Of Holidays

The electricity got cut off again the night before last: the third time in a week and on the same day as the previous post, too; it was terribly annoying, especially since it was night and everything was dark as well as humid. But the afternoon was okayish, because a short time after the previous post, the family was bundled into the car and we went off mall-strolling until we found a KFC with WiFi, upon which we settled in for the next three hours, during which we caught up on as much as possible of life beyond these shores--the nature of the family's lifestyle means that a large part of all our contacts live in a different time zone or continent altogether.

I watched Transformers 2 last night; it was pretty good, even if it began to start throwing out--I can't decide if those were loose threads or plot holes or sequel hooks--near the end of it, what with suddenly having teleportation and robot ghosts (plus an afterlife!) and the idea of lineages and robot families (I can't help imagining the Jetsons' robot maid at this point) and various other strange things. And of course Megatron and Starscream got away in the end, which would be the most blatant sequel hook of them all. The Pig took great delight during the movie in identifying all the vehicles, the companies that produced them, and their current price (as well as also identifying which ones aren't on the market yet or are still prototypes)--he's a bit of a car geek that way. This sequel's got a bit more slapstick humour, though, plus a good deal more toilet humour than the last; still, the cinemagoers (the theatre was packed!) seemed to appreciate it.

The Pig's gone off to Betel Island, where he'll be for the next 10 days or so unless he visits KL too; which means no late-night excursions for awhile, no suppers and movies and such; and of course when he returns his classes will soon start, so it's not clear if I'll be seeing very much of him from now on. I think I might go swimming later; it's still rather warm weather for my liking and it's been awhile since I got a good swim--the last time I went there it was with the Pig, and his stamina in the water rather leaves something to be desired; not to mention that we ran into a few ex-Loch Yuck-contacts there (my fault for insisting on going over to talk to them, that) and so I ended up treading water while they discussed cars and lives and holiday activities and practiced leaping into the water from poolside. I'm no good at socialising, I must admit; either I'm tongue-tied or I'm voluble, and there's not much of an in-between for me. It's something to try to fix.

Subject registration is tomorrow afternoon; I very much hope I get the slots I want; fingers crossed, of course.

Bored People Are Bored

It has been a month since I typed the above post, or very nearly so; it's not all me being my procrastinating self really since I only got my laptop back yesterday (it was with a technician for the past two weeks) and I'd not thought to do the typing during the two weeks before that. Also, the laptop was a bit busted up: some time after the previous post, I had a fit of destructive experimentation (it's what I call it when I get the idea to study something by completely taking it to pieces, though usually it's limited to rather more easily replaced things) and began unscrewing the laptop in an effort to see if its internal bits were running okay.

The Pig, when told about it, decided I needed semi-professional-bordering-on-amateur help (apparently he started his university days as a computer engineering student before deciding he hated studying electronics and switched to mechanical engineering), and so I screwed everything back on and took the whole lot to his house the next day for some tinkering during which we first took off all the little fiddly screws, then the casing (he did this one because he didn't think I'd be able to find the little notches without breaking something, possibly his magnet-headed screwdriver or the casing itself), and then the inside bits--the DVD cartridge (I call it so because that's what it looks like--no idea what the official name is) and other little colourful things. Someday I shall Google the service manual and learn what they're called; I do know at least that I managed, while the the Pig was absent (he got a headache and went to take a nap while I moaned about wanting to Google for help), to remove the RAM and somehow knock the processor loose. Somewhere in all this we also managed to get the LCD screen disconnected from the rest of the computer, which is why the laptop had to spend those two weeks in the technician's and also is why after that day I was completely unable to use the laptop, being forced to use the desktop of my hosts.

So the laptop is back, and we owe the technician 700 bucks for the shiny new crystal screen (the old one was a matte); this laptop will either go to Fifth Hun with the kid brother or to Spore with me, though both the kid brother and I hope for the former outcome--the Fifth Hun desktop is not in the best of conditions either. I might encourage the kid brother to frequently dust off the fan or something, though, because when the Pig and I opened the casing, it was fairly choked with dust. (Also, the former outcome has a necessary corollary in that I will have to get a new laptop for myself, and the Pig says there are fairly decent ones available now.)

The family arrived on the 10th and the 11th of June: the parents and the kid siblings on the 10th, and the Gobbler on the 11th. I returned to my own house on the 9th (anyone who knows me through the Internet will probably recall the 8th as the last day of me being online for quite awhile), and spent the rest of that day and part of the 10th cleaning it: the floor was dusty so I swept and mopped it four times, managing to get very sweaty in the process, and also getting distracted by the many books left behind that I haven't seen in ages, including Loch Yuck's old yearbooks. Huge disappointments those things, packed with bad grammar and ugly photos. On the 9th I swept and mopped; then the Pig arrived and we went off to buy some things I thought the house needed--toilet paper, detergents, cooking oil (the relative who takes care of the house in our absence had thoughtfully stocked us up with cooking gas), and some soft drinks and shandy; then I had dinner with the Pig by some little local market by the seafront; all the way there he was enthusing about lobsters the size of an arm and swordfish longer than he is tall (and he's not exactly shrimpy), and while there were no giant swordfish or lobsters of any size that day, we ended up sharing a lightly-fried prawn longer than my thumb and index finger combined, and that was while it was still curled up: stretched out it was easily 50 or 60 cm long, and proportionately thick as well. It was very satisfying, though it did cost a bit (around RM 35).

The family arrived on the 10th, reaching the house around 6 or 7, and spent the rest of the day and a good deal of the next three or four days spring-cleaning: more mopping, cleaning, wiping, laundry, gardening, sweeping in random spots that nobody would look at in a hundred years--it doesn't sound like much, but it was hugely irritating to me especially since I didn't see any point to it all. My idea of a comfortable holiday is one where one lolls about waking up late, going for long leisurely walks or swimming or sitting around chitchatting; my parents disagree, and think a holiday is when you can catch up on all the work that you weren't able to do during your working-days (in my case, the semester). Of course this isn't helped by them still being morning people and me still being more of a night owl than anything else; after being used to waking up at 12 or 11, being woken every morning at 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 with shrill yells is... less than enjoyable. Even more so when you realise you're only being woken up so that you're awake, and not because the floor absolutely has to be swept and mopped by 10 or something dreadful will occur (other than the wrath of the parents). It's absolutely pointless and I still don't see the point in waking up to sit around doing nothing.

The Gobbler arrived on the 11th, just as the throes of the cleaning spree were starting up. Being in a Sporean school, he only had about two or three weeks of holidays; but he only stayed for about 6 days because there was an exam due immediately upon school's restarting and he wanted to give himself a week or so to revise. As a result he arrived and immediately plunged into frenetic activity, to the parents' great approval--you know the sort of thing. With such limited holiday time, I'd probably not even leave the hostel; I'd prefer to sit back and relax while I could. Not the Gobbler--with limited holiday time he decided that he was going to do without adequate sleep or rest or something, and decided that all his time would be that horrible modern idea of "quality time"--waking at 6 for tennis, then breakfast, then rushing around meeting friends and distributing souvenirs (which reminds me that I haven't distributed mine--and they're from last December!), then more rushing around. And of course there was no small talk with him, not when time was so limited. I think I liked him better when he was less rushed and not everything had to be deep or meaningful or profound, when ideas and insights were more like the gleam of a small shiny stone you accidentally find while playing in a sandbox and less like some sort of commodity that you had to mine out of every other person at every opportunity. Certainly there is the time and place to engage people in discussion about their hopes and dreams for the future, or how they think they want to grow personally in the next year, or what useful life skill they want to learn with their leisure time. But not all the time, and not every place! It may make for what he feels is meaningful conversation but it certainly is less than enjoyable. Profundity and wisdom are all well and good, but there must be someplace where people can just kick back and be people, foolish or shallow as they may be, without constantly being instructed to consider themselves and every possible future ramification of their attitudes or emotions or actions...

But enough of that. The Gobbler came, plunged into activity, was a veritable whirlwind of activity, and then left; I have only a sort of confused impression of seeing bits and pieces of him every now and then. In the meantime we went to islands, beaches, dinners, church, malls, and did a lot more cleaning than is strictly necessary to continue living comfortably in a house of any size. At the moment the cleaning routine is down to simple maintenance--sweeping, mopping, laundry, the dishes, garbage disposal; so there is all the more time to spend sitting about.

Relations with the family are still what they usually are; the father appears, dictates, generally radiates disapproval of our activities when he's not wrapped up in his own, and now has added "being a man" to his list of resolutions for me, which apparently includes taking initiative and being responsible and waking up early and sleeping late and not reading fiction and reading self-help books and applying them to one's own life with immediate results and doing whatever he wants as soon as he wants it done and getting grades "to the best of my potential" which I'm rather convinced by now isn't really all that high. To be honest it sounds quite drab and dreary and I think I'll at best be a partial man--I mean, I do see a certain amount of value in initiative and responsibility--what the heck does he think motivated me to buy groceries and clean up the house before they arrived, anyway? Utter boredom?--and as for self-help books--phooey I say, I harbour great distaste for such things. And as for the idea of giving up fiction! We've had one or two clashes already, neither of which ended well. After yesterday (Father's Day) and an apology (from me, of course), we're on relatively good terms, though he's still more partial to the other siblings than to me. Can't blame him, they're a lot better at accepting the idea of holidays not being used for rest than I am. Still, the relative peace is very nice, and we do at least talk cordially now...

Other than that... there's nothing much to report. I see the Pig relatively often, and by now I think we're starting to run out of places in Patience that serve good food--the list has run all the way to Burger King (admittedly they have awesome stuff!) and Archie de Corner, which apparently serves nothing good except chicken chops, is one of the next entries on the list. All the same I'll probably go back to Spore several kilos heavier than when I left it, and then proceed to slowly lose it again, or not; most of the people I've met in Sabah say I've gained a lot of weight in the four or more years' of absence, and the others just didn't mention it. We also occasionally watch movies--they're a quarter of the price they would be in Spore and I'm taking advantage of that.

