If something matters enough for you...

A recent subscription charge hike from Backblaze combined with the limitation of group calls in Google Meets to 60 min coupled with a few other memories of similar situations made me think about this:

If something matters enough for you, then don't rely on it being provided by someone else.

It sounds like it is a selfish sentiment, but hear me out---it is actually more pragmatic than selfish.

Back in the day, most things that matter to us are pretty concrete and easy to see, because they are mostly physical artifacts. A gift from someone, the refrigerator, stove, a couch---these are just some examples of physical artifacts that matter to us. Of course I have actually skipped a few steps in not going far enough into the past, since I have leaked in things that rely on micro-controllers. The thing is, micro-controller based equipment was the start of the era where the things that matter enough to us is no longer wholly owned/maintained by us any more as we rely upon the manufacturers and their proxies to provide the necessary trouble-shooting and repairs. That is, until the economics of scale have commoditised the micro-controllers and other electronics involved, making it easier to get parts, and very eventually with the coming of the so-called Information Age, the necessary manuals needed to explain how to use the said parts to fix the diagnosed problem.

But as time marched on, what matters to us slowly straddles into the abstract world of data, and with it, communication/interaction with other people across large distances, people whom technology have helped made them acquaintances or even friends of some sort. The complex interplay of the underlying mechanisms that support all that used to run by enthusiasts (think BBSes) which had to run on an existing physical infrastructure that thankfully had been classified as a type of utility then. Nowadays, when we talk of the ``Internet'' or even the ``Web'', people just think it is Google, Facebook, Reddit, or whatever commonly used social media platform, forgetting about the heterogenous nature.

That is important to note because it marked the surrendering of control and maintenance to some other person, in which case a corporate entity whose raison d'ê was to be profitable. Now I am not arguing that being profitable is wrong, but I am saying that this means the services that these companies provide, no matter how enticing, good, and useful they are, will be subjected to the whims and fancies of their controllers in terms of whether to continue existing the way they were, to be nerfed to increase profitability through whatever business model they have (subscription/micro-payments seem to be in vogue), or dropped outright if they no longer serve any purpose to the company from the money-making perspective.

This means that if the content/service provided by these companies matter enough, one should ensure that at some fundamental level, one has a back-up plan. This is more so for content, since digital content is the closest analogue we have to the concept of physical access/ownership of an artifact. In the muddy world of digital media ownership, it is probably better to think of it as being access-driven as opposed to ownership-driven---all digital media (software, audio-visual, text) are essentially finite-lengthed binary large integers, so calling it ``ownership'' even without the complicating factors of copyright laws is a tad awkward. Storage of these digital media is many orders of magnitude cheaper than storing physical artifacts, because the actual volume/mass required per bit of storage is many orders of magnitudes smaller than physical things.

Thus, if the content matters enough, one should really ensure that there are alternative ways of retrieving the content later on, and not rely on someone else to ``always'' provide it to you. A good way is to ensure data replication across different providers, but considering how these days Amazon Web Services and other cloud service providers from Google and Microsoft are leasing their machines to companies to build their own services, it may not be as redundant as previously indicated.

So long story short, make sure you can physically hold the device that holds the content that you care about for peace of mind. Because doing otherwise is effectively renting access to the content, and when the access is terminated through lack of payment or other reasons, that content is gone for good. It's akin to renting an apartment, except with less regulation controlling what the landlord is allowed to do since legislation for the digital world is quite spotty at best.

As for services that one cares about, most of them can be achieved through using various open source versions. The big catch here is the need to be technical proficient enough to use the alternative open source versions, and to be sufficiently patient in teaching those whom we want to use the service with to use them as well. That last part is tricky to pull off, and is a large reason why many open source projects do not get that deep into the mainstream, unless something really drastic happens that made the original strongly controlled service no longer as feasible.

``But MT, are you inherently saying that the companies that offer such services for payment are evil?'' No, I'm not saying nor implying that. It's a free market---companies can do what they think that can generate the best profits for them since that is their perogative, but I also think that consumers need to know that they have their options and own needs/rights that they should seriously consider every now and then instead of being pushed about by the companies.

More importantly for other smaller companies that rely on services provided by larger ones is to remember that there is no free lunch---one day the services provided by the larger company may mutate away from what they require, especially if they are not among the valued customer group of the service-provider. When (not if!) that day comes, is the company ready to switch over to something else to continue with their business, or will they flounder about, cursing and swearing at all who hear?

Actually, the principle outlined in my first paragraph is applicable even outside that of the technology domain, the initial inspiration for this rant. Consider the case of people wanting more friends. Mechanically, it means that one would like the service of friendship be provided to oneself by someone else. But that never comes out of a vacuum---it is often better to first be a friend to someone else, from which an actual friendship may blossom. It may sound like a stretch, but the principle idea is that of how an active engagement/involvement to achieve a goal is more effective than passively waiting for the goal to be achieved for one.

That's enough out of the old windbag for now. I'm kinda debating whether to binge watch some Hellsing OVA or continue with the reading that I described yesterday, or play some video games---still undecided on all that. All I know is that I have decided to have some nice 麻辣香锅 for my meal-of-the-day.

Till the next update.

Forever War

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, said to be complementary to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Where one glorified war, the other showed how senseless it was with the ending. Both kept it as close to being ``hard'' science fiction as it was possible. Neither as crazy as Lensman series by Edward E. Smith in terms of power scaling---to be fair, hardly anyone can reach that level, not even the Dragon Balls series, nor One Punch Man.

What struck me in The Forever War is the concept of time scales. It plays it straight with [general] relativity in that the plot takes into account that near-light speed travel would lead to time dilation, which caused the subjective time of the traveller to be less than that of the non-travelling people. The other series that plays it straight as well is the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card. It reminded me also of Permutation City by Greg Egan, which explores the other means of having different [subjective] time scales which relies on the concept of simulation as opposed to general relativity. These stories that are more careful with how they portray the passage of time as compared to many other works that involve light/faster-than-light travel, with the different rates of time being an important factor in the set up of the plot. For The Forever War, it is even explicitly acknowledged that the United Nations Exploratory Force (UNEF) planned battles in time scales that spanned centuries to take into account the level of technology of the fighters that they send out and the overall strategic impact.

Naturally, the hows aren't explicitly written. To me, it's good enough that this potential world-building loophole is addressed explicitly with a plausible in-world description.

I enjoyed the book a lot despite finishing it in a single day. I wasn't intending on writing a book review (I still think I haven't really written a book review here), and won't say more than the various things that I had said earlier. Next up is going to be A Thousand Small Sanities by Adam Gopnik---I think it is a rather recent non-fiction work that critiques the concepts of liberalism, humanism, and conservatism. I think it ought to help reify the wrong that I feel when I see and read the many paradoxical thoughts/actions that I see online, even among acquaintances and friends.

It doesn't mean that I am going to go on a trip to ``convert people'' to whatever new thought. Despite being a believer, I still stand by the principle that one should not force one's beliefs upon another; or in other words, if the person is unreceptive and the context is inappropriate, one should just shut up and not try to proselytise, whether it is the gospel or something else. To evangelise is to be a messenger, and messengers usually follow the ``pull'' methodology of responding to someone's query if they have a message for them, and not a ``push'' metholodology where they just blast out their message whether or not it is wanted. Think of it as the difference between answering an enquiry and receiving an advertisement.

Anyway, this is a short entry. The last thing I want to add is that the new Hololive English VSinger IRyS has a lovely voice and a chill personality (so far), almost like a cross between Hololive English's Ninomae Ina'nis and Hololive Indonesia's Pavolia Reine. I think that these calming and less chaotic VTubers are just what these chaotic times require.

Alright, that is that. Till the next update.

Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace

After reading both Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz and An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield, a certain deep childhood fascination of space had quietly creeped back into me. It got to the point that I was this tempted to hunt down the LEGO NASA Saturn V set. What stopped me wasn't really the price, but that I would then need to find space for a 1 m tall construction---I don't have that luxury of space, so that served as a great brake towards stopping my temporary insanity.

But what was it that awakened once more in me after reading these two accounts about the US space programme? It is the idea that a dream, associated training, grit, tons of learning by doing in engineering and understanding in science are part of the necessary ingredients towards success and greatness. It was about being unafraid enough to build up a large risk appetite, and using the said appetite to take on large calculated risks that have associated large rewards. It was about pointing out how technology alone was insufficient to guarantee success---the infinitely flexible human factor was a much greater swing factor that, under the right amount of stimuli, can do things that technology alone cannot do.

It is related in some ways to the epiphany I had regarding TTRPGs and CRPGs---though that was cast in seemingly different terms, it is really saying the same thing: that human behaviour, being of an emergent system, is superior over technology that is deterministic in situations where the environment is uncontrolled/uncontrollable by virtue of the fact that the emergent system adapts in a more time-efficient way than the deterministic one that yields good-enough outcomes.

That last part is probably the most important point to take note: it's always about good-enough outcomes, not perfection, and sometimes, not even excellence. Now, I'm not saying that perfection or excellence are not worthy; they are the ideals that one ought to strive for. But reality is not understandable by us who are not God---sometimes the effort that is taken to get to perfection is infinitely more, while the effort to achieve excellence may be stupendous over good-enough.

