Stay On Target…

Serial Jen just broke 50 pages. I think maybe, just maybe, I can wrap this up in ten more. YAY!

Unless Jen does something drastic that bumps up the page count. Which she does every three or so pages anyway. ARGH!

Stubborn characters SUCK.

Thank GOD…

Blitzball sidequest: FINISHED.

I’ll never have to execute another fucking Jecht Shot for the rest of my days. Screw this team game shit…

All Celestial Weapons acquired. Lulu is now so amazingly powerful that she kills pretty much everything with one casting of “Ultima” and if that don’t do it, she’s got the “double cast” ability that lets her do it twice. Of course, the only problem now is that she’s so imbalanced compared to the other characters (I’ve been constantly using her, meaning that she’s been going up in levels like no one’s business and no one else has) that it’s gonna’ a take a while to bring the other characters up to speed since she kills everything before anyone else can move.

This is a good problem to have…

Break Time

This has been a fairly productive week.

I’ve cranked out multiple articles for my opinions on games, where they’re going, started reading comic books, kept up faithfully with Serial Jen, at least 3 pages a day, just broke 40, and watched the animes Outlaw Star and Super Yo-Yo, then gone off and written my reviews of them. The only thing I haven’t been doing is playing Xenosaga, and that, unfortunately, is because the software was… hm… how shall I put this? Acquired through “enterprising means” and likely bought from some guy selling them at a table at ridiculously low prices with an English vocabulary only slightly larger than the number of teeth in his mouth. In other words, the PS2 refuses to read it. Argh. I suppose things will continue this way until PlayWorks gets more credibility in the industry and more developers start kissing up and unloading free software in their laps. As it is, they’re not receiving much cooperation from anyone except the keepers of the Bill-Box. *Sigh*…

Oh well, at least there’s still Final Fantasy X.

Damn that Blitzball… pissing me off. And this monster hunting side-quest is getting really, really old. On the other hand, I’ve acquired every celestial weapon but one, and that’ll be done once the stupid Blitzball tournament has been won…

Right. INTO THE FRAY ONCE MORE!

Welcome To The Candy Store

Today has been a good day for freebies…

Unfortunately I can’t keep all of them (Well, not the comics anyway…) but to have this much in the way of geeky goodness dropped in my lap in one day is kind of mindblowing.

I got that Xenosaga game and now, at long last, the geekdom truly ignites. As far as the comic books go, a lotta’ classics, which I’m extremely happy about, since most of them I can review favorably. A reprint of G.I. Joe… the nostalgia factor alone makes that a winner, a Trade Paper Back compilation of my all-time favorite Marvel storyline the Dark Phoenix saga, back in the glory days of Claremont and Byrne, the 80′s comic dream team, a TPB of the Jim Lee run of the X-Men… oh, and I’m supposed to review the entire run of Sandman plus Death compilations, but since I already have those, no freebies there…

So now there is this big, huge, gaping maw of geek matter that draws me in with the inexorability of a white dwarf crushing under its own gravitational pressure in that most feared of all cosmic phenomena, the Black Geek Hole. Speculation in the scientific community suggests that travel through could lead to new laws of time flow, possibly lead to portals that circumvent normal relativisic laws of travel, or possibly lead to other dimensions altogether, like my deranged imagination, for example.

Between writing Serial Jen, playing Xenosaga (Purely for work-related reasons, of course. I love my job…) reading a mess of comic books, writing up all that material, and securing new article ideas/interviews/reviews for the PC platform (Yes Amos, those last two are directed at YOU. Do me proud. Use your spell check regularly, we work on American spelling, so it’s “center” not “centre” which is stupid anyway…) and last, but certainly not least, sucking up to the girlfriend in the wake of the Geek Vortex, things will be busy and posts, while not disappearing altogether, will probably be small.

See ya’ on the other side…

Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus…

And he’s bringing GAMES. In the metric tonnage…

The trip down to Playworks was one of those Good News/Bad News scenarios, although I think in the long term, the good news far, FAR outweighs the initial disappointment of the bad news.

