Belated Christmas Posting

I didn't want to write on Christmas, because, truth be told, I had a bit of a personal crisis that night.

In review, it does seem like I did okay. I found a job despite the pandemic. I learned things. I achieved some of my resolutions from last year. But when I look at the external things, such as finding new friends, making a game - I haven't really made the progress I desire.

If one were to ask my father, he would say these things are secondary, and now is the moment to build career and wealth. If one were to ask my mother, she would say I should stop playing video games and chase those things instead (and somehow fit doing more household chores in there). I don't think they're strictly wrong per se, but they're not exactly right, either.

Firstly, the truth is I am not my parents, who work all their lives and derive a majority of their self-worth from that work. My parents became this way because they were driven by survival in a Singapore that was much poorer. I am instead driven towards achieving a higher state within Maslow's hierarchy (without forgoing the base my parents have built).

Secondly, I was under the impression that playing games would provide me greater "inspiration" for my own designs. After all, the original idea for my designs came from two games. Yet it's effectiveness has been quickly diminishing, and I admit I've been in a "block" for the past 3-4 weeks. Not to mention I also stumbled upon this piece of advice from a developer a couple weeks ago:

Saw some vague discourse about "getting pro skill at game design". "play more [digital] games" is a myopic (and potentially prohibitive) answer imo, especially considering that most of the greats of the last century predated the current medium as we know it 

I feel weirdly about this one because it's generally good advice to play a lot of games bc it's shorthand for developing systemic intuition, but studying genres you like/are working in can be a slippery slope towards homogeneity

I already dedicated myself against playing Hades, Diablo, or Grim Dawn for the time being, but I think I've been spending too much time playing similar games e.g. League of Legends that have little relevance to my actual goals. So my mom is right, but not for the reasons she thinks.

Anyway, my point is that I really need to realign my goals. It's been absolutely great that at least I got something done this year in spite of COVID-19. But I really need to be a bit more focused and ambitious if I want to make next year better.

December Writing

Dec 14

A quiet day in the office without much work.
I look back at my resolutions for this year.

• "Get a job"
  Done, but I'll need another one soon as the contract will end in April.
• "Finish the SAP course"
  Done, although afterwards my dad made my buy the subsequent intermediate course and I failed to finish in the requisite time. I guess I should still feel happy about finishing the resolution.
• "Finish the Python course"
  Not done - thankfully this thing doesn't have an expiry date.
• "Finish reading a book"
  Not done, unless you count Hellboy Vol. 1 as a book. Although to be honest I don't know why I wrote this resolution, as I find most self-improvement books aren't worth the cover-to-cover read. Might just count the comic as a book and call it a year.
• "Clear 24 heat (difficulty) in Hades"
  Abandoned. It's way too difficult and with my job I have no time to practice games that hard anymore. I did succeed in my alternate goal of beating the game (at low difficulty) in under 20 minutes, so that's that.

So my success rate is 2/5, but closer to 2/3 if I ignore the last two as bad goals. I'm disappointed, not because of the rate I'm succeeding my resolutions at, but because I feel I could be more ambitious with my resolutions. Yet if I add more, I might really dip hard in my success rate.


Dec 15
Okay, so I didn't post about it, but lately I've been thinking about two aspects of my life that I feel I really haven't sorted:

My social/dating life
If you gave my introversion a strength rating out of 100, I would score 95+ with ease. As an introvert, I make very few friends. The nice thing is the ones I do make tend to be close. But herein lies the problem: the few friends that I have made now are scattered about the planet. So as close as they might have been, I find myself rarely having people to confide in.

I was planning to take the effort to make some new friends this year, now that I'm done with college and am a 'proper adult' and all, but then this COVID thing happened. Now, thankfully, the country is on the road to recovery, with Phase 3 hitting on the 28th, so I think it's time to revisit the topic.

And, uh, dating. I do think I need to work a little bit on the platonic friend base first before I go there. Walk before running, the saying goes. Also I think I'm being influenced by my colleagues, who have been talking about OLD as of late (they're trying to find the socially awkward WFD specialist a partner). But I do figure that, like, half of the way my life has gone is because of one breakup almost 4 years ago. While not all the consequences were bad - I did get to reassess my life because of it - I don't think I should live in the shadow of that event forever.

My hobbies
Despite my spending over a third of my life on my hobbies, I actually don't think I've fully settled on what they are. As in: in social situations, I'm not particularly stoked to reveal to others that I draw or write, as a lot of that is pretty personal; I'm also not really stoked to mention gaming as it tends to become a social label and I consider myself much more than just my games. I would like to say I attend the gym but I don't actually go frequently enough; same with reading.

Blog Theme Change - 01 Nov 2020

Changed my blog's theme back to a white post background with black text. I was finding the white-text-on-dark-grey particularly difficult to read.

Dark theme works for social media sites such as Twitter because of the font and font size they use. Not so much for my blog, which is pretty much a heavy wall of text.

Road to Nowhere

So I heard NY city is having a bit of an exodus. Combination of rising unemployment, crime, and COVID.

