LTYER
Last thing you'll ever read…again
Mafia
Jul 12th
Everybody has played mafia before right?
But there’s more variations to the rules of mafia than the colours of the rainbow. Everybody plays it differently and it largely depends on the group you play it with.
I’ve more or less played 3 main variations of mafia (the previous statement was a hyperbole…I can sense you trolls already).
- Variation 1 – There are mafias and police officers
- Variation 2 – There are only mafias
- Variation 3 – There are mafias, police officers, doctors and suicide bombers
I “played” variation 3 yesterday. I was bored before the first round. Just the mere idea of having all those characters turns a psychological warfare game into a game of scissors paper rock. Or perhaps it was simply because of the alcohol inside me that made my attention span drop to the size of a pea.
I was taught variation 1 and it was the one I preferred. Nice and simple. But then I was later introduced to variation 2. The interesting thing about variation 2 is that mafias do not kill. You kill off people by simply going around the circle and getting each person to in turn accuse someone being a mafia and then everybody votes. If there is a majority the person dies. I first thought “this seems a bit dull…” but soon I realised that this is fact is actually the most fun.
Police officers more or less give players the ability to guess who the mafias are. The problem with this variation is that as soon as the police guesses a significant amount of mafias, they can just sacrifice themselves to reveal the information.
The great thing about variation 2 is that it’s 100% psychological warfare. There’s no random killings and no police officers guessing who’s mafia and what not. It makes the game so much more interesting as accusations go flying across the circle.
That’s my 2 cents about this game.
I just lost the game.
Another cinema rant
Jul 10th
Okay okay. I know, I already wrote a mini rant. Actually the last blog would probably have better suited to a FB update or twitter update. But pffish, you guys enjoy reading my blogs so much more than my status updates right?
Anyway, I should have mentioned this in the previous post but it didn’t occur to me.
Anywho, I had bought my movie tickets online. Yup who cares about the $1 booking fee. Sigh. They should totally make it free to book things online. Anyway, we got there at like 3:10pm, 5 minutes before the movie was gonna start. Lined up on the “Red carpet” but as usual, you get ignored for 1 or 2 customers before they notice the “VIP customer”. When I got to the counter, I just handed them my iphone which had the tag, the woman tried to scan my iphone with the barcode scanner. I’m not too sure on the science of the barcode scanner but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work on lcd screens. I might be wrong though. Anyway, my iphone had the orientation lock switched on meaning you can’t turn it sideways for it to switch (I tend to read my emails in my bed lying down). Anyway, she hands it back to me after failing to scan the screen and asks me to make it horizontal. I tell her to just type in the code herself. She obliged. I mean come on, you would rather go into the effort of handing the iphone back, wait for me to make it “horizontal” and then for you to waste another 10 seconds trying to scan the damn thing when you have the keyboard right infront of you and can actually just type in the 10 or so characters? Anyway, this didn’t tick me off, lazy people are lazy.
So I got into the cinema and the ads are playing and everything is dark. Toby was the seating person! I didn’t even recognise him since it was so dark but he was like “Hey John!” and I was a bit too shocked to reply but it clicked. Anywho, I got to my seat and yup, some dude and his kid were in our seats.
“Err, excuse me, I think you’re in our seats”
“No we’re not”
“I think you are…this is L7 and L8″
“This is K”
“No…K is infront of you”
“Wait…yeah…we’re in L”
“Okay…but we’re in those seats”
This is where Toby and this other seat checking dude came to assist in this god complicated mess.
“Can I see your ticket?”
“We bought these online”
(Who the fuck cares if you bought them online…I bought my tickets online. Since you bought them online you should know exactly where you’re sitting)
“Yes but can we just see your ticket just to make sure there hasn’t been any mistakes”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
(No you dumb fuck. We just want to check your fucking ticket since my tickets clearly says L7 and L8.)
“No, but we just need to make sure there’s no mistake”
The guy grudgingly takes out his ticket and surprise fucking surprise L9 and L10. The guy then acts all confused as if he doesn’t have a place to sit.
“It’s no big deal, just move down a seat”
“Oh…sorry.”
Stupid idiot is stupid and an idiot.
Did I mention that they were asking questions during the film as well? Not to mention laughing at inappropriate times. It’s the fucking Chinese culture you ignorant fools. Talk about ruining the moment. Sigh. Okay. Rant over.
Karate Blog
Jul 10th
So I went and watched the Karate Kid with my kid brother today.
