pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain painpain pain pain pain pain painpain pain pain pain pain painpain pain pain pain pain painpain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain painpain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain painpain....

but it's not so bad, remember worse during the PE lesson in JC. * heart-felt shudder*

Wonderful game of badminton today! Thanks everyone!
Status at 7pm: Slight ache in right shoulder and upper arm
Status at 2 am: Increased to tension in upper back and thighs

Wah! Thot i could reward myself for finishing transcribing by getting a manga by the same authr as W Juliet - it had the stories of some supporting characters in W Juliet and i was pretty surprised to find the previously-out-of-stock book. It is not as though I can't read chinese - the back cover summary should have warned me - it turned out to be a manga on short stories of really scary stories! Arrghh! After I finished it, went to hide it in the depest corner of my manga cupboard - I should stick to the funny romantic ones - the heroines may run the risk of be a little weak, but at least they are alive...*shudder*

have been have a Sendoh Akira craving recently, besides the FF8 one hmm...maybe it's the shoulders...I keep picturing Sendoh shoulders on Seifer when I read the fics *lecherous grin*

Yes!

Freedom from transcribing at least! Because it is finally done! *kicks video discs into the darkest corner of drawer* But still gotta double-check, type in interview notes and re-time the screen-capture video files....but too tired to even re-count the minutes now *yawn*

was happily transcribing when i noticed that the video seems to have someone knocking continously from the office next door - it was actually pathetic air-con dripping water again, and the sound was muted through the headphones.

was happily transcribing halfway through the interview my handphone went off, I was mildly irritated at my past self for not switching off her handphone for the experiment - it was actually really my handphone ringing.

...hey! it stopped dripping! must because I turned it down by one degree...funny how much one degree can mean...less global warming, more transcribing done in peace...

Booyaka! 699 min! ... damn, one minute short.

From the looks of things, my last disc is only 45 plus minutes, so it may not hit 750, plus some of my preliminary calculations (maths-idiot though i am) puts even less than 720 min. Better do some tracking down of lost time after this...

A bit worried at how any i gonna wirte all these stuff down - seem to be many stuff to write, some patterns, but they seem wildly disparate...Also better get some write out ready for my supervisor...kyaa!!! 26 days left!....not to make anyone panic of course, heh.

hmm, and i got 26 min faster than yesterday...and 26 days till deadline...hmm, numbers always got a funni way with me....and 26 is double of 13...and i have just realised I won't even go there.

another peek into my transcribing-demented stew of a mind - came across a GW song-fic and two lines of lyrics struck me as very thesis-related.

And I guess that's why they call it the blues

Time on my hands, could be time spent with you

That totally describes how I feel when I'm on the train and not at home with my transcribing. Hey, I even got the next lines!

Taping my readers, typing like crazy

Printing the many pages of transcripts (I know that doesn't fit but...)

And I guess that's why they call it the blues


Heh...in other news, my FF8 fascination has taken a turn for the obsessed...

Yay! 650 min! Left another two discs to transcribe - 90 min at most...I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!.....but for now, I'm very hungry. *stumbles off in search of Oreos*

damn...now I wanna make a SeeD uniform, but there's no way I could carry it off, and I'd look worst in the uniform for the female cadets *sigh*

30 min into the last reading session - so took a little break to ogle Squall screenshots, heheh

got hung up on an old fic i read a yr ago - the best characterisation for Seifer, Squall and the rest of the gang. <----- my excuse, because I wasted the whole day re-reading FF8 fics and only starting transcribing like 9pm - I think it's cause I like working late at night and getting hungry at funny hours of the night.

am kinda irritated now because the air-con unit in my room decided to start dripping water - in my old room I won't give a damn because it was one of those that sticks half-way out your window - now I jump at the first drop of water because the damn thing is only 2 metres above my beloved newly-replaced PC. Something about my karma really hates all things computer. First the laptop, and now this crap.

So now my cork-board used to pin up my timetable for this semester is cheerfully decomposing because it is sheltering my monitor and tower and providing support for the cloth to absorb the water. But the construct is not big enough to cover all the computer parts, so i got half-a-ear tuned into the sound of water falling where it should not be falling - except when I got earphones plastered over my ears for transcribing, then I gotta look up to make sure that no new leakages have developed.

All this looking up and peering into the black maw of my air-con is reminding my about that Sherlock Holmes mystery - The Speckled Band or something, where the murder killed using a snake through the air-vent. Eeek. Wigging me.

an I think NUS is doing some maintanence thing with their network, spent the better part of the day trying to access my email and swearing at Outlook before recalling that pleasant little fact...

