I'm not even trying here.

A lot has happened, but first it probably deserves mention that I just had what can actually be considered my first bowl of instant noodles in the hostel.

Alright, so ten minuets or so is stretching the definition of instant to the lengths of "not agonizingly slow", and it's not really the first meal (again, elastic definitions here) of noodles that I've ever had in the hostel, since that putrid polysterene-packed pasta technically counts, but I've never actually experienced the joys of having a steaming bowl, that isn't saturated with CFC, of noodles in the hostel. Until now.

The beauty of the entire moment was tragically stomped into the layers of dust on my room floor when the noodles didn't really taste that good.

I really need to get meatballs or ham. Anything to go with the noodles. And come to think of it, I ought to get noodles.

I'm counting on my hopes that Zeyang never finds out.

But while I'm on the topics of simple joys, I've found a source of euphoria: an alternative to simultaneous decapitation, dismemberment, and dismebowelment, followed by the hearty, alcohol laced bellows of a black scottish cyclops. I've discovered Captain's Ball down at the school track at five in the evening, once every few days or so.

It's especially fun when I get on one of the chairs and everyone starts overcompensating for what is apparently my towering stature. These poorly thought out tosses often result in someone in the canteen spilling his or her drink then swearing very loudly.

But now there's work to do, and I'd better get to it.

Of Plays and Pulling Plugs

Well, pus.

It looks like the play might not be going on after all. This means that those two weeks of surviving nights on nothing but sheer willpower, coffee, and sleep are probably going down the drainhole that the admin just unplugged, although in fairness, it's also sucking down any chance of this pandemic getting any worse, so I suppose the sacrifice of having our play solicit with RNA viruses in the sewage might be for a worthy cause.

I'm not really sure how to respond to this whole debacle. On one hand, we spent over a month drafting up concepts and writing, and we would really like to just perform it, but on the other hand that has unkempt fingernails that have been to unmentionable places and should have been washed a long time ago if it wasn't for the fact that its owner was a lazy prick, by the time we get this approved, it'll be next week, and that would mean little over a week (if we're lucky) of rehearsals.

That I think, strictly falls under the category of the ridiculous, so if the play's cancelled, it's a bit of a double edged sword, and I can't say that I regret having worked on this script, although just on principle I am angry at the administration.

Well, not really.

Shit is happening.

Well, the world's a mess, but there's no reason that Iran should.

Go on ahead and read up:

Timeline of major events in Iran and explanation detailing their Rubik's Cube governance system:

http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/3354654.html

Twitters you should follow:

http://twitter.com/ProtesterHelp
http://twitter.com/NextRevolution

And something to stop you from unintentionally killing someone:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/cyberwar-guide-for-i.html

Shit is happening in Iran and the least we could do is at least follow it with the power of the Interwebs. To quote the fervent, boiling-over-with-righteous-fury Iran election guru Abbeh:

"The revolution will not be televised, it will be tweeted."

A Trek To and Through

He walked, or rather waded, through the thick, sticky air. Stickiness wasn't a property that you'd commonly associated with air, but unorthodox as it was, this air knew its stickiness inside out. That is, inside and outside of buildings. Even within the giant refrigerator that doubled as a shopping mall, the stickiness of the air was still there, but merely masked underneath the skin's mutually exclusive nature when it came to feeling stickiness and coldness.

He walked past a food court, where the scent of freshly cooked omelette creeped its way through the viscous atmosphere, and found its way to his nostrils. He took a deep, hospitable breath, but timed it wrong and inhaled just as he walked past the nearby dumpster. His lungs quickly kicked out the stinking, drunken stench out of the respectable premises of his respiratory system.

He wasn't here to skulk around the bins though. Where he was headed to was the park just across the road, which also doubled as a line drawn between the park and garbage bag territory. Nothing, even smells, passed across that motorway from one side to the other. This agreement was facilitated by the thick mist of exhaust, ensuring that if any smells DID find their way to the other side of the road, the leftovers of ignited gasoline would bury them quickly.

Scaling the overhead bridge, he found himself looking at a tall grey tower, constricted by two red frames of metal that didn't serve any purpose other than to hastily draw attention away from the dull grey. They twisted around the rigid, honest-to-god perfectly vertical slab of grey, but not smoothly in a perfect spiral. They opted for an approximation of a spiral, shooting off in a straight line and then changing direction sharply at a rigid angle. The overall effect was something that sort-of-spiralled, but wasn't too concerned with the details.

