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The last post of 2008

2008-12-30T19:56:00.003+08:00

No matter how lazy I am, I still feel obliged to write a final post for this eventful year.

Just returned from China 2 days ago after a long hiatus. I must say, I had quite a nice time there, but I was really starting to miss my computer(of all things...how pathetic). Sadly, after taking a long break, my computer got all cranky and the graphics card blew up within 2 hours of onning the comp after I returned, and I wasn't even playing any hardcore game!! Nor watching any hardcore video! Oh my heart...

Besides stoning around in my father's apartment in Shanghai Pudong, I also did a few other interesting things. I will talk about my adventures in "Thousand Island Lake"(千岛湖）and South Korea.

So on some random day, my family decided to have some fun at Thousand Island Lake, which is a huge lake with many islands. We took my father's car and traveled a helluva long way, most of which I spent sleeping, a harmless process which nonetheless became rather hazardous as I somehow managed to stretch my thigh muscle while trying to wrestle my shoe off to sleep more comfortably. How am I going to go NS man...

Finally we reached there and checked in at some random hotel. On the second day, we went for a tour of the lake on this boat and visited three islands. Obviously the local authorities didn't think the natural beauty of the lake was enough, and went to such lengths as dumping random exotic animals on the islands. One of the islands was called "Ostrich Island", and true to its name, had a number of stinky ostriches on it. Another island was called "Poisonous Snake Island", and again, had a few enclosures of snakes. Interesting huh?

Anyway, the highlight of the tour was the lunch, where we ordered a huge plate of fish-head. It wasn't just any ordinary fish, it was the Thousand Island Lake Organic Big Headed Fish. Anyway, they cooked it with beancurd and it was spiffing fantastic!! I stuffed myself to the brim. Then after the tour we checked in at a more imba hotel which had a computer and a TV with lotsa movies. I managed to finish reading an interesting fanfic on soompi and watch 无间道 at night and watch 画皮 the next morning. And discovered that the stupid Dongz and Rongbing tricked me with a fake lame plot of 画皮 when I asked them what it was about a few months ago. Oh well. The actual plot was not that much greater but the actors were really good I think. Oh and that night we actually ate another Thousand Island Lake Organic Big Headed Fish at a shop. That was super killer as it was like 4 kg, and we had it divided into 3 and cooked three different ways. Enough fish for a lifetime!

Then on another random day I went on a 5-day South Korea tour with my mum. It was quite cool. We had a Korean tour guide who is a second generation Chinese migrant. On one of the nights it snowed!! That's the first time I saw snow in more than like 10 years.

Well...there's a few things I think of when I think of Korea. Starcraft, pro-gaming, kimchi, Korean drama, and of course Korean superstars like BoA, Rain, and DBSK. Sadly, the only thing from above that seems to surface very prevalently during the tour was kimchi, which did not fail to appear every single meal. It doesn't exactly taste very nice, but it's unique. I guess it's a cultivated taste, just like smelly tofu or fermented tofu. Well...the only thing from korean dramas that seems to be very prevalent is Bae Yong Jun, whose posters simply appeared everywhere. I did see a small part of a starcraft game on TV though, but obviously it was not very exciting as it was some 2v2 in its late game and one team got completely owned by a swarm of mutalisks. Then I saw Rain on some talk show too but didn't understand a single word he said...duh.

Of course, the tour involved going to many shopping venues, the most interesting of which is probably Myongdong, which is a very nice crowded collection of streets and alleys that have shops and roadside stalls that sell everything from clothes to food to souvenirs. There also happened to be a lot of chiobus, some of whom were wearing outrageously little for such a cold winter time, like bare legs or simply one layer of stocking(the standard is 2-3 layers of thick pants). But good things are not to last...we only spent 2 hours there. We also visited other interesting places like the Seoul imperial palace and Jeju island, and the tour guide did a very good job of explaining a lot of Korean history and whatnots.

If I ever get another chance to visit South Korea again, I would want to go in winter again and this time go to some ski resort(like Hyrum)! :P

10 reasons why burgers should be eaten as burgers

2008-12-04T05:50:00.004+08:00

So...just returned from prom night 6 hours ago. Well...it was pretty much what I expected. Was pretty ok but it did take a hell lot of time. I'm so glad I didn't spend a single cent on clothes/hair/whatever, although I did wish my hair wasn't so long...urgh. But it would probably have looked even more horrible if I went for the cheap haircut so lol. Can't believe Kovan spent like 70+ dollars doing up his hair. Think I might post up some pictures later...after I reach China...

Anyway...on to the main topic. Was having an intellectual debate with Chunkai a few days ago regarding whether burgers should be eaten as a whole burger or separately. Well, obviously I think that burgers should be eaten whole, and here's why.

My wonderful lunch.

1) They look fat and juicy and round.
2) It's faster if you eat the burger like that instead of piece by piece.
3) The delicious juices from the meat patty mix with the soft texture of the bread and smooth feeling of the egg and cheesy feeling of the cheese and your saliva to produce a wonderful concoction.
4) Meat patties and omelettes fit nicely between the round bread pieces.
5) Burgers sound nice.

Oh my...I feel weird after staying up the whole night...need to do neopets dailies now, ciao~

New Skin!!!!!!

2008-11-22T21:31:00.002+08:00

Woooo after like 4 hours of searching for a suitable blogskin, tweaking it, and adding nonsense, I finally revamped my blog!! It's quite a bit different from the old skin...everything is in one place now and the background is more simple. Both have their advantages I guess. Now the tagboard is more accessible lols. I really like the BoA .gif! But then it would have been better if was a Made in Twenty theme instead...that album is my favourite.

End of A levels
YEAAAAAAHHH! A levels has finally and truly ended forever and ever and ever. Poof! Gones. In fact, I'm so busy doing shit now that I cannot truly come to terms with that fact. Well...I've torn my entry proof into little pieces and chucked all my notes into big bags and dumped them in the storeroom to rot for an eternity but...perhaps all that mugging has already left an indelible mark on my delicate brain...

Class Chalet
Had our 6k class chalet on Thursday...and guess where it was? Cranwell Bungalow in Changi again...in short, one of the horriblest places to have a chalet. Well, the chalet itself is not bad if you are able to ignore the 1000 mosquitoes that bites you at the rate of 1 bpm(bite per minute). It's quite roomy and there's a big kitchen and stuffs. Bad thing is, it is probably in one of the most ulu places in Singapore with the only close inhabitated area being Changi Village, unless you want to count the various prisons in Changi, but I doubt the dudes in there are gonna make fun acquaintances. Furthermore, it's about 2 hours away from my house...that's no jokes.

Still, we managed to have fun, making use of what limited resources there were. Went with Wentao to Tampines and then got conned by Lau Fun into taking the bus to Changi Village to meet our classmates when we could have stopped at the chalet. Turned out that she needed us to help lug drinks back to the chalet, a 15 minute walk away...talk about slave labour.

So after we finally arrived in one piece at the chalet, some of us holed ourselves up in one of the bedrooms and turned on the aircon, locking out all the mosquitoes save one, which was foaming because of the low temperature and couldn't suck blood effectively. Or maybe it's male...w/e. Played with my nice bleach cards(haha those were very useful Wendi :P) in the chalet when we reached there. Played some games of bridge...just floating haha brainless game. Then after that me Wentao Kovan Ivan Jingxiong and Yaming started to play asshole revolution daidi, which I imbally owned by permanently being the King and koping all the imba cards, despite valiant efforts to revolutionize by the asshole, which was mainly Ivan LOL.

Then me Wentao and Jing played draft with the huge stacks of magic cards that me and Wentao brought. That took rather long...and eventually we completed my sets, with Wentao and Jing not having faced off. Not unexpectedly, I lost both -.- Wasn't really thinking properly when drafting and drafted a lot of shitty cards. Eventually couldn't decide between red and green to put in my draft deck either, having just not enough good cards and a fair amount of crappy cards in either colour. Haiz...the fact that Wendi came in halfway while drafting and giving me a BoA 2008 live tour dvd(which I have looked for about 4 times in various music shops and failed) as a birthday present didn't help much either, basically putting me in a state of mind-numbing bliss that leeched what was remaining of my discretion after the vigorous battle of king vs assholes. Mm...Wendi may not be that good when it comes to cat noises but he's sure good at bday presents!:D:D But obviously I still wasn't thinking properly when actually playing my draft deck and made some really stupid mistakes against Jing, which the meanie absolutely refused to let me take back, at the expense of me getting pwnt even faster than might have been. Hmph. w/e. Both of them had more experience with drafting neway.

Ate barbecue after that(how unsurprisingly), and unsurprisingly, Zhan ming again demonstrated his imbaness at cooking, this time ordering the food people to buy an expensive pack of spices(think it's basil leaves or something). Well...I wasn't really sure what he did with them, but he was cooking these strips of bacon that had one side COMPLETELY covered with spices, most of which he claimed will fall off into the bbq pit once he flipped the bacon -.- Then he made meatballs again, which ended up looking sort of like fried rice...

And then we celebrated me and some other classmates' birthdays in the living room with a nice cheese cake that they bought. Yay. Then we watched Kung Fu Panda, which turned out to be as funny and lame as Dongz had described. The Wu Ji Zhi was truly imba...Hm, one thing I thought could have been better was the characterization of Mantis. They barely talked about him at all...while the other 4 fighters all had some stuff. Being small really doesn't help I guess...

Then after that some of them went off to night-cycle, while the rest of us played the Playstation 2 that Kennedy borrowed from his friend. We played some fun games like Top Spin and Dynasty Warrior. Then I sort of got sian at like 1am then went into the bedroom and started to chat with Dehui. Then after that Kovan and Junwei joined us too then we chatted more. Then slept at like 2+ am.

Woke up at 6+ and played more playstation. Then the night-cycling people returned and we did some final stuff and finally left. Oh well, I'm getting pretty bored of narrating and I'm pretty sure you're getting pretty bored of reading this so I'll stop here lolz.

Todaeeeeeeeee
Had more fun today. Haiz...I think I'm saturated already...but nvm I suspect I'll never have enough fun to make up for what is to come during NS. Met with Hyrum Ben Jord Wentao and Chester at my house and played basketball. We played...very long. xD. Like quite a few matches, horse, and some rounds of Manjiang. I discovered that I can still shoot but can't really move around much, nor jump, nor do layups and underbaskets like before cos I've become really fat and unfit. Lol. Then we rested a while in my house and ate lunch at Macs'. They have this new promotion of mega huge mcspicys and big macs, which had twice the number of patties as usual. But I didn't try either... -.-

Yay done. Long update; had fun. Finally, another picture of BoA in a headphone commercial. Kawaii ne?

2008-11-05T14:26:00.002+08:00

Hmm BoA's birthday today. Posted Happy Birthday on a few forums and stuffs...but I couldn't do anything else...not with this stupid exam hanging like a dark cloud in my mind. Actually the rest also dun really care, it's just Econs...urgh...the timing has to be so own some more...in the afternoon after chem.. ><

Quite weird that I don't feel much after two days of A levels...I have no idea how I did for GP, and I don't want to predict anything because I've learned that essay scores were unpredictable. Physics and Math was ok...physics a bit heng that I did part A quite fast else no time to change qn in part B, Math got some stuff wrong already but oh wells.

Just can't wait to get this over with...I can't think of anything else now... ...

2008-10-04T23:13:00.003+08:00

When I blog, I always like to write something interesting, something that can glue people’s eyes to their computer screens for the duration of the blog post. So it is no coincidence that many of my blog posts are not about mundane stuff that happens in my life. Imagine what people will think if they come to a blog and see something along the lines of, “Today, I went to school, I attended x lessons and went for x CCA, I was very tired and came home and slept,” for majority of the posts. Even if I was to come back and read my own blog some time in the future, I’m probably going to think, “God was I a boring person…”

Unfortunately, for my case, “something interesting” do not normally pounce upon me like the 20000 ninjas hiding somewhere in your ceiling and waiting to jump on your head and scare the living daylights out of you (be very scared). It follows that the frequency of my blog posts reflects just how un-interesting my life is.
Now, with that superbly soporific introduction, I hope you are sufficiently bored that my subsequent boring mundane narration is going to arouse every single deprived and half-bored-to-death cell in your body and drive them into an orgasm of intellectual delight.

Yeah…just took the SAT chemistry subject test today at ACJC. Firstly, I have to say that one year ago, I would never have thought that I will go to ACJC for the third time in one year…but oh well, no complaints from me since the school, and especially the examination venues, have quite nice environments. Secondly, after all the intensive chemistry preparations for prelims, I found the chemistry test rather cake-ish, besides a few random trivia questions that challenged my extremely limited general knowledge.

After that, I took my leave and left majority of the other test-takers thrashing in mental agony at the prospect of their impending two subject tests (since I have already taken 3 subject tests previously). Went to U.S.E.I.C, short for United States Education Information Centre, after that with my dad, who has been constantly pestering me to apply to U.S universities recently. Haiz…I still have serious doubts about my direction in life and seriouser doubts about whether I even stand a fighting chance to get into a good US university. However, the advisor we spoke to turned out to be quite well-informed and proficient, and was able to answer many of my queries. What I found out, of course, did not alleviate my concerns about how far my sucky prelim results and soon-to-suck A levels results will get me. And the advising session cost a bomb too, of course…no free lunch eh?

Ahhhhh…I’m half bored to death by myself already…and I think I’ve bored at least 3 other people half to death with all this gloomy talk about university apps, namely Shida, Kovan, and Wentao, who I keep bugging on msn about the above topic.
Well, at least I have 2 things to look forward to in the near future. One is the outing at Kovan’s house on the coming Friday, yay can meet everyone again, so happy wewt! *Punches myself in the face for sounding idiotic*

The second is that BoA’s music video for her song “Eat You Up” is going to be released on the coming Tuesday!! Wheee! Anyway, that’s the first song on her new English album that is due to be released next year in the United States. Whether it is successful or not aside first, I think its just amazing that a person can record songs in three languages, with acceptable proficiency in each, at such a young age…
As I’m not the type of people to go around flaunting my obsessions (blue hair red eye chick anyone?)(hem hem), I guess not many people know about my obsession with BoA, but then those who know are probably puzzled as this happening is rather out of the blue…

But then, I just feel a need to justify myself and I want to say that it is no random occurrence. I feel that many factors, not least restricted to my current circumstances, character, emotional state, and age has led to this, ok that sounds corny but heck. But then it’s true.

First of all, I desperately need an outlet of entertainment especially after brutally murdering Warcraft and anime. I’m the type of person who cannot, cannot possibly survive on mugging and more mugging however hard I try to convince myself otherwise. If I ban myself from all distractions, my d(daydream)/dt will just increase exponentially whenever I’m mugging.

Then…never mind, I suddenly don’t feel like explaining anymore rofl!!

Ah, joke of the day to liven up the deathly sianness!!

Wendi: Do you all know that cats don’t say “miao”???
Wentao, Rongbing, and me: ???
Wendi: They say, “iao!!”
Wentao, Rongbing, and me: ………………………………………

Yay, pic of the day to cheer everyone up!

BoA in a "My Name" performance outfit, about 4 years ago..?

P.S: Expect a more interesting post next update!

2008-09-12T22:08:00.002+08:00

Beneath me, the old timbers of the wooden bridge creaked ominously as I walked. Surrounding the bridge is an expanse of murky blue water, in turn ringed by huge craggy mountains, looking like grim Sentinels that had risen out of the very earth. Off to my right, in the middle of the lake, there rested a strange-looking complex that looked like a giant beaver den, yet somehow I sensed that it was ten times more sinister than a mere beaver den. Evil emanated from the very walls of the complex, enshrouding the entire lake with a ghastly, poisonous aura. Instinctively, I knew that it was called the "Palace of Ice and Poison".

Heart pounding, sweat oozing out in thick rivulets from every pore on my body, I picked my way along the rickety wooden bridge ever so slowly, desperately trying to avoid the attention of any denizens residing in the evil building...
*Shift*
--
I was on the top of a steep grassy slope, one side which ended abruptly to meet the mouth of a yawning abyss, the other side a steep decline into a dense forest. I picked my way delicately across the narrow path, fear threatening to overwhelm me as I literally felt the presence of the bottomless abyss, as if it was the mouth of Satan trying to suck me in. I finally found a place at which the decline into the forest was somewhat more gentle, and tumbled ungraciously, brambles and wild grass slicing across my unprotected arms, into the seemingly benign green.
*Shift*
--
She was as beautiful as she was gentle, the epitome of elegance.
"Where did you come from?" She asked me, the edge of urgency creeping into her voice.
"I really do not know, I think I stepped through a mysterious portal into this place, and then I saw the Palace of Ice and Poison," I explained, feeling very confused myself.

An expression of shock and fear instantly appeared on her face, all traces of her normally collected air gone to the wind.
"You should not have mentioned the name of the place. Now "He" can hunt us down, even if "He" does not arrive physically. I am the only real opposition that "He" has remaining. "He" will be drawn here like a moth to a flame," she finally managed to say, her voice quavering.
*shift*
--
She was not wrong. Within half an hour, she had retreated into the house, sitting stock-still on a chair, a look of intense concentration on her face. She did not respond to anybody, not even her gardener, the only other person besides me in the vicinity, and her faithful servant. Days passed and she remained in paralysis, unmoving, her face growing ever more wane and sickly looking. There were times where she rose up from her frozen position, coming to the window and staring out at us, but I instinctively knew that that was not her. A look of pure hatred so concentrated that it seemed to set ablaze anything that it touched, malign so deep that it will shake the bravest of hearts, shot out of her wide open sapphire eyes. Yet those moments will pass, and she will return, zombie-like, to her frozen position on the chair.

"We must do something to help her!" I said, in desperation, to the gardener, after the second day of her paralysis.
"There is only one solution," the white-haired gardener said gravely, the lines of age on his face emphasized by his worry. "We must go to the Palace of Ice and Poison to confront "Him"".

Instantly, my brief determination vapourised, the very mention of "Him" luring out the coward in me, and more than anything, I wanted to remain in this very spot, even if she is going to die.
*shift*
--
I charged clumsily through the forest, ragged gasps torn spasmodically from my beleaguered lungs, legs feeling like lead, and yet carrying a determination to continue running that is blown out of all realistic proportions. Because I knew that "He" was after me. Yet my attempt to escape is as doomed that of the field mouse who tries to escape from the eagle on a wide open prairie.

