i is sad today

typically i get sad for a bunch of reasons. usually they're kind of obvious, like House not having a new episode this week, or FF13 not coming out in english in singapore.

but today is different, for some reason. i can't exactly pinpoint where and why i am so sad, or rather why i'm so not happy.

but i can tell you how this sad day started. it didn't even start today. yesterday at 2345 some person called me on a landline, i.e not a handphone, a 6xxxxxxx number. then the woman on the other line told me that she was from the air force recruitment and that i was no longer eligible for UAV and Air warfare officer, 2 out of 4 vocations which i applied for. first things first, i was 90% asleep during the phone call so i couldn't really make out much of it, just that i needn't go to some talk on saturday at cmpb which is difficult as hell to go.

then comes 2 problems. first thing it was april fools' day and it was close to midnight. no government agency calls near midnight, ever, or we would have the most efficient public service sector, so i thought to myself hey maybe it was a joke. second is that. since those 2 are actually the easier of the 2 vocations i'm applying for, then what about my other vocations, which is pilot and weapons officer, both of which are significantly harder to get into because they actually require flying. if i'm not even eligible for the easier ones, what chance do i have with the harder ones.

so i decide to call the hotline in the morning, i tried calling from 830 all the way to 10 before remembering it was good friday and no government agency would be working. fuck.

then my grandparents came to do some praying and burning incense paper. they do this every year because good friday is near the sao mu festival and my grandfather's ashes or something are in my house, for some reason, since my father is not the eldest son.

and my sore throat is still there since i caught "something" from my father. he has since healed but i still ave cough and sore throat for 3 weeks now. with the occasional headache and flu on and off throughout this period, i think it's pressure building up in my sinuses, but i don't know what causes it. i actually went to the MO in tekong about this and he made me wait 4 hours in the friggin waiting room for both my x ray and his diagnosis, only to tell me that its' better for me to see an outside doctor. WTF. on bookout day no less.

anyway, that 4 hours got me "kicked" out of drills squad. i was put on reserve team for missing the one session that i couldn't attend, the same day they needed to get "volunteers" who actually don't want to be in at all. nice

and then back to today, i got so tired after my lunch/breakfast of 2 paos, i fell asleep on 2 wheely chairs in front of the computer after i lost my connection, and i slept from 130 to 5 or 6. and waking up didn't feel as good as it should be.

during my internet time, i tried to find out more about the air force pilot selection process. and what i found was just a load of absolutely not helpful at all things. worst of which is that i need to get into OCS first before i can get into the air force, contradicting what the guys who brought us to the compass test and aeromedical centre told us, which was that we would be put into flying experience program before we went to australia for air grading.

i had to think about OCS. because i really really want to go, but i don't think i had done enough in the commanders' or even my own section mates' eyes to deserve a place there. so with that considered, i'm quite sad. someone told me that a PC said only about 70 per company would be going to command school, meaning roughly 25 to OCS and 50 to sispec. i have to be in the top 25 in my coy to get in the first place, and my ippt is just a pass and my soc is chui like hell.

I'm just really tired


also sick, feel my sinus building pressure again

How to Overcomplicate your life

Step 1: Have x number of choices where x is a positive integer and 0 < x < 2

why not having only ONE choice is bad: basically out of every single course in every single university, i have managed to isolate my preferred choices down to 3, Architecture, Engineering, Psychology (in FASS). This doesn't look complicated until you add in Step 2

Step 2: Get External Opinion

Why other people's opinion is bad: when you think about it, getting advice and suggestions from others should be a good thing, that way you get different points of views and a broader perspective. isn't that how democracy was born (Note: it probably isn't) It does sound good, until these points of view clash with one another or even your own.

All my life i've been thinking i was a science person. that's the way my brain functions, when i look at a situation, i figure out how it came to be at this state, how something may or may not happen due to the current "forces" at work, not how people should have been more tactful so as to not hurt his feelings.

den my results come out as my science subjects being the worst, which is actually pretty normal considering most of my other papers. den i ask for advice from other people, teachers friends seniors etc, and they say i'm more of a language and arts person, den immediately and i say immediately because i actually saw this in the middle of the jungle under a basha (tent) and said WTF out loud. i asked even more people and they gave me the same response, so now i'm screwed because on one hand i don't doubt that they may be right, and yet i also cannot let go of the fact that i'm really not much of a science person.

but of course all this is nothing compared to if you did Step 3

Step 3: Future Prospects

future prospects adds in 2 elements of chaos that would drive any manger insane, the unguaranteed possibility of a great "payout", in the form of a secure job or paid fees via scholarships, as well as the fact that getting one is going to screw up something else that you've already been working for.

In Tekong, I expressed interest in signing on in the airforce as either a pilot or an officer who controls big guns. Don't sound off any alarms yet, it's just interest, i haven't signed any contract or any thing yet, they need to evaluate my capabilities before they make the decision. and besides there's a 90% chance that i will not become a pilot, not because i suck that hard, it's just the "rejection" rate of applicants.

the good thing about signing on is that it fulfills one of my 2 criteria for a job, it cannot be an office job. the other thing is that i can apply for the saf scholarships which would lift a huge burden off my parents.

unfortunately, that also means that i can only take either engineering or psychology degrees. which would be bad if i already accepted to architecture course by then.

that also means i have a hard time applying for scholarships that apply to architecture or even other courses should i be accepted to the university itself

and that's not even considering overseas universities.

headache.