He didn't see the two electronic billboards at the side of the tower until he followed the curved path down from the overhead bridge. These boards displayed the sides of dice, and every few seconds or so they jumbled themselves and displayed a different number. He'd known from his previous but equally misguided visits to the park that this was the dice tower, built to administrate the overall board game theme of the park. There was a Ludo garden somewhere off to the left and a Snakes and Ladders trail to the right, but the subtle infusion of plant life into these "boards" meant that no one knew that they were supposed to be life-sized game boards. So everyone tragically assumed that the dice tower's flickering billboards were to be addressed by National Parks, which of course, didn't do anything about the non-existent malfunctions. So the dice tower stood there, faithfully jumbling its electronic dice once every few seconds, but for no reason at all.

He realized that he could see the billboards clearly today, owing to the absence of an easily discernable sun. Today, a glare guard had been fitted over the sky. The normally distinct circular glow of the sun became what the glow of a lightbulb behind a sheet of frosted glass became: a panel of light.

Following no road in particularly except one based on avoiding the groups of indian workers spread out across the park with almost nomadic inconsistency. (It really wasn't so much of a racial thing. He would have avoided groups of chinese workers, or even just chinese people in general, as long as they were bigger than he was. Even if they had been individually smaller than him he would have summed up their body masses while calculating the odds.)

The thought that this geometrically planned picnic mat of nature in a field of concrete and people was a good place to get lost occured to him. Unfortunately the thought had occured to a few other people as well, thus ruining the prospect of getting lost for every one of them.

(Would you look at that! It has been continued! Well, a little bit. I think the tone of writing in the previous paragraphs that I liked so much has slipped under the table and rolled off somewhere to germinate and scoff at meatball trees in a couple of years time.)

Horrigins
A review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine

There are valuable life lessons to be learnt from the colossally proclaimed treasure trove of rotting cheese that is Hollywood, and just today, I learnt that things in life tend to work themselves out as long as you snarl a lot and have the ability to sprout bone claws from your knuckles.

And that seems to be what the entire of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is about. The entire movie can be very aptly summed up as Hugh Jackman snarling a lot and stabbing people, and when he's not stabbing people, partaking in all manner of socially unacceptable actions and brooding in the dark shirtless. In an attempt to really highlight his pursuits of the intellectual, he takes a merry jog across a meadow naked.

But Jackman's revelations aside, there are many things to be said about this movie, and they're best said after acknowledging that there are two possible audiences for this film.

The first is inevitably the armies of X-Men fandom that walk amongst us unseen. Quite fortunately, I don't happen to be a part of this demographic all that much. My background knowledge about Wolverine and the other mutants that star in this series of moving pictures is best summed up as everything that's on Wikipedia, and easily accessible to anyone who's looking for some entertainment if Youtube videos won't load at a pace that isn't rivalled by that of the Blob's. (Alright, alright, I just found out after reading the wikipedia article on the Blob that he's able to run fairly fast. But shut up now, this only proves my point.)

The second possible audience for this film is consists of anyone who's looking for a spectacular potpourri of explosions, sparks, and people leaping at each other while yelling battle cries that would make Leonidas cringe.

The third completely non-existent (statistically) audience is composed of hopefuls that think that there's the potential that Origins might actually have a decent amount of character development and intellectually stimulating dialogue. To get a better idea of my opinion on this after watching the movie, picture someone hoping that the movie will possess the aforementioned qualities, in the form of a thought bubble hovering about their heads. Now picture this thought bubble being viciously shredded to pieces by a furious Hugh Jackman who is now standing behind the doomed hopeful while panting very, very heavily, claws fully extended.

Allow me to explain this whole thing by giving a bit of an introduction to the movie. Origins covers the a-bit-of-a-bloody-giveaway origins of the mutant Wolverine, from X-Men, who possesses the ability to sprout bone claws from his knuckles and regenerate a ridiculous amount of flesh and bone (No, really. I'm not just referring to the inexplicable protagonist shield. He really does have this power.) It basically starts off with him as a rather sickly child sulking in the 19th century. His fate as a the subject of a blockbuster movie allows him to live all the way till the present day while looking exactly the same, all the while slaughtering chockloads of people with his half brother Sabertooth. Eventually the snarling duo join some secret government team of mutants and go around abusing African villagers, which upsets Wolverine deep inside his fuzzy heart and makes him leave.

You can see precisely where this is going.