COVID and unemployment are basically "what else did you expect from America?" But the crime part is a little more interesting. In lieu of the George Floyd protests, NY city Mayor Bill De Blasio reacted as the people wanted US leadership to do - by cutting funding to the police and moving it to social services. The police responded by retrenching their officers, resulting in a spike in crime.

You see, people fail to understand how corrupt the US police force is. They know that as long as they keep up demand for firearms and military gear, the gun lobbies will take care of them. Force leaders would rather retrench their own men than stop wasting money on guns, knowing that the elected officials will be voted out if people are angry - and they will be angry if crime is high. And police officers are paid high enough to be retrenched with no issue and get rehired later.

But this also presents another piece of insight. The people wanted De Blasio to defund the police - it was literally the slogan. He did. Now they buried themselves in this problem.

What's the lesson? People are very good at identifying issues - this is why politicians should hold town halls, listen to their voter base, address issues directly. But people are pretty bad when it comes to solutions. Despite crowds in the thousands, few realized the solution needed to be more nuanced than just defunding the force - you must mandate a budget to limit unnecessary spending, particularly in the equipment and munitions areas. (Or maybe they did realize, but with the way the system works, everything has to be marketed down to three-word slogans.)

Anyhow, my prediction is NY will elect a Republican mayor soon, and he'll undo the work De Blasio has done, reducing crime and keeping him popular, but bringing the situation back to where it was before. It's all a big ol' circular road to nowhere.

The October Post - Genshin Impact, New Ideas

Been exactly a month since I last wrote, and two months since I started my new job. My personal life is nothing much to write about as I have simply been working at my job for most of the last month. Workload has gotten slightly more lenient at least for the time being - I'm now clocking ~45 hours a week give or take, and my work-from-home commitment has gradually moved from nil to 2 days a week (which is more relaxing, but ofc I get less work done at home).

Friends and I have moved off from our brief stint in Paladins (which was a terrible game, in hindsight) to a mix of Overwatch and the brand new title Genshin Impact.

 

I guess I should discuss Genshin since it's new and most of the gaming world is talking about it. It's certainly not a bad game, but it's not a good one either - somewhere around a 5/10 in my books. The problems Genshin has are really complex and not something I can discuss in a short blog post.

 

If I could sum it up, Genshin is both a mobile and a PC game. Mobile games are intended for short spurts of gameplay - you can just switch it on during lunchtime at work/school and play for 15-30 minutes for example. On the contrary, PC games are generally intended for longer sessions as one has to sit down and dedicate time at home to play. The problem with Genshin is that you've got a game that is rigorous enough to require the precision of the PC's mouse-keyboard controls, but the systems are designed for short periods of mobile gameplay. So it doesn't really feel amazing on either platform, and that's where I see a majority of complaints come from.

 

Also, the game is a gacha (gambling) game. Not much to say in that area but I feel all reviews should disclose this for people who are against gambling, who may have children interested, or who are against pay-to-win games in general. I should also note Genshin's rates are very expensive ($3 per roll and 0.6% for the rarest units), so even people who do enjoy the occasional gamble may want to avoid it.

 

Anyway.

 

I've been really struggling with my story. It's a bit weird since I've always considered myself a good writer. But as it turns out, writing a linear story and writing a game are two very different beasts.

 

My main line of thought right now is that I should just scrap my old idea and work with something else from scratch. I actually have a number of story/game ideas that I have no intention of working on (as I don't think they are good enough to market to the general public). But then I looked at the most complete idea and thought, "Why don't I transpose this into my original game's story, since it kind of sucks right now?"

 

My old story idea involved something to do with racism, which I figured was an important topic that permeates the lives of many people around the world. But when I think about it, I realize many game devs are leftist-type folk and so there's already tons of stories with themes of diversity out there. If the gamer crowd can go through titles like Overwatch, Wolfenstein 2, Mafia III, or Far Cry and ignore the lessons in diversity depicted in those, then why would my title be any different? What could I, an amateur dev with 0 experience, possibly do that would magically make an impact where bestselling titles have failed? This direction feels like an exercise in failure.

 

I think it would be more effective to tell a story that metaphorically references the region I come from. Not to say that this is any easier. In Singapore we don't really have any national dress like the Chinese or Japanese or Koreans do: we use the Indonesian batik, the Malay kebaya, and the Chinese hanfu or qipao. Neither do we have much history in war, so I would struggle to take any part of Singapore's history and convert it into the ever-popular action RPG genre that I am making. If I were to ask myself, "How do I take my ARPG and make it 'look uniquely Singaporean?'" I have no answer. (Perhaps for a good reason. Why must we be so obsessed with fighting?)

 

But I set out to make an ARPG, so I will. I think I would have to assimilate elements from other cultures. To my mind, the coolest of the few extant depictions of Singapore in global media is Pirates of the Caribbean, particularly Sao Feng. Seafarers in the South China Sea such as Sao Feng identified as Chinese (and Disney calls him Chinese) but many would eventually become Singaporean in later decades, or their children would. In that sense, Disney was accurate with the movies (and also captured much more of the Chinese audience that way). I can also use elements of British/European culture as we were colonized by them.