I tripped. The thrice damned tree root that caused me to fall seemed to laugh aloud at my plight.

"You're doomed, you're doomed!!" It mocked at me.

"You're doomed, fool. There is no escape," a voice, cold as the coldest glacier in the coldest of winters, cut right through me, freezing me as I tried to get up and run.

Slowly, slowly, I pivoted around, feeling like all the light, all the warmth in the world has deserted me. There was no hope, no hope...

"He" was there, just as I expected. "He" was accompanied by the gardener. Somehow, I did not feel at all surprised. I did not have the capacity to feel any emotions, except for a yawning despair.

"Wait, do not kill him!" the gardener said suddenly. "Let me have him; I have use for him. You have to handle the Snow Queen anyway," the gardener pleaded with "him".

"Why this sudden change of plans?" "he" uttered coldly, "his" slitted eyes narrowing even further. The gardener did not respond, only looking at me silently, the barest look of hopelessness registering in his eyes.
"Well then, I will erase him now," "he" said, as uncaring as if I was an ant.
"No!!" the gardener shouted, putting himself between "him" and me. "If you have to kill him, kill me instead!"

Nonplussed, perfectly calm, "he" leveled a long, crooked, white finger at the gardener. "You'll just have to die, then."

The gardener closed his eyes, a look of resignation on his face. Abruptly, he moved his finger, now pointing at me. Somehow, the gardener sensed that, and exploded into motion. Just as deadly white pellets of energy burst out of "his" fingertip, heading directly for me, the gardener completed a quick incantation, raising his right hand. An icy shield of purest translucent blue formed on his hand, blocking the energy bolts just as they reached him.

One, two, three. The shield managed to absorb the deadly impact of the energy bolts, flashing a brilliant white each time they hit.

Four. A crack appeared on the shield.

"He" looked at the gardener, "his" face betraying the tiniest bit of emotion, a mixture of surprise, sudden respect, and amusement. With a look of what might be regret, lips moving slightly, he fired a final energy bolt at the gardener.

Unable to withstand the deadly onslaught any further, the shield burst into pieces. The gardener was thrown backwards, his white hair askew, despairing face looking at me. With petrified fascination, I realised that one of the shield shrapnel had punctured his head, splitting it open slightly. Time seemed to slow as he dropped towards the ground, light fleeing from his eyes.

He hit the ground.

"Mm, this is delicious!!", "He" cried excitedly, a sick look of insanity in his slitted blue eyes. "He" pounced on the dead gardener and put "his" mouth to the crack in his skull, sucking at his partially exposed brains...

---

I woke up. It was just a dream.

But then, the econs test the next day was not. How ironic is life, to save me from one nightmare just to deliver me into the next?

2008-08-26T15:34:00.006+08:00

Boo! Tomorrow is GP prelims :(

And I can't say that I've been caught by surprise, or haven't had time to mug, or any other excuse, especially with the kind of atmosphere in school for the past few weeks. What with the abundance of chem tests, programmes such as Mega Mugging Madness, and the way everyone else is taking to the books, even the most hardcore gamer will feel some stress. Still, I'm not feeling confident at all especially since I haven't had much practice with GP. Not taking GP CT2 isn't helping and neither are the unique circumstances of our GP lessons of which I'm sure all my fellow classmates understand very well. Oh well, all that's left to do is to hope that the notes and some last minute frenzied devouring of relevant general knowledge and current affairs will help my essay and that luck is with me tomorrow. :)

At this point, I'm guessing that people will wonder, meh since you haven't exactly been preparing for GP these few weeks, what the hell were you doing? At the very least, I'm proud to say that I haven't touched DotA since time immemorial!! An overwhelming urge to double click the tiny blue icon engraved with the head of our great King Arthas has always been greeted, this past few weeks, with an even more overwhelming sense of impending doom. Or perhaps *gasp gasp*, its just that I have outgrown the game. Whoaaaa! That's new!! The only other worthy accomplishment I can claim is attending one day of Mega Mugging Madness with Kovan a.k.a Commando Kok last friday. That was really great as, removed from the overpowering distraction of my comp and my bed, I experienced a hike in efficiency and actually managed to mug for about 7 hours straight + breaks for ordering dinner and eating dinner.

Aside from that, I've pretty much been doing crap (That's to be expected since I appear to be uncontrollably doing crap at this very second). The presence of various senses of impending doom, peer pressure and whatnot sort of ran out of steam and gave up after banishing thoughts of DotA from the recesses of my mind. Which is why I'm still playing Neopets, wasting time, and even playing Magic cards, the game which I thought I've forever and ever left behind in RI. An explanation is due for this unexpected phenomenon, I think. Well, the ironic thing is, the dying embers of Magic cards has been reignited for me at the expense of the bright flames of DotA. On National Day, the original plan of going lanning was scrapped in view of the limited time and limited participation. Instead, due to the highly coincidental circumstances, three of the only magic players in our class: Wentao, Jingxiong, and me, have been assembled(together with Wendi) feeling very bored and having nothing to do for the long hours stretching towards the NDay celebration. And guess what, half an hour and a trip to J8 later, we found ourselves in the all but deserted 6k home room once again, this time in the guise of omnipotent planeswalkers, summoning legendary creatures and conjuring devastating spells from a (rather hopeless) pool of magic cards! What happens when a tree....no, it doesn't fall...catches fire in a forest and no one is nearby? Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that I've been buying Magic card boosters ever since -.-

Actually, I want to dedicate this post to someone...guess who? Yep, its BoA!! :D
I think her songs have been keeping me alive while plowing through the endless piles of chem notes, soporific stacks of econs notes, and confusing jumbles of GP notes. Not to mention, her videos(together with neopets and msn) have been keeping me off the greater evil of DotA. Its not that I didn't know about BoA before, I've known about her ever since hearing Every Heart on Inuyasha and subsequently being impressed enough with the song to obtain it and check her up online. I've even got a few vids and songs, which unfortunately got wiped after I reformatted my old comp due to some virus.

The craze started on one fine day when I remembered out of great boredom that I once saw this BoA MV of winter love on MTV, so I checked it up and that sort of started a chain reaction >< Anyway, I was hooked to the extent I actually bought her latest album, "The Face", which actually wasn't very recent, released around half a year ago, and found it not at all disappointing!

After looking up(and procuring) some videos on Veoh, I found myself increasingly impressed by this petite jpop/kpop singer from Korea. What is amazing is not that she had started her professional career at the age of 13, but that she managed to constantly improve and still remain so successful after 8 years. I can only guess at the extent of the hardship and loneliness that she faced, having to leave her family at such a young age and facing all the associated pressures of a professional singer. Perhaps this video is best at representing these feelings.

A combination of great singing, great dancing, and a great personality, that's BoA for you.

2008-07-27T12:42:00.002+08:00

Due to the incessant whining of some people, I shall post some random stuff as a filler episode, since I don't really feel like writing anything serious now. Rest assured that filler episodes on kuity's blog are of the highest quality, of course.

Random event 1
The greatly exciting Altador Cup on neopets has just recently came to an equally exciting conclusion. Alas, though, for all my great efforts have come to naught as the team I support, Shenkuu, was unable to emerge victorious. After a valiant battle in the double round robin which spanned a torturous 30 days, Shenkuu managed to scrape into 4th position in the group elimination finals. This is an important accomplishment as the 16 teams are split into groups of 4 for the finals, so we managed to get into the top bracket!

Sadly, though, exhausted by the vigorous battles of the second round robin, we were unable to overcome the overwhelming forces of Krawk Island and lost to them, and got placed into the 3rd-4th placing match against the Lost Desert. Low in morale and bone-weary, it was no wonder that we lost once more to the Lost Desert, eventually placing 4th overall. My 853 wins in yooyuball, which totals to about 40 odd hours? was not entirely wasted, however, as I managed to attain the top prize, a fire yooyu, with the points that I earned. This I sold at a relatively cheap deal of 500k np and a cloud paint brush to some random person who was quite nice as she waited 2 days for me to finalize the deal. With 500k in hand and some generosity from Jordan, the ever-wealthy stocks connoisseur of neopets, I finally cleared the 700k np I owe him. Whew, what a relief.

Random event 2
Finally got around to watching End of Evangelion, the NGE ova that the same noob who has been bugging me to blog has been bugging me to watch. I must admit at the end of movie that I think...
...
...

...
[Spoiler]
Rei is a slut (HAHA!), cos she keeps walking around naked, and even the big Rei that rose from the middle of Earth was naked. And she straddled Shinji within the dreamscape after instrumentality has been completed. And she got her boob groped by Gendo(not entirely her fault but she didn't exactly resist too).
[/Spoiler]
I foresee that I'm going to get bashed up very soon, but I couldn't resist(LOL). Okay la, at least I admit I'm starting to grasp the frail concept that Rei is quite a pretty... ...slut! LOL
But anyway, the movie was overall quite satisfactory as it is much less cryptic than the highly cryptic last episode of NGE. But then again, it is bloody(especially Asuka getting smashed part), apocalyptic, and plain dark. But then again, typical evangelion for you. Without those characteristics, NGE will just be another mecha and harem junk. The weird part was the few minutes where they showed scenes of the real world, mostly crowds and a lot of people sitting down in a stadium or something, which is really quite weird. Then there was the silhouettes of the obviously cosplayed trio of Rei, Asuka, and Misato standing amidst a crowd which is plain weird. And then, there's our good old retardedly emo Shinji who deserves to be smashed into tiny bits. One can't help feeling a bit of pity for him in End of Evangelion though, considering all his ordeals.

Random Event 3
Yay I'm so happy I managed to complete Nuclear Physics, Radioactivity, and Group VII in the weekend. Mugmugmugmugmugmugmugmugmug!!!!!
..
Or not? NOOOOOOO
..
mugmugmugmugmugmug. Mugging is the way to go!!

2008-07-11T20:53:00.004+08:00

This idea is probably quite old and unoriginal...but still, I'm going to go ahead with it. Yes, I'm gonna do a review of two anime series I watched recently, Shakugan no Shana and Ghost in the Shell. Mm...a daunting task indeed.

Shakugan no Shana(I & II)

Shakugan no Shana, a very interesting series indeed. This is one of the rare animes where the first episode is so good that it totally and completely absorbs the viewer's attention, primarily by dint of an original plot and narrative style. Basically, the viewer is introduced to a typical Japanese city, Misaki City, by the narrator, the male protagonist Sakai Yuji, who promptly proclaims that it is the last day of his life. This is faintly reminiscent of that kewl-ass Chinese movie(can't remember the title, something to do with 萤火虫), where the male protagonist proclaims that he is dead, right at the beginning. [SPOILER] The viewer who is probably completely absorbed by now is subsequently pulled into an intriguing plot where beings known as Guze no Tomogara from a parallel world, Guze, comes at will to Earth, and steal power of existence, which is possessed by every human, for their personal gain. This action causes humans who have had their existence stolen to completely and irreversibly vanish, creating an imbalance in the world. The minions of one such being attacks people, Sakai Yuji inclusive. Enter Shana, A Flame Haze, or a human who has made a pact with a King of Guze who wishes to purge the imbalance. Flame Hazes are granted special abilities like spellcasting and combat, and fight to stop Guze no Tomogara. Whenever humans are "eaten" by Tomogara, Flame Hazes alleviates the imbalance caused by creating a "Torch", which is a spark of existence, in place of the human. Torches will fade away with time, hence a gradual disappearance in favour of a rapid one. Shana rescues Yuji and tells him that he is one such Torch, and hence it is a certainty that he will die. [/SPOILER] Of course, there is a catch to this, but you'll have to watch the anime to find out :P

One of the things I like most about SnS I is the character development of Shana. She is completely Kawaii desu!!! The characteristic "Urusai, Urusai, Urusai!!!"(Shut up, shut up, shut up) and the fetish for melon bread, reflect a strong, slightly childish in a cool fashion, personality and heaty temperament. Whats more cool about the petite, large-eyed, flat-chested(yeah, serious) Flame Haze is that her waist-length black hair and black eyes turn a flaming crimson when she is in combat mode. Of course, a flaming sword and black voluminous cape are great assets,as always, for ass-kicking. The two extra episodes on Shana's history of becoming a Flame Haze were enjoyable and essential, in my opinion, despite what some SnS bashers say.

Finally, the first opening theme of SnS is completely kick-ass!! Hishoku no Sora by Mami Kawada. Linketh: http://youtube.com/watch?v=be4utbxs7O4 if you happen to be interested. "Why do you like jap songs so much?" "I hate j-pop; they're so noisy!" "You don't even understand it, why do you bother to listen to them?" are some of the typical responses I get for listening to jap songs. I don't happen to be a jap fan or anything, but I believe that the value we attach to songs is proportionate to their positive influence on our emotions. Nice songs are nice because they "click", because they soothe or because we can identify with the song. The reason I can listen to some jap songs 100 times or more is because the song, for me, has gained an additional unique identity, more than "just another song", in fact, more than "just another nice song like the thousands of nice songs that exist". This is gained through it being the theme song of an anime. So whenever I listen to that particular song, emotions are triggered in me as I recall the anime a thousand times stronger than those triggered by "just another nice song", the emotions worn down and faded due to the attrition of time, flowing afresh in me. That, coupled with the dynamics of the song itself, makes Hishoku no Sora an imba song. In fact, comparable to the likes of Danzai no Hana and Broken Wings.

Of course, the anime is far from flawless. Let's start from some of the more minor flaws. Firstly, the first few villains were really bad. As in, sickly bad. As in, really sick. The first villain somehow had a twisted attachment to a talking doll(which he created), while the second, blond girl-boy twins, engage in extensive French kissing, complete with saliva and stuff in the animation, that completely throws the viewer off.

Many people also mentioned the bad quality of the animation. While some of the battle scenes, on recall, do seem rather crudely animated and somewhat static, the inconsistency is not to the extent of driving me to intolerable heights of irritation. Well, perhaps different people have different standards.

What is most crucial is the predicament that the makers of SnS put themselves into. With such a powerful and absorbing introduction, people's expectations have been driven way up and as such it is hard to live up to the expected standards and constantly impress. As I myself am not so quick to formulate first impressions, I find myself relatively satisfied with the progress of the plot, which is, in all fairness, logical and flowing, although not spectacular. Of course, many other people do not find it so and think of SnS as a great opportunity wasted. Personally, I feel that a possible improvement would be to delocalize the story, instead of having it constantly centered around Misaki City. While this achieves a clear focus, it greatly curtails the epic-ness of the plot and makes it hard to retain freshness, but I guess this a fault of the novel, not the anime.

Ah, Shakugan no Shana II, the sequel that came so close to making me give up halfway through.

One of the results of having such an adorable main character is producing an extreme bias in the viewer. Perhaps that is the reason why I completely, utterly, irrevocably despise the entire love triangle thingo and despise to the core shana's love-rival Yoshida Kazumi. Keeping this in mind, understanding the torture I experienced under the unrelenting onslaught of 10 episodes of love-triangle, slice-of-life, and school-days nonsense is not a very demanding task at all. Words cannot possible express the disgust I have at the love-triangle shit. Firstly, although I really hate to use this word(my classmates will understand why), it is so CONTRIVED. Like, please, what's the chances a random girl who happens to an arch-nemesis love rival happen to find the two protagonists together every single time? Its like, hey, we're on this ulu riverbank at midnight enjoying some nice scenery, and this random girl just happens to feel like walking her dog(at midnight), and happens to pass by the ulu riverbank. Wow.

Secondly, the SPEED of the love relationship is just SO SLOW. Imagine like a full 10 episodes devoted to character interaction and the entire prior season's worth of events to boot, and the love triangle does not budge a single centimeter. Furthermore, the empathy between Shana and Yuji at the end of season 1 seems to have been conveniently forgotten in favour of more love triangle (in)action. And seriously, disappointing cannot begin to describe the first 10 episodes. How incomprehensible is it to enter a prolonged mushy school-life arc when fans are expecting an action packed fast flowing sequence?

Thirdly, the exact PURPOSE of the love triangle is indeterminate. While the existence of Yoshida Kazumi as an instrument to contrast ordinary life/life with Guze no Tomogara and Flame Haze and whatnot is somewhat justified, the air-time given to love-triangle events and nonsense is definitely not. In other words, the love triangle exists for the sole purpose of having a love triangle. It does not lend any depth to the characters nor can it make character interaction any more intense and realistic.

Which leads in to my last point. Instead of making the characters more like-able, this damned love triangle creates the reverse effect of undermining the characters. "I won't lose to you", "Me neither", this predictable dialogue has manifested itself with slight differences in phrasing/punctuation/pitch/intensity at least 5 times in the character interactions between Shana and Yoshida Kazumi. So why, why are the anime-makers so stupid as to undermine the intelligence of Shana and make her look more childish than necessary?? Utterly incomprehensible. Furthermore, 30+ episodes of love-triangle lameness serves to severely undermine the emotional quotient of our nice male protagonist, Mr. Sakai Yuji, who remains blissfully unaware of the feelings of the two female rivals throughout 30+ episodes and even starts pimping a third girl.

However, I must say that the rest of Shakugan no Shana II makes up for the inadequacy of the above nonsense (indeed a monumental achievement). The battle scenes have improved further, with some great graphics and animation and more dynamism, especially the battle with Sabrac, the destructive blade. Overall plot was more than satisfactory, with all fragments of the storyline congregating and falling into place nicely at the revelation of the final episode.

Overall, I must say that Shakugan no Shana is a really imbalanced anime, with its strong points astonishingly strong and its weak points unimaginably weak. What makes me place this series in the upper ranks of the anime I have watched has really got to be Shana, though. What a thoroughly kick-ass girl!!

Side-note: Think I'll leave GITS to some time, as I don't imagine any person would be able to get through both reviews in a single post.

2008-06-29T12:26:00.002+08:00

Finally, after one month of torturous mugging, the dreaded CTs are over. Hm, that sounds wrong. Actually it is only one week of torturous mugging, and god knows where the rest of my june hols have flown. And yet, this break is doomed to be short-lived, what with the even more dreaded prelims looming but a few months away and people like Zhanming and our beloved Civics Tutor nagging about stupid electrochemistry tutorials and CT papers which can burn in hell for all I care. Nope, I didn't say that, it was my inner demon.

