Is there a dance that doesn't involve, you know, dancing?

Learned during hockey training that the girls' team might be having even fewer members due to the intensity of our trainings. well, wish them the best of luck on that. on a lighter note, saw sei yee and darren with the SAJC team, both of them become damn zai already sia. hopefully NJC will also improve by A divs :)

after training, rushed to NJC for the first walk-in practice. i was 30min late, but apparently the only thing they covered at the time was doing the body waves (yes, it did take that long to go through it, and admittedly most of us still cant do it after the practice) so i didnt miss much. i always knew that dancing wasnt my forte, but now the fact has been securely hammered into my mind: "YOU CAN'T DANCE FOR NUTS". i flailed my limbs around for another 2 hours or so, and it was over. i cant imagine how in the world im gonna catch up after coming back from korea, with all the practice sessions im gonna miss.

zombie movies seem to be universally appealing; there's just something about watching mindless humanoids getting hacked and slashed that everyone can relate to. and as with any movie theme that has been rehashed countless times, there has grown a certain chain of events that's bound to happen in every zombie movie or game. so, here's How Everything goes to Hell during a Zombie Apocalypse. the moral of the story is that when the zombie apocalypse eventually hits us, do NOT choose the safehouse with the ball pit, cos the only guy i know who can survive on small sperical objects alone is pac-man.

fyi, im posting so early cos i still have to rush off to nyp training which will end at freaking 9pm, and tomorrow there's still morning training T_T how to survive training with no recovery time?

7 years down the road, the magic is still in the air

4A bbq today was surprisingly successful beyond my expectations! ok, at first things weren't looking too good. i left home at 1pm cos the bbq wholesale centre gave their ETA as anytime between 2-4pm (uncertainty of 2h -.-), but as usual my time estimation was way off and i arrived at 1.30pm. killed some time at amk library first, listening to music (on a random note, i think my earphones are "losing steam" or something? can barely hear anything anymore) and reading a dummy's guide to quantum mechanics which i found there to "prepare" for H3. damn cheem sia, no matter how many times i try to go through that crap i can never seem to fully absorb it. i know about planck's solution to the ultra-violet catastrophe, einstein's explanation of photoelectricity, broigle's (is that how you spell his name?) stationary wave electrons, schroedinger's cat etc etc, but somehow i just cant see the main learning points from all these seperate discoveries and how they link to each other. sian, hope things become clearer once H3 actually starts.

ok, back on topic: the food came at around 2.30pm, so from then until 4pm i was just stoning at the bbq pit (in hindsight, im amazed at my own patience) until zhaoming and melvin's mom came. afterwards, zhaoming and i struggled to start the fire, with me making some idiotic elementary-level mistakes (note to self: bring a lighter to the next bbq), but at least we managed to make a little progress. well, it was alex, ziwei and yefeng to the rescue, cos they actually knew what they were doing around the fire. also, the sky looked very foreboding at around 4.30pm, and we were already scouting for a sheltered area for our wet-weather plan, but in the end the weather turned out to be pleasantly cool, aka perfect :)

im surprised by how many of us turned up. myself, zhaoming, yenjin, siyun, melissa, michelle, shihqian, yefeng, ziwei, alex, clarence, cheryl su, kahming, ms loi, bryan; an unprecedented number of people! and i find it such a magical thing that we all managed to hit it off so well after 7 years splitting up, it almost seemed like we meet up every week or something. recalling all the dumb things we did, gossiping about tame primary school scandals, and laughing about it throughout, it was great.

for nostalgia's sake, here's 4A 2002:

in case you're wondering, im in the top row, second from the right. honestly, i cant remember why i seem to be punching melvin.

7 years donw the road, the magic is still in the air.

Ghosts of Christmas future

For some reason, my family thought that it would be a great idea to go to vivocity for lunch today, even though i was completely starving and vivo was nearly an hour's drive away. my father kept on insisting "we should go to a shopping centre to feel the christmas spirit!", and i simply had no energy to remind him that thompson plaza was a 5 min walk and junction 8 was a 5 min drive, so i played along. when we got there, as usual, vivo just looked like a bigger version of junction 8, but what i found more disturbing was the "christmas spirit" that my father was talking about.

what did i see there? confetti snow, plastic santa clauses, foil snowflakes just to name a few. tacky imitations of the originals, but you cant blame them for trying. what really caught my attention was all the christmas sales going on. i have seen them going on since even mid-late october, and now in november things are really picking up. all the retail franchises cashing in on the innocent traditions of giving and caring which christmas stand for... at least i believe thats what christmas used to be about. now it seems it's just another generic holiday to get rid of old stock and attract new customers. "yuletide cheer, 20% off!", they seem to coax me, as the sirens did to passing sailors. "christmas spirit,at half-price! come get yours now!" what will christmas become in the future, if it has degraded so much by this present day? 50 years down the road, will our children and grandchildren remember what christmas is about? will they still adhere to the values of charity and compassion, or will they treat christmas as just another excuse to get some money from their folks? will they even remember that it is christmas, and not "generic holiday" day?

and that was the "christmas spirit" that my father was talking about. sadly, it seems like it's more of a "christmas phantom" than any spirit, a shadow of what it once was.

I think i've posted Palms Read before, but here's an 8-bit version of the song i just found. that's right, 8-bit as in the kind of beeps and clicks that used to pass as music during the era of gameboys (the kind of stuff that used to be a part of every kid's life, but which people now download and play on their phones as a lame time-killer egs. pokemon red/blue/yellow). the song definitely has a less hardcore sound now that electric guitars and drums have been replaced with sounds that sound like they came from mario, but the essence is still there, and the awesome tempo shifts are still right on cue.

The rainbow is worth it

My mom wanted us to start packing for the korea trip. honestly, it didnt really hit me till then that it's already approaching the end of november and the start of december. only one more month to go, and my homework is still gathering dust and cobwebs in some forsaken corner of my schoolbag (figuratively speaking, of course; in reality, the unfortunate technological advancements of KM now allow teachers to torture students from anywhere in the world, through the magic of the internet!). take away the week in korea, and hockey trainings and walk-in practices, will i be able to finish anything at all? damn it, have to start prioritising; if i cant do maths for nuts right now, gonna have to start on other subjects and pray that i'll catch up eventually.

the fates have worked their magic again; after yet another shuffling of schedules, i can at least go for a few wlk-in practices again. i finally feel like im contributing something to the orientation. now, all that's left to do is to learn the dance. that should be easy, right? right?! ok, self-deception fail, i am so gonna screw up T_T

happy thanksgiving! ok, i know that singapore doesnt really celebrate thanksgiving, and i myself only found out today that today is thanksgiving, but it makes the perfect pre-amble to...



this video really made me lol, as in literally "laugh out loud", and not just something you type during msn chat whenever someone tells a joke when really you're facepalming yourself over how lame it was. sometimes, even though intelligent humour is good, you just need something completely mindless to laugh at. this is one of them. lmao at the last part, who would have thought you shouldnt use an uncooked turkey as a cooked turkey?

sometimes, even through the longest and darkest of storms, after the wind, rain and cold is over, you see a rainbow and it makes everything worthwhile.

Limited time and unlimited desires for its use results in opportunity cost.

Twas our first in-school coach training. even before coach arrived, his presence was already being felt as his commands travelled across vast distances through this amazing device called a handphone: "keep running for 25min while holding your hockey stick or until i get there, whichever is sooner." well, his voice could travel instantaneously but his body couldnt, so we ran the full 25min. i absolutely hate running based on time rather than by distance, because it's so difficult to judge how far you are from finishing. if he said something like "run 2.4km", at least i can count down the laps left while running. however, when i run by time, im afraid to look at my watch because i will get severely demoralised if it turns out i've only been running a fraction of the time i feel like i've been running, so i end up following the people in front of me until they stop running like some sadistic game of catch which i will never win, because the people in front of me are always people like the nigels or kian boon, and seriously i could never hope to even pace with any of them for more than a few laps. afterwards, coach arrived and we did drills the rest of the way, pretty standard stuff. some of the seniors were there, but they didnt really help much cos everything they said to us can be summarised by "it's just gonna get worse". on the plus side, i finally managed to do pull-ups! :) well, by "pull-ups" i mean 2 pull-ups, which i know is pretty pathetic, but it's still an infinity-percent increase from 0 to 2, so dont burst my bubble. after training, talked cock with the guys for quite a while, and here's my favourite quote from the entire conversation:

