i know i shouldn't

but i really want to watch this



saw a few clips of it on the intertubes. this is the first disney princess movie with a african american princess, which is apparently ground shattering. also, it's funny to listen to their accents. not in a racist kind of way, but just an observing kind of way, like how people like to sit around and just "people-watch" as some term it. this is probably my way of "people-watching".

Fishbowl Vision Activate

my parents just finished making my new army specs. need to wear them for a while to get used to the fishbowl vision effect.

also, on an unrelated note, my intestines were rebeling against the rest of my body. you don't need to know the details.

also, i'm still available (to go out and do stuff)

also, can anyone lend me an army cap for a photoshop thing? no need peak cap, just the green normal recruit one.

Remember When

i promised to write some stuff about the multiplayer in cod modern warfare 2. right now, the connection is so bad i can't get a decent game without spasming, both me and the game character.

although i did in fact played it for a few hours (days) before the connection went out the window, i doubt anyone really cares about how i felt about the game.

Why?

because firstly, none of my readers (that's the person sitting in the chair looking at the computer screen) own an xbox 360 or any console, so is unlikely to buy one and hence cannot enjoy the games that i am about to offer them. but if you actually do, drop me an sms.

secondly, if you were going to buy this game already then my words won't sway you. ever. otherwise i couldn't really care

but on to more important topics, ASSASSIN'S CREED 2



If you've always wanted to visit italy or venice, but is too cheap or afraid of planes, this game is the closest you'll get to being there. it's probably even better than being high. the scenery is just so amazing. but i have to warn you though. when i started playing in the first 10 minutes, the ridiculously fugly models of people just totally freaked me out, i was going to yell at the television screen and demand my money back, until i actually went into florence and saw the "real" people there.

it's really ironic how people in the real world look less real and more disgusting than in the Animus.

the gameplay has really stepped up, although greater depth is needed for it to really shine. combat has a lot more variety with new weapons and the ability to disarm your opponents. i found myself regularly disarming them, stabbing them and then dropping their weapon just to disarm another one. the free running parts are still incredibly fun, although it's hard to find a way down after going up, especially without interrupting the flow of the movement.

the storyline is lot more beefed up, Ezio has a much greater personality than Altair, although he seems to be a little too eager to help out people he just met. the sci-fi part is a little too abstract i think, so it won't be easy to tie it up at the end. but i still have to give props to the guy whoi came up with the idea for the glyphs and the "truth". if you play the game, you'll hear this quite often "nothing is true, everything is permitted" so the glyph has you do puzzles regarding many moments in history where many great people that we hold as "pioneers" like Thomas Edison, were actually just using the Piece of Eden and manipulating the view of the public, which is very conspiracy theory-ey and puts people like john wilkes booth as the "hero" or the "assassin" who "safeguard the evolution of humanity". it's really interesting to think about how the victors write history and the fact that the assassin's work in the shadows.

the soundtrack composed for the game is also incredible, albeit a little too "soft". but i think it's the kind of thing that really adds to the atmosphere rather than being a great standalone piece. regardless, it's still "feels" great to just play the game. although at the end, there's really not much to do once you completed it.

and speaking of completing it, now i just finished what i already planned for my next 11 days. wth am i going to do at home now.


this was actually going to be another post but i got bored and lazy after that day and the subsequent ones. here's a story i'll probably tell my grandkids or at least anyone interested enough to hear.