I'm also decidedly sunburnt after that island trip with the Gobbler and his friends; it was meant to be a reunion between himself and the friends he'd made at Loch Yuck, but the family decided to tag along and so I ended up there too. We went to the island (this one was called Sappy; the one I'd visited with the aforementioned Canadians was Man You Can--names altered, of course) in the morning, arriving there around 9am. We took a table, left a lot of stuff on it--we'd decided to bring lunch in the form of a great amount of sandwich ingredients--and off went the children into the sea while the parents lay back on rented rattan mats on the sand in the shade. We'd also rented snorkeling sets, though only one of them was still functioning perfectly after half an hour--one was leaky and the other one somehow detached the snorkel from the goggles with no way of putting the two back together. We went swimming, which was easy with the sea's additional buoyancy but difficult with the sea's currents; and let me say that Sappy Island is much nicer, at least as far as seabed scenery goes: Man You Can Island had little isolated fist-sized pieces of coral, flapping lethargically above the sand and looking very much like the last individuals of a species on the verge of extinction, which I supppose they were; Sappy Island had a veritable carpet, green and yellow and pink and undulating like a sea of fangirls squeeing. the other thing about Sappy Island was that the seabed takes sudden dives and turns, and one of those forms a sort of bowl-like structure with decidedly steep walls. The kid brother and I came across it while swimming around the edges of the safe swimming area, and it was decidedly a surprise; we'd been going across the carpet of coral, and suddenly the carpet fell away and we were looking down a depth of (it looked like) 20 metres or so of perfectly clear water at corals dotting the place and fishes merrily swimming around as if knowing we couldn't follow them. It was utterly beautiful, floating there above the bowl, and I wish I'd been able to see it more clearly (the snorkels and my spectacles couldn't be worn simultaneously and thus my field of clear vision was limited to around 7 cm or so).

We ended up swimming around, more or less continuously except when we went on a bit of jungle trekking and when we surfaced for food, until 3pm when we showered, packed up, and left the island. That was probably last week--the 15th or 16th I'm guessing, because the Gobbler returned to Spore on the 17th. I began peeling last Saturday--the 20th; and by now enough skin has been peeled off me to form a sort of wing-like shape on my back that reaches over my shoulders and looks like it's about to meet at my sternum. It's quite a nice shape actually, and I think it's not entirely due to Sappy Island alone; the weekend before this, my church had organised a little outing to a little beach and though I did wear a shirt throughout that outing, I did get noticeably more tanned after that; it was quite fun, actually, because a member had brought an inflatable dinghy and large plastic oars, and I and three other guys took it and went paddling off, got caught in a wind (being inflatable it was difficult to steer and was very easily pushed around by wind and sea-current); we hitched a ride back to shore from a passing obliging fisherman (whose boat was not inflatable and was gas-powered).

The electricity just got cut off again, by surprise; the second time in a week. It's very annoying, especially with temperatures and humidity being as high as they are; these days I start sweating again within five minutes of getting out of the shower. It's very highly annoying, and is compounded by the location of the house being such that the air is very still--or perhaps it's a state-wide thing due to the humidity in the air making it hard to move by natural wind. I don't know, but my palms are already sweating (an inheritance from my paternal grandmother, because my paternal grandfather apparently does not sweat from his palms).

From A Computer Not Mine

My last post was May 21st, which means I have--let's see--16 days' worth of typing-up to catch you up on, plus whatever ramblings I come up with on the side. Essentially you're in, dear reader, for another wall-of-text post that might just eat up my next three hours in typing. You'll probably take about one-sixth that to finish reading it, of course.

Life is still much the same, but reading the May 21st post--mostly about the RAID driver--I feel it behooves me (that's a nice word, actually, behooves is. It sounds as if I were about to turn into a cow or some sort of cattle.) to elaborate about the life I lead here in Patience, or have led for the past two weeks-odd.

I commonly sleep around 12am or 1am, waking around 11am or thereabouts (today I slept at 3am and woke at 11.48am, making it my latest yet), after which I descend the stairs. I am currently living with church friends--the exact relationship is friends-of-parents and parents-of-friends, but their children are away studying and haven't returned for summer break yet, so I'm occupying one of the spare rooms. I usually eat two meals a day: breakfast/lunch and dinner: the slash is there because I generally eat either breakfast (a light meal) or lunch (a heavier meal), almost never both, which is understandable given the times of waking.

My day is thereafter usually spent online, periodically clicking on the Hunter's Horn on MouseHunt (I reached the maximum level in Restaurant City some time ago and have therefore gotten bored of it and its bandwidth-sucking abilities), mostly reading webcomics and TVTropes and occasionally blogs--Crazy Scary's blog is remarkably often updated these days. Quite likely he is also feeling the effects of this large block of free time.

My hosts are somewhat healthy-living, and usually return to the house around 5 or 6, upon which they often (about four days a week at least, at last count) immediately change clothes and head right back out to a little beach club where the wife plays tennis, the husband walks sedately on a treadmill, and I roam the beach for about an hour or so. The beach is a lovely one, not too terribly polluted, lots of life, and extending quite a distance every way. Leftwards are the small shelled creatures--miniature whelks and hermit crabs and regular small crabs, the balls the crabs produce while making holes dotting the surface of the beach in pretty patterns, partly due to the patterns made by people walking over those balls and flattening them. This goes on until one reaches a small jutting bunch of rocks, which one could conceivably go around and continue on if the rocks didn't keep jutting out into relatively deep water. Rightwards, the sand is washboard-like and very hard, which hurts my heels but then dulls into a sort of blur thumping pain that is barely noticeable after awhile due to the comparative great pleasure I take from walking in water. When the tide is out, this section of the beach gains about 30 to 40 meters more in the direction of the sea, and one can walk out onto large patches of seaweed and watch beached starfish frantically scrabble their way back to water or, failing that, burying themselves and leaving behind little five-pointed indentations in the sand. This section of the beach has fewer crabs, but they are larger and crabbier--upon seeing your shadow, they dance and raise their claws up and then proceed to run in a random direction, forcing you to not move for fear of accidentally stepping on them as they run under the shadow of your foot. More often than not they run into an incoming wave, then stop and bury themselves so quickly you start to think all crabs receive formal training in ninjutsu--or that ninjas have performed extensive study into the hiding methods of crabs. Further on, there are jellyfish--small blobby things with stubby tentacles that drift apparently completely at random, and are immensely adorable; however they drift in seaweed territory, and it leads to some moments when something soft brushes up against the back of your calf and you're not quite sure whether it is jellyfish or seaweed. At the very end of the right side of the beach there is a hotel, where you can occasionally see barbecuers (almost always foreign). Walking to the end of either side, from the club, takes about half an hour; thus a round-trip usually lasts an hour, if you don't occasionally stop to watch the aquatic life or look at the scenery (for the sunsets are quite beautiful things).

That's only the average day, though.

I am not the only one in the church here who is back on summer vacation; there are two others, a brother and a sister, who were from here but have gone to Canada to pursue studies and have returned from there, and last week five of the sister's seniors, who have graduated, came over as part of their graduation trip--it seems to be a world-wide phenomenon, this graduation trip thing. At any rate they came over, and that kicked off a few days of entertainment--semi-solitude is all nice and well, but after awhile one begins to crave physical contact with other humans of roughly one's own age group.

We went to an island (that was the first day I met them), which was nice. Man U Can Island's rather too popular with the tourists, unfortunately, and the beach isn't sandy--it's composed, apparently, mostly of bits of broken coral and shell which makes it extremely painful to walk on for long periods especially if you don't like squinting at the ground. However, there were little omnivorous fishes that we found when we started eating in the water; we were, at the time, eating buns and fruit and chicken, and fed them buns first; they liked it. So a bit of fruit went in, and that was received even more enthusiastically, upon which a bone with some meat was offered them and they immediately went all Vashta Nerada on it--the bone was picked clean before it hit the seabed. And that was just the little fishes barely the length of one finger joint--they were gossipy, it seems, because they soon attracted larger fishes (around forearm-length) that would see a bone and nibble on the fingers holding it. We also went banana-boating that day. Banana-boating involves the boaters (at least three, at most five) sitting on a speedboat and taken a safe distance away from shallow water (in our case we went practically out of sight of land). At that spot, the driver unties some ropes, dropping a large inflated thing made of three balloon-cylinders made of hard plastic into the water--a cross-section of it would probably look like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette. On the topmost cylinder is where the boaters sit, and it has little handgrips; the feet are supposed to go on the two smaller ones. The entire thing is connected to the speedboat by a long length of rope, and once all the boaters are on, the speedboat takes off and the driver attempts to drop the boaters into the water by making the boaters overbalance--either through sharp turns, or go-stop methods, or whatever else their creativity comes up with. Each set of boaters is allowed two falls, and then the ride is over. After that we snorkelled in a No Snorkelling zone (we later found out that this was because of the tides, which turned the No Snorkelling zone into a No Exit zone), got reprimanded for it but got a lot of lovely views of fishes (much more colourful than the Eat Everything Fishes!) and photos out of it; and after that one of the Canadian graduates found a sea cucumber and much fun was had--my personal favourite is when I managed to poke it enough times to get it to spew water halfway across a table's width. We then played cards (apparently my eyes are so narrow that my winks go unnoticed), ate, and went away. I'm still waiting for those photos to turn up on Facebook.

A few days later we went whitewater rafting, though the Wikipedia article says we actually only went roughwater rafting, the term whitewater being only applicable to rivers of difficulty level 3 and above; we went on one of difficulty level 1 and 2 (there were two sections of river but I'm not sure if it was respectively or not). It was entirely fun, mostly because getting river-water in your mouth doesn't taste as bad as getting seawater in the mouth; also, rivers are great fun to swim in as long as you don't stand and get your foot stuck (not that that occurred). The company even supplied a couple guides with waterproof videocameras and shot DVDs that they later sold to the rafters, and (naturally!) we bought one copy amongst the eight of us and I think I'll be getting my duplicated copy tomorrow if the company wasn't tech-savvy enough to use copy protection.

I've been going out for dinners and suppers with the Pig, so it's not like I just sit around the house all day typing extra-long blog posts; however he's maintaining his habit of randomly falling sick which makes these rather erratic. My laptop persists in its troubles, and has refused utterly to even load ever since a few days ago when I and the Pig attempted to open it up and cure it; the surgery perhaps was far too invasive (the Pig insists that it's all due to me touching the heat sink and processor), and now I fear the laptop will need professional care or replacement. I'm hoping for professional repair to be effective, because replacement will be very expensive and besides I forgot to back up all the data I have on it and would hate to lose it. And then if the laptop's restored to functionality I shall start on that external hard drive!

