Haven't been blogging Japan because a) tired, and b) figured I was boring most of my friendslist based on the dwindling number of comments. So no full blogposts from me. Instead, have the Flickr photostreams.

Most of the streams aren't too detailed because time spent shopping == nothing particularly photograph-worthy, but I did put in some lengthy explanations on some of the photos I did take, so they're worth checking out if you're interested (particularly the Washinomiya day).

Tomorrow we head to the Tsukiji fish market in the morning so that might be something more interesting. The day after that I fly back to Singapore.


Day 6: Ikebukuro
10 photos


Day 7: The Lucky Star shrine (Washinomiya)
44 photos


Day 8: Shibuya
7 photos, 3 videos





I'm tired and I want to go home.

Our first full day in Tokyo passed in a madness of shopping and elbowing through crowds of people. I went to Harajuku intending to spend money, and spend money I did. Something like six tops, two skirts, a bunch of leggings, and a whole plethora of accessories to go along with. Packed ¥30,000 (about USD300) into my wallet and spent almost all of it. Along the way, managed to grab some good food, meet some of Tokyo's more outrageous denizens, and have dinner with dilettantka and hinoai. Sugoi.

The main attraction, for us, was Takeshita dori, the little street that could--crammed from end to end with shops hawking clothes and bags and accessories for the trendy kids of Tokyo. And it's got benri--convenience--down to an art: get off the train at Harajuku, follow the big bright signs that say "Takeshita dori", and bam! The street is right in your face the moment you step out of the ticket gantry. No maps needed. Just cross the road and you're on your way to a day's worth of browsing the colorful, beckoning, overflowing stores down its maybe-hundred-and-fifty meter length.

Here's a very brief pictorial recap of our day there-- mostly I was too busy buying stuff to take pictures.


One of the places we patronized hugely was this shop called ACDC Rags, which had multiple outlets around Takeshita dori. They sold all sorts of punk apparel, frills and checkers and skulls and metal studs. I bought a pair of boots and a sling bag from them.


( Cosplayers, and madness )

Here's a little video of Meiji-jingu-mae, where my sister wonders about the nose strip popularized by (I believe) the Gazette's Reita.

Tomorrow we head to Akiba: Otaku heaven!

Day three had been reserved for traveling: from Kyoto back to Tokyo, and then bashing around Tokyo until we'd finally located our hostel, and then riding on the Yamanote line like crazy bastards getting used to commuting in Japan.

It went sort of something as planned.


We walked back to the Kyoto Tower to do some last-minute souvenir shopping. And while we were there, we saw something quite unusual--or perhaps quite usual, by Japanese standards:


Then it was Shinkansen time, back to Tokyo. We ate bento we bought from the station, as well as a few mementoes we got from Kyoto:


We got to Tokyo and onto the Yamanote line without a hitch. That wasn't the hard part of our trip. The hard part... was to come later.


( Getting lost in Tokyo! )

And here is the video of the day: the Ameyoko open air market. Deliciously crowded and lively.


Here's the flickr stream for Day 3. As usual, bookmark it if you are interested in seeing more photos later-- I will probably upload more after I get back to Singapore. This is a brief (very brief) recap, after all.

NEXT UP: HARAJUKU AND THE WALL OF PEOPLE... or so I've heard about the conditions of Harajuku on a Sunday. But we must catch the cosplayers and the Goth Lolis in action!

P.S. I know I have a metric shiton of comments to get back to on the previous posts-- sorry! I will get to them... eventually. A bit short of time here, I am.

We got up early and hacked our way to Kyoto station, where we caught the 8:04AM Shinkansen to Hiroshima. Our destination: the A-bomb done and the memorial park.

Luckily for us, there is a electric streetcar that goes from the Shinkansen station to right in from of the A-bomb done. The station's even called Genbaku Dome-mae.


The dome is the beginning of a series of interconnected parks and memorials around the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which documents the bombing.



( Memorials and okonomiyaki )

Tomorrow, we head back to Tokyo and settle in. In the meantime, here's a video I took of the Shinkansen arriving at the station in Hiroshima:

pkyyr and menelvir were trying to stick their fingers into the shot while I was filming >8(


Here's the flickr stream for Day 2. As usual, bookmark it if you are interested in seeing more photos later-- I will probably upload more after I get back to Singapore. This is a brief (very brief) recap, after all.