so me and edmund went to the starbucks in sengkang to study for chem. we saw a few SR people there like xiying, but they sat separately since it was a really small place. so we study and study and study. then around the afternoon, this guy just comes out of nowhere and says hey i need to use my laptop and there's an electrical point there. this is a place for everybody so you should move to the other seat so i can use it. there actually was a smaller seat that we used to put out paper and books and periodic tables and stuff, so we' out of sheer kindness and goodwill' decide to let him have a place there so he could use it. we cleared up the papers and edmund sat on the small chair, it was more like a stool cushion. so this guy just took out his laptop and just plugged in and just charged and went on to read his papers. he wasn't even using the goddamned laptop. i wanted to say something, but figured i have just as little right to sit there, figured i shut up. i got pissed off after a while and decided to ask xiying to pretend to come in as if we were waiting for her all along. so she comes along and we ask him, nicely, mind you, to please move to another seat so that our friend can sit because we were waiting for her. who would have thought that he actually raised his voice and said this is the community space and i can sit wherever i want. so i said hey if you and your family were sitting together, i wouldn't come in and just break you guys up because i needed to sit there. he just kept interrupting me and said i don't want to talk about it, i don't want to talk about it. of course i got fucking pissed. so xiying, just decided to leave. he lowered his voice saying that, you can ask your friend to sit at that seat, which is occupied by a bag. edmund just used his logic and said don't want to talk about this everytime he opened his mouth. so he diam diam sit there do his stuff. when he was about to leave, he started to pack his stuff and as he went, this is what i said (shouted across starbucks) to him "Bye Bye Uncle! Merry Christmas! Cross the road be more careful hor!. it took him a few seconds before he came back, all the way around the winding shop to where i was sitting, and said,

"what are you trying to say" .

then edmund just pointed to his stack of newspaper that he didn't put back

so all i said was be careful since there was a rain.

you trying to be "zhuai" isit you want to guai lan with me isit. i careful anot also none of you business

i'm just trying to be polite

you so kaypo go and ask everybody what they drink for coffee la

ok la, i will i waiting for you to go nia

then he just turns around to another guy who was drinking and said, eh this boy want to know what you drinking

orh orh i drinking "some coffee"

so i pretended to write down.

u trying to be zhuai isit, no respect for your senior isit, tell me your school and number

ok la, i wrote down on a piece of paper my school, the website and my name along with that i'm a jc 2 councillor, just for kicks

u trying to be zhuai with me isit,

so the guy next to him, who is just a stranger, tries to calm him down and say eh they just children la don't need to uptight la

u dunno him ar, no respect. eh where is the number

how i noe the number, i only got the website

nevermind i will send to letter to your prinicipal to complain ar

edmund is still pointing to the newspaper, eh you never put back

now he pai seh, i going to put back la, i going to toilet first.

ok, den put back la.

den he pai seh, go back and put the newspaper and walk away.

so the stranger turns around and talks to us, you don't need liddat talk back to him one

so we explained what happened

he said, aiya this kind of people is liddat one la and goes back to drinking his coffee.

and the worst part was, HE DIN EVEN BUY ANY COFFEE TO BEGIN WITH.

hahas, i actaully wrote a "warning" letter to the school to warn about the complain( and make really stupid jokes about him) , but it got bounced by some administrative manager or something.



i only have one last paper left, next monday, its the physics mcq. had the physics paper 3 today, got a lot of really small details that i couldn't remember like resonance or the fact that angular frequency is 2 pi f. i actually rememebred that with 3 minutes to the end, but i din have enough time to change all the answers, since they were continuation of the first. i doubt i'll get an A, so i'm kinda scared to look up the internet for answers. my parents still haven;t really absorbed the news that i actually can repeat my J2 year so they think that this is do-or-die. i feel kinda pathetic having to use retaining as a safety net. damn.

i also need to cut my hair soon and get some ns stuff. in about 2 weeks, i will be another botak going to the army and learning broken english

in case you're wondering why i'm up blogging at this time right now, i actually went to school thinking i had chem today. then the only ppl there were lit ppls. stupid lit ppls

Highlighting My Enthusiasm

my parents just came back from dinner with my brother and also celebrating my paternal grandmother's birthday. to highlight how enthusiastic i was about it, the first thing i asked my brother when he came back was how the food tasted. I was more interested in what food (and it's tastiness) i was missing then i was about my grandmother.