 

If this new story idea is good I will achieve my original goal. Singapore has not "beat" racism - no one can - but we do alright as far as legislation and regulation is concerned, plus we are a minority voice in our own right. To tell something Singaporean to the world, then, is to tackle racism in a small way.

The September(?) Post

Aug 18

Started work 6 days ago. It's been a whirlwind. The positive is I got a pretty decent company. They're far from perfect, but you can't bring value to a perfect company, and if I don't bring value there's zero chance of a permanent job. (Not that I think there's much chance of a permanent job anyway, but hey, I can try.) And besides, as a government-sponsored trainee I'm glad they're actually taking the effort to train, rather than going through the motions. That's the least I could ask for.

 

Anyway, I'm constantly tired as hell and I don't have the energy to play much, even less the time. For the first week I managed to quietly get 1-2 hours a day fooling around with my friends in that old game Paladins (by waking up at 1 AM and playing until 2 AM then going back to bed), but yesterday I realized work is so tiring that I can't even do that.

Sept 10

Tomorrow marks one calendar month at work.

It’s actually a pretty tough job and I have limited time for other stuff, writing included. I average 45-50 hours a week in the office. Normally if I have free time I would log into Onenote and write, but since this company contracts to the military the laptops have no internet. So I’m writing this on my phone, which I can’t do too much of as there’s supervisory eyes everywhere.

 

I’m also a little bummed because I’ve been searching everywhere for interesting boss fights and find none related to my game. I feel like I need more research.

Sept 13

I just realized it's been over a month since I last posted to my blog.

Work has taken up my life. I've been clocking about 46-47-ish hours a week in the office. The work isn't exactly easy, either, at least not for my tiny brain.

 

Problem with all my training at university is they teach stuff, but not really how to apply it in a workplace. Like universities taught marginal return of labor, but this company's HR has no way of measuring that, and finance is just too busy to help. So what do you do? The company right now just guesstimates the marginal cost of short-staffing, which I think is problematic - the costs are much, much higher than most people imagine, even experienced managers.

The monthly post - August 2020

Aug 01

So I got a job.

It's a traineeship at a local logistics business, in the 1000+ employee range. Basically they're looking for someone to show the ropes with regards to their HR systems, then having me provide ideas/recommendations for modernization/digitization. I can't quite say "Just like the simulations" but it is related to what I studied in college. So that's good.

 

Job has flaws, of course - not that I want to concentrate on them now. The only negative thing I'm thinking about is how short it all is. The contract is 9 months, and there's no saying the pandemic will be over by then. So if I haven't shown some real value to the company by end of the term I'll be out looking for a job in a pandemic again…and without the aid of government-sponsored traineeships.

 

I admit the stress is keeping me awake.

Aug 06

Preparing hard for the job, buying some new office clothes, visiting the dentist, reading up on topics related to the job. Been…not too happy, despite the good things happening in my life. The reality is I have new challenges to face and I have a bit of fear. I have to perform at my new job; I have to gradually take over the family finances; and I have to do all of this without selling soul to my career or money in general (re: my parents). I also admit I've been losing sleep lately, probably a compounding factor in all this.

 

I also continue to be astounded by how miserable the games industry is. Global competition in games is so saturated and the sheer scale of it is mind-boggling. The more I look at this crap, the more I realize that if I make games as a hobby, I will need to accept the high chance that I could offer it for free and literally nobody will play my game. At a bare minimum I could enjoy it myself.

 

Which then also begs the question why, in such a massive gaming industry, nobody has attempted the game idea that I have. It's hardly an original idea: all I'm basically doing is taking 2 bestselling games and smushing them together. If there was already an existing game that came close to my vision, I would gladly forgo my design ambitions in favor of just playing that game.

Magicked out 2 more job interviews. I noticed that these two interviews were from jobs I only applied to like a few days ago - which means that the 20+ other jobs I've applied to over the past month have not accepted me.

Also yesterday was election day. My vote is clear as per my last post. Some places were crowded and my friends predicted the PAP would get slammed for calling an election during a pandemic, but I walked into an empty polling booth, so voting took me like 5 minutes and I was at little risk of COVID-19. (It's not luck - it's timing.)

But from the results so far my friends don't seem to be wrong. Personally, I'm a PAP supporter but I'm also chill with WP (I just never voted for them simply because they've never contested my GRC). So I'm fine with the election results. Only SDP/PSP make me nervous: my greatest fear as someone who's lived overseas is everyone in SG gets infected with lofty Western-centric ideals of freedom of speech and transparency, not understanding that Westerners rarely actually practice what they preach. CSJ (who leads the SDP) is like the living epitome of this infection. And I've discussed the PSP in the past: I find they adopt very populist policies and that a good portion of their reasoning is not based in fact. So in my eyes, it's good SDP did not do particularly well this election, although I wasn't happy with the PSP's relative success. At a minimum, neither party gained a seat.

The Big Populist Blunder

Kind of in a grey mood. I've only gotten to 2nd stage for 2 openings - and it looks like I'm not getting into one of them, as they said they would get back to me "in one or two weeks" and tomorrow marks the end of said second week.