So! Day 1 in Japan with pkyyr and menelvir. After a long overnight journey which was so empty I got to sleep across a row of chairs in cattle class, we arrived in Japan, and spent the next six hours shuttling from highspeed train to highspeed train until we finally arrived in Kyoto.

Kyoto/Hiroshima is the scenic leg of our trip, all culture and scenery and sane, not-at-all-brain-melting things. Or at least, as un-brain-melty as it can get when it involves people like my sister and I.

A brief pictorial recap!


We arrived in Tokyo in the morning, struggled out of the airport and somehow managed to not only buy our passes, get our tickets and locate the train, but also do so without getting lost. 2 years of Japanese language studies have paid off, apparently!



I did some Japanese studying on the train journey there, which was a rather cramped and uncomfortable affair for someone traveling with 10 days' baggage. I was up to the eyes in stuff, and I kept elbowing the poor salaryman in the seat next to mine everytime I tried to retrieve something from my bag.


It took us a bloody long time (and a lot of trekking, 10 days' baggage and all) before we managed to locate K's House Kyoto, shoved into a small side street. After checking in, a sort-of lunch and a quick shower, we set out to explore on foot and search for Kiyomizu-dera (清水寺)-- the love shrine, and I don't mean the dirty sort. It's old, it's famous, and it's also right on top of a hill overlooking the city.

( A bajillion pictures of Kyoto and Kiyomizu-dera )

And that's my very brief recap of the day. I leave you here with a video I shot while we were walking through the tiny back streets of Kyoto. I call it "The Trouble With Tomare". JSYK, "Tomare (止まれ)" means "STOP!" in Japanese.




Here's the flickr stream for Day 1. Bookmark it if you are interested in seeing more photos of Kyoto-- I have tons more, which I will probably upload after I get back to Singapore. This is a brief (very brief) recap, after all.

Up next: Day 2, Day Trip To Hiroshima! Hopefully, I'll be able to get some blogging done tomorrow since we apparently arrive back at the hostel fairly late. If not, you'll hear from me on Saturday when we finally get back to Tokyo.

PinkDot! My Very First GLBT Event was a blast, I ran into people I knew, I met a whole bunch of people I hadn't known. I met up and had dinner with an old secondary school classmate whom I hadn't caught up with in years, and whom I just found out was gay today. That was awesome. Hung out or met up with ataraxistence, forochel, renovak, htenywg, glazzal, malyntine, the usual #awaresg folks (@missbossy, @ctham, @bruincoffee, @bionic_creative, @Wolfgang_, @wynlim, etc.), plus a whole lot of other friends-of-friends and assorted folks, including someone I'd hooked up with on OkCupid (hi Kai Er!)

In other words, it was awesome. A great day spent in the company of many like-minded, open-minded and/or openly gay folks. I can't really put the scope of it into words, so I will let my photos (and videos!) do the talking.



( PHOTOS, 20+ OF THEM )


And now, I will leave you with this. Due to my abominable videography skills, and the fact that I tried shooting all my videos by waving my camera above my head and hoping I would get something good, all the videos I took turned out disjointed, random, and worthy of Blair Witch-eqsue motion sickness fits. So I tried to salvage the scraps by snipping them together and pasting music over them. At 1AM. On iMovie. A program that I actually have no idea how to use.

I was tempted to use "Free" by the Lighthouse Family as a backing track, but the Glambert won out in the end.

My Flickr set for this event (with larger versions of all the photos here)
ETA!: The actual Pink Dot! Via Twitter
Son of ETA! Official PinkDot video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9gDazG4cC0 I'm in it @ 00:28 -- check out the stupid face I made!

Last night I attended the first ever #awaresg_tweetup, which was also the first ever tweetup of its kind in Singapore. It even beat out the planned first-ever Singapore tweetup scheduled for next Thursday (sorry, guys, but we got there first, hah!)

As a tweetup should naturally be, this was a spontaneous event that was conceptualized and organized entirely on Twitter one night before (with its own hastag!) We met up at a beer place by the river, had laughs, beer, some food, more beer, some really good conversations, and then a little more beer. Topics of conversation ranged from MOE's suspension of Aware's CSE to our favorite #awaresg tweets from the EGM to how various American TV shows not just lost the plot and jumped the shark but also slaughtered it and made shark's fin soup with the results. Jokes about what a letdowns we all were, actually spending all our time talking to people instead of incessantly tweeting about the tweetup. A sudden inexplicable flurry of "PLEASE FONDLE MY BUM".

