Personal

Do you sometimes feel like you’re not smart enough, not strong enough… not _ enough to do your pursuits?

At what point do you give up? I am so tired. The alternative – not pursuing what I want to do… is worse.

Argh,.

In the span of a year, I went from looking like the picture on the left to looking like the picture on the right.

This blog post is what I did to get there.

I went from 80kg at about 24% body fat to 65kg at about 14-15% body fat. Most of this blog post will indicate a much higher start point (of which I didn't have a photo of), at 87kg and about 30% body fat. [Read More]

I made a mistake in posting a women-hostile picture on Twitter yesterday. This is an apology. But first, let’s start with a recap.

Yesterday I posted this tweet:

This: http://t.co/wo4gsU5NCT (By now you should know that I think gender/identity politics is a waste of society's time)

— Chewxy (@chewxy) September 25, 2015

I first saw the picture on /r/funny. And I tweeted the picture after a brief view. I mainly tweeted the comic because I believe that politicking identity issues is generally a waste of time* Politicking of any issue is generally a waste of time, in my opinion. . I had neglected to notice that it came from @AntiFemComics.

This morning, a shitstorm ensued. I woke up and the first notification was from Nick Coghlan:

@chewxy Seriously, dude? You're going to blithely ignore all the evidence of structural biases and claim women just aren't interested?

— Nick Coghlan (@ncoghlan_dev) September 25, 2015

Upon reading that, I went and re-read the comic. I realize the horror that I have in fact misread the comic. And the issue snowballed on. This blog post will stand as an official apology from me.

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You may have noticed I have not blogged for a while. And if you do follow me on twitter you’ll note that my tweet rate has also dropped. Ever increasingly, I find the need to share some ideas, but the ideas cannot be succinctly communicated in a pithy sentence or two. I have a lot of what I consider to be “dangerous” ideas (in the vein of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas), and I think it is imperative to be clear about the ideas. [Read More]

I started lifting weights a few months ago after a bit of health awakening. At first, it was a lot of fuckaround. Eventually I got into a program, and a routine. I started seeing progress in my strength, and I kept a record of how much I can lift – I’ve got nice charts to show my strength progressions. It’s not much but I can bench press about 60% of my body mass now. [Read More]

For the last 3-4 months, I had been thinking a lot about holding a dinner party. I had been playing with several ideas in my head. And you know how ideas are like - they are screaming to come out of one’s head and into reality. So last month I decided to send out invites to 6 people, for a dinner party around the world.

For the dinner party I knew there had to be a theme. I originally started with the theme of “Layers”, but as time went on, I convinced myself that the theme would be too subtle. So I changed it to “Travelling Around Planet Earth”. But I still was very enamoured with the idea of layers in my dinner party. So I made a compromise. By the time the invites were sent out, the dinner party was called “A Trip Around Planet Earth”, with the theme of “Layers”

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So, I visited China for the very first time - in essence, looking at my cultural roots. Along the way I have gained some impressions about China, as well as new views on old topics. This blog post summarizes my impressions of my first trip to China.

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My travels to China also accidentally brought me to all of the four ancient great capitals of China – Beijing, Luoyang, Xi’an, and Nanjing. I had spent a lot more time in Beijing, hence the separate post. I didn’t spend as much time as I would have wanted to in the other ancient great capitals of China, but I had still taken some photos and notes.

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It was a hot and sweaty night in the Nanjing airport. Cigarette smoke wafted across the waiting area in slow curls. Overhead, announcements were made that due to weather conditions, some flights were being cancelled. I waited, sweating, fervently hoping that my connecting flight to Beijing wouldn’t be cancelled. To much of my relief, it wasn’t cancelled, only delayed. I soon boarded my flight and arrived in Beijing, feeling very tired and worn out.

Exiting the airport, my travelling companions and I took a taxi to the hutong (胡同) where our boutique hotel was situated. To our dismay, the taxi driver simply dropped us off at the junction between the road and the hutong. His taxi couldn’t enter the small alley that is the hutong. At 1.30 a.m, we trudged into a dark alley, not even knowing where the hotel is – it was about 600m into the hutong. I was getting quite cranky at that point and my impression of China wasn’t very good at that point.

The next morning however, marked the beginning of a change of impression, of both Beijing and China on a whole. The booking of the boutique hotel was a good choice. In the light of day, I got to know the location, and it was impressive. The hotel is a siheyuan (四合院). The receptionist later intimated to me that it was built in the late Qing dynasty, making it about 140-170 years old. It was small (I would visit much larger _siheyuan_s later), but surely impressive. It was quite interesting to think about how a family would live in a building with such architecture and how the architecture of such buildings dictate social convention and dynamics in a family.

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The week before last was a terrible week for me. It was one week after I had published my books. I was looking to take some time off from updating the books. After about 6 months being self-employed, doing the things I love to do, I felt it was time for me to return to the workforce. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to be self employed and get a steady paycheck. So I started looking for jobs.

All was well. I had applied to a number of jobs that I was interested in. By the end of the week however, I had nothing – nobody called back. Naturally, coming off the high of having just published a couple of books, it was crushing.

Remember a few months ago, I was mulling over acquiring a tablet? Out of sheer coincidence, I came into posession of a Nexus 10 a few days after I blogged that entry. It’s an older model, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Despite coming to possession of the tablet, I never really used it.

Anyway, back to the week before last. Combined with the fact that I got rejected for those jobs that I wanted plus a few more not so nice news, I was feeling pretty shitty about myself. So on Friday evening, I altered my state of mind chemically to relax a little.

After some drinks, I took out my tablet and fiddled with it while relaxing with pineapples. I decided to download my favourite game on tablets since 2011 – Jetpack Joyride. Now, when your brain is under the influence, time seems to slow down – your body appears to lag. Specifically my eyeballs felt like they were lagging. I kept looking at the right of the screen, and I could feel my eyes darting to look at the right and back to Barry on a very regular basis.

This led me to ask a question: what does Jetpack Joyride look like when one’s eyes are tracked? What would a heatmap look like? Clearly there are eye tracking devices out there like the EyeTribe or Tobii which is fantastic. But I didn’t have access to any of those. The front-facing camera of my tablet appeared to frown at me. Then it hit me: why not use it to do eye tracking?

So I dragged myself to the computer, and started learning how to write Android apps. To their credit, the Android developer page is absolutely easy to use – if an intoxicated person can read and create an app in about an hour, you know it’s bloody good documentation. I didn’t get far, except to capture videos and detect my face, which is easy stuff anyone can do. I went to bed.

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