The Life of Leisure

It's been awhile since my last post, hasn't it? Or has it? I'm not too terribly sure myself--at any rate it's possibly less time than I think--or possible more. It's hard to tell; I've been in Patience for a little over a week now: my flight here was on the 18th and it's now what, 8 days? 9? since then. It certainly feels like a bit more. But one's sense of time is different when there's no assignments to do, or classes to attend, or suchlike.

At the moment I'm not living in my own house, though my family does possess a house here; it's reasonably well-kept because a relative goes down every week or so to hang around it for a bit, make sure all the parts still work, runs the car for a bit and tops it up as necessary. I'm just not going there yet because I hate doing laundry and cooking and especially cleaning--sure, slipping around on soap water is fun, but not the kind of thing you want to do for a whole day especially when you've got things on the floor that can't take too much exposure to water.

Life? Well, let's see. It's been going on. It's hard to imagine I've only spent one weekend so far with all the many things that've happened, though I suppose I'm not used to having more than one non-repetitive event occur per week; and in the past 8 or 9 or maybe 10 days, a lot of non-repetitive events have occurred. I've not got photos, but my memory should serve to recall the basic details well enough.

I arrived last, let me see, Tuesday; but I should begin the story earlier, because the last you heard of me was in So Hour--if then--and my flight went from KL; you will no doubt want to know the in-between. So thus it goes.

The fifth sister of my father, whom I shall call Fifth Aunt because that's what I do call her, has a son and two daughters; the son has begun (at the time when I was there he was due to begin) studies at TAR--ACCA accountancy. And as that is in KL, I thought that perhaps they might go up early and I would go along with them, saving myself the hassle of ticket-purchasing and an amount of travelling-time; not to mention that I had not been able to procure a place to stay yet, and that was a main sticking-point in my plans to just go up myself.

Therefore I stayed in So Hour, in the house of my grandfolks, until after dinner on the 16th of May (which, in So Hour, takes place around 6 or 7 pm); then I had my cousin drive me to Fifth Aunt's house, where I stayed the night, chitchatting and catching up with her and the cousin who should by now have started classes--I shall call him Pig's Tail, because that is what his name more or less translates to. The next morning at around 6am, I was woken by my cousin (I suppose he felt rather less need to sleep, this being a rather big thing for anybody who hasn't constantly moved around since youth) and got up, repacked anything I'd taken out (my toothbrush and that was about it really), and off we piled into a little rented van. There was myself, the cousin, three of his friends who were also going to TAR but not all going to study Accountancy, the driver of the van, Fifth Aunt, and two other mothers (of the additional friends). The adult women were very worried (you could see it) and the young ones... well, not so much so.

It was a decidedly interesting journey, mostly because only one of them had actually been to the rented house before and knew more or less where it was; other than that I was the only person in the van with anything more than a passing knowledge of KL and unfortunately my sort of knowledge of it doesn't extend to the location of every student-rented building in the immediate vicinity of TAR; thus the journey went smoothly until we entered KL, upon which the van was a cacophony of "Stop and ask directions!", "I think it's over there", phone calls to people to say where we were and ask where should we go next?, and so on. Very deafening and I have no idea how I managed to go through the whole thing without breaking down and yelling at them all to be quiet and not worry so much and we'd get there eventually. The place eventually turned out to be located behind a dilapidated restaurant that's been there for at least 15 years and quite possibly is older than I am; and the rented apartment itself was dilapidated too: dust all over the place, water that didn't run so much as limped along through the pipes, and at least the electricity was working.

We spent two hours cleaning the place--the three mothers naturally were the main workforce here, sending everybody else running to get sponges or buckets of clean water or brushes or rinse the mop or help them hold something steady while they gave it the scrubbing of its life. It took us two hours but eventually the mothers pronounced the place fit for human inhabitation (I noticed through all this that there were no spiderwebs. It was very odd.) and proceeded to take us off on a journey for more things--easily-portable wardrobes, mattresses, curtains and curtain-hooks, gas stoves, plastic cabinets, and various other things. It was 6 or 7 before we were quite done with that place and even so the mothers couldn't resist talking about the crime rate in KL and how important it is to keep one's keys close to oneself at all times and such like before going off back to Patience in the rented van, probably talking all the way back about how worried they were and how completely unsuitable KL is for poor young things with no parents to guide their every step.

I spent the night there, sandwiched between Pig's Tail and one of the other male occupants of the apartment. It was quite interesting watching the group dynamics; Pig's Tail, you see, is commonly a very taciturn person, doesn't talk much, etc. but that's only in the presence of family gatherings, and apparently only when there's no computer nearby and the only people around are cousins and aunts, uncles, grandfolks, etc. In the presence of friends he lightens up a great deal more. It was quite reassuring (yes, I worry about my cousins too. At least, some of 'em. The Brats could be found tied up and dead in a ditch tomorrow outside this house, with all their organs harvested for black market sale, and I wouldn't turn a hair other than to wonder if the parents knew yet). The next morning I woke, around 6, and left along with some of the occupants who also had to wake up that early. Pig's Tail also woke up to send me off.

It was about 3 hours' journeying to get to the airport and check in and everything; my check-in luggage was about .5kg short of the limit, because I was wearing my trekking shoes and had put my flipflops in the bag. (When I was wearing the flipflops and had the shoes in the bag it was 1 kilo overweight. Those are very heavy shoes.) I left the apartment around 7.15 or so; it was about five minutes from the apartment to the bus stop, ten minutes by bus to the LRT station (we happened to arrive with the bus so there was no waiting), about fifteen minutes' waiting for a sufficiently empty space on the LRT trains, half an hour on the LRT to get to the Central Station, five minutes to find the shuttle buses, another ten minutes of waiting for the shuttle bus to start moving, about 75 minutes or so of the bus ride, and then I was at the airport and ready to check in. I was the 38th passenger to check in on that flight, if I remember correctly; I certainly went online, on the WiFi (weak thing it was too, kept disconnecting and I couldn't open MSN and had to communicate by Facebook chat), at around 9.45 (boarding at 10.40 which gave me 50 minutes' chatting).

I arrived at Patience, and almost immediately due to a snarl-up of communications it was three hours before I was fetched from it and arrived at the house where I am currently staying.

And thus I am now here in Patience, in this house (which is not mine).

My hosts are a middle-aged couple, whose children I know through church and who also know my family quite well. The children are currently away, and will eventually return. I could dissect their personalities for you, but you'll find out enough from these posts anyway, if you read; so I'll not do so. They're very devout Christians--well, if you hadn't known my beliefs before you certainly ought to by now--so they somehow shoehorned me into attending an all-day conference thing of some sort on Saturday. To be honest of course I didn't put up too much resistance since I hadn't got any plans on that day anyway so I said okay.

In between Tuesday and Saturday, I found out that my computer has issues with routers and cannot go online for some reason--I am typing this post in WordPad which is primitive but at least won't crash my computer every few minutes. I also found out that my external hard disk will not work for unknown reasons--Jogger and I discussed it over MSN and it's probably something loose in it, but I can't open it up because I haven't got screwdrivers and I don't know where the screwdrivers are in this house. On the other hand it might be something in the power supply or whatnot--I've never, I realised a few days ago, tried to use that hard drive in this country. It's always only been used before in Spore, China, and Hong Kong--never Malaysia. Of course that shouldn't explain it, but at this point I'm willing for even an inane reason to hope that I won't have to scrap that thing and all the data in it. My laptop also somehow lost a driver (it is apparently called the IDE Controller, and is listed as an AWHNBLAHBLAH thing) and now keeps telling me to update that driver. I tried. It won't update (partly because I have no Internet connectivity on this blasted laptop). I'm very seriously considering getting a new one.

Saturday came, my hosts and I went to the conference, met some other friends from church there, and sat down to listen. Very unfortunately it was not an enlightening experience in any way--the man may have gifts of all sorts but preaching and teaching certainly aren't in his skillset. It may also have been because the speaker was a Sanguine and tended to get carried away with anecdotes, little jokes, metaphors and descriptions: at one point he ended up spending ten minutes describing a metaphor as an analogy to some sort of simile and the audience--at least, I--ended up not getting his point entirely. If he had had one to make to begin with. It was all very incoherent and I didn't find it at all useful. On the other hand... Charismatic Christians are differentiated from other denominations by their huge insistence that God should play an active, visible, audible role in their lives. At least, that's how I see it; and one particular result of this is that they believe that prophets exist and can relay God's words directly to you, because you're too dense or un-gifted or naughty for God to speak to you or be heard by you. Or something. I find the theology behind the idea somewhat eyebrow-raising to say the least; though admittedly sometimes God works a lot too subtly for the common person to hear. That's the whole idea behind the mystics running off to be hermits and monks after all, the idea that you get rid of all the wordly distractions so you can act as an uncluttered pipeline of a sort... but I digress. This speaker chose, after the seminar was done, to pray for every single person attending, which ended up including me. He turned out to be rather accurate, which I'm not sure to be happy about or slightly creeped out about. The idea of a near-total stranger (and don't you give me that stuff about everybody being siblings-in-spirit because that does NOT automatically get you my approval) knowing stuff about you that only God should know... is less than comforting to me. And of course the fact that he was doing it in earshot of a lot of other people just decreases that comfort even more. (Then again, I'd turned my phone's voice-recorder on and had accidentally recorded what he said about the three or four people he was talking to before me, so... yeah.)

After the seminar, I was invited to sleep over at the house of a couple of church friends (they'd attended the seminar too) so I did, and was introduced to TED.com: quite entertaining that site is. Pity about the buggy Internet connection, though, because it froze up halfway through Bill Gates' speech and we went to sleep shortly thereafter.

Sunday I went (with the aforementioned friends) to church (leaving my camera behind in their house in the process), and was recognised by about 30% of the people there; 70% of the church was totally unfamiliar faces to me, which I suppose is a good thing really. We talked a bit, and then that was that for that.