According To My Mother

My studying habits haven't changed since I was in primary school.

in fact she was prepared to guilt trip me and "talk" about my habits, or in her words' "let me bang my head on the wall so i know how it feels."

more essentially, she has been doing that since i was doing my psle.

thats friggin 6 years ago. and she's been preparing after every major exam

woah. i think i just used up all my luck juice for the next 10 years

post a level/field camp celebration

some of the platoon mates got together 10 plus people to go to supperclub, which surprisingly, isn't for supper.

met about 4 of them at 9.30 at city hall more of them stream in. got in at around 11 plus, they bought 2 vodkas and 1 johnny walker whiskey.

it cost 1 person roughly $50 to get in and drink that shit, and most people only got 6 cups, which is the suck.

so the first real drink i get, they got me to down vodka half full cup with some mixers.

by the 4th, i felt warm out of breath and still i didn't feel high. clearly something was wrong

my last cup was the whiskey, and still i didn't feel high yet. the dancefloor started filling up, and our pc shravan came at that time so we started to dance, it started to get crowded and got a weird ah quai started to dance near us and moving around.

i only managed to dance for around 1 hour before i had to bail. took a cab home and ended vomitting on his cab, my pants, shoes and my wallet, and only 5 minutes from my house. i ended up giving the cabbie all the money i had, which is like $19 and a us 5 dollar bill.

so to sum it all up, i drank vodka for my first night, which is a bad idea according to my mother, i didn't get high, and i vomitted.

so for anyone who wants to do me a favor, do not invite me to a club

i am not a club person

i just did it for the experience.

Hello, Happy New Year

This is what i said to every teacher i met yesterday, along with merry christmas and gong xi fa cai


Got back A level Results today, like everybody i was scared, but bo bian, cuz i want to act man, so cannot act out. so the principal started giving his talk about how some subjects have a certain percentages of passes and A+Bs, which for some reason everybody cheered, even though it had no meaning per se, i.e comparing with last year's results or predicted MSG.

but the one thing that was very impressive was the fact that people with a minimum 3 H2, GP and H1 Content Subject Passes, increased by 10% from 63% to 73%, which is incredibly amazing considering the kind of people that come here and what he's has done with the school and students themselves during a short span of 2 years.

another thing impressive was that 2s10 is in the top classes with an average msg of 76 or 79, i can't really remember, 76 is the more likelier choice. this is the only point i started cheering

so the principal started going through names of 80 pointers and above. Edmund's name was on the second page, but his score was easily predicted, since he tops the school regularly. Then came a few people i knew but didn't really care about, then came Tricia's name, which also wasn't a big surprise, cuz her L1R5 meant she should have been in a different school. then as soon as the next page came theodora's name, where everbody was just as stunned as her to see her name, but still congratulations on job well done. Xiying's name also came up on the screen and i was quite stunned she did better than edmund

for the next part it may be a little difficult to explain on paper, on the 7th-ish page was wei hin's name which was the second from the bottom, so i lagged a bit cuz him and i were sitting beside each other and sitting down at a corner, with a bad angle at the screen. so i saw everybody started turning around to cheer and congratulate wei hin, i just looked up and scanned the page for his name and score and i also turned around and did the same. but then i glanced something familiar at the screen below his name, i saw sim, then i open my eyes big big, i saw bing then i open my eyes even bigger i saw han, so i sit up very straight to find my english name glennard, i wanted to throw my hands up in the air at that moment, but i made sure it was me first, so i looked at the cca and it was the student council. i did a fist pump and let my back slowly return back to the floor before putting my hand on my heart and trying to slow it down. along the way i can hear people congratulating me, including wen hui turning around and saying wah lau. then after me came people like wen jie who cried like crazy and Al who got the top among the council, and samuel and sam for getting special mentions, both for different reasons.

later went to the concourse to actually get the paper, waited for a few people to get their paper, when my turn came, ms Guo said this to me: "you really surprised a lot of people with your results." Awesomesauce. my results breakdown is GP A, H2 Math and Econs A and H2 Physics and H1 Chem C. so i got ACAAC, pronounced A-kak.

saw a few of my friends, they both did relatively well, enough to get into local university. when to find some teachers to thank them, like Ms Ni and Ms R and Ms Guo and Mrs Lim. Mrs Lim in particular told me how you get A 1 ar, damn surprising you know. i wanted to find my council teachers but i couldn't find them and i was running out of time cuz my dad was waiting at the gate. so i have to go next time.

this is the more in depth breakdown of my grades. i have both of my sciences getting C while my Econs and GP got A, which is going to be a problem if i apply to engineering, but considering the type of people they allow in, i shouldn't have too much competition, except for maybe aerospace engineering. surprisingly, my grades are actually quite suited for FASS, but my father is incredibly against it because it doesn't have much of a future in singapore. but if i were to somehow get into fass, the only thing that appeals to me both intellectually and job wise, would be psychology, which by my father's definition means talking to siao nang everyday. Ms Ni says i'm suited for sociology for some reason. i dunno why.

7 things you need to know about field camp

SHORT WALK

DIG HARD

HOT CHOW

GOOD FIGHT

LONG NIGHT

SLEEP TIGHT

and that the Red Army Leader Is very good at mindfucking

IFC : Camo On, Camo Off

for the uninformed, ifc means individual field craft, which sounds really complicated, but its' just things you need to know how to do when you're in the jungle during an operation.

and what we learnt is seriously just the basicest of the basic, and it is still complicated as hell.

it's not that it's physically demanding or anything, it's just because of the fact that you're in BASIC military training, everything you do needs to be in a certain particular order, meaning in order to execute a simple movement, you need to bring your left hand to your side and hold your gun and then use your right hand and then blah blah blah. the deliberate decision to place everything such that you need absolutely precise control of all 4 limbs simultaneously means that people who are clumsy and/or slow get stressed out pretty fast, and the easily stressed out get clumsy and slow.

also, here's some food for thought, imagine you're about to run over a low wall, roughly your waist level. it's too high for you to just raise your legs to jump over but low enough for you to put your hands on the wall and push yourself over it, the way you would sit on those metal railings in bus stops (i wonder where they went). this in itself is an incredibly simple movement, something that primary school kids have been doing since metal railings existed in bus stops.