Firstly, what’s up with all the hating on facebook? I don’t understand. People even suggested that Twilight was better. How outrageous!
I thought the movie was great but there’s some items I want to rant about.
Maybe I’m more out of the loop with China than I first thought but…is there suppose to be that many blonde haired kids in the schools? In every shot of the school you always have some western kid walking though the shot in the background. What the fuck is up with that?
Actually I think that’s it. There’s some smaller issues but that’s somewhat expected out of these kinda movies.
One thing I want to point out is…yes…every Chinese person knows Kung Fu…except for me. FML.
That is all.
Oh and I also watched Fight Club yesterday. Great movie.
We’ll see
Jul 8th
I’m not going to publish this blog. I wonder how many people will read it. The people that have this on RSS will obviously read it. I wonder…
Things aren’t going so well.
Confused about a lot of things. Don’t really have any direction.
I decided to stop playing HoN for a lot of reasons. I won’t bother going through them. Today I was so bored that I decided to play 3 games. They weren’t even fun. It’s like you’re watching one of those tv shows or movies where the guy quits drinking and then something happens in his life and he’s just like “fuck it, what does it matter?” yeah…it was one of those days.
Things will get better kiddo.
I don’t doubt that…but when?
I got marks back for 3 of my subjects. 3 credits. Waiting for one more. If I get a pass then it might be over for me. I guess it’ll be the easy way out. It’s sorta like when you’re playing a game and there’s two options in front of you, you don’t know which one to take. Then you realise you’re missing the bridge pass and can’t go through one of them anyway, so the decision is more or less made for you.
Take the path less travelled by they say. Which path is that? We’re at a stage where every path is different.
It’ll be my first semester without a single Distinction. I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m not sad, I’m definitely not happy though…indifferent. Work is great though. I spent the entire day yesterday fixing this report for the business. Met the client and talked through requirements…this was 2 days before the report is meant to be finalised. She more or less changed her requirements and so we had to make a few changes.
The application is heaps old, everything is done via pyodbc so you’re more or less playing with SQL statements. Yuck. Anyway, 15 minutes before I had to leave, I was showing my boss what I had achieved and then outlined several problems. It turns out one of the problems is quite major and there is no clean workaround. Basically for one particular case around 6*30 checks needs to be performed per item. So that’s 180 DB queries. Sigh. Whatever, bottom line is that it’ll take a long time to generate the report. I don’t want to talk about it any more.
Keep expectations low. Avoid disappointments.
Edit: I fail, posted the wrong tag so it tweeted. Changed url I wonder who will notice now…
No more
Jul 5th
Was driving home last night. This car was on a left only lane and I was on the lane right beside him most likely in his blind spot. (btw, when I say him…I mean him or her…) anyway, he wasn’t signalling and I thought “I hope he’s not an idiot…” And guess what? The fucker was an idiot. All of a sudden his lane ends and he’s about to crash into me. If I wasn’t paying attention it would been a 3 car pile up since the car behind me wasn’t too far before me. This was one of those few instances where I’ve used the horn. Horn count = 2. I never use the horn unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Sigh.
Was at the powerhouse museum yesterday and this kid had his leg caught in one of the swings and is more or less yelling in pain. What do you do? I was like 1m away, who the fuck knows where the parent was. In the end I decided to just leave that shit alone and mind my own business. Seriously, this is what the fucking world has come to, where you’re scared to help in case you get blamed for the situation and land in court for being a child molester. I was also snapping pictures of my brother and was somewhat waiting for some pompous parent to walk up to tell me off for taking pictures of little kids.
Sigh.
In a way we all have ownership issues.
Whatever.
Runnin’
Jun 28th
I decided to go for a afternoon run today. Did 5 laps around Kogarah park in 30 minutes. Around 4.5km. As I was running I thought back to Year 7 and the 1.6km run. My first attempt was something along the lines of 10 minutes 45 sec. Yeah…I was that bad. I think at my peak I got it down to 7 minutes 40 seconds. It just made me realise how much fitter I am now. Kinda amazing. I guess it’s cause I have longer legs and run a further distance with less steps. I reckon I can easily beat my previous record.
I wonder how long it’ll take me to do the 1.6km. Maybe I should go to Moore Park and find out. Anyone else up for it?
Still haven’t done a lot for honours 
I think I need to get into SIT before I can do any reasonable amounts of work. Supervisor isn’t going to be happy.
