The Hostel California

Well it's been a gruelling two weeks so far, which tend to be slightly better on Mondays, when they actually serve porridge, which isn't all that bad, and in actual fact I can't really complain about the whole concept of staying at the hostel during the weekdays and jumping onto a number 198 bus and having to trek home on the weekends while carrying a laptop that would have rather stayed at the hostel and plugged itself into the morbidly, sky blue colored LAN cable dangling from the LAN port next to my bed that I was too lazy to remove from, and proceed to wistfully watch Fry and Laurie videos till 2am in the morning.

People have taken a lot of different approaches to having to stay in the hostel. Some people squeal with delight every time the friendly, charming hostel biometric scanners beep twice and beam an approving green, while others (I might be mistaken here) attempt to poke out that stupid little bastard's eye out with their fingernails after having been rejected for the fifth time in a row. Others remember that they should be going up to do their laundry and come down to the library just in time to study, but I'm sure that we can all describe these studious, dilligent students as negligible. Well, not so much, actually, or rather, many. Lots of people find that it's a lot easier for them to get work doen when they are stringently enforced to do so, which is something that equally unenthusiastic classmates can never really contribute to much, so it's nice to see people experienced in totalalitarianism take up the matter into their own cold, leather gloved hands.

But what I've noticed (the party's over, is it?) is the drastic difference in responses to hostel life from various people, and while that might have happened with other issues in the past, it's never been something that's been so evident, especially when the effects of their enthuasiasm/hemlock are clearly visible for two weeks. It's at the end of those two weeks when the stances that people take to the same conditions really start to show, and I'm wondering if they might eventually even out in a few months time, and we might all start reverting back to normality, at least until we all have to go home at the end of the year and have trouble trying to find the biometric scanners on our apartment doors.

The Abandonwagon

Every night when I sleep in the comfort of my warm, soft, and on nights when I feel particularly lonely, a little bit damp, pullout bed, I stare at the ceiling wondering about how long I can possibly keep putting things into to the massive cupboard on my left before it decides to publicly remind me of what it had in it, mostly old worksheets collected over the years that I've simply been too lazy to throw out. The worrying is often compounded by the fact that the cupboard is located on my right and a few metres up, which isn't so much of a problem if it stays a few metres up, but further assessments of the structural integrity of wood have forced me to dart quickly to the side everytime I open the cupboard.

The strange thing is that even though these old worksheets pose a potential threat to my ability to impress the citizens of Flatland, I simply don't have the motivation to clear them out, which isn't much of a problem anyway since I'm able to quite easily and conveniently rationalize that they are there for the purposes of book-keeping, and that the administration of the school might one day call upon me to resubmit work for exhibition and demonstration purposes, thus allowing me to contribute to the fullest to any Green Week events and so on. But the truth is, I've never had any reason to touch any of the old worksheets that still sit grumpily in the top of the cupboard while investing in the acquisition of exotic fungi. It's been years since I've even looked through any of the documents that I put up there. But the thing is, all these worksheets are the (unwanted) results of late night toiling and contributions to the coffee business, and it just seems terribly wasteful to allocate them into the black void of the rubbish chute. I just want to keep them for absolutely no reason.

Now let's just assume for the sake of linking this to the topic I'm about to discuss that someone wants my old worksheets for reference purposes. Ignoring the obvious integrity violations that come with that, let's just say that I refuse to give it to them on the grounds that they are my worksheets and I have the right to not give it to them. They might argue that I'm simply not using them anymore, so why not let them have it?

And let's just assume, for the sake of the argument that I haven't even told you about here, that someone else had already photocopied my worksheets in the past, and for the reason that I wouldn't give anyone else my worksheets, started making copies of that worksheet and distributing it to those who wanted it. I might get very angry, and possibly make that person stand in front of my cupboard of worksheets while I open it. Here's the question: Is that really fair?

Alright, alright. All that was a rather flimsy and clumsy buildup to the topic of Abandonware, but I just wanted to be able to mention my worksheets. But on to the actual topic of Abandonware.

Abandonware is basically the business (not really, actually) of taking old games or software that aren't being sold anymore and distributing them for free o'er the mossy swamp that is the Internet, and this is usually done by everyone except the companies responsible for the creation of the released software/games. The rationale behind the whole process of distributing old software (which is not actually legal, despite common belief) that isn't being sold anymore is that since the company or companies that created these pieces of old software aren't selling them anymore, and aren't making any sort of profit from them, then surely it stands to reason to simply allow the general public to use the aforementioned software for free, since it simply isn't of any use to these companies anymore.