In spite of these gloomy premonitions, I must say that considerable effort have been put into de-stressing activities on my part, at least. Right after the conclusion of the physics CT paper, we were scheduled to go on a class learning journey to kusu island(guess who scheduled it), for which the aforementioned planner wickedly cajoled almost the entire class to go but didn't go himself, ironically. It was with resigned resignation that wentao and I desperately looked for outlets of entertainment while waiting for the hired bus to arrive, and found ourselves playing with wentao's magic cards which were rotting away in his locker, and after that basketball with a dusty non-round red and black "basketball"(if it still can be called that), which was rotting away in my locker.

3 hours, one bus ride, and one ferry/boat/raft/driftwood ride away, we found ourselves on a nice deserted island the size of perhaps two football fields. After the preliminary touring of the island, which had an interesting temple full of turtles and another interesting temple which was situated 170+(can't remember exactly) steps up on a hill, we found ourselves lounging on kusu island beach. Being an innovative bunch, we engaged in various entertaining activities such as wading into the shallows to find exotic marine debris(like seashells/crab shells/whatnot), walking on the precarious rock embankment which stretched about 10 metres into the shallows, neither of which I took part in(thankfully), or boring activities like lying on a canvas sheet(thoughtful planning on the part of the aforementioned planner), playing cards, and getting high on lollipops, chips, prawn crackers, raisins, nuts, melted chocolate frogs etc. After the chips and prawn crackers got demolished, though, many of us started to feel drowsy with the chips and prawn crackers being digested vigorously in our bellies. So, someone came up with the brilliant idea of playing captain's ball! (Yaming had thoughtfully brought his beach volleyball)

After an exciting and fun filled game with much comic relief(e.g. zhanming running after the ball(which bounced off a tree)and head-first into a tree, with the ball landing on his head subsequently), we watched the greatly-awaited sunset where the sun really looked liked a salted duck egg yolk hanging in the sky.

So finally, at 7.40pm, we took the ferry/boat/raft/driftwood back to the harbour. I managed to grab a precarious seat on the back of the ferry/boat/raft/driftwood, facing opposite the direction of travel, and it was with the cool sea breeze blowing through my hair and the company of classmates that I increasingly thought of the ferry/boat/raft/driftwood as less of a driftwood and more of a ferry, and that perhaps, just perhaps, this trip was not so bad scheduled after all...

2008-05-25T10:41:00.000+08:00

Let’s play a guessing game. Which sport involves a non-spherical ball, exotic-looking Velcro strips, and excessive rough-and-tumble?

That’s right, tag rugby. After many days of deliberation, I have yet to make up my mind whether this interesting game has been my nemesis or saviour. On the one hand, because of playing tag rugby on guess-what? Yes, the nice concrete parade square, of course, I sustained a knee injury that now looks like an unearthly yellowish purple blotch, the effect of various antiseptics. Also, even though Yiding commented that it was a great slippery slope, I maintain that playing tag rugby caused me to fall down, which caused my immune system to degen, which caused me to get infected with a particular nasty flu that effectively put me out of action for 3 days, and the aftereffects of which are still continuing to plague me. On the other hand, of course, the same nasty flu gave me the perfect reason to give the greatly feared General Paper CT2 a miss (and to play comp at home instead). Still, I’m glad that I won’t ever have to play tag rugby again.

With so much intensive action, I hardly noticed that the June hols have officially begun. Still, life is not going to be any less hectic for me, what with the coming A Tempo concert tomorrow, and SAT II coming up in two weeks. Both events have me rather worried, to be honest. For the former, I worry about my playing condition as I have skipped 3 consecutive band practices because of the greatly irritating flu, which is now thankfully almost eradicated and banished to (hopefully) some other dimension. I hope that I will have enough endurance to last through the whole concert, and more importantly, to play my parts properly, which may or may not have any major impact on the entire concert but is important to me personally after scamming so many people to buy the highly expensive concert ticket. For the latter, with only two weeks left, I still have not decided on which subjects to take, and how the hell I am going to study for it properly with no books or study material.

Now, let us turn back the pendulum to fill in more than one month of negligence.

The past month has been, as evidenced from my continued absence on the blog, very busy indeed. Just completed my external H3 final examination a few weeks ago, and I must admit that it has not been the most pleasing. I wasn’t able to do two questions, and know that I did one wrongly, while by rights I should have been able to do more. Still, I am hopeful for a distinction, which I really desire after all the effort that I have put into the course. As Nelson said though, it will be strange when we return next term, and suddenly not have to attend H3 lessons on every Monday and Thursday, as going to HCI/NJC twice every week has already become a routine for us. For an academic subject, I feel that this Numbers and Matrices is as fun as they can get, with all the interesting real life applications like cryptography, which the NUS module does not teach, and I do not regret taking it.

Besides that, I also went to some other concerts, like the Chinese Society performance, Chorale concert, and Chinese Orchestra concert, all of which were quite interesting. I really must applaud Shida again for his enthralling duo dizi performance. Also, the Chorale concert was rather interesting with all the funny chicken songs and cat songs and whatnot.

2008-04-18T21:49:00.002+08:00

Ha, I see that another two weeks have passed from when I last blogged. I blame this not on the lack of time but rather my laziness. Of course, by all logic, I should be VERY busy right now mugging my head off for my upcoming SAT and H3 maths tests.

The reality is a different story though. Lately, I find myself in an increasingly indulgent and laid back state of mind. For instance, we had the final physics spa session on skill A today. While I felt that I did fine for it, the reason is not because of hard work and effort but more rather a stroke of luck and some frantic last minute mugging. In fact, I had actually completely forgotten the existence of the physics spa just the night before it, until fortuitously kovan reminded me of it incidentally around 9pm.

Another piece of bad news hit me face-on with my resounding napfa failure. Not that I really did not expect it since in the first place I can at most scrape a silver and furthermore, I did not exercise much in the weeks leading up napfa, instead gouging on nice junk food like potato chips, ice cream, and oily chicken drumsticks/drumlets(the nice crispy ones in the school canteen). Despite knowing my chances of passing were dismal, I still can't help being shocked out of my magically drowsy and wandering state of mind when the fact that I hopped a pathetic 214 cm for my standing broad jump registered on my decomposing brain. With urgent desperation, I summoned all my strength for a second jump...and bravo, 214 again! Haiz...and I thought that just maybe I had a chance of stuffing potato chips, ice cream, and crispy drumlets into my mouth without feeling painful tinges of guilt.

So, what have I been doing at home if I had not been studying for SATs and H3 maths test and all my H2s? Besides eating potato chips, ice cream, and crispy chicken drumlets, that is. Well, I proudly admit that I have been watching more anime, tv, and stoning randomly on the comp. Got caught on Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex recently, a rather cool futuristic anime. As can be seen, this is another cool-sounding cryptic title that does not really reveal anything about the anime itself, and hence can be classified into the huge ranks of impressive sounding anime titles that does not tell you anything about the anime itself, which include the likes of "Fate/Stay Night", "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Elfen Lied"(this does not apply if you understand German, though). In fact though, as I watched the anime, I gradually begin to get an inkling of what the title signifies. Given the context of a futuristic society where most humans have had cybernetics implants like robotic arms, legs, eyes, and even brains, "Ghost" actually refers to a "soul", while "shell" refers to the robotic exterior of the bulk of people in the society. Cool, no?

2008-03-29T17:05:00.004+08:00

Haiz, life is indeed tough. Although CT1 is over, I don't feel as if I have gained any breathing space at all. First and foremost, I am going to get owned by the H3 maths test next week on matrices, which drive me completely crazy with all the tedious calculations.

And its not as if life is going to get any better after that. My second pathetic attempt at tackling the SAT reasoning test to gain a slightly more presentable grade shall come on May 3rd, which is barely more than a month from now. I really regret being not hardcore enough in preparing for my first attempt, which was rather disastrous.

A Tempo, the annual band concert which will be held at the Esplanade this year is also driving me crazy. Like everyone else, I am stuck with the rather difficult task of selling 5 tickets, priced at 21 dollars each, within the next 3 weeks. I also foresee more intensive band practices, as compared to the the rather slack practices we are having now, in the near future.

Not 2 weeks after the SAT test comes the final H3 maths exam of the year, which will probably determine whether I get that highly required distinction for my H3. While the fact that the external H3 will end by June hols is definitely a plus, the intensiveness of the lessons when squeezed into a short period of less than 6 months is certainly daunting.

Somehow, the imminent release of the CT1 results does not seem to worry me as much now as it did directly after the CTs. That may be simply because I worried so much that I'm bored of worrying and so I don't care now, or it may be because I just don't see much point in it anymore. After all, there is still CT2, prelims, and A levels. Adding to that, my parents don't seem to worry much about me now. In fact, they seem to have completely forgotten about the existence of this common test and did not ask me about how I did. Nor do I plan to tell them of my own accord, certainly. This situation is quite fine with me as I do not need to come up with excuses for any lousy grades.

I still remembered a time, a few years back, when my dad was still living with us, when he constantly bugged me about schoolwork and stuff and terrorized me with a periodic checking of the contents of my school bag and file. Even after going to secondary school, I was still getting bugged about school and stuff and constantly looked forward to whenever my parents went out so I could play comp behind their backs. Gradually, this situation changed and I got more and more freedom, until now my dad went to work in China and I can basically do anything I want since my mum doesn't really care. Now, I realised just how big the change is, with CT results coming back and no one bugging me about my grades, though maybe that's because I didn't bother telling my dad over the phone that there was such a test in the first place.

With this realisation, I could not help but wonder if this change is really to be welcomed. Is a situation where you just have to listen to other people and don't have to think for yourself better, or is a situation where you have to find your own motivation and make your own decisions better? Thinking about it, of course the latter is more appealing, but it is also much more troublesome. After all, a life in which the only thing you have to worry about is getting good grades in school does have its appeals. But I guess we all have to grow up sometime.

2008-03-12T22:50:00.002+08:00

It is funny how every time I come to this page, I get stuck for a long time thinking of how to start my newest post. Maybe it is the unconscious tendency to allow ideas to run free through my head for just a few moments longer, a reluctance to imprison these ideas within rigid words, which upon their taking shape, limit the flow of my ideas and solidify the structure of my thoughts. Then again, it is probably just me being clueless and blur.

Once again, I am amazed how quickly time passes. In the blink of an eye, it is already well into the middle of the one-week march holidays, or rather, mugging break. Aw, give me a break already! All that frantic mugging from January to March and now a mugging BREAK? Please...

However, attempts to escape from the dreary task of memorizing definitions, reading notes, and doing practice questions are futile with the imposing common test 1 looming just a few days ahead. However, I can't say that such attempts are completely futile for me, as my capacity for slacking is immeasurably huge. Despite thousands of warning signs pricking up and tiny voices whispering of horrible ramifications, I successfully managed to watch nice anime and read nice manga and play DotA to my heart's content. In fact, it is quite amazing how I manage to materialize in front of my good friend, the computer screen, every single day without fail.

Such a conversation will often take place inside my head late at night nowadays.
Mugger: Hey, its getting late. We should stop for today and get a good rest so that we can replenish our energy for tomorrow's mugging!
Slacker: Butbutbut...we haven't slacked today yet!! Let's go play comp!
Mugger: No, no, and no. Its getting late. We must sleep early and wake early!!
Slacker: If you say so lor...good night, mugger!
Mugger: Night night.
...
...
Mugger: Weird...what's this?
Mugger: HEY!! Isn't this the comp screen?? I thought we went to sleep?? You CHEATED!!!!
Slacker: :D

Anyway, I managed to watch the whole of Claymore, an anime series which Wentao, who happens to be the epitome of slackness, recommended. Turned out to be better than all expectations, and got me really hooked.

I won't go into the details of the plot as the simple expedient of paying wikipedia a visit will more than satisfy any twinge of curiosity. Suffice it to say that it is about chiobu warriors fighting horrendously horrendous monsters. So if you are expecting anything that has a theme of romance/deeper-meaning-in-life/comical jokes, sorry to disappoint. This is our good old sword and sorcery story. Actually, forget about the sorcery. This is our good old sword and maiden story. Scrap that. This is our good old maidens with swords(Duh, else it wont be called Claymore) story. If you like fighting and chiobus, this is the perfect anime for you.

The only minus part of Claymore is that it seems to contain a few hentai references. That would be putting it a bit too strongly, though. It is more like a few vaguely disturbing symbolisms here and there, and is far from sufficient to cause any major distraction. A lot of people will probably disagree with me on this though. I still maintain that it is a possible area of improvement though.

Anyway, to ease off my withdrawal symptoms after reaching the rather abrupt ending of the anime, I hungrily devoured the manga and got my hands some really nice songs sung by the voice actresses of some of the main characters in the anime. I especially like "Kioku"(Memory) by Clare's voice actress, "Zouo"(Hatred) by Ophelia's voice actress, "Genei"(Phantom) by Miria's voice actress, and "Henbou"(Transformation) by Priscilla's voice actress.

I shall end off this post now and wander off to imagine how badly I'm going die for CTs, having 4 days left to revise half of chem, all of physics, and all of econs. Haiz...

2008-02-14T20:34:00.002+08:00

I'm feeling very demoralized now. What with the newly received test scores for various subjects as well as my January SATs score, my self-confidence has just hit a record low. Got 20/25 for some simple free fraggish maths test, 12.5/25 for chem test, and unspeakably low for econs essay test. To top the list, I got 2160 for SATs while I aimed for something like 2300. I really hope that this losing streak will be ended here and now so that I don't get completely owned for my Maths H3 test. If I still can be completely owned for that, which I must say I put in a colossal amount of effort for, I can really go stuff my head in the toilet bowl...

Despite this influx of demoralizing results, I nevertheless feel rather slack and enervated. I actually skipped my H3 maths lesson today to watch the interhouse cybergaming tournament, even though BB already got owned. Actually wanted to go slightly late, but since the DotA finals got delayed and started at 4+. Then it was super exciting also, with MR's magnataur lina rogueknight qop luna vs BW's earthshaker treant viper zeus warlock. Even though MR probably has an overall higher skill level, BW's gay treant-earthshaker-warlock combo started to dominate from mid game, but due to the entrance of some mood-spoiling teacher who declaimed the termination of the competition in 5 min just at the climax of the match, the end result remains unknown and a pending draw was decided.

Also, MT's counterstrike team was really imba and completely dominated the other finalist, a BW team.

Anyway, I shall try to put a stop to my holiday mood after take 5 tmr and lan outing, haha!

2008-01-26T17:39:00.000+08:00

Zz, just got completely owned during SAT. After some frantic mugging the night before and on the train to ACJC, finally took the test with an entire mob of other people at the badminton hall in ACJC at around 9am today. As usual got some dumb RI kids wearing uniform and looking dumb, since everyone else was wearing home clothes.

Anyway, the test was mentally taxing to a very huge extent. 3 and three quarters hour of reading long english passages, answering random questions, writing essays, and doing elementary math is certainly not what you want to be doing on a picnic. I was actually feeling dizzy after the 6th or 7th section, and the last 3 sections were really a frightful ordeal. I was just completing the questions mechanically with my head swimming around. They should really try to increase the break between the sections or reduce the length of the paper. What's worse, I found out to my abject horror that I did a vocab question wrongly from some random discourse between my erstwhile fellow SAT takers, wentao and fangjin. GG now must treat yidong to a drink liao >< Not as if I really expected to get full marks though.

On the bright side, to use a hackneyed expression, I really feel as if a large weight has been lifted off my shoulders, as I no longer have to cram vocabulary into my cranium nor force myself to complete SAT practice papers. Which means I have more time to cram physics and chem and econs and maths stuff into my cranium. Yum. The intensive learning of interesting new words may also have improved my GP essay writing cos I now have more bombastic words to use! haha.

2008-01-01T14:45:00.000+08:00

Ah, the long-awaited first post of 2008. After much delightful merrymaking and fun, the two month long holiday, probably our last real holiday, has come to an eventful close.

I spent the last day of 2007 at the boon lay countdown, a.k.a senior citizens' countdown, since many of the planned activities were for small kids and senior citizens. Went to the boon lay community club with wentao in the afternoon, all ready to do our part as volunteers for the countdown, organized in part by boon lay youth club. Anyway, found that the community club were actually a stone's throw away from my old house. I was quite shocked to discover the changes that happened to my old neighbourhood, like the old public pool. I was saying something like, "Hey look, there's a nice swimming pool there!" Then discovered that the swimming pool has been razed and is now an empty field. My old house is also painted differently as compared to 5 years ago.

Anyway, after much strolling around and general lazing, since we were quite early and did not know what to do, we finally discovered that we were supposed to be in charge of a funfair booth from 7pm-9pm. Hmm...so we actually came 3 hours early ostensibly to do some random saigang(mostly blowing balloons and carrying barricades), which we found out were all taken care of by the bountiful numbers of boon lay youth club members and the hardcore enthu canoeists like kennedy, jrem, and michael. So after 2 hours of pointless wandering about, we found ourselves assigned to one of the two funfair booths. Basically, customers were supposed to throw a mini basketball at a mini hoop, the infamous magic hoop for New Boom Action(NBA). Anyway, the hoop turned out to be in a much dilapidated condition, the original hoop to all appearances busted and replaced with a wooden hoop with a pathetic diameter(means that basically there is a very small chance of scoring). So in the end, me, zhanming, and wentao were in charge of the booth, while ivan, another guy, and some girls were in charge of the other booth which had another retarded game(didn't bother finding out what it was).

