Old Personal: March 2005 Archives

Well, for starters, you don't live in a country where there is no meaningful sense of civil liberties. At least you have a democratically elected government that won an election that was vigorously contested. You are a Republic, you elect the people who make the laws, if you're not happy with the laws, then there's actually a chance that you can elect people who can change them, or persuade those people, or people who have influence upon them, to change their minds.

Personal disagreement does not abdicate your responsibility in upholding the rule of law, so you can apologise up your own ass. I can't be the only one to find people apologising for things they're enforcing but don't disagree with annoying, can I? In all likelihood, the people who are most likely to get the law changed are not going to be you. You have no vested self-interest in the thing itself. Spunk. There are however, people for whom this means money - it means money because fewer people are applying, fewer qualified applicants are bothering, and fewer outstanding graduates are entering the markets that require them.

It’s a problem for me that satire is effective through being distancing, but that it seems to be evinced by anything but. And also that to be effective, satire necessarily relieves itself of a certain level of sincerity, or inquiry, or intelligence.

The will towards democratic empowerment does not divorce you from the requirements of access - the baseline of which is validation. Flash, and Frames, are a bane upon the Interweb.

I can't quite bring myself to muster up to write anything worth anything about Extraordinary Machine (which I'm listening to again right now) and Psycho Beach Part (which I just finished watching). Fiona's growing on me, though I think I prefer her light touches, her aggressive stuff sounded more convincing in When The Pawn.

Psycho Beach Party I never quite realised isn't quite as trashy as I imagined it to be, apparently it's by a reasonably prominent queer/drag playwright, who's responsible for Die, Mommie Die - not that I know what that is. Amy Adams didn't get much of a role, which is unfortunate - I'm sure that Lauren Ambrose being red-headed like the drag self-image helped her in inhabiting the role. It's a pity the number lost to the pit that's 6 feet. I suspect that the episode I like so much of crazy Buffy owes something to this. It's interesting in any number of ways, not least in the narrative framing, which appears very deliberate.

I'm now satisfying my Go-Gos craving - very very much like early REM. I'm now remembering it was brought on by missing Rich Girls. UKNova is working out rather handsomely. I'm always digging myself holes with not burning things. I hope I'm not getting I Heart Huckabees for the umpteenth time.

It's strange not having no future any more. It makes buying a mahjong set and table seem almost rational. But yes, Mahjong night is on Thursday - Su-lin requests dinner. If air-conditioning is required, as I assume it is, the pasta place or ramen place at Shaw Towers spring to mind - though with the former we might need to make reservations. I'm assuming expensive japanese food is too expensive. No air-con we can just get hawker stuff from the place just at the start of Liang Seah Street proper - the one I keep telling people gives me bad vibes.

Do people want to come with me to buy the stuff? It's always more comforting having moral support - I'm just worried that if I put it off for too long, it'll end up being closed on Thursday or something. Anyway, tell me if $60 is too much to spend on a set, and that same amount on a table. The date of the event puts my holy grail reference in rather sharp perspective I think. I no longer have no future, yay me.

And really, this requires both Delwyn and Dion, if not there won't be sufficient hardcore people to play. Eugene has said he would come, but that'll depend if he flakes like last time. Any and all are welcome - edel? clarissa? (is she even back yet?). I wonder though if Delwyn's day of jubilee has yet arrived from the UK, and how that will affect all this. I don't have great hopes for Under the Sea, but I can now play most of Frank Black's Headache.

I now wondering if I should get another gmail invite from someone so that I can get a shorter username - and one that's not misspelt.

It appears that all this time I've been misspelling the word - it's supposed to be weltanschauung, rather than weltenschauung. I wish someone would have told me, not that it would have made a lot of difference. But I could have sworn that that was how it was spelt in the narrative texts I read - misprinting or me being silly? Oh well, not much I can do about the e-mail addresses I have with it. I was considering putting up a button with my gmail address, as seems to be the rage, but it's just free advertising isn't it, for a service that I really don't use - and whose pop service seems to be flaking on me. Bugger, it turns out that I'm just the leader in following instructions - it's not my fault they don't provide screenies for the advanced screen and make sure you turn on SSL - bastards. But yes, the misspelled word above is my gmail address. But apparently the buttons aren't gmail produced, you can find the generator here. I suppose it's useful in that you can use the smtp for fastmail :). I still think IMAP is a more useful protocol, especially if you have as many accounts as I do.

