Last Sunday, I returned from Bangkok, after visiting Bram, my good friend. As we were coming in to land, I looked out of the window, and I realized I had arrived in Singapore. As I had also booked the flight from Bangkok to Singapore, this was not a large surprise, but somehow, the return felt fresh. For the first time in a while, Singapore felt full of possibility.

The week before the return was good. Excellent, even. However, and as you may have noticed from the shorter blog posts, I had been in a funk for a few weeks already. The funk was partly just a bit of home-sickness, but it was partly work-related as well. The details are not suited to a blog, but Monday the 28th some circumstances changed that largely resolved the direct causes for the funk. I would like to say that I immediately felt better, but in truth the rest of the week was spent somewhat overthinking things, as I am prone to do.

As a reaction, and as a result of the resolution, I made sure to have fun during the week by planning fun stuff, to prevent me from shutting myself in too much. I also made sure to have several discussions with family and some friends over the past few weeks. This allowed me to fight back against the feeling that Doom was upon me, and have some fun while doing so. Poekie is still in Vught anyways, so that would be impossible.

Tuesday the 29th, I went to eat with Yusuf, and I was introduced to pineapple rice and the Cola float, which is certainly a very dangerous beverage for my health. It’s extremely tasty, but I honestly do not want to think about its contents.

I also had a call with Saskia and Erik, family, that evening; I was able to see their kid Lukas for the first time too, on stream, and he was adorable. I got recommended The Thinking Game, which I still have to watch.

On Wednesday the 30th, me and Erfan went out for dinner. I wanted steak, so we spent some time choosing a not all too expensive steakhouse to go to. When there, however, we threw all caution in the wind, and went for a Wagyu steak; I wouldn’t say it is always good to indulge, but sometimes it is, and I have no regrets. The steak was very good, certainly the most tasty fat I’ve ever had on meat. I am unsure if I would do it again, for I generally like less fatty meats, but I have no regrets. We also found that Hoegaarden glasses can be very big.

On Thursday 1st, I took things a bit more easy and recharged a bit.

On Friday 2nd, I worked from home. Generally, working from home is better for creativity and focus when I have a goal, while working on location is better for setting goals and finding resources. I still have to train it a bit, but I think it is good to put this desk to use and work from home once a week.

The evening of Friday the 2nd, I went to Bangkok. I was at the airport far too early, but then, I had also forgotten to pack some underwear, so I had reason to explore the overly expensive airport shops. At 20:50, the plane went to Bangkok, and when it arrived, I booked a taxi to Bram’s place. Though I was ready to sleep, Bram convinced me to watch White Chicks before we turned in; what followed was a fairly relaxing and entertaining late evening. Though the movie is not something I would normally watch, it was fantastic. If you like zany plots and an excellent comedic turn by Terry Crews, White Chicks is one to check out.

On Saturday, we pulled out all the stops with regards to relaxation; Bram had made some plans, and they were excellent. After some time, I finally fully began to relax. The highlight was a visit to the Tribe, an excellent bar in Bangkok; maybe even the best bar I have had the pleasure to visit. There, we enjoyed fruit, a nice south african sparkling wine (it turns out that reservations in Bangkok require a certain amount of spending, which is effective policy) and we met some cool people from Thailand and South America.

We also went to a whisky and cigar lounge, which was quite excellent, and we reminisced a bit (as one does when sipping rum and smoking a cigar). Thanks to my father’s and Bram’s tips, smoking the cigar went quite well; I may do it again in the future, on special occasions.

On Sunday, we took it easy. Me and Bram discussed life a bit (a very good conversation) and we went on a small excursion to find brunch. After some more chilling, I then returned to the airport for my flight

The weekend was truly excellent, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Bram again for it. The Saturday especially features high on my list of favourite days in the past few years. I had forgotten one could live that much in just a day, and I am happy to have been reminded.

I have some pictures below:

In hindsight, it therefore seems logical that I felt like a new man when I re-entered Singapore. The clouds had largely broken, and though I am still working to break the last of them, it will be a matter of time. For the first time in a while, I felt ready for the next week.

It is funny to realize, now that my overthinking is proportional to the events of the week again, that I didn’t have to change much about my actions to have an effective week. I had been putting too much focus on results to measure effectiveness, while I am not someone that can force results out of myself by putting myself under pressure beyond a certain limit. This week, however, the effort I had put into broadening my horizons to fit the current main project seems to be starting to pay off, showing me that not every effect needs to be immediate once again.

Monday was not too special, though I had a nice conversation with my dad, who I had wanted to talk to during the weekend a bit and which was useful for me to clear some of the cloud debris. I also had a nice and fun conversation with Nazanin over whatsapp.

Tuesday, however, I had a meeting with Martin on the current project which allowed us to realign a bit better, and from this I was able to make some headway in the project. That evening, I enjoyed some audio plays with Pim.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent on concretizing an idea I had on wednesday, which will be discussed in the next meeting. On wednesday I furthermore had a good curry, and on Thursday I took a leaf from my stay in Bangkok and had a Banh Mi.

Friday was a mental health day, and I took some time to visit the Bukit Timah nature reserve with David. It was a sweaty walk, but a good one; I saw my first ever group of wild monkeys, and we also saw a turtle in the lake we visited. Sadly the haze was quite present; it seems to be particularly bad this year. Just one more thing to be disappointed in humanity about then; the haze seems to be caused by intentional forest fires for agricultural purposes, and a period of at least a month of shit air quality per year for others seems to be considered a perfectly acceptable consequence for those doing the burnings. A somewhat disappointing pattern which can be found everywhere these days.

Anyways, pictures:

In the evening, I met with Ferry and Bob for AuDaLa; Ferry is doing good work there, and we planned a day to meet when I am back in the Netherlands. I also considered how to solve my one mistake in the thesis.

I came to the conclusion that to solve it, I would need to add a set A of AuDaLogic variables to AuDaLogic triples. These variables are then used to define an equivalence class relative to the AuDaLogic variable environment: for every environment s, any environment in the equivalence class over s and A can differ from s only in the values of the variables A. An AuDaLogic triple with set A is then only valid for a state with AuDaLogic environment s if it is valid for any state that replaces s with an AuDaLogic environment from the equivalence class over s and A. This would allow us to abstract away from exact values for i in the Gen Parallel proof rule and fix the rule.

