I haven't posted in a long time. Hmm.
Anyway my grades this semester have been...average. Much better than for my first 3 semesters, but really not good enough to get that 2nd upper. So ohwell. Of course i'll still try my best for the remaining two semesters, but i'll be honest and say that 2nd upper is beyond me. I'd need all As i think - easier said than done, and trust me, it is NOT easy to say it. I've given up. My focus is just to add some gloss to my relatively dull resume.
Putting that aside...other updates!
Holiday has started. Yay. But nearly one and a half months of it have already gone by before i realised it. Boo hoo.
Our family bought 3 bicycles over the past 2 weeks. So we've been going to ECP to cycle around a bit, and now i can cycle to nearby places, like the Siglap area and to Bedok South market for my Hill Street char kway teow. Swell. Well...except my mother forbids anyone in the family from cycling on the roads without a helmet, and i'd also be the first to admit that i'm not a very stable cyclist - i can't seem to keep the bike going perfectly straight on a regular basis, and i'm very unstable at low speeds, so i'm kinda scared that my bike would bump the kerb and then swing out onto the car lanes and something nasty happens...but of course that only applies when there IS traffic. After midnight is another matter entirely. One thing's for sure...no more going to bike rental shops along East Coast Park!
Last weekend, we also had a new addition to our kitchen...a gas-operated grill! So now we can make flame-grilled steaks, lamb chops, burgers and chicken (we may need a separate cast-iron for our chicken though...). Yummy. We've already used it to make steaks twice. Tastes great...credit and thanks goes to my cousin-in-law Joon Woon for his recommendation to get a gas grill in the first place, helping us to buy the grill and fly it from the USA to Singapore, and for his simple salt+pepper+olive oil recipe.
If any of my readers are err still around and wish to have a steak party at my house, go ahead and contact me for arrangements to use the grill! Of course, jio me to the party as well lah (that's the whole point, right...) and help me to buy the steak and maybe bring some olive oil, horseradish, and french fries/sweet potatoes/salad. I can handle the salt+pepper and the setting up (and cooking). FYI, for S$11-12 per steak, you can get steak that'll cost you anywhere from S$30-60 at a restaurant. And seriously, mine can taste just as good (just look at how Black Angus overcooks its steaks every single time...gosh...) If you can get steaks that are at least an inch thick, that'll be the best.
Next up, there has been a "wild" animal roaming our driveway this past week. It is...a Tokay Gecko! A pretty huge lizard (this one is longer than my shoulder width) that used to be common and native to Singapore, but is now a very rare sight (go check it up on wiki or something). I think it might have been brought to Singapore by our Malaysian neighbours and set loose here. It's got orange/brown spots all over...and it's supposed to be very expensive!
We'd been hearing its mating calls for a few nights - its cries are loud enough that my mother can hear it pretty well despite being separated from it by at least two closed doors and two layers of glass (one of which is supposed to be "sound-proof"). Then we managed to catch sight of it a few days later. My mother once caught it sleeping in one of the cupboards in our driveway, and even took a few photographs of it. I saw the photographs, thought the gecko was quite large, and then went to the cupboard to take an actual look myself...and boy was it big. Much bigger than i had thought. Seeing it in person was really one heck of an experience.
A little scary too; after staring at the gecko for a while, i gingerly closed the cupboard to let it continue sleeping uninterrupted. The same way i might gingerly step away from a swimming pool after discovering a small crocodile swimming in it. I'm not saying that the gecko is very dangerous however. Tokay geckos can be very territorial, and when they bite you, it is hard to get them off (and there can be issues with infection too). But this gecko has been very tame so far; it hasn't caused us any problems and there hasn't been any incidents thus far - all very quiet......so to speak.
I don't think my parents have decided what to do with the gecko. What
I think we should do, is to call the zoo or the AVA or whatever ASAP to take it in, once we make sure that our neighbours have either no claim over it or do not want to claim it. I'm not so sure about the legality of selling such an animal (both the list of animals restricted from being sold as pets and the list of animals allowed to be sold as pets do not mention the tokay gecko, and both lists are not exhaustive either). Also, taking care of tokay geckos can be a huge hassle (just check it up online). But then, for the gecko's sake, i also don't want to just leave it to wander around for too long; i don't think our driveway is a particularly bountiful place, with enough arthropods to feed our "little" reptilian friend over the longer term.
Next, i've started going for singing lessons! The real kind of singing lessons, not the kind that i went for during army which i stopped after 3-4 lessons when i figured out that it was more like karaoke lessons than anything else. After going for these singing lessons, i realised that i SUCKED. Seriously. I've been getting so much praise from my family members (especially) that i thought i had attained some success and was on the right track. But actually, i've been singing with the wrong technique, squeezing too much and singing with a high-larynx mixed voice that may sound quite good, but also prevented further development and would only give me problems later on. My actual mixed voice was not really developing.