"Wei Shian doesn't talk cock; he talks sense. But his sense is so sense that it becomes like cock." - Marcus

if any of that made sense to you, you should seriously consider getting psychiatric help. so anyway, ivy told us that coach lost his notebook during monday's pitch training, so if you happen to be reading this and be from hockey and know what happened to it, then go talk to her.

met bryan in school too, cos the floorball people are designing a t-shirt to give their seniors as a parting gift. talked a bit about the 4A gathering. turns out the response so far is pretty pathetic, with only 9 confirmed guests. even melvin wont be there (even though he lives literally THERE) cos he'll be going overseas. sian, i really hoped to see more people, but i guess this is good too.

ogl dates have been shifting around again, and suddenly i find that i can't make it for any of the walk-in practice or banner-painting sessions due to a combination of hockey training and me going overseas. i havent done anything ogl-ish since the whole thing began, and the only thing reminding me that im even an ogl is the sms that lionel sent me. i just hope that i will be able to come to some sort of resolution at the end of all this.

and speaking of clashing schedules, im starting to get worried that H3 will intefere with hockey. turns out that there's a H3 test on 24th april, which is right at the beginning of the hockey A div season of late april-early may. even before H3 actually begins, it's already clashing with my other commitments, and that's discounting the very probable situation of lesson times clashing with other things. have i bitten off more than i can chew? have i overloaded myself beyond capacity? i guess only time will tell.

i found out from songko that applications for leaders in boarding for term 1 are still open. i was under the impression that term 1 applications have closed and the earliest one could apply again was in term 2, but it turns out you can just go to the general office and grab a form. should i board again? on the one hand, it totally rocks to be able to wake up an hour later than from home and still have time for a shower and breakfast, and seeing friends after school everyday is also a plus, but on the other hand it can sometimes be quite inconvenient staying in boarding, and whether i meet friends there or not completely depends on who else is boarding. i'll think more in depth about it another day, right now im just tired and hungry and brain-dead.

i think i've talked a bit before about why i dont like twitter, and this comic totally illustrates my point:

when you are encouraged to keep things short, you dont feel the need to think about what you write, thus you have dumb posts appearing all over the place. so to all you twitter-lovers, if you are going to use twitter, at least make sure your posts dont end up like "riboflavin" (which i believe is the proper name for vitamin B... *checks bread packaging* vitamin B2).

White elephant (noun): Look in the mirror

I got a call from the NJC general office this morning while i was asleep, and my first thought was "WTF?" cos the last time i got a call from them was when i left my IC at the maths promos exam venue. thankfully though, this time the clerk bore good news. i've been accepted by NTU H3 contemporary physics! haha, a huge sigh of relief there, i got quite worried when i didnt receive the letter yesterday. i wonder why NTU suddenly changed their procedure to send the letter to the school instead of to us personally? i tried asking the clerk on the phone, but she sounded a bit impatient so i didnt probe. guess it's a universal truth that nobody likes to work in a completely empty school at 9.30 in the morning. and that's right, my lazy ass was still in bed at 9.30am on a tuesday, cos it's the holidays and i can do anything i want. xiao lan also made it, and there's this other guy who put contemporary physics as his second/third choice i think, who i've never met, who also got in. i cant remember a lot of other names off the bat, but congrats to josias who made it for SMU game theory, and to jerrell who amazingly applied and got accepted by 2 courses. wonder if he's gonna stick to one or go for both... wow, with 2 H3s and being president of PA, he could be well on his way for president's scholarship... which would make me an acquaintance of a president's scholar! haha, a perfect target for riding coat-tails :)

the 4A outing is finally taking form! excited to see all those long-lost classmates again, but at the same time i feel quite guilty for not doing anything thus far in the planning and organising stages. i think all the heavy lifting so far has been done by bryan, melvin, zhaoming and ms loi (it never ceases to amaze me how we've actually managed to get back in contact with ms loi!). well, i'll try to help out on the actual day, but just so you know i failed the cooking part of home econs; epic failed, in fact. i think it was supposed to be a quiche if i remember correctly, but it came out half-cooked and in a tin foil bowl (cos i forgot to bring cutlery -.-). aaaand im not very good at fire-starting either, so if any of you guys need generic-heavy-object-ish kind of help, i'll gladly offer my services, cos probably the only thing i can do in bbqs is to sit down somewhere.

Hope is my placebo

I was too caught up playing SSBB and sleeping to post yesterday, which i guess means my one-post-a-day streak has ended. oh well, didnt miss much, because yesterday was truly uneventful. i tried to do maths, but to bo honest my brain is so rusted that i cant recall even the basics anymore. in the end i gave up before even finishing up the first paper (dunman high promos). i can imagine how ns will kill the few bright sparks that our nation has to offer (bright spark guys, of course. thankfully the female geniuses of singapore will be spared). just imagine, if it's only been a few weeks and already i cant remember anything, then 2 years of ns will definitely sap any lingering wisps of knowledge straight out of my mind.

today was our first coach training of the holidays. coincidentally, it was our first holiday training where it rained (hmm...). as was expected, he's pushing hard on our physical training (because as he puts it, and i agree, we dont have the sheer hockey skill to beat other teams, so we can only rely on being physically tougher than them). warm-up was 5 sets of running across the pitch and back, bent over and stick in front of us. that one was really tiring, and the killer part is that bending down while running not only screws around with your centre of gravity, but also prevents you from taking full strides. the body has to subconsciously compensate for all these anomalies, making it a lot more tiring than one would expect. the stationary drills after that were also quite tiring, but after that things toned down to a more comfortable level. goalie ivy got quite a tongue-lashing though, and you really have to feel sorry for her. the entire year she could only self-train as a goalie, and now george takes over and starts shouting at her over little things which in his opinion should be common sense or second nature, but for her might be something new. well, at least they have a goalie; the guys' team is still sadly without a goalie, and im starting to get anxious over where we might be able to find one.

after training, i went to j8 macs for lunch. saw youyue from 6D, but he didnt see me and he was just passing through anyway, so i didnt bother to call out to him. then just when i was about to leave i met bingqiang from 2-8, and we talked a bit about jc life, then he got on the mrt while i got on the bus. amazingly, i saw jill from 4A on the bus too, but i didnt call out to her. if i count marcus from hockey training as meeting someone from 4-4, then i have officially met a classmate from every class i have ever been in before jc, all on the same day. what are the odds! really brings me back to the older days, back to cat high and even ai tong. i wonder if this much nostalgia is healthy in a society that seems to scream right in your face every day: "NO TIME! NO TIME! FORWARD! FORWARD!"

when i got home and opened the mailbox, i really got my hopes up when i saw a letter addressed to me. i thought that it was an acceptance letter from NTU about my H3 application. well, turns out that it was just an advertisement for teaching scholarships:

"YOU'RE AN 'A' GRADE STUDENT"

"YOU SHOULD BE LOOKING AT AN 'A' CLASS SCHOLARSHIP"

what bullshit are they trying to sell me on? that i'm one of a "selected few" who got this? i'll bet they sent this to half or more of the entire JC1 cohort. but more importantly, im wondering if this means i didnt get into the H3 course. they did say that acceptance letters would be sent out starting from 23rd nov, which means (at least it is implied from the choice of words) that there is a chance that i did get in, but my letter will arrive another day, but i dont want to be led on by false hope all the way until 1st dec when the applicants' reply letters are due, only to realise that i didnt get in. well, a man can dream, a man can hope, and i'll be abusing those rights all the way till the last day (and by then i'll probably go emo in a corner or something).

a few days ago, gabby went on an SOAD rampage and got more than a hundred of their songs at one go, and he also introduced me to some of them. here's one that's been stuck in my head since then. it's called U-Fig.



in case you cant tell, the song is a protest against the Iraq war going on at the time. "melt in the sun" obviously refers to the Iraq desert, "hide in the sky" refers to the fighter jets, and "the cause" refers to ridding Iraq of their supposed WMDs, which was one of the reasons why the war was started in the first place. i hate it when people stereotype metal/hard rock lyrics as "satanic" or "barbaric", because in reality there's so much more than that. it also irks me to see people carrying over this assumption to the actual bands and their members. for example, there are actually people who think that AC/DC's band name means "Anti-Christ/Devil's Children" (obviously people with no knowledge of basic electrical safety, and given that they're surrounded by electrical appliances im surprised they even survived long enough on the computer to post this kind of crap in forums). i mean, just look at a band like PTH: they're a metal band, but when they perform live you dont see them biting off bat heads. *looks at Ozzy* they get on stage, tell jokes, drink beer and give one heck of a show. and before you say it, i know that there are actual satanic bands, but those are usually from the black/doom metal genre which i dont listen to anyway. so if you're one of those people who immediately associate "metal" with "satanic", you should know that that's as untrue a stereotype as any idiotic racist or sexist comment on the street.