Doing something like this is not a new idea, as similar things have been done in logics in the past. In the end, I decided to not implement it, as it requires a substantial rewrite of chapters 7, 8 and 9 of my thesis, which I do not think is something to prioritize right now. I may do so later, and depending on what happens with AuDaLa, I will include this in any second version of the logic.

Having been somewhat productive on Friday, yesterday, I swam a bit and I played V Rising with Niels. Today, I finished off this blog and a series I was watching; I intend to go eat after this, and then put some work into either a work project or my D&D project. Though I am not fully in the clear yet and still clearing out the last negative clouds, I can feel the drive to do things once again reaching useful levels.

Hopefully, I can use that for something nice. But I should not forget; no undue pressure.

Tom Out.

I have been reading and watching and playing a few things these past few weeks. Among the noteworthy things I’ve seen are the Infinite and the Divine, which is quite fun but which I have not finished yet, The Good Place, which is fun but a bit taxing to watch, White Chicks, which was surprisingly fun, and V Rising, which is an excellent and atmospheric game. However, I think the thematical winner of the weeks with regards to media is most likely Re;Zero. I’m not going to spoil exactly what happens in it, but as someone who generally thinks isekai anime (reincarnated in a fantasy world-type anime) are not particularly good, this is probably the best one I know. The anime has hit pretty close at times, too, as it did the last week of September.

Tuesday, other than work, I went to eat with Sungmin and Martin at Nana Thai, whose Green Curry I had wanted to try for a while already. What I did not know until I had ordered it, however, is that the curry was made for more than one person to eat. I gave it my best, but I didn’t finish it in the end. It was delicious, however.

On Wednesday, me, Sungmin, Martin and Bernice went to the final movie of the Dollars trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Even though I went in already knowing most things that I was going to see, I was still quite impressed by how much more ambitious the movie was in scope and character development. Tuco is a delight to watch and an excellent protagonist, even if he is not the hero, and the way the war impedes upon the world of these cowboys and bounty hunters is also quite moving. An absolute recommendation from me.

On Thursday, me, Sungmin, Martin and Yuntong (colleague) went to get Ramen, near the IKEA. I should have made a picture, but I forgot. Friday evening, I took it easy.

Saturday, I met up with the neighbours for a board game night, which was fun. I introduced them to Coup, which led to at least one additional eternal duke in the world. They then introduced me to the card game The Singaporean Dream; I will have to acquire it by visiting all of Singapore’s board game shops.

Today, I felt a bit restless, and using the principle of “get the less exciting things done first”, I started reviewing a journal paper I was asked to review. I will have to continue that tomorrow. I also ate some nice indian food.

Next week, there may not be an update at the usual time, as I will be visiting Bram in Bangkok. I’m really looking forward to it. Furthermore, I also have some news: If all goes well, I will be back in the Netherlands from around 12/13 December to January 9. I will hopefully see some of you then, be able to celebrate Christmas with family and New Year’s with friends, and also be able to relax with the adorable Poekie:

Tom out.

This week, I shall recommend Doctor Who: Dark Gallifrey, the Decayed Master, for being a surprisingly good and quite atmospheric Big Finish boxset which I listened to on Friday. Though this Master does not have other standalone boxsets, I would love to hear them if they are going to be like this.

I also got some adorable videos of Poekie, but as these feature some voices, I have decided to not include these in the blog itself. She is sorely missed. However, I made some headway in gaining the trust of the local cats; I met one of them twice last week. The first time, the cat hid:

The second time, we just stared at each other, as the cat was on the walking path and so was I. It was a deadlock for the ages.

The work project is going decently well, according to the meeting last Friday. I have not yet fully acclimatized to the use of LLMs in these things, but I dare say that I’ll get used to it in time.

On Monday, I went to eat Korean food with Sungmin, and it was very tasty indeed; especially the Kimbap, which is explicitly not sushi.

On the way to the Korean restaurant, I also took this picture:

From discussions later in the week I heard that there were some fires in Indonesia, the smoke of which is blowing into Singapore. Makes for a magnificent view, but less magnificent air quality. The week was therefore quite misty, and the weather took another turn for the worse around the end of the week, with harsh rain. In fact, this is my window right now.

Notably, I’m at 6 floors high, so it’s very, very wet outside.

Tuesday, I went to the Staff Introduction. It had all the features of staff introductions, including some nice provided food. The most interesting things that I learnt were during the morning of the second day, where I learnt that the Teaching and Research tracks in the NUS are two distinct tracks, and I’m in the Research Track. I also noted that the NUS likes LLMs and AI quite a lot. However, I also met some good people, and during the break on Tuesday I had my first bubble tea. It’s not really for me, but it was an interesting thing to try out nonetheless. We made a group picture just before I had to leave due to a group meeting:

Tuesday evening I met up with Erfan, and we went to the Odyssey. It’s an excellent movie, in my book, and I enjoyed watching it again. On the way there, me and Erfan had an interesting discussion about the future and AI; I wonder how society will look in 20 and in 50 years.

The rest of the week was somewhat peaceful. On wednesday, I worked late (having missed 1.5 days of stuff due to the Staff Intro) and on Thursday I also worked somewhat late. On Friday, me, Martin, Sungmin and Nurjamal went out and ate deep dish pizza, which I have not had before. I’ll be returning to John’s Pizza in the future. After this, we made some stops at some shops (I wanted to go to IKEA, and Nurjamal needed a sim card) before taking the bus back. Me, Nurjamal and Sungmin went together (as we all live close to each other) and we therefore all got soaked into the deluge that started just as we exited the bus. In the weekend, I played Portal and listened to some audios with Pim, enjoying some delicious choco:

I write to you now, however, instead of on Sunday, because I finally got around to replacing my old “desk” with something worthy of the name:

This is the end of the time in which the only place to lounge in my room was a bed and a rickety chair. I now have a real chair, and a nice, broad place to do things on. I think that this should also improve my energy, for it can’t be good to just lie down all the time; now I can sit. I can furthermore also work from home if I want to, which is probably a good idea if the weather is going to continue being wet.

Now it is time to put the desk to the test! It is time to continue my DnD prep, and to fix that one mistake in my thesis. Let’s see how far I get with that in the next week.

Tom out.

