Completion Spree

Ok, I exaggerate. It's not really a spree. But after some meditation and reading of Westernized philosophical Taoism precepts, I managed to calm myself and come to the conclusion that I was freaking out because I was leaving too many unfinished things behind me. Just building up stress until it got to be too much.

So I got to trying to complete as much as possible. 3 of 5 immediate work projects have been cleared, with the other 2 started in on (they are, unfortunately, the biggest 'stuck' projects I have atm.)

I cleaned my desk some. Room still needs more cleaning, but hey, it's a start. And I aim to finish sometime. :/

I watched my 8 hours of American football for the week, so that it's done and completed and can be deleted off the dvd drive until next week's games.

Meanwhile, through the game, I also got some recreational painting done and -finally- finished the mini I was putting off working the details in.

He's not great. But okay for not having painted in months.



And to my dismay, my photo-taking skills have taken a turn for the worse. Maybe it's the lighting. I had to use the camera flash to get light onto the damn mini. And all my desk lights are way too yellow to use to light it. Which sucks. My previous house had a good setup by pure chance, the fluorescent light was VERY bright in the hobby room and I had nice pics come out. Now I have to consider getting proper lights some time.

Painting under the living room light conditions also suck. Cos my parents like yellow light. VERY yellow light. Which is kinda crappy for judging correct color for minis, so I had to keep running into the room with fluorescent white light or check using daylight to see proper colors.

I like the blend on his flesh and the armor though. Layered carefully to make it a gradient. Alas, I don't have patience yet for layering carefully too small surfaces, so the detail work is still bare minimum.

But he's done. And I don't have to feel guilty about him not painted anymore. One more thing off the "unfinished items" list.

Blocked

It's disturbing. I'm suffering from a severe case of 'blockedness.' I don't even want to call it writer's block because it's gotten beyond that to thinker's block...

I've fallen out of the habit of freewriting. Which is totally scary. I used to at least scribble stuff in my head down at work onto a Word doc every day, so that I remained relatively 'unblocked' but now, there seems like a million and one other better things to do, not to mention, people reading over my shoulder and stuff like that tends to put a crimp in anyone's style.

And it's now carried over to the home. I can't make myself sit down and freewrite, something just howls NO! and refuses to do it. (I am now fooling myself into a more palatable version of a freewrite by sitting down to blog. At least I am still in a verbose mood when it comes to forums, groups and blog posts.)

It's really disturbing. Like I'm no longer comfortable with myself. Like I need to have other people viewing my words before I am justified in saying anything, and it is ridiculous - why am I so approval-seeking all of a sudden?

My brain feels very cluttered. Like there are many many things that I need to be doing, but I don't want to list them or even face them, so I turn away from them and I turn away from myself.

And this set ups a greatly conflicted feeling because I know I must face them, but I don't want to face them, and before you know it I am blocked and stuck squashed between two brick walls, and I just shudder and surf the net or load up CoX in an attempt to forget about the pain. Of the conflict.

Which sucks. Avoidance at its finest.

It's little wonder why I can't even solo roleplay if I'm not comfortable with myself. How the hell do I find this peace within myself again? I hate this adult world. I want to go back to the certainty of childhood. I try to meditate and I end up falling asleep instead. I take two days off work in the hopes of finding myself and I end up bored shitless and with no progress. Gah, feeling so nihilistic.

I can't complete things I start. What's wrong with me?

I'm almost done with an orc I painted, just a few details left to go...but I stare at it and feel disappointed with what I produced and just don't want to let it go and declare it complete...So I don't even want to sit back down and start my final session with the orc.

It's the case with everything. So many loose ends hanging open, but I can't bring myself to complete. Bleh.

Anyhow, I think I've winded myself out for the hour. Can't find anything else to write about or say. Hopefully this at least opened something in my head that will encourage more freewriting later.

The Search for Novelty

I'm in one of -those- phases again. Ever so slightly manic, with grand plans of doing something new and different.

Well, it's a heckuva lot better than feeling blue and low and somewhat depressed, which was the overall mood for the last week or two. Hormones suck.

A gradual "I need to paint" mood has been building up and gathering momentum for the past few weeks, culminating in revisiting the Reaper Forums and several painting sites like Brush Thralls, the Games Workshop site, WorldWorksGames cardstock stuff, new mini companies - Rezolution looks quite interesting, Warmachine by Privateer Press has come up with a new Hordes game that also look pretty cool, I go into paroxysms of "IT MUST BE MINE" every time I stare at Rackham minis (never quite get around to buying 'em though)...

I also made myself finally visit Comics Mart again. (My discount card expired Apr 06 - shows you how long ago I last visited.) I caught up on my comics. Lucifer has finally ended its run. Picked up a whole bunch of Neverwhere comics, looks like that run is ending soon too. And realized I am missing a bunch of KoTD comics - intend to just go and order backissues from Kenzerco eventually, 106, 110-113.