The creators of the software have responded to this by saying they didn't say that anyone could do that yet, and that while the old software may be old it's still theirs, and that if anyone were to distribute it for free it would be them. Very few software developers actually release old games for free anyway, and so the general public have taken matters into their own hands and simply started distributing old software by themselves anyway, which the creators have labelled as piracy since they didn't have permission to do so. The whole debate then degenerates in the same way that most alcohol based marriages do, with both parties going off into their respective haunts and doing what they were doing, while muttering about how the other party can't see reason. Meanwhile the children are left sobbing in their rooms, or blasting heavy metal.

And the whole thing really is understandable (dropping the analogy). While I take the relatively pubescent stance that Abandonware distributed by third parties without the permission of its creators is still illegal regardless of how much your teeth shine and your love for the American Dream, because the decision of whether to release the old software in question still lies with the software's creators. The problem here is that more often than not, the begging of the public for such software is often met with results of the Oliver Twist variety, and since the software isn't being produced anymore and isn't available on store shelves (or even bins, for that matter), those who want it don't even have the option of purchasing the software. In this case, there is simply no way of obtaining the old software, even if you are willing to pay for it.

And at this point the owners of old software have two options: They can either release the old software for free download and be bathed in rose petals and confetti and never have to worry about fall injuries because of the good amount of people constantly following them around ready to perform a trust fall catch, or they can do what Valve has done for years now, which is distribute their old software online.

Not for free, of course, seeing as how that's the alternative and the point of an alternative is to not be the same as the non- alternative (which is actually an alternative to the alternative anyway, but heigh-ho). But online distribution gets rid of the unfeasibility of having to reproduce old software for distribution via stores, and so provides people with the option of obtaining that old software legally and for a small profit, assuming that the owners of old software charge much less than they originally did, which seems reasonable considering the software's abundance of medical problems by this point.

And Valve have done this amazingly well with Steam (No, I don't get any sort of commission for this. The correct ethical question should in fact be: Why not?). All their games, from the very first Half Life, are available for online purchase and download via Steam, and they also seem to have grasped the concept of making old software very affordable, as seen by their move of making the original Half Life (released in 1998) cost under five US dollars, which makes sense. Valve still gets profit from their old software and the consumers (It seems I've turned American by the end of this article) have the option of purchasing the old software for an affordable price.

And this does several things to the argument that old software should be released for free. Once old software is made available for purchase via online distribution, the argument that old software no longer earn their developers any profit is given good slap on the head, as is the argument that they are no longer available for purchase. From that point, it's up to the owners of the software whether they want to release it for free, but at least the dream of being able to obtain the software is made thoroughly obsolete, and can be replaced by dreams more appealing and affordable.

The only problem that would arise from this solution is what arises from all good ideas (I've yet to patent it as a result of my unbearable humility). That is, once someone does it, just about everyone does it. While that might not be a problem for all ideas, the problem here is that Valve distributes their software by way of Steam, an online client, that must be installed on the user's computer and you have to make an account for it before you start digging around and the whole process is actually quite an ordeal from my previous experiences. The thing is that if every software company were to start doing this, how many clients would you have to install on your computer before you run out of space for the actual software?

So what solutions might there be to this? A single, new, universal client that can access each company's "marketplace", or services like Direct2Drive that pride themselves on online distribution for all sorts of media? What will the online marketplace look like once many companies, not just software or game developers, jump onto the bandwagon? Will their jumping on shift the cart forward by way of momentum or will they break it? Who knows? Meanwhile, all we can do is sit and reminisce about the old software and games that we miss so dearly.

Of Jetpacks and Skis

Being the sort of person that the mass media point to every once in a while while on the topic of violent games and go "He's what we're talking about!", a few days ago I was looking for something to soothe, or rather cater to, the savage beast within me, and so started hunting for first person shooter demos that would dispense the necessary amount of adrenaline to satisfy the fix that I so badly needed. And after a bit of hunting I rediscovered the Tribes Vengeance demos.

Also being the sort of person that people point to and say "He's what we're talking about!" while on the topic of nerds, I promptly started reading about the Tribes series as a whole after playing through and thoroughly finishing the two single player demos. And it was then that I discovered that according to the collective wisdom of Wikipedia that fans of the original Tribes games considered themselves to be playing the only true 3D first person shooter.

Also being the sort of person that can be entertained for a good amount of time by a Word Processor, this got me thinking about subject that I just spent an entire paragraph talking about earlier. But just so I don't alienate everyone else that isn't essentially a scholar when it comes to the Tribes series, I should probably just give a quick introduction to it (That was probably a bit of a stretch, really. I'm really not well versed in the Tribes mythos so I should probably stop talking like I am one.)