Both books on space exploration talk about the single most understated thing of being an adult: everyone is making rules up as they go along. In Failure is Not an Option, Kranz makes it clear that there were no rules to govern how one ought to land humans on the moon---the mission controllers had to come up with their own rules even as they were learning what physics present them in terms of orbital mechanics, and the various limitations that their crafted spacecraft gave them. The tight deadline needed for regaining the lost lead of the space race did not give them enough time to go the academic route to reason everything from first principles and prove things rigorously. There is some sense of cowboy-ism, but it was not based on uncalculated recklessness. The importance of achieving the outcome with whatever resources were available was a strong motivating factor towards the success of the early US space programme. The courage to be less conservative to push the edge of what is permissible was what made the US space programme mighty.

Unfortunately, as we move on in this century, risk has become a bad word, and I don't just mean it for the US---I am also referring to SIN city and everywhere else that has reached a point where they believe they have something to lose.

The thing is, there is never a stable position that one can be in. Stability has always been quite illusionary---stability and conservatism just means that the majority hasn't been paying attention to their surroundings for a while.

Space exploration. It's probably the only frontier left that can pique the innate curiosity and hunger of knowledge for humanity. Some corpos have started to see it as the next step for their investment even as governments shrink back towards a more protectionist slant. But I am not laying the blame down on any specific people---we live in very strange times, and while we all know that the rules are still being made up as we go along, the signal-to-noise ratio just isn't as great as before.

Maybe we'll figure out how to push forward without killing ourselves first. After all, we ought to harbour a little bit of hope that things will turn out well.

Otherwise, what's the point of living?

SumatraPDF v3.3 Release

I have not been more excited than having version 3.3 of SumatraPDF being made available. It's not because of the performance updates, the changed toolbar with added functionalities and what-not.

It's because Alt-Space finally pulls up the standard Windows 10 system menu after being broken in version 3.2 that was released a year and change ago.

I know it looks very silly to be excited about a bug-fix of this nature, but before I go into it, let me sidetrack on the whole issue of PDF readers.

Back in the day, I relied heavily on the Adobe Acrobat Reader for all my PDF reading needs. It was a good enough reader for the most part, a type of baseline standard no thanks to it being from the company that effectively defined the PDF file format. However, even as early as the mid-2000s I was getting frustrated with its clunky loading speed, as well as the trend towards ever-increasing sizes of the toolbar, reducing the amount of space actually needed to display the PDF document. That's when I discovered Foxit Reader. Apart from an opt-out advertisement option, it was speedier than the Acrobat Reader, and supported tabs, which fit my LaTeX work-flow super well.

But eventually, even Foxit Reader started to suck, because their advertising was getting harder to opt out of. The bloat was getting real, and the start-up speed was starting to reach the levels of the Acrobat Reader, i.e. slow. That was when I discovered SumatraPDF. It ticked all the boxes that was important for me---speedy start-up, good rendering capabilities including the ability to view stupid large PDF files that even Acrobat Reader had trouble loading, let alone display(!), and it had no sneaky advertising/potential malware entry points.

And from then, SumatraPDF has been my go to Windows-based PDF reader. I don't talk about Linux ones because there are just so many to go to: Evince, Okular, and the old stalwart Xpdf. They are all free and run super fast, and thus there isn't much to talk about, really. Many of the Windows-based PDF readers don't have ports to Linux, but really, it isn't a problem.

Anyway, SumatraPDF has been my PDF work horse. As for the Alt-Space, I use that a lot when I'm operating in Windows just so that I can do the window maximise command of Alt-Space, X. It's a much faster way to do it than to reach out for the mouse to click on the relevant icon---long-time readers will know that I am a keyboard jockey, and thus this functionality is quite important. To be fair, these days I tend to use Win-Left or Win-Right more---these are keyboard commands that change the window size and position to either cover the left half or the right half of the screen respectively. However, due to some weird silliness in the logic that I still haven't bothered to figure out, that behaviour isn't consistent unless the window is first maximised---hence the importance of the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut.

SumatraPDF version 3.2 not having that was an irritation point for me for quite a while. That it was fixed and released in version 3.3 has made me very happy.

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

Recorder & Range

Things are heating up in Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz as the narrative moved on from the Gemini missions to the end of Apollo 10, where I last stop at. What's coming up is Apollo 11, the mission that first landed Man on the moon. I am excited to continue reading, but man Failure is Not an Option is unabashedly long. A fun book, but it is a dense book.

In other news, I have re-picked up the recorder once again. I have quite a few members of the recorder family, and they have been part of my ``casual'' music making back from when I was still studying out in UIUC. I have been following Sarah Jeffery/Team Recorder on YouTube recently, and her recent video on composing for the recorder made me re-look into this family of instruments once again.

The thing about the recorder is that it has a similar timbre as that of the traverso flute, of which I have been playing it lots during this sabbatical, though its dynamics control are a little more limiting than that of the traverso because the only controllable component of the source signal is the air-speed, as compared to additional direction of attack as used in the edge-blown flutes. This means that low notes often cannot be played loudly, and high notes really don't sound when attempting to play softly. However, because of the removal of this additional control surface, the timbre of the recorder tends to be much purer than that of the concert flute---in fact, in A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ``A'' by Bruce Haynes such fipple flutes are mentioned as pitch reference tools to tune other instruments by.

Dynamics aside, another interesting thing about the recorder is that its correct fingering patterns rely less on re-using fingering patterns through overblowing the harmonics. Part of the reason is as noted before---without the ability to control the embouchure, the change in the angle of attack that is necessary to fine-tune the specific resonance of a harmonic standing wave is greatly reduced. Because of that, we find that the recorder uses the infamous half-thumbing [of the left hand] as a type of register hole in order to force the second harmonic (and higher) to appear to play the higher notes---we see a similar concept in the clarinet and saxophone as well with their left-hand thumb keys.

The interplay of fingers on the left hand in the first upper register of the first harmonic allows instrument middle B, C, C♯, and D to play accurately and flawlessly. Combining that with the right hand yields the cleanest D♯ across simple flute systems with no additional D♯ key by far. Using the notation described here, a summary of the fingering patterns for what I said can be seen here:

Instrument Note	Fingering Pattern
B1	T 1--|----
C2	T -2-|----
C♯2	12-|----
D2	-2-|----
D♯2	-23|456-

The other fun thing that I learnt about the recorder is the fingering patterns for second octave instrument G to third octave instrument D. The fingering patterns are... interestingly unintuitive, unless one has tried something weird/similar on simple system flutes (which includes the dizi as well). Summarising the relevant fingering patterns:

Instrument Note	Fingering Pattern
G2	t 123|----
G♯2	t 12-|4---
A2	t 12-|----
B♭2	t 12-|456-
B2	t 12-|45--
C3	t 1--|45--
C♯3	t 1-3|4-6- X
D3	t 1-3|4-6-

The unintuitive part is using the right hand holes to ``shade'' the left hand to force nodes in the standing wave, causing the resultant resonant frequency to go higher. In a way, this technique has been used before in achieving the fourth-harmonic notes on (say) the dizi---like the high instrument E (12⁠-⁠|⁠45⁠- using a similar notation for the recorder as above, or 65⁠-⁠|⁠32⁠- using more traditional dizi fingering pattern notation).

Then of course there's the weird detail about ``baroque'' or old fingering versus the German fingering. All the recorders that I have in my possession (except for my 27-year-old Mikatone C-Soprano Model 200 (in C<sub>5</sub>), ABS resin---the one I used waaaaaay back in primary school) are using the ``baroque'' fingering. The key difference is stated in the linked Wikipedia article section: a much smaller hole 4 compared to that of hole 5 as counted from the main column from airway to end excluding the thumb hole. I can't play a German fingering system properly---the chromatic notes just sound off. I remember that it was a little off-putting back in the early days of my recorder playing, but having since gotten used to forked fingerings and shading on the traverso, all these are more natural for me now for the recorder.

So much fun!

On a side note, I just want to point out that the tenor recorder basically sounds in the same ambitus as the concert flute, the bass recorder in F (or the basset recorder) is closer to that of the 倍大 C dizi. Incidentally, the Garklein recorder is an octave higher than the G 梆笛, or equivalently, the upper two-thirds of the range of the piccolo, not counting the applicability of third octave extended range alternate fingering patterns. Recalling also that the high notes of a recorder cannot be played softly... it's terrible.

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While on a high from all these revelations about the recorder, I have also taken the opportunity to update my experimental instrument-range visualiser. New features include coloured banding of the rows for following the playable ranges easier, and writing down the span of consecutively orthodox playable notes in octaves wherever there is space.

That last feature... it killed me. So here's the thing: one octave is defined as the interval determined by a doubling of the reference frequency, so C₄ to C₅ is one octave. That's why a ``2-octave interval'' is also known as a ``fifteenth'', since we first climb the eight notes from C₄ to C₅, then another seven notes from D₅ to C₆. But these counts of notes are messy because they aren't of equal length---thanks to the major/minor intervals, the seven notes/intervals that comprise the octave aren't equally divided, a no-go for chromaticism.

