuffie---Stuffie is irrevocably mine, a gift for me to keep. Stuffie reminds me of the good times, and reminds me that happiness sometimes do come in small packages, and is what you want to make of it. My new work place (it's not really new considering that I've worked there for four months now) does not have enough table space to set up my takoyarnie army, but remember that I only started bringing out more and more critters to keep my sanity when things started to go sideways for whatever reason.

Anyway... yes. A new start, in many ways.

One can keep telling oneself that one has moved on, but one never has truly moved on until one has taken actions to demonstrate that one has moved on. And the more I keep thinking/talking about this, the more narcissistic this all feels.

Not sure what to feel about that.

There are strange stirrings from the US, and I'm not comfortable about it. I had said some time back that it would be years before I was comfortable to visit the US, and it seems that what I had said then holds true even today. There are also other odd rumblings elsewhere, and overall the vibes I'm getting from the world at large Is Not Good. I think too many people who are in power have gotten too drunk with their power, and that many have convinced themselves that they have subjugated the very people that they were supposed to lead (not rule over, mind you) to be completely pliant.

I fear that there might have been some rather serious miscalculations, and that the masses are slowly building up in their restlessness against what they believe to be injustices. It does not matter if they are politically conservative or liberal---the voices of dissent are rising from the quiet background noise to something that is metaphorically audible as whispers. Soon it will reach talking, and then shouting, before an invisible level is breached and outright violence breaks out.

Oh, I didn't mean just the US for that matter; I do mean it for places all over where there is seemingly no good trade-off from the oppression. People are willing to accept some oppression if whatever they get in return is considered to be of greater value. I am not declaring that they are wrong/right---I am merely making an observation.

Well... there's not much that I can do except to pray. Not to pray for world peace, but to pray that I fulfill God's purpose for me here and then fuck off to Judgement Day before reaching into eternity.

Fallen world is fallen. We can fight entropy, but it will always win in the end.

Always.

朝顔の伝説

Okay, it's stupid o'clock, but lemme tell you a story.

A story of how I got hold of my bottle of asa-gao iroshizuku ink.

For a long time, I was using the Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black (packed in 62.5 mℓ bottles). This was a relative cheap and wonderful work horse ink that I used for my Pelikan Souverän M400. As seen in the sample scribbles from nearly 13 years ago, the colour is lovely.

But the recent years of using the same make of ink saw a general degradation. Gone was the blue---what was left behind was some ugly fading gray mess that I found to be utterly disgusting and unreflective of what it used to be. It might have been due to an exceptionally old batch of ink (the bottle was white capped instead of black), or it could be due to my changing taste, I just didn't like what I saw.

It also didn't help that the new Pelikan inks were more complicated. While Pelikan 4001 inks are available now (albeit in smaller than 62.5 mℓ bottles after their rebranding), they were much harder to find in SIN city. Much of the Pelikan ink series revolved around their ``Edelstein'' series, which all had wonderfully misleading colour names, super high price point (we're talking SGD30 vs SGD4 here), and in smaller quantities (50 mℓ vs 62.5 mℓ, resulting in a comparisong of 0.60 SGD/mℓ compared to 0.064 SGD/mℓ) during a time where I was more price conscious.

Which brings me to today (or thereabouts). I was running very low on my blue-black ink, and decided to finally look for a replacement. I didn't bother with trying to hunt down the Pelikan stuff, but instead turned to the iroshizuku series of inks from Pilot. The price point was similar to that of the Pelikan Edelstein series, and had similar wacky abstract names. But there was one big difference that swayed me towards going for the iroshizuku inks.

I knew I could find them easily.

I saw them in Tokyu Hands before, and I was pretty sure that I had seen them in Books Kinokuniya as well; a prior search online also revealed CityLuxe as another potential source with physical presence (I've not physically checked them out). As a brand presence, Japan's Pilot was definitely more visible compared to Germany's Pelikan in SIN city.

And so I found myself en route via bus to Jewel Changi, where a larger Tokyu Hands branch was at. The trip was not worthy of mention, other than the observation that there were still people in this time and age who would watch videos at full volume in a public but enclosed area with no headphones. I zoomed in to the store, and went to where I remembered they stored the inks (second store floor), and checked out the asa-gao labelled drawer.

Wait a minute---that's no asa-gao! It was a yama-guri for some reason. That made no sense... and so I looked about. There were 15 mℓ bottles of asa-gao next to the transparent drawers for the 50 mℓ bottles, but those were sold more dear with stranger requirements (need to purchase 3 at once for a grand total of about SGD33, which works out to 0.73 SGD/mℓ, compared to the 0.44 SGD/mℓ for the 50 mℓ bottle at about SGD22), and there was no way to tell if one could buy three of the same colour in the first place. I looked about as much as I could, and was going to settle for a tsuki-yo (sort of a more blue type of blue-black) instead. As I walked about, I made a side discovery of the black 4.0--8.5mm uniPAINT marker PX-30 was from Tokyu Hands instead of Popular, and picked two up.

Then I went over to the fountain pens corner and just browsed the display drawers. And there, tucked in a little unnoticed corner, was a 50 mℓ bottle of asa-gao just sitting there, without its gray string necktie.

