Hao Jiu Bu Jian

 So... Wow! It's been a really long time! 

Looking back at my old posts... Wow, I was so unhappy. I was struggling with so many things. But in spite of that, I managed to create so much beauty. So much prose, so many lovely photographs, carefully-written recipes borne of hours spent experimenting in the kitchen. I'm...really proud of myself. I created so many amazing things. I deserved to be loved, even in those days when I thought otherwise. And now I can see, very clearly, that my isolation wasn't my fault at all.

I'm still a creator. My soul is still desperate to speak, and so I continue to draw, and write, and craft things with my hands. I bit the bullet and created an AO3 account, and now have multiple published works - with comments! Bookmarks! People like my stories! I somehow ended up in charge of a club at work (a club! Me!), and publish the monthly newsletter - which also gets likes! From upper management, even! I still bake and cook, and bring things in to share at the office, and people like them. My boss likes them! She goes early to get them from the office fridge because otherwise they'll be wiped by lunchtime. I made a hand-painted gift for the annual Christmas exchange, wielding brushes and paints for the first time in years, and the recipient genuinely loved it!

These days, I actually have validation. I'm loved and appreciated for what I do. It's... Well, it's really all I ever wanted, and now it's just so easy.

To my past self... You struggled so hard so that I could get here. You pushed through pain and loneliness and betrayal, over and over. Thank you, truly. I will always love you very much.

It's Been a Long While

So the last post was, um, a downer.

I didn't want to just leave things there, but... I'm fine. It's been more than a year later, I've broken free from many of the things that used to make me miserable, I've found things that make me happy... I'm fine. I'm still here.

I might not be back for a while, but I'm still going to be here.

Cloudy February

Another month has drifted by. There have been some upsets here and there, but I like to think that I'm getting better at handling them. I'm still working hard to improve myself. It's a hard battle, and I'm my own enemy. But I am seeing progress, and I won't stop now.

Unfortunately, I'm starting to see diminishing returns with my touch-typing. I think there's only so good I can get while working with a laptop keyboard. I really would like to own a Model M keyboard. There's probably one in the storeroom somewhere, but I doubt it works, and the connector probably wouldn't fit my computer. One of the old computers in the lab had a Model M. It was rather dirty, as was normal for shared equipment that no-one was responsible for cleaning, but the keys were well-spaced, and made nice clicking sounds. I once spilled tomato soup on it by accident. The keyboard survived, but the Esc key was always a bit odd after that.

Recently, I managed to reach IKEA just in time to try out their breakfast dishes. The waffles were somewhat hard, dry, and underwhelming – probably because I got to them late – but the scrambled eggs and hashbrowns were genuinely good. It's definitely worth the extremely low price. I'm not a huge salmon fan, but their salmon croissant is pretty good too. 

I've reached the age where ghost stories don't scare me very much, but stories of home invaders and creepers are frightening. Is it a sign of being an adult, to fear hypothetical creatures less than other people? People are terrifying, and there are some exceptionally terrifying people in this world.

This entry was rather stream-of-consciousness, wasn't it? I do have some more things going on, and a frozen cheesecake recipe to post, but I think I'll stop here for now.

Happy Birthday, Singapore

You know a show is good when it literally moves you to tears.

...

Happy birthday.

2016: A Killer Year

Look back upon the glory days of 2012, when I used to post more than a dozen times per year. This hasn't quite been a good year! People have died, the world has had some moments of insanity, my chilli plants refuse to produce fruit... It's been...some year.

On the other hand, some things have gotten better, at least for me. I've gotten a handle on my chronic procrastination – on that note, I strongly recommend watching Dr. Tim Pychyl's lecture on the subject, his research drills down into the psychology of procrastination, and so his advice has a sound scientific backing. I've commented on my weight loss before, but it's probably worth noting that I've managed to maintain a healthy weight for the past five months or so. After years of being iron deficient, my iron levels are back up, too, thanks to daily consumption of black sesame soup and dark chocolate. Quite dramatically, my hair stopped falling out as much. It's funny, what you get used to when you're chronically unhealthy.

