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…

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.

Oxygeeeeeeeeen!

For those of you who for whatever reason actually follow these ramblings, you may have noticed a clear, decisive absence in posts. That is for one very simple reason:

Konami’s Suikoden III for the Playstation 2.

I am finally coming up for air after sitting there this morning at 4:30 am, watching the final credits roll on the game and checking the game clock to realize that I had been playing for over 100 hours. The guys who made this game lied. They said it would take 60. This is the kind of lying I like though.

Yes, this is the obessisive compulsive RPG gamer side of me again, finally being put to rest for at least a couple of weeks and letting me come up for some air. I don’t know what it is about those damn games. I think it’s the whole immersiveness of it, because RPGs don’t just give you a realistic environment to play around in, they give you a world, with traditions and history and little people all wandering around going about their business. One of the things I liked about this game–well, there were a LOT of things I liked about this game–was the fact that when I wandered around in the cities, they felt like real cities with people talking to each other, kids playing, people at medieval market stalls stuffed with baskets of fruit, vases and urns… It was just unbelievably cool if you’re the kind of gaming geek like me who just wants to completely lose himself in the game.

It was a good game. A fine game. I was initially put off by the simplistic, cartoony, polygonal graphics, after coming from the visual powerhouses of games like Final Fantasy X, but in the end, what Suikoden III lacked in visual splendour it made up for with one of the few epic story-lines in video game plots for 2002, and I can see why it won the awards for RPG of that year. From a pure story point of view (Assuming you care about that stuff like I do) nothing could touch this game. It just sucked me in, and no matter how tedious the random battles got, I kept pushing myself to move forward because a) I HAD to find out what happened next, b) I got so attached to my particular group of 108 possible characters in the game I just liked making them kick ass be at ridiculously high levels and most important of all, c) I stupidly felt like there were stakes involved, high ones, and that I wanted to make sure that when the upcoming battle with the enemy came up, my troops were up to the task, the enemy would be thoroughly vanquished, and the sanctity of the kingdom was preserved. When a game gets me THAT emotionally involved in the welfare of its fictitious world, I know I have a winner on my hands. Fortunately, I didn’t have to neglect the girlfriend for this particular effort, ’cause it had anime based designs, a fantasy/epic storyline and she is ALL about that stuff, so 3/4 of the time she was sitting there playing backseat gamer and pointing out things/objects I’d missed, and sitting there oohing and aahing the story right up until the very end. I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. My girlfriend got just as excited about the end of a videogame as I did.

And that, my friends, explains where I’ve been for the last week. Coming back again and again to fight for the preservation of the Zexen principality and the Grasslands to ensure they wouldn’t be annihilated by the overly ambitious Holy Harmonia Kingdom and its phalanx of magic wielding Bishops. On a scale of five shoes, I give Suikoden III five shoes, with shoelaces. All neatly tied up.

Of course, now it’s time to worry about the real world. First thing up:

Uh… We Don’t Know. Go Away And Don’t Bother Us.

MOM is confused.

The Ministry Of Manpower, in its usual, stumbling, bureaucratic way, has promptly gone and fucked up my application for a business and they don’t know how or why it happened. Fortunately, none of this is my fault.

What happened is that normally this type of application would be processed in about 10 working days and they would tell you what the outcome was, first by sending you a letter to let you know what your processing number is for references regarding inquiries, and then, eventually with the final outcome itself. None of this happened. I never received my letter, and my passport, which, thankfully was extended to the end of February, sat there and clocked the days. Last week, I finally got antsey and so called up MOM to ask what was going on. MOM was utterly confused as to why this happened and asked for my name and passport number, and that they would conduct an inquiry to find out what happened and either call me at the end of the day or the next to let me know what happened. They didn’t call that day. The next day they DID call, and that was to act surprised all over again and ask me the same questions and tell me they’d conduct an inquiry and that I’d be receiving a call by the end of the day or the next. The next day, they called back with the nebulous, “It’s still being processed,” excuse, which seemed to baffle the woman on the phone as much as it did me. So I had to write a letter to MOM explaining in the politest possible terms, “Please extend my passport while you sort out your fuck up,” and they did it, telling me that THIS time, for sure, the processing shouldn’t take more than ten business days.