But the real point is, they were having a Games Workshop SALE. Rofl. Finally. See, the new edition of Warhammer (again? 7th now, I hear) was about to come out the next day, and so suddenly all the old stuff was no longer of so much interest or value. The box set (with a bunch of plastic Orcs and Empire troops) was suddenly slashed from SGD 180 to 90 dollars. Better yet, blister packs and a few box sets (like a Space Wolf dreadnought) experienced the same slashed price, 90 to 45 dollars, and from 18 bucks a single figure (fucking insane pricing) to 5-9 dollars a single figure (somewhat more reasonable and more Reaper-like...)

And joy of joys, the LOTR minis were ALSO on sale. Finally. I had been drooling over the figs for ages, but just unwilling to put down that kind of moolah (plus copyright fee) for them. Now instead of $42 for a mounted and unmounted Gandalf, it was more like $20 - way more tolerable. Yea, I bought a bunch of stuff.

Adding to more lead in the house. And this guilty feeling of "OMG, I really really need to start painting again."

So this impetus pushed me to get really constructive stuff done instead of computer gaming the hours away.

See, I couldn't paint since my move because there was a bunch of crap in the way of the paint table. So I had to pack them up in order to make room. I did. Sounds simple when you just write it like that, but getting started and continuing with packing has to be one of the most agonizing things ever, for me anyhow.

I'm kinda thrilled. Apparently you don't really lose it even with not enough practice. I've also developed a new cunning way of painting, inspired by the world of cooking. It's something called misc-en-place, I think, or something equally Frenchy. The idea is that when you cook, you shouldn't be chopping up stuff as you're throwing it in the pan and cooking, you should get everything ready in small little bowls and dishes first - just like how the TV chefs cook.

So when you're painting, you shouldn't be brooding about what color to mix now and so on. I suspect that the master painters already do this - they have their colors all pre-mixed in the palette and they just pick it up and put it on, and having all the paint there also helps to switch colors and blend them. But I can't do this - I get too worried about all my paint drying off the palette (I'm also real stingy on my paints, hence why they dry so fast).

Then I saw this guy on the forums. He had these small little paint pots, and he premixed the colors in the paint pots as he painted a dragon. And suddenly it all became clear. I *ahem* made off with a couple of microtubes from the lab and premixed my colors - basecoat of green, two shades of darker green, and two highlight colors of lighter green. You could visually see the gradation of color, and then you could thin it to the correct consistency - and then stop worrying about it and just start applying paint. It was great. It utterly rocked.

I painted red to my satisfaction this way too. Really nice.

---

So that's it for painting. Plan to continue. The other thing I was thinking about was solo roleplaying. Mythic, specifically. It's a remarkably simple system. See, the heart of Mythic is that when you are stuck, you ask a question. Pose it so that there's a yes/no answer. Did I manage to pull the treasure chest out of the well? Did I hit the serial killer with the flower vase?

Essentially, it's like tossing a coin for your chances. Except that 50/50 success is just Average Skill opposed by Average Difficulty. If you had Average Skill and were trying to do something Exceptionally difficult, then of course, your chances of failure are much higher than your chance of success, and Mythic incorporates all these different possibilities into one big chart, called the Fate Chart.

They add a twist by allowing Exceptional Success and Exceptional Failure on an extreme dice roll. So you could knock the guy out so well with the flower vase that he's killed in one hit, or miss so badly that you sploosh all the water out and then slip and fall so that you're at the serial killer's mercy.

The results are up to the players/GM. In this case, since we're solo roleplaying, there's not much argument about the results, just up to one's imagination.

An additional twist is to add randomness to scenes - on certain dice rolls, a random event that you roll for interposes itself, so that it mixes some unpredictability into the affair. This unpredictability, imo, is perfect for solo roleplay, otherwise it tends to turn into a narcissistic daydream or something and get boring very very fast.

I notice that this random event, being unable to predict your troops' movements, is also an essential component in solo wargaming rules from Two Hour Wargames. Complete control becomes boring.

However, I have encountered an interesting problem. I'm not sure if it's to do with the game design, or with me as a player or something else. I find that I can solo roleplay and start it for a day or two, after which I appear to run into a road block and then just...stop. I can't ever conclude. Tried it three or four times now.

Part of it is when I run into something that's not known by me. The context is uncertain, the world setting is not known, and suddenly I halt to figure it out and I don't seem able to figure it out and poof, that's it for that game. Random rolls to decide don't seem to work because I want it story-based and logical and twice now, it's the motivation of the antagonist that calls it to a halt. My protags are clear, but the antag is not, and when I have to stop and thinking about him or her, the story just grinds to nothingness.

Once it was a Dark Sun game where I read forward in the script and suddenly when I knew what was going to happen, I was less interested in bringing the characters through it - not to mention a combat that got bogged down and stopped being interesting to resolve.