I'm still waiting for some mouse to start dancing in front of me

Partly because i received feedback that my posts are too long and wordy, but mostly because my life is utterly boring right now, things will probably be shorter from now on.

Tried to work a bit on that 100-word write-up again. was discussing with yeeni online, but these kinds of things are rarely productive, and this time was no exception. it's just so hard to bounce ideas around and really stay on-topic when there's no face-to-face communication. at first we wanted to invite ivy to the group convo to discuss further, but she thought that we should wait till monday when we can meet up after training. well, she does have a good point there, cos i think that real-life meetings will definitely be more productive than msn group convos (which isnt really saying a lot; in fact, hockey meetings in general dont really go anywhere). well, i guess that's why she's the captain eh? however, i do have a few misgivings about this suggestion. we're all gonna be tired out after training, and to make matters worse it's gonna be our first coach training of the holidays, and the seniors say that he almost always ends 2 hours later than is expected of him. good for our coaching funds, not so good for our immediate physical well-being after trainings. i can just picture a group of zombies all semi-conscious from fatigue and still trying to be all poetic. and of course, CCAB is not exactly the most conducive place for a meeting, especially with the next group of hockey players, whoever they may be, shouting and hitting across the entire pitch. i guess we'll see how it goes? i hate how our admin matters always seem to be so unstructured and disorganised, but i guess im being a hypocrite since i can barely keep my own life in order.

i need inspiration for the write-up! i have no idea whether we should be humourous or nostalgic or grateful or with well wishes or some other style. i wish the councillors could have been more specific regarding what kind of a video they were aiming for, or at least i want to look at what the other ccas are doing so we can conform and not stick out like a sore thumb in the video. ok, im suddenly reminded of the chinese A level compre passage. it described how Walt Disney was inspired to create Mickey Mouse after a mouse that has stayed in his studio for ages got so used to his presence that it would actually eat his food and dance in front of him. who knows, 11 years of chinese might actually have some sort of practical benefit after all. all that's left to do is wait for that mouse to tell me what to put for the 100-word write-up.

another cool song from The Human Abstract, this one's called Crossing The Rubicon. i have no idea what a rubicon is, but the song's cool so i dont care.

Bound and gagged by invisible red tape

At hockey training today, marcus told us that ms wong smsed him this morning to say that our $4500 budget for equipment had magically shrunk to just $1000 after paying for pitch training. ridiculous! is the pitch made of kevlar and watered with white wine? wth man, i already calculated that at the very worst case scenario we might spend maybe $1000 on pitch (and that's seriously stretching things), so i have no idea why it became so expensive. stupid admin crap... so anyway, we had to scrap our original plan of buying a full goalie set and settle for just the high-rebound kickers, i believe. and the teachers also want us to get freaking 100 balls with the same money. i think we just need to get one ball... then i'll proceed to hit it straight into their skulls. i think 100 balls is enough to last until way after we graduate, so why cant we just devote more money to where it's really needed (read: goalie suit)? stupid admin red tape, makes being an exco seem completely not worth my time if im bound so tightly by regulations so pointless and inflexible.

on another hockey-related note, next monday is gonna be the first coach training of the holidays, which means it's probably a good time for me to start on my epitaph. how about:

He wanted to go peacefully in an open field

But died on fake grass while being screamed at by his coach

ok, i dont really want to go in an open field, but im too sleepy to think of something witty and relevant. heck, that sounds like multi-tasking, which just makes me sleepier.

oh, and welcome back to all those who went for YLTC! and especially to seng, ivy and alicia! :):):):):) in case you havent noticed, im sucking up to the 3 of you cos i have done just about nothing regarding the 100-word write-up, and there's also the news of the missing $3500, which im pretty sure you wont be taking very lightly.

now that L4D2 has come out, L4D sure looks really ancient, doesnt it?

i loled when i saw this  NES version of L4D. the same 8-bit sounds, pixelated graphics and 2D gameplay from an era long gone. quite disappointed that there are only boomers though, i really would have wanted to see what the other boss infected look like. i wonder if i can get it on emulator...

Don't blame Murphy's Law, blame ourselves for complying

Today was the guys' "class outing" which can pretty much be summed up with "lunch and LAN". jj, gabby, jtan, victor and i had lunch at the prata shop opposite bukit timah plaza. after that, it was really pouring. it was already raining when we got there, but got much worse by the time we were done. we thought it couldnt get any worse. jtan and victor were wearing sandals, but the rest of us got our feet extremely wet. it was so bad for gabby that he actually went to the nearest provision shop and bought a pair of budget slippers (and he says he will bring them for every lan outing from now on). i myself took off my shoes once we reached the lan shop, hoping they would dry. they did not. we played for a while, then jacob and kaiwei joined us, and eddie later on. this is the first time we ever played more than $9 of lan at underground. next stop: playing until we use up our $10 deposit!

remember when i said we thought the rain couldnt get any worse? well, apparently it did. jacob and kaiwei told us of nothing short of a disaster film plot on their way to underground. it rained so hard that the storm drain along bukit timah road (that really huge drain between njc and hci) was overflowing, and the roads were submerged shin-deep in water. on their bus were a few sh2 njcians, and at the coro stop the windshield wipers broke down. the rain was so heavy that without the wipers, visibility was literally 0, so the bus had to stop, and the sh2s actually asked the driver to open the door so they could run the rest of the way to njc to avoid being late for their physics A levels (it was 1.45pm and the paper was at 2pm). i heard from zhihao later that some of them eventually had to sit for their A levels in hci instead. talk about murphy's law eh? i hope this kind of crap doesnt happen to me next year.

and 4 hours later, on our way back from underground, the effects of the storm could still be felt. the air was still extremely damp, and the roads were still jammed. we waited about 30min for 852 to come, which was extremely long, because nearly every other bus passed by at least twice (except 75, which passed once). murphy's law strikes again...

then again, i think murphy's law is more of a psychological issue then a fortune-based one. people always tend to think of things working out, so when something bad happens they automatically assume that it's the worse thing that could happen. when you stop and think about it, there are an infinite number of bad things that could happen in any given situation. if you fell down and twisted your ankle, you could quite easily have maybe torn your tendon in the same fall, or even break a bone or (touch wood) landed on your head and snapped your neck. as natural planners, humans like to think about things when they are successful, so most wouldnt naturally start thinking about how things could have been worse when something goes wrong, instead thinking about how things should have gone right like what they have planned in their heads. so it is by human nature that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, because we mostly never think about what will go wrong until it does.

i finally found the Limb From Limb music video! it caught me quite by surprise when i first saw it, because it was so starkly different from the other Fortress music videos (bloodmeat, sequoia throne, spoils). however, after a bit of thought i realised how it actually makes a lot of sense to have a video like that in an album like this. Fortress is a concept album revolving around the theme of goddess worship, and Limb From Limb is a song about how the ancient irish goddess of the forest (Flidais, i think) has come back to slay her enemies. the video depicts many stereotypically "manly" occupations (cowboy, police officer, construction worker, sailor etc) acting in a very feminine manner, which is analogous to the album's theme of degenderisation. also, its dam funny to watch, especially the part where the sailors start dancing XD

One step at a time

First pitch training since i can remember, and as farouq put it, "at least got a little bit of progress". well, maybe a bit too little, but progress is progress and beggars cant be choosers. mostly there was utter chaos without the coach there, but with farouq and lim we managed to scratch together a somewhat sketchy plan of drills which we carried out. even the st andrews coach saw that we were fumbling about (he was waiting for his pitch to start), so he offered to help organise friendlies should we need something to do during pitch. well, at least from that training we managed to get contacts for friendlies. after our pitch booking ended we stayed to watch a friendly between cjc and st andrews sec. if im not wrong the final score was 4-1 to SA. those guys are seriously good. even though they were lacking in physical fitness (being sec school students and all), they still managed to beat cjc with skill alone. talked a lot of crap with the hockey guys while watching them, but personally while watching the match i was just constantly reminded of how much more we have to go to get to that kind of standard. one step at a time i guess.