I can't really give away anymore of the storyline because that would spoil the entire thing, but thank goodness that isn't really possible, since Origins is going to disappoint hardcore comic fans and anyone who so much dares to hope for a storyline. Comic canon is broken even more than the realism of the human physique in this movie, and the storyline is can essentially be summed up as a series of events, which in all of them, Wolverine gets extremely angry at a particular person and proceeds to try and stab him, while slaughtering and intimidating boring, blank slates of ordinary people and other mutants. The whole thing simply feels like an excuse for Hugh Jackman to rip things apart while snarling. The whole thing seems to be stitched together and even Hugh Jackman's regenerative abilities wouldn't save it.

But I hear you say "Ah, but kind sir. Is that not a perfectly legitimate direction for a blockbuster movie to take? Things blowing up and innocent African villages being terrorized are perfectly acceptable forms of entertainment." This would have been fine (except the terrorising of African villagers.) had it been executed with more flair. During the course of this automated beat em' up, Wolverine performs many action movie staples, such as being chased by a chopper while on a bike, and then proceeding to destroy both to an equal extent, despite the fact that he wasn't even trying to do that to one of them. He does plenty of pouncing and stabbing and so on, but all of it feels rather bland and doesn't feel like anything we haven't already seen. Most of the action is really just composed of Wolverine or his brother being stabbed in someplace nasty, which the audience responds to by cringing and making a plethora of supposedly sympathizing sounds, but that's all there is to the action. This is inevitably trouble since that's all there might have had been to begin with.

So that's what the entire thing is: A series of rather bland action scenes stitched together by a dilute storyline that swooshes down the drain without much fuss. If you've got ten dollars or so that you need to desperately rid yourself off because they have a terrible secret written on them that marks you as the target for some undoubtedly religiously funded organization of assassins, then by all means, purchase a ticket for X-Men Origins: Wolverine and leave the cinema pondering that maybe fleeing from those assasins in the two hours spent watching the film would have been vastly more thrilling.

Walking a Lonely Rope 

This seems to be an odd thing, and in fact completely impossible, thing be doing in a building, and in a very small room, in fact, but I'm walking on a tightrope. I've been doing that since nearly a year ago, before which I was rather contented to stand on the side of the tightrope and watch people nearly teeter over and point at them and go "Whoa, that guy nearly teetered over!" 

Well, I suppose there must have been something appealing about it, since a while later I jumped on (or rather, was dragged on by a group of very persistant people and after a while, I found that I rather liked it). So for a solid nine months, I've been walking on this not-so-much-solid-as-wobbly tightrope (that you've provided figured out is metaphorical by now and if you haven't, then never attempt a conversation with say, Mr Valles) and I've found several things to be true. 

It's very hard to overtake people when you're on the tightrope, and when you try doing that you end up falling over because people that are in front eventually get annoyed after a while and inevitably start displaying their amazing ability to kick behind them while still staying on the tightrope. So after a while you decide you might as well just admire their posteriors and tiptoe behind them at a pace that could almost be described as "merry", except that there's nothing very "merry" about the whole business of getting kicked if you don't. 

It's also fiendishly difficult just staying on the infernal cord. It gets very tempting at times to simply lean over to one side, since you've got the justification that you could quite easily compensate by leaning over to the other side ready, which comes in quite handy when you're looking for an explanation as to how you ended up lying down and staring up at people walking on a tightrope, the point at which the you now might turn to the you then and very sardonically raise one eyebrow and declare this whole idea to be "Perfectly executed". The response is usually silence, although if the fall was traumatic enough a "shut up" might be heard. 

So what I'm doing right now is creeping along on this piece of rope, hoping that I don't fall and if I do, then someone might think me lying in the mud an eyesore and yank me out (Quiet, children) of it and slap me down (I said settle down) onto the line that seems to be standing in for a compass that said it'd be back in a while and it just had to settle this one thing. 

I hope it gets back soon, because everytime I look at my feet I know precisely how I stand on the line. 

Squatting Ideas

Every so often, and I really mean this, I'll find myself sitting in a school canteen where dustbins have been liberated of the social obligation to wear their lids, and I'll hear a distant voice of a rather nasal and high pitched quality proclaim something nearly as annoying as itself. 

These incidents happen to coincide very closely with the times in which I start weighing all the pros and cons of the Internet. Usually, the nasally voice is allowed to continue with its gummy bear muffled ramblings since the alternative would mean me getting closer to its source, but I still can't help but wonder during those moments whether the Internet's advantages outweigh the terrible scourge of most Internet memes. 

