| Dogg's Hamlet |
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| Dec 12 2009, 0:50am |
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"Outside of a dog,
a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
~ Groucho Marx |
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| Letters from Home |
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| Dec 9 2009, 14:21pm |
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Today I received an attorney's letter informing me of the 2005 death of someone who shares the same last name as me.
I am clumsily informed that his real family died in Sumatra in 2004 in a tsunami disaster (and shown the wiki entry to this terrible tragedy) and that there is 17million at stake here ("please contact me for more information").
Of course, there is no reference to what that last name might be, nor who this "deceased client" is.
The email originates from insing.com (singaporean yahoo knockoff) and goes back out to sify.com (Indian gmail knockoff).
It might even have been credible, except, given the amount, there's no way it would have been anyone in my family. |
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| six snapshots into real life. |
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| Nov 19 2009, 19:13pm |
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6 years and I'm still reeling from culture shock.
Nowhere else in the world it seems, though this corner apparently takes up a good half the world, is decisions such as owning a $500 handheld entertainment device (ie blackberry, iphone etc) and supporting its monthly subscription(say an average $120 a month) an inalienable god-given right even when you're on a take-home of less than $1500 a month. And no-where else in the world it seems, is this apparently the fault of your employers and not yourself for being stupid with your money. It's the employers' fault for not paying you enough to cover your bills.
I've started to understand why it is that PWDs are not advised to get into relationships.
Your care system basically works best when your staff is a little bit enamoured of you and hold fantasies about being your only safe port in the turmoil of your life and all that other dramatics. i.e. so long as they are able to maintain the little delusion while they're around you that they're some kind of martyr being the only person you, the disabled, can rely on. Which brings me to the conclusion that bob made a grave error when he decided to go for the one person on his staff who didn't actually have a secret fantasy about being in love with him or vice-versa. Seriously, what the hell were you thinking.
I struggle every day against the haunting wisdom of my mother.
Creativity is for trustfund babies, she used to say. Find something you can score at and stick with it. Nobody cares if you like it or if you're actually any good with it. She secretly wanted to go to fashion school. Which I couldn't understand because so far as I could tell, growing up, she did not have particularly good taste in fashion. She flunked out of nursing school doing the entrance exam. I don't remember why anymore, only that somehow, twenty years after the fact and a decade before she ever thought of having children, it was still my fault, and I owe her my whole life because of it.
I tell myself constantly to let go.
I'm terrified of becoming the kind of control freak my mother was. But it's hard. It's bloody hard. Especially when things irrefutably crack at the seams and go to pieces when I'm not in choke-hold control. The hardest part is trying to distinguish between inherited paranoia and fact. The scary thing seems to be that while control-freaking is indubitably a disorder and a hindrance to productivity where we grew up, it appears to be a basic necessity here. Having no inherent sense of responsibility towards themselves and each other, control-freaks are necessary in these climes to keep things together.To make sure that things get done to a minimal standard in the least and that the cogs grind in the least. We sat on the rooftops and laughed at the sheeple, back in the day, not realising that our sheeple were not sheep at all, but droids. Give me droids any day. At least in their similar boorishness, they got things done.
I had a curious dream regarding the debate of science vs religion last night. Both sides were equally insipid. Religion at least could tell a good yarn, harrowing though their fanaticism and dry as their literature was. And in the end, it wasn't that any one side was particularly offended by the other. It was really all just a matter of getting the other guy to lick their balls. Almost literally.
Once upon a time, I was a creative genius.
I say this in all good conscience, you must realise. Once upon a time, for example, the NaNoWriMo challenge would have been no problem for me. At age ten I had four times the number of creative writing workbooks than anyone. By fourteen, my average daily wordcount was somewhere in the thousands. I worked on three projects at a time. You don't know this but I've actually finished a couple of novels. Let's not consider if I thought they were any good, just that I'd actually completed the damned things. But that was in another country, in a different class and time, where things like that were worthless. And then came the education. And the life experience. Both things considered invaluable to the writer. Funny, that. Ten years later, my average weekly word count stands at a mellow 60. On a good week.
This too, is a kind of death. |
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| ...is a maverick Talgeese requiring ground support |
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| Nov 6 2009, 23:37pm |
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it's creeping up to a year since I've updated Ophiuchus 01: The Secret Life of Gardenias. Which doesn't sound like such an incredible thing until I confess that I haven't actually stopped working on it all this time. Yep, it's been sitting open on my desktop all this time, false starts, tangents, winding rhetoric and etc. while the "background plot" documents grow, morph, mutate etc. I think too much and can't stay focused on any one particular timeline. I start on the background story of the background characters who drive the canon plot, next thing I know I'm making notes and paragraphs about their parents 20 years ago. It's not a very good excuse, but it's all I've got lol nope, not ready to quit everything else to be a fulltime writer yet. Still great dream though.
I wonder if starting a forum for the series would help move things along.
