Old Personal: August 2003 Archives

30th of August is when I must play mahjong. Clarissa and Delwyn will be there. Emen, what the fuck do you have on that you're so god-damn busy. Anything less than getting laid is not good enough. It's not like I didn't ask early enough.

So would Su-lin like to play mahjong? (I promise we'll actually play as much bridge as Su-lin's little heart desires, which I'd be rather intent on myself anyway)

Anyone? Peishan too busy? God damn it what's more important than me coming back and mahjong? (please restrain yourselves from answering that)

I know my sister-in-law reads this, though I suppose marital bliss is excuse enough?

I'll promise to be no end of charming (read: sullen and tired) and I'll bring lovely duty free wine...

Screw you guys... home.

I'm just thinking of the time when I exclaimed about Jiang (Q) who told me he was going to watch Chicago in Sinapore, to which I did qudruple takes and kept exclaiming how wonderful that was. It was only later that I realised he was referring to Chicago the musical which had been on forever whilst I was thinking of Chicago the band.

On another note, I have a punchline without a joke, which goes "...which really puts the whore in Sephora".

Su-lin is just so agreeably funny at times. I mean, personally, this is the kind of writing that I think Su-lin excels at, basically being Su-lin on the page - pithy, sharp, very very sly; very like a china-shop wanting to be a bull.

Now if only Su-lin would master the art of short paragraphs, which makes online reading so much more pleasureable... :P - and honestly, which I think would really play to her strength of very syncopated prose - punchy with a sense of rhythm and pace.

Following my little anti-MP3 diatribe, I'd just like to give a heads up to people that I'll be giving away my MP3-CD collection because I can't stand them anymore and will be bringing my CD collection with me like a lamb, or like Mary, whichever way you see it.

At the moment, the way I see it, Winston and Peishan should get first dibs, then Clarissa/Delwyn - I don't suppose Su-lin particularly wants anything. If Dion were interested he'd have to work through Delwyn in some way. The services of a burning machine *might* be on hand, as well as a ridiculous amount of CD-R's to people who are at Mahjong parties, or who come over to my place after I build the new comps.

The Michelle Branch CD is a mixture of getting things okay and being annoying. As with most autorun flash stuff, it takes over your PC without asking when you insert the disc (autoplay is actually useful which is why I don't turn it off by default). It also has all it's content as macromedia embedded .swf files which, unlike the previous penchant for .mov files, I can't view in full-screen.

So I bought at 19 inch monitor running at 1280x1024 for fuck? (yes I do realise resolution doesn't actually matter in full screen mode, but I assume it does somewhat in midget size)

On the up side, the trend in these things has been to make them much easier to exit than before, which means that the content is actually easy to access, meaning you're actually going to bother to view it more than once, since it's not as annoying as it once was.

Still no initial menu for playing the CD instead of going straight to the extras. Viewing the extras is not the only reason you put a CD into your PC. Fuckwits.

The Neil Young album I bought was slightly more elegant, putting the extras on a DVD - and in this case, it seems (I haven't seen the extras yet) that the content is actually an integral part of the musical experience. Oh the wonders of economic circumstances creating new forms of art :D.

Of course I'm in many minds about the rather pathetic fillip that most offer in terms of special extras to get people to pony up for the CD rather than downloading. But then I've just recently been evangelising my annoyance at the inadequacy of compressed audio formats - CD quality is really just so much sharper and fuller.

The album's wonderful, Young just sounds so much more crunchy with Crazy Horse. And I'm quite impressed with the HDCD format in which the CD's released, though I suppose I shouldn't have been pissing myself/been surprised by the discovery that the format is now owned/propogated by the Vole :).

Well yes, it does seem that Louis just tends to be tetchy when he's blogging, but it's probably just the nature of the exercise and the will in not wanting to be entertaining on demand.

There's to be a lunch buffet thing on the afternoon of my brother's wedding dinner, which might be a good excuse to get people together to play cards, feed them and avoid my relatives. Honestly the first people who come up to me and tell me I should lose weight are gonna get a hand to talk to. I would have said I'd tell them to go fuck themselves, but there are things relatives just don't understand.

I'm just thinking of the rather curt way in which I rebuffed Ve-Yin's attempt some time back to draw out my romantic aspirations by talking about computers. If you don't get it, whose fault is that?

(Please note: close personal friends are somewhat exempt from all this, but only just.)

Oh, and just to say to people in general, if you have "friends" who live overseas, esp in the states who you want to bring stuff back for you? - don't be an idiot. Shopping for things, even online, isn't the most fun of things, esp when you have to be considerate about things you don't want to be.