The Frank Black version of Hang on the Your Ego is incredibly apt for him.

It's like finding the holy grail, only not holy, and with cupholders rather than a chalice. It's a place near to OG on the way to Sim Lim, and it sells a range of tiles properly, as well as a not entirely shabby looking table. Now the downside is that the nicer set of tiles costs $60, which I'd be willing to pay, as long as I knew someone was going to buy it off me at the end of the day when I leave (since I'm pretty much definitely leaving now). The table is $60 as well, which I don't mind, since I'd get a smaller bedside table in the deal. Chips for poker aren't that pretty, and $500 worth is about $7, so I'd get say 2 or 3 packs? Enough for about $15 worth of chips, with plenty of change.

But yes, drawers in the table for chips and extendable cupholders. The only thing holding me back is that the rim might be too high if I want to put my notebook on it. The felt looked pretty nice though. This is the Hong Kong supposedly good stuff, as opposed to the cheap ass China stuff. Get back to me on what you think, and as and when someone shows up to help me carry it to the cab on the way back - we're in business. I'd call people out today, but last minute appeals don't seem as effective as the once were.

And so when I tell a lie I feel the need to make that lie be real - to tell the lie to others who I don't need to tell the lie to, and be convinced of it as I persuade them of the fullness of the factual thing itself. I suppose that that would that mixture of extraordinary and unremarkably natural. Though really I've not had the chance, nor the inclination, nor the circumstances under which, to lie on that scale and need for say 5 years?

I'd try to find and post the quote from Toby, but it's funnier when you watch it - Election Night, 4th season, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. So I should be writing 2 speeches, one, yay computer, the other, I'm sorry for your loss. Apparently Eugene was asleep at home, so it wouldn't have been a good idea for me to have just gone over and tried calling him there. I'm bringing popiah, which is happily halal (there's a sticker on the wall), though there's one less than there was because I was hungry.

I'm currently reinstalling Neverwinter Nights, since I've discovered the new campaigns, I hope they don't suck. If only the DVD versions weren't all in Italian or spanish. The side glare of the panel is much better now that they changed the panel, and they'll get back to me about the colour issue. Not all that bad, them coming over, and prepared to do the swopsies on the spot - but still plenty of annoyance to get there. Tech repair people are so meek and unassuming, I wonder what that's about.

The Maxell discs I bought (well, eugene bought) are fantastic, especially with the Benq - exceptional in fact. I'm very tempted to replace the Lite-On, but then I wouldn't have pretty scans anymore. At least not on this box. I'm being stubborn about restarting but I really should, so my mouse gets turned back on and the monitors work properly again.

I knew there was a reason I keep reading Su-lin's boggling. It's because she's intelligent and clever, and actually knows how to write - which is always nice. It's the kind of thing that it's nice to wake up to, to discover a tiny narrative of happiness or little vignette of a happy occasion, evoking perhaps the shared memory of the future while exercising the will towards nostalgia and the romantic desire for companions. I'm rather ashamed that I ever chastised Su-lin for not making her prose more interweb friendly by using short paragraphs as I do for the sake of plate-spinning attention. I think it has a lovely pith to it that reminds me (not in terms of pith necessarily) of the picnic in Brideshead. The perhaps unfortunate effect of the passage though is to render the character of the author as a vaguely marmish and scoldingly fond woman - one that is held in such regard by those that love her. And love her in an almost dismissive Sports Night manner. Just because this is what I'm doing right now I might as well confess that I've probably thought in the past, and likely think now, that Su-lin and I are probably not the best or most natural of friends, but happen to be people who despite that try very hard at working at it, for whatever reason, to attempt to make it work. The silly romanticism of Louis early in the morning. That requires the shame-laden indecision of a dismissive and vaguely comically rendered and protractedly convoluted retraction and disavowal. With that easy shame of shrugging of shoulders, 'I don't know'. I suppose I do subscribe to the notion of reading with the spine, but every so often, the sentimentality of the gripping of the chest is a rather fine way to judge and experience narrative. You can find the entry here.

