tunnelnuke's Xanga

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:31:41 GMT

"For history's a twisted root
with art its small, translucent fruit." - Paul Muldoon

"I don't have faith in faith.
I don't believe in beliefs.
You can call me faithless. You can call me faithless.
But I still cling to hope,
and I believe in love.
And that's faith enough for me. That's faith enough for me." - Rush, Faithless

That sums up my life for now.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:24:08 GMT

Because harsh words don't pierce my soul like an arrow through the heart of an animal, so carry on.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:57:04 GMT

We live to tear each other apart at the seams,
With violence of the like no friends have seen.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:38:27 GMT

We are bricks as soon as we're born
Then time-hardened and weather-worn

The kiln-forged clods of mud we build with:
the people we fill our spaces with.

As a bricklayer thinks, so we pick and choose,
welcoming people as far as their use.

We build our lives on each other;
a fortress of cracks and gaps papered over

that can only stand so much
(I fear being turned to mulch;

what happens when I no longer fit?)
The bastion I inhabit

has little use for fracturing stones
and even less for my flesh and bones.

I could try and rebuild - with the bricks that remain-
the palaces from the past, but what would I gain?

Towers of memories that crumble to dust
and a fortress as empty as an earthen vase.

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I'm tired of being, more so than anyone would care to ask or know.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:49:25 GMT

It's time I disappear.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:09:58 GMT

I'm blogging in bits because I need to go play DOTA then go sleep. Yes, every craving, every habit, every activity I repressed from sec 4 til after NS, is coming back with a vengeance. Freud is having a field day analysing my cyber-gaming and movie-going. Whatever.

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Porcupine Tree's "The Incident" is a little too dark even for me. Mind you, by "dark" I don't mean the usual radio-played pansy emo stuff, this is sheer melancholia put into tunes. It's a whole 55 minute song cut up into smaller tracks. A once-through listen of the whole album puts you on a downward spiral. Even "Fear Of A Blank Planet" could draw on some angst and disillusionment. It's not a bad thing; I think I'm in need of a downer. The opening track Occam's Razor is an epic-sounding blast of chords, followed by some almost imperceptible ambient sounds, that preps nicely for the opening of the second track. That's about as upbeat as the album is gonna be. It's a good album; not their best, not radio-friendly, and certainly not for new listeners to be introduced to. That's "Deadwing".

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Students who faithfully do their readings but are unfortunately not able to do anything else but quote from them as if they're the Bible, should never be allowed to become teachers. Ignorance has no room in the education of our children.

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Organized religion gets on my nerves sometimes. Why hire an "office manager" when he doesn't come in three quarters of the time, and then expect my parents to work over and beyond their schedule just to cover some logistics. And why are they not paid overtime? Thou shalt allocate thy resources purposefully.

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I don't believe in this "honeymoon period" shit when people disappear for inordinate amounts of time to shower their attention on the significant other. I can understand privacy, not self-centredness.

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The most moving thing about "The Cove" was Ric O'Barry standing in the rain on a street in Tokyo, guilt-soaked, murder put on repeat playing on the TV screen around his neck. To feel responsible for the idolisation and then the victimisation of a whole species - that's far too wide a spectrum of emotions for any human to bear.

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Done.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:09:54 GMT

At moments like these I feel patriotism welling up in me like an overflowing septic tank.

Moments like these also remind me that there can never be enough vocal coaches/English language teachers in Singapore.

Zipbras and duck jins here I come.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:28:42 GMT

To temporarily halt the deluge of gloom here, I shall post some photos taken over the past few weeks, mostly of Lucid.

One of my fave photos.

I love film, imperfections and all.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:57:25 GMT

Conversations over the past 2 days made me realise the difficulty of knowing friends worth keeping in uni. It's not a sudden epiphany, I've always had that impression more or less but now it's like a confirmation. But I guess it's also a lot of my own doing. I detest "camps", "networking" and "bashes", the last unless it involves some form of destruction of public property, and am content to zone out with my iPod. Acquaintances fall away with time, and I'm far too lazy to attempt to keep up with them. A mutual thing really. And as far as "group projects" are concerned, I'd much rather work alone and have no friends than try to find great people to work with and become sorely disappointed when you realise they're a bunch of idiots (who probably think the same about you). I've only ever had ONE random project group I really enjoyed working with, and that alone puts me in the top 5% already I'm sure. The list of people I'll still think of after I graduate won't be long, and likewise I'm not too affected if I don't make many such lists. The world is much too much filled with devices that provide illusions of familiarity and kinsmanship: you live and die alone.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:25:47 GMT

When (not if) I become God, anyone who writes a computer program that requires an inordinate amount of clicks and signing-ins and password-changing WILL die a horrible death. They shall stew alive in the juices of their own semi-conductors, be flogged senseless with the razor edges of broken motherboards and clobbered with full force on (both) the heads with a sack of hard drives. < /end rant >

The above follows my attempts to sign in to post on the class blog my general thoughts on modernism (yes I actually have a class blog to post on), and after much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes and sitting in ash, not to mention swearing so much the words sound like tongue twisters, I give up. There are reasons why DOTA, Left 4 Dead, Counterstrike are so popular: they only require a few clicks here and there to get in and have fun. When you have to sign up this and log in that and change password here and check email there, all for only 5% of your class participation grade, there's a tendency to say a big "fuck it".

But before I do that, some thoughts on modernism:

Like them, I would be fucking upset too if I woke up one morning in 1918 and half the world was dead and maps of almost every area are useless because the bomb craters are the size of Toa Payoh. Would I have written an epic? Would I have painted strange shapes and passed them off as women in some bathing scene? Would I have debated the foundations of man's knowledge and determined if truth was merely a matter of perspective?

Quite simply, no. I would have just gotten on with life.

Because all that debate and deliberation over such matters pales in comparison to the fact that my house just had the shit quite literally blown out of it. Where are we to sleep, what are we to eat and so on and so forth, and all that talk becomes a form of escapism, an unwillingness to note the real and immediate crises the people had to suffer. It's almost disrespectful, there being clusters of people everywhere dealing with the shit that is war while the modernists sit in their high chairs and hold ontological discussions regarding the nature of beauty.

But what if they hadn't? What if they just "got on with it", and no art, no epics, no philosophies come to light after the Great War. Will we have anything to remember it by, to mark it with? The modernists, in sitting around and doing "nothing", may very well have done more than what everyone else could have. They burned the memory of that Great War right into the skins of culture and academia. What better way to remember, and hopefully avoid, a world war than by impacting future generations with images and words fraught with the nightmarish possibility that man possesses the capability to destroy himself?

Ok. FUCK IT.