I was... shocked, to put it mildly. It fuelled my hopes, and so I boldly asked the staff member who was operating the automated engraving machine if there were any more asa-gao stocks left as I could not find any among the drawers. He acknowledged my question and told me to wait a little as he was servicing the other customer's engraving requests. I nodded in assent, and watched him multitask on the controlling computer to pull up their internal stock take. After settling the other customer's needs, he turned to me and informed me that the system said that they still had stock, and that he would head out to the stacks to find it for me.

I waited eagerly.

He came back after a while with an ashen look on his face, apologetically telling me that he could not locate the stock.

This was when I pointed out that bottle in the corner of the display drawer, and asked him if that counted as being part of the stock as well. There was a chance that it was part of the display and not for sale---it was a display drawer for fountain pens after all, possibly with the ink wells surrounding them as a kind of decoration.

He was a bit stunned, did a double-take, and realised that the bottle was indeed of asa-gao after removing it from the drawer to examine it. And he said that yes it was that stock that the system said they had---he hadn't realised that they would put a bottle so far away from the rest of the bottles.

I thanked him profusely, and headed off to the cashier's on the first store floor and paid for my purchase.

To say I was delighted is probably a severe understatement. I could only thank God quietly for having such good fortune. I ended my time in Jewel Changi by heading off to NY Verdan Bar and Grill, where I enjoyed a lovely steak, tater tots, apple cider, and a tiramisu.

The bus trip home was also not very noteworthy, other than the further observation of people still watching videos on their phones at full volume in public, coupled with singing(?!) in the bus.

🤦‍♂️

I changed the ink on my Pelikan Souverän M400, and wrote a new dead-tree journal entry. The colour difference was literal night and day (asa-gao literally means ``Morning Glory''). Since it is my dead-tree journal, I can't really post any samples here. Take my word that it is a much brighter blue than the blue-black from the scribble samples from before.

This entry is starting to run a little too long, so I'll just add one last point before posting it: I could have gone through this entire purchasing process online, but I don't see a need to do so when I live in a place as accessible as SIN city. Besides, it's yet another 4-day weekend---I do need to get out of the apartment to do something just to ensure I don't get a fat ass.

Anyway, it's getting real late. It's still a public holiday... today (Tue), and I would like to do some stuff later on too. And thus, sleep is still needed, remembering that I generally do not sleep past sun-up.

Till the next update then.

Edit: Here's a small scan of the sample after I have had some sleep:

Lovely colour, ain't it?

May Day May Day May Day...?

It's the First of May. Jonathan Coulton has some choice words for this date (and season). Before you go crazy, I just want to point out the lyrics are NSFW, so don't listen this in public with no earphones.

One really shouldn't be listening to music with no earphones as a general rule of thumb anyway...

There are just some phrases that auto-trigger some memories. ``First of May'' is one of those, ``I'm on a Boat'' is another, ``Long long time ago...'' is yet one more.

Songs that I grew up to? Close... more like songs I aged into adult-hood to. Those were some fun times.

Diversions aside, the past two days of the weekend was on a different level of comfiness. I overdid Hack Day last Wednesday among other things, and I paid the price with some really messed up head space. But despite all that tiredness and weirdness, I came to a startling realisation.

I honestly do not know how to be a husband of any sort, godly or otherwise.

For some reason, when I started to picture myself in a domestic relationship, I suddenly came to a blank. A literal blank. I just... couldn't see it happening.

It wasn't even the case of ``oh I'm out of a relationship and thus cannot picture who my wife would be''. It was literally a ``I just cannot see myself living in a domestic arrangement''.

And I don't know why.

Does it terrify me? A little... not enough to be unduly worried, but enough to realise that eternal singleness might be the true life path of mine.

I mean, I've been readying myself for that for quite a while.

It's okay---people are terrifying. Trust is not something to be given freely---look where I ended up each time I decided to trust someone. Anyone who claims otherwise has been exceedingly lucky, or has managed to block every single bad memory of trust that has failed.

------

In other news, I've started on SanctuaryRPG (Black Edition). I have mine on GOG.com for a while, and I must say, it has that ``head empty---no thoughts'' type of fun that I crave after working my head too hard. It is reminiscent of some MUDs that I played before, and is related to an old idea I had about a text-based duelling system. I still haven't finished a run, but this is to be expected.

Anyway, the weather conditions are starting to get ridiculous once more. Night time interior temperatures are at 30 °C, with humidity in the 60% to 70% range. Without air-conditioning, it's just going to be a grind to get enough sleep.

Tomorrow and the day after are both public holidays, one being the extension of today's Labour Day holiday (being on a Sunday and what-not), the other being Hari Raya Puasa. In calendars that were printed much earlier, the two gazetted day-offs were swapped because Hari Raya Puasa was originally slated to be on Monday, which pushed the day off-in-lieu for Labour Day to a Tuesday. This was eventually rectified through the various religious authorities who did their usual computations/observations to reach their associated declarations.

Urgh... I think that's all I can write for now. It's getting muggy.

Till the next update then.

How Did They Mess Up Making Public Transport Payment Actually Convenient?

I spent a large part of my off-hours in the evening attempting to sort out the mess that is auto-reload of my new EZ-link card.

For the busy, I failed: there will be no auto-reloading of my EZ-link card from now on.

For the less busy, here's a longer narrative.