Did I already mention that there was a lot of beer?

Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles, we discussed Important Stuff too. Stuff like migrating/transitioning the We Are Aware website post-EGM, now that it's no longer a Hub For A Revolution--and I will keep folks posted on that, as I have volunteered to helping out with it in my capacity. We are Serious People, about Serious Business (bum-fondling notwithstanding)!

Finally, as night marched towards next-day, we showed off our stunning math prowess by collecting so much excess money to foot bill that we ended up with a impromptu $70 donation to AWARE, as accepted by Martha, the exco member who joined us. ("Are you guys sure about this!?" "...er, yeah, we have no idea who's supposed to get that money back, so keep it, it'll help towards the $90,000 dollars.")

It was good times. It was really good times.

And here's the amazing thing about it. A month ago, even two weeks ago, I had no idea who any of these people were. I didn't even get to meet any of them during the EGM. All my interaction with them was through that baffling, delightful and often overwhelming you've-got-to-use-it-to-get-it phenomenon, Twitter. Yet within five minutes of meeting each other we were talking and throwing around jokes like old friends. We had so much in common, so much to talk about.

Looking at it now, it was almost as though Twitter and its hashtags had magically drawn together a whole bunch of people who were alike in spirit, and plonked them together IRL. Like the Internet has been doing since the dawn of its creation, but on a much faster, 140-character sized scale. Instant community, for the instant gratification generation (not defined by age, but by mindset). Just add beer.

If we were ever to invent rainbow sparkles that magically bestow the power of telepathy to all in its radius, I imagine the result would looks something like the Twittersphere.

After all, we can all appreciate a bum-fondling joke or two, can't we?



From top to bottom, L to R: @Scubear, @hanifn, @bruincoffee, @ctham, Jac, @gtuckerkellogg. Then @missbossy [the ringleader], @bionic_creative, yours truly, @germaine, Yen & Martha. Had to put on the flash because poor lighting required much steadier hands than the poor waiter had (it takes a lot of practice to figure out my camera on no flash)


ETA: And just because I can! Aware-related linkdump!
Callan/@ctham's tweetup post
How to win an EOGM and win lotsa friends An old post, but still full of delicious, delicious lulz.
Aware saga on Reuters!
Aware saga on the Economist!
Our Feminist Mentos featured on RollOn Friday, a UK blog for lawyers Got to love droll British humor-- sorry, humour.
Dogemperor's post on the WayangParty site (P.S. dogemperor, you were mentioned at the tweetup! You're famous in Singapore now! Ha!)

So, by now, everybody who's been following the Aware issue is already I don't think there's anything more I can contribute to the Aware reports that aren't already out there. There are excellent transcripts from Wayang Party, videos and coverage from The Online Citizen, blog posts from everyone, and tons and tons of videos, photos and tweets all flying around the Internet. I can't possibly add anything more useful to that.

What I can do, however, is write a long-winded, hyperbolic, needlessly-dramatic and certainly very backwards-looking-rose-tinted photoessay-cum-personal-account of my day at the EOGM, complete with photos randomly taken in black-and-white because I was having too much fun with my camera's color filters.

So have at it!

THE LONG ROAD IN
I met thurisaz83 sometime around 12.30PM, half an hour after registration had opened. By that time the queue had already snaked its way through the fourth floor of the Suntec convention center, folded itself into crenulations, spilled down the stairs and crept across the third floor. Hundreds had shown up to join the queue hours before the counters were open-- typical of Singaporeans!


The queue just got longer and longer as it got closer to 2PM. In the end, the EGM was pushed back to 2.30 just so that everybody could be seated. All in all, the estimate was that some 3,000 or so people turned up. It was a massive, massive event. Supporters of the Josie Lau's exco were in red shirts, while volunteers from We Are Aware were wearing white shirts, and handing out signs, flowers, and bottles of water.

There was a separate, shorter line for people who wanted to sign up on the spot and then join the EGM, a route which htenywg took. Not sure how many new members Aware got that day but I figure it must have been a few hundred folks at least.

