I’m An Alien, I’m A Legal Alien

Finally got my Employment Pass, the innocuous little green card that says “Don’t arrest this character, no matter how unsavoury or anti-authoriatarian he may appear, he actually has legal right to work here.” And the best part is–at lest if you’re a snob–it’s an Employment Pass and not a Work Permit!

For those of you who don’t get the distinction, just bear in mind that Singapore–being a former British Colony–is still steep hip deep in class distinctions. They just loves to separates their people by educational or financial classes here, it’s incredibly important to them to that people know their place. So, as far as foreigners go, they fall into two classes; if you do low paying, undesirable, but necessary jobs that are too good for the locals, like cleaning streets, looking after children, constructing buildings, cleaning homes, prostituting yourself for money, etc… then you get a “Worker’s Permit” and are referred to as a Foreign Worker. However, if you do high paying, desireable jobs that the locals covet but can lack the drive, ambition, talent or imagination for, such as working in a high powered multinational corporation, directing for television, cutting throats in advertising, or prostituting yourself for corporate accounts, etc… then you get an “Employment Pass” and are referred to as an Expatriate.

Class distinctions… Gotta’ love ‘em…

Almost Legal

With medical report in hand (I don’t have AIDS, whoo!) I paid a visit to MOM (Once again, the Ministry of Manpower) and MOM told me that I was a good and healthy boy, and so I could continue to work, just as soon as I handed over my passport. It’s a weird feeling to know that you don’t have any legal means of identification (I used to have my old university ID and driver’s license, but lost those when I lost my first wallet here back in 99′) but it’s only for an evening and morning.

It also looks like the temp job is off since I got a call saying that they’d found someone and so a meeting wasn’t required after all. Oh well, looks like I’ll still be looking for something to do next year…

The Temp & Married Geek’s Night Out

A productive, if uneventful day, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun.

Spent the vast majority of the day laboriously working through my final interview, with a very smart game developer named Jay Wilson who works with Relic, a Canadian games company and one of the better developers in action today. The total interview, when finished, weighed in at seven pages, and it’s all quite insightful. It’s always fun to talk about games and the mechanics and design of them (At least it is for me) but it’s more fun and interesting when you talk to one of the guys that actually does it and he shares with you the nuances of design, little tricks to make things easier or more visual for players which make you stop and wonder how anyone came up with that in the first place.

Also finally got in touch with someone at the Singapore International Film Festival. There’s a temp job in the offing. It would involve me actually going to an office, but it would only run a few months, from January to April. Heck, I don’t have anything pencilled in, and it’s movies, so why not…

In the evening I hung out with some of my co-workers. I guess you’d have to call them that, since GameAxis is my only regular gig, and has been for the last couple of years, so I’ve come to know the editors there very well and we get on famously. They needed me to review a couple of games, so we met up for a quick comic book run (He got the Darren Aranofsky graphic novel The Fountain, I got the latest compilation, book 6, of the amazing Y: The Last Man) and then met up with the other editor for a quick meal and some coffee.

It’s always fun hanging out with fellow geeks.

It’s a bit weird for me, because I’m so used to being the single guy, and now I’m the married one and saying stuff like, “What time is it? Oh geez, it’s getting kind of late, I should be getting back home to the Wife,” and meaning it. I actually want to go home. I want to spend time with the Wife. Fortunately this also means playing Dragon Quest VIII since she is heavily, HEAVILY into it (Which, in a perverse way, does me no end of pride. “Why yes, my Wife is a hardcore RPG gamer, what of it?…”) but to be honest–and perhaps this is simply a newlywed thing–it feels good to go home and just be with her. For years I’d resigned myself to just being a jaded, cynical loaner who was constantly turned down by women for not being rich enough, or prestigious enough, or “marketable” enough in some way, and now here I am with someone that not only tolerates most of my quirks, but actually likes quite a few of them. I am a lucky guy, and I know it.

Speaking of which, there’s more gaming to be done.

Holy Crap. Old School RPG-ing!






















Wow. That’s all I have to say about my initial experience of Dragon Quest VIII. The Wife looked down kindly upon me yesterday and allowed me to get it.

For the first time in years, I got my ass handed to me in an RPG, and it was for reasons that I had no longer come to expect from modern RPGs.

The game doesn’t hold your hand. I haven’t been beaten around this badly in the opening hours of an RPG since I first booted up Final Fantasy VI back in the early 90′s and figured I could waltz through the opening town without worrying about healing. I was surprised. But it was a pleasant surprise. This is going to keep me busy for a good long while.