So we go back to 12-tone equal temperament then. Now from C₄ to C₅ as an octave comprises 13 notes. Naturally, ``2-octaves'' is now 25 notes, since we climb 13 notes from C₄ to C₅, then 12 notes from C♯₅ to C₆. Basically thanks to the definition of what counts as an octave, the simple trick of divide by 12 doesn't really work. I just shrugged and start with the divide by 12 trick, and for the remaining, decide how much out of 13 it is to see how many fractions of an octave we have left. I think it is good enough.

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Phew, that's a long one. I think I'm done nerding out on music-related things for now. Till the next update.

Big Storage Needs?

I've completed Halo 2 of the Master Chief Collection on Steam. It's a different type of first-person shooter compared to say Doom, but it's alright. The story is good enough, and the gameplay is a little more plodding since high speed running and fast dakka with a large arsenal are not the main mechanics of this game.

If you do check out the system requirements blurb on the Steam page though, you would realise that the total storage space required is listed as 43 GB. Mind you, this is for effectively 6 games.

Now check out the same storage requirement for Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition (HZD): it weighs in at 100 GB, and that's for one game. That size (and maybe the fact that it is a port from the PS4) is one big reason why I haven't gotten it despite all the raving reviews about it.

``MT, that's an unfair comparison since HZD is an open-world sandbox game, while the Halos are not! So more data is needed!''

Okay, fine. Check out Cyberpunk 2077 then: it is 70 GB. Or an even better open world game that could fight HZD: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: 35 GB.

What I am trying to get at is the increasingly stupendously large sizes of the games. It has gotten to the point that having good old platters of spinning rust is too slow to run these games, with solid state drives (SSD) being the expectation. In addition, after taking away the 30 GB for Windows 10 (why does an operating system that has less functionality than a simple Linux install require so much space?), we are looking at an average of less than 10 games for a normal 1 TB SSD. It kinda sucks too considering that using either digital distribution (i.e. via the 'net) or by physical media (you gonna need high density optical media like Bluray instead of DVD-ROM) is stupid costly.

To be fair, modern games have looked incredibly prettier compared to the games of old, with increased hardware capability of pushing literally thousands of times more pixels than the past. This results in a general increase in the detail in the textures used to represent the terrain and entities in-game---nothing much has changed from the old polygon-wrapped-with-textures principle of visualising virtual worlds. One might think that for certain more ``natural'' terrain (and maybe some man-made ones), some kind of fractal texture using less space can be used to regenerate it, sort of like the proof-of-concept game demo .kkrieger. However, this does not scale well for AAA production titles---procedurally generated textures requires either the digital artists to know enough math to create the necessary reproduction steps to get what they want, or the programmers to pick up enough digital art nous to write the functions that generate aesthetically pleasing textures for their game.

Apart from the development team scalability issues, we are also trading ``dumb''/fast bit-blitting in the GPU with potentially recursive programs that may have poor locality of reference characteristics, which leads to an overall slower performance despite the technical smartness. This is a classic case of the space-time trade-off, where we can trade space savings for more time use, and conversely.

Chip speeds are relying more and more heavily on tricks to ``get'' various performances (speculative branch prediction, thermal-limited adaptive clock multipliers, multi-threading), but the associated gains are much smaller as compared to that storage, for the same unit cost spent. So, combining this technical limitation with workforce scalability, we see the case where the prettier the games are trying to look through exploiting whatever the latest and greatest hardware is available, the more storage they are going to require.

Does that affect gameplay? It really depends, but it is generally the case that the more aesthetically pleasing a game is, the more likely someone will be attracted to it. And attractions lead to sales, which in the modern age of digital distribution means that the publisher will get a payment from that sale. Now whether that game can retain the interest of the player, that depends also on the underlying mechanics (interactions, quantification of certain game physics, gimmicks), and possibly narrative-related properties (relatability of the player character, plot, replayability) which combine together to this one word of ``fun''.

So, in the end, does a game really require that much storage space for its assets? I think that it does, in this modern age. Reducing storage space use can be seen as an optimisation problem, and one of the cardinal rules of thumb in software development (game or otherwise) is to not do premature optimisation. The best time to do an optimisation is at the penultimate version, but at that point in the modern era, there is literally no business reason to do so, and thus, it will not be done.

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

Tintin and Blind Rule-Following

Alright, I've finally finished up the Adventures of Tintin series by Hergé. I think I actually completed it once before back before 2014, when records were less consistency kept. Having re-read it and filing it away nicely is a good thing to have, since I am somewhat adamant in getting my reading record right.

It's not because I'm obsessive, but more of having my small wins of the day to keep all that positivity going.

Tintin shares a similar genre as Modesty Blaise in the sense of being an adventure-type series, but differ largely in their presentation---the former was always meant to be a graphic novel and thus consumed as a whole, while the latter had three-panel strip syndication as its primary form, with later work being done to combine them into a convenient volume. Due to this difference in presentation, the cadence and flow of the stories are necessarily different---Tintin does not hesitate to use elaborate false documents and longer speech to present background information with action likely spread over longer runs of panels as compared to Modesty Blaise where the three-panel format necessitated a much choppier and action-oriented style of story-telling.

Between the two, Tintin definitely reads in a more comfortable fashion due to the better pacing, but Modesty Blaise does have better character design due to the need for clearly identifying characters within a monochrome context. Art in Tintin can sometimes be a little too ``busy'' in comparison---Asterix has a similar issue, but its comparatively more cartoon art-style makes it easier to generate stronger caricatures of the characters involved, making their identification within a complex scene that much easier. In that sense, the quasi-realistic style of Tintin does make the dozen or so repeating characters (both pro-/deuter-agonists and villains) tricky to catch up with when things start to get chaotic.

Has Tintin aged well from its 1950s modern world into the 2020s post-modern world? For an old geezer like me who has been alive on the cusp between the analogue and digital, it's definitely relatable, but I can see younger readers born more recently shake their head at the dated references to telegrams, and the general lack of ``instantaneous communication'' that the current world relies on heavily. It's not that big a deal though, since the adventure parts are still as gritty and relatable as before, and slow communication wasn't something that was relied upon heavily as a plot point.

It is always a joy to re-read such masterpieces from back in the day. Makes one appreciate the better things in life.

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In other news, I have a serious bone to pick. First, some context. Back in the day this QR-code ``parking zone'' for shared bicycles thing was launched. There was a boom of ``shared bicycle'' companies that would have digital-lock enabled bicycles and an associated mobile phone app with which subscribers of the service can scan the lock on the bicycle with their app to unlock it, ride the bicycle to wherever they need to go, and then scan it again to lock up the bicycle at its destination to be ready for the next rider. The digital locks were also physical locks that would make it hard to operate the bicycle if it weren't unlocked through the app.

Like all good things, it became a scourge when bloody idiots would leave the damn bicycles in the most awkward of places, which end up obstructing pedestrains and basically become public nuisances.

And so, some brilliant planner decided to draw these yellow ``parking zones'' for the shared bicycles, and set up associated QR-codes there to ensure that the bicycles are actually corralled into an official ``parking zone''. The linked article should provide a good enough of the background before I start bitching about things.

Notice that I keep on using the phrase ``shared bicycle''. ``Shared bicycle'' is a very important term to remember, because here comes my serious bone to pick: idiots have decided to ``park'' their own bicycles in such ``parking zones''. It's just left there, without even locking it to anything (there are often no fixtures to lock the bicycle to in these ``parking zone'' boxes). I don't get it at all.

It's like, SIN city has gotten so safe that basic protective instincts for one's personal safety have been completely left out, from stupidity like leaving one's belongings in a café while heading off somewhere else for a quick meal to unofficially reserve a spot to taking unnecessary risks like walking in the dead of the night along the darkest corners of the street. It's utterly insane.

No wonder SIN-ners always get bullied by those who are more street-smart. ``But mah government will protect me...''---that's an attitude that is getting us bullied/killed now. In places where the government is useless at best and corrupt at worst, the people are more street-smart, and are willing to stand up for themselves against what is going against them; they have some form of survival instinct, and a type of determination that allows them to prevail no matter how much the odds are against them.

For SIN-ners? Cue the ``请有关当局……'' spiel, or the snivelling bystander nonsense of meekly filming an injustice happening before denouncing it with bravado behind the pseudonymity that is the online platform.

``Hey MT, isn't that what you are doing now?'' No, that's not what I am doing now. I do give them what-for if it crosses my path. Fighting back doesn't mean fighting every wrong that is available---that's stupid because it suggests that lashing out at every wrong is the right thing to do when it isn't. It means that when it is a time to stand up for oneself, one should not hesitate to do so. I have learnt my lesson a long time ago when I was less likely to fight back.