First off, the office. Is temporary. Right now they’re holed up in their MASSIVE version of my Cave, a side-company they own which is a glorified videogame den for members of the club, called The Brotherhood Of The Box. Basically you pays your money, and that allows you unlimited access to a while buncha’ X-Boxes that are laid out on one end of the place (Just request your game, pop it in, and try to show some consideration for other players who visit…), or, if you’re lucky, you sit down at the couch with the MASSIVE screen hooked up and digital surround with optical cabling and play like you’ve never played before. When I showed up, they were, unsurprisingly, playing DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball.

Unfortunately, the editor who was supposed to meet me, apparently a former, disgruntled editor of one of the newspapers here, Today, was sick with a bout of food poisoning, so I didn’t get to sit down and talk to her. I met everyone else though, and it’s pretty much what I suspected, a stinking, drooling, giggling den of hardcore geeks.

I felt right at home.

I hung out with their creative director (He’s one of the poor slobs that works there 18 hours a day, sleeps the rest of the time and see his home twice a week) and he dragged me off for cigarettes and coffee. He seemed pretty bemused by me, since most of the people who are begging to be reviewers are local, speak English pretty badly, and are mostly kids in their late teens or early 20s.

CD: I’m going for a cigarette… Uh… you wouldn’t happen to smoke, would you?

My Pithy Reply: I’m a WRITER, for God’s sake…

CD: [Big grin and thumbs up]

It was pretty casual. I talked to the Editor In Chief (Translation: He runs around trying to secure funding until the marketing person is hired) and he pretty much told me that there wasn’t any doubt that I could do this job based on the resume bomb I carpeted them with. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to hire just at this time, and so the best that I could hope for was volunteer contributing reviewer.

HOWEVER…

In about two months, once their marketing person has been hired (Whoever that ends up being, interested, Ching?) and things stabilize a bit, they’re going to be looking for a fulltime reviewer/editor. They told me the job was mine in May if I wanted it.

IF I WANTED IT?!?

IF I FUCKIN’ WANTED IT?!?

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “He don’t know me very well, do he?”

So it looks like for the next little while, they’ll be easing me in as a volunteer reviewer. That’ll show me the ropes of how they work around there, get to know the people while they get to know me, and assuming all goes well, I’ll have a job that, if you can believe it, will require me to go out and purchase game consoles and write it off as a business expense come tax time. They tell me it would be better if I had all three consoles. It’s a tough, painful process, having to go in there and buy those consoles so I can get saddled with free games, but hey, I’m a professional and there’s a job to do…

[Distant Ironic Mode OFF. Redneck Mode ON]

YEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Redneck Mode OFF. Distant Ironic Mode ON]

Anyway, they’ve already registered me on their web community, given me staff privileges that allow me access to sections of the forum hidden from general gaming eyes, and given me my first two assignments: Xenosaga and Primal, both for the PS2. I pick up my games on Thursday and have been warned to keep my Xenosaga review down to 600 words or less.

Bonus Points!

After that decidedly odd experience, the girlfriend and I went down to our regular comics joint, @omix comix, to see if there was anything interesting and so I could paw, molest, and whisper sweet nothings into the packaging for the Babylon 5 Season 1 DVD set that is still sitting there, waiting for me to get up the funding to bring it home.

She’s doing their new website, and so we’re scoring major points down there and getting discounts left, right and center. Today the owner asked me, completely out of the blue, if I’d be interested in doing the comic reviews for him. This of course, made my jaw drop as first people are throwing free games at me, now I’m getting comic books too.

Maybe, just maaaaaaaaaaaaybe… Life can be not terrible once every few days.

So to tally up the total damages for today. I am now:

Officially a games reviewer for Playworks.

Am now officially a comics reviewer for @omix comics

Will officially be Reviews Editor for Playworks if things work out.

Am now getting paid to play games, read comics and then talk about it afterwards.

Too.

Fucking.

Sweet…

In the meantime, the demands of paying the rent continue, and so it’s time to sign off and get back to writing more marketing-based web copy for a friend of mine who is hoping I can start sounding less casual and start sounding more slick and corporate since this is the third crack I’m taking at the web copy. I think I’ve finally got it nailed, so with any luck I won’t need anymore rewrites after this. Then it’s back to FFX.

Hey, it’s not just lazing around, it’s my job now…

WHY IS THIS SO STUPI…Oh, This Is Ours… Eh Heh, Heh, Heh…

And so the end result of the visit to the RCB, which was a great source of satisfaction to the girlfriend was…

Even THEY were baffled by their own easy to use, quick, efficient, online registration system, had to get another pencil pusher to help, still couldn’t do it, had to call a manager, then had to call us back later in the day once they’ve straightened it out.