I should add a note here that my hosts are also members of a club located by a nearby beach; thus they go there almost daily for tennis, gym sessions, etc; and I usually go along with them to walk on the beach, usually in about five or six inches of water and sometimes a bit more, depending on the length of my shorts at the time--they're not all the same length. In fact we went there the evening I arrived, and a lovely rainstorm came along and I thought it was a nice way to make up for the irritation of sitting in an airport for three hours calling people up to find out just what had gone asnarl and why nobody was already there to pick me up. In any case it's a lovely beach: quite clean, there's crabs and snails and things all over the place most of the time, and in some parts of it if you wade out to knee-height, you can quite suddenly come across a clump of jellyfish--little cute bubbles that nevertheless inspire the most amazing fits of terror. And crabs, of course, tiny little territorial buggers that react to your shadow falling on them by raising up their claws and doing a little side-to-side dance, covering random bits of sand and kicking up a little cloud in the process--and then the dance stops, and the sand-cloud clears, and the crab has vanished safely under the sand. I've accidentally set off a lot of crabs a-dancing, and once even accidentally stepped on one. It was quite a nip, but only painful because it was unexpected--if I'd seen it coming I shouldn't have felt it at all, I think. Sometimes when the tide is especially low, starfish are exposed as well and then you're treated to the sight of a lot of little five-armed (or less; some of them are injured) critters slowly undulating their way back to water. Some of them don't even do that, preferring to burrow under the sand so that they get to the damper layers underneath. Overall it's an entertaining sight, because starfish are not very stealthy burrowers: they can be found by the star-shaped indentations they leave behind (or rather above) them. I unfortunately have very few photos of these; due to having only gotten my camera back yesterday (after Sunday), I haven't had the opportunity to photograph very much. I fully intend to remedy this.

It was, I think, on Saturday night that the Pig first SMSed me after my arrival in Patience. Unfortunately my phone was on silent as it always is, and I didn't read it until far too late to respond. On Monday night he called instead (clever move that, really), and we went out to supper and eat. I got back at 2am, to my hosts' disapproval the next morning; fortunately I've gotten into the habit of always having keys around when I go out so I didn't have to wake anybody up to get back into the house. On Tuesday night I went out again for supper and came back at 3am, having discovered a wonderful little place that apparently serves insomniacs because it's a collection of little mamak stalls that open beginning from 1am or so; I also visited his new house (new to me: he's been in it for a couple years or so by now) and--my goodness--I want a screen like his. And a laptop, of course. And pretty much everything else. I feel like a pauper really: a very ill-equipped pauper. Wednesday morning I woke quite early, having got about 4.5 hours' sleep, and went out with the church friends and some of their old schoolmates and some other schoolmates of theirs (they used to be local, then moved to Canada, and now are back for their summer holidays too) to an island.

It was a nice trip: I've always liked water anyway, and the sea spray was absolutely delightful. It was partly disappointing that the beach of the island in question was mostly composed of bits of broken coral and shells, which made it painful to walk on; and trash left behind from previous visitors (it is far too popular an island!), which made it painful to look at. But we didn't spend too much time walking on the beach or staring at the trash, because the fishes distracted us. We'd been swimming for awhile, and eating in the water (or, rather, eating just above the surface of the water) when we noticed fishes. Thinking we'd feed them, we dropped in a bit of fruit and watched the fish attack it ravenously. We next dropped in a bit of meat and the fish went Vashta Nerada on it: the meat spun for a bit and turned into a bone. And then the big fish appeared, having somehow caught scent of the meat or perhaps the little fishes were gossipy. I'm not sure how, but we soon were feeding bits of meat on bones to the big fish too. This lasted awhile, during which the big fish demonstrated their ability to grab and swim off with small bones, as well as their propensity to nibble on fingers when the bone had no meat left on it.

We then went on a banana boat ride (two of the others went parasailing), which was also decidedly enjoyable. A banana boat ride occurs in the following way: you go on a speedboat out on the sea into deep waters, after which the boat-driver unties some ropes and pulls a large inflatable cylinder down, leaving it to drift behind the boat attached by some very long rope. The cylinder looks like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette in cross-section, so it doesn't continually roll over and over like a log. On the part of it that is supposed to be the top, are five handlebars. You sit on the topmost cylinder, holding on to one handlebar. At least three people are needed, though (obviously) a maximum of five people are allowed on. Once everybody is on, the boat starts off again (it stops while the driver deploys the inflatable thing and you get on), and the boat driver does his best to get you to overbalance and fall off. Two falls and the ride's over; but the falling, admittedly, is the most fun part. My particular bunch of people was most entertaining, because our first fall didn't all happen at once; one girl fell off first and was left in the sea some distance behind, upon which the 4 of us still hanging on yelled to the driver that she'd gone overboard. The driver made such a sharp turn back to her that we all immediately fell off. The second one was far more simple, and everybody fell off together. As a side note, my watch strap somehow contrived to snap during the first ride; fortunately it didn't fall off, being stuck to me by sweat, sea, and forward moment; and I had the presence of mind to grab onto it as soon as I saw it was broken, so I didn't lose it in the fall. I'm quite thankful for that.

After the banana boat rides and falls we went snorkeling, eating, swimming, photographing, shell-and-coral-collecting--essentially what anybody does on an island. It was good fun, and it eventually ended and we all went back on the last boat available (I think it was, anyhow), at around 5pm.

Later that night I went out again with the Pig to catch the premiere of Terminator: Salvation. It's not too bad, quite entertaining, although in their effort to be all techy and stuff the directors omitted a lot of science and research. Helena Bonham Carter put in a minor appearance as a somewhat deranged technician. Admittedly she does the deranged role very well, but one somehow wonders if she isn't getting a bit typecast. The movie wasn't too bad, and after it we visited the Insomniacs' Mamak Collection again (as I'm starting to think of it, because I don't know its name--the Pig calls it Lido or something like that).

I woke up today at 7, 9, and 12pm (but got out of bed only at 12).

Screwdriver of Better Size

I'm typing this from Patience, where I have been for the past four days or so... I wasn't expecting to have Internet really but living with friends who possess a router has its advantages. At any rate I'll be online for a little bit, maybe the next two or three days... might be useful seeing as how the exam results are coming out tomorrow (if I remember correctly). Not that I'm terribly wild to see them, but I might as well know the bad news sooner than later.

My ability to inflict unknown sorts of damage on electronics all around has manifested itself again, or perhaps it's just the laptop showing its age: something called the SCSI/RAID driver has got itself uninstalled somehow, and now every time I start the computer up, up pops a little Install New Hardware dialogue box that then proceeds to inform me that the New Hardware could not be installed properly and probably won't run. I've no idea what the significance of that is, but attempts to System Restore to an earlier state where this driver was working have failed repeatedly. It almost sounds like I need a reformat (plus something to deal with the annoying overheating malady). In addition my 3.5" hard disk, on which is about 250GB of photos, videos, episodes, movies, and various things... is undetectable on my laptop or on any of the desktops within reach. I did try to get Jogger to help me with it but there's only so much one can figure out from over MSN... I'll probably get one of the people from church to help me, surely there has to be somebody there who knows something about repairing electronics (preferably without wiping all the data on it but if it's necessary...).

It's usually times like these that I wish I had a genie or something. Aladdin was an idiot--though of course he was, according to the original sources, 15 or something--certainly not the kind of age one entrusts with (semi) cosmic, (near) phenomenal power! But then look at Jafar, too. Not the best wishes in the book, but then again they didn't have computers that keep overheating back then. They do now however, and at any rate if I had such wishes I'd likely draw up a long list of legalese to avoid any vaguaries and unexpected corollaries, etc, and still forget one large gaping loophole or something.

Life As I Live It

The holidays are upon me! Well, they've actually been upon me for the past two weeks--it's a strange feeling to have the days pass so unmarkedly. I spent the first week of the holidays in school, naturally, packing things into boxes and moving them into the new room/temporary storage area; that, fortunately, came off okay despite me again falling through the cracks in the bureaucratic wall, not appearing on lists, etc; but all the same I got my new room and accompanying new roommate, with whom I exchanged exactly one line of dialogue:

Me: "Uh... hi."
Him: "If you'd move your boxes I can take my table away from beside your bed."
*moving occurs*

And thereafter I said nothing to him and had nothing said to me, which was a pity because his belongings looked like they might have an interesting owner; of course, I was only in that room for a little over 12 hours anyhow, of which about 5 or 6 were spent asleep; so it's not all his fault, I suppose. I spent the next day travelling from the hostel to my current location--So Hour, the grandfolks' house--and will be here until I can get my aunt to decide on when she wants to go up to KL; hopefully she'll choose an earlyish date or I'll have to let her go up alone because I really don't want to miss my flight. As it is I'm already three days behind my travel plans: I was expecting to be in KL three days ago now.

Of course, I still don't have a place to stay in KL... the Coconut's place is off-limits for obvious reasons, and everybody else is having classes and certainly hasn't got the time or space for me. Well, almost everybody else--I could probably ask Jogger's parents, except I'm not terribly familiar with them for one thing and for another I still don't know when I'm going up, and I don't want to sound as if I'm making hotel reservations even if that is basically what I'm doing. Of course if worst comes to worst then I can stay at the local inn, since Cheeky (an outside shot at best really that one) isn't even going to be in KL while I'm there. A most inconvenient situation. Actually, erase that... worst comes to worst, I'll temporarily bum with my cousin up there for two or three days and then leave for Patience, or else I'll go up on the 17th and stay overnight at the airport and fly the next day, insanely overpriced food be damned.

Life here isn't too bad. I get to sleep earlyish and wake whenever I will--the first two days found me up just before lunchtime, but my circadian rhythms have got more or less back to normal and now I wake just after everybody else finishes breakfast. Also I have a double bed (I'm not sure if it's a normal double or a Queen or a King), which is large and very soft and quite comfortable, though I do need to put up the mosquito netting at nights and take it down in the mornings. And of course there's food all the time, healthy food too, and cheap--a bunch of noodles the size of my fist costs about RM1, and my fists are not tiny ones.

The homebrew's going much more slowly than I'd thought; there's just too many factors and they're quite overwhelming: attack types, vulnerabilities, terrain effects (which then makes me need to create a whole world full of realistic geography), the different skills and their effects and what happens if you put them together... and all this, of course, for a game that few to no people will ever play, because nobody in this continent seems to have any interest in tabletop RPGs. Curse you, Internet MMORPGs!--but honestly it's interesting crafting things, but I like the things I craft to have some sort of use, and this one doesn't have any obvious one.

Boredededed and Liquoredededed

So, the exams are over--the very last one was yesterday afternoon--and already I'm quite bored out of my mind with nothing to do. Well, technically I do still have a roomful of items to catalogue and boxes to obtain and pack it all away in, but I've three or four days yet to do that in and I'm in no hurry.