We’ll see…

The Beautiful People

Nadya is not in town. Or if she is, she’s not speaking to me at the moment, which I regard as a Good Thing.

One thing I have noticed about the Beautiful People, and perhaps this is because they are, in fact, beautiful, is that they have a very reliable habit or not calling you back when they say they will. Normally, I suppose this would be regarded as an extremely annoying trait to have, especially if you want to keep their company, but they can get it away with it because, again, they are beautiful, and that turns a blind eye to many normally intolerable failings. Since I’m wierd and don’t seem particularly eager to keep their company, this suits me just fine.

For the last little while, the majority of communications with Nadya have been through e-mail. I think she finally realized I was serious when I said if the sun is out, it’s Access Denied regarding me. I wrote up her concept proposal/treatment, sent it off, she came back to me saying that she liked it, but that minor changes needed to be made ’cause she’d spoken to some people at a possible network that wanted to pick the show up, and they said they wanted certain changes made to the concept. Fortunately, they WERE minor, so it was no big deal. I was a little taken aback when she sent me photos of herself and the other host (Taken by a professional photographer here by the name of Wee Kim, hey, no snickering in the back there, that’s his real name…) that she just naturally expected me to nicely crop and drop into the document. I once again grumbled about The Beautiful People and how they expect everything to be done for them because they are beautiful (Unfortunately, more often than not, they get their way) and so enlisted the help of the girlfriend to do that, since I’m utterly clueless when it comes to computer tech that goes beyond cut n’ paste.

The document was done, I sent it off, and promptly got a call from ANOTHER total stranger who is now asking me to write HIS concept proposal/treatment based on glowing references from Nadya. Whee… gettin’ to be a real popular boy here. Or, as I explained to the girlfriend, “I spell for people who can’t.”

That was yesterday. I’m assuming that he’s one of the Beautiful People too as he said he’d call either yesterday evening or today, and has thus far failed to do so. Oh well…

GAMEZ! FREE GAAAAAAAAAAAAMEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why, oh WHY didn’t I stumble onto this scam before?!?

Perhaps it’s because I’m just getting craftier, more mercenary, gearing up for Geek Life (The unofficial motto if it ever gets off the ground, “We’re Not Nice, And We’re Not Sorry About That Either…”) or it’s just the needs of the poverty stricken, but I may have finally stumbled onto a scam that will ensure I’m always at the ready with the Latest Hot New PS2 Thing and it won’t cost me a cent!

Of late, I have been helping out the girlfriend by writing articles for a free tech-head magazine here called Upload. Initially it was just doing the movie/music reviews that she didn’t want to, though lately I seem to have taken over all her chores with this mag, ’cause I write them faster and it’s not as painful for me to come off as snarky and obnoxious. While flipping through the irregular contributor’s copies we receive, I noticed that they had a game review section. I also noticed the game review section was riddled with small errors such as, for Lord Of The Rings, “There are up to four controllable characters, the ranger, Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn!” (Nope, not making that up, it’s actually in there…), and pointed these out to the editor, mentioning in oh-so-subtle fashion, “I’m a darn good writer AND a dedicated gamer, y’know…”

So since they already like the articles I’ve been giving to them, I’ve been asked to review GAMES! I GET REVIEW COPIES! OH MY GOD, IT’S LIKE GEEK HEAVEN! And here I was, wondering how, in my poverty stricken state, I was going to get my grubby little hands on a copy of one of THE RPGs of 2003 (Second only to Final Fantasy X-2) Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) and it turns out that the kind boys at Upload are willing to drop a copy in my lap if I would do them the favor of telling them what I think, WHICH I WOULD’A DONE FOR FUCKIN’ FREE ON THIS BLOG ANYWAY!

MY GOD, LIFE IS RICH, AIN’T IT?!?

This also means that aforementioned FFX-2 as well as other goodies in the pipelines like Silent Hill III and Clock Tower III could also be within the grasp of my sunlight deprived hands. If only they didn’t already have a DVD reviewer they were comfortable with it would be heaven. Ah well, it’s all region 3 stuff anyway, so I guess it’s no big loss…

Hey, Aren’t You Supposed To Be A Writer Or Something?