This week’s recommendation is A Wizard of Earthsea, which was indeed as excellent as I expected it to be. I think I finished the book in a few evenings, the thing really reads itself. I’ve now started on the second book.

On Wednesday, I had a meeting in which some expectation mismatches were cleared and we decided on the project I would be doing. I am happy to say that it’s an interesting project that makes good use of some of my existing skills but also allows me to get some experience in things I have not done before. To get it off the ground, and in preparation for next week, I spent Saturday working as well (which was fairly relaxing).

Other than work, I went to the Sushi Tei in Holland village on Wednesday with David; one restaurant I will return to. Friday after work, Martin showed me The Star Vista, a mall near Buona Vista owned by a megachurch (found on the top floor).

In it, I found a truly beautiful shop: a bakery shop named Redman, where they had cacao and other important things to make hot chocolate. I forgot to make a picture, but though I bought the cheapest cacao for now, I see a good alternative for coffee in my near future. Then Saturday after work, I went to get some more kitchen stuff to facilitate my future hot chocolate brewing.

Today I took it easy, before going to A Few Dollars More in the evening with Martin, Zhao Huan (a colleague) and Bernice. I think the best thing about these movies is seeing how basically everything about the three movies is better than the last movie. The music in this one was especially good.

On the side, I spent some time thinking about the time in Singapore so far and what I will do beyond it; I think I have started to tackle the question of what doing research means to me, as well as a few practical side-questions.

Next week is going to be mostly work as well, as Tuesday and Wednesday are partly spent in the staff introduction, which is a bit inconvenient for the project timeline, so I will probably try to work some evenings. Let’s see what next week brings; I shall bring it chocolate.

Tom out.

Though my world revolved around work this week, I still got recommended the excellent small game Wanderburg by Mark, which I now recommend to you. In the game, you drive around your medieval Mortal Engines style siege engine and eat towns and other siege engines. Delightfully silly.

On Monday, I enjoyed a relaxing session of listening to Doctor Who audios with Pim. We listened to Master! Nemesis Express, from the worlds of Doctor Who. A horrible evil villain haunts the time vortex (time dimension in Doctor Who), and he has manifested himself in a train traversing the dimension for faster travel speeds. It is up to a plucky bounty hunter and her alien accomplice to stop him, before he regains a permanent body! It’s exactly as cheesy as it sounds, which it leans into, making it very entertaining; the taste is like an over the top scifi shooter.

On Tuesday, I roused myself for a small adventure, as I joined Martin and his girlfriend Bernice for the first of the Dollars trilogy, a Fistful of Dollars. I’ve seen these movies a few times before, but they’re truly classics. Notably, the soundtrack is also amazing, and I found myself whistling it for the rest of the evening. I recommend them to anyone. The next one will be watched next Sunday.

We watched the movies at the Capitol Theatre, which is quite excellent:

After the movie, me and Martin took a bus back, and we talked about books that we read. In the end, I recommended him the Empire of the Wolf trilogy, by Richard Swan, which I read last year (during my thesis writing days somewhere) and greatly enjoyed.

On Wednesday, I was not reading anything in particular. I went to Tayyiba Biryani with Yusuf, which was quite nice. After this, I went home, and me and Pim listened to the last episode of Nemesis Express (we hadn’t gotten to it on Monday). Having been re-interested in reading due to my conversation with Martin on Tuesday, I then did some arranging of my ebooks. After some hesitating I eventually (on Thursday) got myself the Earthsea series as depicted on the right as an ebook; I read a few chapters and I already love the calm narrative style. It put me in mind of the Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart, which I greatly enjoyed; I bet I’m gonna love Earthsea too.

On Thursday, I read Board & Conquest, by Maxime Durand. I have read a lot of this author’s work. He writes a lot of books in which a protagonist needs to game some RPG-like system, and the author is skilled enough in plot and atmosphere that reading his work can be considered one of my comfort-reads. The plot is never boring and the atmosphere is often well thought out, but you can also guess enough of what is going to happen that the experience does not become taxing. My favourite of this author is still Vainqueur the Dragon, which is one of his sillier works.

Sadly, I hadn’t noticed that Board & Conquest is a part 1, so now I have to wait for the next part.

On Friday I did not have much time for reading or listening: work had intruded, and the time I did have was spent finishing Board & Conquest. Luckily for me, I got a new desk this Friday, which I like much more than my old Desk. Unluckily for me, I had been developing a headache for a part of the week, which came to a head (mine, in fact) on Friday. I therefore took it somewhat easy, and continued my journey through Logical Foundations, by Pierce et al.

I therefore went home relatively early, but I then met up with Ferry and Bob. We have been working on the side on AuDaLa. It was an exciting meeting, which got me talkative; Bob only had an hour, but me and Ferry were busy for about 2-3 hours. After the meeting ended, my headache had grown terrible, and I went to bed.

On Saturday, I did the smart thing and ate somewhat early, unlike a few past weekends where I skipped meals on Saturday (which I felt the consequences of). I then met up with Niels, to play Guild Wars 2. I still had a bit of a headache, and Niels also was not particularly inclined to play Guild Wars, so we discussed multiplayer games and eventually played Clank!, which is an excellent boardgame. It currently has a kickstarter going for its 10th anniversary, but sadly I will have to skip on it for now; the version I would like is exceedingly expensive, and I do not currently have enough people in Singapore I play boardgames with to justify this expense.

There is a boardgame night on the 25th which I am going to, so who knows, but for now the answer is no. I also decided that I would not have a picture of Clank here, as the pictures I could find were boring. I therefore added a picture of the Order of the Stick, which I also read on Friday and Saturday. I got the pdf version of Volume 01, as I wanted to read it on my kobo, but the link is to the site, where the whole series can be read online.

Then, on Sunday, some food did not agree with me, so I stayed in my room for most of the day. I finished the game Dishonored, including DLC’s; the Knife of Dunwall was fine, but the Brigmore Witches was excellent, especially the last mission. As with many things. This means that I will be playing a new game from now; Dishonored 2 right after Dishonored may be a bit much. I think it will be the Witcher 3, which I never finished. I also continued with the Logical Foundations; my Rocq-skills are getting there!

Funnily enough, Brigmore witches contains something I also wanted to do in my DnD campaign, which I found out after planning it in the DnD campaign. This is not the first time this happens to me, nor will it be the last. I would like to say that great minds think alike, but I suppose this is more a case of there not being any original ideas anymore. At any rate, I found it amusing.