SIN city uses the contactless (wrongly named, since we still need to contact the card to the reader to ensure it gets read properly anyway) card that is run by the EZ-link company. This EZ-link card has a built-in ``expiry date'' of around five years---I suppose there's a technical reason, if not for the policy one of ensuring that any new technology will be rolled out eventually without having to support too many legacy cards out there.

The normal way of topping it up (or ``reloading'' the said card) is to use one of the ticketing machines found ubiquitously at MRT stations and bus interchanges and pay using one of the standard cashless payment mechanisms to add value to the card.

Then there's the auto-reload way of linking it via a GIRO order. For the confused, a GIRO (short for General Interbank Recurring Order) is a system that allows direct payment via bank transfers within SIN city between participating banks and associated billing organisations. This system of auto-reloading for the travel cards has been in place since the late 1990s, from the old magnetic farecards of yesteryear to the current generation of CEPAS cards (check out this CNA article for some details).

To say that it is convenient is to severely undersell it.

Fastforward to today.

My old card is about to expire this year, and so it was time to get a replacement. It's my third overall card ever since the contactless farecards were in use (or my second replacement). I did my due diligence of heading to the EZ-link website to find out about how to enable the beloved feature in my new card.

To my horror, I discovered several things:

1. They phased out GIRO for regular cards, (but kept it for concession cards);
2. Any auto-top up required the installation of yet another app onto one's mobile phone with its associated finagling; and
3. There was a severe restriction of payment methods available for actually doing the top-up.

I verified this myself while going through the process to see if there was any way around it.

I couldn't install the app in my standard phone because my Google Play account was tied to the US for some reason, and the app limits itself only to SIN city Google accounts. Changing countries involved surrendering payment details to the Google Play store, an action that I refuse to partake because I do not intend to purchase anything from the Play store (need to know basis). And even if I did, there were a whole bunch of other waiting times that were just not worth it.

That was not that big a problem---I had an alternative phone that could set it up.

Then I underwent the whole song-and-dance of adding a payment method. I only have a debit card, and the app allowed me to proceed with the whole registration process, only to fail when I tried assigning the card to the auto-top up. Now the debit card that is verified (through Stripe, no less), but is grayed out.

What does it mean? I have no fucking clue.

Reading the reviews, it turns out that the app used to allow debit cards too... but they were mysteriously removed. So now the app is effectively useless for anyone who doesn't have a credit card. There were also other reports on how the NFC feature was a hit-and-miss, and there were weird double-deduction issues for payment, with resolutions taking as long as three weeks.

🤦‍♂️

I feel like I've dodged a bullet there. It's okay, I can be a peasant and just top it up manually. It works out to be around SGD50 a month for me anyway, so it's not that big a deal. The routes I take tend to pass by some kind of ticketing machine, and there's always the ATM top-up route if I'm really lazy.

``But MT, why don't you have a credit card?''

Good question. Short answer: I don't feel like getting one. I don't spend often enough to justify holding one of these ticking time bombs that implode if I don't pay enough attention to it.

There was an alternative plan of using the so-called SimplyGo account-based payment option. They touted a lot of benefits, but the actual implementation sounded even dodgier to me than the stunts that EZ-link was pulling.

No feedback on the amount left on entry/exit, even heavier dependence on the existence of a mobile phone (with associated app and payment method), more finagling to ensure that the correct payment method is used, and the creation of a definite point of failure that is the mobile phone with dodgy NFC capabilities.

Yeah... hard pass.

I did muse that if I had to have a bloody good reason to spend nearly 100k on a new car, it would be to avoid all these increasingly bullshit nonsense for basic public transport travel.

And yes, I was sufficiently annoyed at the whole sordid affair that I took the time to write something here as we near stupid o'clock, instead of turning in early in preparation for yet another work day of meetings.

Till the next update then.

``I'm Tired, Boss''

``I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having me a buddy to be with to tell me where we's going to, coming from, or why. Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world... every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head... all the time. Can you understand?''

---Stephen King, The Green Mile

There are days that I feel like that. Is today one of the days? It is a little too early to tell.

That scene as played by Michael Clarke Duncan in the film adaptation was one that stayed with me throughout all these years. A quiet, simple scene that was full of emotion that I feel ill-equipped to describe properly, despite being some kind of a quasi-writer myself (or was it just a hack, in the sense of the generalised ``hacker'' that I keep alluding to?).

I do feel the compelling urge to just want to hug something or someone and just curl up and sleep with it/them in my arms, forgetting about the world, even for a moment, and feeling that sense of safety and comfort that seems sorely missing in my life these days.

``Eh MT, thought you were a Christian? Doesn't God provide you with that kind of support? If you can still feel like this, does it mean that you're not really that faithful a believer after all, and are just as phoney as those who proclaim the prosperity gospel, right?''

It... doesn't work that way. God's promise in the form of Jesus' sacrifice at the cross and His subsequent resurrection is about fulfilling the law of having sinful humankind be reconciled with God, after the Fall of Adam and Eve for disobeying God. It is about future glory, and the cultivation of the soul through the Holy Spirit to be ready for when we are done with our time on the mortal plane.