McDonald's has brought back the Gula Melaka McFlurry for Chinese New Year. Someone out there is listening!

A friend got married in December, so I attended my first-ever Chinese wedding. You can believe I spend hours reading up on gift-giving and attire-related customs before going! They weren't terribly strict about it, but I think a wedding is the worst possible place for a social gaffe. I probably didn't have to check all the banknotes (it is traditional to gift money) to ensure that the serial numbers didn't contain 4 or 13... The wedding did introduce me to Cantonese cuisine. Crispy-skin chicken looks like an interesting challenge!

I just want to say, I once tried making soufflé when I was quite young, and it failed so miserably that I didn't try again for years. Then I watched the QI episode featuring Carrie Fisher, in which she declared that soufflé is really quite easy to make, and she did not see what the fuss was about. Inspired, I tried making soufflé again.... and it worked. Perfectly. 

I was devastated when I heard Ms. Fisher had passed away. There have been many notable deaths in 2016, but this one cut deep. She was a remarkable woman, and it's no wonder that so many admired and respected her. Rest in peace, Ms. Fisher.

This was a downer of a year, wasn't it. But tomorrow is another year.

I'm a Doctor, Not a... Normal Doctor!

I have my PhD! The graduation represented a final gauntlet - seriously, half an hour before the ceremony they piled on a set of complicated instructions, complete with a map, and pretty much everyone got it at least slightly wrong - but we all survived, no-one tripped on stage or lost their bonnet, and about twenty new doctors stepped out into the world. And then cupcakes were had.

Unrelated topic - since the previous post, I have managed to get my hands on a bottle of kirschwasser! Authentic Black Forest cake is now a possibility. My other recent baking attempts have included two different types of bread - potato rolls and Hokkaido milk bread. Both work with aquafaba substitutions, although for the milk bread I still used a beaten egg for the glaze.

A recent acquisition for my kitchen is this Grilla grill pan from IKEA. The price is affordable but the pan works beautifully, I highly recommend it.

Finally, I think it's someone's birthday or something. I think it's... Iron Man's? Yep, just four days from now, on May 29. Happy birthday to Tony Stark!

Culture, Cuisine and the Occult

Aww man, it's already November, where did the year go? Also, apparently I've only posted here five times previously this year, this is a new low.

I watched The Martian in the cinema shortly after it came out. It was a thoroughly brilliant and enjoyable film. I don't think 3D viewing added much (I have yet to view a film where it did), but it was not terribly distracting, either. I am also stupidly proud to have known of Andy Weir before he became famous (I have been a longtime fan of Casey and Andy).

I think its slightly less meaningful to be stupidly proud of any Homestuck alumni, since Homestuck was a force of nature, but I do remember when Toby "Radiation" Fox was relatively nobody. If video games cannot be art, then what is Undertale? For example, without Undertale, this cinnamon butterscotch tart would not have existed.

(Recipe available here - all I changed was to cut the amount of whipped cream topping in half, and use sweet potato flour instead of cornstarch. Also, I suggest allowing the tart to sit in the refrigerator overnight before consuming.)

Contrastingly, spaghetti recipes (for that animate skeleton in your life) are not difficult to find, but this one for Tagliatelle al Ragu Bolognese is my favourite.

Overall, this has been a good year for independent artists. Scott Cawthorn's Five Night's at Freddy's survival horror series, which I have been following vicariously through Let's Plays since I am a huge coward, will be getting a film adaptation from Warner Bros. Pictures. I'm ...not sure if I will overcome my fear long enough to watch the film. Or even the trailer. I enjoy horror prose, as embodied by the SCP Foundation, but visual elements are...harder to ignore.

On the subject of prose, I recently came across the satirical works of Saki, which are freely available via Project Gutenberg. The style rather reminds me of Jane Austen's, but with a mostly masculine viewpoint and greater usage of biting social commentary. Saki's heroes are witty and intelligent, contrasting with their dull, greedy, self-centered antagonists, although over-cleverness is not rewarded either.

