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This has been a pretty ordinary month, all thoughts considered. There's rather a lot to say, but we'll get to it in due time.
I have spent much too long trying to get one application in, but got it in I did, and that was my second. I should have done two this month but for some reason I didn't.
It has always been a bit difficult for me to progress the application, primarily because they require me to write a bunch about myself, which is something I have been known to struggle with. That makes it so that this application, which I have reserved myself plenty of time to finish, actually got handed in at the last moment, leaving the two week buffer period in the middle to nothing because I just look at the application and despair.
I don't know how to deal with that at all, other than just to grimace it and hold on, and also take my own advice when it comes to a similar thing with conlangs: it gets easier after the fifth take.
Oh well. At least now I have one more in the air after being rejected once, and then I have two more lined up to apply to. Let's keep this up.
The recent HKD 10,000 consumption voucher (not to be confused with last year's HKD 5,000 consumption voucher) has landed in my hands, and it's a "use it or lose it" kind of thing so I have to get it off my hands and replace it with goods and/or services as soon as possible. Well, as is classic for anything involving receiving money, it's being drip-fed to me and actually this time I only get HKD 4,000.
Unlike last time where all of it went into my belly, I intend to give myself a bit of enjoyment this time. Amongst other things, such as a Switch controller, I have also thought to give myself a little bit of a computer upgrade. As my GPU turned out to be so old that Proton does not support it, it seems to me an opportune time to upgrade it as that money would not be mine anyway.
So that happened, but the case was too small to fit it in. But that's fine, I can get a new case. Also a new adaptor for the new DP output that I don't have.
Unfortunately, I have appeared to have blown the CPU trying to install the new GPU, so that means I have to get a whole new CPU. And then the CPU doesn't fit so a new motherboard has to go with it too.
All in all, it's about twice as much as I budgeted but I think it's worth it. Though now, a new RAM stick might not be a bad idea…
Some progress has been made on UJMJ, but not as much as I have hoped. I did spend a couple of weeks just stuck in a rut trying to devise a replay file, but then a friend told me to just stick to native functions for now and that seems to have done it. There's still a few other things to do to bring it up to even workable condition, like implementing winning (which is really, really hard and I'm not looking forward to it).
I learnt of [remotion], which is the text-based video engine I always wanted. It uses React though, which I'm a bit apprehensive about, but I have to try it at some point to see if I can get my video making skills off the ground.
Also something I learnt is [clog], a GUI framework for Common Lisp. Absolutely something I must try, especially for UJMJ. It's going to become part of the local stuff at least.
A dozen or so pages were completed this month, but still no scan utility to upload them. It's now been a year and a quarter…
But also, I had made a nice collection of road signs for model cars and how to use them. It's posted on my Tumblr, where it got a nice reception.
I have three or four articles in preparations that I want to write. I'll probably get them done soon, time willing. They revolve around roads and the things that go on top of them a lot.
As should be fairly clear by now I'm now in a bit of a car phase, which isn't that surprising. At least some part of it is random, but I think a little bit of it has to be because YouTube recommended me a car channel and I got lured in from all the statistics, numbers and notation.
Of course you have heard of my veritable collection of toy and model cars, which at this point is so numerous that I did a survey and there are…
5663. « Documents/Junk/dat % grep -Pc " +- " cars.yaml 354
…that many cars. A considerable amount, and of course I would like a few more.
It is slightly interesting to note, however, that my main prioritisation algorithm as to which ones to buy first is, in part, by whether or not they have been modded in to everyone's favourite car physics simulator that happens to also be the world's best car crash and destruction simulator by virtue of it actually being detailed enough to actually model damage realistically, unencumbered by licensing restrictions by semi-uptight car manufacturers that would rather not see facsimiles of their products being abused (in some cases literally) to hell (and so the cars that are in the game are actually all more-or-less fictional and "real cars" have to be modded in). It's funny to me then that the whatever the community adds in, I would usually push up the priority list, which has some nice unexpected properties to it vaguely classified as "humorous".
Of course it's a bit expensive, but that's fine; it turns out that they're pretty cheap anyway, with a lot of the cars being around the HKD 50 range even for fairly high-quality models. My standards are not high so I can do this, but maybe not if I want to be "serious" about it.
Ultimately, my "ultra" life goal is to somehow find a model for every single car that has ever been on any public roads since the 1930. But if that's not doable, then an acceptable alternative is to get at least one of every "brand" of car, here essentially meaning the logo on the front so some manufacturers do get a leg up by putting custom badges. Storage is a concern, but not for now….
A few weeks ago the new amah came in and she's settling in now. Should not be too long before things start settling down. That's good at least, what with mum being stressed over having to do so many chores it's all just in time. There had been a few hairy incidents but it's all sorted now.
My health is… okay, but it could be better. I've been attempting to lose weight but the only thing I can say is that I didn't gain any more weight. It's mostly just a game of mass in and mass out. Doing the old "conservation of mass" idea seems more concrete than some vague association of food to body-extractable energy, at least to my physicist brain.