SIN-ners are generally spineless when it comes to confrontation. It isn't about the whole ``harmonious society'' propaganda that drives this spinelessness. It is about being under so many explicit and implicit rules and regulations that they have lost sense of the fine line between standing up for oneself and being abusive/disruptive. So many ``rules'' that have been passed through hearsay have made SIN-ners cowardly---the fear of being excommunicated due to offending someone has made them less likely to stand up for themselves under the misguided idea that somehow, standing up for oneself was ``rocking the boat'', or ``being a troublemaker'', or even ``ungrateful''.

Two generations of gaslighting has given us who we are now. Will SIN-ners continue to be cowardly and be bullied? Only time will tell.

A Jumbled Thought

Consent, transparency, and surveillance, the big trio of things to worry about with ubiquitous computing. In some aspects, it seems that we have been blind-sided by the stomping over consent and transparency in the bid to quietly build up the massive surveillance infrastructure under the noses of everyone. But is it really a blind-siding moment, or is it a deliberate application of apologising instead of seeking permission?

I think an important factor that makes the modern digital-centric world different from others is the separation of the ego from material body in which is strongly associated with, and the far-flung nature of its influence in both time and space. Let me dissect what I am saying down into smaller components.

``Separation of the ego... associated with''---this refers to how the ``I'' in my head (ego) is less related to the ``I'' that is my body. The ego can be itself devoid of context of the body through the pseudonymous world that is the information networks, indeed this is an artefact that had been understood early on, with aphorisms like ``On the Internet, no one knows if you are a dog.''. So a paraplegic person need not be confined to the wheelchair to lead a rich and fulfilling life, assuming that the person is comfortable that such a rich and fulfilling life happens mostly with the ego and not with the body. Information networks are fast becoming a reality on their own, and to see it otherwise is a great way to get trapped in fallacies that drive much of what is wrong with the world.

``Far-flung nature of its influence in both time and space''---this refers to proliferation of the knowledge of any particular person's ego in geographical space (someone in Russia may well know the nature of someone in Indonesia despite them never having shared a common geographical space while interacting), and time (someone who left a series of comments in the past will have the comments made available for reading in the future, allowing someone from the future to know intimately about the person from the past in ways that go beyond regular archaeological reconstruction). Contrast this with the pre-Internet world, where the knowledge of a person every ten kilometres away from where that person lives decreases quite substantially, and that past [mis-]deeds are inadvertently forgotten, unless the said [mis-]deeds are sufficiently catastrophic for a large number of [angry enough] people.

In the pre-mass surveillance world, the three items I stated in the beginning had the following properties:

consent

Explicit consent is required, with the ``analogue'' nature meaning that the consent is more likely to be informed than not.

transparency

There is little incentive to actually be transparent about most processes since there isn't a good way of transmitting the associated information.

surveillance

Surveillance is targetted due to the vast amounts of effort required to maintain the surveillance. The targetting is usually well thought of to improve the return of investment [of effort] ratio.

Comparatively, with the effects of the modern digital-centric world, we see the evolution of the properties of the three items to this instead:

consent

Consent is largely implied, and even if it were explicit, there is usually enough carefully constructed details to confuse and obfuscate than to inform, leading to the paradoxical state of an ``informed'' consent without necessarily actually informing anything.

transparency

Processes can be transparent, but they can be made sufficiently convoluted to the point that it defeats the purpose of the transparency from the sense of understanding. Sometimes this isn't deliberate---the processes could be machine-driven/machine-designed, which adds an opaqueness that isn't intentionally meant to obfuscate (but does so anyway).

surveillance

Surveillance is cheap and widespread, since information in its pure form of digital data is easily observed, copied, and retained without ever affecting the original transmission. Comes ``naturally'' with the original intentions of optimising the system (which often degrades to monetisation) and implicit consent through de facto use of a system due to popularity.

So what do these all mean?

I don't know. Maybe it means the end of individuality as we know it, since mistakes are no longer permitted to be made when one is young, since it will be recorded and retained, and definitely used against one in the future by whomever has the incentive to do so, be it a government body trying to screen for candidates for its civil service, or a company trying to pick their employees, or even a landlord screening for potential tenants. Combine mass surveillance with machine-assisted artificial ``intelligence'', it is a great way to suppress individuality, since it is hard to argue against the ``hard numerical facts'' as presented by a machine.

A mass surveillance society run by algorithms is going to be a more discriminative than an inclusive one. Because algorithms have no morality, and more importantly do not share the values that we treasure as a society. Some may claim that it is possible to train the algorithms to learn our values, but I will point out that only past examples are used to train algorithms---we are still making up the rules on how inclusion ought to work in order to right the wrongs of the past, and that isn't going to make it into the algorithm soon enough.

Alright, that's enough depressing thought. Going to read more Tintin, and watch Reine's start in her playthrough of Virtue's Last Reward. Till the next update.

Traditional Ordinances?

Traditional ordinances that got handed down over time are not always a wasted effort designed to make life difficult. Survivorship bias suggests that it is more likely than not that an ordinance that has been handed down has certain benefits conveyed that would help the society in which it was an ordinance in to proliferate long enough for it to be passed down.

That thought came to me from two interesting sources, one being a Facebook comment regarding how when trying to refute certain practices, the research that the person turned up became ever stronger pieces of evidence confirming the validity of those practices [within the context], and the other being my recent reading of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers with their very long and explicit descriptions of the various types of offerings, when each is supposed to happen, how they relate to behaviour of various people and the like. That second part was when I hit upon an epiphany while thinking about just how many lifestock and agriculture was required to fulfill all of God's offering requirements for a whole year.

I didn't work out the exact number, but a rough estimate suggested that the number was fairly large, and literally required an entire community to provide for it, which was justified through the sheer numbers of Old Testament Jews as stated in Numbers. To me, it seemed like creating such rules was God's way of ensuring that His chosen people had goals to work towards together, thus reducing the amount of in-fighting that could have occurred when too many idle people were present. By specifying so explicitly the numbers and types of animals, as well as the weight of the various grains, the end result is a very clear definition of economic goals for the Old Testament Jews to meet, with the unspoken side effect that while they were trying to meet these goals, could easily extend their efforts to provide food for themselves. The priests of the day were full-time and set apart from the rest of the Jews, and their sustenance was solely derived from the offerings that they needed to bring to God on behalf of the people---from that alone, it seems that it is possible to estimate what the average food consumption was needed per person, and from there, a rudimentary level of economic planning could be done.

Perhaps this is the reason why Jewish people are notoriously known as capable arithmeticians and mathematicians---it is hard to be completely numerately illiterate when the Scripture that one lives by (and is known by all) has such concepts hidden within them.

But going back to the point of traditional ordinances having some positive utility. I think a large part of that relies on setting up the correct context to observe the intention of the traditional ordinance---most rational people will agree with this particular sentiment. What people may disagree on is the boundaries of what constitutes a ``correct context''. There are usually two reasons on such a disagreement: following the letter of the ordinance sans its intention, or mis-interpreting the intention of the ordinance. The former can be ameliorated through techniques used in the study of literature, which can be horrifically simplified to identifying whether a body of words are meant as a literary technique, or as a blunt description/observation using only the vocabulary that exists at the time. That last point is key towards solving the second reason---language generally gets more complex over time due to having to expand the expressiveness to handle newer concepts that emerge. Ordinances are not always reactive in nature; they can be proactive as well, in which case they try to capture some kind of universal truth which may have concepts that are beyond what the language can precisely describe.

An example would be trying to describe the modern concept of a digital computer during an era where even the abacus doesn't exist. Calling it ``thinking sand'' is technically correct (i.e. accurate), but it is liable to mis-interpretation, since the particular choices of words leave out the nuance-filled details that make the description precise.

Scripture is not meant to be a set of reactive ordinances, but a proactive one. The books that make up the Scripture are penned by humans in their specific era and language, and thus may not have precise enough language that can stand the test of time. However, the information recorded is accurate enough, as long as one remembers the context in which they were recorded and interprets the intention from that and then.

Thus, to be a believer in the Word actually requires a certain amount of intellect---think of it as God's way of incorporating checks and balance into His believers so that they don't get misled by the wrong thoughts of a fallible person.

Sadly, this means that anyone who blindly follows what their leader tells them without question are the true cause of many problems, since they did not make use of every opportunity to decide for themselves based on the evidence that has been handed down through the generation. This constant inquiry of the validity of traditional ordinances is one that everyone ought to demonstrate, no matter their creed. Any system of ordinances that cannot be presented in a fixed form like words on a page is liable for situational adjustments, which is a great way to derive bribery and other inconsistent and inaccurate applications that cause social upheavals.

Okay, that's enough of a shower-thought rant. Till the next update.

Freewriting

Today's a weird day. It feels good, but with a strange type of emptiness that I cannot easily describe because I don't feel like I want to dig in deep to find out what is there to be described.

I think I just miss some of the good times that were had in the thirty plus years that I have lived thus far. Because of the abrupt changes that were pandemic-induced, there is nothing much to anchor to. Were I still be working, I would probably just get obsessed with the work and feel the same way but less acutely since that weird feeling is somewhat tempered by an income.