I've still got the best part of 35 centiliters (about 350ml, or roughly 3/4 of a 500-ml bottle) of liquor yet to go--it's about three months old really since I bought it in late February and it's now almost May. I don't really plan to let it last longer than the next week, which means about three shot glasses a day of Creme de Bananes (as it is labeled) a day for the next few days after dinner before bed: I should have some interesting dreams. I've also got a lot of other comestibles to polish off, which shouldn't be so much of a problem either as long as I've got water to wash everything down with--or so I think.

...I'm bored. Very bored. Bored enough that I can spend minutes at a go staring at Restaurant City and wishing I had people to do things with, like go see a movie or clean the room or even walk to a mart and collect spare boxes; but the exams are over, the locals have scattered like the winds, and the nonlocals have either gone home or are hidden behind a roomful of boxes or have something to do--and I, I am bored. Blah.

In other news I've got an idea for my homebrew tabletop. It sounds workable to me.

"Those who Disobey shall be Regarded with Condescension"

So, I've had a lot of time and conversations recently, mostly over MSN but one or two in my own head, and at least one over Facebook and one over the phone. And over the course of all this talking, I find myself... expressing opinions of intense dislike of certain, shall we say, habits of people. In fact they're not so much habits as character traits (flaws, from my point of view, but who's to say the handkerchief was supposed to be spotless?), and... I simply cannot allow my views on these things to go unannounced any further. Not many people will read this, I'm certain, so it's safe to assume I shall not be offending anybody; and anybody who manages to plough through the entirety of this post will almost certainly be intelligent enough to understand my arguments. Not that I flatter myself that my blog attracts intelligent readers, but that the lack of photos and the proliferation of verbiage are sure to drive away all but the most perservering of readers.

We address the first issue: spelling. I'm an administrator of one forum, visit two or three others on a regular basis, and occasionally get drawn into discussions over MSN and... oh, my heavens. What, in the name of the one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight positive integers before 1729 causes these people to spell the way they do?! Replacing "y" for "i", "d" for "t"--it's phonetic spelling all over again, and while it may be somewhat acceptable in SMSes or over MSN where things want rapidfire replying (and even so I manage to type perfectly well), in fora it only serves to tell me that these people, whoever they are, never had an English module they didn't barely pass. Either that, or they're actually taking pains to write in this amazingly illegible method: being unable to scrawl with indecipherable handwriting, they choose to type with near-illegible spellings. It's gotten to the point where I barely even notice people typing "u" for "you" or forgetting to capitalise the first letter of their sentences or special nouns; those are just too widespread to even begin to attempt to tackle. I will not even deign to consider the causes of people randomly adding "x" to the end of their words--"hahax" being the most-often encountered, but surely there are many more similarly-mangled specimens of the language out there--this falls below even phonetic spelling and descends into the territory of Black Speech. If Tolkien wrote the LotR in modern times, the orcs would speak in this. Leetspeak, while irritating, at least admits a certain sort of spelling system, else the symbols should become impossible to understand; combined with this, it becomes a sort of visual illustration of hell. I find this particularly painful because it seems to be primarily a characteristic of Malaysians and Singaporeans, both of which claim some level of English education, and yet write like this... and then, of course, they have the gall to claim education, and then invoke Godwin's Law by calling grammarnazism. Patriotism be thrown to the winds, I say: with apparently the majority of the population that visits fora typing like this, and the rest being apparently completely illiterate, it leaves a very small literate and intelligent minority. Suffice it to say that there's a reason I read very, very few blogs by Malaysians, or Singaporeans for that matter. Naturally, I do not mean by this that the Western Hemisphere is free of such people--the existence of an Eragon fanbase tells me that somewhere out there are a few million people who've effectively switched off their brains and hold out their wallets, bleating for pulp. But nowhere else have I seen such... such effort being put in to mangle the language beyond comprehension. It reached its apex some days ago, when somebody unapologetically told me to look beyond their "back englsh" to the supposedly intelligent message behind the misspelled words and the broken grammar. It's just a pity that I believe intelligent thoughts are expressed intelligently, or at least intelligibly, and if you want to claim intelligence--go learn yourself a language.

Next: chivalry. Wonderful word, is it not? Conjuring up images, for what seems to be a neverending sea of women worldwide, of them gently swooning into the strong arms of some cleft-jawed, doe-eyed, muscular man in plate armour who's just braved the fiery breath of a dragon and all just for poor little ol' them. And with dragons being extinct at the moment and plate armor being out of fashion, I find more than one female exclaiming over chivalry being dead. Good heavens. Grow up. Oh, certainly they don't always say so. What they say is something like "I bumped into somebody and they shot me a glare instead of stepping aside and laying their jacket on the ground for me to tread on", or "I made you dinner and why are you not worshipping the ground I walk on yet?", or simply "I don't like your non-servile, non-fawning, non-ingratiating manner, and you are nothing like the knight in shining armor I want". I think it's about time men started making demands in return: "Why are you working when you should be reclining on the swooning-couch?", "How dare you attempt to do anything other than clean and cook", or simply "I don't like your non-servile, non-fawning, non-ingratiating manner": the two attitudes go in like vein. What they basically both boil down to is "everybody of the opposite gender must behave in such-and-such a way, to my satisfaction, towards every other person of my gender". And that, let me tell you, died with feminism. Gender equality, the idea of men and women having equal rights, was a good thing: I won't deny it. Women are a valuable addition to the workforce and have many capabilities that men don't, such as maternity leave and lawsuits to get sexually-harassing men out of the force. However it's got to the point where the genders are not only equal, but interchangeable, as seen in the whole idiotic brouhaha about his/her/zir; and of course, women have been told that they are strong and powerful and can do anything! In essence I see this whole idea of chivalry as utter bosh; it strikes me as something akin to a person with perfectly good hearing demanding that people communicate with them with hand gestures and loud voices, or an Olympic-level runner asking for a piggyback ride. Common courtesy makes its reasonable demands--be generally nice to each other as social situations allow or require; get rid of the idea that your gender merits you special treatment from the opposite gender, or at least be consistent--if you insist on being given special treatment, act like you need it. If you want to be given a piggyback, be lame; if you want hearing-aids, be deaf. Otherwise, please don't complain when people treat you as normal, regular old you.

And next, those who create trouble for themselves and then, when offered help, turn it down because they don't think the help's good enough. I'm the first one to admit that I get myself into scrapes every now and then--but I ask for help, and am grateful for it when received! On the other hand... really, however, this speaks for itself, and I get so, so, frustrated with them, not least because this is a feedback chain and they'll just keep on repeating their troubles because they'll never want the help--either because the help will require them to change something they find oh-so-important, or... no. There's no other reason I see in these people--they're the sort who think if they complain enough about something in their own power to change, then somebody up there will notice and get bugged enough by their many many complaints and change the rules of reality to suit their particular needs. Absolutely ridiculous, but that's what happens when people start thinking oh, they're special and the entire universe worships their discarded toilet paper.

...and now I've just worked myself up into a fine old fury, when I was planning to use this as a catharsis and get it out... how counterproductive--but really, when it comes to it, I'm glad I've at least vented somewhere, even if it's not to any living person. I wish I had one of those sometimes on hand--but I don't. Quite likely never will really.

Designing Fairness

...it's surprisingly difficult. Of course, the creators of D&D, and the creators of pretty much every tabletop RPG, know this by now--that's why they have so many door-stopper-sized editions in which every action and spell and ability takes up rules that go for pages (I almost typed ages but that would have worked equally well)--just in case they accidentally overlook something and players everywhere immediately snigger with malicious glee and set out at once to take advantage of hapless DMs (who then, presumably, set up house rules to more than counterbalance that advantage).

However, I refer to Monopoly, a game where three factors at most are at play: 1) human choice, as far as trading goes, or whether to build or hoard or even to buy the property in the first place; 2) the game's intrinsics, such as the credit card debt or income tax or property values; 3) sheer dumb luck, which is what you get from the dice. By simply playing all four sides by myself, the first factor is eliminated: I've evenly divided up property amongst the player-characters by value (the maximum price payable for landing on that property) by using a lot of auctioning and trading, and none of them will be building houses until I want so. The second rule is just as easily overridden: my edition of Monopoly has options for toggling those things, so that credit card debt, income tax, etc, are set to zero and so the only remaining problems there are from Chance and Community Chest penalties, which generally even themselves out anyway.

The dice--those, on the other hand, are tricky. I'm typing this about 40 minutes into a game, and so far there's still two or three properties left unsold; very, very annoying. I'm reduced to just hitting Enter a lot to move the game along so that, by the law of averages, those last squares will be finally landed on, auctioned off, and then I can proceed to the next stage of the experiment which will consist of hitting Enter even more and seeing if it really does keep in balance; by which I mean I'll see how long it can go until one player at least goes bankrupt. Unfortunately, there's all sorts of other unforeseen variables toying with the game as well.

Things like, for example, Chance cards that send players to specific squares and cause the owner of those squares to make alarming profits; also, the fact that the airports are far apart that it's actually possible for a player, within two or three consecutive turns, to land on two or three of them; which is impossible for a set of three properties, because they're set closely enough together that the probability of hitting two of them in two consecutive rolls is maybe 1/36 or less. At the moment, in fact, the player owning the airports is leading by about 15 million (considering they all started out with only 20 million each, it's quite an amount).

I suspect I'll have a lot of time, in May, to design my very own first module RPG; whether anybody will actually play it with me is yet to be seen, but I've got some ideas--been harbouring them for awhile. Well, we'll see; at the moment, my premise is something along the lines of:

A bioweapon, recently created and apparently perfect (dissipates quickly, easy storage, heat- and cold- resistant, etc), is developed independently and simultaneously by three countries in a war; believing themselves at a last resort, they each use this trump card on each other and consequently about 70% of the population worldwide is wiped out, leaving only the 30% who happen to have a mutation making them immune to the weapon. However, exposure to the weapon's effects has had interesting effects on them--and soon they discover these effects also spread to 30% of all other multicellular life on the planet...

Of course this sort of a premise leaves the idea of magic- or fantasy- themed classes and abilities out, apart from a Magic from Technology sort of thing. Of course, like I've said, it needs refining--like what's spurring on the Brave Party of Adventurers in the first place, or the kinds of abilities/feats/skills/weaponry/etc that'll be usable--monster encounter charts, EXP charts, a consideration of a great many factors like climate and vehicle gas consumption rates, and so on. In fact considering all that, it'll be surprising if I don't end up with a bit of a Door Stopper myself. And yes, the premise is hardly new or original. I couldn't be more cliched if I tried--no, actually, I could make the weapon be a mutation-causing agent, or make it cause zombification, and so on--those would up my clichedness factor by a bit.