So now, i'm basically starting over from scratch and building up my voice the long and hard way. For $150 per hour of singing lessons. OUCH. Although i'm more hung up over the fact that i've wasted so much of my life singing wrongly. I should have gone for these lessons a long time ago. Lesson learnt: do not trust everything you see (and hear) on the internet. And paying so much money for singing lessons can actually be worth it (and millions of people all around the world DO pay thousands for singing lessons), because all the computer singing programs and guidebooks in the world cannot beat one-to-one singing lessons with a proper instructor. Knowing what exercises can be done to improve the voice is not the same as knowing what exercises you need for YOUR voice at any one time, as well as HOW to do the exercises and WHETHER you're even doing the exercises correctly.
If you really want to improve your voice, you really need an expert to listen to your voice and make a custom set of exercises. My instructor, by the way, is a level 3 Speech Level Singing (SLS) certified instructor. He is the highest level SLS-certified vocal instructor in Singapore. He is very, very, very good. But also (to me) very, very, expensive. And he lives in Toa Payoh. Damn.
By the way, speaking of singing...is Law IV still on? Our producers (Michael and Anthony i believe) seem to have gone on vacation or hibernation or whatever and have totally forgotten about Law IV. I hope the script-writers have started to liaise with the prop-makers, or they'll be in for squeaky-bum-time later on. Ohwell.
Finally, on to games...I've FINALLY bought my PS3, and i've finished playing Final Fantasy XIII. An okay game - better that i had expected because of its great graphics, great fighting system, and great (albeit short) story-line with lots of plot twists, but still not that good, partly because the game is too scripted with only one chapter of fun-filled exploration.
Also, some of the conversation was REALLY cheesy. Like they kept having scenes where the main characters would gather for motivational group-talk, and the camera would pan to each one of them just to show them saying cheesy one-liners or just nodding at another person's cheesy one-liners. Most of the other cut-scenes were also way too emo and melodramatic. As one game reviewer said, you wouldn't be able to tolerate the conversation unless you've watched plenty of anime before that. Comparing it to previous Final Fantasy games that i've played (besides Tactics and Dirge of Cerberus which i think are in different genres, and X-2 which i hardly played), i'd rate it above 4, 9, 12, and Crisis Core, but below 6, 7, 8, and 10.
I don't just have FFXIII of course - i've got Super Street Fighter IV, Marvel v Capcom 3, Killzone 3, and Eternal Sonata. I wanted to get Red Dead Redemption, but somehow i just don't feel like playing it anymore.
Just like how i didn't feel like playing Mass Effect 2 anymore despite getting it for free with Dragon Age 2 and being able to play it NOW just by going to my desktop and double-clicking an icon. Dragon Age 2 by the way was a HUGE disappointment - crappy female romance choices, very little exploration, a dumbed-down item system with not much immersion, repeated environments, badly implemented friendly-fire...the list goes on. I also hated the conversation wheel system (where instead of picking whole lines for your character to say, you pick funny/serious/aggressive/etc options with a rather inaccurate short summary of what you are going to say), and i don't think it necessarily helps for my character to have a voice. Just like in Mass Effect, i didn't feel like the character was ME - Shepard and Hawke were just some random old dudes whom i just didn't care for.
Not that everything was worse than in the first Dragon Age (Origins). The companion system has improved and has been made much more realistic with more immersion - I've always thought that the base camp system that's been around since Neverwinter Nights was a HORRIBLE implementation. They've also kinda done away with the predictable "go to A, B, and C to complete the main quests there and then get ready for the final scene" that was heavily used in Neverwinter Nights and still used in Dragon Age Origins. The best part of Origins for me was from the start up till Lothering, when i felt like an inexperienced lad stumbling into a wide, wide world, and just about to begin a long, exciting adventure with the beautiful and mysterious Morrigan and the funny and dependable Alistair. And then everything went downhill when the main quest locations were just spoon-fed before me like that.
Well, at least there's a lot of gaming to look forward to...There's Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the December holidays and Final Fantasy Versus XIII for next year. And i'm gonna start playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings soon! Except it's been delayed in Singapore; i haven't found a vendor that stocked a copy and i don't want to give any website my credit card number so easily. I'm starting to get impatient...
HMMM you know, i actually wanted to make a list of my favourite songs of all time in THIS post. To, you know, have something that i can look back to when i'm old and graying. But seeing as how i've spent so much time on updates alone, i think i'll leave this list for next time. Hopefully by this week or the next!