I would console myself that at least I can take up a shitty job serving fries at McDonald's…but I can't even do that either, because they sure ain't hiring in COVID-19.

I follow a guy on Twitter who is a 'senior analyst' in a small consulting firm. He basically got his job out of college by running a blog that reports on video game statistics in Asia (primarily China): sales numbers, reviews, etc. (I should also probably note this man is about the same age as me, give or take a year.) Thing is, in the 6-ish months I've been following him, I've discovered he doesn't seem to have an outstanding grasp on the financial forces behind his numbers. So he's not really an 'analyst' per se, but more of a financial reporter that specializes in the video game industry in China and greater Asia - that is, his greater skill lies in sourcing for numbers rather than crunching them.

Yet this is the man who has a job, while my hobbies, despite being closely related to his, are not only non-beneficial in my job search, but also burn a somewhat deep hole in my wallet. Talk about bad life decisions.

I could (and should) probably begin writing a lot more about the video games market, not just video games from a design point. While I don't have access to obscure sources like this man does, I believe I have a somewhat cohesive knowledge of the video games market in South-East Asia, and of the economy in general. (Wish I had actually finished an econ minor in college to back this up with paper, but oh well.) I'm thinking I'll do a bit of writing about Singapore politics as well - my political opinions tie in heavily with economics, so it fits the overall theme.

In fact, in lieu of the Singapore 2020 general elections in like 5 days, I thought I'd briefly discuss my vote.

The Big Populist Blunder: Debunking False Information in the PSP's Manifesto

So the two parties contesting my GRC are the PAP and the PSP. Everyone in Singapore is very familiar with the PAP's policies by now, as they are the policies of the existing government, and they've outlined where they're going in rather clear terms. I'm not going to describe them in detail because they are both complex and complicated. Instead, I've decided to look at the PSP.

ChannelNewsAsia did a good piece summarizing the slogans and primary campaign policies of the PSP. It seems their main platform hinge is going to be the economy. The PSP's talking points are mainly about how the "economy must serve Singaporeans, rather than the other way around" and that bringing in foreign labor results in a "trade-off" where there is increased GDP but 'a depression in real wage growth'.

I fact-checked this. The World Bank did a study on immigration and emigration across many countries in 2010 (when immigration into Singapore was around its highest). I quote: "The effect of net migration (combining immigrants and emigrants) on average wages is clearly positive for Canada, Australia and Singapore." (pp. 13) Knowing that Singapore had very few emigrants and a large influx of immigrants at the time (confirmed in said report on pp. 11), it is clear to me that increases in immigration into Singapore actually increases average real wages - the exact opposite of what the PSP is claiming.

So the PSP is wrong. But what actually is going on here? Clearly, if more immigrants are coming in, they're taking jobs that you would otherwise have, and that's going to be bad for your wages. Common sense, right? So what are these ivory towers babbling about?

Not so fast. Basic economics dictates that when something is wanted (people want jobs, for example) there are two forces at play: supply and demand. Indeed, the common sense is actually correct in that immigrants that enter will saturate the job market, shifting the supply curve of employment to the right. But when immigrants enter a country, they also demand goods and services: they consume food, live in houses, so on and so forth, and those things are provided by local workers. So while the work of immigrants drives wages down, the goods and services that these immigrants demand actually drives wages up. So immigration drives wages down and up at the same time - which, of course, can't actually happen in real life. What really does happen is one force overcomes the other: if demand > supply, wages go up and immigrants are good for everyone. If supply > demand, the opposite is true and immigrants are bad.

From here, it's pretty obvious the answer is actually indeterminate. You can't conclusively say "immigration drives wages down" or "immigration drives wages up" - you can only say that it depends on the relative strength of supply and demand. But what you can do is survey real-life economic data, come up with a proper study for specific countries and then draw your conclusions from there. That's exactly what the World Bank did, and lo and behold, they discovered that immigrants benefit all Singaporeans and Singapore residents from a real wage standpoint.

Now, that isn't to say immigrants don't have other consequences for the country. Purely economically speaking, wealthy immigrants do, first of all, push up the Gini; but more than that, there is a softer element that doesn't have well-studied measures. A foreign CEO that bosses others around, shows off their wealth, and hires executives from their hometown while tens of local subordinates remain stagnant in middle management or lower-end jobs is going to have psychological implications on potentially hundreds of employees; and when these employees then take that mental burden to their families and onto the streets, the effect multiplies. The PAP has only started realizing the issue in the past 5-ish years or so (after over a decade of arguing otherwise), and to this day only somewhat addresses it - for example, with heavy economic equity measures outlined in the 2020 budget and with tightening of employment rules last March. It's something, but one might consider that these might be "wayang" policies aimed at garnering election votes; and more concretely, that these current efforts fail to adequately solve or mitigate the problems at hand.

If the PSP were to argue like I just did, I might strongly consider voting for them. But they did not: instead, they chose to base a significant part of their manifesto on an entirely moot point, easily debunked with a combination of Google and any Macro 102 syllabus written post-1980. I will not support a political party that lacks a single prominent member capable of grasping enough economics to say, "Hey, this one-third of our manifesto is honestly a load of BS, so let's rethink this." On the other end, while it is undoubtedly true the PAP's policies possess flaws, they clearly understand the situation on a much higher level (ie: at least past the first-year of a business bachelor's degree) and also have demonstrated some capacity to learn from past mistakes - slowly, reluctantly, but with progress nonetheless. To conclude, my vote this year will be with the PAP.

