I mentioned a while back that I just joined a choir. We had our first practice session yesterday and the girls outnumbered the guys nine to two. Haha. We were supposed to have more men but three couldn’t make it yesterday.

The last time I sang in a choir was when I was in primary school. I’ve always enjoyed singing in or listening to choirs. The blend of the different parts of a melody always sounds so amazing and sometimes it makes me want to cry.

In this choir, we sing quirky contemporary songs. The songs are written by an American composer who’s our choirmaster, who started this choir. Like, there’s this song about American President Calvin Coolidge and his wife visiting a chicken farm. Cute!

Anyway, we have about 10 ladies and only five men. So we need at least four more men (1 tenor, 3 basses). If you’re interested, e-mail me! Experience not required but you do need to know how to hold a tune.

Still busy as ever here. I don’t have work today but I need to go run errands. Life is unrelenting!

Categories: Regular Blogs
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Most bloggers I know will scream (or groan or grumble) if you make them sign up for yet another social networking account. I’m one of those bloggers myself.

But this new upstart piqued my interest because it’s actually beneficial and incorporates elements such as blog advertising, blog promotion, a Wikipedia-type database and, limitedly, social networking.

The site is called Qassia and is a “credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory”.

That doesn’t mean anything to you so I’m going to explain.

When you sign up, you’ll get a profile page for promoting yourself. Then you post tidbits of information to the Intel database. You can post anything and everything, from lengthy treatises on quantum physics to what your dog likes to eat.

“What we value is intelligence about the people, companies, and places around you. The people and places do not have to be famous, and the intelligence does not have to be earth-shattering.”

You see, anyone can contribute anything.

Each Intel you post gets you a backlink to your blog and ranks you higher on the web directory.

Each Intel you post could potentially attract advertising and every dollar earned on your posts is 100% yours.

Cool, huh?

It’s now in closed beta, which means you can only sign up by invitation.

But fret not because I am personally inviting you to try it out now!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

It’s not limited to bloggers, of course. Anyone with a website you want to promote can benefit from it.

See you in Qassia!

Categories: Regular Blogs
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I hope y’all had a great Valentine’s Day.

The Goonfather and I had a Non-Valentine’s Day, in keeping with tradition.

We had more of a Geeks R’ Us day, in fact.

I woke up bright and early and got dressed.

To go to work.

At a stuffy old office.

In a sad lonely cubicle.

(Where one can camwhore in relative privacy when one’s boss isn’t looking.)

The day passed (really slowly and laboriously because I didn’t have enough sleep the night before).

And then it was 6 pm.

Time to get out of the office and head for the mall.

A geek mall, if ever there was one.

Funan the IT Mall.

Where GAMESCORE, my favourite games shop, resides.

I had to sneak off work early to buy a present for the Goonfather.

(We tend to be more pragmatic than romantic so we usually avoid getting suckered into the commercialism of Valentine’s Day, but we love buying presents for each other.)

But I gotta stop doing things last minute.

I won’t say what I bought, yet. But you can tell it’s some geeky thing.

Next stop: Eastpoint Mall, to meet up with the Geekfather, who decided that Valentine’s Day was the perfect day on which to run errands.

He picked last night, of all nights, to get his phone serviced.

And to pay his parking fine.

And to drool over data cables and geeky peripherals at Challenger.

The geekmeter shooteth up.

And then the highlight of the night: Dinner!

Dinner was fast food because we wanted to be done with it quickly so we could rush home to play games.

(Actually, that was more my idea.)

Yes.

We have both become PotBS addicts, although I’m a sorry sort of addict, having not enough time in which to encourage the addiction. Which explains why I’m only level 7 while Kell Jade Dragon is level 17 (plus he has a Level 8 alt!!!! wtf). And we both got the game on the same day.

(Kell Jade Dragon is Elyxia’s boyfriend, whom we sometimes lovingly address as Unker Kell.)

The Goonfather is level 13. He has more time to play than I do because he spends his lunch hour playing and he doesn’t blog. But he obviously has less time than Unker Kell because Unker Kell plays games for a living. Sort of. Plus his bonnie lies o’er the ocean, so he has a lot of time alone, poor bloke.

But I digress.

Dinner was at Long John Silver, my favourite fast food joint.

I love fast food. The Goonfather hates. But he allowed me to drag him to LJS last night because:

1. Fast food restaurants don’t have ridiculous inflated V Day prices.
2. He tries to be accommodating on “special days”.
3. Long John Silver is a pirate so it fits in very nicely with his PotBS addiction.