And to add to , contrasting how i felt about this, last week, my grand godmother, or god grandmother if you're that stuck up about names, celebrated her birthday last week, hers was actually a few days before or after, but she decided to celebrate on a weekend. she called me one week before to tell me about it and i was just "ok can" on the phone, without consulting my brother or my parents. just yess, off the cuff, no questions asked. and just to put a little perspective to that, it was actually 3 days before my math paper. i managed to get out of today's get-together because of my supposed sickness and the fact that i would be "studying".

Speaking of "studying", modern warfare 2 is amazing, except for the ridiculous lag i'm experiencing right now. if you are going to take away dedicated servers, at least have the dignity to put something as competent. anyway the lag right now is so ridiculous i can shoot a few bullets and later see the bullest come back into my magazine.

i'm gong to give my take on the campaign and non-online components, so if you're sensitive to stuff like that, eat some icecream then. anyway, the campaign this time around consists of more missions but they are now smaller in length so it rounds up to about the same time, which is rather to cheap considering that they give the impression of a longer game. but anyway, the shorter missions tend to end and alternate between the different characters, which is fine, except that there are so many friggin characters. At the start, you're using PFC john allen, which you have grown some attachment to, only to find out that he dies at his second mission. that really pissed me off. any sense of connection of the different plotlines between each character's story is quite weak and the short missions don't give enough satisfaction when you finish it. the breach scenes are very cool, although its' not very realistic. there are more variety in the objectives but the fact that a quarter of them rely on "following" the team leader, who usually doesn't move unless you do becomes problematic when you don't know where to go. also, the fact that almost all of the missions end with some kind of (scripted) failure or mishap means that there seems to always be some sort of miraculous "Hollywood" scenario to fix the problem kind of threatens the suspension of disbelief that you are willing to suspend for this game. there are a lot of twists and turns at each corner, so that keeps you at the edge of your seat. the only problem is that it doesn't draw you in at the start like the first Modern Warfare, it's almost as if the first game felt that it had somethig to prove and pulled out all the stops while its' big brother knew that there was going to be people who would be interested and just focused on the big explosions. overall, this is kind of like the Hollywood big budget sequel to the original, complete with over the top explosions. they also keep using the military lingo Oscar Mike alot, which is quite annoying when you don't know what it means, also Hooah, which translates to yes in brutespeak.

the special ops on the other hand is a real piece of work. never before had there been a good fps co-op that allows for split screen. this mode alone is reason enough to buy the game. being a 2 player game mode, it allows for a lot of 2 player tactics and communication which is lacking in most online games. me and my brother took on most of the scenarios in veteran so we ended up dying about 20 times before we finally succeeded. anyway, just believe me when i say it's great.

i'll talk about the multiplayer parts next time, for now i need to go back to actual studying.

i read my old posts about the t shirt incident thing back in HIHS

i just started laughing

i'm such an evil person

A level math

paper 1 was done a few days ago, i did it sick and coughing

i actually gt the flu the day before the paper, then the days it self i got a combination of both flu and sore throat, then i took medicine, now my flu's gone, but i developed coughing. now i have coughing, sore throat and a build up of phlegm, and not to mention a sore right eye, which feels like i got punched in the eye, but i actually didn't, unless somebody hypnotized me and made me sleep walk into an ongoing bar fight.

anyway, on to what you actually care about



my math results.

in case you were wondering where i got the answers, TA-DA, wonder no more. i just googled for answers and out it came, pretty nifty huh.

also, i wrote down all my answers, just the final answers, of my paper 1 so that i could check and gauge roughly how much i could have gotten.

the magic number here is 57

upon 100

which is like i said just a rough gauge, lots of things that i can't really take into consideration like error carried forward, which would affect about 2 qns which is about 8 marks ( meaning if they were generous i should get about 5 marks out of 8), also a lot of "exact values" type answers, which i could be marked down for because i always take the physics way out and just write all the numbers in 3 sig fig. that will affect roughly 4 marks i think, and lastly some show and proofing type qns which i couldn't really add to my answer sheet, which should also be around 4-ish marks.

and not forgetting moderation which is essentially the "My-head-is-a-lemon-your-argument-is-invalid" method of avoiding arguing with parents over marks.



oh yeah i went there.

anyway, i'm not putting my hopes up to high and can safely (or naively) believe that i can get within 60-70, which is the B range. also, that means that if i can get my paper 2 to be above 80, i can almost definitely get an A. that is if i'm not dreaming.

