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When I started writing this I haven't expected so many things to be there. It does show that things are happening a little bit, both from my actions and from the environment.
Let's have a look...
Well, whatever that mystery medicine is, it certainly worked. A whole lot of strange things happened as well. Let's have a look at what happened.
All the wounds have closed up and all the flakes have finally come all the way out. I've felt less itchy and there is basically no dust buildup wherever I go now.
There remain a number of scabs and marks that I am told is part of the skin healing, and while the early ones have gone away entirely now new ones have appeared because it's really hard to resist messing with them. For the most part however the marks have gone and the skin looks halfway normal now.
It's still is mystery medicine and I have no clue what's in it, and the fact that the bottles are unlabelled means that I can't even pretend to look it up and understand it. Plus, I have to take a second course of pills whose contents I also have no idea of though their quantities have decreased somewhat. But it's hard to argue with the results. Oh well.
Possibly related to this, I have lost a bit more weight. According to the statistical standards set up for everyone except Euro-American men and possibly women, by having a BMI of less than 23 means that I am not overweight anymore and am in the normal weight range. At time of writing my most recent weigh-in is 66.65 kg. and I have been losing weight at a more or less safe (?) rate of like 1000 g a month or so.
I didn't really increase my exercise level at all and I don't care to, but I have changed my diet deliberately in some ways. First, I have tried to lose the habit of drinking too much sugar by basically switching to the zero-sugar variants of drinks wherever possible. I still allow myself one full-fat drink every day and I don't care if I had more than one but that one small conscious thought in my mind does drive me into choosing aspartame over sugar. Sure enough the weight did go down a bit.
The other thing that has happened is that the Mystery Medicine I have taken is so numerous that I end up downing 400 ml of water every time. This surely has something to do with losing weight too as it means that I don't drink so many other drinks and also that it should help flush out things that shouldn't be there (certainly I have a healthier pee profile during this moment).
So yeah I think this may help kick-start me to a better lifestyle. Not That much better but better.
I got an unexpectedly high score in the JLPT so I'm off to the races to go up one more level. This is strange because I somehow got full marks on listening but I remember struggling very hard to listen to things right. I must have guessed correctly all the time in an incredible stroke of luck.
Listening really is very hard. I can hear completely different syllables to what was sung, which isn't great for listening to songs. And they speak very quickly, so I have to fill in a lot using context, which sometimes isn't there or isn't helpful.
Well, I hope that listening to a bunch more videos will help with that.
Did a lot of driving this month both to entertain myself and to a practical end. Mainly ferrying my parents and other relations around and also going to places where it would take ages to get by public transportation.
Having now gotten a bit more of an intuition as to the costs of driving I have found out that the deck is surprisingly not stacked in favour of driving at all, definitely not as much as "the urbanists" would like to imply: parking is stupid expensive where it is available at all, going across the harbour and back is an instant $40 penalty where public transportation is usually half that, and that's before taking into account just how easy it is to get a bus to a place and that you can time yourself using a live bus arrival time service. (For political reasons, I don't take the MTR at all where I can help it.) Ultimately, the only places where I can see a car win out are two very specific shopping centres that are on the island and also require a difficult bus change: one on the Peak, and one in Tai Koo. Maybe the ones over in Stanley too but I never go there personally.
Of course, I am also allegedly living in a "transit paradise" according to those same urbanists, so perhaps this is no surprise to them nor should it be to me. I intend to write about this in full at a later date. A draft is already in progress.
Meanwhile at the end of last month there was an anime con I went to and it was pretty good. Once again I basically just took it as a vtuber event and went to see two of them. Both are pretty huge and commanded a massive audience and it really is amazing how that happened.
Things have undoubtedly slowed down in this department. I only managed a handful of pages last month, and did twice as much but still only barely over the double digits this month.
I have completed another set of flags to be printed and sent out, but this is mostly because I had an emergency flag that I have to build and send to someone as fan mail (see above). It's good now, and that did use up a little more of my art supplies which is always good. It did however require me to dip into my old flag supply to maintain efficiency in paper used – I always print eight flags at once which is the maximum that will fit in one A4 sheet of paper.
I finally bought some RAM sticks that are a definite upgrade from my current RAM configuration. But to install it, I need to turn off my computer, and I don't really want to do that. Probably I'll turn it off when I go to Japan.
It looks like the AAS has somehow blocked the entirety of Hong Kong from seeing its jobs board. It has been my only known place to search for PhDs so now I have to go to some other website to search for it.
I got annoyed that all the clocks in my control are out of sync except for the ones with an onboard computer, so my phone, my tablet and of course my computer. I know that three of the clocks have a radio sync and one of them don't have any sync capability at all. I want to buy a new clock replacing that last one – which I think has been with me for almost half my entire life thus far – but the other clocks take a radio sync signal that doesn't reach here. I have tried using alternate means to trigger the sync loop but I didn't have any success. I hope to find some way to convert signals that do exist into the ones that those clocks can understand.