No, I'm not saying that the sabbatical is a bad idea---it really isn't. The break is quite welcome, and having the opportunity to sit down and think different things is very important to me. Most people would have figured out their life at this point, what with the steady on-going responsibilities that comes from their married life and/or managerial life.

But those kinds of life aren't always meant for everyone. There are some of us who are just built different.

The problem comes then from how to derive motivation for a person who isn't motivated by conventional means in a place where unconventional motivation is frowned upon by those who have the capital. In addition to that, said person is also generally unwilling to move away to some place where conditions may be an iota better, because the grass is always greener on the other side while the bad points hardly ever show themselves until it is too late.

Motivation. People keep using that word, but I'm not sure if all of us are comfortable/familiar with what it means. Many link motivation with extrinsic factors when it costs them nothing, and then linking them to intrinsic factors when it actually costs them something in return. Fundamentally though, I believe that motivation is related to the reason why one is living in the first place. Climbing the corporate ladder may be the superficial motivation of someone, but the true motivation of having that motivation could be to have enough recognition from society in both prestige and money, which have their own perks in the operation of society itself.

But what about those who aren't that inclined to play the game of society and buy into the collective hallucinations? The traditional place for these people are that of religion and art, with the trope of the holy people and the starving artist being dominant. But are those truly the only options?

In many ways, it is to society's selfish benefit if everyone were to participate in it, preferably with as little compensation being provided in return, since it would lead to a net profit for the society in general. This means that if works are done through altruism, society benefits more, as are labours done with minimal pay increasing that of the economic output. Such a utopian set up cannot work for the single reason that humans are fallible and greedy by nature---if there is a way to exploit then it will be used to exploit until that way is ``patched out'' through being ruled as illegal in the collective storytelling that is the law. There are meta-games played with the law consisting of lobbyists who fight for the non-outlawing of the exploit through argument both sound and unsound, and their associated opponents.

So how can one live a life that is more morally sound than what society has to offer as is?

Following God's word is definitely the way, but while Scripture does say that one should live apart from the general society in terms of moral behaviour, it doesn't actually say that a completely separate society parallel to that of the rest of society be set up. And sadly for those who want to stir chaos, it also does not prescribe annihilation of other existing societies---don't pull up the war and gore stuff from the Old Testament as examples because they were instructions for the original chosen people (i.e. the Jews) under the Old Covenant; us believers are Gentiles and are under the New Covenant that is Jesus Christ, where the rules are actually stricter yet paradoxically more liberal.

Anyway, I'm not sure what else I want to add to my current thoughts on the matter as at now. Till the next update then.

Fansa and Affirmation?

I started reading Failure is Not An Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz today. It's an autobiographical book by Kranz on the evolution of the operations control team(s) in the US space programmes. I'm about a quarter of the way through, and it has been quite a ride. While it isn't push the usual leadership/management guidebook spiel, it has some interesting nuggets of knowledge and experience hidden among the narration.

As an aside, I find myself keep returning to this video by Kiryu Coco before she graduated, the cover for ``Fansa'':



There's something about it that speaks out, and it isn't just the beautiful execution nor the events surrounding her graduation. It definitely is the lyrics, but more than that, it is the feeling that is conveyed by the lyrics, not in the sense of the ``idol feel'' but something more fundamental, the idea of connection between people and wanting to matter in someone else's life.

Yes, there is that attention-seeking aspect of being an idol that shows up within the lyrics, but realistically, aren't we all a little attention-seeking in our own ways? The type of attention we seek need not be at the scale of that of an entertainer, but in the form of having attention from one's parents, one's siblings, one's peers, and even one's bosses. The attention isn't about pride but as a form of affirmation of one's existence, a way of external validation. It's as basic a need as food and water, since the affirmation of one's existence by another is the start of creating a social fabric.

Mutual affirmation---I think this core feeling is what is largely missing these days in the hyper-connected world. Self-selection of images to promulgate combined with the echo effect from The Algorithm perpetuates a strong sense of being ignored, with various insecurities amplified within the like-minded. So the in-group affirms the shared insecurities, but the out-group seems to fail to acknowledge them, let alone address them.

Perhaps that is why we see the rather strong push-back from various subsets of societies in attempting to change the narrative, justifying their actions through whatever means necessary, to the point that an unaffected third party observer can only conclude that it is all delusional.

Eh, not sure if this is some ``deep'' thing---I might have an important idea here, but it may not be well-represented with what I have written. I could do more research to fix it, but it isn't a high priority.

Turning the observational lens back to myself though, am I also seeking attention then?

In a way, I would be lying if I said no. Obviously, if I weren't seeking attention, I wouldn't be updating this obviously public blog.

But from a different angle, the answer is more nuanced. Outright winning some popularity contest isn't my intention---if it were, I would be doing some rather drastic things, and even so, use other media that are more easily accessible and welcome over the blog medium. I'd like for people who care enough to read what I have written here, since sometimes it is easier to understand what I am thinking through sifting through what I said as opposed to listening to me say it out loud, not because I'm shy, but because I have a tendency to not talk about myself if I can help it in meatspace. But I'm not too anxious if there are really few (if any) people who read my blog entries; maybe a little disappointment, and that's probably it.

After all, my blogs are mostly ways for me to vent whatever is eating away at me, a type of catharsis where I can safely put away what I would like to think about, but not obsess over.

It seems to be working well for me so far.

Hmm... seems like I have indeed run out of things that I would like to say here for now. Okay, in that case, I'll just leave it till the next update then.

SGDQ 2021 Begins!

I know much of my blog entries are some variant of doom and gloom, so let's do something a little more uplifting for a change.

It has finally started raining in a substantial sort of way today over at where I am staying in SIN city. The timing could not have been better---it is near the morning, where the air hasn't been heated up by the sun just yet, which provides the opportunity for a much lower temperature once all the rain is done. In a high humidity location such as SIN city, every degree that we can lower leads to rather outsided temperature comfort effects, and thus it is very welcome.

In other news, Summer Games Done Quick 2021 (SGDQ 2021) has finally begun, and it will be a full week of non-stop speedrunning fun, including beloved blocks such as ``Silly Games Done Quick'', the ``Doom Block'', and the ``Nintendo Block''. I can't/won't catch most of it live, partly because I no longer participate in the nearly-abandoned IRC channel (all chatting has been moved to using Twitch's chat, which is... cancerous, to make use of Internet jargon), and partly because the viewing quality using the VODs is that much better than keeping the stream going. I've always been using some standalone proxy service to buffer up to 60 s of video to be streamed through my local running copy of VLC Media Player just to beat the horrendous lag spikes that kept on coming on.

I just get lazier the older I am, and so tinkering to that effect is starting to get old for me. Besides, these days there's usually some Reddit thread tracking the start points for VODs of various runs (this one is for SGDQ 2021), so there is a lowered incentive for me to go ``live''. Back when I was still in the US, I would donate to the charities that the particular iteration of GDQ was supporting, and having the message read ``live'' on stream as an interactive element was cool.

Now, it's gotten too big, and has lost its cosiness. Plus, living in SIN city, donating to GDQ events requires a bit more effort, and well, the time zones don't help much since we are usually in the graveyard shift of the event. Graveyard shift games are still quite cool and cosy, since the longer games and/or less established runners/less established speedrun game are scheduled then. The big stuff is usually during the daytime [of the event], which is when I am fast asleep. Back in the day I would stay awake to watch it ``live'', but man, being older now, it just sucks to be screwing up my sleep schedule that way.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I might head off to my favourite bar to say goodbye to the manager---it's her last day---and do more reading with glasses of Guinness. The rain should have let up by then, making it slightly easier to travel.

Till the next update.

TTRPG and CRPG

Man, this weather is going to make me sick, literally.

Yesterday was like a hell-hole. Today, the vast amounts of cloud cover has reduced everything down to something more tolerable (26°C interior wall temperature), at least at the time that I am writing this.

That 4°C difference in a place with consistently high humidity makes a helluva difference. Using this heat index table for reference, and assuming the average relative humidity of 85% (rounded from the 83.5% as obtained from this handy chart, it's a difference between a heat index of 39°C @ 30°C against less than 29°C @ 26°C (it's closer to 28°C using some formulae).

So yes, that 4°C dry bulb temperature makes a bloody big difference when it comes to actual perceived temperature comfort, particularly in the presence of high humidity, which is the case of SIN city. And such a varying range can be quite jarring to the body's adaptation, considering that I do not use any air-conditioning whatsoever.

With the small point on the weather settled, I just want to talk about something a little more trivial---the difference between tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) and computer role-playing game (CRPG or RPG without qualifiers since it is more dominant). Both involve the suspension of disbelief to be taken away into a different world, the western concept of isekai that has become a trending concept as of late. They may involve different levels of realism, and usually involve some kind of story-telling or story-making. Apart from the general world-type in which these role-playing games reside in, another key distinction lies in the mechanics being used to model the in-game character, or as I like to call it the physics of the system (everyone just calls it ``system'', and so I will follow suit despite it being less descriptive in general). The many different systems out there differ largely in their choices of emphasis---combat-heavy systems have rules and quantification that are more precise on combat encounters, while role-playing heavy systems have more detailed guidelines regarding how both player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs) interact with each other.

