Episode 1357: I Caved...

Caved this morning and sent my supervisor the thing I did for Introduction to Research Methods before leaving for church. Figured there was no point in wasting time worrying about a pseudo-deadline when there's a real one looming at the end of the month. (Two weeks to write 6000 words is entirely doable, and I'm excited to get going with this one anyway. Have decided I'm going to put the dissertation out of my mind until this essay is done. One thing at a time, right?) This did mean that I could enjoy the rest of the day stress-free though. Watched another episode of Downton Abbey after the morning service, then met up with Phil and Sarah for a drink in Costa, and pool afterwards. Then after the evening service, I discovered another item on the Varsity menu that I love: the Dirty Rocky. Way too much food, but so much chicken goodness! (To be honest, it's really just the batter they use that's really yummy. That and the hot sauce.) Also, in preparation for reading Joey Comeau's newest book The Complete Lockpick Pornography (which is really two thematically related novels being published in one volume, Lockpick Pornography and We All Got It Coming), I've started rereading Overqualified, his novel told through a series of cover letters. It's heartbreakingly funny, and I definitely recommend it to everyone.

Episode 1356: Spooky Numbers!

Just realised that the number 30 is even more significant for the Merlion than I thought. I already noted the 30 years between Thumboo's 'Ulysses By The Merlion' appearing in his collection of the same name (1979) till the publication of Reflecting On The Merlion anthology (2009), but it turns out that 30 years also passed between its first use as the then-STPB's logo (1964) till the poem was inscribed on a plaque in the Merlion Park (1994), as well as between the Merlion statues' installation in the Merlion Park (1972) till their relocation to the other side of the Esplanade Bridge to provide a better view (2002). Definitely should stick this somewhere in my dissertation, just as a sort of historical quirk. Maybe in the introduction, to provide some spiel about the significance of the anthology's timing being traced back to these earlier milestones. Haven't written much today, although I've got an opening sentence down for my middle chapter, and an idea of the conclusion that the first chapter's argument heads towards. Am at the point where I'm thinking that I should just e-mail the thing we had to do for Introduction to Research Methods to my supervisor as a crude draft of what the literature review section of my introduction will look like. It's not perfect, but most of it can be salvaged/trimmed down for that purpose eventually.

Episode 1355: 731 Views!

That's how many views the journal eventually got for today. It's obviously going to be a one-off spike, but hey, still pretty cool. Have started watching Downton Abbey at last, in order to put off writing my dissertation for another night. (Will definitely do something tomorrow!) I'm actually really enjoying it and wondering to myself why I didn't start watching this sooner. It's like a classier version of Gossip Girl, with English instead of American accents, and set in the previous century. Am simultaneously procrastinating by doing my film titles for next term's WSC publicity booklet. Can't upload them though, as my laptop freezes every time I try to access the subfolder that contains the remote desktop package. So that's two things that can't work now. The weird thing is that otherwise, the laptop seems to run fine. I mean, I even managed to run Granado Espada, and everyone knows gaming consumes a huge amount of system resources, right? So I'm starting to think if maybe this isn't even a hard disk problem, but something to do with the laptop's memory instead.