I was randomly surfing the internet when i came across this hilarious video. it's a parody of lady gaga's music video for Bad Romance. in case you've never seen it, here's the original for comparison:



personally, i dont really like this song. i do like the "ra ra ro ma ma" hook and the bridge though, but the rest of the song is a bit bleh for me. and i dont really get the mv either. is she supposed to be prostituting herself (the part with the laptops showing "lady gaga $1000000")  for the sake of revenge (end scene with guy burnt to a crisp in bed) or something? in any case, here's the parody, the thing i really want to focus on:



the little kid got everything right, down to the weird hand clawing and the weirder thrust-hand-into-pelvis-region motion in front of the mirror (watch the original again if you dont believe me).

Isn't a rainbow just an optical illusion anyway?

nothing much going on. regarding SSBB (which takes up majority of my time nowadays, goes to show how still my life is), finally completed subspace emissary but havent unlocked toon link and wolf yet. oh well, meta knight is still my favourite character anyway, i dont think that will change even after i unlocked them. after all, they are link and fox clones respectively anyway.

I thought it was a sign that everything would soon return to what it should be. i thought it was a sign that it was time to bury the hatchet. in hindsight, i guess i was being extremely naive to cook up such a fairytale scenario from the given situation. the rainbow after the storm which i envisioned while drunk on hope, was nothing more than a mirage disguising chance occurence. would i say i am crestfallen? no, i dont think it's so extreme. somehow my eyes have become less and less sensitive to the light with each passing day, as everyday all i saw was the growing darkness. i was once brimming with hope that this was all just a passing shower, but now im resigned that it could very well be an eternal thunderstorm. well, i still havent given up that last wisp of hope; perhaps this random occurence will turn out to be just the little sunbeam to shine through the dark clouds.

found another song from The Human Abstract. they dont really appeal to me that much overall, but there area select few songs which i like. this one's called Mea Culpa.

The world will not end on 2012; watching the movie assured me of this

Today was the first hockey training in a very long time. and to make things more interesting, seng is off doing YLTC, meaning lim was in charge of training. i find that he has a very "bait and hook" style of doing PT. examples: he will say "do 40 pushups", then at 25 he will say "take a break, we're halfway there" AKA doing 50 pushups. also, when doing leg raises, he said "ok now legs down" and i thought we were done, but then he continued "but not all the way", so it turned out we were doing leg raises with the up-down leg movement too. finally, he said "ok after these pullups we go to the 'D' " and i thought we were finally done with PT and were gonna play the mini-match, but in turned out he wanted to do suicides -.- And speaking of the mini-matches, i think i have to start reining in my sweeps. cos of the adrenaline high during the match, i twice decided to sweep the ball into the goal, both times nearly hitting marcus' head... yup, need to practice some self-restraint there.

there was an exco meeting after training, and somehow i was suddenly tasked with the job of doing a 100-word write-up for the hockey seniors to put in some grad night video. i just opened my email inbox and saw an email from nigel saying that "everyone" should be involved and we should "discuss with the girls' team". well, if by discussion he meant something like "who's english is very good? *all eyes turn to me* ok settled", then we had a very good discussion. i have no idea how im going to go about it when we barely interacted with the seniors at all. oh well, this is where the most important life skill comes in, and by that i mean bullshitting.

went for the class outing after training. jj, kex, tz, qh and bren were there. lunch was at burger king, and afterwards we tried to discuss on the class tee design, but that quickly degenerated into laughing at threadless.com t-shirt designs. the only thing we managed to agree on is that we didnt want the shirt to be blue (keep that in mind). afterwards, chin joined us and we went to watch 2012.

2012 was just what i expected it to be: a mindless cgi-fest. there were some EXTREMELY epic scenes of buildings crashing and trains flying and volcanoes erupting, but there were so many deus ex machina-like elements thrown in to keep the flimsy plot together that it kinda put me off. the starting part particular made me roll my eyes because of the blatant use of big physics-ish words in a completely wrong manner. supposedly, the whole 2012 fiasco started because increased occurence of solar flares from the sun bombarded earth with neutrinos, and the neutrinos somehow "mutated" into a wavicle similar to microwaves, heating up the earth's core and causing tectonic instability and shifting. ok, ASSUMING that tectonic shift actually happens, the rest of the movie is plausible, but the whole neutrino thing is obviously just a load of hollywood bs. neutrinos dont "mutate", and even if they did mutate into microwaves, they got the whole heating concept wrong. microwave ovens work because they cause water molecules to vibrate at their resonant frequency. WATER molecules, not the molten magma beneath the earth's crust. judging by how magma molecules are much bigger than water molecules, one would expect them to have a much lower resonant frequency, definitely in the radio wave region, but radio waves would definitely not have the penetrating power of higher-frequency waves to go under the crust anyway, so it's another dead end. i think the story would be slightly more plausible using positrons instead of neutrinos (following hollywood sci-fi's weird obsession with anti-matter), because symmetry theory implies that, like electrons, positrons would spontaneously emit photons which would maybe form EM waves such as microwaves. however, i still dont see how any of this would result in the earth's core heating up. using occam's razor, it's definitely more logical to say that 2012 aint happening (at least not by the mechanism described in the movie) than to say that 2012 will happen given all these nonsensical assumptions.

however, the movie did raise a few ethical questions. should apocalypse really come knocking on our door, do we choose only to save the cream of the crop of humanity, or do we give everyone a fighting chance at survival? should we, as sentient beings and not animals, still adhere to "survival of the fittest" when it comes to crunchtime for the high and mighty human race, and if so, how would we even define "fittest"? where do we stop looking at this as a economic or darwinian issue and start looking at it as an issue of humanity?

dinner was at pizza hut, where yicen and j.gan joined us. talked cock, and jj started "sniping" kex, chin and i by taking pics of us with his macbook webcam. there are a few pics of me where jj set the photo effects to "reflection" such that it looks like im kissing myself (yup, he is THAT mature). going home on the mrt, yicen started us discussing on the class tee again, stating that she DID want  a blue shirt (thus undermining what we took an entire lunch to agree on previously). a bit more random conversation, and im not sure what had happened to the shirt as of the time i got off the mrt.

yet another flash of light come through from the clouds. is it really the sun, or just another lightning bolt? do i have another ally i can trust in rebuilding this bridge?

here's a cool song i found why surfing youtube randomly. it's from this genre called neo-classical metal. it sounds like an oxymoron, but hear it yourself, it's really not bad. it's called Ghost Opera, by Kamelot.

Humans are mammals after all; maybe we're all sheep

My family went to people's park hawker centre for lunch cos my mom needed to go to the tour agency nearby to pay the money for our holiday. the actual paying of money was quite straightforward, nothing to say there. i do, however, want to comment a bit about the lunch experience. there was this yong tau foo stall there, and the queue was the longest i've ever seen for a hawker center stall. it literally stretched the entire breadth of the hawker center and then some, and even after we had finished our meal it did not seem to be any shorter than it was. it got me thinking about the prevalence of herd mentality in people. according to my mom, that yong tau foo stall was extremely basic; you had no choice of wat pieces of yong tau foo you wanted, you had no choice of whether to have it soup or dry (it's always soup), and you had no choice of whether to have it with rice or some other staple (it's always bee hoon). isnt one of the draws of yong tau foo being able to choose which pieces you wanted? and to top it all off, not more than 10m away was another yong tau foo stall with the traditional flexibility. is the yong tau foo really that heavenly, or are people just compelled to think that way after seeing such a long queue? it brings into question a lot of comsumer stereotypes and assumptions, like how people always assume that older brands are better even after there has been a shift of management, or that handmade goods are always better than mass-produced versions. there are many instances where these assumptions simply do not stand, but people just stick to them anyways. just goes to show once again how logically fallible we humans are. maybe a loss of logical reasoning is the trade-off for emotional and sentimental attachment.

i got accepted as an ogl! well, the whole application process was honestly more or less a formality with lionel, seeing as how he's my classmate and also an overall laxing dude anyway, but at least now i know that the teachers have officially recognised my application.

do my eyes deceive me? or is it true that slowly but surely the broken bridge is being rebuilt again? in any case, just say the word and i'll do everything in my power to chip in.

bon voyage to everyone going for YLTC tomorrow! :)

i was randomly surfing the net when i came across this url linking to the urbandictionary.com definition of PTH, and it was a joke. apparently, PTH once went on tour with DragonForce, and all the definitions were either pro-PTH-anti-DF or pro-DF-anti-PTH. to make things worst, some anti-PTH people actually said that PTH was EMO. wth man, since when were they emo? people who cant appreciate the tempo shifts might call it unstructured or something and i could just brush it off as people who cant appreciate prog, but where the hell did EMO come from? they are most definitely NOT emo. personally, having been a fan of both DF and PTH at some point of time, i have to say that i prefer PTH over DF anyday. DF has fast guitar, sure, but it seems so pointless. for most of their songs they play two verses, then go into a 5 min guitar duel, then into the final verse. PTH songs have way more coordination between the different instruments, not to mention Rody Walker has a much better vocal range than ZP Theart AND can scream and death growl extremely well to boot. to all those who think PTH is trash, i dont blame you cos prog (or more specifically, PTH-style music) is quite an acquired taste. BUT if you hate PTH cos you think they're emo, then you need to actually listen to some emocore before calling anything "emo" the moment you hear death growls.

on another music-related note, The Human Abstract sounds interesting. maybe these next few days i'll youtube a few of their songs. but for now, here's one i just found, called "Vela, Together We Await The Storm". for most metal songs with piano intro/outros, i find it a bit hard to get used to, but for this song the intro somehow flows quite well into the song.