It was never about achieving some kind of ``heaven on earth'' state, where there is no pain, no anguish in the now. As long as I am still bound by my flesh, I can and will still suffer whatever nonsensical temptations that my flesh brings with it to me---that's the core concept behind being a disciple of Christ. The realisation that we are all sinners, and even though Jesus has redeemed us from God's wrath through His death and resurrection, we need to live up to our regenerate selves through taking up our cross daily, to deny ourselves against sin, to follow Him.

So yes, while my fate in the far future into eternity is assured, I still need to live through this life first.

Speaking of living through this life first, I recently read Holy Sexuality and the Gospel: Sex, Desire, and Relationships Shaped by God's Grand Story by Christopher Yuan. The key takeaway from it is that an ego-centric identity is the true sin that we should all be aware of and work against. Part of the transformation of a believer is to shift the ego away from personal self-interest towards one that is God-centric (or more specifically from the New Testament, that is Jesus-centric since Jesus being both Man and God is infinitely more identifiable by us as humans). People who start declaring this identity or that identity, or prematurely judging people in terms of their actions as being sinful or otherwise have both sinned, no matter their self-declared intentions, the sin being completely ignoring God's ultimate moral authority over all. That as believers in a church body, it is our duty to help our brothers and sisters in Christ to redirect themselves towards a life that is centred upon Jesus, while keeping in mind that we are no better than they ourselves, and that all are sinners who need Jesus to save them (see Matthew 7:1--29). Religious hypocrisy is one of the biggest pet peeves of Jesus that He keeps pointing out to in the gospels, and it makes me sad that despite having the entirety of the Holy Bible today, we still see that as a norm.

Dr Yuan does a better job at explaining all these than I---he is with a PhD on this topic after all---and I think that this overarching theme used in reframing of what has been largely a series of cherry-picked skirmishes is helpful in seeing the world anew.

It does give me comfort. But again, I am still human, and need to work through some crap still.

------

Theological discursions aside, I went back to my Minecraft map and did some quality of life adjustments. I moved my Nether wart plot to make space to grow me some cocoa beans that I had grabbed from my deforestation runs in the jungle biome way out in the map. After doing that, I built a couple of automated farms for my melons and pumpkins, and situated them on top of my manual farm.

The last thing I did was to build a small and simple lava farm in preparation for future builds where I would need stupid amounts of lava without necessarily having to hunt for these pools in the world. Unlike the video that is present in the linked-to page, mine is literally just an enclosed lava source block with attached pointed dripstone and a cauldron beneath it. I do have 2 double-chests worth of lava from deep mining before, but it's always good to have a renewable source somewhere within reach as well.

Anyway, I think I'll go for a ride on my bicycle. It feels right, and I've been too tired throughout the week to do so---time to rectify that.

Till the next update.

A Short Entry

Today was rough.

There were times when I was just sitting there, realising that the past had no meaning other than random pangs of pain from memories from those who hurt me, and that the future was not worth it to look at.

It didn't help that I was reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, and was at the part where Fat Charlie was prevented from reaching home by Spider, where the latter took the opportunity to... get fresh with the former's fiancée.

That made me irrationally angry.

I'm feeling a bit better as I write this, but that dark cloud still hovers nearby.

I know, because I can feel it.

Anyway, perhaps it is time to do some mindless click booming with Ghostlore.

Sorry this entry is this short. Till the next update.

End of 4-day Long Weekend

And with that, this very long 4-day weekend comes to a close, and the usual daily grind returns once more in about ten or so hours.

Was it a ``productive'' break? Depends on what it means by ``productive''---if it is referring to getting work done, then hell no because I refuse to work over non-working hours if I can help it for the two simple reasons that 1. life is too short to be spent on working for not my owned business and 2. I'm not paid for over-time anyway. Moreover, work is never-ending---if work truly ends, then either one is finally made irrelevant at the job that one was working in, or the company/business is at a dead end and have literally nothing else to do.

Now, if ``productive'' was meant in a way that is more tailor-made to the fact that it was a break, then in some ways, it had been quite productive. I completed Psychonauts 2, and by ``complete'' I do mean 100%-ing it too, collecting all that is collectible and maxing out all my character upgrades.

I like Psychonauts 2. It's a 3D platformer with RPG elements, a genre that I honestly don't play much of due to the general requirement of using a controller [with twin analogue sticks] to operate. The closest in genre to it is those third-person action RPGs (think The Witcher 3, something from the Batman/Arkham series), but those I tended to play with keyboard and mouse... just because. 3D platformers with controllers are something of a recent thing for me, with the latest prior to Psychonauts 2 being Bayonetta for the PC, which I abandoned about half-way through due to some serious input lag issues.

I enjoyed the exploratory aspects of Psychonauts 2. The combat mechanics were a little clunky at times since certain enemies could only be dealt with using one of the eight skills (that were mapped to the four shoulder buttons/triggers for activation). Most of the time though, three of the four PSI-based weapons (or skills) are more or less permanently assigned---one for the AOE fire damage, one for effectively ``fast move'', and one for medium range shooting, leaving only one button for whatever ``special'' skill needed. I usually assign the slow-time skill to that button---that slowing of time allows a higher relative DPS to be applied to the enemies, which is always great and is a more general but effective tactic.