My recent readings have included Charles Stross's works. I loved the Laundry Series from about a page into the The Concrete Jungle. The protagonist works for "The Laundry", an organisation very much like the SCP Foundation in function and scope, but with a distinctly British flavour to contrast with the Foundation's faintly North American air. The stories read like detective fiction, in which the protagonist has to figure out what new supernatural creature is involved in the latest case and how to defeat the creature, and any humans who might be assisting it. However, the sheer delight of these stories is how the paranormal is described in terms which allows it to fit into the known scientific world. Equoid is particularly wonderful in this regard. (Note that Equoid is mildly unsafe for work, and very much unsafe for sleep if read immediately prior.) The novella's explanation for the appearance and behaviour of a certain mythical being is fleshed out with gradual, creeping horror, small details inexorably building a final, sickening picture. At the tale's conclusion, I felt both ill and enlightened.

Returning to video games, I think A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky is another strong contender for the video-games-can-be-art argument. It's a thoughtful game, deconstructing some video game tropes while playing into some others. It's also, frankly, underrated. Perhaps the long title, somewhat subpar graphics and plodding pace put off some players. It is a long game, and it takes a while for its true brilliance to be apparent, but it is very much worth playing until the end.

This was another edited stream-of-consciousness post. It's almost the only type of post I write. Also, I'm not good at closing paragraphs, possibly for the same reason. My mind certainly doesn't stop, not just yet, so how should this prose end?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SINGAPORE!

A very happy 50th birthday to Singapore! And well done to everyone involved with the parade, it was fun and nostalgic and brilliant.

Also, to whoever chose Departure to the Front Lines from the Naruto Shippuden soundtrack to accompany the mobile column, I LOVE YOU.



I am unashamed to be a weeaboo.

Congratulations, Singapore!!

Closing In

I have the deplorable habit of talking when I have nothing to say, so I make up for it by not writing when I have nothing to say. That's the theory, anyway.

I must be growing old, because the prospect of Christmas and the end of the year no longer fills me with excitement. It's... just another day. Another year. I've had plenty of those. There will be good times and bad times, just like any other year. This year had too much excitement - the wrong kind of excitement. I think I could use a little peace for a change.

My PhD thesis will be finished soon - really finished soon. All the chapter writing is done, it's just a question of editing out every last mistake and stitching it into a book. It feels like the end of an era. Certainly, the PhD course was a difficult experience, both mentally and physically. I didn't quite handle it the way I would have liked, but wasn't that the point? The difficulty of completing a PhD is not the coursework itself, I don't think, although the work can be intensive and writing a thesis is a novel form of torture. It's the psychological part. Having the discipline to come in to work everyday including weekends, plan out experiments, meet deadlines and milestones. Dealing with office politics. Handling the various crises which inevitably arise from working with dangerous equipment in the company of many other individuals. Supervisors are there for guidance, but only minimally; most of it is self-directed. It's like a primer for the real life working experience. And you do work alongside postdoctoral fellows and research assistances who are there for the money, and you learn from how they handle things. 

In fewer words, doing a PhD is a horrible experience and I strongly recommend it.

Bionicle will be rebooted next year. That's a good move, I think. It's been gone too long to rely on old fans, and the old story is far too convoluted to bring in new fans. Back then, it was pretty obvious that the writers were making a lot of things up as they went along, especially in the early years. A fresh start will be good for the series. And the new sets do look pretty sweet.

I think I might actually be looking forward to the new year after all. There'll be good times, and bad times, but they won't be same good and bad times as before (stunning observation, there). 

In the meantime, enjoy these fifteen minutes of Wheatley's nattering.

Another Quick Post

It has been too long, yes!

I've been writing my PhD thesis. It seems that there is a critical limit to the amount of writing I can endure in a single day. So, a high thesis output means a low blog output. Even though blogging is significantly less boring.

So! What have I been doing recently? Well... writing I suppose. Where do the days go?