While there's a colossal amount of galactic history behind the Tribes series, all you have to know is this. There are jetpacks. These jetpacks are attached to people and this makes the aforementioned people fly. The aforementioned people, also aforementioned twice before, now having the aforementioned jetpacks attached to their aforementioned backs, decide that, quite logically, the thing to do would be to shoot other people with similar jetpacks while flying around (both of the groups of aforementioned people are doing so) while stealing the flags of the other group of aforemntioned people. But grammatical purity aside, the point of the Tribes series is team based objective driven games that also introduce one very important element: mobility.

Everyone in the game has a jetpack and, from Tribes 2 onwards, a set of skis that can be magically summoned to their feet by the touch of a button, though the characters in game don't seem to have to do anything at all, so we can only assume that the skis are in fact clairvoyant, and both are used to traverse massive, sprawling environments that usually consist of many very conveniently smooth hills and mountains. Jetpacks allow the player to gain altitude, while the skis allow players to take advantage of their gravitational potential energy by skiing down hills once they have ascended to the necessary altitude.

This, as you really shouldn't be imagining instead of actually doing so, is immensely fun. About half the fun (correct to about as many decimal points as is really needed) comes from traversing terrain, while the other half can be attributed to everything else. In other words, without jetpacks and skis, an incredibly bizarre combination that has never really been brought together in anything else other than in conversations that end in "that would be awesome" before this series, Tribes simply wouldn't be Tribes. It might still be called Tribes, but there would be a lot less jetpacks and skis, which really isn't the point of the game that would have existed. Never mind, forget that. The point is, the jetpacks and skis contribute a lot to the fun.

And seeing as how hardly any other games have really truly adknowledged the y-axis in game environments at all, one (I'm assuming that this is the current population of people reading this, sadly inclusive of me) has to conceded, at least to a certain degree, that the bold proclaimation made by Tribes fans is somewhat justified. While just about every game that comes out these days (Specifically which isn't really important, since the phrase "these days" seems to be completely acceptable even though the actual amount of days that is meant isn't specified at all. People just seem to understand what you mean and nod their heads in agreement.) don't really focus on vertical movement as much as Tribes did, despite the fact that a good amount of y-axis' are available for use. The 3D aspect of most games seems to be limited to where you aim, but the sensation of being able to move up and down has pretty much just been limited to jumping, usually to a meagre height that would warrant exasperation from the protagonist of Narbacular Drop. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_Drop) The technology of 3D environments seems to have taken a somewhat passive role in actual gameplay.

Which raises the topic of technology and gameplay. Why aren't technological advances, such as the physics engines of today's games, being more heavily implemented into gameplay? While the common expectation that something must move the moment it is hit in a game exists, this doesn't seem to have much of an effect in gameplay, other than the fact that it simply feels unusual and morally incorrect if a cardboard box refuses to yield a shower of bullets that would otherwise invoke a good and healthy amount of screaming from any enemy. It seems to be a practice that is done in game development simply to establish the fact that the game in question is clearly a next-gen game. But what if this technology was implemented into gameplay as a core element?

Portal, for instance, that probably doesn't need anymore polish from me on its critically acclaimed nails than it already has, took advantage of 3D environments and physics as a core part of its gameplay. Momentum, velocity, perspective were all elements of a brilliant game that could only have been done on an 3D engine with proper physics. Call of Duty 4 is another, with a proprietary physics engine with bullet penetration physics and a lot of other things that sound very impressive built into the game, that had an actual impact in gameplay. Cover was no longer something that you could simply loungue behind for very long because of its tendency to disappear after a while.

Physics engines are taking on a the role of an Edwardian chimney sweeper, poor and unnoticed and simply begging for more. We've all spoken of the fabled cone headshot incident in Halo 3 in hushed voices, something that wouldn't have been possible without today's physics engines, and while Bungie, in its intellectual torpor, hasn't had the good sense to take advantage of that IP, why not someone else? A game that implemented launching grabbing and tossing things at people would be very welcome at this point, and the fun derived from using the Gravity Gun from Half Life 2 is a testament to that. Physics engines are there to be made of use of, and we can't possibly pass by our duty to do so, can we?

Liebraries

Hello there

I like libraries. I like them a lot. I like the feeling of being in a place where everyone simply wants to be left alone to drown in whatever novels or textbooks that they happen to be reading, and will react with great adversity the moment they are disturbed in the very slightest because they know that the majority of people in the building are on their side. I like the idea of a place that is put aside for the sole purpose of being able to be left alone, something that I'm not able to find even in my own room at times, so it's nice to be able to sit down and write completely pointless articles on Wordpad (my previous flame used to be Notepad, but we fell out of with each other after I realized that she gave absolutely no regard towards formatting). So I go to libraries a lot, but not, as one would expect, for the sake of the actual resources and books. Goodness no, I find all of that on the Internet. I come here simply because I like the atmosphere's wetness, probably due to the fountain on the ground floor of the library that has no doubt been exhaled and inhaled thoroughly by countless other people who also come here for the atmosphere.