I'm bad at the actual platforming though, mostly because judging distances are hard even when one has control over the camera---this was made particularly worse with moving platforms over void with collectibles (that cast no shadow) overhead. Thankfully, there was an option in the game menu that allowed the negation of fall damage from failed platforming, and that made the gameplay smoother than it should, given my not-so-great 3D platforming capabilities.

It was a fun game, and I definitely enjoyed the 40+ hours that I had spent in it.

------

In other news, Vampire Survivors introduced a new mechanic called ``Arcana'' to their basic gameplay loop. At this point, I'm not really sure what to feel about it---it does add a little variety to the builds, but it is starting to feel like it may reach Binding of Isaac levels of randomised gameplay, which sort of defeats the quick fun that is the draw of Vampire Survivors? It's related to the issue I have with the cross-game skills meta---there is really no reason why the order of purchase of a skill upgrade should matter in the cost of getting the next available level. What I mean is, there should be no difference in the overall cost of (say) upgrading in the order ``ABC'' as opposed to ``BCA'', or any other order, for that matter, for the three cross-game skills of A, B, and C.

------

On a separate note, Ghostlore is finally in Early Access stage on Steam. Ghostlore is a game made in SIN city, and is based on the mythology of the SEA region. It's a hack-and-slash built along the same vein as ye olde Diablo, but with some interesting mechanics that differ from the regular skill tree. I tried their demo some time back and found it interesting enough to keep an eye out on, and when they finally released their Early Access a few days ago, I just snapped it.

There are some instabilities at the moment, and I will probably play a bit more on it in a few days once the more obvious bugs are fixed. I think this might be a cool game to look forward to, if the developers keep up what they have done so far.

------

Okay, game-related stuff aside, there is little else to talk about over the four-day long weekend. I mean, okay I attended church service for Good Friday in person, and the Easter service this morning via live-stream, but those aren't exactly things that I generally write about here anyway. I mean, it's a worship service to God... the general contents are more or less the same, and while there is definitely reflection involved with the message that was preached, much of it probably falls into the ``better to put them into the paper journal instead'' category.

I think that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Good Friday

Today is Good Friday.

It is the day that we remember the crucifixion of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. He died on the cross as propitiation for our sins, and through His work on the cross, we are now reconciled with God and have eternal life.

``But MT, this does not make any sense! There is no scientific evidence to prove any of your statements here!''

If I were trying to convince someone [who values the scientific method] with my statement, then I admit that there are no scientific evidence that can be provided ever, for the simple reason that Christ's entering of the world (as divinity entering humanity through history, as Pastor likes to remind us) is an event that cannot be replicated/repeated the way scientific experiments can be. There are many different types of evidence out there, and each of them serve a slightly different purpose in how and what it is that they can support the claims.

God is Creator (another unprovable statement within science), and as such He is situated outside of the natural world (much like how the system administrator of a Linux operating system sits outside of the operating system proper). He encompasses all that is knowable, eventually knowable, and never knowable, by us. He is as real to me as any phenomenon that has actual effects but unexplainable causes to you---the moniker ``God'' is what we have chosen to give Him while referring to Him. His own name for Himself is simply I AM, a simple logical axiomatic assertion that self-substantiates with no need for anything else within the logic framework.

To refuse Him is to refute that single statement that He is, and there will never be a way to prove/disprove that within the confines of what we have to work with. It is, in many senses of the word, a leap of faith, something that one has to make up their minds on to know it ``deep within their bones''.

``Okay MT, you don't have scientific evidence... fine. You claim historicity... then show me the historic evidence!''

The Holy Bible exists. It is the inspired Word of God that is without error. It holds Truth in it---the Truth of what it means to be a human in relation to the literal pinnacle of the Moral Good. The New Testament itself encompasses all that is to be said about Jesus, His Ministry and Mission, what happened after, and what will happen in the end. The remarkable thing about it all is the sheer lack of pomp and overall low-keyness of His work. He did not operate the way kings and other people of high places were ``supposed to'' operate befitting of their role---there were no big flashy parades, there was no hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, there was no demand that people adhere to man-made social rules that had no linkage with God's commandments, and more importantly, there was no distinction of who is to be saved and who isn't by birth---it was all by faith and faith alone.

Events in the New Testament can be matched with other contemporary sources to mark their historicity---scholars have been doing that for years now, and it would be a disservice of me to not acknowledge their efforts. If the New Testament did not stand up to the scrutiny of the work earnest scholars, then it would be the biggest news to hit everyone, considering the sheer number of people who claim to be Christians (cultural or otherwise).

``Okay... I suppose I could look up the scholars' works on the New Testament for historicity. What about the Old Testament and its whole lot of contradictions then?''

The Old Testament is the backdrop of who Jesus is (as well as the mission that He is given), and should be understood as a collection of many different types of writings. Some are more documentary of events (in which case, the moral message is not as the text writes, but as the text appeals to---the actual text records the actions of the parties involved), some are actual prophecies embedded in the record of actions taken by people, and some are songs that are sang by the people. Usually it is the pre-historical stuff that gets people grinding their gears (Genesis, specifically).