On the other hand, who'd join a GW forum about psuedo-science and psuedo-history and no yaoi? lol
Also sad: how I can't seem to discuss any of the other things I'm up to except obscure fic writing. |
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| designer tech |
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| Oct 29 2009, 3:35am |
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this is the first one of these type of creations (diamond encrusted iphones/ipods, blinged up cellphones, laptops etc) that I've actually really liked. hm.
i wonder whether it's a statement on how I've changed, or how the design industry's changing. hm.
Designer tech-fashion |
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| zombies at home |
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| Sep 7 2009, 11:05am |
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in this morning's dream, the zombie virus hits singapore and is dealt with with the usual health cautionary. Wash your hands, avoid physical contact, don't spit, don't sneeze or cough on each other that sort of thing.
I'm not sure where my mother and I and m brother went, but we were together and navigating our way home. despite the "epidemic" the news makes it sound, it isn't really too bad on the streets if you just keep an eye out and keep your nose out of things that don't concern you. there was a bus station and a brief argument about which bus to take. Mother didn't want to take the one I was going to take because "the sign is written in blood". or looked it. I pointed out that zombies can't write. but we went and took another one, whose route I was unfamiliar with.
It seemed pretty uneventful really, just a undercurrent of unease throughout. and zombies in the deserted streets. The advisory advised against being out in the open. we got off the bus and had to walk 6 blocks home, passing by a hawker centre where we picked up some dinner (羊肉汤mmm).
Somewhere along the way, while me and him were fending off some vagrant zombies from my mother, my brother got splattered on. Kindda gross and dangerous, but he wipes it off on his sleeve and is convinced he's going to be fine. Near the hawker centre was a large pile of other-people's-junk like we used to get in HDB elevator lobbies when people clean out their apartments, and we rummaged through them for some kind of weapon. sticks, mostly, just to be able to keep things at arm's length. honestly i didn't think they were going to be very effective but it was a security blanket kind of thing.
so we trooped home (i had a beer wow. twas the taiwanese variety) with dinner and these sticks, and it was when we got in that my brother started looking really green about the gills. so i was insisting we take him to the doctors who've got a vaccine against the virus provided you're still alive and where i could convince them to detour before we got home, when he started spewing pink stuff. Like when you're throwing up pepto bismol.
meh. NOW do you believe me that he's sick? i was mostly miffed cos i have to go out again and i was looking forward to dinner and my beer =/ so i turned around to put some stuff away while my brother and mom got ready, and al lthe while the kid's complaining that he's okay, and then started mucking around with me, doing that "they're coming to get you barbara" thing from the beginning of the old Night of the Living Dead movie, making fun of my fear.
I shoved him back with my stick (old curtain rod with a round knob on the end) and told him off, told him to put on his shoes, but he kept coming at me repeatedly and mucking around, and got me pinned to a wall (sortta. there was still the whole 6 feet of curtain rod between us, but damned if i was going to get any closer within range of him, he's turning into a zombie!)
Mostly I was shoving at him in the chest. at one point the knob slipped to his throat, and he got kindda upset with me and started going on about my wanting to kill him. as part of the rant, and because he thought it was funny, he kept holding the knob end to his throat, taunting me (between the part where i would be too scared to kill him in case he comes back, and how i'd be too chicken and weak to do it anyway), and i kept trying to get him to get back and bloody go get his shoes on, and yelling for my mom to do something about him... and, i dunno, the knob went through his throat.
Not easily, there was all the proper resistance and such and not through the spine, just the fleshy throat bits, but certainly beyond my strength and beyond his conceivable strength pushing down against it... so anyway, it was kindda a surprise. and I yelled for my mom and the kid just keeps wriggling on at the end, and uh... at this point I'm worried about how to kill him properly, seeing as I can't seem to sever his spine...
My mom freaks out, wouldn't come near us, and the last thing i remember waking up was arguing with her about my plan to throw the body out the window and hopefully the impact will sever the spine and if not, eh, at least he wouldn't be in here when he comes back, and my mom babbling about respect and burial rituals... I guess she just doesn't believe in zombies. |
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| Sep 3 2009, 15:29pm |
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It's been a long time since I'd blogged properly. Years and years.
The internet used to be a safe place, the proverbial hole in the ground that you yelled your secrets into, except now it's grown into that plant in that one story. I think it had to do with a barber and the emperor's ears.
Except, it wasn't that that stopped it for me. I've just stopped journalling, period.
A remnant of magic, perhaps.
Once something has been written down, it becomes immutable, and so long as it isn't yet committed, there is still room for change, for hope. Or something.
I am continuously dazzled and amazed by my ability to foresee situations and events and promptly ignoring my own predictions.
I am constantly in flux about the mystery we unceremoniously dub "magic" and belief.
But that's besides the point.
My mother had a baby girl before me, but she died.
Sometimes I think I am the ghost of that girl, being lived out by the rest of the world.