Time is a parasite: it eats my will, perforates my heart and hollows my mind

celebrated my bro's birthday today, though the actual date is tmr. the cake was really wierd: strawberry chocolate. the rest of the family liked it, but personally i find the taste of acidic strawberry jam with milky chocolate cream quite disgusting. but it was sweet anyway, and im a sugar junkie, so i ate it anyway. not really a gourmet by nature, as you might have noticed.

there's finally a class outing organised, and by class outing, i mean a gathering of the usual 6+ ppl who go for anything labelled as a "class outing", myself included. yet another failed attempt at class bonding, but at least it's something. we're going to watch 2012, though personally i dont have high hopes for the quality of the movie. i mean seriously, it looks like a lame excuse to hire the world's best CGI artists and let their imagination run wild with hurricanes and volcanoes and other random apocalyptic rubbish. there isnt even a theme to limit how random their creations can be! the supposed "prophecy" from the mayans doesnt really specify anything, so they could have AVP + Day After Tomorrow + WWIII going on simultaneously and still nobody could accuse them of going off-topic. oh well, if i cant find solace in the movie, i'll just find it with my friends i guess.

hockey training is still one thing that's sitting at the back of my mind. i havent heard from nigel about getting seniors to help us train during pitch trainings, so i guess until further notice we are still without guidance and wasting our time away - precious precious pitch hours ticking away. i guess we should just make the most out of the space and terrain and chiong drills and mini-matches.

on a random note, i take back what i said: Lucario is nothing compared to Meta Knight in SSBB!

SSBB, MKWii, PTH, hockey... yup, that just about sums up my life right now. wat a pathetic, insignificant existence i live, where everything can be summed up in four words. maybe i should be doing more constructive stuff with my life and actually take advantage of all this free time instead of letting it while away doing nothing. some of my friends are working part-time over the holidays... am i a useless bum for not doing the same? i wonder when i should start including stuff like say, holiday homework? another time, perhaps.

Nothing ever ends

ok, now that the holidays have begun, my life is becoming very monotonous. day in, day out, the same old things. i guess that can be mostly attributed to the fact that i have no life... yeah, stoning at home all day doesnt really make good blog material, does it? as usual, im keeping myself busy with the wii, but u guys must have heard that about a million times already. sorry, but seriously there's nothing much to talk about right now.

well, i guess hockey deserves a brief mention. monday's the first training of the holidays, not much issue there, but there'll be wednesday and friday pitch training  with NO coach... i have no idea wat we're gonna be doing there. one of the graduated seniors might be coming down to help, but chances are slim and im not betting on anything to happen. i can just picture it now: play mini-matches for maybe 30min, then [insert awkward cricket-chirping silence]. oh well, we'll have to play it by ear i guess.

well, one thing about the holidays is that when you've had your fill of fun and games for they day and all you can do is sit and stone, your mind tends to wander. and when your mind is filled with as much random bullshit as mine is, it tends to wander very far. i cant really rmb why, but suddenly i started thinking quite seriously about the last line of the Watchmen comics. for the uninformed, Watchmen was an awesome mini-series released by DC comics which was turned into a movie early this year but caused quite a stir cos one of the characters, Dr Manhattan, appears naked like 90% of the time, and also because of a rape scene between 2 other characters. before you cringe at the sleaziness of it, you should know that it was probably the most intellectual comic of its time, and possibly of all time.

so anyway, in the last scene of the comic, Ozymandias AKA Adrian Veidt asks Dr Manhattan (who is more or less an all-knowing, all-powerful, literally god-like character) if he made the right choice in killing the whole of New York to cease the Cold War and turn everyone's attention and hatred to a perceived alien invasion; he asks if it will all end well. Dr Manhattan replies "It doesn't end, Adrian. Nothing ever does" before teleporting to a distant galaxy permanently to experiment in creating sentient life.

i only just started ruminating on these words. nothing ever ends; we win, we lose, we succeed, we fail, but ultimately, there is no end. we naively celebrate the end of PW, seemingly blind to the imminent arrivals of SH2 year and A levels. in the future we may celebrate the end of A levels, but there's still NS, and uni, and working life. no matter where in life we reach, there's always more to go. in that case, where is the end? is death the end? maybe for the individual, but isnt the individual insignificant in the bigger scheme of things? it would seem that there is no true goal to talk about.

if that's the case, is there really any incentive for us to do anything? if there's no goal, wat do we work towards if we were to do anything at all? any form of action will just shift the situation from one state to another, each one no closer to the desired "goal" which doesnt exist anyway. any actions we do are based solely upon our own goals, which can and probably will conflict with the goals of others. then there's the problematic issue of deciding who's goals are of a higher priority. "Nothing ever ends" brings about so not just a sense if hopelessness, but also renders any notion of order invalid without any proper model to follow.

on an unrelated note, Limb From Limb music video was released today on some canadian music channel, but i couldnt find anything on youtube. another day, perhaps.

A pile of coal powder and a single flawless diamond

there was a hockey exco meeting today at school to discuss chalet and challenge shield stuff. well, in accordance to wat has become some sort of sad, sad ritual, most of the guys team was late (myself included, sadly, cos i forgot the side gate would be closed), and the guys and girls teams mostly functioned as 2 seperate entities. wats the point of meeting up if discussion is absolutely absent? it really makes me wonder how the hell we can ever function effectively as one exco group if there is such little team bonding and chemistry. anyway, i drafted the proposal for the challenge shield, but felt it was a bit sketchy though. hopefully it goes through, then i can at least say i did something for the team in my time as exco :X

ok nothing much from then till now, drafted the proposal, played SSBB, etc etc...

then out of the blue, there appeared a completely random class convo! ok they wanna try and organise a class outing, but as usual everybody got sidetracked by random crap. most notably, everyone kept harping on coming over to my house for outing, thanks to some negative influence to the NJ1356 ppl. [sarcasm] Thanks a lot guys! [\sarcasm] but sadly, things didnt really reach much closure, ended up the girls organised an ECP cycling/jian fei outing. oh well, no reason to feel left out, cos the guys also organised a lan outing too :) AND we settled our stuff in 10 minutes, unlike the girls who went one big round with random crap like singapore idol and PW and MEC (metal entertainment centre, AKA my house -.-).

still, i feel the convo touched upon a raw nerve, that of our class having virtually no cohesion. in the past i always thought that i was being oversensitive, that it should be normal for some sort of seperation to exist between the guys and the girls, and that coming from a boys' school i was not in the position to judge whether the class was bonded. however, over the past few days i have gotten feedback from both guys and girls saying that our class bonding is pathetic. well, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it exists, but it's still rather disappointing that we didnt even manage to finalise a class outing... but hey, everything has to start somewhere, doesnt it?

what's the difference between coal powder and a diamond? it's the bonding between the atoms, which makes all the difference in the world. here's to 09SH27 emerging as a diamond.

btw, i cheated again, cos the convo lasted till quite close to midnight, so im messing around with the time of post. in the future, if you see that this stuff is posted at 11.59pm, then more often than not i cheated :P

lucario is my new favourite SSBB character :)

Finally, it's over :)

OP is finally over!

we were actually quite worried that we would have a moderator, because the previous 2 groups we fulfilled audience duty with didnt have moderators, and quite honestly our group has had pretty bad luck over the year. but there wasnt a moderator, and that's a good thing. however, i seriously screwed up q&a. the teacher wanted to know some commonly used hokkien phrases in singlish, then i suddenly thought of the "I Not Stupid" movie, and the first thing that came to mind was "lim peh". oh well, epic fail there, shan't elaborate.

