Happy new year. What a rough start to the year though; everything kind of went faster than I expected. Let's have a quick recap of what is going on here.
Pretty much nil; It's fair to say that I have kind of jumped out of the creative loop in order to tend to various slightly more important things. This is the first time that I have actually written anything that is even partly fun this entire month.
In some sense, this is something that I have decided to do for myself, but this is only part of the story; the other side of the coin is that it is also partly forced by outside forces, which I will detail later.
I intend to write something about a type of music I really like soon. Stay tuned in my main website.
However, I have several interesting projects that I want to play around with over the next two years, all of which are well-defined with a good end product:
A card game where the stat lines are complex numbers which are occasionally taken to be matrices, and can be modified by other matrices.
The game is intended to play a lot more like football than a battle, with the goal of a game being to get a ball, which is a number, into and then out of a region on the complex plane.
The goal for this project is to prototype out enough cards to make it a playable game, for a definition of "playable" that requires players to have a calculator with them, and then maybe print a sampler set just as a bit of an artefact.
But what I want to do is to make a small video game that plays this game, along with maybe some training parts such as recognising winning patterns and calculating scores.
Additionally, I want to use neural-network-based AI to create AIs for this game, which would otherwise need to be multiplayer.
This would be my first real "game" that I would have programmed from the start.
This will be another video game that replicates one of my hobbies: ride buses everywhere and to see things.
The idea here is that you have an unfamiliar bus network with an unfamiliar language in an unfamiliar place. Your goal is simply to get from one place to another prioritising speed, price or less walking. You can choose a number of different transport methods, but you cannot drive and you don't get to choose when you start your journey. There are also secret routes that everyone can access but you have to say the magic words to actually make use of them.
This is going to be tricky because it depends on an existing transport network. I will have to make that transport network to start with, and it has to be large enough that games would be interesting to play with.
I don't have a job anymore. This is the thing I was hinting at earlier.
This is mostly fine, but it did come as a bit of a surprise as I did not expect it to come this early (I should be on my last week as I write this blog). There's a number of rather annoying things that I have to arrange along with this rather sudden change but they have to be done and they should be mostly done by now.
I have to keep the details mostly under wraps because of various reasons but the consequences are mostly clear enough. Basically, one of the things that I did take up with employment is some counselling sessions, which I have used to great effect, mostly for careers reasons. With that gone I can't have that counsellor anymore and she has to refer me to another one. That's fine. And I have to pay, which is also fine.
Ultimately, as a summary position to this job I had, I would say that working is valuable and gave me things that I want, but it was not without cost and I paid for it quite dearly. I would not have done much differently.
Anyway, with no work, this section is pointless and I'm not going to include it in future logs.
The counselling sessions I have mentioned above have pushed me down a direction where I have managed to apply for a PhD. That is, applied. Finished. It's quite relieving actually.
Obviously there has to be more to come, and that might be a bit difficult given the current season, but now I have a play-book if I can find a position. And that is all nice, I can deal with all that.
If all goes well I might not be in Hong Kong anymore by the end of the year, which I am fairly torn about. I don't want to study in Hong Kong because of several things: first, the political atmosphere here is not conducive at all to any sort of research, even if my area of research is not at all political; and second, astronomy is not very well-founded in Hong Kong anyway. Even putting aside that most of astronomy does not depend on local sky availability, there's really only one game in town (HKU) and I already applied several times and didn't work out and I feel like they might recognise me if I tried too many times. It's also the wrong season (they only open their registration part of the year and closed in November). On the other hand, this is my home of 25 years and I will miss it if I leave, perhaps permanently. There's no telling what I will return to if I even do, and there's the question of what to bring with me to re-settle in the UK. Ultimately I don't think mere nostalgia, or projected future nostalgia, should hold me back, but I will say that the fact that I'm worried about that shows that I genuinely love my city and am sad that it is being fed to the dogs for no particular end than an ideology that probably won't even care for it if it exists or not.
Anyway, that's enough of that.
My weight has stabilised and is holding steady, though I would like to see it come back down a bit.
Skin problems have been beaten back slightly, but remains a slight issue.
Mentally, the family has been under some tension, though it's not unmanageable though it is unpleasant. Since I don't have a job anymore I have become the driver of the family mainly to fill in for dad who is at work all the time and so can't drive.
There's not much to talk about here so let's move on.
I have been enamoured with Inscryption recently. It is the thing that inspired Matrimony, above, though the name came from the fact that it was originally meant to be a Pokémon parody but with matrices (and is far enough removed away from any combat that Nintendo have no right to sue me to hell – especially now that the gameplay loop has completely changed). Watching people play the game is just as interesting as playing it myself, which I have yet to do but fully intend to at some point in time.
This dovetails my introduction to virtual YouTubers, or vTubers as they are actually called now I guess, which I have found trying to get into recently. I think I might do at some point.
Over the last few weeks it has been increasingly clear that the tensions in the world are about to boil over again and that there might in fact be war in the very near horizon. I have stated earlier that I think there might be a war near Hong Kong before the end of 2029 with about a 50% confidence, but now I think I can creep it up to 55%. As for everywhere else, I can put it up to 65% now.
It is not nice to think about this but I believe I must to make sure that I have a clear plan of what to do next.
Ultimately, this has been a month that isn't really all good or all bad. There had been some ups and downs. As the lunar new year approaches, I hope that the balances shifts towards good.
Until next time.