And there do seem to be a lot of people who don't actually come to the libraries for the books. Many of the people sitting at the tables next to the very bright windows that outshine whatever might be on your computer's screen thus making the tables the exact place that you shouldn't sit if you're going to use a laptop, which is also where all the powerpoints are which makes the tables an okay-ish sort of place to use your laptops, have, not suprisingly at all by this point, laptops with them. They are also open and they (the people) seem to be using them a lot.

Maybe they're here because of the environment or for something else, perhaps the free wi-fi. In any case, they don't actually seem to be here for what libraries exist for: books.

The wonderful and late Douglas Adams wrote an article about this that I found in the Salmon of Doubt (which by the way, Gan, you should read once you emerge from the beneath the waves of programming that you seem to be diving into a lot lately). He basically wrote about how some things have features or components added to them that essentially make something else in those things redundant, and thus need to be removed. For instance, advertisments in magazines. Now that many magazines are online, advertisments no longer need to take up more space than the actual articles in the magazines because of links, which only need to be so large to get your attention, and can lead you to an entirely new page with plenty of detailed information about whatever the ad is about. The idea that advertisments need to be intrusive is removed. Online magazines also remove a lot of dead wood from magazines. Some things become redundant along the way, and should be removed.

But we still see magazines that you can actually hold in your hand. Papery ones as well. Which is puzzling seeing as how almost all of us possess some sort of device capable of accessing the internet. But it really isn't as puzzling as it sounds. Magazines still have the advantage of not running out battery, seeing as how they don't have any battery. People still favour the convenience of being able to take out a magazine and read without having to connect to a wireless hotspot, type in the URL of the magazine and so on and so forth. And in actual fact, we've really just subsitutted dead wood for burning already dead things that have become fossil fuels. We haven't actually removed anything overall.

I've got nowhere to go with this, really. Anything random comments on the tagboard, please.

No one can hear you screen.

Here's a thought about the matter of touchscreens. They're not all that omniscient when it comes to input. You may argue that they're incredibly versatile and that their function is only limited to whatever they are programmed to do, and while this sounds very good on paper (something else that is a lot more user friendly), it really doesn't translate all that well onto an actual device, in terms of one thing: precision. Two things actually, but we'll get to them later.

Some might argue that what we're talking about here is in fact accuracy, but they should stop talking now because what I'm really talking about here is precision, quite ironically the more accurate term here.

First, let me just say that touchscreens are still a wonderful idea. Those that argue for its versatility are indeed, in some sense, right. Touchscreens can be incredibly handy in some cases, especially when you want to target something all the way on the other end of the screen on a handheld device, which would be laborious with something like a button cursor, to the point where you find yourself completely uninterested with what you were going to select by the time you get to it. In this case, touchscreens allow for quick and wide access.

Touchscreens also allow for gestures, which takes the pressure of the poor, miniscule screens that most handheld have to hold a ridiculous amount of buttons on them, and so freeing up the screen for more interesting things like epileptic backgrounds. Gestures also allow for more intuitive control. In the case of the iPhone, a rebel in more ways than one, including the area of proper capitalization, to scroll over lists you simply swab your finger across the screen to drag the list down, thus scrolling. It's very intuitive and those using the iPhone for the first time will probably figure it out quickly.

Touchscreens also remove the staggering limitation of how many buttons a small device can hold before it means that you no longer have the option of not accidentally activating your camera when you don't want to. On a touchscreen, you can simply classify buttons into panels, and swap to the set of buttons that you want to use. This means that the functionality of the device is only dependant on how lazy the developers are, which is something that has yet to be worked around.

So if touchscreens improve the range of functions a device has, as well as allow for intuitive control, then why all the fuss, and why the terrible pain in both my thumbs as I type this out on my tiny Tungsten C keyboard. What is wrong with touchscreens?

The problem with touchscreens can be explored using the analogy of... You know, never mind. The problem is that touchscreens lack two things: precision and feedback.

Touchscreens, while incredibly versatile, can also be terribly frustrating. As a Palm user I can testify to this (Listen Apple people, I'll get to you soon. You just wait for a second). A lot of frustration comes from selecting things on lists. Lists cram many little items together, and it's quite often that I can't seem to select what I want to select, and the reason for this is that my fingertip, being the mystical alpine dwelling creature that I am, often covers two items on the list at a time, this means that I usually end up selecting the wrong item.