Oh yeah, temporarily forgot about that.

Serial Jen MUST be completed before the end of March. If I’m going to submit that short story for consideration in the Open Spaces Anthology for Canadian speculative fiction, then I need to mail it off before April 3. I keep telling myself that I work better with a deadline anyway, and the only thing that could possibly put the screws to this story and make it nigh impossible to complete before then would be the untimely arrival of Xenosaga, which would also entail a sudden absence of my shoeless presence from the blog scene as well. For future reference, the only times I will, in all likelihood drop off the face of Bloggian Earth for days at a time, would be A) I got dumped B) I’m playing a REALLY good RPG that triggers my obsessive-compulsive gaming disorder. Heck, I figure even if I were on a book tour, I’d probably keep blogging, if only so that all the fans could find out what I really think of them, and that poor schmuck who so politely told me he thought I was so cool… in reality, my polite grin and thank you was saying “You, my friend, are an utter and total ass.”

Okay, I think that should be it. I’m pretty much up to speed with everything that’s happened (Not much admittedly, since it was all about Suikoden III) so the only thing left to do is reply to e-mails that have been piling up and going largely ignored…

Oogh

Last night I made the girlfriend cry. It was not for a good reason, and it wasn’t even for a bad reason, it’s just one of those things that seems to evolve naturally from a seemingly innocent point of conversation and suddenly starts opening up doors in the heart that should stay closed until a more approriate time.

Of late I have been waxing rebellious over at the William Gibson blog forum, because some local there, calling himself Big.Brother, started up a thread claiming to be an inhabitant of what Gibson, in an essay for Wired magazine called, Disneyland With A Death Penalty. Basically Wired gave him a free trip here about ten years ago, just to get his written impressions of the place. Since this Big.Brother seemed to have no compunction about blasting the place, I gleefully joined in. In a–in retrospect anyway, at the time I was totally caught off guard–not so surprising twist of fate, it turns out that the guy I attended film studies with at the U of A, who got me here and who I consequently stopped speaking to a couple of years later, was also tooling around on the forum (He’s a big Gibson fan himself and, like me, is very influenced by his writing, though I was influenced by it at 14, he was influenced by it at 28 or something), and started to take issue with all the slamming, though he responded to Big.Brother’s posts, not mine. I didn’t want to get into a flame war, and so never directly responded to his posts either, but the gist of it is, since he came here with useless history degree, white skin and the usual attitude that locals come to expect from caucasians, he found paradise. He called himself a writer, and thus instantly became one here, found a nice Chinese girl that gave him none of the attitude of the girls back home, and found a job and a people more willing to accept his genius than he ever could back home. So he was mighty offended with people who actually picked holes at what he referred to as his “private utopia”.

This, to say the least, invoked the wrath of Big.Brother who called his posts deluded and myopic, but then he doesn’t know the guy is white. Since then, a flame-war has been simmering between the two as Big.Brother and “Ebo” (The name of the main character from his first abandoned novel, actually it’s Eboman) started trading posts and snippets from other websites either praising or damning Singapore, proving that other countries have the same problems that Singapore does, so leave this island paradise alone.

What does all this have to do with the girlfriend?

What started it all was when Ebo made an effort to play peacemaker and said something to the effect of, “The only problem that Singapore has is rude cellular phone users.”

In retaliation, Big.Brother posted a hot spanking new story (Still, unsurprisingly, not covered by the press) about 6 protesters being arrested by the police for attempting an anti-war demonstration. In addition, they were interrogated and it was found that the source of their motivation was an SMS message urging people to demonstrate. Doubtless whoever made that initial SMS is already detained. Here’s the story.

I mentioned this to the girlfriend and she was quite incensed. So incensed in fact, that she needed to rant about it on her own blog. Then she read Gibson’s article, and she got very upset indeed.

I have always hated this place from the perspective of someone who is used to a certain vibrancy, texture and freedom, who is pissed that I am denied that here. I’d never really come face to face with someone who’s emotions equalled my own, but came from being intelligent enough to realize that she’d never even had a taste of what I had enjoyed and was incensed about no longer having.