We managed to get into the hall somewhere around 1PM. By then the front third had already filled up, and there were still hundreds more to be seated. The non-voting associate members--men, non-Singaporean/PR women and girls between 15-18--were separated from the voting members on the far side of the conference hall, and given hard white plastic chairs to sit on (instead of the plush green ones that we got). We thought it was rather unkind, and one of the first things the old guard did after declaring Josie Lau's exco ousted was to invite the associate members over--to enthusiastic cheering on both sides.

( INSIDE THE HALLS )

( PUSHING FOR THE VOTE )

( THE LONG WAIT )

( VICTORY! )

ETA: Forgot to add, and perhaps am too late with this, but bigger versions of each photo are available @ my Flickr photostream. Enjoy!

Alright, for a change, here's something completely unrelated to the ongoing Aware saga. A photoshoot of my Pinky St. girls!

I have 7 of them at the moment: the first two whose photos I've already posted, then the three that I adopted from shinrei_24, and then finally the two who arrived last week. I'm thinking of getting two more: the one of the kid from The Sky Crawlers and this one named Caine.

Yes, I am rather obsessed with collecting these, it is clear.


Here's a couple from an older shoot of Ana-Marie and Collette, when they were the only two I had. Yes, they are a couple.


(The rest of the girls are just friends. ;))

Now this one is specially for pigtail78:

And poor Matt's all, "I guess I'm not getting any..." Bawwww.

OMG WHY AM I SLASHING AI CONTESTANTS NAO WTF JUNE WTFF

Some backstory. I RP Ribbons Almark on the #g00tweets Gundam00 Twitter RP. We get to talking about skittles a lot. Not the candy, the Innovators. Sometime during one of our exchanges I was suddenly compelled to go to Skittles.com and check them out. Which was when I discovered that the Skittles.com homepage had been transformed into the Twitter search page for the word "Skittles" and that ALL OUR SKITTLE-RELATED TWEETS WERE SHOWING UP ON IT.**

Several hours of clicking on links and pictures later, I had developed a horrifying craving for Skittles. (GOD DAMN BUT THOSE INSIDIOUS MARKETING TACTICS WORK.)

So before I headed for Japanese class this week I went Skittles-hunting in town. I managed to corner a packet of the damn things in a 7-11 and made away with them. As we walked into a narrow, crowded underpass roped into half to manage the traffic flow, I giggled to my sister, "Who needs food when you have Skittles?"

And just then, as we were crammed into the crowd at the barrier's edge, next to the stream of folks going in the opposite direction...


A RANDOM SETSUNA WALKED PAST ME.


... ..."WTF?!?!?!"

It was a random group of cosplayers; aside from the Setsuna in the red scarf and the mad spiky hair, there was at least one character from Bleach amongst their number. Walking around the heart of town in full costume. I have no idea what they were doing, but I very much regret that the crowds were moving too fast in either direction for me to go up to the Setsuna cosplayer and intone, "SETSUNA F. SEIEI". Or, as my sister suggested, "INNOVATOR". Before running away giggling like the madwoman that I am.

Missed chances, missed chances!

But at least I didn't miss the chance to do a Skittle and gunpla/gashapon photoshoot after I got home.





In case you're asking: yes, I nommed all the Skittles in those pictures after that. No, I obviously don't give a flying fuck about poisoning from lead in paints. IT IS CRIMINAL TO HAVE SKITTLES AND NOT EAT THEM, OKAY?


**(Screencaps of Skittles.com or it didn't happen!)

After weeks of anticipation, my 2nd set of Prop Plus Petit figurines came earlier this week. I got a box of ten, and as expected of it, got one of every figure available--no repeats.

As expected of me, I pulled out a few to do a little PPP photoshoot. Miss Hallelujah Productions is proud to present, for your viewing pleasure, a double bill:






( Pretty Woman starring Tieria Erde )

( The Lament Of Hallelujah Lecter starring H/Allelujah Haptism )


And now, time for a shameless plug! Anybody interested in playing a Gundam00 RP on Twitter? So far, there's a Ribbons Almark account (owned by me) and a Red Haro account (owned by anibunny). It would be awesome to find more people to play with. ETA: NOW WE HAVE LYLE, SETSUNA, BRING, MARIE, TIERIA, MILEINA, H/ALLELUJAH NEIL, a HILLING (Healing?), and a REGENE. \o///

I'd probably run the Ribbons account like a normal Twitter account, responding to stuff in the news, replying to other Gundam00 character accounts (or actually, to anyone who sends @ replies to my account). I'm thinking the almost-anarchic structure of  would allow for multiple accounts all playing the same character, for real people butting in to have conversations with the fake characters (e.g. the immensely popular God & Socktington accounts for example).