Call me sadistic, but I derive great pleasure from the bureaucrats being overwhelmed by their own bureaucracy…

It started when the pencil pusher (Actually, a kind of nice lady. For a pencil pusher…) went over our particular case. The case being we tried to register the business online and got stopped dead cold in our tracks because while the girlfriend could register herself as an owner in the business, I could not, seeing as you had to log onto the system using your National ID number, which of course, I don’t have, not being local.

This, apparently, was something the rocket scientists had NOT taken into account when they developed their online system, but had conveneniently failed to mention anywhere in the registration process. This despite the fact that the government has officially stated that it wants to encourage foreign workers, investment and entrepreneurship in Singapore. So the message I guess, is, “We want you to come here! We want you to work here! We want you to have businesses here! We just don’t want you to be able to start one!”

Like, HUH?!?

Thus, the girlfriend had already used her credit card to pay for the registration before the system stopped her and said, “You can’t do that.” So the pencil pusher tried to do it for us, couldn’t. Called her co-worker, her co-worker couldn’t figure it out either, they called the manager, and finally after some fiddling around with the system, (And a 90 minute wait, we went off and got lunch) they got it all figured out by doing some arcane thing with system access that ordinary users aren’t. So in the end, their convenient, online, easy to use system only worked out when we went DOWN to their regular office and they had to circumvent their own safeguards and it took three of them to do that.

Convenient. Easy. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur it isssssssssssssssssss…

Say, did I ever mention I hate bureaucracy?

Well, I do.

We’re nearly there, anyway. After all that got settled we needed to acquire our business registration info, the documents we need to present whenever anyone asks for certification that it actually exists. This is deceptively known as “Instant Information” and we went down to the “Instant Information Counter” and were told our instant information would take a few days.

Say, did I mention I hate bureaucracy?

Well, I do.

I’m A Loser Baby… So Why Don’t You Pay Meeee…

Hm… it’s kind of pointless for me to try and go to bed in a few hours for an interview at 4 pm, so I think I’ll just skip that show up dead tired. From what I can see, the Playworks guys operate in a Zombified state anyway, so me showing up slightly brain dead from writing and playing FFX shouldn’t be that big a deal and might even score points.

I’m still not sure if they’re looking for a full time staff writer, or just a contributing one. That hasn’t come up yet. I’m pretty much game for either, although if review copies are on offer for both positions, I’d probably just opt for the contributing writer since it means more time at home to play.

Yeah, I got my priorities screwed on properly, don’t I?

Money? I’ve Heard Of That. Is It In Algeria?

There may be a job in the offing, and happily, it may not be with Nadya!

After not hearing from Playworks for a few days after writing them, I assumed that they weren’t interested and wrote them an e-mail that said “Since you didn’t write back, I’m assuming you’re not interested. Oh well…”

They wrote back.

I have an interview on Tuesday. I already warned them that there will be no suit, tie or shoes involved, since these are all primary ingredients which, when combined with me, act as a catalyst for spontaneous combustion. But then, they’re gamers, so I didn’t think the suit thing would be part of the culture. Still, if it works out, it’d be a paying gig. They’ve warned me however that the hours are insane. They work 18 hour days 5 days outta’ the week. Sometimes they don’t even go home during that period, so it’s pretty hard core over there… My guess is they’re probably gearing up to see if they can send some lucky bastard to the E3 and play games until they achieve cerebral hemorrahge, but that’s the price you pay for being a geek.

RCB Stands For Retarded Cheatin’ Bastards

Or, if you follow conventional wisdom, Registry of Companies & Business.

This is the next critical step. Now that MOM has said it’s okay for me to get a job, I have to go to the Retards and it seems in order to make themselves more efficient, user friendly and convenient, they are slowly making the transition towards the process being done entirely online.

This, of course, has made the whole process more tedious, less efficient, needlessly complicated, and unbelievably inconvenient, if not impossible.

The girlfriend was so frustrated by the whole affair she ended up slugging back three drinks in the aftermath of the not successful attempt. Things like instructions to click on hyperlinks were there was none, asking ME to log onto the site to confirm the registration and then finding only locals with a NRIC (National Registered Identity Card) make it impossible for me to do this, and so, we are faced with the prospect of making another trip in broad daylight in order to accomplish this.