Weird. Is it me? Imaginator's block? Or is it the system? Probably it's me. Just got to figure out how to get past it...

Imitation Media

I was watching episodes of the cartoon "Avatar -- The Last Airbender" when I wondered why I felt it was authentic instead of silly. After all, we've all seen Western takes on "asian" culture before. Usually they were just silly (like those token caucasian villains in chinese period kungfu films, who exist to 1- speak weirdly accented chinese, 2- commit acts of brutality with firearms 3- display some ineffective western kickboxing style 4- get their asses kicked by the chinese hero with 'real' martial arts :P), sometimes they were a bit offensive.

I liked Guildwars: Factions too. Kaineng City felt like a real asian metropolis. It had that kind of Hongkong-y realism to it. Or, in a more local sense, a Telok Ayer-y style. Chinese, with streaks of minority cultures. But -- hang on, NCsoft is a korean company. The credits at the end of the game was filled mostly korean, japanese and chinese names. Well, no wonder when they make a game set in a pseudo-asian continent it feels realistic.

(I still recommend Factions. You should get it and help me get my second character through the storyline:P)

Avatar really is produced by a bunch of Americans though. How do they do it? Get that authentic feel, that is.

Apparently they take their job of creating an asian world really seriously and hire cultural/martial arts consultants. So let's give these ang mohs some credit. If you and I can understand and appreciate King Arthur, or learn greek/latin, then they can appreciate chinese culture too, and write some chinese characters. All it takes is effort and trying to be serious about it.

I recall being quite irritated by City of Heroes' Korea-launch trailer. I felt the trailer was dorky and fake. I like the comic genre too, and I know who batman or superman is. City of Heroes is a western genre and -- hey, it's a pretty cool premise -- but the way they somehow smooshed it Statesman and some weird Hongkongy-action-movie -- cum -- weirdo taoist notion -- cum modern chinese superhero blend -- cum... blahblah ... is just... stupid.

Plus, there was something incredibly dorky watching spandex clad Statesman in what appears to be Korea.

The end result felt incredibly colonialist to me, for some reason. I don't know why, but all I can say is, I "eat rice grew up", and there's this deeply ingrained sense of what is real/authentic/sincere versus what is dorky.

By the way, Avatar can be bittorrented, but I'm going to buy the DVDs when I have spare money. (Posting my stuff back to S'pore is sucking up all of that now.)

Still suffering from gaming/computer withdrawal...

Sudoku!

I know it's a fad, but this game is addictive.

The game is a 27x27 cell square, made up of 9 subsquares containing 9 cells each. There are some numbers and blanks, and the goal of Sudoku is to fill in the blanks such that each row, column and subcell contains the numbers 1-9.

This is one of those Minesweeper or Solitaire games (or Sokoban, Alchemy, etc), i.e. one of those great games for wasting your time on by yourself.

There are a lot of free puzzles on the web where you don't have to waste paper to work out the puzzle too. Check out Web Sudoku


My computer is still dead. I really don't see why it won't post at all. I got a new motherboard, swapped CPUs and power supplies around, and took extra care not to zap anything with static. Power seems to work, I don't think I have two dead CPUs (took a lot of care to smear thermal paste on both too), some cheap ram sticks I got off Ebay swapped around, so I find it hard to believe I have two dead motherboards. Or maybe I shouldn't buy $40 motherboards. Grrrr... I'm starting to feel a very strong urge to play CoH...

You want what?

After convincing myself that the US kind of sucks (which it does), Singapore started looking better and better. No more ridiculous temperature and humidity ranges, bad food, randomly patronizing caucasians, and paranoid jingoistic religious right governments. Of course, every place sucks in its own way, it's up to a person to choose which kind of suck he wants to put up with. But seven to eight years in one kind of suck is about enough.

I browsed through some possible jobs. Hmmm, how about Science Center? :P There's another one in data processing. Then I looked at the application forms.

They want what?

Why in the world do they want the entire list of my relatives, my relative's NIRC numbers, and occupations? And every sundry detail of my life including my "Hobbies and Sports"? If my hobby is shopping, do I have to put down "Window Shopping and Cycling on a Stationary Bicycle"? How about "Lazing in Front of TV". Or for the more sports-inclined, why does your employer want to know whether you go sky-diving or scuba-diving in your spare time?

Why do you have to list all your family members in the first place? Are they hiring you, or are they hiring your entire family? That and all your children -- maybe they only hire people with more than four children? And an entire page of yes/no questions ranging from whether you have pimples or not to whether you have been bankrupt before (I'm joking about the pimples part but you get the idea).

Seems like they are less interested in hiring someone who can get the job done, than hiring someone to tell their life story complete with sundry details like whether they watch football or basketball on Sunday. One wonders if anyone who isn't the perfect poster child of Singapore, with shiny teeth, all As, a wholesome marriage and a set of three (or more) children can ever find a job.

That's Singapore for you.