now add a rifle and it becomes 10 times more complicated. for some reason adding a rifle to your hand is somehow going to screw up pretty much every movement. here's why, when you have your rifle, it means that you are more or less in hostile territory, in other words, be prepared to shoot in less than one second. in even more words, that means you need to be holding on to the grip (where your finger is 3 cm away from the trigger) at almost all times, essentially eliminating the use of any of all those 5 fingers you found yourself so attached to. now think about that simple movement of jumping over a wall again. now you have 1 free hand, 2 legs and 1 extremely elongated metal arm thing that's going to get in the way of pretty much any confined space. so imagine going over the wall, the first instinct would be to do exactly the same thing, but then you'd realise that if you did the same movement of putting both hands on the wall and vaulting over, the hand holding the rifle would have crushed fingers thanks to the rifle plus your weight. if you try to let go of the rifle and place it flat on the wall, your sergeant would f you upside down for letting go of your rifle and letting the enemy shoot at you. if you try to use one hand and vault yourself over, 2 things you need to think about, 1) does that one hand have enough strength, 2) how are you going to place your other hand so that you can still shoot forward while not making yourself off balance.

now imagine all those considerations when you have probably a hundred more different maneuvers you need to do like proneing and leopard crawling and hiding behind cover and high kneeling and lots of stuff.

but its' not all bad, its' actually quite "fun" not in the traditional laughing giggling fun but the satisfying feeling you get when you do the whole procedure right, after screwing it a thousand times, kind of like A Math. in fact i'm going to name this the A Math Joy.

but camo sucks. camo definitely sucks

I've Been Thinking

For the past week i haven't had any access to the internet, so obviously i didn't know what was going on on the blogosphere of me.

so i came back and what i saw was, well people trying to stop me from doing something stupid, which being my friends, they know 2 things. 1) They have the best of intentions at heart. 2) They know how bad i am going to fuck up if don't say anything. And for all intents and purposes, they are really great friends and they are just doing what is, under the moral etiquette of friendship, the right thing to do.

and then i realized,



i spent too much time trying to change other people's mindset on this blog.


and this blog is by far the worst way to do so.

hell, playing my message in the form of a catchy song with a guitar in Somerset MRT would be a better way

so i have been thinking that i have been doing it all wrong all these time.

writing my stuff any funnier, more interesting, more charming will not attract more people to read my words. with 33 viewers every week, many of which just the same one person, what i'm going to say is not going to have a lot of impact on how the world revolves.

so far the only way i have been able to garner any response of any kind has been through either being incredibly emo or doing something incredibly offensive. by being emo, i trigger the natural reaction in most people to return me to equilibrium, a state of non-emoness. while being offensive generates hate from all corners of the world.

as unpleasant as these 2 methods are, they are the only way i know that there are still people reading my blog. it's pathetic, i know. but it's the same reason why people who can afford it, steal small things from places like 7-11. or like why rich and powerful people feel that they need to go through prostitutes to feel any form of human contact, however meaningless.

when you stand away and watch from the side, your brain is still functioning rationally, and you tell yourself, these people are retarded. even i know i'm retarded. but yet, for some unknown reason, it just always seems to keep happening. and most of the time i only figure it out after i do something stupid. like the guy stand 2 blocks away from the 7-11 he just stole from and looking at his hands, filled with a pack of tampons. he just doesn't need to do it and yet he does it for no apparent reason.

so i thought, why try so hard, why put all these dumb pictures and get so much flak for it. i started this blog with the intention of acting as my surrogate memory. i type away at my keyboard so that future me can remember all the lessons i already learnt.



and about all the offensiveness.


my principles tell me that i shouldn't need to apologize for something i believe in.
just because nobody agrees
that i needn't hide behind the mindset of the majority when i want to express my thoughts.
that i shouldn't be afraid
that if i truly believe that what i say is true then there shouldn't be a reason that i fear consequences.


yet i apologize

because i should.

because our friendship is more important than that
because we should be able to talk with different mindsets
because we needn't trade our shoes and walk a thousand miles
Because we're already friends
and i should have known better

if it was any other group of people, i would have stood by what i believe in.
most people call that being stubborn
most people would be correct
but our friendship is not worth that
it's not worth throwing away all that.

so i'm sorry

and who's up for some mahjong

responsibility

state of which one is able to answer for one's conduct and obligation


obviously the picture was just a small thing

but it made a huge impact

because it was something you believed in

and something you hold close to your heart

and when somebody who doesn't care

twists it into something inhumane and offensive

you become outraged

you think its' distasteful

but that's only because you associate it with so many other things

so the next time you make fun of people worshiping elephants and cows or people counting their money or having big noses.

think about jesus pointing that middle finger at you

because that's what i would do

had i been jesus

but i'm not

so i'm relegated to lose

i will probably never win

because i am not the majority

and for everyone person i offend

a thousand can overwhelm me

yet if you do the same to someone else

nobody can stop you

we can only shut up and suck thumb

i'm still a small little ant in this world

but that does not mean i have to fear everything else

psychopaths

Hare's Checklist and other mental disorders

Psychopathy, as measured on the PCL-R, is negatively correlated with all DSM-IV Axis I disorders except substance abuse disorders. Psychopathy is most strongly correlated with DSM-IV antisocial personality disorder.

Factor1: Personality "Aggressive narcissism"

• Glibness/superficial charm
• Grandiose sense of self-worth
• Pathological lying
• Conning/manipulative
• Lack of remorse or guilt
• Shallow affect
• Callous/lack of empathy
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Factor2: Case history "Socially deviant lifestyle"

• Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
• Parasitic lifestyle
• Poor behavioral control
• Promiscuous sexual behavior
• Lack of realistic, long-term goals
• Impulsivity
• Irresponsibility
• Juvenile delinquency
• Early behavior problems
• Revocation of conditional release

Traits not correlated with either factor

• Many short-term marital relationships
• Criminal versatility

The official stance of the American Psychiatric Association as presented in the DSM-IV-TR is that psychopathy and sociopathy are obsolete synonyms for antisocial personality disorder. The World Health Organization takes a similar stance in its ICD-10 by referring to psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality, asocial personality, and amoral personality as synonyms for dissocial personality disorder.

realise that if you remove promiscuous sexual behaviour, i would actually be a psychopath

To the 30 odd visitors to my blog from 17/01/10 to 24/01/10

Because nobody left a reply out of 30 odd people.