But the main fact behind all this is that I should be studying muscle mechanics. Which I, obviously, am not doing... well.

Fling a Flock of Sixpence

So, it's 21 days since my last post; I'm getting dreadfully, dreadfully backwards with these posts. I must make it a point to update at least as frequently as I update my new Twitter, which is about once ever few hours or so since it's taken up a permanent spot on my Tabs; my Tabs, at any given time, generally contain manga, Twitter, Facebook (Home), Facebook (DnD:Ta), and at the moment a GameFaqs walkthrough for Pokemon Emerald plus 1275 Things Mr Welch Can No Longer Do During an RPG. In addition there are two tabs of Pokemon Emerald Gameshark codes, three Blogger Tabs (one is this, one is the blog itself, and one is for my blog's lone follower), and... well, actually, that's about it. Sometimes I have a hundred or so TVTropes or Wikipedia Tabs too, but not at the moment; in fact at the moment I have only 9 Tabs up which is quite an unprecedentedly low number for me.

Exams! They're coming up very soon. Horrid little things, and I've still got assignments and things to do before them: oral presesntations, lab reports (most of which I haven't the foggiest about how to start), pop quizzes, and then tutorial answers to copy because I've been skipping all semester because I hate waking up early on Monday; but in return I plan to summarise the notes very extensively! Beginning tomorrow!...if I can avoid being completely distracted!

Things are getting busier, time is running short on supply--or, really, more accurately, time is still there: I'm simply somehow unable, these days, to stick to whatever task I set myself. I half-suspect I've come down with some sort of ADHD or whatever, because I simply cannot stick to any one task without eventually turning to Sudoku or opening an MSN window or something of the sort; and then without me knowing it it's several hours later and my original work remains undone. While it mayn't sound so very horrible (or it may sound horrible; I've no idea), multiply it in varying severity over a semester and how I managed to have three late lab reports (out of 12) becomes quite understandable. Not to mention, of course, that I'm forgetful enough that completed reports sometimes don't find their way into my bag, or they get lost in the tangled morass of other papers strewn around--I only just cleared up this morning and found papers I'd thought were lost forever--and both those factors contribute I'm sure.

In any case I made myself a Studying Schedule, and if everything goes well I'll have devoted at least 4 full days to each of my cores; hopefully that insane amount of devotion, plus whatever I retain from the lectures, will suffice. Otherwise... well, otherwise I shall be greatly disappointing, shan't I?

...a lot of people are graduating from Campus Crusade; it looks as if half the membership has vanished. We definitely need more first-year people to start attending and helping out, but it's not too realistic either to expect them all to specifically pick their classes and schedules to make time for it--I mean, I did it, but that's just because I do stuff like this all the time. My schedules are more fluid than jello, or at least they are while I'm planning them out during registration time.

Which reminds me that my eviction date draws near, and I must prepare to pack, as well as find some place to stash all this stuff; also I must prepare to ask Crazy Scary if he wants to apply for a room next year--if he doesn't then I'm going to probably have to forgo the Singapore-Local-staying point, because it looks like everybody wants to go on exchanges and things and thus won't be staying in halls. Very annoying... I should apply too except it's certainly far too late for that--with IA and then FYP coming up in the next two years, the free time of the course has already evaporated.

"*gasp*" "I'm Gonna Jump!" "Don't Do It!" "Okay"

This is a post that comes up only because I should be doing my Chinese Translation essay--it is, of course, late; the past week has been full of disappointments in various forms, of which lateness (I usually like to imagine myself as being relatively punctual) is only one form; even if it did affect two lab reports, that essay, and a lot of classes.

Now, where should I start covering from? Perhaps from, hmmm, two weeks ago. That should produce a nice long post and cover a great deal of stuff. After all I'm due to be typing at least 2,500 words of Chinese tonight, assuming I don't do any backspacing or deleting, which means at least 4 times that number of keystrokes--unless I write by hand and that would just give my poor lecturer a fit of eye-twitches.

So let's see, I'll get at the recess week; then cover this week; and hopefully that'll be enough procrastination to force me to actually get to work on that essay!

[this post is continued roughly 6 days later]

Well then... the last of the two quizzes for this week is over, so I can get down to posting up a nice long long list--you've got another 6 days' worth to account for now, besides, so it's going to be a long read. I hope you brought your reading glasses...

We begin, naturally, with the recess week, as I mentioned above. The recess week--well, it began (so to speak) on Friday night when the lab class (the only class I have on Friday, all three hours' worth of it) was over. I think I can safely speak for most of the class in saying we were very impatient throughout the lab work because a good number of them live in inconvenient places and were anxious to get the travelling over with. Me--I was planning to leave on Saturday morning, so Friday night was mostly spent packing.

I travelled for 7 hours on Saturday, arriving in KL around 3 or 4 and from there to the Coconut's house, where the room I was placed in rapidly turned into a disaster area with clothes, books (my study materials plus the Inkheart trilogy which I finished reading during the bus trip and consequently got no sleep during it), and electronics: laptop, mouse, various cables, a blank hard disk... (Which has just reminded me that I should have passed a copy of MATLAB to the Gigantic Cat, but since he didn't remind me and apparently has forgotten it too we shall let it slide.) It was good to be back, even if I was almost immediately press-ganged into playing piano for church the next day. Heck, who'm I fooling?--I like playing, and I like hymns anyway--my greatest peeve at my current church (apart from the difficulty of connecting to anybody in the congregation who isn't from the University) is that they seem to not sing hymns at all. The number of hymns they've sung in the past year-odd I can count on one hand, and even then it wasn't much more than the chorus, or maybe one verse or so... quite unfortunate really, because I much prefer hymns to the current idea of worship songs: most of 'em fall under Only Chorus, or One Verse Song, or Forgotten Second Stanza (if they even had one to begin with!), or else... You know that description--"four lines, three chords, seventeen times"? It fits a depressingly large number of modern songs.

So the weekend passed: Saturday went moderately well, and I was surprised with a chocolate cake by the Coconut and family (my birthday was on Friday); but all that has been covered in the previous post, has it not? So I shall skip ahead a few days during which nothing happened, and proceed to a day on which something did happen, which is Tuesday; for that day was spent mostly in packing things and hunting up laundry and packing it away in my backpack. It's amazing the amount of stuff that can be crammed into a bag when there isn't a laptop inside and you roll everything up; or perhaps that's just a testament to the thinness of the fabric of my clothes. We were taking a bus that leaves at Saturday midnight, so we were all packed by 10, at which we left the house and went to the bus station. The party size was seven: myself, Soul Sounds, the Coconut, her parents, and two siblings.

The bus trip was 6 hours; we arrived, obtained breakfast and return bus tickets, found a ferry and crossed over to Long Kiwi, got a rented car (with its gas tank almost empty) and a few road maps, went shopping (we obtained chocolates, I got a small bottle of blueberry vodka, and the Coconut's mother got a can of beer), and then dumped our bags in the condo we were borrowing/renting for the time (I'm still not quite sure what the arrangement exactly was); after which everybody took a nap and then woke up to start planning the itinerary. (At this point I have opened up my photos folder to help jog my memory of the exact sequence.) We went, according to the photos, to some sort of theme park containing cable cars and a mini-zoo and an airbrush tattoo parlor and bridges (admittedly the support tower was very nice-looking, though the path itself had loose boards) and a little crying child who was laughing about 4 seconds after I photographed her sprawled on the floor. We remained at that park for at least 2 hours, during which we roamed, had orange-flavoured popsicles (RM1!), and shot a good number of photos.

After that strange little place whose name I cannot remember, we drove on some rather hilly and isolated-looking little roads until we came to a bit of beach with a nice view of the sun and a couple of trucks selling rojak; so we stopped, ordered some food, went walking on the beach while waiting for the food (we found some interesting bits of coral and a worm that covered itself in pebbles and sand and thus surprised us when it popped out), and went back to the food when it arrived.

We went back to the condo after dinner, everybody showered, and then came some card games--the Coconut's family loves them, I think--unfortunately we played Bluff which I'm no good at. Nothing to do with me being honest really, though, I'm just better at lying in situations other than card games: maybe cards bring out the honesty in me or something. In any case the vodka tasted quite nice despite Soul Sounds' accusation that it smacked of medicine; I'm rather suspicious however about the sort of medications he's been having if they taste of vodka.

The next day we went on more travelling, after breakfast by a roadside (claiming to be the best in all the country!!!!111) and filling up at a station that insisted on its customers paying first and NOT TOUCHING the pump until they did; and all the while it was a self-service thing. Really, the cheek of some people... We next went to the Black Sand Beach--most beaches, if they are blackish, are that way due to pollution in the sea that stains the sand. Black Sand Beach, on the other hand, (supposedly!) has naturally black sand, and huge patches of it too--at least, a long time ago there were huge patches. Now it's more like a large patch of regular whitish sand, interspersed with the occasional patch of black; it looks rather as if the Black Death came and got the island and never quite went away. However it's only the sand at the surface that's white (I don't know why it is so); digging a little yields up plenty of black soft sand (very small grain sizes!), and the crabs are obliging enough to dig very industriously. So Soul Sounds and I went off on a photo spree, while the Coconut sat down somewhere and frowned. (She'd been, at this point, frowning for a very long time.)

In any case we got some quite nice shots of that area, I took a few to be blended into panoramic shots (which have not yet been made), and we found an empty crab shell which was full of water; the previous occupant had evidently vacated it some time ago. I took photos of it too, and then left it on a little rock. After that we went to the Underwater Park thing, where we found that all the nearby food outlets had had their prices inflated skyhigh to try to take advantage of the location--so we walked until we found someplace relatively reasonable and ate there, after which we went to the Underwater Place (I forget what exactly it was called--Underwater/Ocean/Sea/Beach/Aqua World/Place/Park/Wonder or some combination like that).