For those of you that jumped on the console bandwagon in more recent years with the Playstation, there was a time when Square-Enix was just Square, and they weren’t the uncontested masters of the RPG genre on consoles. There was in fact a time when there was a separate company called Enix, and their Dragon Quest series (In North American shores called Dragon Warrior for complex licensing reasons that are no longer an issue) rivalled the Final Fantasy series for complexity and fun. After a while Square realized “If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em,” and so one merger later, Square-Enix was formed, and the Dragon Quest series, formerly their fiercest competition, was now another money making franchise they were proud to support rather than fear and curse.

I guess from a veteran gamer’s perspective the easy way to sum up Dragon Quest VIII is that it’s a very nearly perfect evolution of the “traditional” RPG. The combat is turn-based, but simple. There are still weapon shops, armor shops, item shops, inns and even taverns that you can visit in each town. And if you do not take the time to patiently level your characters up and get them decent weapons, you will simply DIE. As I mentioned earlier, the opening mission, “Get my crystal ball from a cave!” initially seemed like it would be a cake-walk, so I went out, found the cave and promptly died within minutes of entering. The reason why? Because I was level, freakin’ ONE, and that’s amazingly weak.

The other thing I like about the game so far is the humor. It’s been a long, long, loooooong time since I played an RPG that didn’t take a riff from Square’s Final Fantasy series and was all sturm und drang and personal loss, and people sacrificing themselves for love or honor. This game actually has bright, colorful, over the top comical characters and I can’t believe how much of a breath of fresh air it is. The voice acting is also suitably comic, with British, Romanian and other accents being played to the hilt.

All in all, I’d say if you’re looking for a “traditional” RPG that’s been perfected for the current generation of consoles, this is IT. But it’s not easy. And if you’re looking for a fun, funny RPG, this is also it, but it means the random battles and power-leveling that old fashioned RPGs are known for. You’ve been warned.

If There’s A Heaven…

I imagine that there’s a whole league of angels right now standing over cars with rags on the hood while Pat Morita intones, “Wax on… Wax off…” other angels stand on large logs stuck in the sand, learning a kick that involves raising your arms up in the air like a bat, while other angels cry as they realize that they are the man that will fight for your honor, they’ll be the hero that you’re dreaming of, they’ll live forever, knowing together that they did it all for the glory of love.

Train ‘em like you did Daniel-San, Mr. Miyagi.

I’ve got a fence to paint and some boards to sand…

Truth Is Hard

I think that as I get older I become more and more firmly entrenched in the idea that if our world is overly complex, it’s because people–not the universe–have made it that way. But there is a reason for that that goes beyond a simple love of bureaucracy or needless complexity. The fact of the matter is, the more you strive for simplicity, the harder life becomes to live. At least for most people, because they usually try to cheat it, and shoot for complex benefits while getting–or trying to avoid all together–simple detriments.

Like blogging for example.

There many varied levels of truth. Of honesty. People want an honest blog, but to get a real, honest blog… I think that is nearly impossible, unless you were to tell the person involved that they were just writing their own personal diary electronically, and they were unaware that the blog was being transmitted virally across the Internet. In short, the only way to achieve as close to total honesty in a blog as possible would be if you were to Truman Show it, and have someone be completely unaware of the fact that they were being watched, because in a weird twist on physics, Quantum Theory also happens to be true on a human psychological level; the act of observation (Or at least, the awareness of being observed) changes the outcome of the experiment.

At the most superficial level, blogging has made more relevant the conventions of letters. If you’ve ever read the correspondence of really prolific diarists or letterists, you’ll notice things like referring to people by their initials, as in “Went to the park with M today.” Or the usage of pseudonyms, like “I had another date with Mr. Awful.” People will argue–rightly, of course–that this is to protect the identities of those who may not wish to be publicly read about, and it is their right not to have their lives published for mass consumption. But again, if you get right down to the simplest level of honesty, this is already “lying” since factual information is being willfully withheld or distorted, which is the basic definition of a lie or deception.

But here we’re trading the moral simplicity of total honesty for the more complex/higher moral prerogative to respect another individual’s right to privacy.

On another level, we get to things like the actual subject matter being blogged about. So many people take so many different approaches to this. Like for example, Neil-O for the most part tends not to blog at all about what his wife and children are up to, except in how it directly–and harmlessly–impacts on his own personal experience. He’s not about to divulge where his wife works, and he’s not about to tell people the course schedule for his daughter so that people can track them down and say, “I LOVE YOUR DAD! BE MY FRIEND, PLEASE!” And this is once again, holding back. He’s withholding information. No one is going to argue the sanity of that decision, since it is very wise and very prudent, but that is because Neil-O is not a stupid man and has realized that there are very real consequences for the action of making such information available.

