Sunday, February 28, 2010
7 things you need to know about field camp
DIG HARD
HOT CHOW
GOOD FIGHT
LONG NIGHT
SLEEP TIGHT
and that the Red Army Leader Is very good at mindfucking
Sunday, February 21, 2010
IFC : Camo On, Camo Off
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
Friday, February 12, 2010
I've Been Thinking
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
Sunday, February 07, 2010
responsibility
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
Saturday, January 30, 2010
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
Sunday, January 24, 2010
To the 30 odd visitors to my blog from 17/01/10 to 24/01/10
(except wen hui and yang, THX!!)
Friday, January 15, 2010
Deja vu
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
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.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
i counted
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
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Learn
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
Saturday, January 02, 2010
2 stupid (funny) ideas
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
Friday, January 01, 2010
i dunno what to title this
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.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
2 stories
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
Saturday, December 05, 2009
beauty
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 ...

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.