Post-COVID...???

So my COVID-19 lockdown is over. I could sum my lockdown experience as:

• 5 weeks of studying online courses in SAP HCM and Tableau
• 1.5 weeks of studying Python for the one job application I found over the lockdown (that I obviously failed the online assessment for, as you can't pick up Python in 2 weeks. But at least I tried.)
• About half a week of hammering out cover letters for the government's new trainee jobs - part of their reopening stimulus
• Working on my game (for only a few minutes a day) and playing Guild Wars 2, League of Legends, Arknights, and Terraria when I'm not studying or applying to stuff

I'm pretty disappointed in my failures to actually finish a course, and that I haven't picked up Python to a stronger skill level. I need to practice more, I suppose. 

Only good news is I'm actually done drafting player abilities for my game. Just took me the better portion of 3 months, and I remade vast portions of the entire game in the meantime. (Makes sense when you think about it: games revolve around the things the player can and cannot do, so I had to change the rules of my game when I realized certain cases that shouldn't be.)

My next step is…monsters. Things you kill. And I'll be writing the story to accommodate some of them, particularly the bosses. I'm not sure how they will work, though, because I am neither an animator nor a programmer. I'll try to envision monsters that don't have a lot of moving parts

Beyond that, aside from the occasional chide from parents to 'work harder' (what would you have me do? Not like there were a lot of openings until last week), life is really uneventful. I guess that's good, considering everything I read about what's going on in the world. Nothing really surprises me about it. When I look back I realize US healthcare was always shit (and got worse in the last decade) but I was super young back when I lived there, so it never occurred to me. And the race/police protests thing…well, let's say whatever comes to the US police force, they deserve it. Only real concerning factor to me is probably the Singapore dengue epidemic going on right now.

Guess I should do a life update. It's been a while.

In short, I've been under "circuit breaker" (basically COVID-19-induced soft lockdown) for just over a month now, and have been crunching 3-4 online courses simultaneously: one in Tableau, one in SAP, and one in Python (which I've just started). I've also been planning the game I want to make: adding ideas, and tossing them out at almost the same rate to keep the game small and not overly ambitious.

Right now I want to redo my story…yeah, almost all of it, really.

The original idea was to make a game where you lived in the fall of society as we know it. Post-apocalyptic society is one of the most overdone tropes in video games, but there are far fewer games that play out the apocalypse itself, rather than the aftermath. But somehow it doesn't feel right for my game. Not to mention, we live in pretty uncertain times right now and a nation/society collapsing really isn't too distant of a fantasy. So after being rather frustrated with it for the better portion of a couple months, I think I'm going to toss it out.

I've also been playing Arknights, tower defence gacha game. It's pretty fun. And yesterday I went back to muck around in Guild Wars 2 for a bit as well. I just have to ensure I don't get too addicted - I'm one of those weirdoes who loved Guild Wars 2 and I remember being heavily addicted back in like 2015 or so. I quit playing by simply reminding myself how toxic the PvP community was, and from the insults that I've seen hurled since yesterday, it's pretty clear it still is today.

Beyond Worried

Can't sleep.

The pandemic has me beyond worried. I thought I would be safer from the whole ordeal, here in Singapore. But at 4 PM on Friday the Prime Minister just announced what is effectively a soft lockdown (he simply refuses to call it such). In short, the economy is dead for 30 days, and I will have no jobs to apply to.

There must be a plan, a solution of some sort.

I've been examining applying for an online master's, but as of my searching last night I haven't found anything of substance. Most online graduate degrees of value require 2+ years of work experience, a decently high GPA, letters of recommendation, an essay…it's not looking good.

I keep searching into the night. Udemy has a number of courses, all 80-90% off. I buy two units on full stack development. The way I see coding now, it's a trade, a way to stay alive if my HR career never gets off the ground. (I'll probably buy a few more later today, given how cheap they are and because software dev pays more than full stack dev.) Plus, there's also the SAP course my dad wanted me to take. I should sign up for the next level.

Frustrated, I open Path of Exile and The Jim Rutt Show. Rutt calls the COVID-19 pandemic "the worst shock to American society since WWII". What does that mean for me? I do not know. The world is so uncertain, and I don't know my place in it.

A small observation on the third horseman

Of the famed four horsemen of Revelation, the Bible makes clear the agencies of the second and fourth horsemen (war and death), while the first and third are more open to interpretation. By far the most common interpretation of the third horsemen I have seen is that of famine. A few think it "imperial oppression" of some sort. Directly, the Bible says this of the third horsemen:

When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine." (Revelations 6:5-6 NASB)

While it may not be evident to the modern reader, this much is established: the prices of the wheat and barley are absurdly expensive. If this was a merchant talking to a worker (earning one denarius a day), the worker would only be able to afford enough rice to feed himself that night, or enough barley to feed a family of three. Thus this produces the common interpretation of famine - that a lack of food has driven up prices to unsustainable levels. It is also of note that the oil and wine were not affected, either because these plants have deeper roots and so would be less susceptible to things like locust plagues, or because the society in the visions were overproducing oil and wine to suit their wealthy landlords (as the Roman Empire was doing at the time), and thus not producing adequate staple crops.