(except wen hui and yang, THX!!)

Less Is More

Because the less is more doesn't apply to me


!!!WALL OF TEXT!!!

Attractive

(Via Friend's Tumblr)

Because Only Some People Get That Attractive

it's sad

when every emotional response becomes a calculated action

Deja vu

i went back to my old posts to check on something

then i realised that one of my posts from last year was also titled week 5

this is what i wrote 1 year ago


although then, the week 5 and this time round week 5 means different things.

also, due to me giving up my precious time for my nation, i would have no time to do the things people say for 2010, unlike years before. if you want to read past posts : year 2009, year 2007.

so i need a favor from anyone who visits or just passes by this blog. if you look to your left, you'll see a little blue box, most people call that a tagbox. now insert you name and then write one thing you love about me, and one thing you hate about me. just write anything you feel like writing. if you feel that i have changed a lot this past year or i have stayed the same too much or that i just a dumb loser fucker also can. i won't be around on the weekdays to do any banning or deleting posts anyway. i'd probably be holding a SAR 21, in my long 4 and aiming down the sight anyway.

Week 5

this week in camp more eventful

but again cannot really say much.

i took my ippt cat today. improved most things except pull up, still zero fighter arr, sianz

then got female recruits join company next to us, but too bad the buildings not connected so cannot sneak over.

some stuff also happened in armskote during this week

we also got do new route for route march. leg pain ar

but outside camp, nothing much happen ar. my dog still misses me, my bro still wants to use the computer and my friends still have their weekends fully booked up. so life as per normal.

Strangely, Even Now, It Feels Weird To receive News Last.

i counted

i drank more than 5 dollars worth of drinks

combined with 2 packets of potato chips and 1 packet of fries

i came into tekong with close to 45 dollars

now i only have 29 dollars excluding the mac meal i ate at pasir ris

hopefully i get my pay by today

Learn

Ba Gua Zhang
Parkour
Meditation
Street Fighting
Card Cheating
Parachuting
Lockpicking
Pickpocketing
Juggling (for real)
Hung Ga
Speed Reading
Eidetic Memory
Alertness

How to make friends

and that's about it for now, can't remember much now anyway.

will learn them someday

2 stupid (funny) ideas

yesterday, saw an ad (some designer clothes or something) of a dude whose body was at a 45 degree angle. in other words, he looks like he's about to fall, but the camera caught him before he landed.

so i thought, how about i make a picture of people (ie. me because i can't ever find a good model) in that half-fall position, except their hands are in other positions, like elvis, or superman except falling backward, bodybuilder poses, james bond 7 around the cheek, things like that.

i got another idea this morning, of a music video, where the lead singer (the one i imagined was a girl) would be in a showdown with someone else, and the other guy had a gun. so throughout this showdown, she'd just be singing her song with an emo expression (i don't know why i thought of that for any particular reason), so the other guy would look very pissed as they walked around slowly in the circle. then the guy would shoot her, and she would just fall back in slow motion while she continued singing her song with the same emo expression that never changes. that she would lie on the floor and people would come over and the blood would continue to flow and she would still have the same expression singing the song, until it ended when her eyes finally closed.

yeah, these are things i think about

i dunno what to title this

In case you don't already know, i'm a fulltime NS man now. For those who don't understand what that means, it's simply that i will be paid to stay in Tekong (and possibly other camps) to undergo physical and combat training (read: tekkan sessions) for a measly 350-ish Sing dollars for the next 2 years, hopefully by then, my allowance would have increased.

There are only 2 things you would really need to know about my NS life. I'm from Taurus Company in BMTC School 3 and I can only read smses at around 9-10 at night. Everything else is on a more or less need-to-know basis.

I mean sure I have stories from army life, from my other sergeants and officers and also my own, but over the course of just 2 bookouts, I realised that no one really cares about what happened to you unless a ghost was involved. so I will most probably not list them here. Every now and again, I would write a few interesting stories here, but that is simply to remove the burden of memory.

But my main purpose isn't to talk about NS. it's about Koreans. Particularly those not under Kim's zone of power.

It would be hard to argue that K-Pop has not reached mainstream popularity in Singapore. So I won't. But we have to remember that there was once a time when a kid liking korean pop groups would have no one to talk to about his/her idols since everyone was all up in 5566's collective junks. But that's a time that people would rather forget.

Anyway, enough sidetracking. I am actually much less concerned about how popular they are. Everytime i hear someone talking about them or singing their songs, I would, for some reason, instinctively go on the defense and go, "hey, you don't even understand the words." But that is of course, an irrational response since I find myself singing lyrics (making phonetically accurate sounds to) japanese songs, like songs from animes for example. So clearly that would be just a schoolyard excuse to me not "appreciating" the K-Pop scene.

Four score and seven years ago (which would make me exactly about 11 years old), I learnt that arguing over music and in particular, musical taste, goes nowhere, ever. At least in fashion or some other perception driven industry, there is a universally understood standard of ugly, even if you could not explain exactly what ugly has to comprise of, if you see it you will know. But not in music, because even the worst music had a (cultish) fanbase. But of course, that isn't to say that the K-Pop music isn't good. It's listenable, and it isn't Chihuahua, so based on that achievement alone, it has earned itself 10 points.

So what is it about K-Pop that I just cannot sit comfortable idolising them. Almost 500 words later and I finally reached my point. Bring up cosmetic surgery with anyone who knows K-Pop groups by name and you'll be immediately greeted with "but "so-and-so" confirm not plastic one, Confirm one!" Talk about photoshopping and the same defensive response arises, usually only about the one they like. I googled up some statistics on South Korean plastic surgery procedures and found quite contradictory results. The first or so google result from Nationmaster.com lists South Korea as the 15th country with most procedures and on a per capita comparison, South Korea actually has less than Singapore, being 27th and 26th respectively. This is very strange at first, and I presumed that the real statistics would be in Korean language websites, until I realised that the data was compiled from 2002. Another result yielded that Koreans Fucking Love their plastic.