That while I eat, sleep, breath, speak, I am still just a figment of some mass hallucination. |
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| Jul 16 2009, 10:20am |
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the top right corner of my dreams is dominated by some kind of stat lately. It only appears near when i might wake up.
a low random number / 48
I'm not sure what it keeps track of. but everytime i get near waking up it drops to like 2 or 0, and apparently that is a bad, bad thing eventhough i don't know the meaning of it.
This morning I dreamt about getting lost with Peggy, yea, that Peggy, the top scholar of our year. I don't remember how she placed in the 'O' levels. It was some sort of after-exams babysitting stint we were in school for, all wearing our school uniforms. Initially I was looking for something with a sense of panic. An appointment book i think. What it was was i'd dozed off in the middle of this boring mass babysitting thing and realised that "shit wasn't i supposed to be somewhere today?" and started looking around for something with a calendar on it, randomly flipping through some books that were laying around on the floor.
There was this bit with Gillian trying to show me a book kindda like an extended symbol puzzle by someone related to nostradamus. Which is odd now that i think about it because wasn't Gilly from primary school? Another one of those people i didn't actually have any contact with.
Well, then getting increasingly upset and kindda desperate i try to sneak out of the assembly, which didn't work too well. The dream does a weird split here.
In one, I somehow ended up in a dark studio all set up and ready to go except that it was bloody really dark, and I wasn't ready. I keep asking them to turn on the lights, and telling the i guess owners that they need higher wattage bulbs for their regular lights.
In another, I ended up on a school bus with the people who were immediately around me, including Gillian and Peggy. We were passing by ave 1, so i asked the aunty if i can get off here at the market, of course she takes forever to get through to so by the time i'm done arguing with her and she goes "whatever lah just tell the driver", we're no longer where i thought we were, but somewhere in the more ulu part of ave 9. so he complains, turns around and drops me off somewhere on the other side of ave 1 where i'd pretty much given up and went "yea here's fine". At some point, the bus had emptied and it was just me, and Peggy looking expectantly at me and following me off the bus. I remember talking to her from the bus about my awful feeling that i was missing some important engagement and am scrambling to get home and hopefully find my appointment book, and how knowing my luck i'd end up having to go all the way back to the school again heh.
I guess she was going to come home with me, so we started to go round these hills and blocks that did not exist IRL but had always been there in my dream. And I climbed a couple of wrong ones and kindda got stuck, and while i muttered and swore about the damned hills that don't go anywhere, Pegs just sort of lept off the side oO jesus that made my heart stop because it was a pretty high drop, nearly 3 stories. I remember panic, and calling after her over and over to make sure she's okay.
This is where things get sort of squiggly again.
On the one hand, we're laying on the hills laughing over something and talking about nothing really in particular and she mentions things to me about crushes on girls we went to school with, and my being surprised that she had any interest in girls.
On the other, we ended up in my grandparents' apartment (for some reason they had an apartment that i'd set up for them for my mom near us. it was for some reason bigger than our place at 4 bedrooms.) I was trying to help my grandfather with something and she was trying to help me and there was something about her staying over and something about us hiding in one of the guest bedrooms giggling nervously when someone young came into the apartment, as though for some inexplicable reason we didn't want to be discovered. It wasn't like we were indecent or anything heh.
I forget the rest, but there's the gist of it. Somehow being good enough friends to hang out with the people i'd never dared to hang around while in school, and discovering that one of them was a secret les (Gillian was always a little less than secret with her manliness, though we were much to young for it to be definitive of anything) (and also, it seems sort of out of character for RL peggy to be, well, the kind of person dream-peggy was. but then i didn't know RL-peggy very well either so *shrug*) and mucking up one of 3 very VERY important appointments. |
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| Jul 1 2009, 0:13am |
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it sucks not being able to say to your friends abroad
"take friday off, sleep in, pretend to be sick, recharge."
and plan to turn up on their doorstep friday afternoon,
spring clean their apartment and take them out to dinner
and brunch and dinner, and be back in time for the monday
morning office blues.
it sucks that i did not think of this when i weighed up my life
and decided to paint myself out.
i'm sorry. |
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| i've been away far too long |
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| Jun 23 2009, 17:14pm |
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this morning i dreamt that i was visiting you and jib in your cave, yes, literally, a cave. it was a nice cave and i didn't question at the time why you guys were living in a cave, but that's where it happened. I was there to drop off something, I don't remember what, and we made small talk about my semi-retired/hermit status and what you guys were up to and we were looking at some things jib'd drawn and discussing aesthetics and perspectives and JoJo's Bizarre Adventures in relation to extreme posing when a Lamia snuck up behind me.
It'd been awhile since i'd seen combat, but i must've been pretty good at it once, at least, i'd fought lamias before. Jib tossed me a knife, which i tried to use but just ended up cutting myself with, then i pretty much bludgeoned the thing to death with a stool (sorry 'bout wreaking your furniture).