After my last blog went a bit more in depth on my feelings on work, you may ask how that ended up going? Well, in general I tried to make the work office spot a bit less an office spot and a bit more my spot, where I can feel comfortable. This was more a mindset change than anything else, and it was successful enough, so the beginning of the week I enjoyed going to work quite a lot. The second half of the week was a bit more turbulent, especially Thursday. Due to this and due to my increasing headache, Friday was a bit of an off-day for me. but I have a better office spot now (literally and mentally), so if I keep at it I think it’ll be fine in the end. Tomorrow I should focus on setting a goal for the week, something that can push my current projects further.

I have even found some lovely music albums which I listened to during work. I especially liked Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues, which I expect some others will also appreciate, if they do not already do so. I especially think Nander will enjoy this:

I have also looked into the possibility of working from home, which is frankly never going to work with my current “desk”. I am therefore making plans to get a new desk, a decent chair, and a drawing tablet with a screen so that I have somewhere else to sit and be productive during the weekend. The drawing tablet is not strictly necessary for that, of course, but I do like digital drawing, and I am at the stage of my DnD prep where having a decent digital drawing desk would be nice.

And that’s it for this week. I currently feel like Poekie on the picture below, so I think I’ll call it a day.

Tom out.

It feels weird not ending with a recommendation, so I suppose I can do another recommendation. I’ve been relistening Avantasia at work too, so I’ll recommend the albums Moonglow and A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society, which has some similarities to the tones of the Brigmore Witches and the Witcher, and maybe a bit of Earthsea, though I cannot really say yet.

Indeed! So I don’t have bureaucratic stories or fun anecdotes for this week; this week I went with the flow, and did some fun things, but no big misadventures were had. I did lose my Rabobank card on Friday, but luckily it was found near the printer of the office during the evening, which was a relief.

On Monday, I went to eat with Erfan, and afterwards we went on a walk through Chinatown and Marina Bay Sands. Chinatown was fun to walk through, made me think of some streets in Vienna (if far more busy and touristic).

Marina Bay one of the fanciest places I have so far seen in Singapore. It seems to be very touristic, and the mall in Marina Bay Sands seems to be for fashion and the bling. Erfan did tell me that there was a bar on top of Marina Bay Sands, which I would be interested in visiting at some point.

The walk ended up at the Merlion statue, which seems to be an iconic statue in Singapore. It was fun, but instead of describing it, I have pictures. I will put them at the bottom of the blog, as there are quite a lot of pictures.

On Tuesday, I finished the Hobbit.

Spoilers:

Though it is clearly a children’s book, it is very well written; the narrative voice was excellent. The story was fun enough, with the middle bit being my favourite (The Goblins, the Ring and the Escape from Mirkwood), though the beginning was also noteworthy. The end was not quite my cup of tea, as Bard was very conveniently introduced when the dragon needed slaying, and then slays the dragon while Thorin’s group are just hiding elsewhere.

As Laketown is destroyed, the survivors then (understandably) go and demand reparations from the dwarves, aided by the Elves, who just so happen to be marching an army to the Lonely Mountain for reasons which, though they may not have been spelled out clearly in the book (or I may have missed that), probably have to do with the hoard of treasure now only guarded by 13 measly small people, who also happened to have escaped the elves custody earlier.

The elves then unite with the men and they go and ask for a share of the bounty, as if the elves also deserve that. The dwarves do not want to negotiate with the elves (understandably), so negotiations break down, with the dwarves blamed for it. The dwarves also summon an army, and the whole situation seems unsalvageable.

Cue convenient goblin/orc army which solves this by uniting all the armies and conveniently killing of Thorin and his line (as Thorin was the biggest obstacle in negotiating with the elves). The elves, wonderous they, are thanked, and get a reward. Bilbo leaves with Gandalf, and though invited, they skip Mirkwood, because the forest is so dark (the elves, of course, are wonderful). Instead, they go to Rivendell, where the book describes for one last time how wonderful the elves are, before Bilbo gets home.

In short:

Now, this is of course exaggerated a bit, and I’m not going to pretend I can write better than Tolkien can, but I am still team dwarf, and the elves were pricks. Let’s see if Lord of the Rings does something to make me more interested in the elves.

End Spoilers

At work, I have finished my tour of Frama-C, and I am now doing a few exercises which are relevant to the current research. This led me to find out the hard way that, as far as I can see, the WP plugin (for deductive verification) seems to not support memory allocation. Finding this out ate most of my Friday, except the two hours spent on looking for my Rabobank card. Welp.

Anyways, now I am done with that tutorial, I will have to investigate (beyond the small investigation I have already done) how LLMs are made, for a project. I also still want to do the Software Foundations series by Pierce et al., so there is enough to do.

Sadly, I get somewhat easily mentally tired these days, so my days at the office have not been the longest. I think this is because I am suffering from mild impostor syndrome; I feel quite a lot of pressure to contribute something meaningful to the group, to the extent that I keep trying to hurry myself, which is the last thing I should be doing. Part of it can probably be solved by getting more comfortable in the office, and a part will just have to be forced through.

For the first part, soon, we will be moving to another office anyways, so let’s see what kind of office that is. I may have to get myself noise-cancelling headphones, however, and see if I cannot find a better spot than I have now. For the second part, I think I’ll just have to do my best. In the Netherlands, when the pressure got a bit much, I used to go home and work a bit extra in some evening later in the week or in the weekend, but my room here (and its tiny desk) really does not facilitate this. Let’s start with allowing myself to work on the Software Foundations series at least two hours per day. Maybe this normalizes me being at the office longer.

Thursday, Martin, me, David, Sungmin and Zhiyuan went to Carnivore, a delicious brazilian meat and fish buffet restaurant which made me taste the best beef I have had in Singapore so far:

It was more expensive than all of my meals so far, but it was worth it. I would return, but sadly the restaurant closes next month. Still, an excellent experience. During the dinner, David proposed the next restaurant, a Japanese restaurant in Holland Village.

Friday I stayed up to possibly call some people at the wedding of a friend of mine; in the end, I gave my congratulations to my friend’s father, as a wedding is a busy day, and calling in may be somewhat inconvenient. This did not stop me from staying up anyways and playing Dishonored, which was not a good idea in hindsight. Congratulations once again, my friend! I hope you enjoy your honeymoon.