The first 20 minutes basically involved zhanming bullying a small boy, by giving him as many shots at the hoop as possible. Well, expectedly the small boy turned out to be rather hopeless and zhanming started to suan him about his lousy skills at basketball. For example, he will say, "哎呀，你怎么那么烂的！看我来教你！" and promptly dunks the mini-ball from a distance of about 50cm away from the hoop. To which the small boy will retort indignantly and a comic argument will follow. It was entertainment for the boring hot afternoon, albeit poor at that...To pass the time and satisfy his hunger, wentao also bought one of those nice oily ramly burgers. To our shock, we witnessed the burger-chef pouring ample portions of barbecue, mayonnaise, and chilli sauce over the chicken patty. Later, while he was eating the burger, the sauce actually dripped out in large disgusting globules onto the burger box. -_-

Business only started to bustle in the evening, when we were starting to feel more entertained with kovan slacking around our booth waiting for his guitar performance at night and the timely arrival of junwei who came at around 7. By then, due to the large number of people and the attractiveness of the dumb activity of having 5 free throws at the hoop and a tiny chance to win 2-year old kids' toys like slinkies, bubble-blowers, and yoyos, we had a humongous queue and we found ourselves hard-pressed explaining the rules and picking up the errant balls. We were finally relieved of our duty at 9pm by the next shift people and went back to the community club to slack. After slacking for 2 hours or so, kovan finally summoned the energy to get off his bum and we walked around the by-now super crowded boon lay place and patronised some stalls for snacks and drink. Then we went to the boon lay youth club, which was a well furnished first floor apartment complete with sofa, tv set and a gym machine. so nice. After slacking there for a while, we went to the main stage to watch the countdown. There were actually some celebs like Kim Ng who hosted for the countdown at boon lay. So, the new year began with a bang in the form of some nice fireworks which were really really close to us!! Pieces of the firework actually rained down on us, and there were complaints of stuff getting into eyes. Finally, after a mad rush to the lakeside mrt station, we managed to catch a train, and all was well.

Home Alone

2007-12-17T10:17:00.000+08:00

Today is the fourth day of the third week that I have been alone at home. Wonderfully, I have been able to stay healthy and alive till now. But alas, all good things must come to an end, for an ailing sickness has struck me with all the power of a thunderbolt.

Indeed, I am wasting away on a stomachache. With symptoms of lasting flatulence and diarrhoea, I cannot help but feel pity for myself. The funny thing is that the possible sources of this illness are so numerous that I cannot even remember them all. Was it the yoghurt that I ate on the day of its expiry? Was the crackers that fell out of the pack some time ago and have been ever since stoning in my fridge? Or was it the somewhat rotten vegetables that I consumed a few days ago? I only know that I am now paying for the consequences of my irresponsible actions and am now stuck on a diet of nothing but porridge, bread, and more porridge.

But, this uninteresting fact aside, many interesting things have happened ever since the last I blogged. The holidays have indeed been an extremely relaxing time for me. Besides playing a lot of comp at home and watching nice animes like Fate/Stay night(my cool blogskin!!), basilisk or kouga ninja scrolls, as well as neon genesis evangelion which I am currently watching, I have also been going out with friends very often. A few weeks ago, I watched Beowulf, which was not very nice, but had a nice song. "Always, the hero comes home!" And soon after Enchanted, which was rather lame, but nevertheless quite nice. Just watched Golden Compass a few days ago as well, which was quite nice but rather short. I liked the fighting polar bears lolz.

Despite my waning health, I nevertheless determined to watch the JC Band Fest yesterday, pulling a dongz along as a companion, since there were so many ppl in band who was taking part in it, and I felt obliged as a fellow batch-mate to give my invaluable support in this event, even though I felt it was rather rip off at a stunning $11.80, which helped greatly in lightening my already emaciated purse. Anyway, it turned out to be rather nice, especially the performance put up by the honour band, which really turned out to be worthy of its name as they put up a repertoire of many a nice song that so astounded me and dongz since they had but a mere five days to practice it. Another interesting thing was that there turned out to be many "lookalikes" participating in this event. While we only caught sight of a piccolo player in the "Fennell" band who looked remarkably like a cheese, paul claimed that there was a girl who looked like Alastair and cheese himself claims that there was a guy who looked like Hong Jiang. lolz. Anyway, the participants all seemed rather high after the performance and kept "bursting into random songs" as dongz put it, on our way to find a place for supper. In the end though, the quest for supper was doomed as most of the eateries near the esplanade were closed, and while they decided in the end to go to Suntec city, I myself who felt a bit like fainting then because of the two meagre meals of porridge and bread that I had and my roiling stomach, chose not to accompany them and went home instead.

To conclude, I must say that the nicest movie I have watched this hols is.....STARDUST!!!! And the nicest anime I have watched is..........FATE/STAY NIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Haha!!! Heck wentao and his philosophical(NGE) and mushy(Chobits) inclinations.

2007-11-13T22:51:00.000+08:00

Hmm, more things have been happening in the hols than I have expected, and I am not getting as much time as I imagined to hardcore maple story. At an average of 1 level a day, my chances of getting a third job advancement by the end of december grows very slim indeed. Haha, but its just for fun anyway. Don't want to get hooked on any game.

Went to play basketball at sembawang as usual on saturday, and something interesting happened! We got caught by the police for breaking the law! Lol! ggxx. Because the court always lights out at around 10pm, den we not shuang so started to play a game of free throws. Like take turns to free throw, den everyone start with 10 lives, and if one guy scores, the next guy has to score, or else he will lose a life. Den if the next guy scores, the guy after him will lose 2 lives if he doesn't score. Damn fun cos it was in the dark and we can only see an outline of the basketball hoop. That does not hinder wuyang who was being super on form from pwning like crazy, and still having 10 lives even after a rongbing and yiding got defeated. But after having a rongbing who was in front of me being a nice meat shield for like 10 rounds or so, I finally got the feeling and started scoring every single ball, finishing off a yiding who was unlucky enough to be behind me. But alas, our exciting game ended abruptly with the appearance of two policemen who demanded that we stop playing since its lights out and asked for our names :(

Just went to watch Stardust with jords and hyrum just now. Supposed to have more 2k people but haiz, in the end only got us 3 lol, quite gay. Anyway, the movie proved to be not disappointing at all, indeed "refreshing", as a friend says. While if it was serious, the love story will really be corny, the tone was lighthearted and just nice so that the inconsistencies in the plot can be completely disregarded (like how Mr. Bean doesn't make sense like 50% of the time but people don't give a shit). And there were people zapping each other with nice magical stuffs :D Always liked that. Gandalf vs. Balrog is still one of my favourites. And Yoda vs. Palpy. Zapzap.

Need to start mugging soon or I'll forget everything that I've learned this year. Believe me, its all short term remembering for me. Thats why I might not know anything people ask me about tutorials and stuff but can still do tests properly. Also need to start exercising or else my fats will doom me to two extra months of NS. Haiz, holiday is hardly a breeze too. Sniff.

Ahhh!

2007-11-08T21:45:00.000+08:00

Haiz, a long time of no blogging and I find myself at a loss of what to write.

The holidays were not what I expected, after all. While we no longer have to go to school, I find my days cluttered with other activities such as my CCA, personal CIP, and other random stuff, like chalet and fixing my comp. Finally managed to procure a sound system from the creative shop at plaza sing today at a rather exorbitant price. The nice thing is that my mum can get MOE to subsidise the full cost of the gadget. Nice policy :)

Class chalet turned out to be fulfilled and I find myself pleasantly surprised that our entire class turned up for it. It really goes to show that despite whatever difficulties that we have faced throughout the year, we still remain bonded as a class. After many fun activities such as helping out with the barbecue, eating barbecue stuff, playing mahjong, playing magic cards with wentao, watching random movies, and playing ps games, however, I was greatly tired and could not even keep awake on the train ride home. Even after recharging for 3 hours after I got home, the aftereffects of not sleeping for an entire night affected the following few days.

Oh, just read a nice series, the high druid of shannara, that I borrowed partially from kennedy and partially from a library. Somewhat surprised that so many unlikely people have read the book as well, like kennedy himself and hanyu. I really thought that not many people liked reading this type of books, I myself first knowing of the shannara series through random searching in the RI library. As compared to all the classics and stuff, fantasy books are really page turners, and despite popular opinion, many of these books actually are worth reading and are not simply "junk".

2007-10-18T21:45:00.000+08:00

不能说的秘密...

Just watched this movie yesterday after borrowing it from ben a few days ago. It was one of the few movies that almost brought me to the verge of tears. After seeing how the main actress being misunderstood and bullied at home and how in the end, she so unluckily saw all the things that make her misunderstand the main actor(Jay Chou), den become very very sad and write some sad stuff on the classroom, all by herself, and 20 years later the main actor saw the writing and replied by writing frantically on the desk, but she couldn't see. And den she just died, probably because of a broken heart, made me feel so sad, even though this might be a bit cliche. All the love stories with the tyco misunderstandings and stuff.

And then I called Dehui on the phone to talk a bit about the movie, and I realise that he is right to say that as Jay was directing and acting in the movie and did not have much experience for both aspects, the acting and shooting part were actually not greatly refined. But then the storyline for the movie is really quite nice and the first part where they were happy and enjoying their time together, was really nice and built up the atmosphere perfectly for the tragedy which was to follow. As I know some music myself too, I enjoyed the musical stuffs also, just thought that it was quite weird that the main actor likes to listen to some damn old-fashioned song, sort of reminding me of Wentao.

Haiz...anyway, I feel that this kind of mutual love and understanding and feeling between two people, the uniting of two people, is really very enviable. The strength and joy coming from such a relationship has the power to overcome all sorrow and despair. But alas so rare are these cases, and woe for all those pairs who were meant to be together but did not have the luck to meet each other, and end up all their days never ever experiencing the feeling to love, and to be loved in return.

A really nice ideal from the movie -- True love transcends time...(Hope I don't sound very idealistic)

2007-10-08T09:35:00.000+08:00

Another period of great excitement has passed, and I realise to my growing horror that the date of OP and Chinese Os' are looming ever closer, without me haven't done much towards the preparation of either.

However, the events of the post-promo period are quite fun and meaningful. While others may think contrary, I think that getting the afternoon slot for befrienders is quite lucky. I mean, I wouldn't want to have signed up for something that in the end I don't get to do much else besides pure saikang. We also had much fun in preparing for the band performance, especially while stoning around the booth and playing the piano and comp in the MEP room.

We did have a rather embarrassing experience in the MEP room tho. During the performance dry run, when we were putting instruments in the MEP room, wench noticed some light coming out of a door, and tried to open the door. Being curious, some of us also went to try to open the door, and attracted the attention of some teacher guy, who started to AP, but we acted like nothing happened and managed to slip out quietly.

Anyway, being a befriender is quite fun as we got to bring visitors around the school and introduce interesting stuffs, and also doing the befriender's dance, which is quite hard for clumsy people like me but fun nevertheless, even though i had to dance with Zhan Ming for one of the dances, but luckily managed to avoid having my toes destroyed and arms dislocated.

Been playing quite a lot of computer lately too, mostly DotA and Lunia, which is a nice mmorpg that unfortunately some people can't play because either banned IP or Fatal Errors. Also played some O2Jam but got pwned rather badly by Ziluo who is level 27. After one rather pwnaged standard warcraft game with wentao yesterday, I realised how much I've deproved and this merely strengthens my resolution to stay away from standard games from now on, which originated with my great disappointment in the unluckiness of my great idol Grubby. Haiz...

2007-09-28T19:59:00.000+08:00

Sometimes, when some things happen, an urgent need arises to write about it. I feel that I have procrastinated enough.

This blog post is dedicated to Robert Jordan, one of my favourite fantasy writers of all time. When I remember the countless exciting nights and magical hours spent in the world of the "Wheel of Time", journeying through various spectucular lands and adventuring with the Dragon Reborn, I feel a great sense of gratitude to the author, R. Jordan. Even though that is but a pseudonym, in my heart, I will forever only know the author who has provided me solace through the lonely nights, the droll days, and the sleepless hours as Robert Jordan.

The feeling of reading a good fantasy is like the ultimate luxury for the soul, is like drinking from a deep magical well that washes away all the hard realities of everyday life. And a good fantasy writer is indeed hard to come by, the discovery of a rare brilliant author amidst the heap of junk in libraries like the finding of some coverted treasure. All good things must indeed come to an end though. The fantastic journey that lasted on and off throughout a series of 11 wonderful books finally coming to tragic close with the death of this great author. How ironic that the next book is to be the last, the magnificent end to a magnificent series. Yet fickle fate has always played pranks on Man, and will continue to do so. Even though, of course, the book will be finished, it will never be the same as that written by the original author.

"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose.... The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning."

And a great beginning you have given me. A wondrous beginning into a realm of fantasy. Thank you, Robert.

2007-09-16T22:59:00.000+08:00

It is quite demoralizing to log into msn every time now and only see all the usual slackers/afkers online. Although I have tried to control myself, I just cannot completely put a leash on some of my desires. While I imagined mugging from 10 to 10 this weekend, in actuality I just kept putting it off and started to play comp whenever my mum went out. Well, I did prevent myself from playing DotA, but that did not stop me from watching DotA replays, and reading Dgrayman manga, which is super exciting.

Effectively I ended up mugging for about 8-10 hours in total for the entire weekend and spent the rest of the time sleeping/watching DotA replay/reading manga/stoning/playing bball. Felt quite frustrated yesterday because I went to Sembawang to play bball with the usual ppl and ended up there half an hour early because of miscommunication. I was thinking of how I could have polished off the maths 2006 promo practice paper every minute of that half an hour...and I realise that whenever I myself am slacking, I will never blame myself for taking up my precious mugging time, and whenever something else hinders me when I finally want to mug, I get super frustrated. It is so hard to be selfless...

Anyway, I am really damn sick of seeing the same AP 7-11 shopkeeper woman every time we go the sun plaza 7-11 to buy the habitual super big gulp. Last time, she attitude when we delayed a bit at the counter while talking about how we were going to fail promos. Now, she attitude when we forgot to pay the money because this idiotic rongbing go and walk out when we thought he paid the money cos our hands were all full. Lol.

2007-09-10T23:29:00.000+08:00

"This innocence, is brilliant
I hope that it will stay
This moment, is perfect
Please don't go away"

I think I can truly experience this feeling now. There is so much mirth and laughter in my life right now, I wonder if it will stay. Haha, but I guess the mirth was at Rong Bing's expense as we kept making fun of him and his "Curry-af" and "We are doomed to win" blunders.

"Hey I'm damn hungry now, let's go buy a curry-af!" "....er, whats a curry-af?"

*RB haxes two imba chops while bballing* "Hmm, I think we're doomed to win!"

Ai but damn funny lar, important thing is that he doesn't really mind.

Haish, I think that people should relax more as promos are not that important, unless they have the aim of getting on 5 Dean's Lists, which will probably require a prodigious amount of mugging. Don't mug so much and frown and get gloomy lar, just be happy lol! After all, a lot of ppl say the time at school is the best part of life, so if we don't enjoy ourselves now, there might not be another opportunity.

2007-09-01T23:38:00.000+08:00

It is yet another transition period. After another term of hustle and bustle, the time has arrived for another long and dreary period of anticipation and frantic mugging. I can almost feel the excitement and nervousness tingling in the very air, but however hard I try, I cannot feel any drive/motivation in myself.

It seems that life is nothing more than a long expanse of significant events and transition periods. What is worse is that the realisation of this fact came at a time where it is no longer possible to enjoy the longest transition period, that of birth to JC. The only "significant event" within this period is the PSLE, which did not really require the entire primary school time to study for.

Nevertheless, the continuous barrage of minor term tests and common tests have maliciously disguised themselves as "significant events" and made this nice and smooth transition period no less daunting and stressful than it is now. Burdened with the weight of expectations and the prospect of an endless array of assessments, we trudge mindlessly into the distant future.

The reason behind the appearance of time passing quickly is precisely the consequence of the above scenario. BECAUSE we move from significant event to significant event, the actual time between these significant events move past with hardly a notice. Assume that I have spa tomorrow and PW report due 3 days later. From now to 3 days later, I hardly REGISTER the passing of time, being so preoccupied with these daunting tasks. Hence the bitter feelings of nolstalgy when so often we look back and find that our past is merely a faded concoction of vague and blurred sensations and dim memories.

"Slow down, we're going too fast!" A very good statement from some past commonwealth essay, I feel. Like Nietzsch says, we must often stop and reflect on where we stand currently. Past, present, future. The weaving of a perfect life story does NOT necessarily to follow the route that was SET OUT for one. Hence we should always ponder whether what we are doing currently is what we WANT to do. Maybe the best marks is not truly the best path of action. A mix of good marks and maximising what limited time we have might probably work better. Of course, if you're some workaholic who don't mind spending your entire time mugging towards the ultimate good 'future', don't be disappointed when you don't have your ideal future or if you had your ideal future but find that your entire past has been nothing but a barren expanse of meeting deadlines and mugging schedules.

Finished rambling. Hope I can find my motivation soon.

2007-08-18T20:02:00.000+08:00

35 is a number of great significance to me.

It is the number of mosquito bites on me, discounting those on my neck. The aftermath of the class adventure camp feels almost the same as that of OBS. Bone weariness, lethargy, made worse by the fact that I am unable to sleep properly, tormented by the sheer number of mosquito bites which made my legs, each with more than 10 mosquito bites apiece, feel like two giant mosquito bites. In the words of Zhan Ming, who was tormented with not only mosquito bites but ant bites as well, due to the thoughtfulness, or lack thereof, of some girls who left a rubbish dump next to the bashar at night, the mosquito bites on my leg looks like a "constellation".

Anyway, regardless of whatever I have put down on the reflection sheet, or sheets, since I helped Jing Xiong to do his as well, I feel that I have gleaned much experience from this CAC. However stupid the 3 core objectives that we have come up with may seem, namely having fun, getting to know each other better, and getting to learn stuff we never expected, the objective of getting to know each other better has certainly been achieved for me. I guess I really did not appreciate some of the invisible undercurrents and general sentiments in the class until now, perhaps due to the fact that I have always been rather immersed in my own world and never much bothered to open an observing eye to matters.

The task at hand to describe the detailed happenings of the camp itself seems so incredibly mundane and immaterial to me, as such a narration while interesting, made more so by my perhaps not masterful but unique use of language, would only suffice to describe the very very outermost layer of our shared experience. Indeed, I found it rather difficult, when asked today about the CAC, to say anything other than me having had my fair share of mosquito bites and mud.