I am beginning to see the appeal of Marxist teachings after viewing all the hoops involved in the so called “Easy start up process” to running a business here. If there is one thing that the Uber-Capitalism of Singapore has been teaching me of late, it’s that Lenin had a point.

Oh well, at least there’s the possible game writing job to look forward to. That’ll be fun for a while until I realize I’m spending more time writing than playing, at which point cynicism kicks in and I start yearning for those blissful days of unemployment…

And For All The Edmontonians Out There

Holy Fuck.

Just read Karen (She of the endless wit) Chow’s blog and heard about the fire on Whyte Ave.

For me personally, the only rational response is:

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OH GOD, WHY DIDN’ T YOU TAKE ME INSTEAD?!?

Edmonton friends can click off now for the next paragraph.

Asian readers can know this: Whyte Avenue is the designated Old Quarter of Edmonton where you’ll find all your 19th and early 20th century style buildings that still has the “old town thoroughfare” sort of feel to it. Littered with Mom n’ Pop establishments where the owners actually man the cash register and know their products (Assuming they don’t make them, or don’t have them made by friends) Whyte Ave has always been the traditional home of folksiness, artsiness (It’s a true Bohemian enclave, unlike the artificial ones that Singapore is trying to create) and its proximity to the university campus guarantees a certain minimum amount of hipness and attitude. This is where my beloved Princess Theatre (The local art house cinema, something Singapore is, again, UTTERLY devoid of) used to be, Greenewoods, the bookshop, Warp One, the geek comic store (Which I’ve been told is slowly degenrating into a pool of greedy, commercial insanity) and more bars and cafes than you can swing a dead cat at. I spent a good number of years unsuccessfully trying to finish the macho nacho platter at Squire’s Taven, home of free food on Friday nights. Played pool at the 24 hours pool hall just down the street. Went down for the Fringe Festival to take in many bad amateur plays and a suprisingly large number of good ones, and basically have invested the entire street with being a significant part of my formative years in university, which is when I actually consider myself to have become interesting and more or less human.

Having Whyte Ave go up in flames like that is kind of like finding out the playground I used to love as a kid has been paved over to make way for a bordello. That’s just wrong.

Man, they weren’t kidding when they said you can’t go home again.

Now I feel like I have to try and include Whyte Ave into the Jen story I’m writing, since it takes place during roughly the same period that I was going to university anyway. If I can’t have the real thing, I may as well try and at least preserve the nostalgia of it…

It’s Official: MOM Is Fed Up And I Reap The Rewards!

Just a couple of hours after the last post, I actually got a call from MOM telling me, lo and behold! MY APPROVAL IN PRINCIPLE HAS ACTUALLY BEEN APPROVED! I think this has something to do with that last visit yesterday morning. The officer at the desk (They’re called “officers” now, no one wants to be a pencil-pushing bureaucrat) must have had something to do with it. She was pretty baffled (AGAIN…) when the records showed that my application for a 10 day process had been pending since January, and since I had nothing to do with it, logic dictates that, against all odds, the bureaucracy must have fouled up somehow. I suppose in order to prevent further blame from burning up the ladder (The girlfriend’s theory is that they probably lost the application and just won’t admit it) they just went and gave it approval in order to hush it up and keep it all in the closet.

So now that the Approval In Principle has been given, I can actually go off and register a name for a business and then hire myself to it, thus circumventing being illegal in Singapore, WITHOUT having to apply for permanent residency.

Thank. GOD…

Crank Up The Drama Magnet

One of the double edged swords that seems particular to my life is that even when I am trying my best to avoid drama, it breaks into my house, ties me to a chair and forces me to watch the slide show it made of its trip to Iraq and North Korea. Which is to say that once one worry is addressed, another shows up asking to be invited to the party.

The worry in question is the next step in bureaucratic hurdle of starting a business, getting the Banker’s Guarantee. This is essentially hostage money. When foreigner goes and starts a business in Singapore, a Banker’s Guarantee of $3,000 is required. You put up the money, they hold onto it, and one of two things happens; when you decide to pack up and go, you rescind your employment pass and you get the money back with some small interest, or, you get arrested for sleeping with 15 year old girl at the fish net stocking party you threw with your clients (“I swear to God, she LOOKED 21!”) and the money is taken by the bank as punishment for you not behaving yourself. One of the steps that is required to do this (Being poverty-stricken, I threw myself at the mercy of Ching and she delivered. I owe you biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime, girl…) aside from putting up the money is that you have to present a business plan, usually the same one that was presented to MOM to get the approval in the first place.