It had the typical tanks full of large fish, like Ocean Park in HK; still stunning, yes, but not quite as awe-inspiring. They did have an albino fish, though, which was quite nice; but the lightning wasn't quite the best they could've selected to show off the contrast between it and the other "normal" fish. Other than that though, there were things only remotely connected to water--ducks and swans, for example; and things not connected at all, like marmosets. (Maybe the connection there was that marmosets drink water.) There was also a tank in which was a positively insane seal: it did nothing other than dive and surface in the same little column, time after time after time. I suspect it was fed only when it performed that maneuver, and over time it simply got used to always doing only that. All the same I pity the poor thing. There were also penguins, who (although admittedly cute and impressive by turns) also seemed to have no connection to tropical seasides whatsoever. They got nicely hooked into the general Save The World And Be Green moral that the entire building seemed to be hammering at people, too, along with the photos of whales and suchlike.

After that was a much larger tank, under which people walked so as to see underwater life through inch-thick glass instead of foot-deep water; the mantas and sharks were pretty, the lone turtle less so, and the giant grouper-fish gave Soul Sounds the willies. There was also one very old, very sick-looking, very lethargic ray that watned to do nothing more than lie under the sand (somehow managing to cover itself very well despite having no hands), and even the feeding didn't rouse it. The highlight of the place? The feeding! Unlike Ocean Park where the dead fish get stuck on a stick, kebab-style, and thrust into the tank at the fish, here there was a man in a wet suit and a little plastic basket of fish that he took out and scattered around the tank. It was much more entertaining, and especially as the fish were actually hungry and so crowded around him to eat; the turtle, greedy thing, was the wetsuit man's biggest fan, and obsessively followed him through the place.

We eventually left the place after stopping by another place to buy things (more alcohol! more chocolates! though Soul Sounds and I made a bad choice and so spent about RM7 more than we could have), then returned to the condo. That night we set out to try to hunt crabs on the night beach, but met with failure: none of us had a torchlight; the handphone-LCD-lamps were too dim; and my camera flash was simply not on for enough time to enable hunting of any sort. I did get some quite good shots of crab holes though.

The next morning was a hectic buzz of packing and leaving Long Kiwi; and thus the account of Long Kiwi is complete. We returned on a Friday, and I left on the following Sunday; but around fifteen minutes before I left, the Coconut chose to have a little talk and the upshot of that little talk was that I left KL as a single person.

So far the weeks since the recess have been very busy--quizzes, homework, lab reports, and all of those add up to a great sleep debt that I haven't yet managed to pay off: the last weekend, when I might have done so, was used up in church rehearsal and it turned into a rather frustrating session of listening to a CD and trying to replicate it without an eqiuvalent level of skill or instruments or anything... Ah well. I shall just hit PUBLISH and go to sleep...

Track of Time, I Do Not Have It

Happy birthday to me! as the many well-wishers on my Facebook wall have drummed into my head. Yes, I know it's late, very late, but being the absentminded wonder I am, I have the right to put up posts late, yeah? My Facebook wall has never been so active in my memory, which proves a) that the account is less than a year old, b) that the information there on my birthday is less than a year old, or c) that previously nobody noticed and this year they do. I think a) is most likely, since birthday information is one of those fields that takes the least amount of thinking to fill in and so is usually one of those fields that I fill in fairly early. The fields I fill in most rarely are those describe-yourself ones, because I'm no good at doing that.

It's... Monday night, which makes it... let's see, about three days since my birthday was over (a quick glance at my watch-mounted calendar just confirmed that guess). It's one of those things I can never remember--see, the Coconut can't very well fault me for forgetting other dates and anniversaries if I can't even remember my own birthday, eh? As tactics go it's fairly rotten, but hey--I honestly forget my birthday most of the time. It's not like it's anything particularly special anyway; in DnD at least there's age categories and associated feats, up/downgrades, etc, but here (I mean, of course, the real world) there's not that much in the way of obvious change between the day-before-the-birthday and the-day-of-the-birthday (which in itself is a very clunky phrase).

In fact I think this trait is getting quite widely broadcasted (and I'm helping that along right now), since on Saturday night the Coconut's family got out a cake, stuck four candles on it, and we all sang along and I was somewhat surprised when my name came up in the [insert name here] part; I was slightly expecting it really since I (as far as I knew) was the only person having a birthday at the time.

In any case I've certainly got white hairs, as my cousins proved to me some months ago and as I was forcibly reminded by the mirror just now--there's a strand in my fringe that I just don't have the fine motor skills to pluck out. I've not got wrinkles yet; I've gotten maybe a little tanned from the swimming, but it's not shown itself in redistribution of my body mass yet; and I've definitely lost a lot of whatever piano skills I may have ever possessed. Aging never was a good thing as far as I was concerned really... it's more of a hassle than anything else if you ask me, but this is one of those things that you can't escape any more than taxes. (And that suddenly stirred up in me the urge to listen to For Now, from Avenue Q.)

The Coconut has given me a couple gifts, and another friend gave me a lot of chocolate foods (chocolate-covered cherries! brownies! one other item I can't remember!), and none of those have been opened... yes, the Coconut... oh, yes, this illustrates the importance of a good sense of chronology, eh? I travelled up to KL on Saturday, the day after my birthday: thus the actual day of my birthday was largely spent asleep, then doing some housework (as opposed to homework)--laundry, general tidying up (though I doubt Crazy Scary will have noticed any change in that direction)--and then there was lab class, during which I got a very nice little hand made of hydroxyapatite and painted in glue, and then there was the packing to be done before the trip the next morning.

I travelled for about seven hours on Saturday, and again I must say (as I've said quite a few times already) that the new Customs office is a huge drain on people's time, even if having it around was a huge necessity for the egoes of whoever is in charge of these things. Two Customs, one on each end of a little bridge, and both containing huge long queues... hardly the picture of efficiency, but then it's tough to get two countries to agree to make one joint office, eh? People will be people, and politicians enjoy showing off their human side more than most; in fact I'd say politicians are about as human as the Brats are, and show it too.

In any case it's the recess week at the moment, a sort of milestone that means half the semester has gone by and I should be about half-ready for the final exams--but I'm not, of course. Heck, I'm not even half-ready for the weekly tutorials, which wring the brain and leave very nearly no free time on weekends unless one procrastinates or types very fast or has a support group to trade answers with... the only tradeoff is that the support group doesn't necessarily know how to do those questions you don't, of course.

And here I am, with a formal laboratory report plus a normal laboratory report plus a 2,500-word-essay (I've chosen my topic to be the developments and differences in Bible translation principles and techniques, since the lecturer suggested that) plus two tutorials that are more or less sure to be un-do-able without a lot of time and brain-wringing... very frightening stuff all of it, really.

So... yeah, birthday's come, birthday's gone, I'm still me so don't ask if I've changed because I'll just tell you to ask somebody who's in a position to observe and I'm certainly not able to watch myself, and I'm still busy--bah!

Talk To My Chatterbot

So, this is the record of the Chinese New Year activities of myself, as well as the record of the few days before that and after, possibly up til today if I have that much time (or if I type fast enough); after all, I have another ummm 33 minutes until the next class starts, so let's see how great a wall of text I can make in that time!

Ready, set, going.

So the last entry was, hmmm, January 18. Chinese New Year, I think, fell a few days after that--actually the Monday after the last post, but the Gobbler and I decided that the weekend really begins the moment class ends on Friday so that's when we left--I was the limiting factor for that trip since my classes end later than his. Also I was a little later than expected since I misread my schedule and thought I should end one hour later than I really did--which then led to me prowling around the school for an hour waiting for classes to start. It was all rather annoying.

The travelling itself was nothing special apart from that we had to do it and it was inconvenient; fortunately I brought along the mp3 player and so amused myself during the one-hour-odd delays while waiting for buses, getting in line, going through places, etc. In fact I credit that little player and my headphones as the main reason for me not going quite mad with frustrated impatience during the whole affair: I like going places, but I don't like travelling. It's probably also the reason why I have lots and lots of photos of places I go, and the travelling sections (the folder is called Between Places) are sparse. Then again, it really isn't all that interesting to keep taking photographs of ourselves with assorted bags in assorted stations, buses, etc--even if the whole world is our backdrop.

Chinese New Year, this time 'round, was a rather muted thing; it's the first celebration since my uncle died and I think they're still getting used to the idea of celebration with one deceased member of the family; also, this being such, there were certain rituals and things to go through--presumably rituals to placate his spirit so they could celebrate without him getting jealous or something. I've no idea; I didn't ask and anyway nobody in my immediate family has any sort of knowledge pertaining to those matters. (The extended family might know, but be offended or something.) All the same there was lots of lovely food and we had the usual fireworks competition between the house's two nearest neighbours, who both had very flashy loads of fireworks even though (I think) they're not Chinese. It was very pretty; even if it was raining, those sparkly things popping in the air were quite nice to see. I didn't take any photographs of those though.

We spent most of the daytime going about, visiting old friends and relatives that we usually only see during this period. We also visited a church that we only go to once a year, in that area, and it's not changed--which, in my opinion, is deeply unfortunate because that church has... a few TVs all hooked up to a mixer and a video player or something, and those little devices run the service. The stage has enough space for a small band--drums and guitar, at least, or a synthesiser if they don't want a real piano--but some bright spark chose to make the entire thing more or less karaoke. Seriously. And the sermon, which was worse, because it more or less consisted of the preacher/pastor (I'm not sure what exactly he was) saying a sentence before 5 minutes of a video would play that was supposed to illustrate his point but distracted me with historical inaccuracies. (It must have been a very low-budget video.) Not the most illuminating sort of place, and quite frankly I wouldn't go if my parents didn't think it was something worth going to.

Other than that, we ate, talked, slept, woke--I should put in here that my father is still an early bird and I am not, and he likes to wake up and sing loud songs to the world at large. Unfortunately this usually wakes me up, and then I'm grumpy because the song goes on and on and on. I think, if I ever get a house of my own, I'm soundproofing my room for those special times when the parents come to visit. And I'm also getting a deadlock bolt for it. But the soundproofing comes first.--and went out on trips to people that I hardly know by sight, let alone name.

Two days after Chinese New Year (on a Tuesday--the CNY was on a Monday), we took the car and drove down to Spore to deliver the Gobbler and myself unto our various institutes of education. Unfortunately a great deal of people had the same idea, which really isn't all that surprising; CNY is a 14-day-long celebration in China, so naturally Spore (which is at least 90% Chinese) shrank it down to 2 days, which leads to people only returning after holidays at the very very last minute possible. We spent about 4 or 5 hours in that jam of cars, taking photos of the sun that went from high overhead to below-the-horizon in that duration and laughing at the odder bumper stickers and categorising cars according to what the occupants were eating (the ice-cream car, the Famous Amos car, the Nothing car...).