We could even have real accounts pretending to retweet stuff from characters who don't actually have an account running.  We'd just have to tie together all the RP tweets with the hashtag #g00tweets. And it's one of those real-time, tweet-when-you-can streams so there isn't even an obligation to take part regularly, only just when you're free. And people who just want to watch can simply do a search for all the tweets tagged #g00tweets.

The more I consider it, the more interesting it seems as an RP format. Think it's a good idea? Anyone want to play along?

....Bueller?

RANDOM MINI PICSPAM TIEMZ.

Last night I skipped gym to rearrange the posters on the wall of my room. Took off a few old LOTR/Star Trek pinups, as well as a few dull-looking Death Note promo flyers, and put up a few new things, including a giant LaMB poster illustrated by the head dude @ IFS (aka artgerm on DA--he's apparently a huge hit there, I hear). His art is effin' gorgeous. Hell, the only thing I got when I went to AFA last year was an eighty-dollar artbook put up by IFS that I got him to autograph. Heh.

I'm quite pleased with the results (mmm, widescreen function on my camera):


Now. I've recently moved tables in the office, of my own accord, and have given up the iMac that I was using on the account of it being old and slower than a bowl of molasses floating backwards in a bathtub. As a result, the Virtue gunpla that was sitting in front of said iMac has been orphaned, and plunked on my neighbor's desk for the sheer amusement value.

Virtue has been having several... adventures on her desk.




Disney 1, Bandai 0!


ETA: THANKS TO A COMMENT BY french_noodles:

EEEEK MOM IT'S LOOKING AT ME MAKE IT STOPPPPPPP

ETA 2: THANKS TO A COMMENT BY piyomon:


IT WAS AN ACCIDENT :3

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Well well well. Look who's posting again. This time I need help from you guys. In the form of a POLL and OPINIONS and everything.

It regards Gundam b00bies! And the matter of some icons!

Under a cut because HELLO SPOILERS UP TO EPISODE 23:

( CUT CUT STABBY STABBY CUT CUT )

ETA: I've just thought of a question. Should I seek a psychiatrist's help if I find the gunshot deaths of several animated characters to be somewhat... erotic? I mean, this is just a hypothetical question, you understand, but in the event that I actually do, you know... should I?

I've had a smashingly radical couple of weeks out here, with a bucketful of photos to show for it.

But rather than overwhelm my already straining bandwidth by posting them all, I'm going to post my lovely ECUs of food. FOOD SPAM AHOY!

Photos here were taken from:

• My sister's 21st birthday gig with relatives @ Sakura restaurant(20090221)
• The first Singapore Writers' meetup I attended (20090224)
• Dinner w/friends @ Sushi Tei (20090227)
• Healthy Potluck! @ the office (20090302)
• Dinner w/colleagues @ Kuishinbo (20090304)
• Karen's wedding lunch (20090307)
• Amazing (AMAAAAZING) swing session + dinner with thurisaz83 and her friend and her friend's friends (20090307)

Plus there's a random photo of a huge chocolate bar.

Ready to set your mouth watering....?




Waistline is going to pay for all that PIGGING OUT. Weeks and weeks of monster workouts in the gym, here I come!

I've had my 3G-enabled iPhone for about half a year now, and I've gotten used to having the Internet in my pocket: instant access to email, IM, Twitter and LJ no matter where I am in the country, even sixteen feet underground on a moving subway train. Nifty? You bet. I've sent work emails while on the bus to the train station, browsed ontd_political on the cycle machine at the gym for breaking news during the election season, even carried out 2 IM conversations while jaywalking across a busy 6-lane traffic junction. I've done lots of neat stuff.

But it was today that I realized the iPhone's true, gobsmacking potential for awesome.

The backstory: in the morning my boss pounced on me and announced, out of the blue, "Around four-ish today we're going to our partner studio to discuss the project we'll be working on, you and I." Fine and well. I'd been there before, not a big deal. 'Cept for the part where I had exactly six hours to jazz up the project pitch I'd written a week before so that it would be presentable.

