Photo Flow

Just going to pic spam a little since I've been a jolly snapper with my phone. The one above was taken on my way home on Tuesday afternoon.

The following are from lunch at the Island Cafe yesterday.


And now for a little rage: I hate how it's noisy in residential areas in the day. Leaf-blowers are usually what drive my frustration levels up, and today there's some hammering going on punctuated with the sound of wood making contact with other hard surfaces. Grrr.

The Butt that Itches

No, I do not have some skin ailment in an embarrassing and inconvenient location. The title refers to a Chinese turn of phrase used to describe the impetus for the ill-advised biting off of more than one can chew, foolhardily overstepping boundaries, and the like. For example, perhaps, "Saddam's butt itched, so he decided to provoke the States with lies about weapons of mass destruction, and so ended up swinging from a rope instead of carrying on as a happy (not so) little dictator."

Well, in my case, I decided that I wasn't spending enough time in front of the computer as it is, and so volunteered my services for an online translation (fan) project. Japanese to English. On lj. Of a certain someone's blog. So I spent something like 4 hours last night labouring over bizarre sentence structures and even wierder katakana words [katakana: the alphebet/script used in Japanese usually for foreign words and loan words]. I'm heavily dependent on the online J-> E dictionary, and am struggling to make the text sound natural in English. Booh.

In other news, I spent quite a long while (maybe amost an hour?) in Kino yesterday looking at manga and trying to find stuff by Yuki Kaori (she who wrote the Count Cain series I was blithering on about in an earlier entry). Was about to give up scouring the shelves when I found her books nestled right next to Hino Matsuri's (of Vampire Knight fame) and realised that she was for some strange reason out of the alphabetical order. But anyway, I chose to go with Neji, a single volume standalone, as they only had the fifth title in the Count Cain series, God Child.


It has 3 seperate but continuous stories, and I've finished 2 so far. It's science fiction as opposed to the fantasy/horror/gothic genres I know her for, but I'm enjoying it a lot. The stories centre around Neji, a young boy who was cryrogenically frozen along with his girlfriend after they were brutally killed in 1992. His corpse is appropriated by a government body that carries out research into ESP and other powers, and they experiment on him. When he finally wakes up 40 years later, his memories are wiped, and they coerce him into training his powers and try to make an assassin out of him. Her art's pretty, but it has the problem of having characters that are hard to distinguish from one another.

Edit: I forgot to add that I was really surprised to find that the volume I bought was from the first print run, way back in 2001. So does that mean that the book's been sitting on the bookstore's shelves for the past 7 years or so? Hmmm.


And here we have a shot of a yummy green tea flavoured mooncake!!! Bought our first box of mooncakes a few days ago. Gosh I love green tea mooncakes! Anne and Pygmy might recognise the saucer in the picture. :p I realised it was the perfect size for these miniature mooncakes! Wehey!

Oh, I -did- manage to get a clam/flip phone in the end! I threw my vague sense of brand loyalty into the air and went with Sony Ericsson. ^-^ I'm still not used to their predictive text platform, though. Hrmmm.

Looks like the rainy (more like stormy) spell we've been having is still going to continue for a while. It was annoyingly sunny for a while earlier this morning, but the felines and canines are now descending upon this tiny little splodge of a country once more.

A Mean Meander Followed by Mildness

 
I can't concentrate properly on typing this when I can hear my maternal ancestor yakking on the phone. I miss having the entire house to myself. Haha. :p 

But anyway, lately, I've been ranting quite a bit about the lack of cultural stimulus and creation in this country. Literature, music, art, or film. Only smatterings that don't seem to rise above a certain level of quality.  When I was in Iceland, I saw that there was a flourishing publishing industry. The total number of Icelandic speakers in the entire world hardly rises above 300,000 individuals, and yet, they are able to sustain a literary scene, AND produce a Literature Nobel Prize laureate. Sunny litte Spore, with her overcrowdedness of 4.5 million people, is in an appalling state when it comes to literature. There was an article in the newspapers (All hail the oh-so-wonderful Straits Times) yesterday, I believe, about book circulation statistics for the National Library. It appears that what my fellow countrymen enjoy reading most are ghost stories. One of the most popular local writers is Russell Lee, who authors the True Singapore Ghost Stories series, which has been floating around since I was a kid. There's also this Mr Midnight series for children, which ranks right behind Harry Potter. If my memory serves me well, I think Mitch Albom's books as well as The Kite Runner were at the top of the adult fiction list. 