I did spend some time the other day watching the following video multiple times. It's an excellent parody of the video game, the style of music, and the style of music video. Also, it contains the second-most deftly-executed "Your Mom" joke I have seen (the first, of course, is from Meet the Spy).

Canonically, Ratonhnhaké:ton is supposed to be a serious, driven, unquestioned badass. Much of the humour of this video derives from a weedier version of the character engaging in slapstick antics, casual psychopathy, and constant, overwrought, failed attempts at being cool. (George Washington is the opposite - he still appears as a tough, admirable character, just not quite in the way one might expect).

As an aside, I am consistently impressed with level of effort fans expend when making tribute to their favourite media. Regarding the above video, if you take into account the costumes, the actors and actresses, the sets, the props, the stunts, green-screen effects, script writing, lyric writing, sound recording, editing... that's a lot of work for less than four minutes of payoff. Hats off to the Smosh team, and to others like them.

As a further aside, how proud would you be, if you were a creator and someone spent so much time and effort to celebrate your work? Creators who attempt to shut down fansites and delete fanworks on grounds of copyright infringement only confuse me. Copying others' work and trying to take credit for it is unethical, make no mistake, but creating what amounts to a love letter has an entirely different intent behind it.

Update XXXI: Beef...Stew

It's a Homestar Runner reference.

To update since the last time (and also to fill in the gaps between entries a little), I have several new recipes which I'll write up eventually. Things are progressing at work, and naturally leading to more work. I have a new appreciation for yoghurt. Also, Magnum Infinity.

Everyone should know about Gangnam Style by now, so I'm not going to comment on it beyond the fact that there's a shop about forty minutes up the road which carries those wedge-heeled canvas shoes.

Meanwhile, Stephen Fry!

Earthquake Lounge

Blogger, why did you have to change the layout? Why?

Whinge finished. I'm sitting in a departure lounge in Kansai Airport. Every now and then an aeroplane lands, and the whole place shakes. It's like there's an earthquake every five minutes.

I've been in Japan for the past two weeks, first for a conference and then a short holiday. Japan is an interesting country. It's true, when they say that Japanese are extremely polite. It's not just the bowing and the greetings, but also the extreme care everyone takes to keep public spaces clean, and to keep services as efficient as possible.

I also understand why so many expatriates, in spite of living in Japan for some time, are unable to speak the language fluently. It is so easy to get by without understanding Japanese, because almost everyone is willing to accommodate a helpless foreigner. (Although I did learn to read katakana and hiragana before coming here - I didn't fancy being completely helpless!)

I loved the regions in the Kansai region I visited, especially Kyoto. I wish I had spent more time there. Tokyo wasn't bad, but I found I preferred the areas which had an old-fashioned feel, such Asakusa and the Imperial Palace gardens, rather than modern districts like Shibuya, Ginza and Akihabara. Maybe I just like temples and nature. Less than a day into my stay in Kyoto and it already felt like home.

I did get to see Mt. Fuji with my own eyes (and camera), and felt all the more privileged when I was later told that it is hard to see the mountain at this time of the year, since it tends to be covered up by clouds. I did indeed see Mt. Fuji covered up by clouds later in the day - it completely disappears from view. Amazing that such a large mountain can vanish just like that .

Anyway, photos may be forthcoming at some point. For now, I'll enjoy this shaking room.

Hacker

To the dude from Germany who accessed my Gmail account: I hope you were thoroughly bored while you were in there.

To Gmail: Thanks!

To everyone else: As far as I can tell, no harm's been done. Let me know if you get any suspicious mail which is purportedly from me.

Update XXX: Thirty Posts Titled "Update"

Quick check in here - been stupidly busy. SO MANY EXPERIMENTS. I am a fiend of science.

Whatever that means.

There was a great short story in Nature last month. Go take a gander. (Make sure that you're not eating anything, or intending to eat anything. There's a fair amount of squick.)

Unpublished Post: In the New Year

(Note from the future: I found this post in my drafts, it was never published for any reason that I can see.)