Despite that, I shall nevertheless go on to recount the happenings. Thursday, after quite a boring start of introduction and campcraft and boring organisational details, we finally boarded the nice yellow bus and started on the first leg of our journey into the unknown. A bout of exciting bridge games later, we have arrived at Changi and made our way to the renowned hawker centre where we had a nice lunch of nasi lemak and said our goodbyes to civilisation. The only interesting thing between the scrumptious meal comprising rice, delicious fried chicken wing, anchovy, chilli, egg, cucumber, ice milo, and goreng pisang, which probably did its fair share in contributing to my expanding waistline; and the arrival at P.Ubin was that someone (hemhem) in our class walked into the girls' toilet at the harbour by mistake, to the delight and merriment of us rowdy boys, who started to make rather sick comments.

The jolly island itself on first impression seemed no different than when it was two years younger, containing its fair share of ants, mosquitoes, thousands of trees, grass, mangy dogs, birds, birdshit, mud, water, and dilapidated buildings. The next scene of interest made its entry upon our arrival at the visitor centre of two animals of a class that me and the godly god have drawn extensively during some trivial lectures. Indeed, they were birds. However, these birds are rather unique. They were Hornbills. That is to say, they were colourful largish looking feathered creatures with gigantic bills that I thought were some painting, myself being more engaged in an exercise of balancing on a rock, until they flew away, their peaceful natures troubled by the excited chatter that arose from our class. But at least I'm not as bad as Hanson, who exclaimed "Eh Hornbill!!", when some cranes flew past later, and later said that they all look the same anyway.

Finally, we settled down to build up our tents, and I'm glad to say that I did my fair share of lugging heavy rocks around and helping to secure the ground sheets to afore mentioned rocks. With the tents nicely erect, our great "Lead-me" members started to direct us to various locations(all of which I have visited before during OBS since I was land-ex). I must really commend the leadme members as they navigated really well and set a good pace for everyone to follow. The third interesting thing that happened reared its head during the trek. While climbing the hill to catch a sight of the quarry from a birds' eye view, we started to mimick the cries of Warcraft III units and DotA heroes, like "The pact is sealed", "I go unseen", and "Time to go!" However, this was only the first part of the newest fad. The best was yet to be.

At a few hours to dusk, we journeyed to the neighbouring village and the feedme members crowded themselves in the tiny provision shops and discussed what to procure for our dinner. Ironically, this rather impromptu dinner is going to be the class dinner with the greatest attendance up to now, with only two members of the class absent. Anyway, many of us rested our weary legs and sipped at small coconuts while waiting for the feedme members to finish buying the food. About an hour later, I found myself admiring the manliness of class members like Hanson, Samuel, and Yaming who took turns soloing the gigantic and completely full jerry can back to our camp. Hanson was really imba, lugging the jerry can alternately with both hands for like a full 100 metres or so.

It turned out that the class dinner, which I also helped to supervise, was quite satisfactory, comprising 20+ packs of maggi mee, canned sardines(tastes superb with crackers), canned curry pork, canned luncheon meat, canned mushrooms, canned sausages and canned minced pork. However, heavy winds started to blow with the threat of a thunderstorm halfway, forcing us to use our great mojo and sing, dance, and look stupid with 3 people standing a row wearing a poncho to prevent the fire from blowing out, and eventually force the Powers above to finally be magnanimous and spare us from a heavy rain(means that it still rained, but lightly). Anyway after that, we retreated into our tents and I started to play bridge which turned into asshole daidi which turned into texas hold'em with pushup as bets which turned into poker with truth-or-dare. However, this truth-and-dare session turned out to be rather disastrous, as our dear friend Junwei, who simply had 0 luck with cards, kenna the truth-or-dare, in other words, truth-or-truth, almost 100% of the time. I didn't know people were so good at propagating gossip and asking evil questions until now, tho...

Next, we went for an "extraordinary" Night-walk which turned out to be actually a reflecting and emo-ing session. I got to emo with Lau Fun, who told me a lot of things which I will decline to mention here. Aha. Interesting thing four. Stray dog ran away with wentao's wet and smelly socks during the Night walk, as he left them at the camp, and they were discovered next morning in the grass. Well, needless to say, we continued with the poker, which evolved into a "I-did-not" session, where wentao confessed that out of all the people in class, he would prefer to shag Kovan, which Kovan, who had infiltrated the girls' tent (I wonder do what), overheard, and went nuts.

Finally, we retired for a restless nights of sleep plagued by 20000000 mosquitoes. Next morning, we ate breakfast and started to trek to Chek Jawa. Aha. NOW is the interesting DotA sounds. We all erupted into laughter when Wendi mimicked the death prophet to say, "Haaaaaaaiiiii!!! You Brought me BAAACCCCKK??!!" in a really similar way. And we took turns saying, "Warriors of the Night, ASSEMBLE!! RROOOAAARR!", and " Whhhyyyy have you summoned me??", and "I come from the darkness of the pit!!" and everyone got really high. Lol. Chek Jawa turned out to be nothing more than an interesting stretch of beach with a nice jetty. 6th interesting thing. Hanson spit into a shoal of fish, trying to get them to think it is food and eat it. Sadly, the fish was too smart and didn't do that. After that we climbed some tall wooden tower and enjoyed the scenery there, but it started raining really heavily after a while and it sort of became a leaning tower of Pisa, so we came down.

After the long trek back, we finally went back to Singapore, ate another nice lunch at Changi, had another few rounds of bridge on the bus, and came back to school. Nice.

2007-08-09T14:31:00.000+08:00

Yay BB won! Too bad I wasn't there to cheer with everyone else, as we left after playing the national anthem, and were too lazy to walk back to the celebration after packing up our instruments.

Anyway, I think that this year was really different, almost everyone was doing their part to help the house, not like the lacklustre attitude and heck-care mentality in Buckley. And the BB councillors really rock too! Working so hard to organise the IHC events and getting people to go there, and turning up themselves to cheer for the competitors.

Overall, I think that the days leading up to N-day celebrations and the celebrations itself were really fun. Although we had to stay back for rehearsals and lug our instruments back and forth between RI and RJ, the time spent together and the late dinner plus chitchats really made the sweat and wasted energy worth it. Also, the school really did a fine job in providing us with all the nice food and the line-up of events during the celebrations itself. Me and Hong Jiang koped 3 cans of coke light apiece and 10 satays, and even managed to attempt some record-breaking during our limited break. I could almost break the speed-typing national pledge record, if not for having to use a weirdos labtop keyboard and making a few dumb typos. We had no luck at the weighing 42 grams of beans station, even though Hong Jiang got 41 grams, since some imbally tyco nub got 42.02 grams...

After we got totally numb and uncomfortable after being forced to stand through 1 hour of the formal celebration and carrying our instruments rigidly, we were finally allowed to leave at the start of the laser show, and made our escape to the varese room in RI. Being too tired to trudge back to the celebration, some of us started to play Texas Holdem Poker using pushups as bets, suggested by the dumbz Chester. I still can't believe that I got tricked by Chester to fold after he confidently raised the bet to 30 pushups based on a rubbish hand, and was embarrassingly forced to execute my punishment, while the others laughed at me for having a "poker face". Zz.

That was not to be the last of the excitement, fortunately. After a restless sleep, I got up in the morning to help organise the class barbecue, calling about half the people in the class to bring any fun games they can think of. After stuffing half a oily tousah muffin into my mouth, I chionged off to go for class+crashers lanning. Due to some communication errors, we ended with 8 class ppl + 4 crashers, which means that we cannot play a dota game successfully!!! :(

However, we still managed to have fun, playing pudge wars at first, which Jing Xiong owned. after tt we played some CS, by which time all the late-comers arrived. After tt we split into two dota games of 3v3. I was playing with Jing Xiong and Dehui vs Wentao, Wendi, and Kovan. Anyway we won after quite a long and rather sianz fight cos I keep getting owned, being not tt adept with holy knight. In the end we won cos Jing Xiong farmed somewhere and got super imba items with his treant protector. After tt we played some CS with me and kovan vs jing and wentao and dehui on a toilet map, and we sort of owned cos kovan is damn imba, and i keep shotgunning wentao and kill him in one hit. Haha, funny thing is tt got a lot of times everyone die except dehui, whose display name was tanasik, and kovan. Den everytime liddat dehui get killed by kovan. Once I died, den said "ahh shit I died!" Den realised tt only have dehui and kovan surviving. Seeing tt, wentao, who was also dead, said, "Ah dun worry, kovan will make short work of tanasik." 2 seconds later, bangbangbambangbam, kovan (shoot-icon) tanasik, game over...

After tt, wendi kovan yiding and rongbing had to go, so we finally got to play a proper 4v4 dota. Anyway my team still got pwned because they had imba pushing abilities, with jing using dark seer's wall of illusion thingy and wentao spamming illuminate with keeper + a damn lot of priests. But I managed to get Godlike with necrolyte so still not bad lar.

Finally, we went to kennedy's house, which was quite fun as I managed to play some magic, watch most of "Meet the Fockers", which was damn retarded and funny, and play some lame basketball in kennedy's basketball court, which had a super short hoop and super small backboard. Den the barbecue itself was quite fun too, as got imba cooks like lau fun and jing xiong and zhan ming managing the barbecue pit while the rest of us koped food. Mr. Se came also and even played some bridge with us. And at the end Cheryl brought her big Collie dog "Lucky" as well, who was super well-behaved and nice.

2007-08-01T21:33:00.001+08:00

Haiz...Life seems to be only getting worse for me. I don't know whether it is my innate beauty or my stalwart refusal to allow them to poke my butt, but Yiding; yes, that most odious and despicable antagonist, and Shuotian, who was a far greater pervert than I had previously conceived(that makes him a super big pervert, nearing the Ted Bundy level), harrassed me throughout the entire journey home after band. The agony it caused to my delicate temperament and even more delicate belly and sides could scarce be comprehensible. What's worse, Yiding tried to poke my butt on a super crowded MRT train, and that's not possible unless he edge his rather rotund and gargantuan bulk uncomfortably close to me. Of course, my brilliantly improvised defense which constituted of my own bag and my trusty file helped to ward off their advances.

Anyway, I'm feeling rather tired because today was a long day, and I exhausted a large supply of energy and inspiration producing some nice masterpieces of our favourite DotA heroes during maths and physics lecture, both of which happened to be rather boring and useless. Anyway, I really could not understand why people scorned and laughed at my beautiful drawings, which some genius said looked like "primary school drawings". Hmph. Furthermore, after eating quite a nice lunch of spaghetti which has virtually been drowned in two ladlefuls of sauce, along with a delicious piece of baked fish and not so delicious beef burger in RI with wentao and Zhan Ming, I was feeling rather bloated. What made that so devastatingly devastating to my fragile constitution was that I played basketball after that with Jordan. Of course, we only played a while and not really seriously, but it was still quite strenuous, especially in school U cos we lazy to change(Shhh!).

After that we had 2 hours of super boring H3 maths...actually, everything seems pretty boring to me right now, don't know why. I think my GP teacher was correct to say that we are being rather frisky of late. I blame my own "friskiness"(of course, most of my classmates know that I have never been really interested in GP lessons), upon SCDWS, or Severe Chronic DotA Withdrawal Syndrome. It must really have been a mistake to go lanning with my classmates + Yiding(My, how he seems to be everywhere), on Monday, as it managed to reignite my interest in DotA without helping to quench it single bit. This is partly due to the fact that I got pretty badly owned; well, maybe it was my team's fault but that's of no consequence, as there is no "i" in "Team".

And then there was band of course, which isn't exactly tiring, but as they say, 'tis the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

So, night found me reading a Jay Chou book titled "The beauty of D Major", instead of mugging for my all-important chem spa tomorrow(note the sarcasm). Reading through the informative book on my only male singer idol, I cannot fail to notice how human even Jay really was, and how he was a single child and was forced to take piano lessons from young, just like me. I still remember, 3 years ago, how we were still mocking Jay Chou and people who liked Jay Chou when he just started becoming famous. A cacophony of laughter mocking his looks and his singing and shit. Actually, I didn't even hear a single song he sang then, I was just following the crowd. Turns out that we had to swallow our laughter as each new album sold better than the previous, and the previously controversial R&B style rapper turned into one of the greatest pop star in chinese history, and that is not exaggerating. I think what really makes Jay outstanding is his personality and his uniqueness, and his ability to PRESERVE that uniqueness and not be affected by other people's criticism. Sometimes it is good to follow the crowd, but weren't we who followed the crowd and cast doubt on Jay's success proven to be wrong in the end? Even more importantly, he is also modest of his accomplishment and also really filial to his parents and grandparents. It really goes to show that personality, not looks, is what shines at the end of the day.

Anyway, heres a phrase to end off my long post! :) "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?

2007-07-28T14:29:00.000+08:00

Quite a lot of things have happened recently, one of which is the latest Harry Potter craze, following the release of the ultimate volume in the series, Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows.

I must say, the days at school following the official release of the book proved to be a great test of my patience. The first great source of irritation came in the form of random inconsiderate people being unable to keep their mouths shut regarding the contents of the book. Although I tried my utmost to avoid the entire topic for fear of reminding said people that they have the power to ruin my anticipated savouring of the book, my efforts proved to be futile, as once again, the great antagonist, Yiding, chased me around the entire Popular bookstore in J8 shouting spoilers at me while I ran around covering my ears. Nevertheless, I still got spoiled in the end. And even if I didn't get spoiled by Yiding, I'll still get spoiled in the end by other random people...Haiz.

The second source of irritation came in the form of a certain self proclaimed god who could not bear to witness the sight of a peace-loving person keeping to himself reading a book which he went to great lengths to acquire. Hence, by dint of a slightly unhinged mental composition and an unusually large mouth, he started to practice his oratory skills 2 inches from my ear whenever I flip open my borrowed Harry Potter book and attempt to read it.

However, I was compensated by the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie that I watched yesterday with some classmates. It was quite enjoyable, although the movie itself was very short and condensed, and missed out quite a few important parts like Dumbledore animating the statue to block Voldemort's "avada kedavra" spells. But the duel between them was still super cool, like Voldemort's thousands of pieces of glass and fire snake and Dumbledore's watery ball. Then we went to eat a very late dinner at Mos Burger and Wendi told me about the IHC badminton, which sounds so interesting that I regretted attending H3 maths lecture that day instead of watching the badminton.

2007-07-05T20:10:00.000+08:00

Dongz was being spastic again today.

On the way home on the train with me and Rong Bing, he was laughing pervertedly nonstop. It just started for no reason halfway through a game of truth or dare. After goading each other to admit that he was not a bachelor and not evoking much of a response, we were giving the "truth" questions an immensely narrow boundary, like, "Which girl do you like most in your class? Not including yourself or your teachers." Well, it was getting nowhere anyway since we all avoided the question somehow. And then Rong Bing suddenly started talking about his eventful India trip(the one where he had diarrhoea every single day), and how one of the girls who went was rather nice and that he visited her room every night. Yes, that sounds wrong. And it also sparked off the intrinsic(GP word!!) horniness in Dongz. Even though Rong Bing cleared up the slight blunder by explaining that it was nightly meetings to discuss the CIP, Dongz could not help laughing his ass off and conjuring up erotic images of Rong Bing at action...

When we asked later, when he was slightly less delirious, Dongz explained that he suddenly thought of how a fat Indian man who was drooling over a poster of Pamela Anderson humped Borat in one of the scenes of "Borat", the movie. And we finally saw off a sniggering and probably rather aroused Dongz at Khatib and helped ourselves to some well-deserved silent reading.

However, given the intensive basketball ordeal earlier this afternoon, Dongz could not be blamed for his slight mental disorder. Playing with rather gigantic people like Lijian and Nigel dominating the inside and people like Ngiamz dominating the outside really does not add a comfortable feeling to the game. But I must say it was really quite fun watching Ngiam's polished manoeuvres and sheer power and Lijian's astounding accuracy. Gives me that much motivation to improve my game.

Anyway, time for brief mention of my CT results. Reasonable, I think. 55/65 for maths, 56/80 for chem, 65.5/100 for GP. Econs and physics donno yet, except for physics mcq which sucked. Happy mugging everyone! Don't slack off before promos!

2007-06-18T22:01:00.000+08:00

I came back from China yesterday on thair air, changed planes at Bangkok. Found myself wondering about jordan's thai trip when at the Bangkok airport, after seeing all the other Singaporean families around.

Anyway, I guess it was quite a good trip, considering that it was only 10 days and my parents were trying to furnish the new apartment they bought while having as much fun as possible too. The thing I appreciate most while in Chengdu is the weather. Early summer air and temperature did well to cure me of the insufferable sneezing fits and near-permanent sweating in Singapore. However, good food and good scenery did well to cover up such trivial matters like the weather. Long anticipated is the sensation of the famous "川菜", or Szechuan cuisine, on my taste buds. Indeed, it did not fail to disappoint, except that a lot of the food, like deep fried crispy pork bits and tapioca-flour chunks in spicy sauce, or even the more common sweet and sour pork, were sprinkled generously with "花椒",a detestable spice which produces the infamous numbing sensation, or "麻", and also generally completely submerged in a pool of oil.

Even though the food, which expanded my normally modest appetite to such an extent that I was wolfing down four bowls of rice on some occasions, is commendable, the even more important thing was the sightseeing. After getting more or less accustomed to Chengdu food and city life, we went on a four-day tour to "九寨沟", or nine-villages-valley. Indeed, it had proved to be one of the best trips in my life, in a more "Nature" aspect. It is hard to describe in words the beauty of the mountain lakes, streams, and waterfalls that decorated the forested expanse of mountain highlands. The lakes ranged from small to big in an entire spectrum of colours that is at once unexpected and striking. The shallower and smaller lakes were generally of a brilliant emerald hue while the deeper ones were blue, just like the sea. All of them have special and rather exaggerated names, for example the "five-colour-sea" or "五花海", which was named so because of its alternating stripes of deep blue and blue-brown, which gave it the appearance of a peacock's feathers. If not for the crowds that literally swarmed the tourist attractions, it would have been a totally wondrous experience.

After the tour, we also visited the panda base in Chengdu, which was of course full of pandas. The first panda we saw was an adult panda who was lazing around eating bamboos inside its enclosure. Don't get me wrong, these "enclosures" are not the pathetic small spaces we see in a zoo, but are as big as small mansions. The giant panda is indeed the national animal of China and invaluable. And they are really really cute!! We watched two panda toddlers jostling around for like the whole of an hour, it was so hilarious. Just seeing them makes you want to hug them, the fuzzy creatures.

But, as the chinese proverb goes, "天下无不散的宴席". All good things must come to an end. Yes, it is time to mug now.