So it’s settled, I’m going to Ted’s tomorrow to buy the D5000 with 18-55mm lens. Then I’ll need to head into Auburn for a gathering. I thought it’d be a good time to buy it now for the following reasons:
- EOFYS
- Charity Night for “The Studs” on 1st July
- Parents planning on going to Port Stephens next Tuesday
It’s so random, mum was just like “Hey wanna go to Port Stephens for next Tuesday?” “Sure”. So hopefully I’ll be able to snap pictures of dolphins and what not.
Then I was like “Wait…is this through an Asian tour group?”
“Yeah”
“Does that mean there’s gonna be heaps of Asians?”
“Yeah since it’s an Asian tour group. They’ll be speaking in Chinese”
FML…
During dinner, dear mother alerted me of some other interesting news. Apparently, after finding out that there exists a 21 year old son who works at Macquarie Bank, two of her workmates have been desperately trying to organise a gathering between the families to get the young ones introduced to each other. It sounded quite absurd. Mother replied with “I like Chinese. Does your daughter know how to cook Chinese food?”. Who cares right? As long as she can make me a delicious sandwich. Snap.
I blog too much.
Universe works in mysterious ways
Jun 27th
So I went K with a bunch of friends on Monday. Yup it was Monday. I lost my headphones that day. I didn’t realise until Thursday that I had lost them. On Wednesday I was late for work and didn’t bother looking for them. On Thursday I was off to my run and couldn’t find them…and that’s when I realised that they were GONE.
I was sad panda. The thing with tech is that you always get something that’s better than the previous pair. I wasn’t planning on topping a $100 pair of headphones any time soon. Gah! I think I left it on the table at K when I took them out of my pocket…sigh.
So I was googling around and found a pair of earphones off the apple website that also featured volume controls for the iphone/ipod, but those were around $120. I was like “Fuck that…” and decided against it.
The previous time when my headphones broke I held off buying headphones for a whole year. It was unbelievable, I couldn’t believe I spent 1 year without listening to music on my way to uni/work and back. Anyway…
Funny story.
Yesterday my mum gets back from work and is all like “John I found something, I think it’s an ipod.” I got slightly excited when she took out a thin version of an iphone. Ipod Touch! W00t. So 20 minutes later, it was on Ebay for a one day listing and I had sold it for $159. Not bad considering I sold a brand new Ipod Touch for $205 on ebay. Anywho…
The interesting thing is that my mum also found a pair of earphones that accompanied the ipod. I didn’t take too much notice of it. Made by some brand I’ve never heard of. I more or less dismissed them. Today, I went running again and I couldn’t stand running without music so I went against what my instincts told me and used a stranger’s earphones. Shut up.
The music quality wasn’t too bad (but then again I don’t have the best judgement of music quality). I got back home and decided to look them up.
Found the website and looked it up. They only had 4 models that looked like mine but only one of them matched the visuals exactly. Ultimate Ears 700. RRP USD$199.99. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I once told a friend that using a pair of someone else’s earphones is like using a used needle. (Okay…maybe not that extreme.) After telling said person of what I’ve discovered I of course was labeled a hypocrite. My response was “if the needle is gold plated…then sure…why not?”. I hope I don’t get hearing-aids. Get it? Hahaha.
Anywho…I ran for 25 minutes today. 4 laps around Kogarah park. The block is 927m so I ran 3.7km in 25 minutes. It’s a start I guess. Tomorrow I’ll go for 30 minutes. I was running and listening to Immortal Technique, a new artist I have discovered through Reddit. I find I breathe a lot easier when running to a beat. On Thursday I gave up after only 2km.
I lose a pair of earphones, end up finding another pair that’s twice as good.
Funny how that works huh?
If only it can be said about grey hoodies.
Can I call?
Jun 26th
Interesting day was quite interesting.
Started my day off at UNI. Lining up at the Student Center to get a friend’s timetable changed. Ironic that I would be the one lining up to get my timetable changed, since I’ve been doing the timetable changing for the past 3 years or so.
When we actually got to the terminal, the person behind it was a noob. It was a good strategy though, do exactly what the customer tells you to do and nothing more. You tell them to piss off if it’s not possible and that way you get through to the next person in line. If it were up to me, I would probably just through what the customer want out the window and give them what I think is the best possible timetable and only if they are extremely specific try and adjust it to their needs. I find that I save a lot of time doing this, get through more people and end up training up my timetabling keyboard micro. However, since you’re dealing with more customers, you get more frustrations. Ah well, it was only after that we left did I realise I could have simply asked to use the terminal myself to try and “optimise” the timetable. I think I’m quite good at it. Even if it is a menial job, I’m damn good at it.