The (Chinese) New Year is almost upon us! I'm irrationally excited because this is the Year of the Dragon, and I'm a dragon. (This also means that my age this year will be a multiple of 12.)

I discovered that the Today newspaper publishes a Sudoku puzzle almost daily. Sudoku puzzles are fun! I've even gotten the hang of the 5-star difficulty ones, and no longer have to slave for 3 hours over them.

I recently had some Kinokuniya vouchers to spare, so I got hold of Black Jack volumes 16 and 17. Black Jack is a manga series about a renegade surgeon with incredible skills and a tendency to be involved in the most bizarre of medical situations. (Building a little girl out of a teratoid cystoma? Surgery on a computer? Surgery on himself while suffering from a parasitic disease and being attacked by wild dingoes in the Australian outback? All in a day's work for Dr. Black Jack.) The stories are well-written with a balance of humour, seriousness and poignancy. In spite of Dr. Black Jack's almost godlike skills, he cannot save everyone, and his personal life is beset with tragedy. Yet there are the moments of fourth-wall breaking silliness, triumph and sheer awesomeness. (Self-surgery! Dingoes, I'm telling you!)

Also, the art is excellent. Poo to all those people who think art has to be realistic to be good. Black Jack is unashamedly cartoony, and yet there's a brilliance about the composition of each panel, even the panel layout as a whole. (In one story, a ship is rocking badly in a storm, tossing its passengers back and forth. The panels angle diagonally and even crisscross to reflect the movement.)

tl;dr Black Jack is an awesome manga about an awesome doctor, definitely a series I recommend.

Update XXIX: Ice Cream in Winter

...There's twenty-nine of these things? Seriously?

Ice cream is good in any season. Even when it's too cold. Also, double chocolate ice-cream on a warm brownie. Can you ask for more?

Three-minute thesis competitions pose an interesting challenge. The idea is to summarise one's own PhD thesis for a non-specialist audience in just three minutes, backed up by a single PowerPoint slide. This is hard enough as it is, but the competitive element means that one has to stand out against everyone else in some way.

Standing out is the key phrase. Most people approach the three-minute thesis by trying to describe as much of their data as possible in an articulate manner. Unfortunately, data on its own isn't particularly interesting, not to a lay audience to whom everyone's work would sound almost equally incomprehensible. What then has to become interesting is the speaker. The speaker must display their passion for their work as they describe it, and thus inspire the audience as well.

It isn't easy. In standard article or report-writing, the speaker has to become detached from their work. They must appear as a non-entity, objectively testing aspects of the world for the truth. However, for a talk, the speaker is as much a part of the presentation as the slides are. And for a competitive presentation, it is personality which makes one stand out.

So anyway, all this boils down to a three-minute talk I had to deliver earlier today. Designing it was an interesting experience, and people afterwards told me that they didn't expect that sort of thing from me. Hey, I can put on a show when I need to. And I did win.

It can be quite jarring when the sun shines into your room, warming it gently - but the minute you step outside, you are plunged into icy air. On the one hand, I suppose I should be grateful for my apartment's good insulation. On the other hand... As if it wasn't hard enough trying to dress according to Melbourne's temperamental weather!

Melbourne from a 737

Qantas. Why? Your planes tend towards old, but are still functional. Your food is good. Your stewardesses - okay, standards are falling everywhere, but you still have a few good ones working for you. Your flights are relatively cheap. If you were more organised, you would overtake Singapore Airlines easily!

I had a harrowing time getting to Australia. Two big traffic jams blocking both routes to Changi Airport, a long delay at check-in because Qantas forgot to deduct a fee, poor signage leading to us almost losing our luggage, and a flu plaguing me throughout the whole thing. You know how your ears pop as the aeroplane lands? Did you know that the pain is twenty times worse if you have viscous fluids blocking your sinuses? True facts!

Anyway I'm here, more or less. I suppose it's too much to expect these things to be easy.