I think that famine is a very plausible explanation. But remember, this is merely one possible truth, and not a necessary truth. The verse does not specify that there is any shortage of wheat or barely; it merely states that the prices are high. So rather, the core of what the verse describes is price inflation, with no real explanation as to how or why.

Now, 'the horseman of inflation' probably does not sound quite as fearsome as 'the horseman of famine,' but its implications are far more chilling. Excessive inflation has had a silent but significant hand in many of human history's most horrific events. In fact, the earliest recorded inflation-induced destruction in Western history is none other than the fall of the Roman Empire itself, the very civilization that Jesus preached in. (At the time there was little theoretical understanding of economics, so Revelations would be truly prophetic!)

I believe the third horseman is not simply the horseman of famine or inflation, but the horseman of a broader malaise: unbridled, uncontrolled desire for economic gain - which in turn, produces symptoms such as famine or price inflation. What makes capitalism and its elements so insidious is that it is like cholesterol: a bit of it is not only good, it is necessary to keep the wheels of society turning. But like all things, these must be consumed in moderation. When a society sips upon the temptations for excessive capitalism, greed conquers the hearts of men, and the third horseman rides.

The Ides of March, 2020

Ides of March post, although it's already the 11th. Resume's pretty much done, although I'm passing it through a friend to give me some last feedback. I have a bunch of internship ads saved and plan to finish off my SAP course so I can finally apply.

My birthday's in 3 days. Used to be a bad time for me. The last time anyone aside from my parents remembered my birthday was my ex - and I left her that day four years ago, beginning the slow slip into depression. I don't really think too much about it anymore. Funny, I don't even really remember how I managed to not be miserable all the time. Flipping back through my diary, I wrote that I did this:

• Finding a major in college that I actually enjoyed and wasn't absolutely hopeless at. And I'm graduated now of course, so that's even better.
• A strict and time-consuming regiment of diet, exercise, and general self-care that would have stunned my parents. I'm happy I no longer need to keep it up to retain a positive self-image, as I'd get nothing done in life.
• Realizing that I wasn't completely friendless in college, much less in life.
• Finding a new hobby - writing a story in the hopes I will be able to adapt it into a video game one day; and planning out the game itself.

I don't know which ones were effective, honestly. I felt like I kind of had to do all of it to get better, and in a way I still think so. I guess I could have had a different hobby, but at the time I didn't really have much time or resources to pursue other hobbies, so I made do with what I had, which was school stationary and a laptop with video games installed.

Speaking of which. The legendary video game designer Hideaki Itsuno once said that all good games need a theme. I was really struggling with this. I had a clear general direction but didn't have an overhanging sentence or phrase that I could point to and say, "this is what my game is about."

Well, that changed a couple mornings ago. I was reading my Twitter feed at breakfast, which was (as with most mornings nowadays) filled with news on the COVID-19 outbreak. But that morning, something clicked.

Call it a silver lining, I guess, that in this crisis I managed to get something good for my story.

2/2020

Feb 27

I'm trying to do 4 blog posts a month, at least until I'm employed again.

Anyway, after God-knows-how-many applications, my dad finally began to question why I wasn't even getting to the interview stage. Personally I believe I was aiming too high, picking roles at major companies with 2-3 years' experience rather than 0-2 (which are much fewer in quantity). But he decided to take a look at my resume, and concluded that it was hot garbage (my words, not his).

Funny. Most of my friends remember me tidying up my resume around December and venting because I was asking him for help and just getting a sort of "do it yourself." Like I appreciate he's trying to push me to be more independent, but this is really something I could use experienced guidance on?? Hello???

Oh well. He spent an evening giving me a bunch of advice and now I'm over here trying to revamp the thing. Better late than never.

I'd have made much better progress by yesterday, too, had Mom not been yelling her ass off at the maid for the whole bloody day, resulting in a lasting headache. One thing that's better about my household - eight, nine years ago my parents would have just told me to stop being a sissy and finish the work even while sick. They're a lot more considerate now. (No doubt some of it is because of the current COVID-19 epidemic too.) Doesn't change the fact it's loud as fuck, though, or that they were at it again this morning.

Feb 29

Hey, leap year day.

So I'm on the verge of finally tidying up my resume. It's good timing because I don't have much to play at the moment. Monster Hunter World added a new quest and Azur Lane has an event, but that's about it. I've even been so bored that I went and bought myself a copy of the old classic Diablo II to replay. (When I played it as a kid it was on a pirated copy as I had no money back then, so this is due payment for the fun I had).

Yet as I say this:

• Grim Dawn updated today
• Guild Wars 2 updated yesterday
• Path of Exile announced its next update, eta 2 weeks
• Warfame has even announced its sweetest update in years - after leaking players like I predicted, they finally decided to listen and make the changes I (and many other players) have been asking for (for years, mind you).