after the thing, the usual NJ1356 gang went to AMK hub pepper lunch express to have lunch (i know we sound filthy rich, but now they have a student meal!). for some reason chin decided to tag along, i guess he must really be very bored cooped up at home all day. jacob and lionel kept trying to trick chin into ending up doing something with the 2 girls after lunch, like watching a movie or playing pool. examples: "some of us watching movie" = "qihui and tzumi watching 'my girlfriend's an agent' " and "some of us playing pool, weishian maybe can" = "weishian cannot, only qihui and tzumi can". in the end he made a wasted trip down to amk hub XD. oh well, he lives nearby anyway.

somehow, after that was over, NJ1356 managed to convince me to let them come over to my house to play wii, so that's wat we did. the first half was spent mostly playing SSBB, and after a while the rest came up with some sadistic torture game: they would all choose the same character, 3 VS 1 with me. needless to say that was quite a challenge. i still managed to hold my own reasonably well though, but things started going downhill for me once they discovered kirby. i guess that's a weakness i'll have to train for, and i've got the entire holidays to do it!

after a few game changes, we finally settled on playing wii sports for the second half of the wii session. even though it's the first wii game ever and comes free with the console, i have to say that it doesnt skimp on quality. it's really addictive, especially when played with friends. special mention goes to boxing for making the players look retarded and oh-so-videographable (i have to admit i made that word up).

we decided to do something special to end off the wii session. since it was brenda's birthday, the ppl who were there (junjie, kexuan, tzumi, qihui and myself) decided to make a sound recording of us singing happy birthday to play on junjie's online radio show later. well, at least we TRIED to sing, but most of the clip consists of us laughing ourselves dizzy. surprisingly, she found it awesome.

just to let you know, i sort of cheated in this post. since i was so busy with the class convos and playing guess the sketch (a facebook app which the 27s are absolutely addicted to), i only completed this post around 1am, but im setting it to be posted a few hours back for a neater archive. that's right; with the internet, time travel can be done with the click of a mouse :)

no song this time. instead, here's something to make you non-wii ppl jealous. if you are the type of person who thinks wii games are purely gimmicky distractions from actual fun games, here's something nice to watch while you PICK YOUR JAW UP FROM THE FLOOR!!!



in case you were wondering, the answer is yes, it IS just as awesome in real life as it is in the videos.

T minus 5, 4, 3, 2...

Today was our last OP practice. I guess it would also qualify as the last PW meeting for NJ136. Ever. haha, sounds a bit melodramatic, but it is true. spent the entire day running through the OP over and over and over again, until we all became pretty sick of it all. even so, i still feel so unprepared; still making stupid mistakes at the most inopportune moments, when i know full well how the script should go. i just keep getting the feeling that my group in general, and I in particular, is always doing things in the last minute. in fact, we only just managed to solve a technical problem of embedding a sound clip which has been plaguing us forever and should have been settled a long time ago.

however, i will say that its awesome how far the group has come from what we were initially. looking back at the video from our OP workshop, i feel that we have really improved from that pathetic state we were once in. it's good to know that all that hard work put in has paid off. but special mention has to go to the powerpoint, which looks infinitely better than that horrible, patchwork piece which looked like a creation of Dr Frankenstein. we each worked on our own individual parts with no interaction with each other, resulting in a completely incoherent piece of trash.

well, tmr's the last day of PW for most of us. if it went well for you guys, then congrats on that :). if it things didnt work out as well as you had hoped, cheer up, put it behind you, and looks towards the future. if like me, it's ending tmr, then here's good luck from a fellow sufferer.

well, with OP happening tmr, what better song to include than one about soldiers going into war? here's Bloodmeat from PTH:

The lap is nearly over, but the race has barely begun

So many groups had their OP today, and the guys from chin and edmund's groups even decided to go LAN to celebrate (and even jacob joined in lol). seeing so many people finally complete their SH1 journey, it's kind of a sucky feeling to know that yours will still be 2 days away. even worse when you realise you will literally be one of the last few people in singapore doing PW. haha, it's just a random connection i made, but since im the last speaker of the last PW group with the last timeslot, that makes me one of the last speakers in the country! well, that epiphany wasnt exactly comforting; it just made me realise how much more i have to wait.

anyway, the wii is working out great. MKWii is still great, but im only just starting to realise the potential of SSBB. seriously, the amount of strategy and potential in that game, all the different combos and stuff, it's just mind-blowing. im starting to see why it was 2008's fighting game of the year. and yet, the show-stealer in my family is the humble yet accessible wii sports. well, since that's the only game my parents want to play when they're around, i guess it's THE game by default. meh, its fun, but i'd still rather play SSBB.

speaking of which, i have to say that parents playing wii is one of the funniest sights you'll ever see. my father had an epic fail when he couldnt find the A button (there are only 2 game buttons on the Wiimote, A and B), and his victory dance is really a sight to behold XD

OP is coming to an end, hockey training and OGL stuff gonna start soon, and there's the wii waiting back home. i think my emo-ness will end soon :)

i think i've been neglecting A7X somewhat, given that they were my first metal band and all. tis song's not too heavy, but it caught my attention cos of the interesting tune and tempo. it's sung from the point of view of a rattlesnake, so that in itself i find quite interesting. so here's Sidewinder:

Codename Revolution has landed.

What's white, (sort of) rectangular and rhymes with "pee"? finally, after a year of bargaining and pleading with my parents, they bought a Wii! haha, happiness in nintendo-packaged form. seriously, its dam addictive. SSBB is dam fun, but im still a complete noob at it, though i foresee some seriously epic gaming in the near future once i master the basics and start playing the game for real. there is a LOT of hidden depth in that deceptively simple control scheme, i tell you. MKWii is also very fun, and it has a more plug-and-play style, very easy to pick up the game and start playing from scratch. in any case, the holidays just got a lot better :). now all i need to do is summon the mental discipline to not get hooked until after OP (which i think is a lost cause anyway...).

in case you were wondering what the title of the post means, "Revolution" was the codename used for the wii while it was still in development. that's why all the serial numbers for wii games all start with REV.

just a random thought that's somewhat related to buying a wii: for some reason, im not very comfortable with bargaining and haggling. i know that it's supposed to be a shopper's secret weapon and a singaporean trademark, but it's nvr really appealed to me that much. i always feel uncomfortable having to keep asking the shopkeeper to lower his price again and again and again. it's always seemed to me that one needs extremely thick skin to go around slashing prices.

still, i predict that the holidays will pass by quite brainlessly. already, i see myself doing the same routine over and over again every day. it's pathetic, really, to see someone doing this. it reminds me of caged animals in the zoo which have nothing to do, so everyday they just end up pacing up and down in their laughably tiny enclosures, just waiting for something to happen. well, i guess all that will come to an end soon, with the wii and hockey training and ogl-ing all coming up soon. here's to a holiday that's actually spent meaningfully.

OP. you blink and suddenly it's about to hit you in the face. still feel so unprepared, so horribly unproficient, but what can you do? 3 more days and nobody can change it, so might as well embrace it. have to give it my all this last few days. and the I&R... i know most of you guys have done it by now, which is exactly why im so worried. zzz too late to think straight now, guess i'll work on it tmr.

and also, the NE challenge shield. i guess NJC hockey is officially in the race to bid for an event for 2010. and the proposal is gonna be done by... me, yup. and the progress of said proposal is... 0%. quite expected, huh? but its not completely my fault; since nigel's decided to collaborate with floorball, we have to wait for their response first, right? haha, im so good at consoling myself.

As a friend, i should have recovered by now. by virtue of how much time has passed, i should have recovered by now. and yet, every once in a while i feel the symptoms resurface again, and it takes a while before i manage to put them at the back of my head. and every time it happens, i feel guilty because i havent done my duty as a friend. time may heal all wounds, but it takes a lot of it to work. until then, i just hope that it doesnt spill over to anyone else.

partly because bryan posted part 1 on his blog, and partly because it's an awesome song to begin with, here's I Won't See You Tonight (Part 2) by Avenged Sevenfold:

Take the sand out of the hourglass, and let's pretend.