Episode 1354: 500 Views In Four Hours

How did that just happen? Eunoia Review managed 500 page views in just over four hours this afternoon, and I have absolutely no idea where the views are coming from. They're almost entirely from the USA, but that's not saying much because the journal's readership has always been heavily weighted in that direction anyway. Whatever the case, it's just another part of what's been a really great day, which has only been marred by the refusal of iTunes Genius to stop crashing my laptop. (I don't use the Genius function at all, so I've turned it off rather than waste time trying to fix the problem.) Firstly, I don't appear to be jetlagged at all. I went to bed at around 10 pm, and woke up at around 9 am, which is the sort of enviable sleeping pattern that I don't think I've ever been able to enjoy at any point in my life, to be honest. Read J.T. Welsch's pamphlet Waterloo today, and it's a lovely sequence of poems. Definitely getting his Holdfire pamphlet (and the others as well) once they're available for ordering on Amazon UK. Am now reading Rebecca Lindenberg's Love, An Index, which Terrance Hayes describes on the back cover sticker as 'a terrific litany of losses and retrievals. These poems re-cover, reclaim, and remake the elegy form.' Have wanted to get it ever since the McSweeney's Small Chair app featured a selection of the poems, and with the release of a second volume in their poetry series (Allan Peterson's Fragile Acts), I figured it was time to start buying. Was also approached by a friend about doing some literary-related stuff in a couple of months, but I'll say more about that when the time comes, with links and appropriate amount of fanfare for the informing of whoever's reading this blog. Then I pre-ordered Splice, the newest game from Cipher Prime (i.e. the guys behind Auditorium, Fractal and Pulse, all awesome, beautiful games). Randomly, I also discovered that I really like the iced caramel latte that the Arts Centre cafe does. Sure, it's probably far too sweet to be healthy, but being healthy is definitely not one of the reasons people drink coffee anyway!

Episode 1353: RIP Ray Bradbury

What sad news. I've always liked Bradbury's work, especially his short stories. There's a three-volume scholarly edition of his Collected Stories being prepared by Kent State University Press, so I would like to get that once they're all published. Speaking of books, I (reluctantly) woke up from a nap at 5 pm and went to the Post Room to pick up seven parcels. (Would have left it till tomorrow if my flatmate hadn't got back to his room.) Everything I ordered before leaving for Singapore has arrived, and I'm actually really impressed that nothing got lost in the postal system. Among the books that arrived is a beautiful paperback of Cavafy's Complete Poems, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. It's a compilation of the hardback editions of Mendelsohn's translations of the Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems. Looking forward to diving into it when I have the time! Now it's time for the Season 3 of Pretty Little Liars, and then back to bed, or maybe I'll read some more of Tucker Max's Sloppy Seconds on my iPad before that. Started reading it during the flight because like I told Shriram the other day on Facebook, there's just something about Tucker Max stuff that makes for great in-flight reading.

Episode 1352: Only Three Films!

So it turned out that there weren't too many films I wanted to see on this flight. Only saw three, starting with This Means War, in which I thought Reese Witherspoon was pretty superfluous. Frankly, the Tom Hardy/Chris Pine bromance was very USA Network, i.e. funny enough to carry the whole show on its own. (Apparently, quite a few film critics would disagree with me though.) I approved of Hardy being allowed to keep his accent, as well as both actors playing against their real-life images. This film was obviously never going to catapult either guy to Hollywood superstardom (I guess that would be The Dark Knight Rises for Hardy and the rebooted Star Trek franchise for Pine), but it does show that they can do comedy repartée. Then I saw How To Train Your Dragon, which I loved and is now being developed into a trilogy, per Hollywood's penchant for spinning out moneymakers. Also watched Liar Game: Reborn, a mishmash of game theory and group psychology, producing outcomes that didn't always make sense, at least not until the later flashback sequences explaining them. I was sort of expecting something more gruesome, like the Saw franchise. Sure, a crippling monetary penalty is something you'd want to avoid, but it's hardly life-threatening, and the show seemed so desperately to want to portray the whole Liar Game as being thus. Maybe I needed to watch the earlier parts of the franchise, which consists of two TV series and one film?

Episode 1351: Four London Trips In Three Weeks!

Am going to be in London four times this month, which is more times than I've been there in the rest of the academic year so far. Going to get the Megabus from Cannon Park, and I've even managed to book two of my journeys for 90p. Had no idea that Megabus could get that cheap! Must be some kind of advance thing, as I could've booked another of my trips for 90p, but when I actually got around to doing it a day later, the price had gone up to £4.50. Have also selected my seat for my return flight tomorrow. Am in the same one as on the flight to Singapore, and I'm actually hoping for a repeat of what happened then, when the rest of my row ended up being empty and I could have a bit of a nap, stretched out. It's probably not going to happen, but maybe at least an empty seat next to me? Oh well. At least with my iPad, maybe I'll actually do some reading during the flight for a change, unless it so happens that there are actually half a dozen movies available that I would like to see. (Probably not, but never say never. Would really like to see Prometheus, but since that hasn't even been released yet in the cinemas here, I doubt it'll be on KrisWorld.)