So there's a lot to do. After I finish my resume I have to go back to revising my SAP course. I've done all the lessons but I need to revise so I can pass the online exam.

Honestly when I look back on my childhood, I was a kind of a huge asshole. As a kid I stole, I bullied, I lied, I fought with other kids. I don't really know why I did all the things I did, either. I remember I stole because I was jealous (and then I returned the items later, after regretting it.) But the rest? I have no idea.

And then at some point I changed, but I don't know when. I remember going to church at 13 and learning more about Christ - I attended a Christian primary school but I didn't really understand the religion until I came to this church. Outside church, I also remember my deeds came back to bite me in middle/high school, as everyone split into cliques, while I was alone: unpopular, occasionally bullied, and constantly lonely. I was miserable, but I think it was the combination of this faith and suffering from my teenage years that tempered me into a better person.

Yet for years afterwards, the loneliness continued to overshadow my life, even when I had no reason to feel so. I stopped being bullied but I had developed a very asocial aura and people avoided me. For years I believed I was unpopular because I had no personality, so I was driven to compensate with achievements so I could be recognized and respected. I was a particularly artsy fellow: English, creative art, and music were my top areas and I worked relentlessly at them, often forgoing the success of my other subjects (except math, which I also loved). Then I went on to military service: not only did I become a respected musician but I also spent my free time going to the gym and poring over books on learning how to socialize, even reading stuff like PUA (although I concluded most of their ideas were too illogical for me to make use of). I even began to pour my time into video games like League of Legends as I was just so hungry for any sort of achievement.

And it paid off, didn't it? Somehow, I did find friends in all of these stages - in the final year of high school, in military service. And then in college I achieved my end goal, the answer to my loneliness: a girlfriend.

Yet now I realize this was a poor objective. My lifelong pursuit of companionship netted me a fair few fake friends in high school. The semester my parents forced me to quit music (in the hopes I would study harder on the other core subjects), I lost the 'respect' and 'friendship' of many of them, amplifying my problems. Later in college, it netted me a girlfriend who didn't have the security or emotional maturity to maintain a romantic relationship. Maybe I saw a little of myself in her.

When I dumped my college ex and my depression hit for a second time, it wasn't just because I was heartbroken. It was because I understood, at least inwardly, that I needed to search for a better purpose in life. And honestly, I don't really know still. But in the three years since, I've become significantly more content as I have narrowed my life purpose search down to three main possibilities.

• Improving job conditions. I am not so idealistic to think employees and employers can come together in an idyllic kum-ba-ya and find an arrangement that makes everyone happy. But I do believe there are things companies can do to make work somewhat less of a suffering experience that also doesn't cut into profits (and in fact can bolster them, more often than not). The problem is I don’t know how lucrative of a career this is, especially in Singapore where HR is not perceived as a particularly valuable service by locals and local companies.
• Making people smile with creative design. It's the area I've always been good in, so why not? My claim to greatness is I have always been good at all three areas of creative art: visual, audio, and literary. I've also become interested in making video games as art; I'm not the best gamer but unlike a lot of game designers I am backed by a solid math foundation, enabling me to analyze systems at a deeper level. The problem is I think this is an even less lucrative career than HRM, given how saturated the art/games market is and how much they struggle with copyright and legality.
• Improving sustainable development in Singapore. I'm still looking into this one, as I just thought of it last year, it's a rather new area, and I'm not a science-y guy. But I'm guessing that saving the environment could also be aided by efficient management and finances, not just a question of the science.

Meh

Finally finished the core story of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Then had a long chat with one of my gamer friends.

The game really shows you how shit the industry is. Because honestly, Iceborne isn't super amazing. Yes there are great fights, but also a large minority of essential fights (Shrieking Legiana, Velkhana, and the final boss Shara Ishvalda, to name a few) are frankly terrible. You just run around trying to hit a monster that can't be hit half the time, then you get smacked by a random tail whip or dragon breath out of nowhere and then you just…die. Even after you learn the hunt and it becomes easy, it still feels like a massive "ugh, why?"

Yet this is Steam's top seller for January 2020. And it's well-deserved. Because frankly, what other games suck less than Monster Hunter World? For all its unfun elements the game remains a relative masterpiece.

Anyway, I finally fell asleep at like 4 AM, and got up at 3 PM and saw the piling unfinished job apps over the past few days. Oops. I also need to get back to the gym. My soul hurts.

In lieu of this mess, I've decided to edit my game design goal a bit, make it a somewhat lower life priority. Instead of writing the story/lore/whatever, my goal this month is to complete designing all "skills". (What are skills? That's a topic for another day.) I estimate there will be at least 125 entries, so my goal is to finish 80-ish this month and 45-ish next month. In April/May I want to design the enemies in my game, with hope for at least 30 variants. (I will also begin drawing them a lot more; been a while since I drew anything though, so that will take practice.) And finally, I'll go back to writing, with the hope of still hitting a grand total of 28,000 words by Dec 31.