It's the two of us going for no discernable reason to a farmhouse, in response to a dubious ad to make money, except that there's a twist to why, which is that they are supposedly supposed to be hiding the fact that they are aliens. Actually now that I think of it it's as if they come onto our farm and proposition us as a family to start the production, careful to say things out of place, like bodies when it's supposed to be plants or something. We both sort of know that it's theatre because I'd heard about it before, from hearing about it online, that they pretend to be aliens to hook you in, but it's really just a pyramid scheme. It ends with me after a while having been at their place, and they've finally managed to steal my wallet which they almost seemed obliged to do, and there's my IC in it so I go back to at least try and get it back. Which I think is still a good ending. Obviously throughout there's an amibavalence as to whether they are really aliens or just actor salesmen or the the professional troupe the conspiracy hires - all kinds of incongruities as to how they can afford to run the scam on the scale for small pyramid selling etc. And the children. Just as you leave the house is when they have the hooded people in black carrying a black shrouded body and mistakenly leave it for you to pull back the veil, but we don't bother. Perhaps that's part of what occurs when I go back. Perhaps they're asking us to move to the country and get others to do the same - as if they were asking us to join the troupe. Stilted formality and slips of mentions of violence and harvesting. I could work in the bit from Big Train where he asks people to give him money and they do as long as he promises that it's not for a time-share. I'm sure I could work Pixley in somewhere.

I maintain, as I should, differentiation from the things that nominally enforce themselves as similar. That is not this, and my protestations are not anything other than the desire to point out that that I am better than all of you, that I know more, understand more, am more.

I'm starting to think that the reason Sally was moved was because it was originally planned as the end of the 12/13 episode initial run - something surely intrigues me beyond all understanding.

Alicia Coppola: On both Sports Night and 2.5 Men, not to mention Lisa Edelstein as Bobby Bernstein.

The extreme close-ups of Sports Night's DOP?

I'm in clover, for... That's what the end of more self-reflexive OC will do to you - I'm downloading the Jennifer Connelly/John Hughes thing it refers to as we speak.

So again, my apartment smells like fabric softener, and I'm trolling about in my one pair of jeans that, honestly, are rather comfy - for jeans. Now if I could only stop waking up at 7 every morning. I forgot to put my towel in, and am wondering if I'm neurotic enough to change my sheets just so I can wash my towel. Of course you'd ask where my other towels are, to which my response would be - have you not *met* Louis? But if it ever happens, shower curtain, bedside table, new shoe rack, and uncontrollable weeping.

I just did the rather silly thing of checking how many episodes there would be in this season of 24. Wait for it. This also means that I can now test out my new firmware.

Apparently there's some computer fair thing on tomorrow at Suntec, and all are welcome to join me and Eugene - I must warn you though, that from my experience, these things are designed for one thing only - to clear old stock before new products are launched or price cuts announced. And I can build you one much cheaper and better - though I'm starting to think I really should charge.

Eugene seems to be wanting to help g/f to get new comp, and I'm just wondering whether it'd just be a better idea to go for a cheap socket 754 processor, and put some ass-indentations in Athlon 64. Though I'm wondering whether it's just not worth it if there's going to be no overclocking - the rated speeds are pretty low for the cheaper chips. And the whole SFF thing is making me wonder if it's a good idea. Well they can have a look at the crap being offered, then they can come crying back to clever Louis.

I think I know what I'll be playing in the background the next time there's a bridge game at my place. And I know that I've not gone out for weeks and many many weeks, but that's because I'm focused on not thinking, is what I'm thinking. Maybe it would do me good, but I think at least at the moment, that would require too much moral support. Mahjong and monitors will have to wait.

The Suede videos I want because of the first disc, the early stuff before they got rid of the good guitarist, apparently the videos are to be mocked, I don't think I'd actually recognise them except for Animal Nitrate anyway. dEUS is more promising in that respect, and I don't think I've even ever seen the videos in question, except maybe the dancing one that came later. What I'd really love is to get that live set of them on MTV - I can't even remember the show now, it featured a bunch of great alternative bands of the period doing rather raw live shows - if someone could illuminate me.