Saturday I slept in and also played Slay the Spire 2 with the friends from the Oddylords campaign; we demolished the Spire at least twice.

Today I got hooked back in by Slay the Spire, but I did manage to tear myself from the screen to get a haircut and eat.

I also did some swimming yesterday, as I also did throughout the week. My arms have gotten week and I have been a bit short of breath, so I suppose I should eat a bit more perhaps, and train a bit more.

And now, I am writing this. The hour has grown late, however, so I will end it here.

Tom out.

This week, I will recommend the Hobbit, which is worth a read. As it was obvious that I was going to recommend this, I will also recommend Outward, which I have played a bit on Saturday but which seems to be a game I can probably sink days in. The music is a bit repetitive, but the game looks great and is a lot of fun so far.

And now, pictures!

Not literally; in a far more literal sense, things are heating up enough for me to make a point of wearing a hat, to not get a sunstroke or something. This of course means that I have now equipped a hat. Those with discerning eyes may recognize this hat as the hat I brought home from Peru, so now this hat has been all over the world.

However, even in this autumn of activity, there was some last adventure to be had, as I announced last week. And so it came to be that on Tuesday, I set out fresh from the house, after depositing my bag there, on a quest to get myself a Steam Deck. I had checked the buses I needed to get; the plan was to catch bus 143, which would bring me to my destination in an hour’s time, during which I could chill and maybe listen to an audio play.

As I forgot to signal the bus, I missed the bus. I ran to the next stop, but that was not to be either. It was thus that I actually had a fairly eventful journey including one busline and two MRT (metro) lines, after which I found myself in a most typical mall:

The mall pictured here is Plaza Singapure, and it has a fan site. It’s quite an awesome sight to behold, for sure.

I truly think that before I went here, I had only a limited understanding of what a mall actually was. I think that’s because shopping streets are more common in the Netherlands, so it’s a matter of taste, but I do quite enjoy the many different malls I see here. You could probably make an entire vacation out of checking all of them out.

This was my first destination. From my earlier intel-gathering, I had found that the shop I went to earlier did have Steam Decks, but not the 1TB version. For a data hoarder like me, buying the 512GB version was unthinkable (Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 together already take up around 200GB), so I had to look for alternatives. Luckily, the branches of this shop were all relatively close together, so I decided (wringing my hands in anticipation) that I would visit these one by one, enjoying the scenery in the meantime, while enquiring about when the 1TB version was going to be back in stock.

And so, I walked into the first store.

“Yes, we have exactly one left.” (paraphrasing.)

Alright, so that was the adventure. But wait! The store manager told me that it was likely that the Deck was the Japanese version, and that I should get a socket converter from another shop in the mall!

As I was already considering my path to this other store (I had not quite understood exactly where it was, but sometimes having a terrible sense of following directions is a boon), it again turned out that no, I was lucky, this was a European version.

I got a screen protector installed, paid for my Deck, tried out the Viture glasses they had (for I don’t have a TV and these could be a nice replacement without requiring a TV), resolved to come back here if I needed anything else gaming related (their service was excellent) and left.

And so my quest ended. I did not see more marvelous sights, so instead here is a picture of Orchard Road, which I walked along to reach the bus stop.

Of course, I got bored during the hour I spent on the bus on the journey back.

After that, it was back to work. I spent most of this week reading Related Work relating to two possible projects I am to be involved in. Sadly, one project was not very interesting research-wise, according to what I found, so that’s one project less. Happily, me and another postdoc, Sungmin, are considering another project to work on.

The pressure to find something to contribute to the group is real, as I feel I should do something to be worthy of the postdoc position, the benefits and the possibility to broaden my horizons by coming to Singapore. Yet, I also know I should be patient, for rushing never got me anywhere.

Wednesday, I had dinner with Martin, which we spent at the ABC Brickworks Food Centre in Bukit Merah, where I ate Penang Asam Laksa at the stall Jason Penang Cuisine, which I have been told is in the possession of a Michelin star.

It was DELICIOUS. At once savoury, incredibly fresh and filling. I cannot do it justice, but I will try to find a recipe and make it myself at some point, for if my efforts will be 40 percent as good as this I will be happy.

After dinner, I splurged a little and bought a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, for use with the Steam Deck and my laptop. My work posture has already improved in the few days that I have used them.

The rest of the week I took it a bit easy, partly because I wanted to play with me Steam Deck, and partly because I have been kind of busy, and so the time has come to wind down. Friday I ate with David and Zhiyuan (a colleague) at Sanook, a nice Thai restaurant within walking distance of my house, where I saw an astounding explosion of road rage from a taxi driver. Also on Friday, I finetuned my audio setup and was able to enjoy some nice audios with Pim.

Additionally, I also found these figures with a most royal bearing on Tuesday:

This leads me to Saturday afternoon and evening, where I once again joined up with Martin and with Sungmin to go and eat crocodile. We traveled to a hawkers food center near Little India in Singapore, where we were able to sample the dish in question (as they got their crocodile from some nearby crocodile farm). It was quite interesting; crocodile tastes like chicken, and the skin is a feature which should definitely also be consumed with the crocodile. The soup we got was also quite delicious, good use of coriander.

We enjoyed this crocodile soup with some beer and rice, and also got turtle soup later, as we also wanted to try that. Turtle shell, when cooked, is also quite interesting (a sort of more solid jelly structure), though it did not taste of much to me. The meat is excellent though, very reminiscent of the beef I would expect in dutch beef soups.

After finishing our meal, we went to eat ice cream at Tom’s Pallette. The ice cream was excellent, so I was sad to hear that the shop would close in one or two months due to not making enough profit. I resolved to go again. Some more pictures from this outing:

In the rest of the weekend, I called my parents a few times, as they are now enjoying a nice mini-holiday for their 30 years wedding anniversary. May many more years follow. Today I gamed with Lars and tried out the swimming pool of the building I am staying in. Swimming has relaxed me more than I expected (especially as what felt like an hour only turned out to be around 30 minutes), so that’s where I will end this blog.

Tom out.

This blog post’s recommendation will be A Short Hike, a wonderfully relaxing and short game recommended to me by Joep. I played it (and finished it) on Thursday and it was just a lovely experience.