You came to heal my cuts and Jib peeked outside, came back in, and equipped more knives without saying anything. I peeked out and groaned. I can't imagine why you two or I would be laid siege upon, but that was what it looked like. mostly warcraftesque creatures: dryads, gryphons, dwarven mortar teams (from WC3) and impish creatures (the ones you've got to fight in lvls 1 - 10 as a nightelf) and satyrs. I unsheathed my axe, which I did not know i had until this moment (and of course then it seems i'd been walking around your house with a double-handed axe strapped to my hips the whole time) and calmly told you what was going on. You grabbed pencil and paper and quickly sketched out the formations outside as i'd described, and threw up suggestions for attack plans, at which point Jib and I told you to stay as far back as you can, in coincidental unison. We were being unreasonably protective, I'm sure, especially since you're a max-level priest (lol). Thinking back, that was pretty silly on my part.
Jib went out to greet the hoard and I followed two-steps behind, having agreed to follow his lead. He was doing well and while i wasn't actually getting thrashed, i felt overwhelmed and can't shake the feeling that this should be going easier. At this point, noticing that Jib was getting surrounded and pinned, I threw down an a.o.e. Earthshock (a la anime style: point and say/shout "earthshock" and watch it "fire" from my fingertip) that stunned his immediate attackers and tried to cast heal on him. This did not work very well as i kept getting interrupted. He told me to save my mana, and i asked sarcastically what i was saving it for. moments later, maybe about 40 seconds of combat later, i realised what a complete idiot i am.
TOTEMS.
I'd forgotten I was a shaman =_____=
so tossing down healing stream and lava and strength of the earth and agility i took another swing at something and fell out of bed. |
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| Jun 18 2009, 2:34am |
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somedays i wish i smoked.
so i can wince mirthlessly at the world and
burn myself with the fag-ends
to let the spirits out that way.
and btw, why don't SIMS smoke?
and don't use the gamerating excuse. they drink, steal, stalk, fight and have sex. On screen. They used to gamble too. And peep. A lot of voyeurs among them. They abuse each other and set each other on fire. And yet somehow all of that is more appropriate for younger audiences than smoking. Come on, ban all or ban none. you can't pick and choose because then your whole moral rating system falls apart. |
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| Jun 12 2009, 9:45am |
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I dreamt we went on a group vacation, you and I and Jib and Shawn, Ziri, Liv, Am, Joe, and, for some reason, Santiago Cabrera (Lancelot from BBC's Merlin) though I suspect he's the place holder for our group's token white guy.
It was some sort of Water-park resort, i think. on the way to and from the dorms we have to pass by this pool that's always filled with people and kids and had a huge slope that you could slide down from.
I dreamt that Jib was from a High Society family and you were meeting some disapproval from his mother, who was trying to set you up with another boy from those circles, a notorious womanizer. You spoke of this on the first night. You begged us to go on a blind date with you the next night and him and seven of his friends. I'm not sure why or how my subconscious worked out that the boys had to go on blind dates with this guy's boys' school pals either. we were somewhat ambivalent. On the way back we spotted some tramps and thugs, saw them disappear into the alleys like something out of a Bowie video. We were warned by the hostel staff not to engage them, and that they were sometimes known to break into the dorms and steal things.
The next day, we set off in different directions and met back together for dinner at the same restaurant you'd told us about the date at. Is it any surprise that we were all a little bit dressed-up for your sake? 7 o'clock came and went and you appeared with Jib and no harassing dates, it turns out that it was a bit of a practical joke you'd pulled on us, to watch us scramble for some decent evening/date wear from luggage packed for summery water parks. It was a good one. Mostly we were wearing dress-jeans and our cleanest, most polite shirts. Am had a summer dress. Liv, for some reason, had a proper cocktail dress heh. For the life of me I cannot imagine where Joe'd manage to find a sparkly tux. But it was more than a little creepy when he leaned over behind me while everyone else was berating you for the prank and propositioned me very softly. His reasoning was since we were all dressed up and had nowhere to go... my mind went blank in horror, which he took for swaying hesitation. I forced a smile and said if I were that desperate to go off with anyone tonight it'd probably be Shawn. or Ziri. maybe both. but not you. He seemed disgusted. What else is new. He got over it, though. I think. As we were all getting ready to leave for the dorm after dinner, he sidled up to me and asked impatiently if it wasn't time he and I snuck off to somewhere more private. This time I swore at him good and proper. I was going to break his nose or something equally violent, but behaved myself in deference to you.
The really interesting part came when we were across the corridor from our dorm room, we noticed that it was open and that there were people inside. I spotted two, going through our stuff. round-faced sweatered goblinesque fellows wearing knit caps and with teeth all filed to a point like from the comics i so adore. Santiago held us back and shooed us around the corner. Am and Liv headed off to find someone in authority to help. We waited a few moments, then Santiago found a stick and decided to go in and knock the little bastards around. We followed cautiously behind him and stood outside while he went in and did the pull (lol) There were three of them, which we took down with some dirty swarm fighting. After we kicked the first guy in his teeth, the other two tried to flee up the stairs. we chased after them, of course, but it wasn't until I had leisure to pause after we'd taken down the second guy that I realised they weren't the same guys going through our stuff, rather distractions to give the thieves time to get away. by this point Santiago was holding the last conscious guy by the collar and about to beat his nose in for him. And apparently this guy said something cryptic to him about hoarding and a great white nest.