I digress once again.
We more or less lined up for 40 minutes. It wasn’t too bad I guess, since I’m ever so entertaining but…yeah…must suck for other people. I can’t help but think people listen to my conversations whilst I’m waiting in line. I say some outrageous things sometimes.
Anywho.
Later, we caught up with Steph at Chinatown. Prior to that though I visited CEO karaoke to see if I had left my headphones there, they didn’t have it. I was sad. I have no idea where they could have gone. It means me forking out money to buy another pair and to be honest, I really do not feel like using money on a pair of headphones right now. I could just buy the same pair off ebay but it’s something about upping yourself every time. If your phone breaks you would get a better phone, not the same phone right?
Right.
Anyway, we went “stationary shopping”. Then it was followed by some shopping at IGA. I was pushing the trolley and Steph dumped two bottles of 2L coke into it. I had a sudden realisation and exclaimed:
“Oh shit, does this mean I have to carry everything?!”
It was quite funny cause then this woman next to me began laughing. Men and Women will never be equal.
Anywho, spent some time shopping, went back to uni, then went to SUV to dump food, went to the liquor store to pick up some delicious alcohol.
Once we got back to SUV, I began making jelly shots. I didn’t have a measuring cup and had to make do with using a plastic cup. I obviously put too much vodka into the jelly mixture as the responses I got were
“Dude, how much did you put in it?!”
and
“I can feel my tongue burning”
Lol. My bad.
I skipped like 5 hours or so but I have pictures to sum things up and even a 20 minute video.
Twas fun. I’m so tired right now. Not even close to being drunk.
The Prestige
Jun 24th
By special request.
I’ll humour you.
Since I don’t have my PC any more, I’ve been using WebUI to control utorrent. I initiated a 22gb torrent hoping for it to download offpeak. My father had realised said torrent and decided to force start it. Naturally, it resulted in downloading 22gb onpeak, leaving me with 20% of my onpeak remaining, with half a month to go. Thankfully, TPG now caps at 1mbps, which isn’t too bad. Although I’ll have to pause my youtube videos for them to buffer once it gets capped.
So anywho, the torrent is “Mind Fuck Movies”. Basically movies that leave the audience in a “wtf” stage throughout parts of the movie. Movies like 12 Monkeys, Donnie Darko, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind etc etc. I decided to watch “The Prestige” again. This is one of the best movies I’ve watched. I thought I’d pick up things I’ve missed during my first viewing but to be quite honest I didn’t. I guess it just wasn’t “mindfuck” enough. I still remember watching it at the cinemas. It was with Fobsquad. I can only remember coming out of the cinema though. I found it rather frustrating yet amusing at the same time. As soon as we exited, you had people who were asking wtf just happened, and then people explaining situations. I personally thought it was quite clear as to what happened. I remember talking to Jase about the movie, one of the few people that don’t find the need to forcefully explain the plot in order to show that they understood it. I kid you not, I’ve experienced movies where the person next to me suddenly gets an epiphany and feels the need to explain it whilst the movie is going on. “Okay dude, you’re not the only person to realise this, stfu and watch the rest of the movie”. I have a problem with people talking in movies. It really shits me.
Anywho.
The thing with Mindfuck movies is that I always find different ways of reading it. But I can’t seem to read it differently for “The Prestige”. I remember writing a blog about it actually and I quoted “Nobody cares about the man in the box”. Okay I just did a quick search through my blog and I can’t find it. Although I did find that I’ve watched Prestige a second time already. So this is actually my third viewing. However, I dod remember writing about it…maybe it was one of those blogs where I wrote…but later deleted. I tend to do that a lot. Most of the time I write a fucking essay at night. Wake up in the morning just to delete it hoping nobody’s read it. I digress. God I love that word. Digress. I digress yet again.
“Nobody cares about the man in the box”.
Am I in a box right now? Or am I out on stage? What is the box? What is the stage? I really can’t think of anything to represent them to be honest.
Let me try.
The box for me is mediocrity. The box is the comfort zone.
The stage is exciting. It’s outside the comfort zone. It’s unknown.
The box is predictable, 8 corners, 6 sides, everything joined together in an orderly manner.
The stage changes. You adjust to the stage. The stage doesn’t wait. The stage doesn’t stop.
Things are only awkward if you make it awkward. Don’t let it be awkward.
That is all.