I really got a sense of just how much she hates this place tonight. She said a lot of striking things, the most memorable images for me all centering around her feelings of betrayal about this place. She grew up here, constantly being fed by the propaganda machine of how important, worldly and sophisticated Singapore is. And she was really disheartened when reality set in. She likened it a couple of ways. Like when you’re one of the rich kids at schools, and all the other kids say stuff like, “My dad comes from a family of 6 generations of weatlh.” “My dad made his money as high powered lawyer, putting criminals away in celebrated cases.” “My dad is the CEO of a company that produces polymers found in every electrical appliance.” And when it’s your turn, you say, “My dad won the lottery.”

But what really drove the point home for her was when she had a chance to travel and found herself away from the machine for a while. All that talk of Singapore’s significance in the region and in the world evaporated in the face of real places that were more concerned with things other than having a World Class Airport. No one cared whether an airport was world class or not, and if it was, they didn’t see why it should be important. All the reassurances of the importance of Singapore were suddenly, acutely absent and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. She said it was like having a braggart father, that was always coming home talking about how important his job was, what a contribution he made to the company that day, how it was so tough being the head of his division, and when she finally got out of the house and visited the office, he was just a pencil-pushing, mid-level bureaucrat with a cubicle by the watercooler, occasionally mentioned whenever more toner was needed for the photocpy machine.

It bothers her that Singapore needs to praise itself so ardently because it really just emphasizes to her how insecure it is. And it really bugs her that she’s from this country and that stigma will always follow her to some degree, that she’s from a country that is in love with its own airport.

So she was talking about all this, pausing, starting, and having to stop again when the tears came. I think I watched decades of frustration just come pouring out tonight, and for her, this attempt to snuff out freedom of expression is just one more nail in the coffin, since it runs counter to Singapore’s sudden need to have radical, innovative thinkers… provided they don’t shake things up and just make lots of money. The fact that Ebo actually defends this point of view and deems it necessary for order (He ascribes to the As Long As The Electricity Works and The Streets Are Clean, I’ll Tolerate Anything ethos) is just another signal to her that people are essentially materialist animals that will do anything as long you keep their bellies full and give them a compliant, adoring, warm body to fuck. Well, that and she’s even less impressed with white people than she was before. A guy that couldn’t hack it in the Real World and retreated here to let his skin do all the talking rates very low in her estimation. The fact that her own country eagerly embraces such individuals and rewards them for their “cheat,” just downright depresses her.

But it was still an enlightening and even kind of touching experience to see just how deeply she feels about all this. If I respected her before, it’s just gone up a couple of orders of magnitude after last night’s conversation.

Blogging Before Sunrise

I feel like a damn farmer or somethin’…

I think the girlfriend finally has her sleep cycle figured out. She operates on Martian Standard Time or something, because it seems that she prefers to be up for 20 hours and then go for an eight hour sleep cycle. This is fine, on Mars, where the day is probably 28 hours and it means that she’d have a regular waking up and sleeping hour, but here on Earth, it means that we have a tendency to rotate bedtimes, going to bed in the morning, gradually creeping to an afternoon bedtime, then an evening one, then a late evening one and so on. We got up at 4 am today.

If the blog hasn’t been updated recently, it’s because of two things; working on the start a business issue and, of course, Grand Theft Auto III. But to address the issues one at a time:

No Senor, I Am A Hardworking Local. Que Habla Espanol?