Yes! 605 min!

..tho' till got 145 min to go *sigh* and it's not really fast - two days of wishy-washyness for 30 min....

more weird dream last nite - forgotten a lot since it i didn't type it down - something about my old and new friends and sword fights...weird...at least there aren't any squids no more...tho' the one on Men in Black last night is just sooo kawaii!!!

i really like my design module - because i would probably be bored to tears if i took the policy or philo one - but arrghh! it's got a project that just won't die!!! *chokes project* Next week, next week, I'm gonna put it all aside for my thesis...

dunno about the rest of my friends, but i just checked the out the thesis guidelines - I thought getting them would encourage me - instead it spooked me out!

Wai! 570 min! Once i finish transcribing my fourth reader, should break the 600 barrier...damn, need all the self-delusional morale boosting I can get...

Surreal nightmare marathon

Started out with me lying on the ground, it felt like I got shot/stabbed in the back - and it hurts but you know its a dream but you can't wake up. Ths is the surreal part because i remember that in the dream I was telling myself to wake up, so i dreamt that I woke up and slapped myself so I'd wake up, and the pain disappeared - but i think i was still dreaming...

Next was a Chinese New Year setting with a bunch of people I didn't know - it had hotel rooms and going down the hotel/building to explore the neighbourhood. Seems like a mix of Chai Chee and Suntec.

Dream soon morphed into giant squid infestation in the hotel. Said hotel soon became a home environment (my old home to be precise, except it was much bigger, and had one of the NUS engineering classrooms)

Giant squids floating through large pipes with large holes o you could see their giant eye as they passed (their skin looks strangly crusty) - little squids wrapped in clear tubes (the exact enginerring of fails my feeble mind) and little squids falling from air vents, catching said squids, finding out that like some species of worms, upon chopping them to pieces they still move. And i mean move - like metres like of move - resulted in the most extreme "Eeeee!" i have ever uttered in a dream.

oh, now i remember why it was a nightmare - i think someone mentioned Freddy, so in that celebrity kindly made an appearance in my dream. It was basically a few hand-sized holes in the wall, so you could see through to another layer under-neath. For a while i ignored them, until I realised those smooth white pebbles were human bones on the inner wall (the old entombed alive scenario), and there seem to be a continuous stream of water that came trickling down over the inner wall. So that was my theory on how Freddy (in my dream his disfigurement was more like Mel Gibson's Man Without a Face - like of melted but not like Freddy's which is a lesson in the muscles layer of the flesh?) looked the wayhe did - after years of the water falling on his face, it changed it's errr...shape. This is the second most scary dream I ever got - the most scary one involved hiding in a dark corner and a voice going "Come out, come out, wherever you are ~"

Damn, I would have preferred the flying dream again - even if you smashed into the face of the earth at 1000 km/h, at least you got a good view while doing it....squids are just so..*shudder*

so anyway *munching on Oreos* recently got my greedy paws on Kareshi Kanojyo no Jijou's Character book (chinese translated!) and got to read Masami Tsuda-sensei's comments on her own characters. She said she found Asaba to be the most mature. I was quite shocked - Asapin? Mature?! The guy who parties the summer holiday away and doesn't even remember the make-up exams? The "I wanna grow up to be a male social escort" and create a "Asaba Wonderland" country with only woman Asapin? *falls over*

That's when I read perhaps one of the most enlightening stuff i've read in chinese (usually I go for the funny stuff) -so this is in chinese, but it was a pretty interesting viewpoint. She explain what she believes is maturity (cheng2 shou2) -

maturity doesn't necessarily have to do with age, but that one can meet sadness and pain with a smile, to let go when it is the best thing to do, to consider others before one's self but also not to give up when it comes to the most important thing to you.

I tell you, some of my life's lessons I have learnt from my precious manga.

was quite happily transcribing when the only thing that could have stopped me happened - - - I got hungry. (535 min,btw)

gack! did more maths just now than i did in the entire year....anyways, finally over! (for the next twelve hours or so...) 525 min! Here i come to increase you! Oh~hohohohoho~!

arrgghhh! The project that never dies! Got such a huge headache now and it's just from the administrative and negotiation details, haven't even started production yet....it has however, strengthened my resolve (Adeline's resolve face) to do my thesis, will do some transcribing tonight even if it kills me. *sticks out tongue*

today was a four-hour waste to time - I'm just glad that it's over and I got good reasons for a rejection report, and after this i can concentrate on my transcribing. Hope nothing else goes wrong *cross fingers*