Oh, I am filled to the brim with trembling patriotism when I think of my beloved motherland and her glorious ethos of good grades, business, finance, and banking. Hooray! Let me conform! I want to volunteer for lobotomy and make the transformation into a reproducing drone~! \(^o^)/

-

Hmmm. I think that came out a little bit harsher than I expected. But whatever. Haha. I am filled with envy when I look at some of the Japanese creative industries - publishing, animation, and music. Ok, fair enough, wikipedia informs me that Japan has a population of 127 million. Hardly a fair comparison. But still. Also, books are dirt cheap there, and there is that lovely huge second hand industry. Oh well.

My two-year old mobile phone is starting to die on me. It was already at a certain stage of being handicapped, but now, the screen has displayed (haha) a tendency towards white-outs. Not good. I desperately want a clam/flip phone, and have something akin to brand loyalty to Nokia, but the only model that is a clam phone has yet to be releas

ed, and is bound to be rather pricey when it eventually is. Boo. 

I am now the proud owner of a 500GB external hard drive. Rather excessive, but since it only cost $10 (approx. £3+) more than a 320GB one, I decided to plan ahead for the future. :p

Another purchase I made that made me happy, was the August issue of Cure, which subtitles itself "Japanesque Rock + Visual Styling Magazine". As you can see, Ayabie are on the cover, and the photo shoot was done in a carnival/funfair setting. I read part of the interview, and at one point, they started talking about their various pets. Intetsu has a floppy eared rabbit! Haha.  

I think I'm going to have to sit around on my butt at home for the next few days to save some of the not-exactly green stuff. Oh wait, there's something called 'Studying for the Japanese proficiency test" which is supposed to be my primary occupation. 

I can't seem to get the formatting of images right. Grrr. Well, this is on the right, but I wanted it in the centre, and now I can't seem to change it. *shakes fist* Oh well. Anyway, it's a pretty pretty picture of a pretty pretty pick (yay, I score for my wide range of vocabulary!) from Intetsu's blog. Picture thief I am. 

By the way, the "ceiling fan" tag here shall serve as my tag for random-ness. 

Oh, and the picture right at the top of the post I snapped while walking back home yesterday evening. It was a nice and atmospherically (in both senses of the word?) overcast day. Also somehow managed to be drenched or splattered by too many raindrops while we were out.  

"And the clouds will open for me"

I feel an urge to redeem this blog from the frivolous, babbling posts that have filled its archives so far. Haha.


It is now raining in that wonderful way it can only do so properly in the tropics. There was the build-up to the storm, with overcast and cloud crowded skies, with the wind whipping it all up. And now it's all coming down, accompanied by the languid rumblings of the thundergods. Lovely. We had rain yesterday as well, which made the bus windows mist up when I was riding down south for a class gathering. It was my class for only less than three months, and I hadn't seen almost all of the people there in real life for something like 6 years. Deliberated for quite a bit before asking Jg to tell me to go. Haha. I am stupid like that - I'd be indecisive, more or less make up my mind, but would want someone to tell me to commit to the choice, or to ask me to do so.

Here's a snap of the view from the bus, with the lights dispersed by the misty windows:


And the view from the boardwalk of sorts where a very stoned Jg and I hung out:


I told Jg "You and I make a very good combination when you're stoned", which is so true, because when Jg has full command of her mental capacities, we'd both end up wanting to talk. A lot. So I take advantage of her vacantness and happily prattle on.

Ok, really need to get out of these pyjamas before Cc arrives.

And it All Breaks Down.....

Just watched the latest episode, Turn 19, of Code Geass R2. And wow, what an episode it was. After the last one, I was looking forward to much drama and great plot shake-ups, but this surpassed all expectations. Brought tears to my eyes, this episode did.

WARNING: Spoilers Ahoy! Rambling and Babbling also sighted on the horizon

But I don't think anyone who reads this at the moment will really care/mind if I put spoilers for anime up here. Haha.