MOM finally decided to take me in. That is, the Ministry Of Manpower. After MOM constantly told me that my submission wasn’t quite acceptable, I went up to my room and did my homework again. Actually, that’s a lie, the girlfriend did, as I’m utterly hopeless with business plans and so she went the extra mile and reworked an existing 10 page template we’d borrowed from a friend and upped the page count another 15, throwing in graphs, business figures and a bunch of other stuff beyond my comprehension. So we visited MOM again yesterday morning and this time MOM liked it and took it. Then MOM said I’d be notified about it in a while and to please go to my room. MOM then stamped my passport till the end of February, so it looks like I get to stay for another month thanks to the good–if tediously bureaucratic–graces of MOM. Guess we’ll just have to wait now and see whether this business thingy actually gets off the ground now…

How Do I Kill Thee? Let Me Count The Ways: Burning, Shooting, Stabbing, Bludgeoning, Running Over You…

You know you’re playing a video game for far, FAR too long when you’re sitting in a cab, see another car go zooming by and suddenly have the urge to take control of the wheel, steer the cab into the other lane to overtake and pass the nice shiny new car, then block it, jump out, throw out the driver and jack his car so that you can drive like a maniac over the elevated freeway and see if you can jump it across the river and into the boardwalk for a Unique Stunt Jump Bonus.

Home stretch on GTA III now. All the side missions are done, so it’s just a matter of finishing the ACTUAL game. Of course, the big problem is that every time I go into The Cave, I see Grand Theft Auto: Vice City staring me in the face, so the madness may continue for some time, which I will probably be killed for.

Darwin Was Right:

The stupidity of my cat amazes me sometimes.

I mean, he’s an animal, so it’s granted that he’s not going to be mathematically simulating the atmosphere of Jupiter using fluid dynamics equations, but STILL… You’d think he would at least only eat things that were actually edible.

I believe at the moment my cat is suffering from Anal Trauma, at least that’s what I’m calling it. It’s a condition where the cat develops a superstitious fear of the litterbox when defecating because he associates it with the pain. The reason he experiences pain is because he’s in agony when he actually defecates, but his little feline mind associates that with the box. NOT with the fact that he went and ate a handstrap for a cellular phone.

YES. Zero ate the little wrist-wrap hand thingy that was tied to my cellular phone.

The level of stupidity involved in this amazes even me, and I’m a moron.

It started when I noticed while grabbing my phone that I wasn’t feeling the sensation of the strap against my hand. When I looked at it yesterday, I noticed that it had been cleanly bitten through. I had seen Zero playing with my phone before, and even trying sometimes to contentendly gnaw on said strap, but after having left the phone out in the living room at bedtime, I guess he seized this as an opportunity to finally ingest the tasty morsel.

I didn’t know this, of course. I just assumed that he bit through it and played with it somewhere, batting it under the couch or something. At least until the girlfriend walked into the other bathroom, trying to figure out why it was stinky and realizing that Zero had once again gone into the shower stall and had left his package, INCLUDING largely intact strap.

Any cat owners out there who know how to stop an incredibly stupid cat from eating things that are clearly NOT food? I thought he’d have enough common sense to only eat things that could actually be chewed into pieces, but apparently he’s trusted that we, in our human wisdom, will save him from his own mental retardation. I think if Zero went to cat school, he’d be riding in the short bus, if you catch my drift…

I feel sorry for his poor little kitty colon, trying unsuccessfully to digest that…

It’s Not That It Needs Work, You Just Suck.

A couple of days ago, as a favor to my friend Ching, I read someone’s short story.

Perhaps it is professional pride. Or ego. Or just being nitpicky, but it annoys me when people (Particularly locals) get it into their head that because something is not involved in Science or Math, it must therefore be drop dead easy, and anyone can do it. These are the same kinds of people that think that Harry Potter is a get-rich-quick scheme, and that the only thing required to make that same amount of money is to have the patience to sit down, not hanging out with friends in bars or restaurants, and just crank the damn thing out.

I say all this because it seems that Ching’s friend has the exact same opinion.

She tells me that this friend of hers that she’s not THAT close to, just one day up and decided that he wanted to write a book. Apparently he had some publishing experience when he was 12 or 14, and based on that glowing assessment, has, after a hiatus of a decade or two, decide to get back into the writing game. So he asked Ching to look at his story. I guess she mentioned me, and he decided that he wanted a glowing report from a “fellow professional” and asked that I looked at it. So I did.

And regretted the entire affair.

