Teaching and reassuring people went well initially, then the witch overpowered us thru our weaknesses which she and her family implanted directly or by chain, when we were younger. There are now afraid and wounded people pressing on one another like never before. Looks like tonight will be a busy one. It's hard not to say that God's plan has gone a wee bit haywire with all the telepathic openings that have been festering since the early 90s.
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Managed to get cleaned just now and am feeling comfortable. It must have been the bird's eye peppers I ate for lunch yesterday which jammed me up this morning. I am lived in by many guailo who don't like cili padi for some reason. In fact, it is healthy to consume regularly in small amounts.
We had a discussion on using Google Translate in my book which went live earlier this year, before I had heard of the need to report it as 'AI-assisted'. Really, the text was finalized in 2025 before that requirement was stipulated. Anyway, it was not trad pubbed, nor do the translations amount to anything significant to the story, nor were they generative.
I did notice Google Translate improved some years ago where once it would do word for word English to Mandarin, then over some months, it began to use proper Chinese syntax due to, IIRC, contributions from translators who used it. So this was not AI related until 2026, when Gemini and GT were merged.
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SuperdereK UnderpantS does not use GT. But my other book was about the mix of Chinese and American culture and I thought as an afterthought, to include a few short rhymes I wrote in English, beside the way they would read in Chinese pinyin.
SDU however, did use AI-assisted editing by CoPilot. This was because TextMaker screwed up my formatting and inserted gremlins into the DocX. So I asked the AI to weed them out. We actually had a conversation like this,
CP: I can find all the gremlins if you want.
Me: Yes please do that
CP: Hmm... this text is rather long. Do you want me to analyze all the words for gremlins or I can generate a report, and just fix the obvious ones.
Me: Yes fix only the obvious ones
CP: I have detected more gremlins. Do you want a report?
Me: etc. etc. etc.
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I posted on Tumblr just now. First post in almost a week. Also posted on X, my daily update. I may post something on Facebook later.
Time for a workout. Took my meds at midnight. Should sleep circa 3am. Tidied up my iPad files and apps storage and optimized it for better battery life and speed. Worked out a few minutes and am feeling good. Discovered there's little point putting a Kinetic on a watch winder as it needs stronger action so I'm wearing it as much as possible.
Thinking of buying a Macbook Neo. But that will likely be in December. RAM shortages are escalating due to AI data center demand.
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Did not get cleaned today due to pent up gas from eating cili padi again. Will probably go in the night, late, just like yesterday. So I took a shower anyway and aired my room, sprayed the diluted Dettol. Seems the telepathy is getting to even the toughest people. We need to break here and talk about concrete solutions.
We managed to shoo off most of the telepathic attackers and now have to stop them coming to sensitive locations and overloading them. After this, I may not be posting much anymore.
This may be my last post, I know I said that twice already. Here's a story to close;
What if?
Aren’t you a writer? Came a sophisticated voice from the far end of the bar.
Why yes, I said, toes wiggling in my loafers.
You’re ChenKuang Yap! I’m Jonathan, pleased to meet you!
And yourself.
I’ve been dying to ask you something -and it weighs heavy on my heart. What’s it like being yeller?
I was actually expecting a question on my stories but I will answer anyway. Being yeller... every time I look at my skin, it’s like I have a disease, and I mentally have to fight the fear off. Also, I try really hard at things that come naturally to others. And the Folks, they must be trapped in a discarded early draft of The Analects.
But what’s it really like? In the you-know-what, Jonathan whispered. Have you ever had a white woman?
If this is gonna carry on, so be it. Think of the negative publicity it might cause if it stopped wrong. Jon, you’re right, many yeller fellers don’t think things through well, we don’t have natural confidence. Much of China was once swamp. We could have built Venice writ-large but the hexagrams of the I-Ching held a different future for us. And as for white women, I think of them as vanilla -the universally-loved flavor.
Jonathan stared at me. He scratched his beard. But what do you dream of? He asked earnestly.
I like watches, luxuries, being pampered. Sometimes, I wonder to myself what it would be like to be served coffee / wine at the Patek Philippe boutique in Kuala Lumpur as I browse their collections. Us yellers, we’re all smitten by wealth and the trappings of respect. Mao was right to burn all those books. We weren’t ready to imagine -to fantasize. In essence, as yellers -it wasn’t our time to rise.
My daughter is a fan of your stories. She reads them every day. What would you say to her, as a role model?
When I was young, living in Kuala Lumpur, we often hit the night market where Dad would buy pisang emas. He loved banana. And what we couldn’t finish, Mom turned into rich cakes. She also sew and altered most of our clothes herself. Kids are a lot like leftover bananas and outgrowing pajamas. When young, we’re all too sweet and spoil easily unless we are mixed with a different philosophy, a foundation of wheat flour / eggs -what have you. And the awkwardness of being clothed with stitches made for expanding later on. I got my first good shoes from an Adidas seconds bargain bin before I left school. I wore good shoes in college, and now I’ve added a respectable hat -I’m a writer. People care about what I say. Wheat flour, and eggs -they’re the universal aspects of wisdom.
Jonathan looked like someone who’d just smelled a wild boar spit roasting. I sensed he had a lot on his mind. A lot to tell me about how his world was very different. Instead, he seemed to be regulating his breathing.
Okay! He exclaimed with a pat on the bar top. We shook hands and I autographed a monogrammed napkin for him with a caricature of myself and the date we met.
I watched him saunter out the door. Against the glare of the evening sun, it seemed like he had golden wings. And I wondered about many things. Things I’d done unworthy, things I’d not considered worthy doing. How I got where I was now despite. And I began to write a new story: What If?