Looks like this is gonna be harder than I thought.

My new year’s resolution is basically to make this a “a-photo-a-day” type of blog. It’s pretty unrealistic to expect that it’ll be possible for me to post a new photo everyday, so I’m thinking that 4 or 5 a week will probably be decent. So yeah, if I’m able to keep this up for the rest of the month, it’s going to be my official new year’s resolution. Smart, right?

Caracal's Gabriel De Souza

Camera: Olympus E-PL2

Lens:  Voigtlander Nokton 25mm f/0.95

Exposure: 1/100 sec at f/1.4, ISO 800

Headed over to Home Club on Saturday (10.12.11) for Wake Me Up Music’s farewell concert, dubbed One More for the Road. It was definitely a challenge shooting with a prime, manual focus lens on the E-PL2. Shooting at such a wide aperture meant that most of the shots I got were slightly off-focus at best.

This one’s probably my favourite of the night because I managed to focus it just right, I’m reasonably happy with the composition and because Caracal is seriously awesome.

Feel free to comment and critique but keep it clean and constructive

My favourite photos taken during the month of May 2011.

(Source: http://www.ageofbattles.ru Author: Age of Battles)

“Oi, you there! You blaspheme against God Almighty! And as such, God’s judgement will be dealt upon you on this day, infidel! Fire and brimstone await you!”

And as they slowly assumed their battle-stance, gradually maneuvering towards me, the only thing going through my mind was “omfgimtotallygonnadie”. However, just as I was about to abandon all hope, a strange feeling welled inside me. Warmth began to creep back into my extremities, and all of a sudden, this huge-ass organic anime sword materialized in my hand.

This bears an uncanny resemblance to the sword that was in my dream.

Trust me, it was totally awesome, and it doesn’t end there.

Sparks of energy began to arc off from the tip of my sword. The flickering lights danced across the terrified expressions of my adversaries. Just as the energy build-up reached critical mass, a beam of pure devastation was unleashed upon the knights, sending them off to a premature meeting with their maker.

Moral of the story? Anime is more awesome than world history.

I know that the tone of my posts tends to drift towards the doleful side, so from now on I’ll try to blog more about my day-to-day activities and hope that it makes for interesting reading.

Also, since I’ve recently started playing Minecraft, I’ll try to blog about my progress through the game since it’s kinda AWESOME.

Ok, now that the preliminaries are out-of-the-way….

Part I: An Unfamiliar Dawn

I came into existence along a deserted beach. I swiveled around to take in the magnitude of my surroundings and it dawned on me that I had assumed a perilous undertaking. The beach stretched out from east to west, and the ocean lay to the north of it. The part of the world that I had manifested in was a mountainous region that was fairly temperate, with an abundance of trees and green grass. I spotted a thicket of trees towards the east, and trekked over to harvest the wood that would be used to build my first shelter.

After harvesting a good amount of wood, I proceeded south-east to look over the hills that were adjacent to the beach. After a minute of hiking, I spotted what I can only describe as an immense cliff. It was like a sand dune, composed of rock and earth. Immediately, the Kehlsteinhaus (more commonly known as the Eagle’s Nest) came to mind, and I decided to construct my variation of the Eagle’s Nest. I managed to scale the mountain with a few minutes of daylight to spare, and quickly began to construct a rudimentary shelter that would protect me from the dangers of the night.

After making sure that I was safe, I did a bit of interior decorating before settling in for the night.

When the next morning dawned, I made my way towards the west to get a better gauge of how I wanted my new home to look like.

Over the course of the next few days, I began to gather the resources that I needed to continue construction. On one of the days, I ventured too far out into the wilderness and found myself utterly lost. I had no choice but to let myself be killed by a pair of zombies, losing the bulk of my inventory in the process. However, I re-spawned back at the beach, and was finally able to find my way back home.

Although I was temporarily thwarted by my unfortunate misadventure, I managed to harvest back the resources that I needed and my dream home slowly came into being.

After a few days of construction…

Looking into the new room from the original room.

From the opposite summit.

The view from ground level.

What a view, eh?

So that’s it for the first post! Please comment if you have any suggestions/ideas about how I should proceed with the Eagle’s Nest!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 141 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 783kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 22nd with 43 views. The most popular post that day was Never talk to strangers..

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, crappyass.blogspot.com, unicornbraces.livejournal.com, and formspring.me.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for zqrtsdv wordpress, lbgoh youtube, real identity of jason hahn and saffy and amanda, shoot achmed, and wordress.org lbgoh.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Never talk to strangers. September 2009
2 comments

Feng Shui. February 2010
5 comments

something about cats and bags. April 2010
4 comments

Crutch – Part 1 March 2010
4 comments

Choice. January 2010
1 comment

Just added something new to the blog layout. If you look to the top of the page you’ll see a link titled ‘SoundCloud’ – it’ll bring you to the embedded SoundCloud player, where you’ll be able to listen to my home recordings and stuff like that. So hopefully I’ll be putting up more content before the holiday’s over  :)

Here’s something I’ve been working on the past 2 days or so, it’s more or less complete.

Composed by Charles Tan

Recorded and mixed by yours truly.