But I pulled it off. Skin of my teeth. Sent the final document to print at four on the dot. Breathed a sigh of relief, started packing my stuff in order to hit the road.

Then Bossman came up to me and said, "Alright, you'll be joining us at the studio for a short while to pitch your story. After that, you'll be taking this to meet my wife at Dempsey Road for another project meeting." And he handed me a mockup sample of a book we wanted to put into printing.

Meet her what where?

He explained in the cab on the way to the studio. Botanical Gardens, British embassy, Gleneagles Hospital... somewhere in that vicinity. I nodded. I knew the general area. Big fucking wilderness somewhere in between a nature reserve and downtown. I have a hard enough time navigating urban areas with right-angle roads and plenty of landmarks, much less remote suburbs with road layouts like birds' intestines. Just great. I got the bosses' wife's number, figuring that I could call her in the very likely event I got lost on the way.

We met up with the studio guys, I pitched my thing, it all went well. 5.30 my boss said, "I think you'd better go. You know the place, right? It's at Dempsey Hill... some place called Jones The Grocer."

No, I didn't know the place, and I had no idea why there would be a meeting in a grocer's place, either. Fantastic. Full of misgivings, I hailed a cab from the street. "I'm going to Dempsey Hill," I told the driver. "Someplace called Joe The Grocer, I think."

He frowned at me. "Dempsey Road?"

"No, Dempsey Hill. Er, it's near the Botanical Gardens, I think."

"Oh. Okay."

I got in, clutching the book mockup, and he drove off.

Half an hour later, as the taxi idled in a snarl of traffic just off the Botanical Gardens, the driver said to me, pointing out the windscreen: "Look, it's all jammed up down here, all the cars trying to turn into Dempsey Road. It might take another half-hour just to get all the way in. Why don't I drop you here, and you can walk right up? Dempsey Road is just up that hill, and you'll get there faster walking." And he waved his hand in the direction of the window, where a path by the road led up a slope crested by a car park.

I got out of the taxi. See, the thing was, I did recognize the place. I had been there once, when we had a joint company dinner at some fancy Indian restaurant with the folks from Animax over the LaMB project. At that time, I had been in a producer's car, and he had known where we were going. And we had gotten lost on Dempsey Hill, because the area was a labyrinth of tiny curving interconnecting roads all labeled "DEMPSEY RD", peppered with dozens upon dozens of chi-chi little eateries and specialty shops snuggled against each other. Finding the hill was not an issue. Finding the exact spot we were supposed to go on the hill itself? Not so easy.

I dialed my bosses' wife. No answer. I remembered what my boss said: she would be starting the meeting without me, because of my pitch. She wouldn't be picking up the phone.

So. There I was. Alone, standing in the middle of the road with my book mockup and my lousy sense of direction and not even a clue as to whether I was to meet them in a cafe cleverly named Joe The Grocer's or an actual grocer's shop. Fuck. It looked like I was screwed. Dead. Done for.

And then I thought: Hang on, doesn't my iPhone come with a Maps application? The one I thought I'd never get to use?

I slid the app panels over and tapped on the Maps icon. Splash screen came up: "Maps would like to make use of your current location." Another tap: ALLOW.

A target icon flashed up for a few minutes, and then: a big blue dot on a satellite picture of the big fucking wilderness. Why hello there GoogleMaps. I switched to pure Map view, and here I was, on an unlabelled road parallel to Holland Road, and there it was, the fabled tangled multi-tongued self-consuming ouroboros of Dempsey Road, not a hundred meters ahead.

I began walking, and as I walked, the big blue dot started to move. In the direction away from Dempsey Road.

"This thing," I said to myself in wonder, "live updates itself! Holy crap!"

I reoriented the map in my mind, and started walking the right way, towards Dempsey Road. iPhone before me as I tracked my progress, I felt like an extra on the set of a Star Trek film, holding up my tricorder as scanned the vicinity for Joe The Grocer's.

Up the main fork of Dempsey road. A welcome fountain, with dozens of little signs pointing the way to various eateries. A tiny blue one read: JONES THE GROCER. Fine, Jones the Grocer, not Joe. I had remembered the name wrongly, with a hearty "fuck you" in the direction of Joe The Plumber. The blue sign had a little arrow that seemed to be pointing in no particular direction at all, so I continued down the road in hopes that Jones The Grocer would eventually show up.

