October Survival Report

October was a shit month. I spent almost all of it revising a dumbass thesis.

Short version: my workplace recommended me for some graduate program. Two years passed, and now it’s time to graduate, which means writing a thesis. Except the topic wasn’t even my choice — someone else picked it, and the content is dumb as hell. The kind where you look at the title and immediately know it’s just flexing with zero substance. Fine, flexing is flexing, it’s not like I’ve never written a bullshit paper before. But after I turned it in, the review crew started howling: “This content is kind of meaningless, isn’t it?”

Yeah, I know it’s meaningless, thanks. If you’ve got a problem with that, go yell at the idiot who assigned me the topic!

Then came the revisions. Along the way I realized the professors at this school have been out of touch with reality for a long time. They think: a technology gets proposed five years ago, a meeting to implement it happens three years ago, so by now it should be everywhere. But reality, as you know, is that adoption needs to be forced. And even when you force it, 80% of the time it turns into box-ticking formalism with no actual use. That’s the tragedy. When I told those professors that at my job we still constantly need USB drives or other removable storage to get things done, they stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “Shouldn’t everything have been networked three years ago?”

Bruh, it’s still not fully networked three years later, okay? You get everything online and people just whine that they don’t know how to use it. You train them and they still won’t learn. Same as the people who refuse to touch anything that isn’t Windows XP — they simply won’t accept new things because there’s a learning cost. What are you gonna do?

Another thing: mid-month I sadly discovered my right knee had suddenly gotten more painful. Rushed to the hospital for an MRI. Fluid buildup inside, worse than the episode earlier this year. Good news, the meniscus is fine. The doctor himself didn’t know why the fluid was there either. He did say that jogging on a rubber track alone shouldn’t damage the meniscus, with a few exceptions:

1. You ran too much
2. You forced yourself to run while exhausted
3. Your running form is wrong

Thinking it over, I hit all three. And I finally understood that proper jogging form needs several joints and muscles working to support you so you don’t get hurt. When you’re exhausted, it’s hard to keep the correct form through muscle effort, and that’s when the joints take damage.

So I started knee physical therapy, once a day, one month to see how it goes. The doctor said that after recovery it’s not like I can never run again — depends on the situation. The moment something feels off, stop and rest immediately. He also suggested starting with brisk walking.

So for now I can only rest. But after a month of therapy the fluid has noticeably gone down and been absorbed. Hopefully in a month I can at least get back on a bike.

I haven’t been idle, though. Started strength training — dumbbell presses, lateral raises, all kinds of raises every day, plus crunches. Hoping to build up my arm strength.

Barely studied this month, but I did play some games. The October releases were honestly not great. I finished Gusha no Kyoben — at first it felt really stupid, then I thought about it and there’s nothing that stupid about it. Actually one route was decent. October was supposed to have a bunch of big titles, but they all got delayed, including that new Liber 7 from the shit studio and “The World That Doesn’t Wither and the Flower of the End.” Thinking about it, November has nothing to look forward to either. Guess I’ll be grinding games again in December.

By the way, the shit studio’s Liber 7 got a trial version out. Feels weird. The game uses a ton of 11eyes assets, but it’s quite a bit better than that studio’s previous stuff. The setting clearly borrows from Fate and Fortissimo, though. And the protagonist in this battle-royale game actually carries Kurou Ryōichi’s pocket watch from 3Days — with that he’s basically invincible. Die and just replay the loop until you win, I guess… No idea how it’ll turn out.

Also out in trial form is Asa Project’s new game. It feels like a total clone of Hitotsu Tobashi Ren’ai, and not even as good as that one. Sigh, probably headed downhill like SMEE. Kuwabara’s new game trial is out too — one look at the little sister’s exhibitionist character design and my cringe gland went into overdrive… Every eroge this year looks like it’s on life support, and then they tell me the Japanese eroge industry actually grew 4%. I cannot comprehend this at all.

So I’ve decided… to go check out otome games…

This month I joined a crowdfunding campaign on JD for a product. Should be a DAC/amp combo unit. The hype was pretty insane, but looking closely, the campaign flies an overseas-product flag while being suspicious as hell. First, Geek Out has plenty of black marks overseas — they’ve run a bunch of Kickstarter projects and still haven’t finished shipping them all. Their founder is a Taiwanese guy doing sound cards. Their videos are mostly hot air with very little substance.

And finally, the promotional video for this product on JD’s crowdfunding page was edited from footage of other products. The English narration is clearly talking about something else, not this product, and the key spots where the product name appears were pixelated and altered. After thinking it over, I decided not to be the guinea pig. Got a refund.

My GPD Win (the Indiegogo version) did arrive, though. Feels way better than expected. I’ll write more about it later.

I cooked this month too, though only sushi. I originally planned to make a video — something like those review videos on YouTube. I even recorded the footage, but no time. Maybe next month, if I feel like it. Still debating whether to appear on camera myself, or do it like this:

Zero matchmaking activities this month. I gave up.