I won’t paraphrase what I said. Instead, I’ll just the throw the e-mail I sent to Ching in its entirety right here:

I really don’t know if I should comment on this story. For the most part, it doesn’t work for me. If he wants me to, I can do a line-by-line edit and point out what I see as the difficulties, but to be completely honest, I think the story is nasty, somewhat pretentious, and entirely too self-centered on the writer himself, going “Look at me! LOOK AT ME!” and not the story itself. In general terms:

This is not the WORST story I’ve ever read. I’ve seen stuff a lot more problematic than this in my creative writing classes. But Darren should find a critique from someone who’s more interested in “literary stories” that concentrate more on cleverness than technique, because he seems more interested in being clever than writing well, and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I dunno… you read the story, see what you think… Myself, I think he’s got a long way to go before he writes the kind of stories that I like, but I make the disclaimer that I’m a simpleton that slums in “Genreville” and not a Literary Writer. Though I would still contend that he’s no Gabriel Garcia Marquez either, and HE’S a fabulous “Literary Author” who’s style is easy AND fun.

And, as Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Life is like a bad writer. The plot generally sucks most of the time.

The Trial, Lah…

For those of you unaware of my incredibly pretentious literary reference, The Trial was a novel by the master of paranoia, Franz Kafka, and “Lah” is the useless tag word that Singaporeans stick on the end of their sentences. Lah.

Mostly I titled this post this way because I currently feel like I am in a Franz Kafka novel surrounded by little yellow people.

Yes, yes, I know that is an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say but at the moment I am daunted and mightily frustrated by the bureaucratic machine that, until I came here, I had thought to be the figments of imagination of a mad genius and not something that could possibly exist in reality in such an exaggerated form. Then I got over here and realized that Kafka had been playing it down.

The plans which are currently being foiled by the Powers That Be (Who require three copies, signed, in color coded paper, with appendices A through G attached here, here, and here, but not in copy three which is for administrative purposes, unless appendix D is signed here, in which case you need appendix D iii, and an additional copy for the appendix D iii processing department, which will require you to fill this form, as well as get sub-appendices… ah, you get the idea…) are to make myself once more nice and legal. It seemed simple enough; start a business. You own it, you work with people you know, you call your own hours, and you don’t have any idiot manager to blame except yourself, a much more acceptable–if somewhat scarier–proposition.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, the Easy-To-Use, Standardized-And-Universal-Format that is supposed to be so easy to fill out and process has been subjected to repeated submission, usually rejected because whoever we are dealing with doesn’t agree with the way it was filled out, even though it was filled out as per the instructions of the LAST civil servant I saw, who told me that this was what I needed to do for an acceptable form when he/she rejected it after I followed the advice of the civil servant previous to that.

So it would seem that this incredibly standardized, universal system of form filling and processing is highly subject to individual interpretation, and whatever advice one duly authorized civil servant gives can be automatically, arbitrarily countermanded by the next one. This could be due to any number of reasons from they don’t like the look of you, to they don’t like the person who gave you advice last time and are inflicting their office political war on you, to they just got rejected at the last government run Social Development Unit party (“Breed! Be fruitful and multiply! That’s an order!”) and they’re not having a good morning so they don’t see why you should either.

Having just spoken to my blogless friend DangerGene Whitlock (Whose baby is due in two weeks! Go Gene!) he presented an interesting solution to help circumvent this problem.

Start taking names.

This, apparently has worked for him in the past. The theory is that if you take the name of the person who is dealing with you, this will trigger the genetically in-built paranoia that is characteristic of Singaporeans in general and civil servants in particular who are Always Watching Their Ass. It will ensure that they try not to be too “creative” in advising you out of sheer hostile whimsey. The pay off comes when you deal with the next person and they give you the completely contradictory information. Now you cite the name of the first person, ask to take the name of the current person, and ask if there’s some way to corroborate with management between this diametric opposition. Now the Always Watching Their Ass behavioural paradigm is kicked in as they realize that a meeting with management to deal with the discrepancy is going to cause untold amounts of trouble for them personally and profressionally, and so they wisely decide that having a bit of bureaucratic fun at your expense is simply not worth a, at worst, dismissal and, at least, boring lecture about administrative ethics, so they usually just let it go, and the always reliable human need to not make life difficult for others if it means you pay for it too prevails.

Bureaucrats. Just. Plain. SUCK.