Sometimes I try to change so that my Palm will still love me, and use the very tip of my finger to target more precisely, but this doesn't seem to work very well, usually because the screen seems to ignore this completely half the time (That phrase is slightly confusing. I apologize), and not respond at all. Even using the stylus yields the same results sometimes.

But many this is simply due to incompetence on the part of Palm. Maybe another company, such as Apple, the democracy crowned king of the touchscreen after the release of the iPhone, will do better?

In order to avoid stoning by all those that can afford iPhones, (Quite honestly, that makes this quite safe, but they may drop the price, so you never know.) I should preface the Inquisition by saying that there are slight improvements. The iPhone's screen buttons are bigger, as is its screen, thus compensating for user belligerence, and gestures do remove the frustration of trying to target those tiny scroll bar buttons. But there still exist problems.

Behind the safety of my anti-tank obstacles I must say this: the keyboard has induced high levels of frustration, ad subsequently, hair loss. The problem with the iPhone's keyboard is not the disregard of capitalization, but rather the same problem that my Palm has with lists. The iPhone's keyboard is simply too small for fast text input. While it does seem like it's a lot larger than it should be, it really isn't. When using Dom's iPhone for reasons that will not be covered here, I constantly ended up reaching for the backspace, only to end up pressing the P. Precision just isn't with touchscreen keyboards, and is especially irritating when you're trying to input lots of text.

The problem here isn't the touchscreen, really. It's the users, specifically the users' fat, myopic thumbs. Human thumbs are simply that big, and this is unfortunate because they're not going to change anytime soon, unless Aldous Huxley is to believed. Users simply have thumbs that are that large, and while they are the cause of the problem, the user remains quite significant when it comes to any device, and unfortunately, developers haven't figured out how to remove the user, and thus remove the problem.

But precision isn't the only problem when it comes to touchscreen input.
If you take a look at a hardware keyboard on a handheld device, the keys are usually much smaller than that of a touchscreen keyboard's, but for some reason they remain easier to use. Why?

The thing that hardware keyboards have that touchscreen keyboards don't is feedback. Whenever you push a button on a hard keyboard, you can feel the button, and this benefits the user in two areas. It informs you that you have pushed the button, through a next hearty click, and it also means that you know precisely how much force you need to press it. Touchscreen keyboards are fairly ambiguous when it comes to this, because there simply isn't any communication between the two. One is never quite sure how hard one should press to "press" a touchscreen button, and it can be distressing when you press too lightly and end up not pushing it at all, or press too hard and end up inadvertently declaring war on your touchscreen, that declares that it is no longer "your" touchscreen, but an individual touchscreen with its own rights and freedom. Hardware keyboards don't present this problem because of force feedback: you know that you have pushed the button when it clicks.

Another thing that helps when using hard keyboards is that you're always able to feel the buttons. In the event that your fingers or thumbs tread into the terrible void of the region in between two keys, you can feel it and correct that. Touchscreen keyboards, on the other hand, don't give you that because keys and the borders between keys all feel the same. As such, you're never quite sure whether you're trying to press two buttons at once.

And these problems themselves have a problem because they can't be solved. A touchscreen will always remain flat, and simply can't deliver the sensation of touch feedback, for letting you know that you've pushed a button or for letting you know the position of your thumbs or fingers. Hardware keyboards have been doing this for years, maybe unintentionally.

And quite honestly I don't think touchscreens will ever overcome these problems. They may become more sensitive and so on, but the human thumb will always remain stubbornly fat, and we humans, not to be outdone by our thumbs, will always require force feedback when pushing buttons. Touchscreens work for certain things, but there comes certain point where some features are beyond it, simply because of the way users are. Sometimes the tendency to rely only on a touchscreen for input can end up limiting the functionality of a device. Developers, like good ol' Steve, shouldn't be afraid to add a few hard buttons to their devices if it will make input more user friendly and efficient.

Developers have to take this into account. Technology and devices may become more sophisticated and so on, but we users won't change. We like our hard buttons.

And so I must let my poor tiny Tungsten C's hard keyboard rest, and I leave you with an obligatory Bow Chicka Bow Wow.

I would like to point out that all of the above, except for the text with the bad posture here, was typed out using a tiny, hard button keyboard on a Tungsten C. The buttons are truly tiny, smaller than the buttons on most mobile phones. Also, one thousand and four hundred words, my fabulosos.

Max Rayne

Today I went on a random hike.