Just something random that happened yesterday: bryan called me out of the blue at night and said that he met Qiu'en working at Icekimo. i dunno why i was so happy when bryan was the one who met her, but i just was. for some reason, these moments of nostalgia, these chance meetings with ex-classmates from simpler times long gone, seem to mean so much more to me now. maybe it would be timely to have another 6D chalet? but the last one went so horribly... i think the problem is because we were primary 6 class, compared to 4A which was only a class until primary 4. because we were a class up till PSLE, there were many of us who went to the same school and formed cliques which became quite strong over the next 4 years. so when we finally had a chalet, we were too stuck in our comfortably familiar cliques to bother reaching out to our old classmates. for 4A however, we were split up before PSLE, so many of us went to seperate schools and were more willing to reconnect with old friends. well, that's my take on it anyway. in any case, i hope that eventually the 6D group will be able to come together as miraculously well as the 4A people.

it just hit me that school will be over very soon. im guessing that after my OP on 11 nov, i can pretty much say that my holidays have begun. common sense and student mentality are screaming at me to feel happy or relieved or excited, and yet i feel none of that. the first thing i realised was that there wont be hanging out with friends at the canteen, staying back after school and seeing who's also crazy enough to stay behind, talking cock about everything under the sun, for just about 2 months, and amazingly, i feel just that tinge of disappointment. of course there are things to look forward to, such as that long-awaited 4A gathering, but on the whole i'll spend my days once again rotting in the couch. i used to be content with such a sedentary lifestyle, but does that still hold true now? well, i guess luckily there will be a few more routines to punctuate the silence. hockey trainings will be quite frequent, plus ogl preparations will all be starting pretty soon if im not wrong. at least there will still be opportunities to get together with the hockey people plus the people becoming ogl (so far i know of jacob, j.gan, yicen, tzumi, seng, bryan, kaiwei, alicia, yeeni, did i miss anyone?), and maybe even meet a few new ppl along the way. it troubles me slightly that im going overseas in early dec though, cos i'll be missing hockey trainings as well as informal walk-in practices sessions. insider info from yicen says that the boys' choreography will be killer, so i have no idea how im gonna be able to catch up after missing more than a week's worth of practice.

speaking of holiday plans, wasnt there supposed to be some sort of cycling-related cip that j.tan signed a few of the 27s up for? i have absolutely no idea of anything about that right now. im not even sure if the darn thing is still on or not. date, time, venue, all these simple basic details i still have no inkling of. better start asking soon, or for all i know it'll just zip right past me.

time seems so transient to me now. a year always seems like a long time until it flies right past you, and then you realise that 365 days of your life just got spent. in another 365 days, we will all be preparing for our own A levels, then maybe grad night, and then that might possibly be the last of 09SH27. all the friends i've made over the past year, could they just as easily turn to dust in the same amount of time? all the good buddies i've met, how long can that warm glow of friendship possibly last before the cold of isolation finally snuffs it out? one year? two years? we, as a class, might never have the chance to meet again. i dont want it to end so easily, i dont want all those good times to yellow with the photographs, and yet it all seems so inevitable. it's even worse than ai tong or cat high, because now im painfully lucid and aware of this impending drifting apart before it even commences. is this wat they mean by friendships being priceless? i think im just beginning to fathom how very true it is. there is a very stark difference between being spoonfed these wise words from your parents and teachers, and actually being put in a situation where you cant help but utter in reverence: "they were right all along". people come and go in our lives, and some people may turn out to become friends, but every friend adds something unique and special to our lives, and having to lose a friend removes something that you are painfully aware will never be replaced again. and that, i believe, what im truly afraid of: not spiders, not fire, not heights, not death, but time; time and its indifference, its irreversibility, its permanence.

i know that this song is traditionally played at graduations and that im a year early, but the lyrics really resonate with what im feeling right now. besides, it's my blog and i can do anything i want :P

The windows open and close. You can't control them, so you better enjoy them.

I think OP is officially making me a paranoid kiasu wussy. yesterday, my mom wanted us to all go take a flu jab cos we're going on holiday overseas, but i actually kept refusing cos i was afraid that the side-effects would spill over to OP day and then i wouldnt be able to perform to my best ability. thinking back, that was pretty retarded. my arm's slightly sore today, but that's abt it. no crippling muscle aches or fatigue or fever, just some tiny muscle soreness, like i hit my shoulder on the way out of the door.

then sometime in the morning, mr tek called me to say that he cant find my application form for my H3 application form, which really sent me on quite the panic attack. all i could think about was all that hard work during promos put to waste, just because of some weird mishap on the NJC side. it also didnt rly help that mr tek sort of became completely uncontactable in the afternoon, so i couldnt even call to ask if the form was found. oh well, crisis averted, cos he called abt 5-6h after the first call telling me that they found the form. now all that's left is to hope that NTU accepts it *crosses fingers*.

every other PW group is all geared up for war already, yet i cant help but feel that NJ136 is sorely unprepared for anything. for reasons beyond our control, we cant have any OP practices over the weekend, so we have to make do with 2 practice sessions, on monday and tuesday. also, im constantly wondering whether or not our members have truly brushed up adequately on our delivery skills (me included of course, and maybe even primarily). i just feel so... unprepared i guess, for all the crap that's gonna be happening come wednesday. no time for hesitation i guess, if we're given limited time then we'll just have to make the most of it.

the 4A gathering is finally coming to fruition! received an email from bryan confirming that it's going on. once again it will be over at that bbq pit area near melvin/ms loi's house. i think the 4A ppl are quite blessed in this respect: how many ppl get to have gatherings and bbqs with their primary school teachers? i hope we can get more ppl this time, maybe even the whole class? haha, perhaps im being idealistic here. speaking of idealism, maybe a bbq will be a good place to tear down the iron curtain...

I tried listening to some of the more mainstream songs which i used to listen to all the time: lady gaga, mika, green day etc etc. well, didnt work out too well, so i decided to youtube SOAD, and that's how i found this. as usual, SOAD songs are always filled with commentary on some of the problems they see in our society, and this time it's on advertising and commercialism. i guess their message is quite true, and that advertising has the potential to slowly turn ppl into mindless sheep that buy wadeva the big guys in the business suits want them to buy. there's just something really addictive abt the chanting chorus. so here's Chic 'n' Stu:

My mind wanders on laxing days

nothing much happening today. firstly, i checked KM last night at 11+pm and i got shortlisted for NTU H3 contemporary physics! haha, feel quite happy, after quite a few days of worrying at least managed to get past the NJC barrier. but quite strange leh, only 4 ppl applied for contemporary as first choice (myself, shi kai, joshua ng and xiao lan). i always had the impression that contemporary would be more popular than semicon, but i guess i was wrong. well, on the bright side, there's a higher chance that the 4 of us will be able to get in tgt. haha, learning some new ultra-chim stuff is always better with friends around. compare this with josias: he got shortlisted into SMU game theory, but altogether there are 22 NJCians who got shortlisted, when there are only 200 slots for game theory for then entire country. bound to have a lot of ppl not making it in the end... well in any case, best of luck to josias, and also to jade (if i rmb correctly, jade also got shortlisted) :). another thing, very surprised to see that alyssa got shortlisted for NTU numbers and matrices (or was it something else? anw, it's one of the uni maths courses). i mean, not surprised that she got in lah (it would be freaking evil of me to post sth like that here), but surprised that she went to apply in the first place. alyssa has always been a rather under-the-radar sort of person in the class, and i didnt rly expect her to do anything outside of the school curriculum. well, i have to say im guilty of stereotyping here, so now im apologising (dunno if she even knows of this blog lol).

stereotyping... wat a horrible phenomenon it is, isnt it? with stereotyping, we have such evils as racism, sexism etc etc. of course, in these instances stereotyping is absolutely abhorred and condemned. and yet, in other scenarios, it's condoned and even encouraged. let's take a light-hearted example, the music that i like. it is very unfortunate that many of my friends have a negative stereotype of metal music, saying that it's loud and cacophonic and demonic and wadeva other weird gripe they can think of. of course, those are all sweeping statements. and yet everybody treats it as a joke (me included, no hard feelings there), and we all have a good laugh about it. isnt this a form of stereotyping as well? condemning all the hard work and effort put in by the various bands of this genre, is that really trivial compared to condemning all the efforts of a particular race or gender or some other minority group? and going a bit deeper, arent banded classes also a form of stereotyping? ur assuming that everyone in the class will do equally well with equal consistency just because they scored on a similar level before. in actual fact, there are bound to be ppl who fluked out and got into a higher band, as well as people who got unlucky and went into a lower band. in that case, couldnt the argument of stereotyping be applied to virtually any form prediction?