I hazarded that that must be their HQ upstairs, otherwise there was no reason for them to have fled upwards when they could have gone in any other direction. We conferred, apprehensive of what we might meet, fully expecting some kind of nasty den of goblins, and scounged around for weapons. We found a couple of big metal plate things that we thought Santiago and Joe could carry as a sort of shield for everybody, while the rest of us found use in some coconut shells and string and other curious things. Then, in a huddle behind Santiago and Joe, we crept upstairs and kicked down the door at the top of the stairway.
What we saw took a fair bit of wind out of our sails. It was a great white room, bright-white, pristine, almost like a clean-room. in the middle of the room was a metal chute. to one side, rows of tables at which street waifs were "processing" stolen goods, tripping them down, cleaning out identifying marks that sort of thing. I recognised some of our stuff. But they looked so pitiful as to not seem a threat. As we watched, one of the waifs brought a basketful of our things and emptied it down the central chute. Then the "boss" moved into view.
A large man with a disturbingly small head, he picked up aggro on Santiago first, possibly on account of him being white and us non-threatening asian. bloody racist, i tell ya. somehow I managed to get behind him and tried to put a choke hold on him. Before we get the the freaky bit, i should say i think you guys were trying to wrest what's left of our things away from the waifs and stop Joe from actually killing any of them. I can't be sure, being so engaged with the boss. See, when I tried to yank his head back to free Santiago, the guy's head fell out.
Seriously. And i didn't even bat an eyelid though the dvd commentary in my head is going WTF??? all over. The guy's tiny head was attached to a long staff which was inserted into this bio-mechanical suit which made up his massive body. So I'm standing next to a window, wrestling with a shrunken head on a stick, and winning by inches as I disassemble him, which is a totally odd thing for me to do i guess, but it worked. I unscrewed the two segments of wood from his neck down and threw them both out the window to a satisfying shattering of glass and all the while we're demanding to get our stuff back.
It is discovered that the chute is password protected, so if we can get the head to talk, we could pick up the carts of stuff he's stolen from everybody that's back down on the first floor. Everyone takes a shot at knocking the head around as we get back down to where we think the chute access might be. We level all sorts of threat at the head, but really, what the hell can we do to the damned thing? until I'm trudging through the muddy grass to cut around a corner and the most vicious, nasty, gopher digs out from right in front of me and makes me jump and terrifies me a little with his sheer vicious evilness. So I dangle the head over the fresh gopher hole and threaten to give him to the gopher. It worked. and while we're on the way back with cartfuls of loot, we pass by the corner again and the gopher scampered up to the side of the road, sizing me up. i thought it was going to follow me and try to eat me. it had that look in its eye. and you come up next to me holding the head and commented that you'd expected me to throw the head to the gopher anyway. I shrugged, saying that we needed to keep him around to make sure the password was correct, eventhough you and i both knew the truth, that being that i've gotten soft in my old age. And then you dropped the head on the road behind you and took my arm, and what happened to the head afterwards is anyone's guess. |
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| maybe if you didn't spend your nights saving universes, you'd have more energy for the days... |
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| Jun 6 2009, 11:28am |
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it started when we joined up with a man with a mission. He wanted to build a new home for earthlings. In that way, it began decades ago too, with the discovery of earth. By which I mean by other sentient species. Anyway, long story short, alien-infested space is not like they would have you believe in trek and, as per usual, the biggest threat to us came from ourselves. Earth civilisation as we know it collapsed into three basic groups of people: the slaves, the slavers, and the free agents. The slavers were merchants, mining out the earth's most valuable galactic resource: people. the free agents are those too clever, powerful, or too much trouble to be caught and bartered as slaves by the slavers. The slaves were largely people on welfare... ^^;;
not to defend slaving, but in a way, it made sense lol some bright spark without scruples realised there is no ban on slaves in the galactic code, although there's a huge shortage of the commodity due to individual planetary or national laws against slave-trading. Earth's governments, predictably, have destroyed themselves arguing over the most stupid and banal of things. the surviving politicians were in the first batch to go. the first human galactic slaver was a power-hungry general who realised within a week of ascension as Emperor of Earth that he'd much rather just be a slaver. Earth has been a sort of ungoverned free port ever-since. like a crazy pirate-town. It remains largely safe from galactic threat on account of it being a valuable "farmland" for the big scary slavers (due to their military roots the dominant earth slaver syndicate has the biggest guns , strictest discipline and meanest attitudes). most people worth a damn took to the stars, Earth now belonged to the slavers, not ourselves.