2007-05-21T21:53:00.000+08:00

Hai I can't believe it. I failed napfa effectively by 2cm. I even managed to pass the stupid chinups, then standing broad jump just fail by that puny 2cm, which is barely a hop. Maybe its better off this way, as I will have the motivation to train during the holidays and not just laze around and gain fats.

Anyway, today was a rather lousy day. Just slept at 11.30 yesterday doing random tutorials, then had to tahan 4 periods of physics tutorial today. First pw lesson kenna replaced by physics, next was another physics slot, then after lunch 2 more physics makeup. Super gay lar. We did so much circular motion that I think my brain is spinning around in tiny circles inside my cranium now. After that unparalleled dose of sleep-medicine, I had half an hour to rest before attempting the napfa retest. Was just starting to have some sweet dreams at a random canteen bench, the content of which I could not recall, when yanjie woke me up as it was already 4pm. So me and Dehui, with Wendi as our faithful supporter, marched groggily to the grand scene of the retest, the stadium, only to find out to our dismay that it was totally boiling in the glare of the afternoon sun. We were like, omg do 2.4 in that?? I remember telling Wendi that he probably won't see me after the test, as I'll become a puddle of simmering fats on the track.

But alas, I didn't even get to experience the feeling of melting into globules of fat, as I already died at the standing broad jump. But we still supported our dear friend Dehui as he ran courageously, setting down a good time of 10.31 minutes. To celebrate the occasion, he treated us to a cup of tebing each! Thats supposed to be condensed milk mixed with some sort of tea, den put in lots of ice. Tastes quite nice, in fact. Then we discussed various matters, like schools in China and schools in Singapore, the education systems, where we want to go for U nxt time and other stuff. Then stone until about 6.30 and went home. I think that its good to really sit down and talk to your friends at times, instead of just spending time with them when the occasion calls for it, like lectures or tutorials or some event. Only in that way do you get to really exchange honest opinions and in doing so get to know each other better. At the end of the day, ask yourself, if all there is between you and someone is the time you spent together during classes, during school events, even during outings, will you continue to keep in contact after your road together comes to the inevitable fork and you have to part ways?

2007-05-16T20:01:00.000+08:00

The first thing I thought of when coming to this familiar page, all prepared to emo, was to close the window, because I do not know how to start.

I must say that life are full of disappointments. For example, me not getting nominated for band exco was rather disappointing. I had wanted to give being treasurer a shot, but then how was I to know that in the end, I didn't even have the gun to give the shot with? Actually, I guess you would only feel just how important something is to you when you miss it. The one and a half hours of council investiture just before the exco elections was really one of the most torturous moments of my life. Seeing my friends receive what is probably the most anticipated sms for me in a very long time, the sms which equipped them with the aforementioned gun to give their desired exco positions a shot, my heart literally started pounding with trepidation, I found no willpower to trample down the surging desperation in my mind, and certainly no appetite to savour what would otherwise be a very very nice and meaningful council investiture.

However, as the saying goes, you learn from your mistakes. I realised that maybe I had not wanted it enough, not wanted it enough so as to be thick-skinned enough to go around asking people to nominate me on the day of peer nominations. Not wanted it enough to suppress my disgusting pride and stupid belief that it was only fair if people nominated me by their own initiatives and not my pleas. Then again, how would people even nominate me if they did not know what position I wanted, whether I wanted it and/or don't know my name?

Also, I take consolation in the fact that by not being there myself, I am giving other worthy people in my batch an opportunity to fulfill their own desires. In the end, just like the SYF, some people walk away happy and some people do not, and it is hard to say who is more deserving. I really feel that Jinjun has taught me something today, and that is the act of unselfishness. Even though he was nominated, he withdrew because he was already running for the position of student conductor and felt that other people were equally deserving of a chance. Even though I know that I myself have a large tolerance level and an even temper, I could not help but be pissed that certain people went for the elections even though they don't want the position. I mean, just bloody withdraw if you don't want it, and give others a chance.

Anyway, what is important that my self-confidence is not damaged because of this failure. Sometimes you just have take things in stride and move on. I guess some of my disappointment showed though, from the way some other people were behaving in front of me. It really isn't fair, though, for me to be expected to put on the usual cheerful exuberant self when a rather highly desired goal has been stripped away from my very eyes, and its not like my shot hit the crossbar or something, its like my foot didn't even connect with the ball. Of course, I believe that most of the people running for the exco positions currently are capable and I sincerely hope that some of them will make it into the band exco.

2007-05-02T21:57:00.000+08:00

Very little time to blog now, everyday is like so packed. Shall blog about Labour Day!!

As some people already know, it was my parents' wedding anniversary! So cool to get wed on Labour day. Some more my mum's birthday is like 29th of April and my dads' is on 10th of May. So celebrate together lor, cos my dad came back from China to visit us for about 2 weeks. The night before Labour Day, we went to Night Safari! Haha, I was thinking eh like so ex den quite childish den go for what? Budden cos never go before so I was quite enthu. In the end found out that its cos my mum can get subsidized by MOE for this type of outing -_-

Anyway it was quite fun lar. We took the tram ride around the place, see some funny animals and some normal ones. Like got elephant and rhino and a LOT of deer. Funny ones include some black and white thingy that I donno the name, some hyenas and weird birds. Then we got get down and walk around at some leopard trail also. We came face to face to funny animals like the giant flying squirrel, which was staring at us from a tree curiously as we stared back, until another giant flying squirrel flew from another tree like 5 metres away and scared the heck out of a lot of people, den they flew off somewhere else. Then there were funny bats hanging around the place also. And got leopard. And cat-like thingies. Then finally went to an animal show thing, which was quite screwed up cos the otters screwed up and donno what can to put in what recycle bin. But I guess the host covered up pretty well. Then got some gigantic python that the host and helpers put around some poor "volunteered" angmoh man. So after that like chao tired liao, went home around 11.30 and slepts.

Labour Day itself we went to some chinese restaurant at Apollo Centre which is opposite Clarke Quay MRT, to eat. Haiz, sad thing is that even though the foods were quite nice, the quantity is really ripoff. Like a 22 bucks fried prawn with a nice tasting green sauce dish only had 6 fried prawns in it. So even after spending 100+ bucks on lunch, I wasn't really full. Then we went to order air tickets to go China in June. That was supersuper screwed up cos its damn late to order tickets already, den my mum very mafan cos the school until very late also nv say exactly when can go overseas. After a lot of unnecessary complications and everyones tolerance were wearing thin, we finally settled on something and zaoded to Choa Chu Kang to buy birthdays cake. Mango Tropicana. Yum. I guess it was pretty worth it to miss the Spiderman 3 to spend time with family. :D

2007-04-20T20:59:00.000+08:00

Another hectic week has gone by in the blink of an eye.

And this week marks the beginning of yet another grueling process: CCA exco selections!! Means increased whisperings of self-doubt, tortorous moments of self-reflection, and important decisions made purely on impulse. What positions to run for? I have a whole lot of enthusiasm, but a whole lot of inferiority complex too. Nvm, what happens will happen.

Anyway, with deadlines to meet and goals to be achieved, I believe all of us are damn stressed. Feels like some bullet train straining to reach each station in a series of never-ending stations in record time.

Anyway, let me recount the events that happened in this eventful week.

Monday: Nothing much. Went home early. Oh, and I ALMOST forgot!!! 2.4 km run for napfa!! wtfs. I think I tried my best lar, 12:05 min. Was like dying for my 5th and final rounds, but nvm just hardcore. I even lapped a Hanyu. Yay. But I was slower than a CERTAIN girl in my class...embarassment. Needless to say, the other guys were super imba lar. Guo nian got like almost 9 min flat. Junweis got 10.07, EVEN after he had 2 days of killer council camp...

Tuesday: Ah, killer. ECONS TEST!! ggxxx. xxxx. Apparently I mixed up joint supply and derived demand...I wrote joint demand. wtf. But the concept is correct lor, just the term wrong. Den I forgot to write ceteris paribus for the second part of qn. Yiding said if don't write den will fail. Omg, I'm a failure. Kiss you goodbye lar, econs. Somemore SOMEONE was scolding me for causing her econs test to screw up because I was sitting beside her. Urgh, can't take it already.
Oh, den went for rec badminton after sch. Originally wanted to play bball but bball girls were having training :( Anyway badminton was also quite fun, especially since I was playing a dongz who is about as pro as me, which is very noob. Then after that went to give tuition at AWWA with jeremy to a primary sch kid. Quite fun lar. Cos the textbook very easy :S Egoboost.

Wednesday: Dying by now already. Deadline for PW preliminary ideas looming up fast. Yay, it was BB Green day!! Go BB! I love the gift pack!! chocolate frog and mentos!! After sch went interhouse pictionary, and as a result missed band. Keyword miss, not pon, ok? Anyway my pictionary team was me, yiding, yujun, hu ching, mel ho, and xian jie! Damn imbar lar. Basically each team has 3 rounds of 3 min each, whereby for each round, one person go and roll dice, den move the counter by the number of the diceroll, den have to try to let his team guess the matching word on the square by drawing on the whiteboard. Haha, prelimary round we owned in the first two rounds so much that even though no one guessed my word for 3 min for the 3rd round(you try drawing "ranch"), and we didn't move a square, we still won all the other teams!! Budden in the finals got two BW teams, haven't play yet already morale low cos they will get double the score, den some more after playing they displayed their strength and luck and guessed uncountable pictures. So in the end we got overall 3rd team and overall 2nd house!! still very well done guys!

Thursday: Almost dead already. FIVE STATIONS!! URGH. i got As for shuttlerun, situp, and sit and reach. Den failed my standing broad jump and pullups. Thanks...Goodbye games modules. Actually still got some hope. If I can pass within the next 2 weeks the five stations, den I won't have to retake napfa. zz. After sch slacked around some, did assisted pullups with Ivan and wentao. And then a memorable thing happened, which is that me and yujun got a grand slam(win all the tricks) on yiding and rongbing while playing contract bridge. Then had to go for band. Can't believe we changed sunrise to safari. Hais. I don't think it will really help. The 3 secondary schs with gold with honours for their syf all play safari I think tts just a coincidence.
Haish. Got suaned until almost imploded by band ppl from dinner all the way until I reach my mrt stop. Content not impt. Various things lar. AND THEN, chionged PI until 12.40. Feel like a landed fish by the time I slept. Not a very good feeling, trust me.

Friday: Dead. Falling asleep in all the lectures. Adrenaline boost in physics lecture cos got Mr. Se as the new lecturer! yay! Played badminton with class ppl + rongbing + shuot after sch. Discovered that my racket is old until teeth drop already (lao diao ya). the nylon strings were yellowish...Bridge after tt. Nothing of importance happened. Partnered rongbing cos my partner didn't come. Knew two nice PRC girls from playing duplicates :)

Saturday: A new tomorrow. Hope I'll resurrect by then.

2007-04-15T22:41:00.000+08:00

A lot of gan xiang. No time to writes.

Yesterday just went to watch chorale concert. Wah. It was damn nice. I must say I'm really impressed with how the performance went, and I can't help but feel a tinge of jealousy too. Why can't our concert be like that too?

Even if I did not know that chorale practices like almost every day, and how strict their discipline is, one glance already reveals the effort that had gone into making their concert the success it was. The songs were really all very nice, even though I didn't understand half of them. The harmony and blend, at least to me, was really quite perfect, and the ensembles!! Wah. Punch was super funny and nice lor!! Even though on the surface its like all funny and stuff, it is apparent the amount of effort they put in. Its like around 20 minutes of skit + all the dance moves + songs. I think if we practiced as much as they did, based on our foundations and our imba conductor Mr. Oura, a gold with honours for SYF is confirmed.

Then we saw feng ping during the chorale concert also! Hehe, cos there was an empty seat, then since she's at RI boarding, we managed to sneak her in, but sadly the second part was more boring than the first part haha. But the interesting even in the second part was wen di DANCING! Indian dance!! Haha, I think he is a really good choice for that dance. He looks like a buddha with those strange dots and the shiny costume, lol.

Then after the concert I slacked at Mos burger with some gep ppl until 10.30, then went home with cheesy, fuginn, and fangjin.

Ok, sleeps now. Tmr 2.4 :(

2007-04-07T21:53:00.000+08:00

Ah, more interesting things to blog about, so less emo-ing stuff.

Haha, yesterday was good friday!! I thought it was something good den i was like asking ben, you never celebrate good friday yesterday meh? Turned out good friday was the day Jesus got killed. -_- Super jack.

Anywaaay, after getting quite pissed off on thursday night *trying* to organise a 2klever outing on friday because of lack of enthusiasm, we finally still decided to go pool, even though its just the 3 of us: me, ben, and hyrum. So in the afternoon we went to ang mo kio the S11 there to pool. Wasn't feeling particularly enthusiastic 'cause ben and hyrum are damn pro, so I'll probably get owned. In the end I did get owned lar, but not as bad as I thought, haha. Pool skills improving? Whoaaa. After ben left for church, me and hyrum "决战三轮". First round I won, next one got owned. Then before the third round we said whoever loses must admit that he got pwned. Well, guess what? I got pwned!! ha.

Then at night was feeling quite sian, go online a while. Then ended up playing BBO with shihua to practise for IHC until like 11+. Zzz the opponents donno use what strange bidding system, bid until 6 clubs once with like less than 30 total points, and actually made lar!! Major defending error :( But I think we're quite ok as a team lar.

Today went early for band to play bball with the usual gang, wench, cheesy, and dongz. Oh, today was particularly exciting, cos han sheng was there too, then the other court got some ri choir ppl playing, whom hansheng knew, so in the end we 6v6 them full court. Actually our team only had 5 ppl, budden yelin came early for bball training, so dongz asked him to join our team. Wah, its chao shuang. We owned them like no tomorrow. After a while yelin left cos too imba anyway. So 5v6. Got one choir guy damn funny, shooting tt time mouth open damn wide, den like we were all looking at his mouth instead of the ball...which was not tt bad cos its quite off most of the time, got once it went right over the board...Oh and they keep passing to our team ppl or kenna intercepted by us. So at like 9.30 went for band, and nothing particularly interesting happened, just tt we played some contract bridge during lunch break and after band. And paul abandoned me halfway to go for church. K, tmr still got syf rehearsal, sian :(

2007-04-01T21:00:00.000+08:00

After a few minutes of recalling, I realised that quite a lot has happened this week.

First one is the old-class outing on wednesday, which I helped my ex-classmate bowen to organise. He was retained after sec3 and then transferred to another sec school, St. Francis Methodist I think, at sec 4, so hes taking O'lvls this year! Anyway, me and roger left before band prac ended and walked with jeremy, gabriel ling, yijing, and yidingz(who was going home) to J8, and then met my old classmates who were already having dinner at S11. Quite a nice turn-up after all, with only a few ppl missing. After enjoying dinner and a nice chitchat with ngiam, jeremy, and etc, those of us watching movie had to chiong off, so we took a class photo near S11, and then went up to J8 cinema to watch Mr. Bean's Holiday.

As expected, the movie was really hilarious! Right from the beginning, when Mr. Bean read his lottery ticket upside down (supposed to be 616 but he saw as 919), den the winner was 616, so he ditched his ticket on a toy choochoo train, den when the train went halfway around the track, the ticket read 616, den he did the dumb pop-eyed Mr. Bean look...

However, I shall not put in any more spoilers in case 5 years or so later it gets screened on Channel 5 den ppl blame me for spoiling their fun. I think that it is good that we meet again, albeit for such a short length of time. Since all of our paths had once crossed, is it not our duty to keep our crossroad free of the dusts of time? I believe that all of us know the 5 in our class who are running for council, and I hope that our bonds are strong enough that at least most of us will vote for them.

Sad case was that I was bugged with a persistent sore throat ever since monday, which got progressively worse, such that I took it upon myself to excuse myself from P.E on thursday, much to the dismay of various people in my class, especially those of the fairer sex who were getting all sweaty doing 6 rounds and stuff, and saw me reclining somewhere on the stadium steps looking not at all flustered or sick :S I think Xiaoxing and Mel are really damn fit, they keep quite a constant pace and manage to do like 12.20+ lar! I dont think at my current fatness, or fitness, that I can do that kind of time myself...*embarrassment* My sole source of comfort is a particular evil immortal, who himself is too bothered with godly stuff to make an attempt to pass 2.4 or chinups :S

Great. Still a long way to go and my fingers are already growing weary. On friday, there was bridge camp!! After losing rather miserably to kovan at some cchess games after all our lectures and stuff, I took off with what remaining face I had left and went for bridge camp!!! yay! Ok lar, we played duplicates for the inter-bridge tournament, den luckylucky our team besides myself and shi hua also got emmaline(who is bridge vice-chair), and patrina, and another J1 team. Haha so we had two rounds that day, I think we did quite well lar den managed to be the top team with 37 points. Budden friday I left at night after dinner(which was a DAMNED LOT of rather disgusting fried rice), cos I had sore throat *coughs*.

Anyway I heard that they had a rather interesting night walk after dinner, which was to watch the ghostly movie "shuttle", and then at 12am walk around various locations in the school in pairs with booby traps like bloody toilets, ghosts in mirror, or ghastly figurines dressed in kimonos lying around. Scary.

So after a good nights' rest on friday, I returned again on saturday, but missed breakfast because met yiding and wentao on the way to sch, walked to the ri bustop gate, which was closed, walked to the colum gate which was closed, and walked back all the way to the rj gate...After which I met various people in school while running around in my assigned group for the amazing race...which was a series of tasks at different locations in the school like keeping a chapteh in the air for 2 minutes(impossible so in the end reduced to 30 seconds). These people include cheryl, who was attending CO, den wendi while we were carrying chairs around for the amazing race, den samuel who had soccer, den xue fen and odelia at interact, ivan at fencing camp, dehui who was meeting his teacher, junwei and kovan and ngiam doing council stuff etcetc. School really bustles on saturdays.