I have not yet finished the Hobbit, the Steam Deck distracted me. I have mostly been playing Dishonored; the gameplay is as excellent as I remember, but the dialogue and story so far are sometimes a bit clunky. Still an excellent game.

Breaking News: On wednesday, I had had enough of my plank of a mattress and I decided to go do something about it. I had plans to get dinner with Martin, a colleague from work. I told Martin of this plan, and he basically told me the equivalent of “Say no more, you need to go to IKEA.”

And so we did. We first feasted scrumptiously at the Hawkers at the Alexandra Village Food Centre, where I established that indeed: the Thai kitchen is so far one of my favourite kitchens in Singapore, and Thai green curry is delicious. I need to get a recipe. Sadly, I am not allowed to cook in my apartment.

Something that caught my eye at the Hawkers was a stall with European style food, which included the exotic dish Chicken with Rice. In fact, as far as I saw it, most of the menu consisted of rice dishes, which amused me. Consider my surprise when it turns out that not only is the IKEA a bona fide restaurant here, but it actually has very European style dishes. I will check this out in the future.

After a bit of a justified splurge in the IKEA and a decidedly uncomfortable busride home, I overhauled my bed. Suffice to say that I have rediscovered sleep, and even though it still takes me two hours to fall asleep these days (lingering jetlag?) I feel better than I have felt for a while.

Other than that, this week was somewhat tame comparing to the past week. My Employment Pass arrived on Friday. Furthermore, My Singtel e-Sim got activated. Like a baffled tourist asshole, I then returned to the store and bothered the overworked Singtel staff with two issues which turned out non-issues:

1. My Settings showed 2GB of data only, but that turned out to be the warning and just meant the amount of GBs I had to spend before my phone would warn me of data spending had reset.
2. My phone is simply to geriatric for Singaporean 5G.

As my phone is only three years old, the second one baffles me and I decided to just deal with 4G instead. I did look into maybe getting a phone with my subscription (pending…), but in the end that requires a two year subscription, so to hell with it. Imma call this obsoleteness policy what it is: a waste of perfectly good, if older, smartphones.

(Small update: It has since been pointed out to me by Christiaan that another possible reason my phone does not support Singaporean 5G is because Singapore 5G may function differently from European 5G. This is a very good point, so my annoyance at not having Singapore 5G has significantly reduced. I am still not buying a new phone just to get 5G, however. In fact, it has become less likely that I will buy a phone here within the next year.

This leads to Singapore Lesson 3: Investigate phone frequency bands before you buy a Singapore sim card. Generally a good travel tip.)

I’m pretty embarrassed about going a bit Karen on this, though; I could have easily figured out the first point out if I had given it some more critical thought. It does mean however that all the bureaucratic stuff is done, as far as I know. At least, on the Singapore side…

On the hobby side, I have spent most of my week working on my DnD setting and a campaign module I am working on. For those in the know, it’s based on an earlier campaign I ran, the Fenusia campaign. I am still quite fond of that campaign, but it was flawed, and it eventually ended unfinished.

Where the original campaign started as a sea exploration campaign which eventually became a conspiracy campaign, I am reimagining it as a campaign which balances the sea-exploration and the conspiracy aspects by essentially being a hexcrawl campaign which switches between raising money for expeditions (interacting with the city and its conspiracies) and actually crawling the hexes on a boat (sea-exploration). I also added a new focus on curses, to add in more spooky elements. The campaign will be from level 1 to level 11.

Currently, I have a good setup for the player paths of the campaign and I am redesigning the city of Fenusia (partly based on Venice), including the events that happen in the city during the campaign. These events and the design of the city will then be used to create questlines for the party to make money off of for their expeditions, through which the party can also affect the city.

During initial stages of design, I used a bit of ChatGPT to rubber duck some of my ideas, as almost everyone I play DnD with is also somehow involved in the setting and I did not want to give them spoilers, but I also like to discuss ideas in some manner. ChatGPT is however somewhat limited in this respect (for one, its a yes-man, which I do not need) and it doesn’t replace discussing this stuff with actual people, I caved this week and asked two friends to do some proofreading and to help me along a little.

I am also still learning Frama-C at work. For anyone learning Frama-C, I recommend the tutorial by Allan Blanchard, which I am quite enjoying so far. I did run into some trouble with getting Frama-C to list CVC5 as a Prover, but maybe this will be solved tomorrow. In other work news, I got some more tasks, which I find quite exciting.

As the last tidbits; I started the Librarian movies (and series), I have managed to get a rudimentary audio-microphone setup going, and I have been invited to a boardgame night with the neighbours. Looking forward to that! Also, I heard from both Erfan and Yusuf (another colleague) that the tax situation here is probably even be better than I initially estimated, so I should be a responsible lad and save up more money.

Tomorrow, the quest for the Steam Deck begins!

For now, however, I have been making this blog for around four hours. This means that I have improved my picture game:

This also means, however, that I have not yet managed to fulfill my intention of going to bed around 22:00, which will surely allow me to be asleep roughly at 0:00. As it is now reaching 0:00, I think it is high time I go to bed.

Tom out.

Practical Note: I have not yet been able to look into a mail button, but I have been recommended Twine and/or Feeder as apps to be able to read RSS feeds, including the RSS feed of this site. I will probably eventually look into this, but I make no hard guarantees.

Small update: I have also been recommended Capy Reader as a good app, which has a fantastic logo. Thanks Jore!

This week I have mostly been prepping D&D, so I haven’t consumed much media at all. Instead, I’ll recommend the EP Empire of the Clouds, which is quite nice and calm. I see that one can embed Spotify on sites; let’s see if that works.

Stupid jokes aside, I was pretty happy with that extra day of rest; I am still acclimatizing, and this gave me an extra day in which I could focus on living in Singapore and not also at the same time getting myself up to speed with work.

Turns out it was needed, I spent most Saturday reading in bed and playing and learning chess with and from Patrick. I am not particularly good at it, but I think I can see the shape of good chess play now, and perhaps I will get better soon. I am considering to get the Chess app for a year too; might be a fun skill to learn.

So, on work: I have, by now, truly met four people of the group and spoken to another few members. The social element of being part of a research group is far less pronounced than it was at the TU/e, which is something to get used to. However, the group seems to be on top of things with regards to research, and I am confident that I can learn a lot here; now it is up to me to find something I can add to the group’s efforts.