Wai! 510 min!

ack! was happily fiddling around with my Lina Inverse layout and the pics are more or less ready - and only then did it occur to me to wonder : "Eh? Where will the scrollbar go, ah?" - right through the middle of the design apparently - damn, I'm such retard sometimes...

geh! inspiration always comes at the most inopportune time - it started out really innocent really. Was getting rid of used and obsolete scribbling in my foolscape pad. Then i saw a bunch of lyrics which i had written down while hearing a song - okay, better keep those, I thought, so i googled them and upon finding the whole set of lyrics, I saved them because they seems to really fit a layout for Lina, using Gourry's viewpoint. Then did a little transcribing but that's boring, so i read a little Slayers fanfiction - Kaeru Shisho's wonderful epic Seyruun High Jinx Summer Special. (Fanfiction.net unavailable for the better pay of the day and poor Ade was deprived of her fix) Loved Valgarv's character in it. So decided to check out his image songs - only managed to find Waru Waru Bad Blood (which is ookaaaay~) and came upon a really nice pic of Lina. Since The Hard Disk Crash era of my life was not long past, I thought i could start a little re-building. Saved that pic, then saw another, and another, and before long, i have enough pics for a halfway decent layout! (With Ade's pathetic layout skills, it's almost always half-way decent...) Which is why at 11:32 in the night, I got me yet another layout experiment for Violet Haze and....only 22 min of transcribing, argghh!!

Argghhh! was hunting around Tampines Central for Sim City 4(?) but no luck - the screen caps in my friend's mag looked very nice! Makes me wanna install my 3000 but *sigh* my transcribing is a-waiting. No worries, will keep my eyes open. *makes like Gollum* erk, scary image...

*sob* just saw a bit of this Japnese movie called Love Letter - it's got a really sad plot - but it's one of those sad movies that you won't change even if they are sad. Gosh, gonna down my whole day now...but not in a damn-i-feel-bad sorta way, more like a awww-hope-they-have-a-better-next-life wistful kinda way. Really novel idea of how the fiancee writes a letter to her deceased fiance's old address and gets a reply from another Fuji Itsuki, who is actually a girl of the same name, but looks remarkably like her (the fiancee). Through the female Fuji Itsuki's recounting through email, the fiancee, the female Itsuki and the audience finally find out that the deceased guy actually liked his female namesake when they were pretty young but never had the guts to tell her. The last book he gave to her (she's a student librarian) to return actually contained a drawing of her,but since she never opened it...and it was only years later, when a student librarian gave her (now a teacher librarian) an old book with a drawing on the last page....but the movie doesn't seem overly sappy, only short clips of memories...the female Itsuki doesn't know the person she was emailing to is her old friend's fiancee and the fiancee never realises how much she looks like the femal Ituski until she sees her fiance's old yearbook. The story is deeper than that but, this part stayed with me...

i know a lot (like 90%) of my team is really unhappy with our design modules client now - but i'm pretty happy actually - i feel there's more than enough reason to end negotiations (though it has only been one attempt at negotiations - i don't think i can get anyone back to the table any way) - and to write a very very long report on why.

What will really be in our favour - is that client (despite attempts at "re-education") could not understand that you don't pay people for their production, you pay them for their consultation and expertise as well (something my team-mate brought up and the client blatantly ignored) even though we had just spent 5 freaking hours in intensive customisation/consultative meeting with him. And it is really ironic because he's a consultant himself!

We changed things from info architecture to layout design, plus the fact that our production schedule shrank by two weeks! And he can still say that just because our teacher told him at first it would only be a few hundred bucks, he thinks he can effectively ask the heaven and the earth from us. And even his point that we shrank the project is in error - actually the html pages (can you believe he was just counting production as just html pages?!) evened out - because even if two websites shrank - the third grew larger!

And he just conveniently forgot that he took ideas from other teams presentations (we did remind him) and that in the beginning we were''t even obliged to add in those ideas (and those teams charged a few hundred more than our proposal did) - so in addition to all these changes, if he can't even meet our proposal price ($840 - which we actaully reduced to $800 for a minimal package) and even wanted to cut it in half to $300 (plus extra hundred on timely delivery), i really feel it is hard to come to a compromise. He even suggested putting a fake price on the contract so we'd look good in front of our teacher and not seem like we are doing to much for too little - that he'll make up the rest in kind (of the products he was selling).