We arrived and went to the hotel, and the next day in the early morning, the Gobbler and I left the hotel for our schools. I was planning to have left the night before really, but couldn't since I hadn't had dinner and the hour meant that I would get either food or public transport--it was no contest, and so I stayed for supper with the family and went back to school the next day.

After classes the family decided to drive over to the University to meet me, upon which things went bad: because of the family's ability to get lost, I told them to tell me where they were upon arriving and I'd go to find them. They decided instead that I should tell them where I was and they'd find me, because they hate waiting, and so what happened (we couldn't call because of the insane roaming charges) was an entertaining series of SMSes saying "where r u? v r in X", "m on d way 2 Y", "m @ Z" and so on until our travel paths finally coincided and then we started heaping blame on each other for not staying in one fixed known location. Now the thing about my family arguments is that my father has an explosive sort of anger, and mine is somewhat less so; so when this sort of thing happens, he starts talking and talking and I simply wait for him to finish. Unfortunately this then proceeds to him yelling about how I should respond to his complaints of my behaviour and if I didn't like what he was saying then somebody had better take some unsavoury action.

I've decided that in future, when up against angry people who're saying unreasonable things or things that I cannot politely disagree with, I will simply ask them what sort of response they think they'd like. It's likely as not to make them blow up more, but then I can take that as their answer and the next time it happens I can blow up right back at them with no guilt. Of course in the rare occasion that it makes them give something resembling an answer, then the argument's over and we can proceed along with whatever's happening. Also I would like a miniature megaphone so I can overwhelm their tirade without too much effort on my part.

In any case CNY didn't end so well for me; but then (if you've seen the post below) it promises to be the general trend of my life, so ah well.

...and it's now three minutes to class, so that entire bunch up there was typed in more or less exactly 30 minutes. Yay me!

Under Martial Law

I was going to do this on Facebook, then remembered that it'll import my blog posts, so... yeah. Heh heh heh.

IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
Yesterdays--Switchfoot. (Ummm. Yeah.)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Michelle--The Beatles. (Apparently I like them to speak random bits of French.)

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Sometimes--M2M. (It's actually rather fitting apart from the whole "being a girl" bit...)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
The Best Thing--Savage Garden. (What, my life purpose is... to have some other person be the best thing about me? It's depressing! it's depressing! What if they die before me, then I'll have no more purpose left!)

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Your Love--Diana Ross. (...my iTunes Shuffle hates me...)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Daisy--Switchfoot. (Given the above two answers--yes. I'm doomed to be giving myself away)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR PARENTS?
We Belong Together--Mariah Carey. (Yeah, so we're stuck, parents, you hear that? Hahaha)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Love for All Seasons--Christina Aguilera. (I now regret including mushy songs in my library. Deeply.)

WHAT IS 2+2?
Everyday--Dave Matthews Band. (Every day is 4 = every day is die. It fits. Yeah.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Mystery Train--FF6 Piano Collection. (Considering I don't even have one... and it's a fairly gloomy song...)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Take Off Your Clothes--Michael Learns to Rock. (NO! NO! I DO NOT THINK THAT!)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Sobakasu--Rurouni Kenshin OP. (Sobakasu--> "Freckles", and it's a song about lost love and so on. My life is a very depressing one it seems.)

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Discord--Bana (Witch Hunter Robin OST). (...right. Yes. It's not the sort of thing one tends to include in one's resume under "future ambitions" though.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
I Need You--Westlife. (GAAAAAAAH. STOP THIS iTUNES IT'S DROWNING ME IN MUSH... though, I must say, oddly appropriate mush.)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
I Saw Her Standing There--The Beatles. (Huh?)

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
I Feel Fine--The Beatles. (I guess I will, at that. Which definition of "fine" you take is your choice...)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
The Take Over, The Break's Over--Fall Out Boy. ("Wouldn't you rather be a widow than a divorcee?")

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
May It Be--Enya. (So I go around telling people "life sucks but I hope you'll survive it"? Well yeah, to an extent maybe.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Sea of Love--Fly to the Sky. (Uh... no. iTunes really needs to brush up its mindreading addon.)

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Kedama--Kanno Yoko. (There's no translation available for it--> the worst thing that could happen is, literally, unspeakable. I shudder.)

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
This Love--Sarah Brightman. (YES. If iTunes doesn't stop throwing lovey titles at me...)

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Can't Help Falling in Love with You--DJ Boonie's cover. (...well, I suppose people do regret crushes that don't work out. Still, I wouldn't give those SUCH high priority on my list of Regretted Things.)

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Girlfriend (Remix)--Avril Lavigne. (...well, I suppose the irony in it is laughable, but really.)

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
One Last Breath--Creed. (Even though I think a wasted life is a sad thing, I don't cry about them.)

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
Your Mother Should Know--The Beatles. (Well. Huh.)

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
He--Jars of Clay. (Parental abuse and various other things? We-e-e-ll...)

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Snickers Song--unknown artist. (Yes! I like Snickers! And snickering!)

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Dedicated--Linkin Park. (Yup. I certainly would like to do something about my childhood and the various irritating little brats I used to be surrounded with...)

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
Life Goes On--LeAnn Rimes. (Uh... but I'm not in that situation.)

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Under Martial Law--Nobuo Uematsu (FF6 OSV).

...I'll probably post up my account of the Chinese New Year and before/after that sometime--I've no idea when, maybe tonight? Heh.

Say Someday Somehow

It's not often I find a song I really like--usually you can tell what songs I like, if you happen to be incredibly nondescript and stalkerific, because I usually occupy the time I spend walking singing (under my breath! I do not contribute to noise pollution) whatever song happens to be on my mind, and it's probably this habit that leads to me having a pretty good command of the lyrics of any song I listen and like enough--also possibly due to me, when I'm paying attention to a song, almost always singing along. Crazy Scary quite possibly (by now) is sick of my playlist, because even when I've got the headset on I still sing along--and probably louder than usual since I can't hear myself that way.

Perhaps it's just me, but I usually choke up a little bit at one of the lines from Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey. It's basically a sad, sweet song about a site programmer (hence the "code monkey" of the title) who has a pretty rotten life that he puts up with because one of his coworkers happens to have a "soft, pretty face". (Everything in inverted commas is a direct quote--in case you didn't know already!) So the first stanza talks about how his job sucks, and the second about how the coworker (she's actually the receptionist) ignores him, and then the final stanza goes "Code Monkey's just waiting for now/ Code Monkey says someday, somehow" and maybe it's the effect of the Code Monkey Dance--brilliant bit of swaying really, you should go YouTube it!--but at that point I always feel this huge wave of pity for the title character who's up against his life and somehow managing to still optimistically think it'll all work out in the end.

Call me sentimental, but it's just... so very very sad and still sweet, somehow; it's like... let's see... it's like watching the prince in his shining armour on his shining white horse pick up the princess from whatever tower and set out for home, but not knowing that aliens have just landed and abducted everybody: you the watcher (or reader) know that the past 300-odd pages of heroic effort have all been wasted and their hopes are about to be terribly dashed to pieces, but they don't yet, and so there's this strange mixture of I-hope-they-make-it clashing against But-they-won't.

On the other hand, there's songs like Chumbawumba's Bella Ciao, where (apparently) some person is telling some other person, presumably of the opposite gender, that they're setting out to tell people to take the price tag off of sunshine, and "next time you see me, I will be smiling... I'll be in prison/ or on the TV" (though in the current state of affairs the two states can easily coexist), and I like this one because it's so similar to Code Monkey except that in there's an overwhelming sense of futility in the efforts; in Bella Ciao, at least, there's a sort of defiance and spirit running through the whole thing: I want the sunshine to be free and I jolly well am going to shout about it; in Code Monkey it's just a vague "someday, somehow"--a sort of pathetic hopefulness that tells you that the character's not about to do anything about it except keep on hoping.

Very sad, but very sweet. I don't know whether it's disturbing that I find sweetness in people hoping for impossible things...

Anyway! The responsibility I was complaining about in the previous post has been taken off my hands, thank God--apparently they decided I'm too much of a words guy to be allowed anywhere near graphics and suchlike, and so they took the code and revamped it, in the process throwing out whatever contribution to it I've ever made. Instead of creating one site with five or six displays (which is what they wanted from me previously), they've also made it easier by creating three sites and just linking them all together and putting essentially the same decorations on them all--in fact if the address didn't give it away, you'd never know the three sites are separate pages. So far looking at the new sites gives me a pain in the eye, though; some bright spark thought it'd be a good idea to make the site entirely white-on-black and then have hot pink text somewhere splashed on, and then for the links to be flashing white strobes. If it were a TV episode, epilepsy cases would already be sprouting all over the place.

It's not at all the kind of thing I'd envision, but--maybe fortunately--my kinds of visions are shared by very few people, thus subjecting the world to that much less Walls of Text. Then again, if everybody was like me, they'd love reading those Walls of Text and then workplaces would grind to a slow halt as people began maniacally reading, and reading, and reading.

I spent half of Saturday out with the Gobbler and the... what shall I call her? I'm settling on the Interrupter, because that's what she keeps on apologising for doing. Right then, some background on this... I have family in Fifth Hun, who attend a church; the fact that they have five children makes them something of a minor celebrity in a country where most kids are single children. Now, the Interrupter is also from Fifth Hun, and attended the church maybe once or twice--I'm not sure because I've never seen her before. But apparently sometime before coming to Spore, she contacted my mom and my mom helpfully gave her my and the Gobbler's phone numbers saying "Oh they'll be terribly helpful and show you around and so on!"

So she did: she first called me on Tuesday night (if I remember aright) and on Thursday, the Gobbler contacted me to say he'd arranged a meeting on Saturday for lunch. So we got together for lunch, and then wound up at a little table in Starbucks although we never did buy anything from them for the next four hours or so, translating her homework and commisserating about life here as opposed to life somewhere else. We finally parted ways around 5, with many apologies from her about taking up so much of our time--maybe she was being polite, but here I have to side with Lewis about preferring a person who takes up a lot of stuff but talks about a lot of things, over a person who tries not to inconvenience you and gives up a lot and so on but can't seem to stop talking about their efforts to not inconvenience you, etc.

In any case I really should get back to my Taylors series...