GP also passed sometime ago. i did qns 7, thanks for asking. to those not taking the paper, it's actually "how far should religion influence political decisions?" i can almost hear all of the millions and millions of GASPS going "he didn't do the science question?!?" i was actually thinking of which of the 2 to do, and because they were actually side by side, being qns 7 and 8. i just decided to start thining of ideas for both at the same time. qns 7 was just lucky to be the number that is higher that 8. Qns 8 must be thinking "Curse you, number 7 for being one less than me!!!!"

content wise, i don't think there should be a major problem, should be just largely nit-picking at words that i should not have used but used anyway, things that make the red alert in the marker's head go off, like the word "still" or "always" and stupid things like that.

the comprehension was a lot tougher though. the stupid author decided to talk about something stupid like work and play, which made it s much harder to paraphrase since all the words that have the same meaning are already used by him, like leisure, and activity.

still have a lot more papers to go, probably the least confidence i have is in economics, because i will probably do-or-die with chemistry, you know, just like o levels.

also, if any of you sharp-eyed freaks have noticed, i actually have a double eyelid in one eye and a single eyelid in the other. Thanks, flu disease, you just disfigured my face, now anyone who sees me will turn into stone. I hope you're happy.

tried to tag all my posts today, guess how productive that was,

Only managed to finish the ones in'06, i was an emo kid back then

also note to self, talk about the lady melissa sometime soon

Why an Economist shouldn't be a viable job prospect

Running on (possibly) limited information, and sleep deprivation, its easy to argue why economists are actually in fact good for the society.

unfortunately, because of retards, i need to preface this with the fact that i don't think economics is bad, just that economists are pointless. you'll see what i mean.

As much as i hate economics, which isn't really much to begin with, it is undeniably a way for us to understand the most fundamental human actions, to get more money. and it is very helpful knowledge to anyone who has a wallet. but the problem lies not in the subject, but the job itself. The Economists (Dun dun dunnnnn). while economics helps businesses and their managers, as well as politicians, when you job revolves around sitting on a chair and telling people what they should or shouldn't do, you better at least get it right. the problem is that economists always appear so divided on issues that actually matter, like what the Government should do during the recession, and the only time they ever really agree on anything is after it has been proven to work, like a fiscal policy back in Keynes' time, that through some crazy logic, actually helps the country earn more by spending. And in case you thought i was bullshitting with the economists divided thing, here's some proof.

Very few jobs in the world rely on just observing and thinking about the world around us, without really doing anything, most of them are in the vein of telling others what to do, and yess these jobs do actually exist. Jobs like theoretical physicists, psychiatrists and unfortunately economists. the difference is that in most cases the others are correct, or at least lower probability of being wrong then say a coin toss. the only real important thing that we expect out of economists, literally people who make their knowledge of economics the only aspect of their job, is to predict future trends based on what already happened and the proper course of action. everything else they do is just nitty-gritty details. And even then, they still cannot agree over what to do.

the problem lies in the fact that economics is such a "soft" "science", and i use the term science very loosely, that when you come up with an argument for, you can just as easily come up with an argument against and both will seemingly make sense, especially to scared, confused and usually uneducated about economics, public. An extension of that would be the use of often unneccessary jargon. anyone who knows why i prefer not to go into business is because of the stupid technical jargon and buzzword that don't really make sense. Economics has a lot of that. What can already be explained in plain english needs to have another word for it, worse when the word used already exists with another (close but distinct) difference. Students, at least in my school, are often critcised for using "coffeeshop talk" in their essays, in other (theirs') words, language so simple my grandma could understand, which to me doesn't make sense, because so long as the meaning is the same, and the reader understands it the same way, there shouldn't be any difference. Now, i understand that certain words are invented for the sake of shortening sentences, like elasticity. but words like demand and quantity demanded should not have such a different meaning. everytime i hear a teacher complaining about coffeeshop talk, i think to myself, why isn't she praising him/her for using simply understood english.