As it is, i don't think i can even get my team-mates back to the table - so even if he was willing to fork out $800, it would take a lot of convincing....and one big miracle.

But one thing though - it has shown me a great deal into how teams work - how in a long meeting, there could start out to be a speaker, but if team members are capable, they can also speak out, and it will not result in miscommunication because everyone got together to discuss already. Also saw how the skills and talents flowed back and forth - we got people good in design, technical stuff, maths, usability and marketing. So although today's been hectic, i feel we learnt a lot....plus we would really have a lot of material to write for the exams, har har!

this is where adeline makes the most obscure reference ever - only a combination of readers of the fic and fans of Slayers and Fushigi Yuugi will be able to make head or tail of this post.

this is about the most realistic tragic heartbreaking foreshadowing i have every encountered while reading an fic. It's not even a new line - but it is the combination of my knowledge of the anime, a Miaka/Yui thing, and the historical realism of it. Reading this Slayers called Those Who Came Before - about the generation before Lina Inverse and Gourry Gabriev - in this fic, Lina's mother (Fezra Inverse) has a best friend who is also a sorceress (Berwen). While travelling together with Lina's father, and Gourry's parents, bad guys attack them (one of whom is Lei Magnus), the group is trashed and Berwen is snatched away in the confusion. Just before this all happens, the beginning quote in the chapter already hints at what is to come:

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

"They say that the war started because of madness, hard on the heels of the Elmekian invasion. That’s what the historians and scribes and royals keep saying. But we knew it wasn't true. The war didn't start because there was any sort of build-up leading to the horrors and pain SHE unleashed. The war started with us. Because of us. Because, when it all came down to it...we failed a friend...

-Loerik Gabriev, commenting on the Chimeric War, 997 AR

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
I feel it was masterfully done - because it is telling you what is going to happen without really telling you - a few chapters laters, we discover that Lei Magnus and two other evil mages have found a way to create chimeras and told Berwen that Fezra has, in fact, betrayed her by allowing her to be taken. Having previously told readers that Berwen had to try harder than Fezra to be a good sorceress, and that Berwen felt left out with the new friends they had made, the chapter also added how Berwen had a disciplined core that made her strong - however, the flip-side that the author did not say (or perhaps i read too much into) is that, like Yui, once she hates, she wil also do it with a vengence. The quote gave a clear picture of a bunch of companions who later turned out to be war heros (probably because they defeated an vengeful insane powerful Berwen) but who are really her guilt-ridden friends. It also illustrated tragically well, how could such a small thing, later cause such a terrible result - which i feel really is how all wars are caused.

this fic is also great in weaving historical references into the story - the author adds just enough references so that the reader has a good idea of what the world is like in the fic - and it sounds realistic/romantic/adventurous/funny enough that i just have to read more.

sigh of relief today...found that the design modules i'm taking now is kinda okay - as in we got a panic button and that we as well as gotten 50% of our grades already (as long as we do our part in the team anyway...) and given that it is in arts (without the Dreaded Bell Curve TM) then an A really is quite reachabe. So we gotta work out an okay workload and we're set. But will be writing long list of recommndations and feedback to Mr Reddy after all this is over...this module need major improvement...

~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Really stuck on W Juliet now - it's interesting because although it has a wacky plot like Makoto (guy) has to pretend to be a girl for 2 years til high school graduation before his father will allow him to be an actor (rather than take over the family dojo). But it's okay, he so pretty no one suspects. He meets Ito, friendly, direct, downright kakkoi guy who becomes his first friend in the school's acting club. This is where you are guessing this is gonna be shonen-ai right? nope..because, Makoto soon learns that Ito is most definitely a girl. Everyone knows that, it's just that she's really tall and hates wearing a girl's uniform because she has short hair and wearinga girl's uniform makes her look strange. And she's taller than him!

Reading the first three books, i found it hard to get over the fact that the guy looks more like a girl than the heroine of the show, and the heroine is so much more clumsy and tomboyish than the guy - and this is not just a Nuriko/Miaka thing - the difference was really too big for me and for a while i discontinued the manga. But then, i re-read the books, and checked out the summaries online and finally got hooked again (because adeline is a busybody and there are few stories that i don't want to know the ending to). Now i realised that i was looking so much that the superficial charcateristics, that i forgot to study the personalities of the characters - and other other stuff, like the art, the humour, the plotlines...and i found much more to like than dislike.