Anyway, after the amazing race(which our team lost rather horribly), was feeling quite shag liao, den had to go for band, so me and wench and yicong went for band for like 2 hours and slipped back to bridge, and damn suay just nice miss the bridge championships. Haha, budden our championship team somehow qualified for finals lar! which didn't get played cos not enough time, but anyway top 2 :D:D. Pride man. Nothing much after that, i joined the gep gang to play asshole revolutions, which was an interesting version of asshole taidi that when everyone pass when the asshole plays something, the smallest card becomes the biggest card, i.e. 3diam becomes bigger, followed by 3club etc. Then we had an interesting dinner of chicken rice, haha den we imba kope the 2 extra packets, in the end after everyone already shared it, we found out that someone doesn't have any food :S :S

After a super freezing night, we broke camp in the morning and went home. Yeah, finally finished this ultra long post, enjoy :D

2007-03-25T14:57:00.000+08:00

In the end I still cant resist blogging, haha. Yay hi to everyone who came to visit my blog, sorry for the small font, budden if its bigger it won't exactly fit the layout too. :P

Yesterday had band in the morning, den before that came one and a half hour earlier to bball with wench and dongz and cheese. I think not bad lar, I won the ABC with a thundering 3-pointer and ended dongz' torment(cos he keep airball-ing and going back one position)!! muahaha. Then after tt me and dongz and wench went to change at the ri swimming pool changing room while cheese went to street-dance. The shower was blardy cold!! Like can't help but gasp when the freezing water hit my hot skin -_-

Then band was quite bad...cos suddenly Jasmine decided that we shall split parts and then she wanted to listen to each of us J1s individually playing La Mer, our SYF piece. Then I was like omgz maybe I never touch my instrument for 2 weeks following the concert, and never practice the song until very pro yet...Hai den in the end diedie lor, but its ok, even if i get the dreaded super-boring clarinet 3 part I wont complain. After that we had lunch break at 11.30 or so, but I slipped off with dongz cos hyrum smsed me the day before tt he want go my house, hehe I guess thats a rather lousy excuse but sometimes we all make choices. Sorry Charlene and Yuleng for pangsehing you all!!!

So in the afternoon, dongz had a lot of fun playing random pieces on my piano(which I personally feel is rather suck as compared to other pianos like bens' and jords', but better than the horrendous piano in our school amphi lar), and den I showed hyrum 2 bleach episodes on the fight between Yoruichi and Soifon! Catfight sia. Den me and hyrum went to bball while dongz started to play xherosiege and anime fight arena on my warcraft III: The Frozen Throne bnet. Haha, I pwnzed hyrum at ABC, lol, den we played horse and he ownt me. After tt dongz went off, hyrum played some lame 2-player online games with me den I had to go meet my mum at west mall to eat KFC haha!

In the end I didn't get anything done cos I went online at night and chatted on msn until 11.30pm den went to bed, haiz...
...
Once a slacker, always a slacker.

2007-03-22T21:09:00.000+08:00

I ask myself, what is the purpose of a blog?
why keep a blog over a diary?
why am i typing these very words with an uncanny precision and dexterity which were infused into my fingers with years upon years of losing myself in the depths of cyberspace, over the satisfaction that I get from the familiar feeling of pouring my heart and soul out onto white pages with a pen?

Am I fascinated with the way these rather meaningless words would appear on my very own portion of cyberspace that was taken and crafted to my liking, how they would jump out at me from the computer screen that has been my companion when I am by myself on lonely nights, when my parents have gone to play cards with their friends, when my friends are busy tending to various matters, and when my homework sits stubbornly in my file giving me a "screw off, i wanna rot by myself" look whenever I summon the courage to look at it?

Am I in fact an attention-grabbing fellow who wants people to look at my life through a kaleidoscope of colourful words that appear so wonderfully on this very webpage? Many things I do not know about myself, starting from the most basic question of "Why?", to the feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt I get when I am assailed with surges of unfamiliar emotion that runs through my system like liquid fire, or liquid ice, ice and fire, ice and fire...

Whatever it is, I do not really know. Does time fly like an arrow? I think no, it is us who fly like arrows, through the winds of time. Some arrows misfire, into terrible tempests and horrible hurricanes, while others fly true, into the soothing kaze which comes from the heavens itself. Our memories are like shelves upon shelves of the books of our experience, but these shelves, they are cursed. At any point of time in our flight through time, we might look for one of these books, and find that it has been ripped from our grasping hands, leaving an empty void that can never be replaced. Are words on this piece of cyberspace, strutting their every contour with unchecked shamelessness to anyone who casts a curious glance their way, sufficient to capture the fiery flames of my feelings which I experienced but briefly with every event that I attend?

2007-03-18T21:19:00.000+08:00

Ok, changed the tagboard and the font following friends' advice. I think I'm too sian to make any other changes, unlike some evil immortal(hemhem), who made his blog so darned kewl and elaborate.

Got some weird tumours in both of my earlobes. Went to polyclinic with mum on wednesday before class outing, but I think I only told 2 or 3 ppl so far. Sometimes its useless to worry about stuff that you do not understand. Maybe I'm gonna die of ear?? cancer, that will be damn jokes...meh like the poor girl who died of tongue cancer. That I didn't even know about it until the student development lessons bothered me. I think I'm really like some frog at the bottom of the well, wrapped with layers and layers of protection, living in my tiny corner of the world, not knowing anything that goes on outside. Oh well, thats fine too, actually. What I matter is so little as to not make a difference, whatever happens me will really only matter to myself and those closest to me. Like a small ripple on a vast ocean of the billions of human lives, so very many with an untold story...The best mentality is still to cherish what we have, to actually experience each second that was given to us by a reason unknown.

Anyway, I guess I really really had my fill of fun this hols. Just had another class outing to ECP on saturday. haha, but I don't really feel like talking about it now. Me selfish. Me keep it in my memories, don't tell you bleh. I wonder what school tomorrow will be like. And the next day. And the day after that. Wonderful, probably. These two years, I have a feeling that they will constitute the best moments in my life, these carefree times where I can run around with my friends with youthful abundance, no worries but for an undetermined future that is yet distant and blurry, each new experience infusing my soul with fresh joy, the joy of being old enough to appreciate sweet stuff and young enough to leave bitter stuff behind. I think i'm ranting too much haha, but anyway its MY blog, bleh, my own, my preciiiouuuusss...

2007-03-16T16:58:00.000+08:00

Changed my blog skin to a gaily coloured yoruichi-theme skin :D

Don't ask me why but she's my favourite character on bleach! :D

Anyway, I was feeling a bit emo just now but after changing the skin I don't feel so emo anymore. Awww. Anyway, school is going to start soon yay~! Can see my classmates again yay! Currently enjoying the nice break from work and band, but I think the time for slacking is now over and once again it is time to hardcore mug. Ok, hope I will revitalize this blog further, but that's all for now, plz visit our group blog on 2klever.blogspot.com, haha.

Mid-CT contemplation

2006-05-06T15:38:00.000+08:00

I know the title might seem weird, but I'm a Lit student, so the CTs ain't over for me yet(rox rite?).

For once, I actually thought of something to blog. I was thinking about biology stuffs, then I suddenly started thinking about the nodes of Ranvier for no reason. Soon after that, it occured to me in a flash of inspiration the answer to why our time seems to pass so quickly. Metaphorically speaking, our lives are just like impulses, and they are speeded up by the so called "Nodes of Ranvier". These nodes are in no uncertain terms the heaps of assignments that we get every few weeks or even more frequently. These assignments, ranging from chinese to english to maths, make our lives as students simply a jumble of deadlines. We are speeding up from assignment deadline to assignment deadline, every single second spent worrying whether we completed this particular assignment on time, that particular worsheet on time. By the time we think of actually enjoying ourselves, it has already come to the middle of the year, and come to think of it, doesn't it seem like just yesterday when we first entered RI?

This is ridiculous, as ridiculous as the exploding files/bags, of so many people, like wentao, chunkai, and kovan :S. And the sole reason for this IS the number of "projects", "assignments", we are getting. From my perspective, they are even worse than "homework" in the form of thousands of assessment books. These assignment books are now replaced by worksheets. Maths worksheets, chinese worksheets, chem worksheets, physics worksheets, and these are all part of our GPA. our GPA! The most bloody important bloody thing in our life right now, is our GPA!! So giving these assignments which make up a large percentage of our GPA, is forcing us to spent most of our energy doing, if not thinking about, these assignments! And that's all for now.

godz

2006-03-27T20:31:00.000+08:00

*title*, i donno how long i havent posted, but if feels like oh my *title* long...

anyway, not much happening lately, except that i got quite a lot interested in cchess once again. Want to beat ck for once lol.

anyway, today jeremy was telling us about some funny quotes from this website called bash.org which quotes from IRC chatrooms.

anyway, it was really funny so im gonna paste an example into here. its really omf*title* hilarious.

anyway, here it is.

hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
********* see!
hunter2
doesnt look like stars to me
*******
thats what I see
oh, really?
Absolutely
you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
haha, does that look funny to you?
lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
awesome!
wait, how do you know my pw?
er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
oh, ok.

Happy Hari Raya

2006-01-10T21:42:00.000+08:00

Yay hari raya so nice, channel 5 got a lot of nice shows. Afternoon I watched this billboard awards 2006, its this song award la, then got nice ppl like Gwen Stefani, Carrie Underwood, some funny Latin duo with a chiobu dancing salsa between them.

Then tonight I watched this movie called the Hot Chick which is quite fun, and not sick like the title suggests. Hahaz, it is this blonde chick, den somehow(i neva watch the beginning), she swap bodies with this guy who was of a rather undesirable nature. So anyways she ended up in his body lor, then it became quite awkward. Ended up she had to pose as gardener to get near her parents lol. Then got one scene where she had to pee, but donno how in a man's body. Ya so got this black cleaner in the toilet, den she kept asking him to turn around -_- So when he did, she squatted down and tried to pee through the usual place, but obv it dun work cos shes in a mans body, den she held up a piece of ice from the peeing drain and asked the cleaner what it was, and the cleaner said sth like "you dont wanna be touching dat..." In the end got another guy came in and she finally learned how to pee through the penis, although it did spray around a bit...

Ok, i dont want to grind thru the whole story now, but in the end alls well that ends well, and she got her body back. Sleep tight :) (for me) (then again, who ever tells himself bedtime stories...)

Right

2006-01-07T15:29:00.000+08:00

By now, anyone who still bothers to visit will have thought my blog is dead. However, i am glad to say that ITS NOT! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I was just feeling rather unbloggy the past few weeks (or months), and so have been neglecting my blog lately. Now, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, im feeling bored sitting on a wooden straight backed chair in front of my comp, and no one is talking to me on msn... :(

First week of school was quite nice for me, I guess. Even though I did not try for psl, which i think i wouldnt get even if i tried, because of personal reasons, I must say that I am not really regretting it. Although it must be great fun and all, it also seems rather time-consuming and my schedule really has no room for so much stuff, even though that is ironic as I am blogging away mindlessly here.

Yesterday' school was quite eventful. We watched Hotel Rwanda(supposed to be Rhuanda), during philo class, for like the 390293840234 time. Still, it was quite nice as we had an entire LT(lecture theatre, not lost temple), to ourselves, and getting the full audio effects in our faces. The "Cut the tall trees" part on radio at part of the movie was in fact rather chilling, and wentao sitting beside me also said it was quite scary lolz. Sadly, the one hours of lesson, or rather half hours as Mr. Au proved to be twenty minutes late (not unexpectedly), was insufficient to finish it.

After sch, I went outside the class for no particular purpose and saw Justin and Shuotian, who asked me to go J8, but I went to the toilet and went I came out they already abandoned me
:( But then this time there was chester and pok outside, so I went band with them, without my bag, and started to play "the mountain is out", the song for raffles trail. As it seemed quite fun, I persevered, especially one part which goes at tempo 216 or sth in quavers, which is REALLY challenging. Umm so I hardcored that part for about 2 or 3 hours and managed to play it to a semblance of accuracy. Well at first I thought that imposing myself in the small ensemble seemed rather extra since pok was already there, and it might take away from his glory or sth, I also thought I noticed that pok didnt really welcome my presence. Hmm but since Weird Al Yankovic's "Your horoscope for today" says something about Scorpius (yes thats my bloody horoscope), having low self-esteem, I decided not to slink away like some worm and so I stuck around and played for raffles trail. In the end (yeah yeah linkin park ownz), however, 2 clarinets didnt seem to figure much also, since the sound quality of clarinet is really subtle and soothing, it fits into the harmony rather than rise above it like the flute, so nvmz, and pok got to play the entire solo, so nvmz also. Anyone interested in the music could go visit wentao's blog to hear the midi version, but im pretty sure we can play better than tt low quality thingum.

So after the raffles trail, I slacked around the band booth for a while, talking cok and such, got really bored and went home with wentao. I dont think joining the rest of the band in concert would be nice as my lips were hurting because of my hardcoring of "the mountain is out". So i guess all wellz that ends wellz :D

So after I went home, played a bit of silkroad, after i disconnected for the 2nd time, I got pissed and started playing ladder on bnet. First game won this lvl 5 human on twisted meadow with some dark ranger ownage, and second game won this lvl 18 night elf on moonglade, creepjacked the noob twice and won with some dark ranger ownage again -_- Yes you wont like 6 skeleton warriors pwnzing ur units. After that I got scared that Ill lose, so I played against comp normal and to my surprise, almost lost. After that I played silkroad again, got disconnected again, got really pissed and went to bed. Ok this is really insignificant events so Ill leave you, the devoted reader, to your important business now :D

pwnzed

2005-10-27T23:37:00.000+08:00

haix...these few days never post because i had post exam trauma. I cant believe it. I really cant. I really cant...hmmm maybe can...It was my own fault after all.

Because of slackness(probably), at least i hope it was slackness and not stupidity, i got pwnzd in my common tests. Failed maths. FAILED. FAILLLLEEED. 26.5/60. lol. I could scarce believe it, ok la that was just a figure of speech, i knew i failed right from the moment i handed the script in. Indeed.

Seriously, its implications is dire. Firstly, my maths for the whole year is doomed to a B+. Thats super lousy. I really require A+ for maths because its a double weightage. And BECAUSE it is doomed to a B+, my entire gpa is doomed to fall by at least 0.2 points. thats shit. Ok english become b+ is expected la...its a screwed up subject that i really dont care about. In the first place my english is as good as i want it, my maintaining of a blog is already testament to this. Physics as a B+ is also not altogether unexpected. A fail in the last common class test has already prepared me for this. But maths is really inexcusable.

The rest of the subjects i guess is ok la, except my chem ct was also quite screwed. 34/60. Lol. But i think its not because i dont understand but just plainly screwed. Ok. Getting late now bb.

Funz

2005-10-14T23:13:00.000+08:00

Yay im posting again out of boredom, even though I just posted yesterday. Just took the english and ss paper today. Really hoped that the compre would be easy so I could manage an A for english, but again, disappointed. I spent the full one and half hours doing the bloody thing, it was so hard...and frustrating. Especially the summary. Their language, whoever set the paper, is really screwed. They're asking for, "the ways in which mobility could have affected class and American lifestyle" Thats more like a question than a summary! If you simply summarize the content, you wouldnt be answering the question, but if you answered the question, you would be sacrificing precious space that could be deployed into writing more content! End up I stared at the summary for like 15 minutes before starting on it.

The SS paper was quite corny la...not corny like corn, but...just strange. The essay question is freaking simple lor...and to think I mug all the Ireland stuff...its just the same old stuff all over again. So deja-vuish. It also happened to be the exact same question that Ben's book thingy provided a model answer to -_- Source based was harder la, I'm sure a freaking poster of a vague bird-shaped thingy covering a vague globe shaped thingy could tell anything about the role of the UN lor. It sort of reminded me of Gollum's possessiveness of the ring...but that doesn't make sense as the UN could hardly be said to be posessive of the world. Damn generic...so basically I ignored source C and looked at source B, which is quite crap also.

Anyway thats two tests done with, but hardly of any meaning to me, as I never had trouble with humanities. That is not implying that my humanities are strong, just saying that my humanities are so rotten (like Pudge), and stony (like Tiny), that it is futile to try and improve them.

A failed attempt to mug chinese tonight yielded some good results as the boredom derived from trying to mug chinese tonight made the subsequent mugging of biology all the more interesting. Oh and I discovered I lost the ming ju list. Heck la its a bunch of nonsense anyway, who cares about what some psycho people with narrow world views and who likes to teach disciples on the top of mountains have to say...

Oh and I had fresh inspiration to write a fanfic of DotA after seeing how an utterly crappy fanfic posted on the DotA forums, which will probably get like 0/40 if Koh was marking it, could actually deserve some good comments. Well maybe I do have some high standards for fantasy, but you could hardly blame me as I read all the best fantasy already, including those written by J.R.R Tolkien, Daving Eddings, Raymond E. Feist, Robert Jordan, C.S Lewis, Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett and others. If you happened to be interested, the link to the lousy fanfic is http://dota-allstars.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8942

10 hours before common tests

2005-10-13T22:09:00.000+08:00

Wow, amazing that I'm actually taking time to update a mere ten hours before the next, and the first common test.

Strange how distracting the computer can be. I remember vaguely that I came on just to take another look at the "unofficial guide to LORMS" in preparation for ss but now I seem already to be distracted.

Really nothing much to write about, except that I have looked at a number of other blogs and found that each blog is really unique in its own rights. These includes Jared's blog, AT's blog, zeke's blog, norman's blog, and a few others. I couldn't believe that I spent an amazing half hour reading Jared's blog, but I guess its mainly because of the fantastically fantastic fanfic posted on it. It is also wonderfully orgasmic and contains some rather juicier bits of sexual fantasy...Jared if you happen to read this I recommend to you to read the plain of horses (or something like that), written by Jean M Auel or Jean A Maul or wadeva, to improve your erotic writing. Still, I am relatively astonished that the perfect quiet, mild, and even-tempered boy of our class could actually have volume for such deeply reaching fantasies. Wow......btw I highly recommend you, the reader, to browse through Jared's blog, the link is on the left hand side of the screen, it can't delude you unless you got eyes like the fat auntie who worked at the late oodles of noodles.

