Saturday, March 20, 2010

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.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

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

Saturday, March 06, 2010

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.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

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

Sunday, February 21, 2010

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

Friday, February 12, 2010

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

Sunday, February 07, 2010

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

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"

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

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

Friday, January 15, 2010

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.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

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

Saturday, January 09, 2010

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

Saturday, January 02, 2010

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

Friday, January 01, 2010

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.

Thursday, December 10, 2009