At this point, I have to reinforce that I'm not being a hypocrite (now). Maybe when I was a kid and was too naive and was much too high on Disney movies and after school specials that I would be ( just a little) against cosmetic surgery. I mean, if it was someone who was close to me who has thoughts about getting plastic pumped into their body, i would advise them to spend the money on other things like learning a new hobby or giving it to me. But if other people decide to do so, then I can't really make a rational reason not to do so since it not only improves their looks but make the rest of society look more tolerable by making me look at them and forgetting everyone else. It's simple ethics, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the many in this case refers to people who like looking at hot women.

What I'm actually more interested is the fact that people are willing to so vehemently deny such accusations even though deep inside they know it to be true. I'm not saying that the only reason that they are hot is because they have plastic surgery, or the fact that girls cannot be hot without plastic surgery. But take a look at any promotional material and there will be quite a number of telltale signs, the funniest of which is that if you take the a ruler and place at any 2 girls knees, you will be able to draw a straight horizontal line that is parallel to the ground. I actually can't find the picture online because i don't really know how to search for their pictures when they have so many.

I believe that the same response can be elicted from fans of jap idols when you tell them that the idols just lip-synch and dance, some of which who even don't. I think the entertainment industry will eventually crumble or at least become soulless (i can't find another word to describe it) if this trend continues. The idea of skill or talent is becoming less and less important in such perception-driven markets. Personally I find such "situations" quite sad. Simply for the same reason you wouldn't hire an incredibly organized and neat lawyer to fight your cases for you, or a very good counsellor to do surgery on your body just because he makes you feel safe when your on your death bed. In the entertainment industry, the X-factor is very important, whether its just that star quality or the whole package. But as we moved away from Sinatra's time (singers who really could sing) to the present, the image they portray becomes exponentially more important. This can severely hurt not only the current generation of singers, actors and all that, but also the future ones. Right now, I look at hot women because they are the only ones on my newspapers and magazines, the singers who actually does the singing for them gets no attention and as a result his/her pay actually goes down because the demand for such talent decreases. simlarly, when you put big names on movie screens and television dramas, the fact that they cannot act, makes watching the show painful, but also the writers and directors to lose credibility while the middlemen like promoters and sales continue to earn money, simply because fans are willing to watch crap if you sprinkle some dust over it and put a nice ribbon.

Eventually children, younger and younger, will understand that you don't need to learn how to sing or how to act to be loved by millions, and eventually they will aspire to be Kim Kardashian instead of aspiring to be Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera. Talentless figures dangling in front of your face, with no cultural value, put there to take you money, while you get high everytime you see them.

labeling all my ns stuff

2 stories

2 great stories i like to share, from the words of Rory Sutherland

Frederick the Great of Prussia was very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because if you had 2 sources of carbohydrates, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread and you get a far lower risk of famine because you had 2 crops to fall back on. The only problem was it looked pretty disgusting and also 18th century Prussians ate very very little vegetables. He tried making it compulsory, but the Prussian peasantry said they couldn't get the dogs to eat this damn things, they're absolutely disgusting, good for nothing. They're even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried Plan B, the marketing approach. He declared the potato as the royal vegetable and none but the royal family could consume it and he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with the secret instructions of not to guard it very well. 18th century peasants know there's one pretty safe rule in life, if something's worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was massive underground potato growing operation in Germany. What he effectively done was he rebranded the potato.

Another story of the veil. Atatürk of Turkey, mush like Nikolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of the veil in Turkey to modernize it. Now, boring people would have simply banned the veil, but that would have ended with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Now Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil.

It's not very fully, but you could see 2 things. How creative both these men were, and how effective that rebranding was to acheive what they wanted.

another example comes from signs and lights that showed you how fast you were going, with smiley faces and frowny faces that indicated whether of not you went over the speed limit. it baffels modern economists because these signs cost only 10% of a conventional speed camera to operate and work better than a fine and demerit points to your license.

it's hard to change reality, it's easy to change perception

off to shave my head

beauty

yesterday before i faded into unconsciousness, i decided to think a bit about the idea of beauty. by decided i meant just so happened, and by faded into consciousness, i meant held against my will while someone injects doxylamine in to the artery in my neck.

once, while i was surfing the net, i came across an article that talked about "rating" women based on how they look. As sexist as that may have sounded, there is probably more merit in it than we care to admit. with that said, i have tried "rating" people, not just women, only once. When? you'll never figure out.

most of what i say (write) would be about women, because i prefer looking at women. enough said.

anyway, i think beauty, the outward kind, has really 4 categories for women. there's the "cute" type of women, which evolution would have us believe that we find them aesthetically pleasing because they look like newly-born or the young, creating a hormonal reaction in your brain to, at least want to, "take care" of them. it's basically why China zoos will never go poor as long as they have a steady supply of pandas and why the German zoo may soon be since, well, since this ...

people that i would consider cute, would definitely be different from whom i would consider in other categories, which i'll talk about later. some defining characteristics were obviously young age (or at least looking like), and i can't really think of any others because i'm sucked in by how cute she looks. anyway, some examples are people like Hayden Panetierre and Lindsay Lohan before she got drugged up.


Another category i would make up out of thin air is the "hot" type of women. it is essentially calling people sexy, which for some reason not socially acceptable anymore. i think just by describing people as sexy brings another "viewpoint" to what we perceive as aesthetically pleasing, so i shall not delve into that anymore than i should. some people that would be called hot would be , well , Megan Fox, and some other people, i guess.

"Beautiful" is also another category. i use it to describe very elegant and classy style of beauty. beautiful is what i would use to describe a date to prom, but only when she is wearing a prom dress that does not look like it's made with less fabric than a handkerchief. the one person that i would describe as beautiful, but not in the other 3 categories, and i would be a little (very) biased is Emma Watson. Also, just so you're not mistaken that people can only look good in a evening dress gown thing, here's another where she still retains beauty without sacrificing any time picking out a intricate dress.


