Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

I woke up at 1pm today, after 5 hours of sleep. You got that right: I went to sleep at 8am this morning. It's not the first time; after all, I did it once before. I merely did it this time with different people. It turns out the Emoticon and the Corn have taken a strong liking to each other, and since the Corn is (or was; I don't know if she won the election) on the Hall Committee and was finishing off a Vote-For-Me poster late last night, she somehow dragged the Emoticon out of his room, two blocks away, to accompany her in the TV room while she painted. And since my room commands a very convenient view of that particular TV room (and vice versa), I got dragged out of my room too, to accompany them. I didn't complain too much since I wasn't doing much more than playing BeJeweled and Virtual Villagers at the time. So we sat around and and chitchatted, excepting the time when the Corn's foot (my goodness, what a pun) got stuck to some wet paint and she had to find so...

Yesterday I went for a bash organised by my Hall. It was held at some club called the Butter Factory--a rather odd sort of name, to be sure, but then again it'd sound much worse in Malay. (Even though I can't figure out what the translation would sound like.) Anyway... I went there around 11--one hour late. I blame the buses for being completely stuffed with people at 10pm. In the end I had to take a cab with a senior (the Corn), and we got out of the cab far too early and wound up about 200m away from the club. It wasn't too bad for me, but the Corn was wearing high heels. (And she was running. I shudder at the damage to her heels.) Anyway, the Butter Factory is actually a kinda nice little place. The wall decor is a little disturbing, though... flowers with skulls for heads and little gnomes with more flowers sprouting out of their fingers... but I very much liked the section of the wall that was covered in pixelart. Kelvin would have approved, I think. I suppose it's...

The following is homework, bless me! an essay for my Effective Communications subject. I'm putting it here so I can easily get at it for editing before submitting it. You can read it if you want, of course, but there's nothing much interesting in it apart from the bits where I seem to be speaking in psychiatrist language... And it's supposed to be 300 words long or so. I somehow turned it into a 600-word monster... ---Homework begins--- It is now three weeks since classes began, and three lectures (including the first one) of Effective Communication. I suppose I may say that what I have learned in these lectures has shed some new light on my views of communication. To me, the most intriguing point so far is the idea of prototypes: that is, that everybody has an ideal model for any particular concept; rather like a very picky director, they wish a certain sort of actor to fill a certain sort of role in the movie of their life. Unfortunately such wishes do not often come true...

The below is my first attempt at a Reflective Paper in my Effective Communications course. It's homework, bless me! and I'm putting it up here so I can get easy access to it once I get back to my room for editing. It's supposed to be about one page long (400 words), but as usual I managed to turn it into a 600-word monster thing. You can read it if you want, but there's nothing in it that hasn't already been said before... apart from the bits where I obviously try to work in some academic-sounding stuff. It's almost like some psychiatrist's logbook. ---Homework Begins--- It is now three weeks since classes began, and three lectures (including the first one) of Effective Communication. I suppose I may say that what I have learned in these lectures has shed some new light on my views of communication. To me, the most intriguing point so far is the idea of prototypes: that is, that everybody has an ideal model for any particular concept; rather like a very pick...

This is the continuation of the post below, so be prepared for a nice long read. Then again, if you weren't prepared, you'd've run far away by now so... This week has been quite mad so far, and it's only Tuesday. Actually the main reason for this would be that last week was the fair for all the extra-curricular activities. Unlike in secondary school, such activities are nearly completely dissociated from the University--which means the students are solely responsible for what happens in the club. (Within limits, naturally.) Which also means that the clubs all have registration fees and posts to be filled and various other little things that I've never encountered before... Anyway, I joined a few clubs, and so far I've had an audition (for the Piano Ensemble) which I flubbed badly but still managed to pass somehow; two interviews for main committe posts (both of which are Publicity Officer, in Piano Ensemble and in Mensa); and tomorrow is another interview (Publi...

School is still going on, and I've had to create something like a schedule just to keep track of what I should be studying. So far I've managed to keep to the schedule--more or less, anyway, according to my ability--and so I've allowed myself a bit of free time (now). Marsh has insisted that I have to change my self-avowed laziness--maybe, you know, self-labelling does have an effect--and so today I woke up extra early and got to class on time. Unfortunately I fell asleep several times in class, and now Marsh has a highly embarassing video of myself on his handphone. I have tried to do my best to control the damage, but he does insist on showing it to everyone we meet... Still, I plan to sleep earlier tonight. If I can. At any rate it's almost midnight now and I'm supposed to meet Marsh in about 7 hours' time, so I'll maybe put up another post tomorrow. For now you can just marvel at the shortest post I've ever typed in the past 6 or 7 months.

I went to a Singaporean church for the first time ever, last Sunday. (Two days ago.) It was with Herr Robson, to a Methodist church two bus rides away from the University. (Doesn't it look simply grand to have the institute's species in capitals?) In any case it was an OK experience, though heaven knows I'm in no place to judge. It's not a performance after all... Which reminds me, last Friday, the University had a performance by the Singing/ Symphonies Organisation (or something like that--they kept referring to themselves as "SSO" but never said exactly what it stood for) and it simply rocked. Or maybe I like classical music too much... Tee Four was there too, by coincidence, and so was Marsh (who probably only came along to avoid being left alone in his room). I enjoyed it very much, and right now I just think it's a pity they didn't record the performance and give out CDs after it... Anyway, after church, we visited some place called Book Is. (Well...

I'm typing this in between Maple sessions. That is to say, I play my Maple account until the character's HP and MP are too low for comfort, then put it somewhere to heal up, and do this while I wait. The Coconut and Claus would surely denounce me as being too cheap to use potions and the like to heal the character, but *shrug* I'm not exactly in a hurry to get to the next level or whatever. It's been an interesting time so far, certainly... having met so many people in such a short span of time means I've got a lot of faces to remember the names for. It only complicates matters that I've found two people with nearly the same name as I--one of them in my block, and the other in my course. Their spellings are more conventional than mine, though, and probably consequently more memorable... Today is the National Day of Singapore, and it's a public holiday. Herr Robson says Singapore and Brunei will soon be jointly issuing a polymer 20-dollar note (the two countr...

Sorry I haven't updated for some time; uni life got in the way a bit, and besides I'm not exactly hyper at the best of times so I'm actually somewhat tired at the moment. Anyway... I got my laptop, and so far I've done a heckuva lot of downloading stuff onto it... emoticons, various game programs from GameHouse (I've got a patch that lets me bypass the 60-minute-free-trial thingy), and other things that I find to be necessary for myself (eg school class timetables). I don't know how many more gigs I have left on the hard drive, but I'm willing to bet I've used up a couple by now. I've almost finished getting MapleStory down... it's the last of the many free programs I've been getting at (don't worry, I've got my firewall enabled and an antivirus running), and it was probably also the most troublesome: I tried downloading the whole file at once, but for some reason it didn't work. I tried doing that again with a download accelerato...