But this trivial talk isn't about comparing systems, but rather on the implementation of the systems. In short, a comparison between TTRPGs against CRPGs, and why there seems to be a resurgence of TTRPGs despite CRPGs being the vogue for the better part of twenty years, or how CRPGs become increasingly lacklustre in comparison to the TTRPGs despite being more ``technologically advanced'' compared to pen, paper, and dice.

The answer is back to the same thing that I have been mumbling on and off for the past few months: determinism versus emergence.

In a CRPG, everything needs to be programmed in to work. Recall that there is no innate physics that exists within any computer system---the physics needs to be explicitly programmed in before any other logic pertaining to the story that the CRPG wants to tell. CRPGs that don't have stories in them are of a different game genre altogether, the so-called sandbox game, which is ``just'' a physics simulator, though the underlying physics may not correspond as tightly to the physics of our reality. Programming physics is hard work, and it must cater to all edge cases so that the suspension of disbelief doesn't break on them. This is why we keep seeing many ``balance patches'' that are put out in modern day CRPGs/sandbox games to address these physics edge cases.

With time and effort being of a limited resource, it is then a major trade off between getting the physics right against getting a good story going. To truly get a spectacular showing for both will require a lot of time and effort, and given the current cut-throat competition present, most production houses tend not to do that. In the event that they do, then the cost of the physics programming is amortised against multiple stories set in the same world, which allows code re-use for the physics, thus saving a stupendous amount of development effort across the number of titles used.

We hear this as the various game engines, though to be fair, game engines comprise more than game physics---they also deal with real-world interfacing with machinery (and human interaction) to effect changes within the game world.

The whole trade-off between good physics and good story is what is known as the ``shallow ocean'' sandbox games versus ``deep pond'' CRPGs.

As the player, one might think that the effort sounds too much for the CRPG. This is a folly because any single player may only see a small number of paths through the game/story logic, but across the entire population of players, the CRPG must be able to handle them all. That is some complex reasoning required, and if production houses skimp on time/effort, they end up with very simple stories with only a few small branches, all so that they can keep the complexity in check.

Will artificial intelligence assist in that? Perhaps, but given the amount of effort to develop such a mechanism, it may well be the case that only one company will have this capability, and that everyone will license from it, and... well the implications should have their own blog entry, just not this one. The point is that computer-based story-telling is centralised by nature, requiring omniscience even before any story is told. That is hard to get right.

TTRPGs though... they are highly decentralised. The physics are guidelines in the form of gamemaster/dungeonmaster (hereon I will just use ``gamemaster'' to refer to both) rule books, as are the player handbooks for whatever system/world that one chooses to play in. The story is not told (deterministic behaviour) but made (emergent behaviour) with the gamemaster and the players. The secret sauce here is that the implementation of physics are augmented by the current king of sanity checking---the gamemaster's perogative. The gamemaster does not need to come up with all possible consequences/outcomes given the emergent situation faced---he/she just needs to come up with enough consequences/outcomes for the players at the current point. There may be some over-arching story arc that the gamemaster wants to follow, but the way to get there is fluid and always adaptable.

And that's how TTRPGs win over CRPGs---sheer adaptability to any situation that arises, even when the rule books (i.e. physics ``guidelines'') may not cover, without ``crashing''. Early CRPGs get a pass because of the low technology---much of the scene relies on imagination due to the limitations of I/O technology. But modern CRPGs have started getting dangerously close to being realistic, and with that comes the unspoken expectation that the stories within are also sufficiently realistic (i.e. with enough depth and entertainment). Such expectations may not be fulfilled through what is being offered, since many CRPGs are written first as a game before being a story-telling device.

TTRPGs start to fill in this gap that the success of CRPGs have created, and are much easier to reach out to nowadays thanks to the proliferation of digital copies---there was no need to wait for a specialised book store to import the [often expensive] rule books and story packages when one can easily buy a digital copy online. Fora where like-minded individuals across the world flourish, thus condemning the stereotype of the socially-backward nerd gatekeeper to the annals of history. The increasing viewing of TTRPGs as a means of story making as opposed to story telling brings about the kind of participatory event that has been on the decline ever since people started to live more insular lives from their community.

But TTRPGs are no ``final solution'' either. They still have the old problems of having to make working scheduled with other people, which can be a deal-breaker in this time and age where everyone is trying to ``life hack'' everything to efficiency, as though their lives are some kind of industrial process that needs optimisation. With the pandemic rolling in and putting a hard stop to many of the old ways of operation though, perhaps people will think a little bit more about what is more important in life.

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

Animorphs and Beyond

Can't keep writing things early, because there really isn't any intention of enforcing a schedule stricter than one post per day.

Anyway, I've finally finished reading the Animorphs series by K. A. Applegate. It took me quite a while, since there were around sixty-ish books in total to read. The story felt a little bit rushed towards the end, and it was somewhat understandable. Much of the adventures of the eponymous Animorphs centred around guerilla warfare, and there are two realistic ways and one unrealistic way of ending. The two realistic ways are that the incumbent wins crushingly through simple attrition, and the guerillas keep on fighting without any real progress, which leads to the incumbent winning.

The unrealistic way of ending involves the guerilla winning somehow. It is an unrealistic ending for much of the Animorphs series because there was never any development of sympathies by the population at large, since the key plot point was for the Animorphs to harass and slow down the invading Yeerks, relying on the Andalite fleet (a regular army) to eventually come in and do the mopping up. It was always unrealistic because there was never any indication that the Andalite fleet would work with the Animorphs (there were always hints that the Andalite fleet viewed the Animorphs as nothing more than collateral damage), and so I can understand how some kind of effort was needed to escalate the narrative out of perpetual guerilla warfare into something that is more decisive.

A decisive win for the Yeerks was probably much easier to write than that of the Animorphs, but that would be a horrifically dystopian ending that was likely to be less acceptable for a ``children''/young adult book series---gotta get that positive vibes going.

Thus, the ending got from one implausible scenario to another implausible scenario, with some suspension of disbelief brought into play only because the adult family members of the human Animorphs were brought into play to lend credence necessary for the sympathetic population factor that is necessary for a successful guerilla warfare. It was still possible to suspend disbelief and award the win to the Animorphs over the Yeerks (and Andalites, curbing their arrogance somewhat).

That cliffhanger stemming from a completely from left-field story arc though... big oof. It was too implausible, and it really shattered the world building that had taken place over the sixty-ish books. It was written quite shoddily too, compressing too much time into too little space and effectively dropping all of the original lore relating to the world that was built.

If the intent was to kill the series after it ended, then it did well.

Would I recommend this series? Eh, it's still readable---the world building isn't too bad/complex, and I think it holds up quite well despite being written at a time where ubiquitous communication was not a thing. There are probably one too many implausible events strung together, but I would chalk it to the need to make the adventures more exciting without going too deep into actual real-world sensibilities---it is still a science fiction/fantasy work after all.

Anyway, I think I will work on The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa: Book 2: Sabha Parva next, even as I [slowly] read through the other long works on my reading list.

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Today has been quite hot and humid---the interior wall temperature was recorded at 30°C just as I am writing this entry, which is ridiculous considering that it is past sun-down already.

If the interior wall, a part of the apartment that does not get direct sunlight and is actively protected through the different tiers of blinds and other accoutrements reaches that level of temperature, what more can be said of where I am actually sitting, just a metre or so away from the open window? I could feel my standing fan circulating warm air, and this is after I had taken it apart to remove all that crazy dust build up.

Calling it bad is probably an understatement.

And now, we are getting some teasing of a nice and wild thunderstorm with all that thick cloud cover and thunder from a couple of kilometres away. Bah.

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We're now in July, and with it comes the official start of the second half of 2021. It's been a lousy year overall, though being on sabbatical means that I am explicitly telling myself to ignore the badness that is out there and be more disciplined in thinking and holding it together in terms of what I would want to do after my sabbatical is done. The thought of going semi-retirement has been floating about as an alternative, but I am not sure if it is really feasible, at least from the financial perspective. I won't get cabin-fever mostly for the reason that I always have things that I can do, whether it is reading, writing, composing, practising on my musical instruments, cycling, walking, or even programming. But financial resources are always necessary when living in an urban environment no matter what state one is in, since there is always that upkeep amount that needs to be paid.

As an interesting side note, we are slightly ahead of parity in the number of posts this year as compared to the number of days (188 including this entry against day 184/365 which is today). We are also at the second most number of ``rant'' entries per year as well---shows just how much ``free time'' I have on this sabbatical in order to rant so much. The year (and blog) to beat is 2007 of my poetry blog which stands at 256 entries, though it may be a tad unfair because the type of doggerel I write there takes less time than even the cruddiest rant here, just due to the number of words/characters involved.

The numbers really don't mean a thing for all purposes or intents, but perhaps making some kind of a mark may be what is necessary to celebrate this first sabbatical year that I have ever taken. It's something new for me, and out of the ordinary for many people, and is worth remembering as one of the milestones of my life.

I don't have anything else that I want to add though, so this will be all for now. Till the next update.