How does one conceive and record pre-history in a form that exemplifies the start of history? That in itself is a common problem, both in the Old Testament sense, and in a more regular and ``common'' scientific sense in the secular world. To be precise, even the modern treatment of pre-history is superlatively vague---the actual [physical] evidence that we have of pre-history is actually quite patchy, and the further we go back in time, the larger the spans of time between the samples of evidence that we base our inferences from, and all these under the twin assumptions of a 4.5 Ga Earth and 14 Ga universe. Part of the reason lies with the sensitivity of our detection methods---from the crudest of observations we can only surface the largest of events; with gradual refinements of said observations, we start to surface the more mundane. Eventually the sensitivity of our methods can unearth the most mundane of everyday existence, up to the entropic floor where natural processes wipe out all the other micro-evidence.

We get the benefit of updates over time, while the pre-historical stuff in the Old Testament do not. Hence, we are always seemingly applying the most up-to-date understandings against a piece of writing that has been around for longer than 1.5 ka---an unfair comparison, perhaps? More importantly though, the pre-historical account in Genesis serves as an introduction to the more important theme that the Old Testament wants to convey---that humankind are sinful with respect to the Moral Good that is God, and that God cannot not punish Sin due to His very nature.

As for the contradictions, it's just cherry-picking all the way down. Many love to poke fun at the Holy Bible by claiming contradictions by picking a single verse that says (for example) ``killing is bad'' (say Deuteronomy 5:17) and then pointing out that another says ``killing is justified'' (say Exodus 22:19 or something), and declaring a contradiction.

🤦‍♂️

Literal cherry-picking. I don't think I want/need to say more. For the confused, remember that any and all citations, no matter where, need to be taken in context for them to make sense. A single line conveying a thought may be part of a piece of satire (for example) that completely negates what the surface meaning is. In a similar way, just because a particular verse appears in the Holy Bible does not mean that it is a factual assertion---the type of writing that it is appearing in (recording of an event, prophecy, parable, poetry), as well as the immediate context in which the verse is embedded in, needs to be taken into account as well.

``Alright, alright... I can sense your annoyance, MT. But why are you talking about all these now? Are you trying to say something?''

In a way, yes. I am declaring myself as a disciple of Christ, in a fairly public way; and this is after my baptism some time back. But I am also declaring that this declaration is just my own, and that I have no intention of demanding that everyone submit to the same beliefs that I do. I would be happy to share whatever little I know with whomever is interested, bringing them to the more learned Christian when their interest goes beyond what I have comprehended and can explain, and defend my own beliefs to someone up to the point beyond which it is just bickering for the sake of bickering, but I will not follow the paths of those who rely on force and deceit to evangelise the Word of the Lord.

Because for Him, the means is as important as the ends.

Additional Day Off, and The Mahabharata

Today's an additional day off as declared by the senior of senior management, and it explains why I'm sitting here at home, ``enjoying'' the cloyingly muggy-ass weather.

Sleep is something that is really important to me these days. I find that for each day where I don't get enough sleep (``enough'' being at least 6.5 hours), I tend to start the day really groggy. It gets a little mitigated with the amounts of caffeine I imbibe through the dual outcome of regular caffeining up and clearing out the old stock of 3-in-1 instant coffee satchets in the office (if I don't drink it, it will just be wasted when expired), but like all regular caffeine users, that ``high'' eventually goes away over repeated use due to the body developing resistance to it.

This means that by around 1400hrs, I would start to lose it, despite having yet another milder boost at around 1230hrs or so.

I think I need to take this more seriously, especially since I have started to incorporate alternate-day cycling trips that make use of the modified Northeast Riverine Loop. That loop is roughly 12 mi long (around 18+ km, both numbers pulled from the direct measurement via the GPSr), and takes me about an hour or so to clear. There are surprisingly few stoppage areas throughout the route, most of which occur due to how diversions to the Loop take one out into the main road areas, where clueless pedestrians and lawless food delivery ``heroes'' (or was it just... gangsters?) amble/charge about with zero situation awareness and complete ignorance of basic road etiquette (keep left unless overtaking, and no surprising movements). It's my go-to route in general, due to the lessened need of dealing with people in general.

Tangents aside, having this aggressive of a physical activity schedule for a generally sedentary me means that sleep to clear the brain of waste particles becomes more important than before.

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In other news, I have finally powered through all 18 books of the Mahabharata. Man, what a head trip that was, and this is considering that I have read both The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (not to mention The Holy Bible).

Where do I start?

I suppose we can begin with recommendation. Do I recommend it as reading material for someone? Probably not, particularly if one is operating mostly in the anglosphere. The cultural references are more obscure as compared to the other works in a similar genre [of head trips], and it does get rather preachy at times. Much of the earlier parts of the Mahabharata make little sense until the depiction of the Kurukshetra War, where the seemingly disparate characters are brought together into a great narrative of conflict between the righteous and the unrighteous.

Of particular note is the character of Bhishma (who is very different from Bhima, a son of Pandu). To aid those who want to read the Mahabharata, I just want to point out that Bhishma's appearance in so many disparate places across a loooooong period of time is not merely an accidental appearance of someone with a similar name, it is literally still him throughout. Just keep that in mind, and things will be less confusing.

Oh and Arjuna has many names... not just him, but many of the other [major] characters have multiple names too. Just keep them straight in one's head and it will be alright. Maybe.

It was definitely an eye-opening read, with every translated line oozing with what I think to be the essence of the culture of the people of then. There are fantasy-like moments the way much of important old writing has (I suspect ``non-fiction'' the way we know it came about only from the scientific enlightenment period onwards), but the cosmology has a certain system in it that makes it easier to see what it means to be a follower of the gods of that time.