Here, have a Bad Romance parody, Bad Project. It's the best lab-related one I know of. This is exactly what it's like doing a science-related PhD (having a good project is slightly better). It's subtle, but "Lady Science"'s costumes are made from common lab disposables.

The title of this post references a song. Internet cookie if you can identify it.

Going Somewhere

Scene: Kitchen, yesterday.

MOTHER: Are you going anywhere tomorrow?
ME: Yes, to Australia.
...

Update XXVIII: Food@Hawker Centre

It's surprising, the sort of things you can actually buy. Browsing a FairPrice Xpress outlet yielded bonito flakes (those delicious shavings used to garnish takoyaki and various other Japanese dishes), and starch balls which are most commonly found in bubble tea. Now that I think about it, takoyaki and bubble tea stall owners obviously get their ingredients from somewhere, but the general unavailability of these food preparations in the average grocery store makes them seem a little, well, magical.

And people wonder that while I subscribe to the traditionally feminine pursuit of shopping, my favoured retail therapy grounds are generally supermarkets. (I also like discount stores - there are always the strangest things.)

For most of the time I was home today (I also spent some time outside in the company of friends - even loners get lonely), I was at the center of a web, communication passing to me and from me and occasionally through me. I think I can honestly say that I have never sent so many emails in a single day. The heads of my lab would laugh, this must be business of usual for them, but for an underling like myself, such activity is rare. Usually I have, at most, two emails which require a response. Taking the position of some sort of operator is a strange, powerful feeling.

It is for this reason that I think I would enjoy being a secretary.

Lest I forget again, there is a very firm reason that I limit my consumption of ice kachang. Consuming the equivalent of a block of ice leaves one as equally cold as a person who just consumed a block of ice. Very, very cold. Air-conditioned food courts only make things worse.

On the subject of food courts, it occurs to me how superior they can be to restaurants. Cheaper, a wider variety of cuisines to choose from, and many of the newer ones are almost on par with a restaurant anyway. Take the Food Opera@ION Orchard (the at-sign modernhipcool thing is horrible why is it everywhere now). Excellent roti prata, even better fish curry, best Iced Milo made by a drinks stall, extremely reasonable price you'd have to go to Serangoon Road to match, elegant wooden furniture and decorative elements on the walls such that you can hardly believe you're eating in what amounts to a hawker centre. Robinsons doesn't give nearly as nice carrier bags as the ones they place your take-out in. And many of the newer shopping malls have comparable standards.

313@Somerset (the at-sign again why) also has a waitress who goes around in a Segway. Yes, around the food court. No, I don't know what she does that requires riding a Segway. Hopefully not delivery of drinks.

To change the subject completely, I have a new computer. My new personal assistant is a ThinkPad Edge, in sleek silver and glossy red. He's a last-season's Lenovo, but I have every confidence that he will handle the tasks I assign him, especially now that I engage in less gaming than I used to. He weighs a very portable 1.6 kg. His name is Magellan.

All I need is that (expensive!) laptop support I saw at IKEA, and my computing life will be complete.

This post has no point. But with this much verbosity, who needs Twitter?

Confirmation

... of Candidature. I just got an email telling me who my panel members are, and asking me to arrange a time to have a meeting with them, to decide if I'm fit to continue as a PhD student. Oral presentations and fierce questioning will be involved.

So my father just read in the newspaper that students tend to do better in exams if they've taken 10 minutes beforehand to write down all their worries on paper. Having articulated their concerns, they either realise how frivolous they are, or are able to prepare themselves to meet the challenge head-on. As the confirmation of candidature is a sort of exam for me, I'll have to try this out.

Of course I'm trying to distract myself from the terror of preparing for this thing. What do you think?

It doesn't help that my main supervisor, who will inevitably be on the panel, has THAT FACE. The one which convinces you that he doesn't approve of a word you are saying. He claims that he's just thinking and his face automatically does that without his knowledge, but given that he regularly tells fairly bad presenters that they've done a good job, I don't know if I should believe him.

What the heck. This isn't going to happen anytime soon. Time for thoughts of chicken rice and roti prata!