More Mumblings About Identity

Identity. Identity. Identity.

What does identity mean? Is it what society has defined for one in terms of the myriad of roles existing along the many different dimensions (crude social, refined social, economical, intra-organisational, extra-organisational), or is it something that is wholly self-selected, with the eternal conflict with what society demands being the reason for living?

Doesn't make much sense to me. Assuming we follow the purpose of Man's life (glorification of the LORD), it would seem that battling for what identity means for each individual is mildly antithetical to what has intended, mildly being the case mostly because God has defined various social entities that He would like to have, from the Old Testament definitions to the New Testament demarcations as being part of a church body.

Unfortunately, my limited Scripture knowledge seems to find that it is silent about how such social roles interact with a person's self-identity---much of it is reduced to the notion of ``called by God'', with little to nothing to talk about in terms of free will choice here. There is indirect support that it will all tend towards God's specifications because everyone's talents are bestowed by Himself for the purpose of His Will, and so in some sense, the identity that each of us takes (i.e. the role that we play) is more or less defined with what I would call a fuzzy boundary where free will may be exercised in the form of creativity.

Mayhaps a solution can come from deconstructing the artificial categorisation that was put together by human-kind to make it easier to discuss/manage en masse. I [probably] have mentioned before about how disciplines of knowledge are artificially created boundaries to better allow some level of knowledge retention and transmission---it is necessary because we are at the point where the sum-total of human knowledge far exceeds what a single person can absorb and be equally effective in. But knowledge (and by extension, skills derived from knowledge) are more general than that---a ``discipline'' is merely a particular choice of axiom and viewpoints chosen to simplify a mostly independent-looking subset of the totality of knowledge.

Knowledge segregation expands itself into modern human societies with all the associated role specialisation, i.e. one's identity then becomes strongly tied to what discipline one has been involved in. So perhaps if one were to deconstruct these boundaries, one could attempt to reach deeper beyond what simple identity implies, thus returning the complexity that is human character back to where it was, thus offering a different glimpse of the self that is richer and perhaps more fulfilling. A sort of ``return to basics'' to what God's intention for a human was, to wit.

What I said can also be applied even if one does not subscribe to the belief that God is involved in Man's destiny---just take the inductive step of the argument and come up with a different starting point for the base case.

Well, this whole spiel on identity is partly due to my initial/immediate thoughts on the going away of a well-loved persona, and partly due to my own internal struggle between doing what is right against the objectives of the economy to prioritise what makes money over what is right. If I had a much looser moral compass, I probably wouldn't need a sabbatical to mull this through---I would probably be looking forward to climbing up the corporate ladder to greater heights myself.

Unfortunately (or should it be fortunately?) I have a moral compass which is further strengthened the more I read and learn through Scripture, and through some experiences on the level of hypocrisy that one can stoop to just to make a quick buck. The loss of rehearsing with my CO and the loss of a dear long-term relationship did not help matters. All that cumulates into me asking who the heck I am in more ways than one.

I am a Man of God. That I know now. But other than that, what else is there?

Will there be a what else?

Need to mull over it more. Till the next update.

Weather Hackers☆

After a rollercoaster month, this is it. Hololive's Kiryu Coco has done her final stream in this persona. Much of it was heartfelt sharing from her on-stream co-workers from the different ``generations'' and what-not.

But that isn't the immediate focus on what I want to write about.

Legacy and self-identity. The decision to ``graduate'' (i.e. retire from the character she plays in kayfabe) has thrown up a whole bunch of existence-related questions. We know that ``Kiryu Coco'' is a character that the woman behind her plays (let's call her ``K-chan'' for brevity), with the vast numbers of archived (and unarchived) video streams, artwork, and social media posts acting as the observers' record and reaction of Coco. And from there, we all form our own individual opinions on who ``Kiryu Coco'' is, and generate a consensus on who ``Kiryu Coco'' is in the form of lore that is kept alive through memes, and content in various wikis.

But ``Kiryu Coco'' has always been a character that is played by K-chan, the woman behind her. ``Kiryu Coco'' also has an off-stream persona that also contributes indirectly to the lore, since the off-stream actions do alter on-screen activities, especially on business done in the name of ``Kiryu Coco''. However, how much of that off-stream action is ``Kiryu Coco'', and how much of it is K-chan herself?

The legacy that is left behind after K-chan retires from ``Kiryu Coco'', is it the legacy of K-chan, or is it the legacy of ``Kiryu Coco''?

Or is there a difference at all?

I find the situation interesting because it is the closest type of experiment we can have with the concept of separation of the soul from the body at the conclusion of the death of the body. In this case, ``Kiryu Coco'' is the body, the avatar that K-chan wears when she is performing as Kiryu Coco. When we say we like Kiryu Coco, we mean that we like the way ``Kiryu Coco'' is being played by K-chan, and I suppose that when we say Kiryu Coco has done a lot for Hololive, we are really saying that K-chan has done a lot for Hololive when she played Kiryu Coco.

So in this parasocial relationship, when we grieve, we are grieving about the loss of the Kiryu Coco character, which is the sum of ``Kiryu Coco'' and K-chan. So perhaps the legacy left behind is both of K-chan and of ``Kiryu Coco'' combined in the form of Kiryu Coco. And Kiryu Coco's statement of sending her off with a smile and informing us that she was ready to head off to be a super-star in another world is really informing us that ``Kiryu Coco'' has reached the end of its natural life, and its soul (i.e. K-chan) is heading out into a different world, and is very much alive.

The question then is if those who loved Kiryu Coco knows how to find K-chan again wherever she goes. Put back into our real world [instead of kayfabe], it's the same as asking if we who loved our loved ones know how to find our loved one's soul again when they are no longer corporally animated in this world.

Naturally, since we do not know who K-chan is, we call her by her last known name, which is ``Kiryu Coco'', even though after ``graduation'', it is a dead character. That's our chosen manner of identifying K-chan whose actions and portrayal in ``Kiryu Coco'' made Kiryu Coco.

Clearly K-chan no longer identified herself as Kiryu Coco any more, otherwise there wouldn't be a need to ``graduate'' in the first place.

Does this mean that if we voluntarily choose to leave our physical body through death, it is also a situation where we (as in our soul) no longer identifies with the body that it is riding in?

There might be some truth in that, to be had. Suicide is often thought of as a way to ``end it all'' for oneself; however this does not mean that any external factors that caused the situation that made one consider ``ending it all'' will be resolved. What is truly ending is the self-identification of this particular physical body with the soul that rides in it.

I talked recently about feeling as though I were a walking-dead, in the sense that I am just going through the steps to maintain [enough] life to fulfil obligations until the point where I have no more obligations to fulfil before just ``ending it all''. Maybe I (as in the soul riding in this meatbag) just don't identify with what this physical body is as determined by the behaviours and relationships that it had gathered as lore over time.

...which raises a different question. Is this notion of no longer identifying with whom I have seem to have been considered a type of self-loathing? I am uncertain about that because I don't hate being alive; I somehow tolerate it ambivalently. I say this because the thought of dropping everything and going to somewhere else to restart a new identity did not fill me with great enthusiasm---perhaps I have lots of baggage left to carry around, sometimes literally instead of metaphorically.

Eh, who knows. It's late night---I've been marathoning the Animorphs series as the temperature kept on being stupid high, and am feeling a little sad from the ending of Kiryu Coco the character. My right ribs feel like I might have bruised them somehow, since breathing seems to make them feel pain, as is gentle palpations of the spot.

Not likely to die, but definitely affected in many ways. Let's just call this a small rant and leave it till the next update.

Ciao.

P.S.: Weather Hackers☆

A M3h Day?

Today isn't a good day. I don't know if it qualifies as a bad day though---maybe it does?

Who knows?

It started off quite comfortably. I was keeping the last TTRPG stream of HololiveEN running in the background while devouring more of Digital Filters (3rd Edition). It was still pretty much okay and seemed to be on track to being a good day.

Then it started to get a little too hot, and I ended up taking a nap, which was interrupted randomly by some spam callers on the land line, and other random shouty sounds all over.

Eventually napping was not possible any more and I pulled myself up from the floor and put away the mattress. Then I was just sitting here and feeling strange flips in my stomach as my head felt a little dizzy.

Couldn't tell if it was something to do with the caffeine dose (too low/too high?), or just due to the stupid heat. Or maybe even the restlessness from being too sedentary for too long.

Most likely it is a combination of all of the above. Easier answer that is technically correct, but explains almost nothing---that's the machine learning way of answering things after all.

So now, as I sit here and stare off into the distance, I just wonder what the heck happened so far.

Ah well. Maybe I should go out and walk or something.

This is a short entry. Till the next update.

Movement and Observation

I'm at the point where my list of things to write about is shrinking ever so slightly, due to me generally staying at home, and also not wanting to keep bringing up the mundane (like how many pages of a book/series I have read). It is easy to get some material to rant about from scouring the various news websites, but at some fundamental level, I don't really enjoy doing that [scouring] much.