Here’s where some people start breaking down.

As the years go by, blogging has come under scrutiny. There have been cases where people have blogged about work and then been taken to task for it. There’s a question of whether or not people should be allowed to talk about professional matters that affect the welfare of a company, or whether they are well within their rights to share their personal experience and whatever happens outside of that is not them personally and so Not Their Problem. Except that it is. This is what I meant earlier by trying to reap complex benefits while avoiding complex deteriments. Many people still have the incredibly naive idea that freedom somehow means freedom from responsibility. That is, of course, to steal from Douglas Adams, a load of Dingo’s kidneys. Freedom does not mean doing whatever you want free from personal consequence. Freedom means being given the authority to govern yourself INCLUDING all the possible consequences that that entails. In the same way that you cannot reasonably expect to live on your own without worrying about providing for your own food and shelter in exchange for not having to live under your parents’ rules, you cannot blithely say whatever you like without expecting some kind of reaction to it.

If you are not intelligent enough to realize that ideas have consequences, then you are not ready to voice your ideas.

Or, you can do the hard thing. Bite the bullet and say whatever you want, whenever you want. Just be ready for the storm that will surely follow. And it WILL.

Medical Check Ups And Old Friends

The medical check up happened yesterday, and it went by surprisingly fast. No need for an appointment, I just showed up, the doctor ran a physical and the next thing I know he’s got a needle stuck in my arm and is filling up a vial.

Today I got a call from my friend Amelia. She’s back in town for a quick holiday on break from New York city. The odd part is, she’s not Singaporean, so the fact that she considers coming back to this place for a vacation kind of bowls me over, but then she’s got a lot of friends here, and she missed out on the wedding, so maybe that has something to do with it. She’s currently running around like a headless chicken meeting up with other friends–she’s enormously popular, yeah, she’s one of those people, the ones that everyone loves–but I’ll most likely meet her for lunch or something else either tomorrow or the day before.

And I still have treatments to finish, a last article to get out of the way…

Man, am I pedestrian enough for you yet?

Xbox 360=I Am Outdated

So now that the first opening salvo of the next generation consoles has thundered through the marketplace I now find myself once again feeling pretty behind the times. This is always the way it goes, although this time I’m in no huge hurry to actually get a new console. At least not this one anyway. The Xbox was an okay system, and I’m sure the Xbox 360 will have its share of impressive games (Although to be honest, the only exclusive I’m actually interested in for it is Halo 3) but if you’re the kind of gamer that can only afford one system, or is more interested in hardcore, “purist” gaming, rather than the usual tourist-y stuff pumped out by Electronic Arts, then you know that the PS3 is the machine to get.

I admit it, I’m something of an elitest when it comes to gaming. I was there in the late 70′s with the Atari 2600, ploughed my way through the Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 600 XL, Amiga, Playstation, Playstation 2, GameCube and Xbox. I KNOW games. I know them very well. And overall the Xbox is really mostly flash, with little in the way of substantial games. The good stuff, the stuff that pushes gaming, things like Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, God of War, Shadow of Colossus, Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts… all of these formidable titles have their home on the Playstation, and of all the consoles I’ve played to date, it has been the Playstation (Both 1 and 2) that have had the greatest number of memorable titles for me.

So while some out there are already hooking up their 360s and taking part in the dawn of the next generation of consoles, I will watch, maybe give the 360 a try at the GameAxis offices when they get one in, but mostly I will wait. Because I have an irrational faith in the Playstation consoles, and from what I have seen already, it will be the system that will deliver on the promise of showing gamers things they’ve never see before. Lord knows I could do with more of that…

The Quick Post

Tomorrow I go in for my medical check up. Finally. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m not a huge fan of needles. However, since I’ve had to get blood tests on what seems like a bi-yearly basis anyway, I’m used to it enough that I just get mildly grumpy. Well, that and the medical check up requires that you have not eaten anything 12 hours prior to the exam because they do an X-Ray as well.

Bleah. What a pain.

Lazy Monday

So I ended up not doing anywhere near enough of the work I was supposed to today.

After getting the air conditioner well and truly repaired for real this time, I ended up wasting far too much time with the Sims 2 on the Xbox and then met the Wife at her exhibit, which is a truly monstrous thing that looks terribly expensive. After that, it was dinner and then just hanging out and spending time together (Something that’s been in short supply pretty much since the wedding) and a quiet night at home, watching enraged British people kill each other in 28 Days.

I promise I’ll get my work done tomorrow.