Yes, that's going to be the topic of this article, and while you're probably digging trenches for the rhetoricky, rant-ish invasion about why can't all these people just grow up and start making up phrases of their own, that's only going to be part of this article. The other part is hopefully going to be a soulful attempt to remember what memes used to be. The end of this paragraph's probably a good place to start, so let's get to it then. 

Memes, when you boil away the thick black coating of Rickrolls and bodily fluid exchange, are really just recurring or continuous ideas within a society that are transmitted from one mind to another by way of a completely mentionable act: communication. And that's never been easier (seeing as how technology tends to get better in every aspect other than eco-friendliness when going forward in time) given advent of the Internet, phones and large buildings with nice hollow spaces right in their middles which make it very hard for you to have affairs (or one, if you'd like) with your attractive secretary(s). 

So with the mention of the Internet and its ability to proliferate memes like a cold does in a Chinese train, the thought of testing the durability of your router may have occured to you. But hold that thought for a second. Memes are something more. (No, just put the router down. Really. It's not going to be worse.) 

Every form of "received wisdom" is a meme. The concept of wearing clothing (some, at least) in public or not going spelunking in your nostrils (those who do have developed apathy shields that would greatly ensure their survival in the event that Halley's Comet came over to grab its belongings. So on further reflection we're mostly safe.)  are all memes. They're generally well accepted ideas that have been deeply rooted into many different cultures, and the cultures that don't have these memes are either exiled or considered "damned outrageous". And the thing is, many memes have served us well, because without memes, it would be practically impossible to get anything done with large groups of people (With the exception of rioting. On second thought, scratch that. Rioting's no exception.) because of the absence of a common idea or set of ideas that unifies them in some way. If it weren't for the meme that stealing and murdering were bad, we wouldn't have a legal system. If it weren't for the meme that goats are by no means a form of standardized (or vending machine compatible) currency, we wouldn't have, well, currency. 

Memes, we can clearly see at this point, are ludicrously two sided (the number of two sides there are is impossible to conceive). It can either be the trusty concrete that we have our riots on or the sewer of humanity where our last hope, in the form of very talented humanoid turtles, lies. So the problem isn't the existence of memes, but rather recognizing which ones should be existings and which ones shouldn't. 

Because while memes can be useful foundational ideas, they can also become the equivalent of soft plywood supports for one of those kampong houses. It seemed like a great idea at the time when the rest of the house was made of soft plywood and its inhabitants consisted of the ocassional hummingbird that would fly off once the boards started creaking, but when its inhabitants atart consisting of walking things the whole thing starts to fall apart. 

My point here is that memes can squat on mental chairs that should really be given to new ideas after a good dusting. While some foundational memes may have been excellent several decades ago, they start to lose their appeal and usefulness today. (The example of wearing clothing comes in here again, and it's nice to know that we're going full circle and that all we need to do is start talking to serpents again.) The problem with getting rid of such memes, though, is that they really don't want to get off their arses, because some have been so deepy imbedded in our culture that getting rid of them seems unthinkable. (Like say, in the case of hoping for a Hollywood film that doesn't have a romance thrown in like soya sauce on ice cream.) 

So they sit there and shove away any new ideas that want to so much as offer them some Pocky. They end up being there for the sake of being there, and then the process of creating new ideas starts making funny gurgling noises that aren't very funny at all in retrospect. 

Internet memes being used so often in some conversations is a clear example of this. Once people start using those memes as placeholders for phrases that haven't been echoed by at least one world, then no other ideas can. 

Memes need to be constantly rexamined to make sure that they aren't irrelevant, and deciding whether they're irrelevant or not is going to take a lot of notepaper and a good supply of Pocky. 

Persuasive Accomodation

A few hours ago I did so relieve myself of the loads that made me suspect for a brief moment that I might have been detained for illegal immigration, and in a startling moment I flopped down (More of a roll on my back. The legs did flop down though, if that's any comfort) on my hostel bed and uttered one of the more startling things of the week.

"Yay, I'm back." 

I'm trying desperately to rationalize this action as simply having been a slip of the tongue into oblivion, and then I realize, with several generous servings of dismay sprinkled lightly with stir fried hopelessness, that the expression (the smug bastard) is probably right. I've seen the hostel so often that it's probably becoming my default accomodation, whereas my actual home is becoming something akin to one of those summer houses in Zanzibar that you can only take the word of your estate agent that it still exists. 