Anyway, I recently noticed that our class is starting to play weiqi more an more often, even though we've only got one board (courtesy of Ben) between us. However, after today, I really decided not to try my hand at it any more until I've did a bit of research on it. The circumstances includes me getting pwnzed by Ben (((the man) *haha_-_*) it rhymes ok?) after he let me have a nine seed advantage. Subsequently I got pwnzed by wentao with a colossal margin of about 50 seeds after he let me have a four seed advantage wtf. Didnt think that such a seemingly simplistic game could be so complicated. Then again, i thought that way about cchess too. Nothing much eventful happened in class today, the normal nonsense which I can barely endure, including the bloody english lesson where i discovered that the letter to editor must freaking be handed in and is worth ca marks...And the bloody FK told me that "the scores are entered already", "if you hand in now you will get a zero", with utter coolness. Dumb fk that she is. I knew she was a cold blooded killer the moment she stepped into our class. No freaking reminders at all! She didnt even freaking tell me that I owe it, and i dint freaking noe too...what kind of shit is that? And now she says its worth 7% of the bloody CA. 0/7. Good job i think i just failed english. Aiya but who cares la I won't be proud of an A* with a teacher like that.

sigh

2005-10-07T16:19:00.000+08:00

Haix damn sad la...circumstances arent helping my mood to improve at all. And I really need my mood right now, because the CTs are coming. Yes, the CTs are coming, and they had better meet me in one of my better moods. In case you were wondering what circumstances I was referring to, and you should be wondering unless you skipped that part to read this part, they refer to my recreational life. Those of you who know me will probably understand that currently, all there is to my recreational life right now is chess and DotA.

This post originated in 4.20 pm on friday the seventh of october, and that is just after the DotA game that I should not have lost. What makes it worse is that I did not only lose but quit nearing the end cos my mum came home. What made it worser was that my mum yelled at me not to eat at my comp. The game was in itself utmostly irritating. I really could not comprehend the unfairness of it. Understandably, we had a high chance of winning. Me junwei and yiphei vs fangjin yichen and some random guy. It was another case of the imbas. I was using omniknight yiphei used broodmother junwei used tiny vs luna(fangjin), leviathan(yichen), and nerub ass(the random guy). I know that I was probably the one who caused the ultimate defeat as I was feeding luna. That is ironic because I used omniknight purposely to counter luna, but somehow, my mouse keep screwing up. The first time I died was my own fault. After that, I could have averted death but somehow when i tried to use purification on myself the bloody mouse just did not click, no matter how much i pressed. What the heck. Then later I could have killed luna but while i was chasing him, clicking madly on the mouse, SOMEHOW my hero just turned backwards and the mouse didnt click AGAIN! holy shit man. As a result of this fangjin got more and more kills and at the same time both of his team mates whom I personally think were quite useless stole some kills and got powerful. Its really shitty la.

I find that diversifying really loses you the advantage. Some people who never play as much as me just keep using the same hero, while i switch heroes every game. That is a compromise on my skill level for each hero, and yields disappointing results without fail every game.

Enough of that, so much talk about DotA would probably bore readers with no understanding on the topic, but I just had to vent my frustration on something and throwing something out of the window just did not seem an appropriate action. Much of my angst is now gone after I wrote so much crap though.

HEY

2005-09-28T19:31:00.000+08:00

guess what everyone? Its BLOGGING TIME!!! haha. haha. hahaha. very funny. are u laughing? no, probably not. hahaha.

That was the customary stalling-while-thinking-of-stuff-to-write time. Basically, my fingers go on while my mind thinks of what to type. Yes, actually I am still stalling right now. The only couscious thought i had to go through was to think to phrase that thing as the customary stalling-while-thinking-of-stuff-to-write time. haha.hahaha.hahahaha.hahahahaha.hahahahahaha. whats next? __________

If you think its hahahahahahaha, yore wrong. Why are you wrong? Cos yore not right. hahahahahahahaha.

I found that my chinese chess skills have deproved visibly recently. For some reason, my mind's eye for chinese chess does not seem very polished. I does not seem to be having a wide enough mind's eye currently. I find that I am doing the same old opening without thinking of the possibility of each move and that my future extrapolation attempts result in either failure or an inevitable boringness. Suffice it to say that my chinese chess skills have deproved visibly recently. See, the amazing sentence structure that Mrs. Selvan teached us. Claim-elaborate claim-evidence-conclusion. Full marks for lit. ahahahaha. Actually, the evidence is overwhelming. I remember a period where i can easily pwnz g.quek and another period where i beat wentao a few times in a row. However, after a short break, my minds eye for chinese chess maybe got broken, dispolished, or trussed on a pole and stuffed into someone ass. And thats because i either keep losing or drawing to wentao, losing or drawing to quek, losing or drawing to yijing, losing or drawing to ben, losing to kok, losing to junwei...not to mention losing to jeremy whos a totaly newbie. I feel quite embarrased actually. Tearfore, i made the resolution that after cts ill go and mug chinese chess and purchase a larger mind's eye for it.

Anyway, i think i need to stop acting the fool in physics lessons also. I think acting the fool has really made me the fool. I got 10/15 for the quiz today and the thats the second lowest the lowest happened to be our beloved chancellor aarony palpatine who got 9/10.

And my german test is sure as hell screwed. there was this picture compo which was about this girl and this boy going on a trip to the country side and the boy kicking a stone into the bushes and seeing a pair of legs sticking out and thinking it was a a dead body and going to a populated place and finding two policemen and coming back and uncovering the bush and discovering it was a sleeping person. Instead i wrote (in german), hit instead of kick, garden instead of country side, grass instead of bush, small hard object instead of stone, in the vicinity instead of populated place and etc. So sure die.

By the way, i think the english debate is fucked. Its distorting what my true view is. For the sake of the argument, i am going against my own better judgement. You see, the argument is that we would rather let 10 guilty men go free than to let one innocent suffer. Fuck, in the first place i MENTIONED that 10 is inacceptable. Ppl tell me not to take it figuratively, but dont they see that the fucking point is that the numbers DO matter. If they dont, then why ten? Why not a hundred? Make that a fucking million. Why not let a million guilty men go free than to let one innocent suffer? So, you would let 10, say, serial rapists go free then to let, say, a measly accountant suffer? Its all very nice to let them go and say, "justice has been done today! Rejoice!" Meanwhile, the serial rapists might be conducting a gang rape on your mother and THEN what would you say? "I sacrificed my mother in the pursuit of protecting the innocent?" Dumb fuck. The problem with philosophy and this crap is that no matter how engaging it might be, if allowed to be applied to daily problems, it would be Armageddon for the world.

Ok, i said what i wanted to. Now for some light music. *beep*
汪汪泡泡果冻真的会生气!生气神气生气神奇生气生气神奇!
汪汪泡泡果冻真的会生气!生气神气生气神奇生气生气神奇!
汪汪泡泡果冻真的会生气!
汪汪泡泡果冻真的会生气!
真的会生气!
开罐前大力, 摇摇摇!
汪汪泡泡果冻, 真的会生气哟!

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

2005-09-22T17:44:00.000+08:00

Just a short entry while im downloading the latest warcraft patch.

Hmmm...its strange that all these funny incidents happen on a weekly basis, and yet after a short time I forget about them. Well, in case i forgot this one too, I'll just shortly "pen" it here.

Lately, I noticed a rather strange occurence in the morning. My daily routine each morning is to get woken up by my mum, and walk half-tight (a cool word i learned in literature which means sleepy) to the toilet where I wash my face and brush my teeth. After that, feeling less sleepy, I will go back to my room, on my light- ok stop. This is the important part. Im sure you wouldnt be interested in reading the rest of what I do in the morning. So anyway, when I on my light to change into school u and pack stuff, a giant wasp will fly in 80% of the time, after the light was on for about 5 minutes. Im quite sure it wasnt the same giant wasp too, cos each time it just seems to get bigger lol. Anyway most of the time I just try to ignore it and get my stuff done as quick as possible. Well today I thought heck just off the bloody light and hope it flies out. Big mistake. The living room light was on too, so after a while it flew into the living rooms, which occupants included me and my mum. Oh shit. It was buzzing around scaring the crap out of us. We didnt want to kill it since it would probably make a big mess and waste time too, since I had to go to school. So we just left the living room lights on and went to the connected dining room to eat. Then by some freak of nature, the wasp somehow buzzed into the dining room, which had no lights on. So I was like omgwtf and we ran into some nearby room. EVEN more strangely, it followed. My mum was like *scream* and slammed the door. lol...getting chased around by a jolly wasp hehe. Anyway in the end I went off and did not know what became of the wasp...

Errr...gtg now bb

Bugger

2005-09-16T20:52:00.000+08:00

To all those persistent fans out there, thank you very much. I am very surprised if anyone would still care to visit my presumably dead(by misadventure) blog.

The explanation to this interesting phenomenon is very simple. A few weeks ago, I went to Malaysia on a school trip. For more info, please visit our 2k blog. After that, I fell sick. You know, people normally talks about the light at the end of the tunnel? I think its more like the tunnel at the end of the light for me. No, actually, more like the tunnel at the beginning of the light. Its like this

Me: Holidays! yay!
Mr. Sick: screw you
Mr. 39 degrees celsius fever: Hi there!
Mr. extremely bitter medicine: Eat me :)
Me: Go away! I want my hols!
Mr. Bed: I love you, you love me, we are a happy family! With a great big hug...
Me: *snores*
Mr. 39 degrees celsius fever: You love me!!
Me: No I dont!
*2 days pass*
Mr. 38 degrees celsius fever: Hi there!!
Me: Leave me alone!
*2 more days pass*
Mr lung racking cough: Hi th-
Me: Shut it.

Ok so thats basically how half my holidays gone. After that, I was too busy recovering to post. After that, my mum was hogging the comp so i cant post too. lolz. Basically nothing much happened la...only that i failed my physics(yes that sux). Yes, it really sux. Especially when you fail by half a mark, den your teacher thinks yore so pathetic she gives you half a mark so you can get 50%. I never thought ill reach this level of patheticness anyway.

Er ok. ta ta.

Tired

2005-08-25T20:28:00.000+08:00

Is it the end or the beginning of the end? Completed Maths test today. It was pretty screwed I had 7 minutes to do the 8 marks linear law question haix...Well at least its over, but on the dark side, it heralds the beginning of the big thing, the CTs. Eh, I really feel that the CTs is just a subsitute name for End-of-Year-Examinations mah. The stress levels are completely same.

Anyway, I guess I had a bit of fun this afternoon. A guy can have lots of fun when he has frozen throne, yeah.

Night is falling
Mum is calling
Comp is dying
Eyes are closing
Sleep is coming
I am going

Yes, you must agree that it is a nice poem. Look, it has the chinese poem's face but the english poem's eyes ok? (I am not alluding to Harry Potter). Indeed, 4 syllables per sentence for 6 sentences and the highly aristocratic use of rhyme. :P What a genius work hahahaha! Wait...I thought i was going...

Pandamonium!

2005-08-22T21:33:00.000+08:00

No witty things to say. No time to say them. No energy to type them. No sense to enjoy them. No humour to create them.

Haix. Another long and boring day. Had to rush my heart surgeons diary yesterday so dint post.

Actually nothing much happened today la. Triple RE today. Supposed to do the presentation but did not, since we have little initiative, and our mentor, a certain D.C, had even less. Im seriously beginning to think, as I have done so many times already, that our mentor doesnt give a toot about our project. Which is by itself nothing anyway. Some leaf litter crap. All we did was gather a few sample and analysed them. Quantitative research? Nah...unless you call 4 bottles of preserved insect components quantity. Qualitative research? Nah...not when we did not even record the dates, the areas, and the conditions when we took the samples. So what it is it then...maybe we should just call it chryselephantine research, whatever that means. Im sure our mentor will give a tout pardonner, whatever that means.

Leaf litter orgas, oops, organisms beginning to turn up at the back of my eyelids. Swear I thought my hamster was a giant springtail when I came home today. _-_ Haix nxt time i can play comp is...tomorrow...hmmm maybe I shouldnt feel so depressed after all.

Times' getting late, toodle-oo!

Sat-ur-day

2005-08-20T20:52:00.000+08:00

What Ho! It has been a long time since I last posted [(around 1440 minutes)(wow, thats a lot)(wait a minute...isnt that only one day?)(shhhhh)]. Anyway, it has been a very witty and entertaining day for me. As in, I have spent almost the whole day on frozen throne(wow). How times flies...[(with a pair of wings?)(shhh)]

Mmm, generally it has been extremely satisfactory, except for one of the dota games. It was a 3v3 with me fangjin and yijing vs jordan junwei and a valeuris(i donno whos that). Anyway, even tho we won, I had a very trying time[(as in, trying to fly?)(shhh)]. Well, at first i was in a solo lane vs valeuris, with me using faceless void and him using sniper. Ok, i wonder how YOU would feel, if you have in your hands a clumsy low life melee hero, up against an idiot puny dwarf guy who likes taking pot shots at you and has a VERY effective area nuke? Well, you could call it mosquito bites if you want...but youll have to admit it was a VERY big mosquito. Built somewhere along the lines of Godzilla. Anyway i was tower hugging when he became level 6 and assassinated(a skill) me. so i got pissed off and killed him after i respawned.

After that, he came back. There was one point where he pushed until my tower. So i was like laging back a bit, playing meek. So he assassinated me. I was like wtf idiot sniper waste your ulti. ahahaha. Den, from the corners of my eyes, i saw a strange thing. It looked like 2 cute little goblins holding a drum between them. My mind dismissed the possibility that it could be the goblin techies, because it was coming at me from BEHIND my TOWER! However, in the split second that followed, my mind registered that jordan was using goblin techies, and jordan was on the other team. So it was like, Sneeky Booky Doo *BOOM* ohshitohshitohshit im gonna die im gonna die oh im already dead. _-_

Subsequently, I died another few times to snipers assassinates. One of the times, my temper really flared and i said, "fuck your dead", immediately after which i regretted, because i was on the winning team and i was acting sore, making me a sore winner, which is worse than a sore loser, which is in other terms a mervyn tan, which makes me worse than a mervyn tan, which is extremely not very nice.

However, after i got my cranium basher and lothars i did manage to pwnz snipers ass once. After that i was under the distinct impression that the game ended.

Well after that i played a couple of enfos, tds, and dont move the taurens with chunkai and gang. Den they had to go. Left fangjin and me, so i felt rather lonely and left too.

Basically by that time, it was already 5 pm. By 6 pm, i was snoring like a pig on the living room sofa. By 7, i was out to dinner. By 8, i was on the comp. By now, I am posting this. Yes, I am talking crap and therefore i shall end now. Pip-pip

Blogger no. 2!

2005-08-20T12:59:00.000+08:00

Aha! Guess who this is :D ok that's lame my name is at the bottom. OK I guessed correctly that there's some way to share blog and allow more people to post...and clever Ling Zhang found out how! Anyway...I'm a noob and I have no idea how to blog...so...this is just some nonsense for fun to see how it works...

Re(from lz)
i shall not remove this post lol

2005-08-19T21:25:00.000+08:00

Hmmm i feel rather bored, so sorry for the double post but nvm, no one cares anyway.
Anyway, I shall discuss about the magnificent game of Frozen Throne here.
Here, I shall start discussing it. Ok stop laming.

Frozen Throne
Probably the best game ever made. Get it for $69.90 at any computer games store. Or, you can always resort to pirateds, if you got no money, like me. As in, i got no money, not i got pirated frozen throne.

DotA
Short for Defense of the Ancients. This is a highly entertaining and refreshing game. Game time could last from 10 minutes to 1 and a half hour, depending on the fibre of the players. By the way, it is a custom frozen throne game map designed for a maximum of 10 human players. Each player will choose a hero of his choice and move against the opposing team. There are two teams, called the Scourge and the Sentinel. Each side will send creep waves against the other side. The objective of the game is to destroy the opponent's ultimate structure, the world tree for the sentinel and the frozen throne for the scourge.

So much for introductions, I feel that DotA has been for me an important moment. In my hours of darkness, it has brought me to life. In the quagmire of the vicious cycle of school life and the impending dull future, mapped out fully before me, it has given me a boost like no other game has. The exhiliration, rush of adrenaline, deep philosophy, pounding of heart, and comaraderie in it all combines to form a spectrum of rainbow freshness.

Sadly, it is extremely fucking ironic that I am not allowed to play it, and the joys derived are always at the expense of disobeying my parents. I feel like a stupid crap. They say that unfilialness causes you to be beaten down into the eighteenth level of hell. But who cares, it probably cant be worse than my life.

Some tips for any newbie DotA players who visit my site. Important tips. Hmmm...lets just call it the dota commandments.
1) It is called Defense of the Ancients, not omfg fragged you of the ancients. Push tank counterpush herokill backdoor support. Do not be blinded by your desire for blood.
2) 2 great items for herokilling: Blink Dagger(2150gold) and Lothars Edge. Lothars Edge is Blades of Alacrity(1000 gold) + Claymore(1400 gold) + recipe(1400 gold). Use your discretion. Heroes with area disables are extremely effective with blink dagger. They are both very good for escaping from tricky situations.
3) Know when to chase and when not to. It is an acquired instinct.
4) Never play too much. 3 games per day is about the max. Play too much and you will lose your interest.
5) Expand on your hero's strength, and not attempt to fix it weaknesses. Example. Skeleton King. Slow attack speed? Hyperstone? WRONG. Bad choice. Insta death. Get heart of tarasque(messerschdimts reaver + vit booster) or satanic(reaver+helm of the dominator).

Thats all for now. Actually, I have more to say, but, i want to watch bleach, so too bad. ahahahahaha.

i blog

2005-08-19T19:57:00.000+08:00

Yes, i have finally decided to create a blog, against my better judgement. However, i do not know how to create a blog. However, it is here anyway, so never mind. Today was a rotten day. There was 4 periods. English, Chinese, Maths and Physics. Extremely mind-boggling and highly unentertaining periods. Maths stuff got confiscated during chinese. had to suck up to chinese teacher to get it back. Dint understand the bloody physics lesson, and got 15/20 for the bloody test cos i -4 marks for the last question. Maths was an express train, expectedly. Raymond Fong thinks everyone is darn smart and can keep up with him. Went comp lab for english to type some idiotic letter. That reminds me, i havnt finished it yet. Darn. Jeremy got pissed off during physics. Well, it might seem trivial but it is a highly rare occurence. Normally he just looks serious but smiles. I am currently eating grapes. Grapes are nice. Go eat grapes too. Yes, you can infer that that is an affirmative sign that I have ran out of words.