Lelouch, Lelouch, Lelouch! Why must you lie so? Two episodes ago, he lied to Suzaku concerning the truth about Euphy's death, and now he lied to Kallen by saying that to him, she's merely a pawn. He's set himself up as the ultimate villain and evil mastermind, and has driven all his allies away from him. All but the one who's too [psychotic/thick/emotionally twisted/underdeveloped/all of the above]. The irony is that what Lulu said to Rolo about hating, using, and wishing to kill him was actually a rare explosion of truth amongst the expanding tangles of lies. But of course, being emotionally deranged, Rolo comes back to save Lulu's skinny anime arse, and finally performs an act free from manipulation and control, by, you guessed it, dying.


I'm afraid MSN (and the maternal ancestor moving around the house and trying to interact with me) is distracting me from typing out a proper reaction and analysis to the episode. Many thoughts ran through my somewhat dulled brain while I was watching it, but unfortunately they have scattered. So once again I fail to rise above the level of "OMG THAT WAS SOOOO COOOL!!"-esque comments on anime. Ooh whellll. Need to get out of these pyjamas now.


EDIT: I forgot to add that it turns out that the casualties for the nuking of the Tokyo Settlement (in the anime, in case you didn't realise :p) was actually revealed to be in the millions! Something like 35 million in total. Whoa. Someone commented somewhere that it was incredibly brave to show an episode last week of Tokyo being nuked the week of the anniversary of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. I won't bother to launch into an analysis of how the nuclear bombings have been etched into the Japanese psyche and all that.

Muddle

Last night as I lay there waiting for sleep to take me, I made a resolution not to come on the computer for the weekend, for the sake of my poor shriveled eyeballs. So when I woke up this morning, I decided to entertain myself by listening to a Drama CD that I downloaded a while ago but never got round to putting on - Miss Pudding, who was Sliced Up and Eaten (Kirikizamare Taberareta Miss Pudding. It's based on the Count Cain manga series by Kaori Yuki (she did Angel Sanctuary and Fairy Cube too, and has a rather typically beautiful shoujo manga drawing style). This Miss Pudding CD I acquired together with another from the same series, Kafka, which involved vampires. A few minutes into Miss Pudding, it started bothering me that I couldn't remember the cast properly, and the only way to rectify that was to press that little button on my magnetic laptop and pull out those CD booklet scans nestled within my ever increasingly snug hard drive. Sadly, I caved in and my resolution turned to dust and was scattered by the Wind of Lack of Self-Control.

I only finished the first part of the Drama CD, which dealt with the series of mysterious murders in which the culprit allegedly has long blonde hair, sings a Mother Goose nursery rhyme about puddings (I'm lost here. Does such a rhyme actually exist??), carves up the victim, eats them (I think I got this right), and leaves a plum pudding at the scene. Our protagonist is the Earl of Hargreaves, Cain, who is known as the Earl of Poisons for his predilection for collecting and studying different types of poisons. His little sister, Meryweather (played by Kawata Taeko, who I really enjoyed as the Duchess in Are You Alice?) tells him of the string of homicides, and creepily starts singing the song/rhyme. He makes her stop, and fires the servant who's been telling her those stories, and departs for a party. There, he saves a young woman from the unwanted advances of another man. She turns out to be the newly-wed Gladys Radcliffe, and asks if she could stay with Cain in the room that has been prepared for him in the manor. She is extremely distracted and distressed, and finally confesses that she thinks that she's the pudding murderer. She tells how she falls into a sleep way too deep, and on the morning after one of the murders, woke up to find a blood-stained pudding knife at the foot of her bed. She says that her husband, Radcliffe (of some title or another), disbelieves and dismisses her fears, and she has no one to turn to. At this moment, her husband barges in after knocking over some interior ornamentation of some sort, and yells at Cain to get away from his wife. Radcliffe is played by Chiba Susumu, and it was fun listening to him as a slightly angsty klutz. I didn't like Chiba as Ichijou in the Vampire Knight anime, but am minding it less now.

Anyway, I'm afraid I've got to go get ready to leave the house to meet my twin now. Can't reveal the conclusion of the story, or go into a detailed ramble about the CD, but might do so later. I'll turn off my computer, and hopefully it'll remain so till Monday, when it's time for me to get my Geass fix. :p

Bobeep

And so I'm back on blogger. Wehey!

My eyeballs are pretty much shot from spending the afternoon on my magnetic laptop youtubing and sharing the enthusiasm and appreciation on MSN, so won't be able to bang out an opening post of any consequence here. Am also dead tired. I think I should aim to sleep before the clocks in this part of the world make the skip across the 01:00 dot/line/spot.

So here you go. First post accomplished in blind, exhausted style. :p