Code word dirtbag

Uhm, so yes; new resolution: actually update this blog.

But it's so hard when I already have an online way of reaching out to a pre-established audience over Facebook. D:

But since Facebook is a closed platform and not really friendly for the indexing and searching of information, I feel kind of bad that I pump so much of my time on to it. On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot more interactive than a blog... And more social too.

Which is really the problem, isn't it? What do we hope to gain from our time spent online? Creation of a digital footprint? Socializing? Getting teh knowledge which fuels P[]\/\/312?? (I have no idea why I suddenly reverted to L33T.) And Facebook kinda provides a platform for us to do all the above. (As well as many, many more things such as poking that girl you're kinda in to but digitally so it's socially acceptable but doesn't that conjure a nice mental image anyway?) It may not do it in the best way but it does it well enough that we don't really mind.

And then there's the fact that we can control who sees our content. Facebook, unlike a blog, rockets you straight from the "trying to get established and find an audience" to the heady heights of "whoa. Got quite a few people who'll interact and respond reading my stuff now... time to start thinking about controlling who can see it!!" But then none of what you put up there is really searchable to the rest of the world which isn't your friend. (Especially if a creepy stalker's forced you into defcon 5 on your privacy settings...) Which gets problematic when you're planning to make a career in writing and all your stuff is locked away behind the Facebook firewall.

What was all this in aim of? Well, mostly because I like to ramble and partly because I needed to justify why I'm going back to a good ol' fashioned blog.

Oh my god. I just called blogging old fashioned. New media has officially moved on.

Packing it in

I'll be leaving the country somewhere in early December to travel around a bit with the family before the exchange.

Anyway, here's my to-do list for before I leave:

• sort out wardrobe (Singapore is tropical. I'll be spending a week or two in Japan and then heading to Arizona and California. Pack will be a bitch.)
• sort out classes. (I lost the list I wrote down of classes I wanted to take. And I need to make sure I'm doing stuff my school will let me map back or I'll have to take a special semester to make up class requirements. Which will cost more money. Argh. I really want to learn Spanish.)
• confirm conventions I want to attend. (I've found two; a Sci-fi one and an Anime one. No good comic cons in the early part of the year in California though :( And no good gaming ones either. There's the GDC but that's for professionals and I'm not interested enough to cough up a couple hundred dollar for conference tickets.)
• Find a bunch of Sc-fi and Anime/Manga nerds at UCLA. (Hey, going to cons on your own is boring. Our geeky-cons may not be huge in Singapore but I've learned that much at least.)
• Find out is best friend is really going to travel from Texas to L.A. (yeah. 'nuff said. It's too bloody far to do it as a road trip so the question is whether her parents will spring for a ticket. Also if I'll be able to find some way to smuggle her into whatever accommodations I manage to get. All this affects whether I'll stay in L.A. an extra week after my term ends to accompany her to a Supernatural con. -_-|||)
• Find some kind of political thing to do. (I have no idea what this will entail but it feels like I should poke at it.)
• Get a social security number. (Uh... yeah. Because I'll probably only have my American citizenship by next year and it'll be weird not to have one.)
• Find someone to take care of the hamster. (I could ask the grandparents but my grandmother has been caught looking very strangely at the hamster a couple of times. I am afraid.)

So that's it. I might add to this list as I go along but that's my pre-departure panic-list. At least Idon't have to mess around with all the visa stuff though. I hear it's a pain in the butt.

Cliche

It's so cliched it's painful. Yet it's oddly addictive. :\

Part of me is really annoyed by the song (you're not defined by your romantic relationship!) because it's kind of whiny and it's such a tired old story that plays on stereotypes. But the video's actually pretty watchable (Taylor Swift is good eye candy) and the song's strangely catchy.

Pop music is weird.

Clothes make the woman

Oh look, a video!

On one hand, it doesn't make sense to me that a country will allow women to run around in what is little more than their underwear and won't allow them to walk around in a head-to-toe sack. (I know the burqa isn't really a sack but you get what I mean.)

On the other hand, how the heck would photo ID be used for a woman in a burqa? And if it could be worn out in public, I imagine it would have massive potential use for terrorists trying to smuggle bombs into anything. And unlike a backpack you could order opened and searched, a woman in a burqa would need to be searched by another woman in a private area. And all because it can hide behind the label of "religious". Clearly security issues...

My inner feminist asks, why the hell does clothing for women always have to be so constraining? The Western asthetic calls for debilitating heels. And it seems some forms of Islam call for an enveloping blanket thing which looks like it's get caught in every door you try to walk through. I notice none of the women interviewed about wearing burqas never rave about how it's not restrictive or troublesome.

Freudian

So I did this little doodle in a meeting while I was bored some weeks back. In case you can't read it (is my handwriting really that bad?), the text on the right reads: Stick Ninja Fight, Stick Ninja Friends and Stick Ninja Fangirls. The text in the bubble on the left reads: Stick Ninja Shuriken (I think...) and is what happens when you slide your doodles over to your friends in meetings where they are equally bored.

Anyway, I was pretty pleased with it because it was cute and properly expressed my love for ninjas and stick figures. (A love which stems from general bad-assery and xkcd)
Which is why I'm somewhat distressed that another friend upon looking at this post it happily proclaimed the stick ninjas were gay. With each other.

Dear lord. I hadn't thought of it that way at all.

What gets me isn't that the stick ninja might be gay but that without meaning to, I created a 3-panel sequence which perfectly captures the typical formula of a yaoi fangirl's dream-pair relationship. There's the hate/disagreement which is what usually kicks these relationships off. There's the eventual friendship/respect. And then there's the hordes of rabid fangirls who read something into the relationship whether it's there or not and brand a couple gay forever in the annals of yaoi fangirl moe.

Worse and worse, stick ninja 2 is staring at stick ninja 1's crotch in the last panel. I swear the pen slipped is all.

This is all ridiculously Freudian and I shall no doubt need to re-evaluate me subconsciousness and the messages it sends me.

On a side note, I hate the SasuNaru pairing. It makes no sense to me at all. Mainly because Sasuke is possibly the most "whiny little girl with a y-chromosome" ever.

Testing, testing...

So It's my first post on blogger (on this account at least) and I'm just testing the waters to see how it handles images and what-not.

On a sidenote, does anyone know where all the Singaporean gamers blog? (I'm sure they do. They have to go somewhere to brag about the head-shots and total pwnage...)