Jan 2020 Life Update + Lost Ark Discussion

Updated my blog's theme today. I'm trying to be a bit more environmentally friendly, and this small change saves a lot of power when you open it up (white is MUCH more energy-intensive than black). I hope it's just as easy to read as before, if not more so.

So I have about 4 job applications outstanding, and have 4.5k words to my background and story so far. So the latter is going swimmingly, despite my wrestling with writer's block; for the former, I wish I had more apps done.

I also beat the core game of Monster Hunter World, and bought its newly released expansion, Iceborne, so I have more to play. I love many of MHW's systems: weapon combos, stamina, gear. I will be adopting (and improving) many of them in my game. At the same time, I've come to the realization I don't actually like playing MHW all that much. I find the game a stressful experience in general, mainly because I am not good at these games and find them quite difficult. And who likes to feel stress in their game?

Video on Lost Ark

Typical Korean studio. Koreans draw AMAZING art - when I was in high school all the top artists were Korean. This translates into beautiful video games and Lost Ark is no exception.

The problem with Korean games is they suck ass: they're super fun for like maybe the first 30 hours and after that the enjoyment falls off a cliff. (That video says the same.) And Korean game studios will always make statements like "Oh we'll update the game with new stuff so you'll have more fun, no worries!" But their updates are typically terrible, and this is just a way for them to sucker customers into paying more for nothing. In the meantime, their existing budget goes to their secret new project chugging along in the background so they can sucker you out of even more money in a few years. 

Clearly, I have limited trust in Korean businesspeople. My father was always mildly racist to Koreans, mostly because in the 90's South Korea was largely a highly corrupt place and he remembers their 'business practices' clearly. I respect Koreans but I do agree in one area: even today, they can be an unscrupulous bunch where business is concerned.

Rant aside, I still want to play Lost Ark, which is why the video interests me. This is mainly because Lost Ark has dragons (4:05, 4:23) and big machine things (3:30). Sounds kind of childish, I know. But you see, all the major Western ARPGs have you fighting demons, which is fine, but after 15 years it gets kind of stale, you know? A simple artistic departure like that actually means a lot in entertainment. 

Ultimately, I want to see how they implement said enemies in their games: animations, attacks, systemic bugs & glitches. Learn by example, good or poor. For example, there's the issue of model blocking - if you see the dragon fight (4:23) some of the players' character models get entirely covered by the dragon's wing or head. So you can lose where your character is and what your character is doing. Lost Ark seems to merely keep the players' overhead names, but I was thinking of also adding a colored silhouette of the character so players could also see their characters' animations.

Model blocking - characters getting completely dwarfed by a dragons' head in Lost Ark.

Happy New Year

It's been almost a month of basically nonstop gaming. Mostly played Hades, Path of Exile, and League of Legends. I do appreciate the experience, though. I think it will help in my game design ventures.

But anyway, I guess I'll talk about last year.

Graduated college
A big life achievement this year. YAY! …I feel nothing, honestly. I simply believe society expects this of me.

Moved away from Sydney back home with my parents.
I'm actually much happier about this than the act of graduating in itself. Even after a month, my dad regularly makes me take the card out to practice my driving (as I haven't really driven a car in about 2 years) and I simply marvel at how everyone doesn't tailgate the fuck out of each other. And I didn't even drive in Sydney. I guess I really hated the place, huh. (Still better than LA/Chicago/NY though.)

Learned a lot about HR
I have Dr. Veen to thank for this one. Absolutely excellent lecturer. Six months ago I was kind of asking myself, "Did I actually learn more than fuck all from this degree?" and was feeling pretty shitty about it. Then in my final semester, Dr. Veen took the academic smidgens of knowledge I barely remembered and put them together in a coherent manner that I actually feel I could utilize in a workplace.

Began aspiring to be a game designer.
This has many sub-lessons, not all of which are pretty and awesome.

• The main thing I've quickly learned in game design is the industry is incredibly saturated. Everyone wants to get in on the next big entertainment cash cow, and a lot of people think they're a good artist. Every month I come across at least 5-10 new games from small-time developers that are absolutely amazing but no one has heard of it and no one has played it.
• As a result of the previous point, I have also learned I wish to build video games as a non-profit hobby. I see video games as a conglomerate of art - written, visual, soundtrack, acting - and I don't wish to be limited in that department by the need to make money.
• Finally, I've also learned that I need to pick up programming. One step at a time, I suppose.

Stopped letting depression keep me down.

Knew it would happen one day, but I didn't really think it would be this year. Although I should have expected it really, as I was already mostly recovered by the end of last year.

Alright, I guess it's time to talk about the coming year now.

At this point in my life, I have few real expectations. I merely expect that the coming year is going to be shit. I have no reasonable super long-term goals either, because the world is going to change at such a fast pace that I don't see any reason to plan anything. Boomers like my father always taught me to not think so far ahead: just in 1 day, then 1 week, 1 month, 6 month, 1 year intervals...which is exactly how we got global warming. But oh well. Better than no plan.

That being said, New Years' Resolutions.

• Get a job
• Finish the SAP course I bought
• Finish the Python course I bought
• Finish a book (lmao)
• Write 40,000 words of fiction for my game 
• Clear 24 Heat in Hades