Episode 1350: New iPad!

Thanks to my dad, I now have the new iPad at last. Have spent most of the day filling it with stuff from the App Store, although I'm being quite selective about what I put on the iPad because I don't want it to become as cluttered as my iPhone. Mostly I'm putting the literary stuff, as well as games that I think would be more fun to play on the larger screen of the iPad. (Am slightly annoyed that iBooks isn't syncing like I expected it would, so I've kind of given up on getting those NAP PDFs onto the iPad.) On the plus side, maybe this will also inspire me to start culling the apps on my iPhone. Haven't done that since the time I had to reset it to factory settings! I've also synced all the articles for both my essay and my dissertation to Dropbox, and then installed that on the iPad, so now I can finally read stuff without having to lug my laptop around or being cooped up in my room. Whether this will actually increase my productivity is another matter altogether, of course. I'm aiming to have 1500 new words to show my supervisor by the middle of next week, although I'm sort of tempted to ask him to push our meeting back by one week, just to give myself time to get over the jet lag. Will see how I feel on Thursday, I suppose.

Episode 1349: Brief Sentosa Visit

Went to Sentosa this afternoon to check out the Merlion, hoping to get some insight into the current branding of the Merlion. It was frankly very disappointing. At the attraction itself, there was no mention of the Merlion's origin as a creation of the then STPB. There is a vague reference to a decision being made in the mid-20th century that Singapore needed a new symbol, but that was it. Instead, the Merlion's now morphed into some sort of lucky charm. It's all really mundane, and even the views from the Merlion's head are nothing great, surrounded as the structure is by buildings and shipping containers (always thought it a rare case of bad planning that Sentosa and Pulau Brani ended up right next to each other). Perhaps more surprisingly, there seems to have been a complete failure to capitalise on the Merlion-as-icon beyond kitschy uses as logos or shapes for cookies and magnets. I was expecting some sort of picture book for kids, selling a cutesy story, but nothing of that sort was to be found. No reading material at all, even thought the attached shop had all of the other usual stuff hawked to tourists. Even at the Images of Singapore shop, up several escalators, not a single book about the Merlion itself was to be found. (I did, however, find a copy of Lee Tzu Pheng's Lambada By Galilee & Other Surprises, literally collecting dust in a corner of the shop, which I have now rescued.) Seems like a failure to actually explore the full potential of the icon, even as a tourist object. I mean, not even selling the Firstfruits anthology of poems about the Merlion? Really?

Episode 1348: Touch Wraps Up Solidly

Saw the two-part finale for Touch today, and I thought it was great. I've been rooting for this show since it began, and while it's drawn a lot of criticism for being schmaltzy and too reliant on coincidences to tie up its stories week to week, I think all those critics are being far too cynical. Surely the point is that Touch as a show isn't trying to be realistic, but rather is asking its viewers every week, what if you could actually see how everyone is connected to everyone else? It might seem hard to believe, but isn't that just because on a day-to-day basis, none of us has that level of omniscience? I'm looking forward to the addition of Maria Bello's character in Season 2, and Kiefer Sutherland continues to surprise me with how he manages to pull off 'sort of vulnerable father', especially acting opposite a child character who's been mute all of this season. I really hope Fox doesn't manage to screw this show up, even though I'm honestly expecting the ratings to tank or hold steady at best, depending on what it's scheduled opposite on the other networks. Oh well. I hope Season 2 will at least develop the explanation for Jake's abilities further, but frankly, I'd be satisfied with another season filled with nothing but randomly purposeful connections among a global cast of characters. On any other show, the diversity would probably feel tokenistic, but this show is so overwhelmingly earnest, it makes me want to believe that all we need to become better people is to realise how alike we all really are.