Because here you have a guy, who isn't afraid to give up being a guy (ahem...but not in the way that really matters) for his dream. And here you have a girl who despite being tall and boyish, is really kind and understanding, although she can be really easily hoodwinked and isn't the calm dignified type - but the most important thing is, she's got her heart in the right place. Maybe he doesn't look like a tall Prince Charming standing next to her (he grows to be as tall a her later...) but he treats her like an equal and likes everything about her, doesn't treat her like an object. Maybe she doesn't dress pretty all the time, but she is loyal, strong and supportive where others would have turned away. And it made me feel, maybe they are closer to an ideal relationshio (though the ideal is always beyond our fingertips) because they don't care about the outside first, but the inside.

in any case, later in the story, Makoto finally gets to dress like a guy more often, and you realise that though Ito has very stong features, she looks like a model once she gets into a skirt. And since the manga kinda met my expectations half-way (i.e. the main characters looking like the gender at least some of the the time) i felt more comfortable with it. That's when i realised how superficial i was being - the manga took me through the process of liking someone for who they are first, then thinking about how nice they look one the outside - and even if they didn't look pretty, it wouldn't matter, because you already like them so much. That's what they mean when they say, i'd love you even if you are all wrinkled and ugly and cantankerous. I always thought it was a line the romance authors thought up - I never figured how that can be true, because i never understood the process behind it. Now, i guess it's not as impossible as i thought..just really really hard to find.

Anyways, Ito and Makoto kinda grew on me, and they have some sweet moments. Like the time Ito's older brother unknowingly lets on to Makoto that in the event Ito ever gets a boyfriend, he would judge the boy by the honesty and determination of his gaze. At the end of the story, Ito is looking on in puzzlement as Makoto is gazing into his compact, practising his determind look.

The plotlines tend to be quite novel - altho' they always start out tame. It's a safe story i guess, just the right mix of humour, action and romance. Not too sappy but not too tragic either - one principle in all my years of anime and manga is simply never go for the sad stuff - i get strongly affected by the stories i read (and anime fic/manga can affect my whole fanship) so i avoid the sad ones like a plague. I only like a precious few because they are so well written/drawn, that to end it any other way would lessen the impact of the story. But if the author just makes the story sad to wring tears out of readers, that's just dumb. Itis even dumber to plonk down money just to make myself sad.

The medium (comic art) is also really good for telling the story - like what they did in Weib Kreuz, Makoto and Ito can look like a guy one moment and a girl in the next, which will work if the reader is able to suspend his disbelief. And, of course, her guys are cute. But most of the time, they look ordinary. Me got a soft spot for Ito's elder bro, the twin with the short hair - a guy that can cook! ^_^

404 mins...hmmm, does that mean I'l run into a lot of missing pages in the next few days?

you know you have hit ground level when you feel insanely happy after updating your transcription countdown and it looks like this:

347 350 / 750 min

On Blogger's main page they're currently plugging this book called Blogging: Genius strategies for instant web content. After seeing the link so many times, I finally checked it out. Brought me to an amazon page where i saw that people who bought this book also bought other books. Then I saw this book called Running Weblogs with Slash....

...isn't it understandable why my mind instantly went down the gutter? Evil me...though i do wonder, did the publishers know the other significance of the title?

In other news, oni 450 min left! (But no time to do it...kya!)

been having dreams (that i can remember) almost every night...screws with my waking hours...make me sleep longer but still get up tired. Usually get that only if i think too much beofre i go to sleep....

wai! i have the world's cutest little munchkins for neices and nephews! It is also very sad to know that your 13 year old nephew can beat you hands-down at blackjack *sigh* Altho' my cute little relatives (CCS reference for those can catch it) seem to be multiplying at an alarming rate! Loud little bundles of eau de baby are suddenly cute (*melts*) toddlers weaving their way in the Adult Forest of Legs between the Play!room and the Boring Place where all the Old Men Sit Around. Met a neice who thot that blowing bubbles in her cup of water was the coolest thing in the world and she laughed loudly each time she did it. Us adults didn't find it funny, but we went awww and ended up smiling anyway.

And there's is NOTHING in the world that is more entertaining than watching my cousins be banker at blackjack. (In a dark corner of my heart, I suspect it even more entertainin than anime/manga). My cousins (The Next Generation) open 21 points (the five card kind, dunno what it's called) like nothing and the best thing is that they keep up a running commentary which is a combination of capitalist equality and Whose Line is it Anyway.

done with the web project in sch for now - gonna dedicate this whole remaining week to thesis stuff *crosses fingers* but as of now, done with my second reader, mwahahaha! Only about 488 min left *sigh*