So back to the point about the irrelevance of Economists. let me use an analogy. Say a guy came for an interview for a job at your firm. he's is extremely well educated about say tables.

So you ask him :"what are the skills you possess that we would need?"

interviewee: "Well, i am very well educated in the field of tables."

you: " Ah, so can you build them?"

interviewee: "Actually, no, i just know a lot about them"

you: "Okay, so can you give me advice on how i should build my tables?"

interviewee: "Well, you see, i could, but all of my knowledge of tables are based on models where all else remain constant. So i cannot reliably give advice in th real world. I could tell you what i think, but the guy sitting beside me would probably disagree."

you: " Hmmm, so can you teach others about tables?"

interviewee: "Ah yes, that i can do, but you would probably end up with people who only know what i know and that isn't really helpful, now is it?"

then you realised that the univers was playing a sick twisted joke on you.

Economists have no "real"(as they like to call it) value to the society, and when combined with the other train wreck that is the media can create a lot of fear-mongering. while now that my awesome exposé has created a black hole where your dreams of becoming an economist used to be, you'd think to yourself "now what am i going to do with my awesome knowledge of economics?" remember when i talked about how businesses use economics to help them in their decisions, you can too. economics is more of additional knowledge, then primary expertise, in the sense that you would rather have a skill where you would be wanted in the job market, such as sports or music or vast knowledge of human anatomy, and then use your economics knowledge to put yourself ahead of the competition, "hedge your bets" a little, like how knowing psychology is incredibly useful even outside of the service sector, where office politics can be much better handled, and stuff like that.

damn, its already 1.15am

My Love/Hate realtionship With Economics and some other stuff

Lots of things i wanted to talk about since my last real post, and by last real post i meant those that were so long that you probably didn't even read, (you bastard). The last 2 were really posts, there were more like tweets, my thoughts in 4 lines or less to show my readers, all 5 of you, that i'm still (somewhat) alive.

Anyway, like i said, lots of stuff i wanted to talk about since, some issues important, some even more important.

with less than 120 hours left on the clock til the A levels officially start (for me at least), its quite terrifying going to a national exam when you cant friggin do half the questions on a mock paper. i don't know why i came off the prelim 2s feeling so confident when i needed to refer to the answers for 80% of the question on a math paper i did yesterday. and the truly terrifying thing is not knowing whether the paper will actually be that difficult or other schools are over exaggerating the difficulty of the paper. Either way it's scary. right now i have to contend with the fact that i may actually have to end up repeating JC2, something which i haven't discussed with my parents, but the most expected reaction would be SEE LAH PLAY SOMEMORE.

but you know the worst part about my revision. knowing that i can't ever feel confident about my economics paper. for the poly people who read my blog, yes, i'm talking about you, i'd like to think of econs as the "social studies" of A level syllabus. it's the essay paper that most people take because trying to avoid would mean jumping through so many loopholes that just friggin doing it would save us all the time and energy. it's also similar in the sense that while they do teach you the whole syllabus, you just end up studying a little more than half of it and hope that it comes up.