i hope u guys managed to see that the last few statements were actually a tongue-in-cheek look at the blurry boundary between probabilistic prediction and blatant stereotyping. nobody can predict the future with absolute certainty, so the best that we humble mortals can do is to take the data available to us and make guesses. of course, people tend to use more chim words like "prediction" or "hypothesis", but in actual fact they can all be called educated guesses. stereotyping, on the other hand, means making predictions of the nature of something (could be the moral character of a person of a particular race or the noisiness of a certain genre of music etc etc.) based on long-standing assumptions. in the case of "bad stereotyping", these assumptions are either drawn from insufficient data (he's XXX race and he's a thief, therefore all people of XXX race are thieves. notice how this person uses a sample audience of 1, which is pathetic) or from outdated data (quite a funny misconception i read about in the newspapers: many americans think that singapore is part of china. while hundreds of years ago, when international travel was limited to sailboats, the assumption that all chinese are from china might have been valid, in modern times it is no longer so). now, if the huge problem in this distinction is still unclear to you, let me ask this question: how do we know whether the data available to us is sufficient or contemporary enough with which to make an educated guess? this very vital distinction between a scientific prediction and a stereotype, is defined by very relative and subjective terms that nobody has ever bothered to clarify. wat can we say about all the scientific predictions that ever came about?

now, you might be thinking that all this is absurd, but there is a very good example, strongly grounded in science, which can demonstrate this. in the era of newtonian physics, people thought that everything was deterministic: that is to say, if the starting conditions for an event are identical, then the result will also be identical. for example, if you threw a ball at the same angle with the same weather conditions with the same strength, then the ball will fly with the same trajectory and land in the same place every single time. in actual fact though, scientists have never been able to get precisely the same result for anything, but they simply assumed that it was due to the fact that it is humanly impossible to exactly recreate the same situation. however, quantum mechanics now teaches us that there is no such thing as certainty, and we can only measure the probability of something happening before it actually happens, and that observation is the only way for anything to ever be certain. the long-standing belief that everything is deterministic has been shattered, because now we know that everything is actually probabilistic. it turned out that the assumptions on which we were making predictions were actually inadequate. looking back now at the difference between an educated guess and a stereotype, have we actually stereotyped every scientific prediction before that?

i think stereotyping is part of human nature. humans look out for patterns, so whenever they see two characteristics which seem like they're linked, the brain will draw the link automatically. i guess stereotyping is just what happens when the brain stumbles upon a particularly unreasonable link.

ok, i just went very VERY off-topic there. back to normal life. i think i lost my moe pre-u scholarship acceptance letter, which is a bit disappointing cos i wanted to hand that up tgt with my H3 application. if PW has taught me anything, it's that everything needs some form of substantiation, and there's no way the NTU ppl are gonna believe that i got the scholarship without some sort of proof. oh well, hopefully i'll be able to get in without that...
so i went to school for what, 5 min? urgh, total waste of my bus fare. why does the school like to set everything on days where i dont have to go to school? but anyway, i saw alyssa, brenda and yicen just coming out of school. apparently, they were having OP practice, and mr chew booked a classroom for them for 4 hours. BOOKED a classroom. he can do that? since when could students ask teachers to book rooms? why didnt chen shu hui say anything about that? a bit bummed out by that, i wished she told us abt it, then we wouldnt have to spend our past few OP practices scavenging for free rooms.

anyway, my mom's a primary school teacher and she needed to prepare an introduction to different genres of music for primary 1 and 2 students. i tried to convince her that progressive metalcore is a genre that deserves some mention, but for some reason she just doesnt want to play PTH in front of 7 and 8-year-olds. i wonder why...

well, OP is coming up soon for everyone, so good luck to everyone guys! :)

here's another SOAD song. it's got quite a weird title... I-E-A-I-A-I-O. love the super-heavy guitar, and the chanting part during the chorus is also quite interesting.

And the last slice of birthday cake is gone. The next cake, I'm sharing.

Well... read the title lah! just finished the last slice of my birthday cake from 2 days ago, shall elaborate a bit on that later. dont worry, this wont be a ridiculously short twitter-ish kind of post i decided to put in cos i've finally run out of steam and need some filler to fulfill a one-post-a-day criteria. personally, i've always found twitter to be a ridiculous concept. seriously, who the hell wants to know whether "i just ate half a sandwich!!!" or "life sux TTM :(:(:(" or some other random crap like that? if u wanna write, then write something worth reading, not something that looks like it came out of a gp summary question (what's the word limit again? 100+ words? do you expect to convey anything meaningful in 100+ words?). the very purpose of a personal blog is to provide insight into the daily happenings and musings of the writer, not to act as a text-based paparazzi for people to know wat ur doing every few minutes.

digressing digressing... back on topic! i met kah ming from 4A at the bus stop. it's been so long since i saw him, i totally forgot that he lives within walking distance of my house. we chatted a bit, him talking about how stressful poly life is but it's balanced out by his cca (skating sia, how come jc dont have any cool ccas like that?), and me talking about how jc students are going into the final stretch of PW OP. there were some awkward silences though, i wish some of the others like bryan or melvin were there. im just not very good with social skills, cant keep up a conversation for nuts... it also shows how far the 4A ppl have drifted apart since back in those days. hope the gathering becomes finalised soon!

so anw, we had to go to school cos the principal was giving something like a debrief to us students about the promos and our general performance throughout the year. was kind of put off by her attitude, which i felt was a tad on the elitist and insensitive side. she said stuff like "this kind of promotion criteria is an insult to your intelligence, and yet some of you didnt manage to meet it". and all this time, i was thinking about some of the people i know who have been caught in precisely that kind of unfortunate situation, wondering how it must have felt. of course, NJC is supposed to be a good school i guess, and good schools all have some sort of a reputation to uphold, but should this be done at the extent of ridiculing those who simply need a bit more time to adjust?

i am suddenly reminded of this news story i once read in the papers: a bunch of students just finished their N levels and were about to start on their O levels, when the principal suddenly tells some of them that they are not good enough and should simply drop the idea of taking O levels. even if she might have the qualifications to be a principal, did she really have the right to take it upon herself to judge those students and say it to their face that they're too dumb?

which brings me to what happened next during my day: some people had to meet the dean cos they either didnt meet or marginally met the promotion criteria. turns out that all those students had to drop from 4 H2s to 3 H2s and 1 H1. she didnt even allow for a probational period for those who really wanted to keep their 4 H2s. it's so sickening watching friends and fellow students being systematically pigeonholed into categories of "smart" and "not smart". havent they heard of late bloomers?! or maybe im just being too sentimental and emotional about the whole thing. after all, i could be said to be a biased opinion for all this, since i once nearly became a victim of this kind of elitist grouping. when i was a baby, my family thought that i may be autistic. even my family's general practitioner suggested that they took me to a child psychologist (but they didnt in the end. who knows, i might be studying in a special school now if they did). it became so bad that i got expelled from nursery. that's right, i got EXPELLED. from NURSERY. like, who the hell gets expelled from nursery? and the teacher went on and on about how my parents should send me to a special school asap (i think she meant more like "anywhere but here"), but in the end i got transferred to another nursery. so, i've always been kind of sensitive around stuff like condemning people due to lack of smarts, or denying late bloomers the chance to fully develop their talents.

bryan gave me a birthday present today :). it's a voodoo mini with a birthday card. i've received many birthday presents in previous years that made me go "oh wow it's a [insert generic material possesion here]! what i've always wanted!", but this one pwns all of that. i always thought that "it's the thought that counts" referred to being happy that the giver actually remembered that it was your birthday and bothered to do something for you, but today i realised that it means so much more than simply that. it means that the gift is a sign that you have affected someone, that you have changed his/her life so much that he/she now considers it a personal duty, and even a pleasure, to be able to do something to repay you for all the time spent together. it's a confirmation that in your fleeting lifetime, you have managed to make someone unrelated to you go out of his/her way to make your own life that little bit better. and that, i learned today, is what really counts.

Here's to eleven years and counting.

well, i just finished the last slice of birthday cake right before starting this post. i guess in a way it also represents my current situation. the "birthday aura" will die down pretty quick, and soon life will go back to normal. here's a big "thank you!" to everyone who gave their well-wishes, whether it was personally, through sms, facebook or msn. special thanks to the guys who treated me to carls junior lunch (thanks btw (: ), and of course a huge THANK YOU!!!!!! to bryan for the wonderful present and for being a great friend.

i've decided not to embed a metal song today. im feeling more of a serene mood today, so the song should also be more calming. this song was the one used by josias' group (josias, lionel, edmund, gabriel, rayson) when making the NE video. it's a song by the Beatles, called In My Life. enjoy:

but how could i resist not putting in a good song? so here's a link to PTH's concert dvd, Gallop Meets the Earth. there's online mp3 streaming for their entire dvd (and if u live in the canada/USA area, u could order it online too, though i doubt u guys are from there). there's such a huge difference between the album and concert versions, so u guys should seriously check it out.