Furthermore, I estimate that I will be able to enjoy working with at least those I have met, and our lunches together so far have been fun and relaxing. Thank you Eduardo for letting Martin know I was going to Singapore. I have an ambition to see how many of the group I can get to join me for lunch, but I have been reliably informed that getting everyone to join a lunch at some point is unlikely to succeed. This will, of course, not stop me for now.

This week, I spent familiarizing myself with the details of C using the book Modern C (thanks Ferry!) and the basics of Frama-C, using a book and the website. C so far is frustrating to me, due to its continued inclusion of historical design choices due to the fact that C is an older language (like the difference between strings and char arrays). The book also has some conventions about programming in C for which the rationale is basically “Just accept this, historically it was done like this.” As someone who has, since his PhD, been focusing on recultivating his curiosity and considers that to be an absolutely bogus reason for the existence of conventions, this does not endear the language to me. Maybe at some point I shall make a little post about my experiences in C programming and analyzing.

On the bureaucratic side, the end of the tunnel is visible. I now have a Singpass, and my Employee Pass (visa) will arrive at the university next week. My address was not correctly communicated to the Ministry of Manpower; this was not debilitating but it sent me on a little sidequest to get that fixed, which ended today when the landlord gave permission for an Employee Pass to be registered at my current address. Furthermore, my bank account works and I have been able to pay all my renting obligations. This did not stop the company from which I rent to send me an invoice the day after I paid the obligations. I tried to contact them through four to six different channels, from which I learnt the following lesson:

Singapore Lesson 2: No news is good news. Do not expect to get confirmation mails for contacting services.

I also had some problems with 2FA authentication; this I had to fix by reinstalling Windows Authenticator, which conveniently defenestrated my 2FA authentication for the TU/e, to which I think I will still have access until February, and to which I more importantly would like to keep access until February as I am the corresponding author for at least some of the AuDaLa papers. I have contacted the TU/e, but they can only reset my 2FA through a meeting, which I will pick back up when my phone issues are done.

Phone-wise, with my Singpass, I can officially register my phone number. Of course, this could not be done through the app, because it turns out Singpass has some trouble communicating one’s nationality to other services when one is Dutch, so today, I visited two different locations of the Singtel phone company to get my phone registered to me.

This should be processed on Wednesday, after which I can transfer my phone to eSim, after which I should try to call the employee of the phone company to check whether I can place outgoing calls, which I for some arcane reason am not able to do (this seems to not be the standard). Then, I should call the phone company for 5G access (I should already have it, but I don’t).

Other than that, I have had dinner with Erfan, as evidenced by the photo’s above. We found evidence of Dutch Presence in Singapore, as well as an English-styled bar where one can order Guinness. Furthermore, I also had dinner with Martin (no photo’s I’m afraid), and tried out pizza from a pizza place in Singapore; the pizza I had some interesting toppings, including chicken, onion, pineapple and crab. Crab really was the mystery ingredient there, as I had no clue it was on the pizza and I spent most of my meal trying to figure out what on earth it was. I had settled on fish, but crab makes sense. Luckily, there is also a pizza place nearby that seems (I make no promises) to sell more italian-style pizza. If I ever want to spend around 20 euro’s for a pizza (which will most likely eventually happen), I will try it out.

Another of my food exploits was the Tasting of the Bread:

I concluded the following:

1. I am still not a selfie person.
2. The bread is good, but I doubt I’m gonna find my favourite types of bread here.
3. Do not eat a full bread without water at hand, it will not feel nice.

In other news: peanut butter is surprisingly not terrible here, but biscuit spread (and some drinks) are sweet enough to rot your teeth where you stand. I also think my toothpaste has an impact on my taste for some reason.

Yesterday, me and a friendly co-worker, David, went to see the fireworks for Singapore’s 61th birthday yesterday, which was fun. I saw some pretty great sights, of which I have photos:

Before me and David went to see the sights as shown above, I decided this was a good opportunity to figure out where to buy a Steam Deck. Luckily for me, there was a gamestore very close at hand, so I went there and asked where I could buy a Steam Deck. So I went to an employee, and he told me that that very store sold steam decks, gesturing downwards:

This was a very sudden end to my side-quest, and as they did not have them in stock right away and I still needed to wait for payday, I could do nothing else than say:

It has been an interesting week. I have noticed that I am still conceptualizing this adventure as a short-term temporary thing, but I am slowly realizing that this is going to be for at least a year, and a year is a long time. This has for now led me to the conclusion that I do not want to miss two years of Poekie’s life, so if I stay for longer Poekie will have to come here. Secondly, I acclimatize reasonably well to moving abroad. I mean sure, I have given an exposition on all the trouble it has been so far, but I find I don’t truly feel like the trouble was a massive imposition; at the moment, it is an amusing annoyance. This also means that it is easy for me to fall into old patterns, which can be a boon or a detriment. I shall have to see.

Well, that’s it for today, I think. I think my next post will be next week. Let’s see if the bureaucratic stuff is truly done then. I’ve also been working on prepping a D&D campaign, maybe I can talk some about that (without spoiling anything). Furthermore, my laptop screen has been glitching a bit; future side-quest? We shall know next week.

(Update: Nevermind, immediately found a fix online. Let’s see if it sticks.)

Tom out.

This weeks media recommendation: Doctor Who, Dalek Universe, a fast-paced 9-episode audio drama saga of the 10th Doctor (around the series 4 specials) traveling to before the Time War, with a focus on the Dalek extended universe as envisioned in Classic Who by for example Terry Nation. Excellent action and character work. I have relistened the first seven episodes, and I have once again been enjoying it quite a lot. Also the sixth episode has some Tolkien parallels, so once again Tolkien did it first, like he invented horses and dwarves. I think I’ll continue with reading the Hobbit soon.

Note that this series has some prerequisites. For starters, it may be beneficial to have seen Doctor Who.

The good news: I have found a room! The room is nice and spacy, though the furniture is a bit basic and the Wifi does not work yet. The airco works, which is a massive relief, and the view is pretty great, as can be seen on the right.

Furthermore, the location is fantastic; work is a 30 minutes walk, and the busstop is less than 5 minutes walk. There is also a mall reachable in 10-15 minutes, and a bigger mall reachable in 40 minutes. Within a radius of 20 minutes, there are also multiple spots to eat.