economics is the kind of subject where i have no idea how good i am at it. it's not like math where i know i don't know how to do this particular topic like quotient rule in differentiation. Nor is it like General Paper where you see how bad at it you truly are, no matter how hard you try. No, economics takes all of your expectations and screws with it like a sick twisted plaything. i'm not saying economics is bad because i suck at it, i'm saying i have no idea how i got my score. everytime i think i may score well on 1 essay, i end up failing or when i feel like i wrote something wrongly, i end up getting great scores. and i can't even learn from my mistakes or successes because they always feel so random and "out of place", like when you wrote something intuitively, which you thought everyone else would too, but end up being heavily praised for that one single sentence. in fact i almost always/never really know why or what i did to deserve really good marks when i do get them. when i score well, i feel good about myself, and think "hey i've improved and that must means i'm doing something right." then the next paper comes to bite me in the ass and i end up failing.

the worst instance of this is after the common test. basically after a year and a quarter of studying the subject i thought to myself " hey, i know how this subject works and what i need to do to do well" and then come Mid-Year, all the questions are so ridiculously difficult that the textbooks don't even have the answers. one example. Explain the importance of resource allocation [25 marks]. i would usually answer that in 3 sentences. but unfortunately you must write all the stuff that just tangentially has any little (if not completely unnecessary) relation to resource allocation. typically the teacher would "expect" you to write about pretty much everything, from the definition, to the policies, to where the policies should apply, tow what the policy maker had for lunch to the time on the giant clock. essentially all that in 45 minutes or less. and the worst part( yes i know i used the worst part more than once) is the spill-over effect. in a span of 2 hrs and 15 minutes, we need to look at 6 different question and do 3 of them, not to mention choosing the questions, planning each essay and actually putting pen to paper. just picking the questions alone takes more than 5 minutes. everytime i read all 6 questions one time through, 3 minutes passed and then i go more in-depth to actually start picking the questions, more than 7 has passed. and then there's the actual planning of the essay where you write down roughly what to write in each paragraph of the individaul essay, which in itself takes time. so even though teachers say you have 45 minutes per essay, you really only have 35 odd minutes to write 4 pages, and yes that is without leaving any lines. that's basically why when i write, i don't think, which sounds surprising, until you realise that i'm not the only one. so when you exceed the time you give yourself, that eats away what ever time you have of the other essasys, and assuming that you hit exactly 45 minutes on the 2nd one (which doesn't always happen, usually you end up 5 minutes over) you end up with approximately 30 minutes to bang out an essay that is supposed to be of equal quality with the other 2 which you probably has the least confidence in since you did it last. this usually results in the last essay being short of a few paragraphs. all that for 20 friggin points.

and that about sums up my thoughts on economics, i love it why i score, even though i don't know why, and i hate it when i don't, because i should have thought about what i missed out in my paper when i was doing it, but hey, i wasn't thinking.

In other news, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize,in other words, he won the Nobel "I-Am-Not-George-Bush-Award", according to Stephen Colbert. while i do find it odd that the committee gave him the prize before he accomplished anything, i find it ridiculous that there are people vehemently contesting the decision in the media. this is just good old sensationalism. i mean yeah, it''s odd, but it's not going up to a camera and looking all angry. he didn't even offend you, and if they gave the prize to someone else, you would have gone on with your life not caring about what he did to deserve his prize.

i have also been watching Gluttony For Punishment. great show on Discovery travel and living on sundays at 6pm or 630, i can't remember. bob blumer is a great host, optimistic and fun. and the fact that he regularly challenges experts in international competition with only 5 days of training. i think this show is so great in that it basically emphasizes the only real reason people should travel to strange lands, no not take photos wth buildings, but to try new things. most holidays just involve going to one place and eating and taking photos. while that in itself is not a bad idea in the first place, i think the "experience" part of the trip has been left out and the tourist loses out a the great culture and activity of the host nation.

Also, The Men Who Stare At Goats, great premise, great actors, hopes are high for this one.

Modern warfare 2 is also coming in 2 days, so if i fail A levels, it's totally Infinite Ward's fault

Also, brutal legend,
and Assassin's creed 2
and Arkham Asylum,
and NFS Shift,
and shadow Complex, i still can't believe i haven't played it yet.

last year's actual A Level papers were so friggin difficult. i can't believe it. *pout