However, the business plan that got us approval in the first place was sitting on the girlfriend’s E: drive, and that, due to some incredible carelessness on the part of the computer repair guy when she brought it in, has been mistakenly reformatted, and we only made the ONE print out. I get queasy just thinking about that. I’ve made multiple copies of my novel which I believe are sitting with various friends as a redundancy measure, I never did that with my third book I’m currently writing. The guy who fucked up felt so bad that he threw in a free graphics card as compensation to her, but in my case, I’d just look at all that work gone and irreplaceable and a graphics card just wouldn’t cut it. If I’d lost my OTHER novels in the process… shit, that’s 8 years of writing down the tubes…

So anyway, after placing a rather worried call to MOM asking if it was possible to get a copy of that business plan back, they gave us a FAX number, if you can believe that, to which we are supposed to fax our request, and they will “consider” it.

Damn you MOM…

Press “X” To Dodge

The tedium of Blitzball finally got to me and I’ve moved on to something else to ease my frustration, only to find it may just increase it. Running around a rocky area called “The Thunder Plains” trying to dodge 200 bolts of lightning in a row in order to get one of the components required to assemble one of the various Ultimate Weapons for the the characters.

Dodging 200 bolts of lightning, what sick bastard came up with this one?

Probably the same kind of sick bastard that is actually sitting down trying to do it.

Damn you, Square. Damn me too, while we’re at it…

It’s Official: MOM Is Senile…

Bedtime will not arrive until the Singnet guys come over to inspect our line which has been giving us sporadic internet connection for the last week or so.

In the meantime, I am posting this in the wake of the latest visit to MOM.

MOM is senile. I am sure that is the official diagnosis now. There are many reasons that have led me to this conclusion, but the guiltiest parties are a parade of chronically recurring symptoms that are only worsening with time:

1) Chronic forgetfulness

MOM: What was your name again?

Me: It’s me! Wayne! Don’t you remember? I was just here two weeks ago!

MOM: Really?

Me: Yes! I’ve been coming here for weeks now! Don’t you remember? The application? The delay? Don’t you remember any of it?

MOM: Just tell me what your name is again, and we’ll look into it.

Me: AUGH!

2) Chronic Amazement

Me: I’m telling you, I haven’t gotten any word on the application yet.

MOM: But that’s IMPOSSIBLE! It’s only supposed to take 10 days!

Me: You said that already. Two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, AND before that.

MOM: Wow! Really?!?

Me: Yes.

MOM: REALLY?!? WOW!

Me: AUGH!

3) Chronic Stupidity

Me: Look, I need an extension for this passport again.

MOM: But why?

Me: ‘Cause my two weeks are up.

MOM: But how could that be?

Me: Well, there’s this thing, it’s brand new, just hit the market, it’s called a “linear timestream.” That means that one second passes. Then… another second passes. And another and another! Eventually you have a whole piles of seconds that, when totalled to 60, is called a minute. Sixty of those are called an hour and 24 of those are days. 7 of those are weeks, and two of mine have elapsed, so stamp me.

MOM: But you’ve already got a stamp for extension here.

Me: [Icily] Gee willikers, how ’bout that? Where do you suppose that came from?

MOM: Hey, this is my stamp!

Me: Well stick me in a dress and call me Sally, so it is…

MOM: How come it hasn’t been approved yet?

Me: I was hoping you could answer that.

MOM: Well, we’ll look into it. What was your name again?

Me: AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!! KILL ME NOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The short form of that rant being that yes, the passport has been stamped in utter confusion, and yes, it will be looked into again.

MOM… I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re old. It’s time. Either go to the retirement home and spend your days mumbling about application forms to the geraniums in the corner, or get someone to take you out into the backyard and put you out of your misery like a well-loved but half-blind, stone-deaf sheepdog well past it’s prime. You can’t dance the Charleston anymore and, by the way, the Germans lost both World Wars so shut up about the Kaiser and that young Adolf troublemaker in Berlin. It’s over. Just deal.