Five hundred meters later and coming to a curve in the road that vanished somewhere in the horizon, I realized that with the dozens of shops in the area, I might take hours on foot to comb the hill and find the one I wanted. There was no-one around to ask for directions, except for the occasional passing car. And even if they knew what I was talking about, I was lousy with remembering directions.

I looked down at my iPhone screen, and saw a big blue button labelled "Directions". And thought, ah, fuck it. What have I got to lose?

I dropped a pin on my current location, fired up Directions, and in the "To:" field, filled up JONES THE GROCER. Not even an address. Just a painfully generic name. With a shrug I hit ENTER and sent my request flying out to the wide world with its million places that might be associated with "JONES" and "GROCER". My wild shot in the dark.

The map came back. A red pin appeared. A thick purple line, down the roads. And the words: "408 m 1 minute".


Follow the purple brick road! [1]

I realized at that moment that my iPhone, like Jack Sparrow's magic compass or Sophie's ring in Howl's Moving Castle, was showing me, live, a guide from where I was to the place I wanted. Every single step of the way.

I started walking. My blue dot started moving down the purple path. Down, down, down, until I came to a very Frostian fork in the road. I started down the one on the left, and I watched as the blue dot wandered off the purple path and into the grey unmarked wilderness-- a side road so insignificant it didn't even merit showing on a street directory. I went back, took the road not travelled, and the blue dot resumed its journey down the Road To Jones The Grocer.

"Holy fuck," I said, lost for all words save sacred profanity. "Holy flying fuck."


Lay on, MacPhone!

The walk, in fact, took me five minutes, as the instructions given had actually been meant for a car. Tapping on the pedestrian symbol gave you the exact same thing, except that the route was labelled "408m 4 minutes". 1 minute for photography. No separate paths for pedestrians-- everyone was expected to drive in. Too crazy to make it in on foot. Apparently.

Jones The Grocer turned out to be a fancy affair that sold both light meals and provisions, situated in a cluster of outlets at one of Dempsey's many stump ends. I walked in, triumphant, to find the bosses' wife in animated conversation. She seemed to delighted to see me. "Oh, you managed to find your way in here!"

"I did! I followed my iPhone's instructions!"

"I didn't know it could do that."

"Well, neither did I. I'm really impressed."

And I truly was.

You can only imagine what this discovery means for a geographically-challenged halfwit like myself. I don't have to go crazy finding places that are hard to get to anymore. Like middle-of-fucking-nowhere industrial complex offices. Or thurisaz83's house, one semi-detached in a labyrinthine estate of hundreds, fondly nicknamed "Longkang (rural storm drain) Land" for its refusal to be easily navigated. I've memorized the way in now, but the first time I tried finding the way myself I only remembered the first half of the route correctly, and spent half an hour wandering the inroads of the estate in a daze of confusion before thurisaz83 managed to rescue me.

Had I had my iPhone then, I might have saved everyone the trouble. Drop location pin. Type in 33 [ADDRESS REDACTED]. Follow purple line. Reach destination.

I thought that with my background as a science major, fully trained to work in a research lab, I would cease to be amazed by technological advancements. Nothing would be too wondrous for me, I would have seen it all, cloning and molecular histochemistry and nanotech.

And then things like these happen.

Of course, if I were a real child of the Web 2.0 I would have been firing up my Twitter client and live-updating everyone with my progress as I made my discovery. As it were, unfortunately, I was too busy squeeing "OMG OMG I'M NOT GOING TO GET LOST OMG!!!!!1!!!!oneoneone!!!" to remember. Darn!


In conclusion: Google + iPhone == EPIC LEGENDARY WIN. I was having a pretty awesome day already, but this? Made it a million times better.




[1] The blue dot looks like it's off the road, but it's really because I was under the foliage at the side of the road, so that sunlight wouldn't mess with the iPod screen for photographing. Sensitive GPS is sensitive. Also, if you'll notice, the entire clusterfuck of roads there constitutes the existence of Dempsey Road in all its plurality. Excellent stuff.

[2] Also Relevant: Lyrics to Immaculate Machine's Dear Confessor, where I got the title from. Refer also to this post, I have the song for D/L. It's fucking awesome.

So this is how I spent my Valentine's Day evening. Getting drunk with a bunch of kids at my sister's 21st birthday chalet party.