The last category would be "pretty". just to be clear, there's a difference between pretty and beautiful. let me explain. someone who would be described as pretty would be one who looks very girl-next-door-ish, a very close to home feeling when you see her. A little like that old high school crush from back in the day that always seem to be in the movies. A simple way to tell the difference between "beautiful" and "pretty" is the difference between Emma Watson and Jessica Alba. Pretty tends to have a effect of making people breathe a sigh of "idontknowwhatthehellthatis", then their eyes go into dreamy mode.


now that i've fully wasted my time talking about something that is only marginally important. let's talk about actually "rating" women, the ridiculously sexist way of giving numbers to girls based on how they look, all in the comfort of your own brain. and they don't even have real units, they are just arbitrary numbers that don't have any relation to anything

For some reason i feel compelled that i must admit that i have different tastes and standards in what i perceive as beauty. Many times have i looked at people, astonished and (vice versa) when they say so-and-so looks better than so-and-so when i thought it was the other way around.

originally i wanted to present this information in the form of a bell curve, where i showed that my "median" shifted either left or right. but then i realised that beauty extends beyond a linear scale of what can be called "eye candy" and "my eyes are bleeding from the inside". also, a shifting of the bell curve would imply that my standards were either lower or higher than my peers.

what i'm trying to say is that what i think is beautiful can sometimes be nowhere near what my friends or even the majority would feel is beautiful. everytime i see a person and i would instantly figure out whether i think the person is beautiful or i think the MAJORITY thinks is beautiful. take the example of Megan fox. when i (like the rest of the world) first saw her in the Transformer movie, i was pretty meh about it. i didn't know much about the rest of the worlds' opinion at that time though, simply because the movie came out after the o levels, meaning that the after-movie buzz could not really be shared with anyone since i'm a hermit that stays at home most of the time. so, i never really expected much hooplah about her anyway. when the Transformers 2 movie came out, i came to be rather surprised (and slightly hungry) at the fact that Megan Fox has become the de facto standard for beauty that all media seems to use. i found that fact to be that using her as a basis for what a goddess should look like is slightly discomforting, simply because i don't put her on that pedestal that everyone else seems to be doing. Even once when i was asked the question "what if a girl that was so hot, like as hot as Megan Fox, decided to talk to you and ask you out, even though you have never talked to her before, what would you do?" i felt that i needed to surpress the instinct to point out that she is not pretty, just to conform with everyone elses' beliefs, much like prison.

To understand why i don't think Megan Fox is hot, per se, is to understand that she does not look natural. not like "of course she's not natural, she's a goddess.", it's more of a she's looks airbrushed, and bronze, like shining. also, she's sounds stupid, or at least, she sounds American public school stupid. that's over-generalising, but that's about as descriptive as i can be as to why i don't think she's that hot. i mean she doesn't have any physical deformity, so i can't really point that out and laugh at her. she may be "hot" but she's not the 10 everyone thinks she is, she may be the 6 or 7, but she has the body that was destinined to be a model, and that's not really a compliment, it's more of a fact, like how some people look like they were meant to be bodybuilders and weightlifters even though you're not really complimenting them.

i have found many many differences between who i think are beautiful and what (i perceive as) the majority thinks is beautiful. which is really really strange to me. often times i found myself saying to other men, hey this girl is pretty, or at least prettier than (whomever you keep bringing up), give her some credit. afterwhich it usually fades away, never to be heard again. i know beauty is subjective, but even then, there has to be some kind of basis for what me and the rest of the world agrees with. it cannot be healthy to often find yourself disagreeing with everyone over something like this. what i'm trying to say is that there has to be an underlying "condition" if you will, something that we can all agree on.

this obvious deviation of tastes between myself and the rest of the world is quite difficult to demonstrate in celebrities simply because they are celebrities simply because they can do what they do on the idiot box or the silver screen without making people want to throw up. i would love to do so by describing people i have met in real life and know by their first name, but that would be unfair and biased, not to mention incredibly demeaning to them.





so i'm going to do it anyway. unfortunately for people who only know me in JC won't understand this story so feel free to put a blindfold over you head and scroll down roughly 3 and a half times on the mouse wheel. that should be enough. remember when we were sec 3 and all through out our upper sec years, we would always proclaim to the heavens that all the pretty girls went to 3/4 Unity (which is a class). Normally i would disagree the hell out of the guy, but then i had no choice but to realise that if you simply turned you head around and saw the other classes, then by simple math, you'd too have to admit that all the pretty girls went to that class. Now in that class, were a few girls that would be infamously known as "the-people-we-would-always-use-as-a-reference-to-pretty-girls-in-our-class group". In other words, they came to become generic names for (comparisons to) pretty girls, like Oprah is to talkshow hosts, scotch is to tape, Maggi is to instant noodles. So for some reason, the majority of not only guys but also girls always referred to these few people as the most beautiful in the school, which truly baffles me, because they aren't THAT pretty, even by school standards, they were like at most a 7.

But unlike Megan Fox, i had a more easily explainable reason for why they aren't as pretty as legends claim them to be. one, for the instances of not getting sued, shall be named Wriscillia. (now my ass is safe from any and all legal matters) she was this girl was okay in looks, but never really stood out to me as someone really really attractive, and you know this because if you were to look out into a crowd, especially so if you were from a slightly elevated position, you (should) instantly see the most attractive person out there. For her, you never really did. Also, if you tried really hard to see why she's as beautiful as they say (like i did), you'd see that she actually looks like either she's only sleeping for 2 hours a day, or she's drugged or she's messed up. Another girl, Lhelsa, would on the other hand, be among guys' top five, if only she did not sound like someone who is really uptight (and bitchy). Both what she says, and what her voice sounds like points to my "conclusion". so i shall not delve into the matter any longer.