It started when we joined up with a man with a mission. He was tired of living in space and not having a planet to call home. So when he purchased an uninhabited planet, he invited other free humans who shared the dream to join him. The planet was terraformed and buildings were erected, people were brought in and everything looked nice. It was still, in a sense, a pirate-town, but at least it wasn't built on the backs of oppressed peasant types. And so far, at least, there were some brains in everyone who've actually made it as far as to sign on to the project. The journey from wherever you were to the planet was, i think, hardship enough to weed out the free-loading idiots. as for free-loading idiots who made it that far on superior wealth, we generally banded together to fleece them blind, donating parts of the proceeds to the city. It was fun. But my dream isn't about the planet, it is about the people, and friends.
Honestly, I think we were just bored and looking for an excuse to get into trouble. Always a good reason to mount a rescue, I suppose. A band of pirates who've sneakily settled illegally on a remote spot on the planet revealed themselves in order to seek help. They had been invaded by an alien that no-one's really seen before, an unknown species from deep space. Yep, an alien. One.
We sniggered, those of us who weren't too good to do so, and sent the escapees packing. But when they'd been taxed and thrown out, our man Mack sighed and gathered volunteers to go rescue the remaining illegals and see about the settlement they had built. After all, this was his house. As much in the spirit of loyalty as curiosity, I suppose, a bunch of us signed on. An alien no-one's seen before could be worth quite a bit of money, yes? And reportedly, there were pretty girls being held hostage.
Mack, the man who owns the planet, was a space-freighter, the kind of men you hear about in classic sci-fi who spend their entire lives in space aboard a ship that makes cargo drops in the route times of decades. This doesn't make him alien, but it does give him a sense of superiority, that he was by nature just a little bit better from us, and different. well, let him. he owns the planet and we are his houseguests. And the only time this becomes an issue is right at the end when one of the rescued girls becomes upset that he would not even look at her despite all her fawning and it had to be explained that he's a freighter and would never have eyes for any woman except a freighter-girl. She remained upset and convinced that i was sabotaging her chances with him and i thought seriously about throwing her overboard. But that's how the story ends.
The alien was some kind of creepy fish-man, a la Lovecraft. He was going to marry one of the captives and declare himself emperor. The lucky girl was 8 years oldish, but apparently very important in the occult way. The fish guy had some creepy trick he could do with his fingertips, which peel back to reveal raw stems with which he sucks out people's souls? brains? that particular detail is kind of obscured now, but you're not expected to live through it, no. But other than that aspect, and being bigger and stronger than humans by a genetic factor of 3, he wasn't actually all that "big bad and scary". just a lone renegade with delusions of grandeur. He spent most of the time being locked up in a bathroom, on account of being unable to stay out of water too long. Meanwhile, we busied ourselves dealing with some kind of octopus-god that he'd installed in a local pavilion. we were going to capture and sell the fish-guy until we learnt how dangerous he was. oh well.
The endgame involved a pretension of us going along with his invasion plans and ambushing him at the altar. It got a bit squidgy when he tried to eat me before the ceremony, but somehow, we managed to kill him anyway. it was kind of disconcerting that he died in a puff of smoke rather than leave a regular corpse. Afterwards, we gathered up all the people who'd been trapped in the settlement. Most of them apparently were part of a shipment of slaves. And, well, not that I have anything against setting them free or anything, but I was not happy with the automatic assumption that we'd be bringing them back with us and assimilating them into our little community. One of those impending sense of dooms.
but the best part about the dream, was the scenery. you can't beat flying over sparkling blue waters rimmed in rich green trees. You just can't. |
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| sometimes i wonder if my dreams aren't windows into alternate realities |
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| Jun 4 2009, 10:10am |
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really, i do.
this morning i dreamt that i was in taiwan, part of a study group of some sort staying/working at a half-completed resort. recognisable characters included bruce, 小charlie, nery, a handful of my mom's old coffee club, my mom, and a handful of models i'd "worked" with the year before.
nothing really remarkable in most of the dream, to be honest. cute girls in swim suits, catching glimpses of various possible shots and realising i'd forgotten my camera, that sort of thing. Feeling apprehensive, surrounded by people i vaguely know but can't really bear, but had to behave well and charming for, that sort of thing. Bruce and I stuck pretty close together. I'm not sure if it's because we both felt lost or because my solution to the camera problem was to hunt him down and commandeer his. Mostly i was taking photographs of the war between architecture and construction. and, of course, candid girls in hot swimsuits. somewhere about town we ran into my mom in a store and i was surprisingly okay with that and thought nothing of introducing the two of them.
it turned a little more interesting when bruce did something i'm not sure what... piss off the camp counsellor or broke a rule, i don't know. but his punishment was to appear in drag at morning assembly. Nery and i were first downstairs with the counsellor/head/leader/i don't know what she is but when she said jump we did and didn't ask how high. the casual conversation turned to nery's birthday, on account of which the head/leader/person decided that it would be really lovely of Bruce to give him a lapdance lol the astonishing thing is, bruce did. and i died laughing while everyone else was shellshocked, and nery was giggling madly and obviously enjoying himself. there was no hesitation on bruce's part at all, that particular kind of gung-ho-ness that comes exclusively with bloody-minded commitment to doing the best possible at everything he has to do. His drag get-up, which he'd gotten no help in constructing, was actually pretty good. immaculate make-up and dress-sense. he picked a black shoulder-length wig and a simple black, slightly shimmering, dress. Imagine a goth flapper, and go minimalist. no accessories, minimal sparkle and tassel, some glitter around the eyes, not a really figure-defining get-up, just loose enough that you might mistake him for a flat chested woman (if not for the hands). so, overall, quite stunning. and I was assailed by the overwhelming urge to drag him into a studio, which is very much like a "zomg can't keep hands off" instinct except i can't actually picture myself getting it on with the subject at their current state. I'm going to contend that this impulse is the same for most fashion photographers.
so sometimes i wonder if my dreams aren't windows into alternate realities, if other mes dream about me.