In short: it was good eatings, and good fun. The chalet we rented, at Pasir Ris, was large and well maintained (except for the walls, which badly needed a fresh paint job), came with a functional kitchen and its own BBQ pit, and was all in all good value for money. My sister invited some dozen-odd friends, a small core of which--mostly the crazy anime-watching otaku geek gang-- stayed over and somehow managed not to burn things down.

Came back yesterday, spent the day alternatively uploading photos and videos to Flickr, napping to make up to the lack of sleep the night before, and prepping this post. (And catching The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button at the cinema, but that's a whole other story.)

Saturday evening to Sunday morning. The essence of madness distilled and bottled, to go with chips and cake. Good things come with age.

Here's the formula.

1. You take a bunch of otaku kids for whom default mode is preset to "crazy".


2. You add copious amount of this.
   


3. Shenanigans result.

Here are pictures of the mayhem, numbering 30-odd, handpicked out of the literal hundreds that were taken that night.

( The BBQ )

( THE CAKE WAS A LIE )

( CHOCOLATE HULK SMASH!!! )

( Games, games, games )

( The Crystal Apple Puzzle )


We also sat around telling ghost stories in the dark, which didn't work out because my sister had somehow expected the army boys she'd invited to not tell the scary army ghost stories that every army boy hears of during the two years he's serving his National Service. Then we progressed to sitting in a circle and telling lame jokes, dirty jokes, or lame and dirty jokes.

That went down a lot better.

(Unfortunately, no pictures or video of either event exists because everything I took with my camera during that period turned out pitch black, with huge red splotches all over. And there was this mysterious little girl in white hanging in the background....)

PRESENTS!
I feel obliged to share this, the most epic of gifts that my sister's BFF got for her. While I'm glad that I managed to capture down her LOLWUT OMFG!!!! DDDDDD: reaction for posterity, I am quite dismayed that after several months I still haven't figured out that flipping my camera horizontally while filming will result in video that will be irreversibly rotated.


I took photos of the inside as thurisaz83 flipped through it in utter bemusement. NSFW, unless pictures of two guys having buttsex while the bottom grinds against a third gagged & bound guy on the bed are par for the course for your office (in which case, where the hell do you work, and are you guys looking to hire a writer by any chance?)

( And from your lips he drew the Hallelujah... )

Other presents included a giant calculator you could kill a kitten with, phrasebooks for making out in Japanese, fluffy Mokona slippers, a SD Gundam00 doujin and A Brief History Of Time. Yes. Of the whole pile of presents, the only one that approached any semblance of normality was a book about quantum mechanics written by Stephen Hawking.

Also, we had a surprise frog invasion.

And now, I provide the concluding statements for my Alcohol + Geeks == MAYHEM thesis.

( Alcohol + Geeks == Mayhem )


My sister invited one of our cousins, who brought along a friend. They were the only normal people at the party, the poor things.

Their reactions for most of the night looked something like this.


Poor normals.

Lacking the time to post anything concrete today, I present to you: a couple of photos of the candy I ate today (sitting in the designers' area == plenty of food around, always). And a screenshot of my desktop.


skittles club


gummi bear death row


iDock

I have a sneaking suspicion that I miiiight have a problem.

Missed today's Gundam live again, as usual. Instead, am freshly returned from lunch and a catch-up with a bunch of friends from secondary school. Good times, all around ♥

Conversation tends to skew in certain directions depending on the composition of the group; with this group of friends we tend to talk about the past, a lot. How things used to be. How much things have changed. And how everybody we knew back then is doing now.

Nostalgia, perhaps; maybe a touch of sadness. Some lingering regret at not having turned out like the others did, elevated to normal and orderly lives which trace nice hard straight paths with a clear road ahead. Instead there's a sense that I took a hard right on a plateau with a very small horizon, and have since then found myself wading into the progressively murkier waters of a swamp.

But that's a story for another day.

Finally, a photo, because I finally have a halfway decent photo of myself with short hair.


From L to R: Melissa, Debby, Jocelyn, yours truly


I picked up both of Obama's books yesterday at a one-day, store-wide sale. Three chapters into Dreams From My Father I can say this: he is as amazing a writer as he is a politician. Hot damn, it's not as if I needed to fangirl him any harder. GADDAM IT! (with a additional ":P" in logam's general direction.)