Like most (legally sane) I have my own "list" of people i think are the most attractive. I wouldn't go as far as to call them my "eye candy" simply because if i did, then i would be doing them a disfavour by not looking at them enough, as proven by my many friends who constantly gaze dreamily at their own eye candy, which is fortunate because at least their eye candy doesn't know them in person, also they have abs made out of iron and painted with the finest of bronzes, which in case you don't know what i'm talking about is the korean pop groups like (i have no idea who they are).

I would be rather fine with you, any of my loyal readers, that's all five of you, if you asked me who my top 5 were. of course, stastically, you would only know 2 and a half of them, which is sad, since the other half said you looked kind of cute.

plans to eat some lasagna within the next 6 days. anyone?

My Safe-Word

"Bona-Fide" will now be my new safeword.

if i ever say that to you in the form of a sentence, i.e "this is my bona-fide new date" or "my mom's at the door, Bona-fide!!!" or "I'm held against my will, Bona-fide."

basically, if you ever hear that word out of my mouth, it means to shut up and find a way to talk to me in private because i can't speak of said matter in front of other people.

so the appropriate response should be "dude, can you help me with something, far far away from here"

this safe word because nobody really knows what it means and we need a way to say alert without giving it away.

And the eleven day countdown starts now.

with 11 days remaining.

within these 11 days, i intend to :

play soccer with friends
buy army things
watch a movie with friends
play pool with friends
edit a photo
finish fallout 3
pack up my books

and then get disappointed over doing none of these things

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

Boomz is not funny

it wasn't even funny in the video itself, it's just something you raise your eyebrow over, not roll on the floor laughing

so people saying it in real life doesn't make it funny too

p.s Neither is shingz

If i sleep now and wake up tomorrow still pissed off about someting i have no control over

then i'm officially in the Popsicle Mutilation Symposium.

HOLY CRAPZ TEKONGZ? NOWZ? REALLYZ? NO! I MEAN YAY! NO! shit

now i have a headache

been long since i blogged anything substantial

i kind of just gave up on the daily blog thing, it wasn't working. i made it a chore to come up with something to write, and even more so since i have no motivation to do so since only 5 people get to read it everyday.

anyway, lots of things happened between then and now. lots of issues i've been thinking about which never fully blossomed into full fledged views and ideas that i found worthy enough to blog. that and the fact that i can't remember anything now.

if you've guessed that i just struck the lottery, you'd be 0% correct. actually i just got hit with the letter to go into NS just now. i've actually been fretting (is that a real word?) about it since i heard from yuan hong's malay friend whose name i can't remember until now, latiff, yes that's him, i think. i have a headache. anyway, overheard him talking about going into police, which he said was racist and that his brother was an officer so he's damn pissed. in a joking sort of way. so i asked yh about how to check the enlistment date and he said the ns website did that. so i've been checking it every few days and not getting any real response. it just wrote: you will be enlisted between dec 09 and may 2010, which is essentially useless information.

anyway, finally got the letter today, going to BASIC MILITARY TRAINING CENTRE SCHOOL 3, on 11-Dec-2009 and for those who don't know where that is, its' in tekong, directly in tekong. and in case you're wondering why this early. it's cause i'm fat and can't run to save my life, although i'm pretty sure i could in an urban environment.

i actually have absolutely no idea what to feel right now, even though i'm feeling really intense right now, like intensely scared or anxious or idunno it feels like how i felt the day before getting my streaming results. i still have no idea what that felt like exactly, but i know it feels like this. like your heart is very "tight" but there's no real good or bad feeling about it.

i feel both very good and very bad about army at the same time, which apparently is not good for the heart.

on one hand, i know i'm probably going to die from not being able to run and do all the physical stuff in the army and kenna tekan a lot. and also because of my retarded reflexes that the stupid test thinks i have. i will probably not go into a vocation with good "credentials" at least, intellectually. so i don't think my luck in the army will be very good.

but on the other hand, i get to touch a gun.

but still, the ippt and all that stuff, failing it is just going to limit where you can go, and more importantly getting screwed by the officers.

but on the other hand, the freaking gun.

so that kind of sums up what i feel about the army. i get the feeling that im not like most people in their perception of the army. most people think that the army is a waste of time and resources and that people who try to be leaders are either stuck up or boot lickers or both. i'm from the school of thought that i want to make the most out the my time there, and the only way i can do so is put myself out there and get attention, be high profile that sort of thing but i get the feeling that most people will probably hate me for it. so i feel kind of weird for thinking this way.

am i really the exception, and more importantly is thinking like that gonna get me screwed by my own platoon? i have never really talked about it to anyone who has attended to army yet so if your reading this post and you fulfill the strict criteria of going through ns and having my email, please send me an email to tell me something about this.

another thing that happened recently. some of us in jc went for lunch after physics paper 2 at kfc. wee teck couldn't so he went to the kopitiam instead, i joined him because i didn't feel like getting kfc for 2 days in the same week. so we talked and he started to talk about a few people in our class whom he thought was , since the pre a levels, quite obvious that they were going up. he atually said that there were quite a lot. which when i asked him to name, he couldnt name more than half the class, which he initially thought. And i think this thought was quite frightening, 40% of the class is at least, somewhat capable and shown proof that they were able to get into a university after the a levels, which means people like us get left behind. and now i have a cough. what happens when you feel like you're going to fail. and please don't say the self-fulfilling prophecy thing because that's just crap. this is the second time this year that i've felt like i was going to and i have no idea what to do. it feels like i have no one to talk to even though i'm online all the time. it's quite scary to do this alone. what's the medical term for feeling alone when there are in fect options available but you just aren't taking it. i'm going to invent one now. i'm lonerscrewed. and i need help.

also i decided i wanted to add another thing to a list of what i want to do in the future. skydiving instructor. because that is awesome. also, i read that you actually need at least 15 plus tandem (stuck with an instructor) jumps before you can do solo jumps and after that you need some solo jumps before you can do instructing.