The excuse that "things are cheaper there" is not a good one. If you can get it where you are, I'll charge you courier fees for bringing it back. "Shipping is so expensive" - not as expensive as my time for stuff I don't really want to do. If you want a keychain I can buy from somewhere I go to everyday (ie nowhere) then fine - things that require me to think while packing my suitcase create enormous amounts of animosity (think MP3-CD players).

Oh, and if I wasn't unemployed, I wouldn't be home all day to wait for UPS deliveries - which means I might have to end up going to the delivery depots to pick up stuff. I'm bringing back heatsinks from here because I really don't want to have to deal with shitty brand ones in Singapore which I know nothing about. And cases are just too big.

The US is insular and myopic - shipping overseas is not something it does easily; for goodness sake, they don't even bother to make alot of their stuff autosensing, so the fact that the rest of the world uses different voltages (but do offer autosensing stuff) doesn't seem to bother them. NTSC is not the only video format available to the world. Deal with it. Rock and Roll.

Oh, and 2 words: Region Encoding. Thank god for Lite-On and the pirate realm that is Asia (and the smurfing interweb).

And on a personal note, I really don't go very many places when I'm here, I spend most of my time at home. Going out is an event, and an event that I want to keep genial and happy, not frustrated and tetchy.

(and oh) For the sake of momentum I've allowed my fears to grow larger than life.

What had promised to be a sweltering day has actually turned out rather temperate, no doubt partly because it's not so humid, and because I've not left the house :D.

Feelings of dissoluteness and lack of employment (in one sense only, not the other) are starting to creep in, though reading the Sword of Honour Trilogy (I've actually finished the second book) is quite a lark.

If Su-lin's reading this, could she recommend a Dorothy Sayers book to me? Basically a good one to start off with, something rollicking and fun perhaps.

Hate the sinner, but love the sin.

This is rather moving.

Huh, it appears the Economist has decided to do a fluff piece on blogs and say nothing particularly insightful (and get things very much wrong - eg: Blogger was selling Blogger Pro long before Google). I suppose the whole thing about the corporatising of blogs is something interesting, but then we know this already.

Like most mainstream newspapers the Economist tends to fall into the trap (less often than most though obviously) of writing about things that simply exhibit how little they really know about what's really going on.

Just because it's news to the doddering old and the intellectually stunted, doesn't excuse you talking nonsense about something you obviously have very little investment in, and something that you're obviously not too clear about. Worse when they decide that they should put aside anything they've ever been taught about tone and come off as completely uninformed and cack-handed.

What's especially disappointing is that for a newspaper that so often makes it its mission to push boundaries in how people think about things - to persuade and illuminate - as well as to provide startling and insightful observations about the unusual sides of overworn arguments, it can so often resort to this kind of sensationalised wolf-crying.

Regurgitating the opinions that could be found by any idiot in the know, much less by Slashdot responses reduces your newspaper from the bearer and illuminator of knowledge, to the rather pathetically journalistic function of nutella - all you do is spread.

You'd think blogging out of boredom is a sign of something, or that it's not the most productive - and yet, as I'm coming to realise, I'm not really to keen anymore to report what's happening around me. And probably my most idle posts are the ones that contain the most reflection, the most considered commentary, which is probably the better part of this blog.

I feel a frustration, and above all a kind of trepidation at writing - I find myself avoiding it, despite thinking to myself that that's what I'd like to do. But then the shuttlecocks here is nothing new, it's not that different (though it is different) from writing academic work.

What can I say about the Throwing Muses but I never quite understood how demeaned the term religious experience had become until I experienced this kind of trembling.

It's amazing the amount of good celluloid I've been seeing recently (Wrong Turn exempt of course). I just got the DVD of CQ, by Roman Coppola, and it's pretty good. It's making me want to buy Danger: Diabolik.

Because I like being dismissive without extended explaination of my pique, I'll just post three links to articles in the L.A Times, the first of which talks much nonsense about critical theory in general, narrative theory by association, and film theory in particular. Obviously no one who knows me will have to guess who's the top of my intellectual midget list now.

(Please note: because the L.A. Times wants you to register with their site to read this crap, I've sacrificed a disposable e-mail account to give you a username and password, so you don't have to. User: latimesprintscrap pw: absolutecrap)

Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology.

Some idiot who doesn't seem to quite get how much of a marxist stereotype he's making of himself.

Take it from a cinema studies grad: Film theory's not for everyone, but there are riches within the jargon

A response to the above idiot, which I've not read, but which probably isn't great.

Film Theory: Elitist Nonsense or a Critical Life Lesson?

Letters of reply, the first by Branigan, a sampling of whose work I've actually read, and who is shown to be a rather witty intelligent man, not least by his response.

This is so god-damn funny (amongst other things) I can't be bothered to comment too much on it, but just to say, download it (after you've registered on my forums of course) and laugh your ass off.

On a more serious note, let me say this: Rodney King.