It was an interesting departure from the usual slog of spending a dark afternoon sitting in front of a computer writing a blog entry, or liberating Omaha Beach of the usual American capitalist scum. I say dark afternoon because it's not actually rainy or stormy of any sort, but rather the kind that threatens that it will be rainy or stormy in a while if you don't start taking it seriously, and eventually does break down into a small sobbing fit in the form of an irritating sort of drizzle.

But enough about the rain, because I"ve genuinely had enough of that rubbish.

After waking up at 12 in the afternoon and feeling very disappointed with myself I left my completely desolate dwelling for lunch at Jurong Point, and rather wantonly declared to myself (on the way there, on a road that was quite populated at the time, much to my embarassment) that I would take a completely meaningless hike from Lakeside MRT to Chinese Garden, for the pure gusto of it.

Halfway through my lunch the rather unstable and angsty sky decided to advise me against this, by dropping me a hint or two in the form of more than two rain clouds that proceeded to blot out any hope of my afternoon's plans.

I decided to give the sky a very mortal and electronegative finger, and proceed with my plans for the day anyway.

I took a very nonchalant and depressed ride from Boon Lay to Lakeside, and by this time the sky was already on the verge of suicide, which was quite uncomfortable for me since I was about to step out in full view of it. After alighting I wandered around the MRT station nonchalantly for a few minutes or so, shamelessly procrastinating like an equally suicidal sky about whether or not I should step into the already prominent drizzle and go ahead with the hike or not.

After a while, my interest in the station's architecture eventually fizzled out from nothing to slightly more nothing, and I stepped out into the rain under the comfort of my shaky, equally suicidal umbrella.

Trudging through what was light rain for a while felt a bit stupid at first. At this point, most people would start getting thoughts like "I'm feeling quite stupid right now", or "I could be on an MRT right now." Although it's important to note that most people don't do this sort of thing to begin with, and thus don't get any of these thoughts to begin with. Although after a while the feelings of stupidity gave way to true stupidity, and I marched through the rain for a good distance.

During this trek I experienced different things.

One of them was getting wet. This is strictly not recommended for anyone, unless you happen to be appropriately dressed for this. In the event that you are appropriately dressed for getting wet, however, you probably aren't appropriately dressed by any other standards. In other words, never walk in the open in the rain, even if you have an umbrella, for long distances without shelter.

But it was through this rain that halfway through my trek, I started to feel incredibly lonely, and maybe even a bit stranded. When my entire left side was pelted by liqueous rounds of water all I thought at that point was "I should probably turn back", but then realized with dismay that I was already halfway through, and turning back would mean an equal distance to an MRT station that carrying on would. I felt incredibly stranded at this point, feeling like I was in the middle of nowhere, or rather in the middle of two places that would each be considered somewhere. It was a very strange, disconcerting void.

And at this point I also had a few thoughts about MRT stations. They seem to be safe points of sort, checkpoints that make us feel like we're connected to the rest of the country when we're next to them or in them. There's this strange sense of relief that I get whenever I see an MRT station when I think I might be lost, knowing that that building can take me wherever I need to go. Without an MRT station, one (and quite literally one, because I might be the only one that feels this way) feels lost, having strayed away from a safe point.

And this made me think about LRT stations, branching out from MRT stations into the further away regions. The whole layout of an MRT map seems a bit like a very confused, multi directional tree, that you must play 50 cents each time to climb. Admitedly, it's a rather large tree, so I suppose it's fine.

Speaking of trees, I got quite a nice picture of a tree on the way, using my phone's camera that kicked and screamed as a put it in full exposure of the rain.



The camera is now in the process of recuperation.

So after a long trek through the unforgiving and angsty rain, I found myself wet and exhausted under the slightly less unforgiving shelter of Chinese Garden MRT station. I had half a mind to go off wandering into the depths of Chinese Garden, but then realized that I was only a few stops away from pneumonia, and postponed that for the day.

I should probably do this again.

MRT Walks

Well, it's been quite some time since my last entry, and in the time in between my last entry this one, I've thought about a few things.

The first thought was that I should probably take sometime to stop and think about things for a second. I'm not quite sure why this thought arose, but it just did, and that's all that matters, I suppose.

The second thought was that Wordpad is in fact a lot better and user friendly that Notepad, so why do I even bother with the latter? After all, it takes care of all that formatting nonsense when I copy over text from Notepad into Word, but I probably won't be doing any of that from now on, so let's just move on.

The third thought, and probably the whole point of this entry, is that MRTs go really fast. I know that's probably been figured out for a long time now but a whole lot of people who didn't really bother to take note of that thought and write it down in blog entries, but that really doesn't matter as of now. What matters is that in the process of thinking that, another thought arose, namely the one a few lines (alright, two) below.