If i'm not in the wrong dream-movie, maybe, and if these people whom i dream-blog about would kill me when they find out what i've told strangers about them and their shenanigans in my head. |
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| fairy bells |
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| Jun 2 2009, 12:37pm |
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as anyone who've visited quickly comes to realise, i keep a garden of weeds. insofar as a couple of built-in planting boxes left to seed can be called a garden, anyway. the apartment's half-sunk into a hillside around the back, so the entire "backyard" is dug out of the unruly hill. Mostly it plays host to dandelions and morning glories and blackberries and ferns and a bunch of other things i don't recognise and can't be bothered to look up. occasionally, i creep out there and train the creepers when i'm particularly bored. a few days ago i discovered that several of the mystery stalks were, in fact, deadly foxgloves, on account of them starting to bud and bloom. this is rather baffling on account of my inability to recall if those stalks were there last year (though if it had bloomed last year i'm sure i would have noticed) and my having never seen any foxgloves in the vicinity. So how the hell did they get there? oO
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| A Swagger and a Roguish Glint, and six dozen silk cuts. |
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| May 29 2009, 0:47am |
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as I saw fit to announce to Shawn at five to Noon this cycle, i had a dream in which i was john constantine's lover and had a debate with the queen of england in regards to the re-emergence of d&d genres and public decency.
it really doesn't warrant much more explanation than that.
there was a part about "prince charles and his father sighted at a d&d convention", which was part of the crux of the discussion regarding d&d with her royal majesty. The original question had something to do with celebrity endorsements versus celebrity interests, like, if Prince Charles goes to a d&d convention, can it be called an endorsement if he went because he wanted to?
oh, and between the two of us (john and i), we inevitably killed a whopping 87 people.
The 87 were the remnants of a subterranean red indian tribe who live in these caverns in the shadow of a demonic beast. we told them they'd be safe as we ventured into the beast's domain for our own fel ends. we tried to keep them safe, we really did. protective circles, sacred ground and everything. The one thing we miscalculated was geography. and I don't think we really need to feel guilty about that failure on account of we were right there with them when the ground caved in and toppled beneath us plunging everybody to their dooms.
There were, in fact, three of us in the party, but the dark haired sidekick boy can easily be ignored. he doesn't get very many lines besides the whiney complaining ones and frankly, i'm not all that bought in by timothy hunter, even though he's a damned sight more interesting than Harry Potter. it's an age thing, perhaps. perhaps if i'd been 14 when i read the books of magick i'd be his fanbitch instead of john's. hn.
and as to how i met the queen... she was staying in a spa-hostel the three of us somehow ended up staying at. on top of my bunk. which, it should be pointed out, i was sharing with john, whom she had yet to meet when i woke up. and also that her cause of the moment appeared to be public decency, with the whole frowning on naked body parts and premarital sex thing going. i'm somewhat disappointed, i must admit, that i did not get to witness john scandalising her with his displays of depravity. |
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| tracking backwards vicariously |
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| Apr 24 2009, 0:39am |
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-putting off going to bed
-watched a lot of mind-numbing tv.
-feeling hungry lots lately... not empty, more like... unsatisfied in the dietary department? I'd eat normally. 'd still feel full, but I'd also be hungry like I hadn't had a right meal, like that brainbug that tried to feed off of Fry's brain, dying of starvation on a full stomach.
-transcribed Aiffe's first travel phoneblog without permission. I might get in all kinds of trouble i'm sure, but i don't think she can actually afford to sue. and i was bored. and sadly excluded from her exciting itinerary. I had to make a contribution somehow.
-i'm not sure what i did most of the afternoon, i think i spent a lot of it hanging around the edges waiting for the next moment to show itself.
-conversation with Nigs regarding siblings and their dating habits, among other things. It's a see-saw talking to the old lot. it's always nice, of course, and it's always surprising to me how many friends i found in that one little group, people that I genuinely like and enjoy the company of. Usually there's like 1.5 people out of any set social group that i don't mind too much and that's it. I don't make friends easily. But at the same time, I rarely want to talk to them. I always feel that I'm a disappointment. I guess, I'd always reckoned that they looked up to me in a particular way, some kind of strength or accomplishment or something, the kind of thing that when you see in someone makes you like them. And that I failed everyone who thought of me in a similar way. I'm not conceited enough to care about disappointing the world, only enough to feel sorry towards those I care about. I did not create history. I have yet to take over the world. I can hardly remember my own age, much less made any sort of milestone, though half the things people'd expected me to have done by now truly just baffles me. I met with crisis-level problems, and instead of taking it head-on in-hand and kicking the ass out of it, I ran away at the first chance I had. I don't doubt the legitimacy of that action given the circumstances, and granted that if the same had been going on with someone else I'd tell them to skip out asap too. doesn't change that I'm disappointed.