That's all I want to write about the Mahabharata though... it's fast become unbearably warm, and the only good response to that is a siesta.

Till the next update then.

Aggressive Regimen of Anti-Depressants

Oh boy, look at it! Stupid o'clock! Amazing ain't it?

Anyway, I've started on an aggressive regimen of anti-depressants. No, it's not in the form of some active ingredient buffered with filler material---it's the conscription of aerobic activity to trigger the brain to feed itself with the correct neurotransmitters to make it less depressed in general.

This being SIN city, the choice of aerobic activity is obviously not running---it's bloody muggy here, and the roads are always full of cars belching their usual catalytically converted noxious gases (compared to say the residential streets way back in Chambana).

I've gotten back to cycling once more.

Now, back in the day when I was working in one-north, I had decided to scout if it were possible to cycle to work. That thought process was triggered by the realisation that my office had showering facilities, a must have when considering the use of self-powered motion [over the long distances needed to get from home to the office] to ensure that the effort thus expended does not result in a day of sitting through some stinky sweat-encrusted clothes.

When I left that place and worked elsewhere, I thought I could cycle to work daily instead due to the much closer proximity. Unfortunately I got diverted out to the client's on-site to work, and that location was not conducive for these kinds of activities. When I was eventually relocated back to the office, I did cycle almost daily, and loved every minute of it.

Where I am currently working at, I don't think I can cycle to work---I have not located any shower facilities that are easily accessible.

But that's fine.

My current tactic is to cycle after work, doing alternate days. I figured that since I was ``not in the market for dating'', and have few people/groups to meet in general after the usual work hours [during the week days], I can totally set aside about an hour every other day to go experience that control over the bicycle, speeding through the Northeast Riverine Loop.

It's a new thing I'm starting, and so far, my body seems to tolerate it well. The anti-depressant effects from the... exercise (hur hur) are coming on indeed, and I am pleased. Hopefully I can make this into a habit to provide a more concrete cardio (and leg-strengthening) augmentation to the daily mini-exercises based on the Hacker's Diet that I had restarted again.

All these are sufficiently important to maintaining this Temple of God that I need to trick myself from giving excuses simply by following through and not accord it more thought than necessary.

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In other news, I've started on Psychonauts 2, a 3D platformer with an interesting story line that I got for free some time back from my friend Dwight who had put up the digital key to an extra copy that he had from being a kickstarter supporter. I'm liking it so far; there's lots to explore, there's character progression to think about (quasi metroidvania), the writing is witty and funny, and they have some cool quality-of-life options like negating fall damage, negating combat damage, and overpowering the protagonist's attacks for those who play the game more for the narrative than to ``challenge'' themselves.

Naturally, I used my trusty controller for this. Also as naturally, I suck at the gliding move in the 3D platforming. And because of that, I just turned on the negation of fall damage so that things are not as irritating. Combat so far has a systematic list of counters for each enemy type, though it is not to the extent one must use the correct counter to defeat the enemy---any other combinations of other moves available to the player are also viable, though they may take a little longer.

Therer is a collect-a-thon part to the game that is so far, quite endearing, since much of the collection is relate to lore, with some (not a lot) impact on gameplay.

Anyway, I think I'm really beat. I can feel myself nodding off.

Till the next update then.

Recovery?

You know, I thought that I had recovered my spoons on Sunday.

But after passing through the day that was yesterday, I'm not so sure.

On the second bus leg for my homeward bound trip, I started to tear up for seemingly no reason. It wasn't an all out eyes-bawling thing, but the kind of feeling one gets when struck by a sad memory from out of the blue.

There was, as far as I recall, no stimulus---I wasn't listening to a particularly moving piece, nor was I reading anything traumatic (like The Economist's coverage of the situation in Ukraine). Since ``TVMobile'' hasn't been a thing for more than ten years, and I was clearly not on my phone then, I wasn't watching anything particularly moving to trigger off that either.

I don't know... might it be because of some latent realisation that this life is all there is, and that it was increasingly more meaningless over time? Leaving the mortal coil seems to be preferable, and yet I cannot reconcile the equal outcome of offing myself versus dying through some self-unforeseen process---there seems to be some resistant (however minor) against offing myself as compared to the eerily calm acceptance of just dropping dead from something that I had no control over.

So irrational... so... human...

Anyway, random tearing and feelings of undescribable sadness. Not sure what was going on there.

Today's another day, and as I quickly scribble this down, I'm also in the process of getting dressed for work. Till the next update, I suppose.

Recovery

I mentioned yesterday about how I ran out of spoons and effectively took a day off from whatever I was supposed to be doing normally [that wasn't work related] yesterday.

Today... I think I got back most of my spoons. Which is just in time for the upcoming week.

I spent the morning with the live streaming of the Sunday service. Pastor was covering Psalm 147, or more specifically, Psalm 147:1. The uninitiated might ask, ``how in the world can anyone preach an entire service based on only this one verse?'', but I can provide a little more explicit explanation.