When you're riding an MRT, and you look down at the scenery, that's about all it is, isn't it? Just scenery. Someone could be running past a stationary train with big cardboard cutout sceneries and you'd still think that the train was moving, and all that scenery would be just about as interesting as it would be if you were actually in a moving train, psasing by scenery that was made only partially of cardboard, with those bits being so small that you probably wouldn't notice them. But the point I'm trying to make here is that in all the places that you pass by when riding an MRT, how many places have we actually gone down to look at? I mean, it's one thing to say that you pass by a certain building or tree or environmentalist headquarters everytime you go to work on the train, but how many times have you actually gone down to the environmentalist headquarters while carrying a newly cut down tree?
Not very often. After all, there's simply no way you would pass the technology quota with the cell phone you were carrying, but it doesn't even need to be a environmentalist headquarters building. All I'm saying is this:

Why not get a bunch of people, or maybe even just alone (which is likely to be so in my case), and walk from one MRT station to another? Maybe in between two MRT stations that you pass by every single day while travelling to work, school, maritial obligations etc. Instead of passing by and watching the cardboard trees roll just like everyday, why not actually go down and watch the trees get rolled into cardboard? Why not follow an MRT track and take your time to look around you, inciting Disney musical numbers as you go?

The exams are going to be completely history by next wednesday, and they will be reincarnated into the very uncreative form of more exams, but for now we can sleep knowing that those exams will only come next year. There's going to be quite some time avaliable for this sort of thing (the walking, not the exams), so why not do exactly that. I'm inviting anyone who has the time or inclination (or both), to poke the tagboard or poke me on msn so we can settle a day for this. The walk will probably be from Boon Lay to Chinese Garden, but then I'm not really the leading authority on completely existentialist walks from MRT station to MRT station, so why not suggest your own?

A+rts and Literature


Well, it's been a good two months or so since I've put a post, and I feel obligated by the very existence of my blog to do so again, and then subsequently ignore it for the following two months. In other words, this isn't going to be a habit.

It's been after the never ending wave of literature homework slowly descending upon you like the final row of Space Invaders that you just can't seem to hit no matter what, or the final bit of the Centipede that constantly evades your slow, blundering shots, that I've started to notice that my personal interest in the study of Literature is now a de facto Lemming.

Never before have I experienced such an utter repulsion for anything that has the label of "Literature" on it. And since the text in this blog is highly dependant on my personal whims, today we are going to talk about Dadaism.

But since my personal whims have changed drastically since the last paragraph, I choose instead to start this paragraph on a complete tangent. Does the repeated study of something lessen your appreciation for it? I'm certainly not going to try and combat the likes of Stephen Fry, but it's very hard to deny something like this after you've been studying Literature for four years now, and at about the fourth year, it simply doesn't feel like the fourth anymore.

Maybe it's not because of the repeated study of it. Maybe it's just because I don't like the subjects being taught this semester, and I'm starting to be convinced that that's really the case.

Maybe it really isn't the length of which you study something, but what you're studying that determines how much enthusiasm you have for something, but in the case of literature, I'm not really sure it should be something that should be taught in a class like the Sciences or Mathematics.

A very good example is Wordsworth. During Romanticism class we studied one of his poems titled "Expostulation and Reply", which was basically Wordsworth's justification for not spending more time in the study and slacking off in the deeper recesses of a forest on a rock. In the poem, one of Wordsworth's unnamed friends (whose existence is debatable) questions him on why he wastes his time sitting on a rock and enjoying the fresh forest air and the beautiful chirping melodies of Nature when he could be in a dusty study room reading the Classics under a dim candlelight. Wordsworth then proceeds to answer, "Well, duh."

It was in a overly air conditioned, depressingly light classroom that I received this enlightenment.

We've taken Wordsworth's philosophy and printed it in books, but what we don't realize is that the book has in fact been printed upside down. Sitting in rooms studying is precisely what Wordsworth was against. He wanted people to go out into the woods (or the AYE, in our case) and sit alone and think. So thus we take his advice and study it.

Maybe some things can't be stuffed into a graded cirriculum, simply because it goes against their very Nature (anyone who got that, my sincerest condolences). Some things simply need to be taught for the sake of it, for the enjoyment of the student, not for their potential use in the future.

But I suppose that's not going to happen any time soon. Literature and the Arts are always going to be accessed and graded like just about any other subject. And it's after writing this blog entry that I'm going to have to finish up that analysis of Percy Shelley's poems that I'll get a one grade penalty for if I'm so much as one day late.