-woke up from a convoluted disturbing dream about being a serial breaking-and-entering criminal. I had an accomplice of opportunity, a sociopathic murderer who killed rich professional couples in their beds then take over their homes for a little while before moving on. the first time, I broke into a house he'd been settling into. the second time, he broke into an apartment I was burgling. he killed them by electrocution, which was surprisingly not as messy in my dream as I knew it would be. in the dream the bodies were just sort of shrivelled a little and browned around the edges and smelt like burnt roast.
-I am afraid of going back to sleep.
-woke up screaming from a dream about snakes. everywhere. tonnes of them. they'd escaped from somewhere. some went INTO the walls via electric sockets and got fried, but some of them made it out of the walls more or less fine. They were slimey-glistening, and white and red and black, from ones as long as my hand to ones as long as my legs. The odd thing is at the beginning of the dream I had been on some kind of assignment to collect a few of them from some contained environment, and I hadn't been afraid of them. One of them had bitten me, well, sunk its fangs into this protective kneepads I was wearing, and I had been fine about it. just gripped him by the back of the head and yanked him off. I'm not sure why or when that changed, really. There was also a weird interlude in there about trying to throw together a stage event for somebody. |
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| of Biker Mice and fishmen |
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| Apr 6 2009, 7:52am |
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oh media giants, what have you done to my childhood? ;_;
Remember in the very first ever episode of Biker Mice From Mars, Vincent remarks that it's all about the timing... that is true. apparently in 2006, a decade after the series ended, they decided to revive the series. However, production difficulties resulted in the show not hitting its own native north american tv until 2008.
but history and trivia aside, having just watched the "official extended trailer" thingemajig on the new official website, i really just want to hide in a corner and cry... not sure if its out of relief or grief though.
Thoughts, in order of surfacing:
1. ZOMG WTF HAVE YOU DONE TO THEIR BIKES??? *shikushikusshiku*
2. ZOMG WTF HAVE YOU DONE TO THE MICE??? ;;;_;;;
the redesigns are a disaster! an abomination! The bikes were what drew me into the show in the first place. the mice, eh, they sort of grow on ya with time, on account of them being furry mice with antenna. that took a bit of getting used to. the bikes used to be slick. they called to me. and the mice, once you got used to their basic anatomy, they made sense, and were rather cute haha...... the redesign took away everything that made them wonderful visually. The boys look like asian fan ripoffs of themselves. WTF is up with the lime green all over Throttle? Why did his shades morph into last century's design? Why did they mutilate Modo's jawline? They've completely ruined his eyes! And Vinnie... he looks like the strung out latino dealer who hangs out on the street corner weekends. why does his head keep, i dunno, going squiggy and changing shape every other frame?
They made the mice less ripped, to appeal one expects to a more modern audience who are used to scrawny kids who become heroes despite not having the bodies for it PROBLEM: the mice are ex-cons (albeit convicted under the bad guys' court of law). They were freedom fighters, and they're bikers, and btw they're the toughest of the martian biker cavemice. it made SENSE that they'd be ripped and no sense that they're built like your scrawny malnourished TV-nerd. And they got rid of their bucktooth. THEY'VE DEFANGED OUR BIKER MICE!!! *cry*
3. it bugged me hugely that in the "trailer", when Throttle is speaking up close to Carbine and he turns his head, his EYES DO NOT MOVVE. the rest of his head does, but his eyes just kind of floated away off his face in a very disturbing fashion behind his glasses. is it always like that?
BUT
4. but, despite all that, it was well written. it retained the tone of the original that i grew up on almost perfectly. Almost, because i haven't seen the actual complete series yet. and yet, it did not seem like a reprisal of the original (yet), so far, it seems a true sequel, something any fan would be happy about. I mean, the Biker Mice isn't like EVA, where there's no possibility of a graceful continuation after its run lol
5. The voice performances were reprised and like an idiot i was moved by the fact that they still sounded the same even though they didn't move the same.
4 and 5 seem to be strong enough points that i'd probably chase down this "new" series/season like a fanatic when it goes on CN "sometime this year" despite the visual flaws that leave me cringing and shuddering. oh Throttle *shikushikushiku* oh Modo *shikushikushiku* oh Vincent *shikushikushiku*
oh, and 6, while looking at the official character profiles. wth. Clint Eastwood? James Dean? Hoss Cartwright? do you really expect your target audience in this century to recognise those names? >.>
anyway, i'd always thought of Throttle as something closer to the Fonz. |
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ruien's journal