So for the time being, I've been constantly reminding myself of the perils of hostel life to hopefully bump this hostel room down a bit on my list of preferred accomodation, and since the list consists of two kinds of accomodation at this point, my actual home and this room, then it shouldn't be too hard to bump it down to the required level of tastelessness. 

So if anyone does see me in the hostel, please try your best to make my stay here as unbearable as possible. 

Spotfrights


Few roles in a play let you feel as close to divinity as fiddling around with the lighting. And I'm not talking about fiddling with a set of tiny switches backstage while you tell yourself that truly, this is as close as you get to divinity. I'm talking about sitting in the control room, pompously or not, depending on your choice, and getting what is perhaps the most authoratative view in the entire theatre and then deciding who gets to be visible on-stage. Believe me when I say that power trips are equally likely to happen with the director and the elevated elite in the control room.

At least, that's the impression you get of the job at first, until you're tasked with something requiring about three hands and fingers of lengths that would anger any pianist into attacking you. The moment you enter the control room in your (well, my, actually) hazey power trip, you are greeted with a panaroma of knobs and switches that would look suspiciously familiar to anyone who's been to one of those open houses showcasing cockpit interiors.

There's what can only be described as an absolute spread of switches in the control room, and that's for lighting alone. There are fill light switches for nine sections of the stage, individual spotlights for each of those nine sections, then an additional larger spotlight for each of those nine sections again. Then there's additional switches for adjusting the color of the cyclorama (A funky screen that would have appealed greatly to the Beatles. Basically a screen disguised as a wall at the back of the stage that can change color in the most psychedellic manners.), and finally two random switches for side stage spotlights. I think that covers about three quarters of the switches. There's an additional (a very trendy word by this point) quarter somewhere that probably requires the synchronized turning of two keys or something along those lines.

Anyway, it's this mind boggling number of switches that really makes the lighting job very difficult. The nice lady that was kind enough not to leave us floundering (mostly out of concern for the equipment) drew us a reference diagram of sorts for the different numbers of the lights and which portions of the stages they corresponded to. It really did make things a lot simpler so all me and Damien were left with was frustration. Since the diagram wasn't divided into a table with labels like A3 or B4 or anything that would help you visualize positions, and so the switches weren't labelled in that manner, we ended up having to constantly refer to the tiny table scrawled (very kindly) in blue ink under the pseudo-illumination of the small lamp that you're allowed during the operation of the lighting, since the control room is apparently tasked with the role of housing the invisible machinations that run the show from behind.

So we did a rather shoddy job of allowing the hypothetical audience to see the faces of our undoubtedly nervous, and therefore grateful actors. But something rather surprising happened halfway through the last run.

We started improvising a bit. As opposed to referring to the terribly written (by us, I should add) set of lighting cues based on the script, we started improvising. We knew what was going to happen when and where, so we started referring to the diagram (not written by us, I should add again) and turning up whatever lights we thought were necessary. All this in very angry whispers in the dark.

I suppose as you do this again and again the numbers corresponding to the different lights become a vital part of your anatomy, and that would explain the labelling deficiency, and clearly we've yet to achieve that.

But regardless, it was fun, and it really was the sort of thing that's going to keep me from throwing my arms up and yelling at the people in the control room "How hard can it be to get some damned lights on?"

Footnotes while on the Run

Hello there.

A bit of brief writing before I return to bed from whence I crawled.

I was just in the process of rushing an application for the purposes of entering the mystical NRP, or Nanyang Research Programme, if you're pedantic about that sort of thing or if you're giving a speech and you have to let the nice ladies and gentlemen know precisely what they're attending the speech for.

The whole process of signing up for the project was a bit finicky, but I suppose that's all part of the process of being incredibly complicated. Well, not really. I can't really complain, though a terrible misintepretation about the concepts of am and pm led to my submission of the form being about ten hours late, which somehow seems more erroneous than one day when you write it down.

There hasn't really been much time for writing over the last two days, and the barrage of tests will finally descend into rancid waters while waving their neatly typed tentacles in the air and making all manner of screeching noises, then it'll probably take about a week or so for them to reemerge the very badly damaged (though still freshly shiny) reactor of a long-sunken nuclear submarine that was previously unaccounted for.

Quite honestly I'll be quite glad once this whole test period is over.

I mean, life's about doing the other work, isn't it?