Bother Tongue

It is probably in the distinct memory of whoever even bothers believing me these days that I mentioned that a Dark Knight review would be coming up on the site, the only fatal flaw being that at this point of time, I strongly advise disregarding anything I say regarding predictions about what will be coming up on this blog, since chances are high that they probably won't. (Congratulations if you are incredibly confused at this point of time, because you have just, as most people tend to say, "gotten the joke" here. If you aren't just ignore everything you've read previously that's in the bracket, then proceed to curse Samuel at the top of your lungs for putting this notice at the back of the bracketed text. It's probably best I close the brackets before they start becoming too proud of themselves.)

I do, however, have an interesting topic at hand here, which is pretty much what the rest of this entry is about. (Dammit, paragraph 1.) And this here is based on a snippet of a conversation I had with Rashidah. Not so much a snippet, since this was pretty much the entire conversation, but shut up you nit-picking git.

Rashidah: Samuel, do you still take Chinese?
Samuel: *gives a stare that would have disheartened Nelson Mandela* Unforturnately, yes.
R: Oh.
S: I don't want to though. I learn nothing in Chinese.
R: Ya, I also don't want to learn Malay.
S: The only thing I've learnt is why I speak English.
R: *Rashidah's trademark laughter that is untranslatable into text.*

And that alone pretty much makes the rest of this entry compltely redundant, which can be pretty much likened to the trailer of every single Hong Kong film ever made, but I digress (I'm not quite sure what the point of pointing that out is, but I've just realized that if I keep up this bracket nonsense it could cause jealously in the unbracketed majority.)

But the point is, to me, learning Chinese is quite redundant. Or rather, learning Chinese to the degree that we are right now is redundant. And the reason for that is this:

I'm never going to study or work in a country where Chinese is the main language.

I'm simply terrible at Chinese. So much to the point that I can emphatize with any Western masochist that attempts to learn the language. To me learning the language any more simply won't make me any better at it. About 80 percent of the vocabulary I've been taught in the last 10 years I've forgotten, which in the Great Wall of Vocabulary is nothing more than a brick, and I've no desire to tour anymore of the thing.

But here's the thing. If I'm no longer learning anything in Chinese, other than for the sake of passing that final A-level examination, why am I still studying it?

On reflection I need to start asking questions that need to be answered by other people.

But here's one that might require some sort of reader interaction. Why do I need to take that examination? I'm likely to fair horrible in it, and pretty much remain right where I am. Why take it if I'm horrible at it, and let it show up on my resume?

As is the common Asian way, I blame the government, and following the next step of the Asian way, subsequently withdraw that statement for fear of getting my arse dragged to the Asian Court of Law. But it is undeniable that one thing that the Singapore government has stressed in "The Things that make us Singaporean" is that most of us are bilingual, and it's quite unlikely that they're going to drop this stand anytime soon, since this seems to be a great selling point (Human Rights activists, feel free to twitch uncontrollably right here) for graduates when it comes to studying or working overseas.

But what seems to be happening is that the exact same thing is happening in other countries. English, thanks to the explosive prowress of the US, seems to be accepted as the lingua franca in the global community when it comes to international interaction (five times, quickly. go.), and foreign students are no doubt striving to avoid the fate of Chairman Mao as we speak.

Can you then say redundant?

Possibly not. While the international lingua franca might be English, the chances that the local population of any country immediately starts taking up English as its commonly spoken language is simply unlikely. It's the language they've always known and it seems unlikely that they switch to English just because those snobby Hamburger eating undergraduates are doing it.

So I suppose I'm just going to have to finish up the five Chinese writing assignments I have due right now, while I nibble the edge of my BK Tendergrill.

The Sound of Violence

The speculative probability of me actually going to see a movie
on Friday, specifically The Dark Knight, and thus rendering my use of the phrase "a movie" grammatically incorrect (the correct phrase being "the movie"), leaves me with the equally speculative possibility of actually having something to write about within the
last month or so, putting me below even the most shameless magazines.

But the interesting thing is that not only are the usual rabid fanboys (more grammatically correct to refer to them as a single entity as of now) of comic books watching this movie, but there have been signs that a good percentage of the audience may in fact be members of the human race.

The Dark Knight is apparently more than just a comic book movie, putting it somewhat at the level of being analogous to Bioshock, the wonderful game/philosophyfest, with the difference of Bioshock being the dumbed down successor to System Shock, whereas The Dark Knight, being the latest installment in an army of already existing Batman films, only serves to further lengthen arguments concerning evolution.

So while I personally promise the a review of the movie after I finally get to live through the greatness that is The Dark Knight, I might attempt to persuade someone else possessing what is known as an actual social life to review the movie as well, thus leaving us with two different kinds of absolutely gushingly positive reviews to work with, as opposed to just one.