If I am going to write about real-world happenings outside of my immediate, personal experience, then it is my duty to actually do enough research to make it as informed a piece of writing as I can to avoid being one of the many misinformation/disinformation spreaders that I have expressed distaste for. But doing all that means that I may inadvertently raise the profile of this blog of mine to beyond the small handful of people who are still reading it---I'm not sure if I want that, or even am remotely ready for that.

Meta-discussions aside, I did think of something to write about while going on a short walk earlier today: movement and observation.

I don't move normally as compared to most people, and by that, I don't mean that I do funny walks or anything of that sort. When I move from one point to another, I am usually quite focused on my surroundings, with the focus level proportionate to how unfamiliar I am with the place. At the lowest focus level, I let instinct take over my vision, relying on a lot of peripheral vision and instinctual facial recognition to take over the navigation process. This means that even at the lowest level of focus, my visual arc tends to be much larger than expected. This reliance on my peripheral vision is why I prefer glasses with wider lenses that do not compromise on that, which leads to lenses that extend much farther out along the frame, which itself is much closer to the width of my head than not. In addition, the glasses itself sits higher on my face so as to bring the lenses closer to my eye, which also increases the effective arc of corrected vision.

Leaving my visual cortex to the instinct level also means that I can often identify familiar faces faster than I can process consciously. So if you are someone that I might know, it is more likely than not that I have identified you already when you appeared within my visual range. Now whether I choose to recognise you is a different story, and relies on the processing of the higher levels of consciousness above that of my instincts.

Apart from making extensive use of my peripheral vision (and lowering my level of conscious control to that of being instinctual), I also use lots of eye and head movement to further increase the amount of surroundings that I can see. I rely a little heavier on eye movement since it is quick and less confusing to others, but I do use head movement to increase it much further even as I am continuing my forward ambulation. Think of it as the extended version of ``look left, then right, then left again before crossing the road'' principle. With these combined movements, I can cover much of the 360 ° that I can observe, leaving about the rear 30 ° or so uncovered. There is usually no need to do that, but if I am in a really unfamiliar place, I will physically half-turn my entire body with the right amount of foot pivot to check my six.

I don't do that action most of the time because for most places, it's not as necessary to be that observant. Covering that remaining 30 ° is important if I'm in a completely unfamiliar place for two reasons:

1. It establishes a view to remember should one need to backtrack later on; and
2. It demonstrates to observers that one is actually aware of one's surroundings.

That second point can be quite important from the safety perspective---one can spot more dangers earlier if one were to look around one's surroundings more, and showing that awareness raises the threat-level (and opportunity cost) for the opportunistic perpetrator, under the ``most violence is committed among familiar people, and non-familial violence is often predatory in nature'' principle. Showing that one is actively looking out makes one look less enticing as a prey for such predatory people, which raises one's safety by a bit. Of course, it also means that one can pre-emptively know if they are setting themselves up for a bad encounter through the observation as well---most times the best self-defense is to avoid being in such a situation in the first place.

Apart from the observation arcs that I talk about, I also use quite a bit of ``reflective elements'' to further increase what I can see. ``Reflective element'' use here means checking out things that reflect light, like mirrors that I pass by, or windows that have some kind of reflection, even camera output displays; essentially anything that extends the normal direction of view in one way or another. It's habitual at this point. Effective shadowing/stalking requires one to not do any suspicious actions when under observation, and sometimes while trying to maintain a low suspicion, the perpetrator may need to make up for lost ground during moments of non-observation. So an effective way of applying the suspicion pressure (and give oneself more time to react) is to use as many of such ``reflective elements'' to increase the duration of observation.

With respect to actual movement, I have a tendency to just walk straight ahead with as little ``wobble'' as possible, keeping on the left side of the route (SIN city rules, sort of). If there are any obstacles, I can end up doing some kind of irimi movement to continue my general forward movement, though with what most would call a ``dodge''. This is often the case if there is just too many people to do my more usual action of just stopping and looking at the other person to see what he/she wants to do in terms of movement. I don't mind giving way to people; it doesn't hurt me in time, and more importantly, allows a more fluid movement since I can always make up the ``lost'' time in the stop through my usual fast movement.

Years of aikido and jujutsu training have taught me how to keep advancing no matter what gets in the way, which includes how to break my falls. There has been instances where I did execute some kind of breakfall on instinct thanks to the slippery ground, and from those instances, I truly got away lightly. I foresee that this will continue to serve me well into the future should I live that long, since one of the leading causes of really big problems from being old is actually bone breakage, particularly of the hips.

You don't really want that.

Anyway that's all I have to say for now. It's a little different from the usual ranting and existential mulling. Till the next update.

Buzzing Thoughts

Bear with me. I'm going to try and capture some rather fleeting thoughts before this buzz goes away. If things are incoherent, well, deal with it. Sorry not sorry.

I went back to my favourite bar for an afternoon of drinking [Guinness] and reading while eating some of my favourite bar grub. It has been slightly longer than a month since I was there, no thanks to all the ``no dining in'' edict that accompanied the ``Phase Two (Heightened Alert)''. I somehow managed to down 6 glasses of my favourite stout, and read some books, while getting a nice buzz.

I've not had such a buzz in a while, considering that I have not drunk anything alcoholic for a while ever since I have more or less cleared out my stash.

I was honestly afraid that I would somehow get myself actually drunk drinking my usual amount at my usual pace after not having drunk in a while. Thankfully, that did not happen.

What did happen is that I have this nice buzz. Combine that with some very positive energy 1980s mando-pop music, I feel innervated (not enervated---I swear these two words are somehow worse than flammable versus inflammable). There's just something about some 1980s mando-pop that makes it all bubbly and full of positive energy, something that I didn't realise that I was badly needing until today, partly because of some of the bad news that I have been hearing from my friends, partly because I allowed myself to start wallowing in the seductive thing that was nostalgia.

Oh no... the thoughts I want to capture are slowly disappearing---gotta go faster at the expense of coherence!

The manager of my favourite bar is leaving for greener pastures soon---her last day is next Monday. Naturally, I should show up to give her some support. I don't know her well enough to be able to call her by name, but her presence was definitely something to look forward to, if nothing but for a familiar face. I saw the owner of the bar [franchise] today, and it was still the same dude.

Tangentially relatedly, my worse fears regarding my favourite sushi place after seeing that all the steel kitchen equipment have gone missing have been realised---they are on an indefinite hiatus until this nonsense of a pandemic [control measure] is stabilised.

Leaving leaving leaving---everyone's leaving. Nothing new, possibility always expected, but still painful when it happens. I really don't like dealing with endings. It ain't over yet though, considering that Kiryu Coco's last day as a Hololive talent is coming to an end post Jul 01, which is like Thursday.

I really don't like dealing with endings.

A recent discussion with a friend plus some 1980s mando-pop optimism and being buzzed made me think very off-handedly about being in some kind of boyfriend/girlfriend relationship---the allure is still sort of there, but (as I have grown to realise) that kind of feeling of need/want decays increasingly faster over time.

It got to the point where when I see a nicely dressed woman with some body-con dress, the only reaction I had was just ``cool dress'' and stop there, not even interested in stealthily checking her out more. The reason is really simple: I don't even know who she is, so why should I even be bothered with being physically attracted to her.

Yabai yabai yabai...

...or is it really やばっ? Not being physically attracted to women is good right, since it means I won't fall into that big sin of sexual immorality and what-not?

Eh, who the heck knows.

I was thinking a little about my situation while taking the bus home from my favourite bar under the influence of the side conversations of the bar [franchise] owner and manager about how I am still on a year-long sabbatical, the 1980s mando-pop positivity, and being buzzed. One word kept coming to mind: walking-dead. Okay, it's hyphenated, so sort of cheating, but who cares? The walking-dead---that seems to be what I am.

Just moving through physical existence waiting to fulfill all the obligations that I still have remaining before turning my metaphorical switch from ``on'' to ``off'' permanently and calling it a day. Sure, some people might be a bit upset, but most of them are too far to really give more than a slight damn about the fact that I have gone away.

Harsh but in many ways I believe to be true.

It's as though I have already experienced what I wanted out of this life (the whole ``不在乎天长地久, 只在乎曾经拥有'' type of mentality that I have said before on many occasions. If I claim that this life is just a phase that I am passing through, and that I truly adhere to the mantra of ``不在乎天长地久, 只在乎曾经拥有'', then logically I should grow a spine and just be content with all that I have experienced and just be ready to be called home to the LORD.

Funnily enough, I feel as though this time, I am actually content to a large degree, despite this weird feeling that there is some yet undiscovered mental lock that I have not breached open.

Alright, I am feeling the buzz going away and regular cognitive functions returning. I'm going to end here for now and go run the hair clipper to lop off the month's growth of hair before my shower. The Animorphs series still has some 18-ish books left, and I hope to complete it so that I can move on to something else.

Why? No reason other than just to check a few things off the list. That's what my reading list is for---to motivate me to just move through works to check things off lists so that I can have a sense of achievement. It's my way of playing a game that I have set for myself---no direct comparison with other people because I really can't be arsed to get trapped in competition for something that doesn't matter at all.

Alright, till the next update then.