I have to admit, the livebookmarks feature in Firefox is pretty cool - it lets you bookmark the automatically detected RSS feed you've found and view the headlines in a bookmark folder. Opera should do that. In case you haven't noticed, Louis has been incredibly bitchcakes for at least a day or so - I've becomes obsessed with traffic - but I've resolved to calm down and deal with it. I think I've tweaked the sidebar quite enough so that I won't fiddle with it for at least a day or so.

My ad clicks seem to have disappeared, so that means it was my fiends being curious - or someone who's lost their poor interweb cherry to the hunger of adsense. At some point I'll stop talking about my obsession with things you do thing with like nipples - and write about something vaguely interesting - as is my wont.

The construction outside my door is progressing - there are now doors to the lift area, and there's a little balcony with a railing to fall off of while you figure out that the chute is there.

Memories of family dinners, getting dressed up, going to tables with big restaurants, and running around up and hiding under tablecloths, playing with cousins and undoing whatever grooming went in to the past few hours. Watching Charlie dressing up Jake reminded me.

I don't think I'll ever quite be able to communicate to people the extent to which the knowledge of shame overwhelms my remote negotiation with the world. And by that I mean I wake up, head stuffed with thoughts that have recurred so many times they are like the apparition of jousting that I remember from my most fevered spellings. I think the extent of it feeds into my digression, my evasion, my awkwardness - it makes me lose control over the directness of language - and you can well see demonstrated. It's no surprise that this should come at a time when other big thoughts play in me like a big mansion. There's a reason why I'm avoiding watching Deadwood, and why I'm so tempted to got Sports Night crazy again.

Oh and I'm taking back what I said about discussion and technology - after awhile, what this chattering needs to do is shut up. They're squeezing a bit too tight.

And so waking up and thinking of Lone Wolf. Perhaps there was something cosmic in moving from 1 to 350. I was dreaming that as Lone Wolf, I was telling my army that the only way to spread things round here was by decree and I was enjoining them not to more or less make porn in a particular place. Apparently though it was good for morale, it just wasn't quite right. I wonder if they ever considered making series with Kai Ladies - though that doesn't sound quite as cool as Kai Lords, to be sure. I wonder if it was subject to the same predjudices that JK Rowling described. Perhaps the first draft was Hermione. Am trying muster up to write about the pie place. Am now thinking about Grail Quest, and that one where you kept ending up at 23 or whatever. I should really try and get access to those. Lone Wold always seemed like a particularly visceral occasion of fantasy, more oozy and drippy to be sure. The blondeness of it is probably a bit disturbing now though. And yes, they never really showed you that much of a portrait of yourself - self-actuation then. Am starting to miss Boomtown. I never quite remembered to mention that is was And Jason Gedrick, which was pretty cool. I really need to shower.

Still can't quite figure the whole auto trackback thing - for some sites it does it automatically, but most of the times not? And editing causing pings? That's just annoying. How would I make it automatic for mine I think is the real problem. So, well, sorry about that, but 2 pings do not spam make yes/no?

Obviously I feel a bit self-conscious about posting so many pictures, but I figure it's like having a little holiday from the pressures of endless text. It seems a 450 pixel width thumbnail (loosely called) is the just right dimension so that things at least look okay on 800x600.

Eugene flaked, but so far at least Su-lin, Dion and Zhi-Xian are coming, which is probably about right - though if Delwyn were here it would more justify the platter proposition. Thus the first Curry Night. I'm thinking Muthu's Curry would be the next on the list.

I'm very tempted now to post that picture of Prudence, but I figure that I should do it when there are fewer pictures on the front page. It's a real pity that MI idiot is in so many ways mean to be such a central figure in Boomtown. Oh, another of the CFL lights blew - I think there might just be something wrong with that lamp.

The newer Blogger.com templates aren't too shabby IMO, though my custom MT one is still cleaner and nicer. Very spunky. Oh, and I'm in the midst of reworking my front pages to make them use the style sheets from MT 3 - it's just a matter of pasting content and deciding what I want to keep really. Eventually.