The bad news: I have not yet been able to pay for the room. It turns out that getting a functional bank account, for which I had to have a residential address (the room), requires about 2 weeks of working days, first to approve the application and then to issue a debit card. Luckily for me the landlord and agent (three hurrahs for the agent) seem to be fine with me being delayed in paying my first month of rent, otherwise this could have gotten quite nasty. (They highly preferred me using PayNow to pay them as opposed to transferring the payment from the Rabobank.)

The absolute knockout blow from the mace of bureaucracy in which I found that out was pretty magnificent. There I was, sitting behind my work desk on Friday, when I suddenly receive three mails from the bank. Paraphrased (though the order is correct):

Mail 1: “Dear sir, your request to update your e-mail address has been completed.”

Mail 2: “Dear sir, welcome to our bank and welcome to digibanking! Login to generate a digital token! Do not tell your login details or your one-time password to anyone.”

Mail 3: “Dear sir, your debit card has been issued; it will be sent to your address in 3-5 working days.”

Tom:

Like an unbureaucratic fool, I could not see the beautiful perfectly sensible logic at play here; I had already waited for three working days for the application to be approved, so I didn’t expect to have to wait even longer for the debit card. I had also never received login information for digibanking, which according to the mail, I should never share with anyone. I checked the digibanking app: I could make new login information, of course, using five different methods (including using the debit card), none of which were available to me.

So I went to the bank twice that day, standing in no less than 4 lines in total before being plucked out of the last line near closing time and being helped by some lovely bank staff, who explained to me that the idea was that I could access digibanking after I received my debit card.

I can never tell whether it is just me in these situations, but I was again in my baffled tourist state at that point. Got a lovely tip to try out some mango-cheese smoothie at a store called Heytea though; forgot to ask the name of the guy who gave me the tip before I was plucked from that waiting line.

Luckily the bank teller was able to assist me in unlocking digibanking early; the next Friday was decisively after the deadline for paying the first month of rent for the room to such an extent that I was uncomfortable waiting until then. I still need to wait up to three working days to transfer the money required to do that to my Singapore bank though.

Smarter people than me may realize that maybe this could have been avoided through the application of a service like Wise or similar (as was recommended to me by Jagruth and Nikhil from St Jozef Doelen), but I remembered too late and decided to just go with this instead of complicating this situation further.

Am I done then? Not quite, as my employee pass appointment is on Wednesday, after which I have to give proof of Employee Pass to both the phone company and the landlord. Shouldn’t be too difficult, however.

And then, it will all have worked out. All that rests me for now is telling you the definite order of how to arrange things when you go to Singapore:

1. Get a prepaid simcard. This cannot be an e-Sim; I checked.
2. Get a proof of ownership for your prepaid simcard.
3. Get a residential apartment/room/house/registered cardboard box/etc. Make sure that you can pay for this in some way preferably involving access to PayNow, Singapore’s fast payment system, but without requiring access to a specifically Singaporean bank account. Make sure to communicate with your agent and landlord, and remember that at least the Rabobank has a transfer time.
4. Get an employment pass via work.
5. When you have a residential apartment and, preferably, a Singpass, make a bank account. Do not make my mistake.

Furthermore: Arrange hotel bookings in intervals of one week, so that you can still cancel the unnecessary bookings. Trust me on that, this is probably the only real mistake I made.

There, done. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

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It turns out I have been in action mode a lot, so I am unsure what to do next, really. Probably work. My first workday was last friday; it was a bit hectic, as I had to go to the bank twice. There was a meeting on what the project was about; it sounds very cool, and it also sounds like I am going to have to become familiar with a lot of different systems in a short timespan. But then, that was expected. It turned out my NUS-id and password did not work yet, and my employee pass request was sent in a bit late, but that should be resolved by Monday and it’s not like I wasn’t running around between different bank branches anyways.

In a surprising twist, I shall first be familiarizing myself with Frama-C, which I first heard about from Bob not even two weeks ago. You can bet that I now regret leaving my Modern C book behind in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, I will still be installing Rocq on this laptop and work through it; I actually quite enjoyed the first bits of Volume 1 of Software Foundations which I worked through before I had to start arranging my move.

On the hobby end, I went to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It was good. It had quite some connections to the wider MCU, but it was a movie focused on Spider-Man first and foremost, setting the stage for a new era of MCU Spider-Man. If you like the MCU Spider-Man movies, give it a watch.

Furthermore, me and Erfan have eaten together a few times. He pointed out some good nearby restaurants, which we have been visiting. Here is a photo of us yesterday, sitting in a thai restaurant: Also dear god peppers are spicy here. I already burnt the inside of my mouth quite a bit with some noodles last Sunday and I suffered yesterday when eating a standard red pepper. Erfan told me some more about visiting Malaysia, and it definitely sounds like something I should do (probably with Bram, when he visits).

Next week, I will probably continue with the process of getting all the right documentation and paying for my apartment, as well as do work. I hope to find a way to watch the new Avatar movie, but I currently don’t have wifi, so let’s see whether that works out. I also think I should put some more time into the Discordia stuff, or do some sporting or something. For discordia, I put Krita on my laptop, so I should be able to draw stuff again.

I think I’ll just take it easy the rest of the weekend though. Not like I haven’t been busy a lot recently. Time for a walk.

Tom out.

Note: I have received some nice ideas for functionality on this site, but as I currently do not have wifi, me augmenting the site will have to wait until I do. Thanks for the ideas, though, and if you have another idea, please let me know.

Bonus: I have some additional photos! Two were made before my plane flight (featuring my mom and dad, and one featuring Joep), and one was made by Erfan yesterday. I also added a photo of me in fancy dress for my defense with Poekie.

Bonus reading tip: If you like reading about my bureaucratic misadventures, you can certainly not go wrong with Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I remember reading this one winter’s evening while on my way to Amsterdam. I was so engrossed in it that when I got off the train, the cold of the platform, the sudden throngs of people and the fact that I suddenly did not find myself in a space that could be mistaken for the labyrinthine attic-like hallways that Joseph K. needed to navigate reduced me to the state of a baffled tourist. I remember only snapping out of it a few streets further, before which my body navigated to where I needed/wanted to be (a bookshop, in this case) while my brain frantically tried to get back to reality.