Technology’s been a bitch towards me for the past 48 hours or so. YouTube refuses to load videos for me, Microsoft Word is frustrating me with auto-formatting that doesn’t work, my spare mouse broke down, Google Wave is a pathetic collaborative platform blah blah blah.

So I’m here, taking a break from my project report which is due on Thursday. Just finished putting whatever everyone else has done into a single document (I’m telling you it’s NOT EASY) and I have to come up with a content page, an executive summary, a conclusion AND I have to edit the whole thing (grammatical and spelling errors etc.) by tomorrow morning.

I need to kill something.

Anyway, if you’re one of the (very) few who follow me on Twitter, you would have noticed me saying something along the lines of wanting to change course. I didn’t reply anyone because I was seriously thinking very, very hard about it for like 3 weeks and didn’t want to announce anything prematurely.

Here’s the thing, I feel incredibly depressed every time I think about school. I feel depressed not because I’m stuck studying something that I hate, but because it’s something that I have absolutely no interest in and no passion for. I find myself unable to care about my school work, barring the electives that I actually chose to take. And the thought of having to build a career out of this scares me unlike anything else.

This semester I chose to take this module called Introduction to Narrative, and the module project was literally to do anything that demonstrated the concepts of narrative. My group decided that we should film a short film since I already had experience in editing footage. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, click here.) During filming one of my group mates said to me, “Seriously, what are you doing in Real Estate? You should change course.” I didn’t really think about it until I got home that night, but once I started it gripped me and refused to let go.

So yeah, for 3 weeks I wrestled with the idea of applying to ADM at NTU to take up Digital Filmmaking. I already had some sort of portfolio that I could submit (a short film that I shot in JC – link here, a half-hour video I did for Hawk Company and the teaser trailer for the SDE Bash – link here), I could easily write the short essay required for application, and I could probably have scraped through the drawing section since it isn’t really relevant to filmmaking.

I know it’s a bit of a stretch for me to apply for something that I have so little experience in, but it’s something that I have a very strong interest in, and I’ve got a knack for being creative when it comes to things like this. I really, really believe that I would be able to do very well there.

I called my mum and proposed the idea to her – she wasn’t very keen on it. I checked on how the tuition grant would be affected since I’ve already spent a year in NUS – I would have to pay full fees during my final year, no subsidy whatsoever. I didn’t even want to think about the Student Loan, because I would either have to pay back whatever I had taken from the bank already and then take another loan, or they would let me ride on the current loan and then I would be almost $50,000 in debt when I graduate. And if I went to NTU I’d have to stay in hall, which would be an added burden on my parents.

And so, the application window came and went, and I didn’t apply. So yeah, looks like I’m stuck writing reports on investment trusts and management principles.

It was a quiet evening in early June, 2002. I was 13 going on 14, and my mother – like any other mother trying to raise a lazy teenage boy – was desperately looking for a way to motivate her son to do anything other than to stay at home and play video games all day long.

On this evening, however, I wasn’t playing video games. I was lying on my bed, reading a book (Harry Potter, I think) under the muted light of the setting sun.

“You’re going to spoil your eyes like that, I tell you.”

“Aiya, won’t one la.”

“So how? What are you going to do during the holiday? Don’t tell me you’re going to just stay at home everyday and play computer games.”

“Aiya, don’t know la.”

Like any other mother exasperated by her teenage son, she shook her head, shrugged, and then sighed, all in one fluid motion.

“Aiya, you ah – ,” she stopped mid-sentence, apparently unable to come up with something else even more banal and inconsequential to berate me for.

This was how a typical conversation between the two of us would play out back then. So, thinking she was finally done, I returned to my fourth or fifth read-through of my Harry Potter book.

“How? Do you want to learn how to play guitar?”

I looked up from my book and saw her standing at the same spot, but with a Yamaha course brochure sticking out ominously from her hand.

“Huh?”

“Aiya, I’ll go sign you up for it. I don’t want you to stay at home and idle the whole holiday.”

“Er, anything.”

And that’s how everything started.

My cousin told me this funny little story during a family dinner a few nights ago.

My mum’s a pretty superstitious person. She’s really, really into feng shui and praying to all the different Chinese deities and stuff like that. So, a few years ago, my mum invited this Chinese feng shui master she knew from China over to the site of my aunt’s future home, to give advice on whatever feng shui elements that should be incorporated into the building plans and stuff like that.

After that, my mum got the feng shui dude to tell our fortunes. I wasn’t there, but my cousin was there with my mum and my aunt, so she heard everything that the guy had to say. I haven’t made up my mind on whether I believe in all that stuff, who knows right? Maybe there are bona fide seers out there. But this guy – heh – I don’t think so.

See, what he told me mum was simply too ridiculous and almost completely out of the realm of all possibility. He said that I, believe it or not, would be married by the age of 23.

WAT.

Well, I’ve got 514 days (as I’m typing this down) until I’m 23. Truth be told, a lot can happen in 514 days. So, I’ll reserve judgement till then. If you receive an invitation to my wedding within the next 514 days, you better believe that THAT SHIT IS REAL.