Okay, let's just make this clear - I consider, and have from the beginning, considered myself as a diarist, and was concerned that this endeavour serve that purpose. If I hear another thing about the political significance of whiny partisans, I'm going to stab myself. The reason I don't have an "issue" bog or don't use it to boggle about something in particular like technology or boggling itself, is because that would be, to me, contrary to the purpose of this as I set it out. I'm not hearkening back to some pure idea of what boggling should be, I'm talking about my conception of it. It's about the person and the ideas, and the way that they intersect.

Sure there are many other uses - they collate information - collectively so; but content management systems have been doing that for a while now, esp things like Neowin, or even Slashdot for that matter. Actually one of the channels I do sort of approve of it for is as corporate communication with its customers. Yes, it's always nice to be able to interact with a human face rather than a corporate website, but that makes sense to me, to individualise the notion of the corporation - as long as it is sincere in its desire to communicate and allow discussion. A certain amount of chatter is always good.

But especially because these bogs are about humanising the thing by showing the people, it is imperative that long technical posts that reveal aspects and justifications of things that you work on be accompanied by personal posts - about the things around you and your thoughts and interests. It's not a thing about at thing, it's a thing about a person. The example I found here, it pointed to here. Then scroll up and read the post after.

Journalism blah.

Now people who do this as vanity work - I really do like that episode of Buffy with Michelle Trachtenberg writing into her diary (Real Me) - but mostly because it's a caricature of what that kind of writing is. At a certain age, that seems to transform into pretentious twaddle. Which is fine as long as you move on. But really, some of the face tilting towards the sun is insufferable in the extreme.

Gah.

Megan Ward. The desire to grasp, to hold, to *create* certainty. How is that kind of testing not morally bankrupt? It boggles me that I haven't written more extensively about this, especially in relation to the Doll's House, and how horrendous I found the insinuation of the test - of the finality of it and the edge of revelation and tipping it seemed to encompass within it. Of all the things I remember about the play, that is the one thing that resonates to me, without question - how the momentous is at best fetishistic.

I'm suddenly thinking about the scene in Royal Tenenbaums, where the tennis player loses it on court.

So 3 down.

This will be another of those posts that posits the question: who reads this crap? I've been browsing my site stats, and I apparently have up to 217 unique visitors for the first 3 days of this month. Now sure, I obsess and constantly load pages but that would all end up being from my one IP address.

Googlebot and other crawlers fine should generate quite a lot of traffic per IP - but again, all from one IP. Next would be the mufftorrent chatboxed I pretty much spammed (sorry bout that) - some are from my forum posts, no doubt thinking I'm anna paquin. What amazes me is that supposedly about 20% take the action of bookmarking or adding to favorites. Out of 217?

What makes more sense is that the majority end up here for all of 30s or less - these would be the ones who realise I'm not hawking subtitles for Jack and Bobby, Unscripted etc.

I would hope that at least the people who come looking for Broadvoice stuff find what they're looking for. Also I wonder how these stats deal with things like tabbed browsing - would that account the the amount of direct requests - ie with no referrer?

I'm now realising that my long titles aren't perfect for pinning on top, annoying. Well, looks like they didn't turn out too bad. Just in case you can't find pinned posts you saw before, the category (ta-da) is Previously Pinned.

It's probably been haze season again recently, not that I even really remember what it used to be like, but yes, pretty erratic weather and being incredibly hot at times and sort of smoggy in the night and mornings. Not so I'd have really noticed, but some times, a bit not so missable. Went on a convenient quest for pocket tissue. Apparently Watsons has decided to diversify their range, segmenting their market if you will. Also their branding doesn't seem to be quite as important to them with those products. Oh, and rambutan trimming.

Ah, I see - their branding is now reserved for the upper end of their market.

Having nothing better to do - by that, obviously meaning that all this is very much writing around - I submitted my blog to a bunch of aggregation services that do Singapore blogs. I think it's funny too.

These seem to be pretty small communities, which will be nice in terms of readership. I'm just saying this to be disclosive to people who have come here to watch the audition. I don't actually read very much of other people's writing - if you don't like it, bite me. If you want to read this, yay for everyone, but there is no quid pro quo unless your superbly illuminating comments don't make me want to stab myself. Welcoming enough?

Who doesn't enjoy a healthy ambivalence?