See, it's the first [Sunday] service of the month, and so there's the ordinance of the Lord's Supper to uphold. Then there's also the rather recent relaxation of COVID-19 management rules from the SIN city government, which simplifies to saying that congregational singing [for worship] is now permitted. So much of the service was really spent on singing hymns and other worship songs. Even during the preaching of the service's message there was even more singing---singing (and non-fleshly music for that matter) are among the core tenets of the worship of God.

Thus, in addition to the rather pithy explanation of why the sole verse of Psalm 147:1 was as important as it was, there was also much opportunity to praise and worship the Lord in song.

Worship aside, I spent some time assaulting the ocean monument in Minecraft. I had erected a set of beacons to provide additional boons to make taking out the regular Guardians (and the three Elder Guardians later on, for that matter) much easier, and had the chance to test out the deployment of the conduit to obtain the boon of ``conduit power'', which gave underwater night-vision, as well as negating the gradual loss of breathing air each time one is submerged within the water. I killed enough Guardians to gain enough materials to make my own prismarine blocks, and with that, I had managed to deploy a conduit back in my Great Aquarium.

The last thing that I needed to do there was to populate it with various fish. A problem that I will need to solve is to ensure that those fish do not despawn---unlike farm mobs of sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, it seems like fish will naturally despawn if they are not named with a name-tag. I'll just have to trade a few more name tags with the villagers in my shopping complex, and if I do get bored, will probably just whip up some more via creative mode if need be.

Apart from the conquering of the ocean monument in Minecraft, I also spent a few hours on completing The Room 4: Old Sins, the fourth instalment of the puzzle/escape room series of The Room by Fireproof Games. I like that puzzle series---they are not usually time sensitive, have decent puzzle mechanics, and are generally fun without being overly taxing. The puzzle type is usually limited to quasi-mechanical physics puzzles, with the twisting of perspectives as an added bonus, though probably not at the level that Antichamber is known for (a puzzle game that I really need to start+complete, just like The Witness). Puzzles are gated by the availability of pieces rather than specific tool-limitations for the most part, and all of them can be solved based only on knowledge that is available in-game (i.e. no need external knowledge like morse code or anything along those lines).

I have also miraculously cleared up the gradual accumulated backlog of YouTube videos from my favourite Hololive VTubers too, a first in many months. I attribute this to my new-found ability to consistently watch the videos at 2× speed---previously the maximum that I could go was 1.5× while still doing other things and maintaining cognitive awareness and understanding of what is being said, but with the expansion of the original five from Hololive Myth (and the adorkable Reine of Holoro (HoloID Gen 2)) to include IRyS, the new group of five from Hololive Council, some more Holostars like Oga and Aruran, as well as a few Hololive JP folks (Okayu, Botan, and HAACHAMA)... yeah, I was running out of time to catch up.

Mind you, this was with a fairly aggressive filtering process. I generally follow what Ina and Reine have, then be selective of IRyS's streams. Then the rest of the Holomems videos are chosen more or less based on the game they are playing, favouring games that I have not seen before or games/genres that the particular holomem is skilled at, and of course anything else that is a special event that isn't ASMR or karaoke related (nothing against ASMR/karaoke---these simply won't work at anything faster than 1× speed).

I guess it shows just how much output following a group of content creators can put out.

Am I obsessed with Hololive? Eh... I don't think so. It's just a nice collegial group of content creators to relax to after the end of a long-ass day/week... sort of like the earliest days of the Games Done Quick events, before it got all corporate. It's about that casual feel these VTubers bring about as they stream, and about that peeking into a perennial slice of life that I have always been a fan of even from back in the days of following web comics and watching animated series. Hololive Productions is its own slice of life---it is so good at its own fun to the point that I can't even bring myself to watch any more slice of life animes these days.

No one needs to watch all the 50+ Holomems just to keep up with everything---it's good enough to just watch those whom one is interested in, and rely on the memes and updates from r/Hololive for the rest.

Anyway, that's all I'd want to say. It's getting late---I should take my shower and turn in for the night.

No sense getting my spoons back just to lose them due to not having enough sleep.

Till the next update then.

Out of Spoons

I gave up for today.

I had simply ran out of spoons.

The past week at work saw me having to talk/deal with too many people, under too many intensive situations, for too long.

I just don't like that. It drains a lot of out me. It drained a lot out of me. And so, I just... didn't feel like I wanted to deal with more people today.

And so, I gave up for today.

That means not going for service, and not going for rehearsal. Just staying at home, with my door closed, and looking out of the window with my head empty, no thoughts, and probably have an early night.

I did head out at some point in the afternoon for a short cycle around the northeast riverine loop. There was a diversion due to yet more ``improvement works'', but what made this trip memorable was that it stormed about a third of the way through. The rain came down hard, and visibility was easily reduced to about 10 m. I wore my usual glasses, which helped a little in keeping the direct strikes of the rain drops on my eyes, but whatever did land on my eyes felt quite hard upon my eye lids. It doesn't sting the way sweat does, but it was still rather annoying at times.

The rain did help wash down my bicycle though---it was gathering dust the way everything that sits outside of boxes do.

So, I suppose I had a little stupid but fun thing going. What made me a little happy about it all was that my level of fitness wasn't that garbage that I ended up being winded from it all (it is still, however, pretty bad I think). I'll probably go for a longer trip on one of the off-days that are provided for at work; not another 70+ km trip, but something that is of a considerable distance.

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