I highly suspect that my life will end in a suicide

it's like this weird nagging feeling.

not like a this much work is killing me kind of way.

but like a holy crap, i'm gonna die alone, and with a gun possibly


and most importantly, facebook isn't helping.

Munchausen

i don't have anything to blog about today because i spent the whole day playing red alert 3

Friends and a rant about complainers

no picture today

went to compass to study with jelena. put in a solid 3 hours in maths and a bit in chem. its ok, but i could have done more, its quite irritating to lose momentum once you start, because you just don't wanna start again.

went home and ate dinner with family outside.

anyway, lets' talk about something that's arbitrarily important.

FRIENDS

i have never been the most approachable guy in the room, not even when i'm alone. so i tend to wait for people to talk to me before i open my mouth, which is admittedly a bad habit. most of my friends know that i ususally have something to say about something, but most of the time i just don't say it. i just keep feeling like there's never a good opportunity to say certain things. i'll admit im a very loud person, it has to do with my upbringing. but so many times, i feel like everytime i open my mouth, i'm not really contributing to anything positively, i'm just filling my ego.

so i end up with less friends than i could have. in my class, we have a mean score of 54 out of 90, which is great and everything. but like some people pointed out, these scores were done by people who just do their work alone and they stand out, which i feel is quite sad actually. i mean i'm not undermining their efforts, i just felt that if they had shared, and if we had been more open to this kind of input, we'd score even better. elizabeth pointed out that in 2s02, which is like the best science class presently, i think, they have a great class bond and they share help with each other, like the best in certain subjects just teach what they know and the others do the same. this is also true in 2a06, the best arts class. so yeah, teamwork does help. the teachers have said it, the principal has said it, now i have said it (yeah i just put myself in the same league as teachers and principals).

i think what really stops us from getting even better results is the lack of social interaction. i used to describe our class as having too many negatives (as in charges, if you take physics you'd understand), and too few positives. too many of us in our class are reliant on people talking to them before they contribute. there is like only what 2 positives in our class and they can't do all the heavy lifting. i mean it's probably already too late to really do anything about it, but i'm just saying

(oh boy html humor)

also, another thing i cannot understand. people like to equate volunteering and trying to be a leader to boot licking and kissing ass. i hear a lot of these stories from army. i have been on both sides of the fence, i was once a follower who thought they kissed ass, and a leader (in some aspect, what have you). being a leader made me realise how minor and meaningless most people's complaints are. everyone likes to complain that we don't do this, don't do that, never help the students, say this say that during election then in liao then never do anything. if we take a very consequentialist viewpoint (look it up), we can say that you stood to lose nothing through the votes and you didn't after it, so unless you lost a pound of flesh when you draw that circle on the oas, you can't really have anything to say.

i mean people stand up and we volunteer and we say, hey maybe i can do something to help. and people shoot us down and say, you selfish, you useless, you this you that. take a moment and think about how unfair and more importantly how unjustified that statement was. i mean, sometimes, people out of sheer goodwill and altruism, decide to help his fellow man and people take advantage. scott adams was right, people are selfish, greedy and horny, and that will never change.

if we took another point of view and said, but you really didn't help me with . think about that request for a minute, and then think about how ridiculously selfish it was. chances are 9 out of 10 times, the request directly benefitted you, and more importantly, at the expense of someone or something else, and also, did you think of the adverse impact on someone else when you complained. i mean, if we could do something to help you that will not directly or indirectly affect something else adversely, we'll do it, and we'll do it happily. here's an example, during the student forum last year, one of the biggest complaint was how the timetable was screwed up. some people wanted it to be longer, some wanted it to be shorter. how in the world is mrs tan supposed to make everyone happy like that, she has to accommodate everyone, encluding the teachers, who graciously have accepted what they were given, in other words they didn't even have a say in it (i think). now think back and ask yourself if you thought about the teachers or even better, the uncles and aunties who lock up after you leave. so ya, people are retarded.

so think about it, if you were to rate all the individual councillors on how they helped you, they would probably all fail. because you are THAT selfish.

(oh the geekyness)

for the longest time i have had friends who are anti-social. and more importantly, because i tried to be more like them, i became more anti-social as well. i kind of think that was a dumb mistake on my part. a lot of times i wanted to do something and because i had no friends who wanted to join me, i ended up backing out, which i sometimes regretted. in this kind of scenarios, i really don't know how to act. should i go for it and end up alienating my friends, or should i not go and waste a perfectly good opportunity.

as i grew up, i became more appreciative of opportunities, especially to do things i have hever tried before. but the reluctance and the hesitation never went away with age. with each new endeavour, i felt equally or even more afraid of trying. and sometimes without my friends, i ended up wasting it. i think that's what people in the industry like to call peer pressure. but i don't really know, it just feels like a lack of support.

also another thing as i grew up, i became more detached from "cliques" and just became this like wanderer from said "cliques". i mean it has it's benefits, at least i have a greater network now. but once in a while, i would think back and wonder what it would like to have a clique, just an exclusive group of maybe 4-6 friends who know anything and everything about each other. i think one thing is for sure, i certainly missed out on telling people my secrets, that's for sure. and whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is open to interpretation.

something jelena asked me as we boarded the mrt, you don't talk to your old friends one meh. then what if you'all like got something to say, you just don't say to anybody? i can't say this for all guys, but i now thts pretty much all that is from me. i don't really share with other people. that's why i keep a blog in the first place (actually that's the second reason, the first is to . that's not to say i'm not a good friend. i mean if i see someone that i am friends with, someone that i click with, i automatically have something to say and the other party also. just because we don't say things randomly, doesn't mean we have nothing to talk about when we in fact do meet. i thnk that if you can click with someone, even if you don't talk to them in a while, you won't ever really feel awkward around that person, not even in a million years.

it's never easy finding friends, but you will never feel that they be the ones who are stopping you from doing what you want.


unless you're taking drugs, then they'll stop you.