We tried to rush through dinner so we could be home as early as possible to play PotBS.

But it was really hard to rush through a feast.

I don’t know what the GoonFather was thinking when he ordered all this food…

For two people.

Honestly!

Amazingly, though, we finished most of the food.

And then it was home to let the Geekfather have his presents.

I received my Valentine’s Day present early this year. It was Pirates of the Burning Sea (including unlimited subscription, wahoo). The Goonfather is very fond of giving me advance presents.

Like he gave me my birthday present (a Wii) in May when my birthday was in July. When July rolled around, he had to buy me another present (a DS Lite) because I insisted that May was too far away to be counted. Haha.

Anyway, in return for my PotBS, I got him a DMC4 for the PS3.

He had been slavering at it for yonks (even before it was officially released) but just haven’t bought it because he’s been too busy with PotBS.

Oh, I also got him a bonus present.

It’s a Goomba!

More accurately, it’s a Goomba mini bolster cushion whatever.

You do know what Goombas are, don’t you? From Super Mario Bros. They’re so cute!

The Goomfather loves Super Mario Bros characters. He has a Koopa Troopa shell for a keychain.

Our night ended with PotBS, as planned.

I bought a new graphics card finally. Better graphics now?

This was supposed to be an amazing picture because there was a beautiful view of the rising sun. But just as I remembered to tap my screenshot button, this hill rose up to hide the sun.

As you can see, I didn’t even have time to get rid of my UI.

Then I got too busy to bother with screenshots because I was set upon by pirates. (It’s a pirate eat pirate world.)

And now I have to rush off to work because I sacrificed my morning to write this blog, so I’m going to have to make up for it by doing OT tonight. Zzzz.

TGIF!

(Funny to be saying TGIF when one has to OT.)

(Funny that one never appreciates weekends until one has a regular day job.)

Happy weekend!

Categories: Gaming Notebook
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A few days ago, Princess from the Cowboy Bar said to me, “Can you please quit your temp job?!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Your blogs were better when you weren’t busy!”

…

Well, I can’t help that. Who’s going to feed me if I quit my day job? And don’t say the Goonfather because it’s almost impossible to feed two people on one salary these days. Not if you want to live pretty comfortably, that is.

Anyway, the reason I took up the temp job was because I forsaw a slow year for acting. So I thought I’d better pad up my bank account while I can, in order that I may sustain a longer period of time without acting income.

But as fate would have it, after more than a month of bumming around at home, the very moment I committed to the temp job, I started getting busy in the acting arena.

Fortunately, my temp job is very flexible and I can work any kind of hours as long as I meet project deadlines, so I can schedule my temp job around my acting. The downside is that I’m killing myself in the process and my blog is suffering.

If something has to be sacrificed, it has to be the blog, since blogging doesn’t pay the bills. Not yet, anyway.

But don’t worry. I’m not killing my blog. I’ll kill it only when people get tired of reading junk and start to leave because I haven’t got time to write more quality posts. Haha.

One of the things I’m involved in right now is with NYU Tisch Asia. There’s a new module this semester on directing actors, taught by Hollywood director Rob Schmidt, who has made a few award-winning films.

I attend all the classes (six hours a week) and act for them. That is, the film students get to practise directing real actors. I love the classes! I get to learn so much while being able to play at acting, at the same time.

The campus is damn far, though. It takes me an hour to get there and another hour to get back home.

But it’s all good. No one’s ever died from being busy, so I’m sure I’ll survive.

Will update on other things when I have more time.

Categories: Acting Journal
15 Comments »

I deliberated for a few weeks whether to post this up.

I finally decided to do it because I’m so busy these days that I need to employ more lazy blogger tricks.

Today’s lazy post is a YouTube video. Haha.

I didn’t want to post it up at first because there are some physically-intimate shots in it involving me and it’s weird posting something like that knowing that family and relatives read my blog.

But, what the heck. I’m sure they can handle it. It’s nothing sleazy, anyway.

A quick background first.

This is one of the films I did for NYU Tisch Asia graduate film students last year. It was their very first project and shot on Super 16 mm film.

(If you were reading my blog three months ago, you’d have seen my posts about it: Flat 7-Up doesn’t taste very good and Last day is for camwhoring.)

The requirements of the project: 4 minutes, black-and-white, no dialogue, no music.

The video you’re about to watch is the director’s cut. It’s in colour and has some musicky stuff in it, but it’s otherwise the same film that was submitted.

It’s called Mara’s Playground and I play the role of Mara.

So, here it is! Hope you like understand it.

Categories: Acting Journal
36 Comments »