Sunday, January 23, 2005
Sunlover
Sitting out in the sunlight this morning breakfasting on a cup of tea (okay this is probably going to fuel more silly Imported Western Decadence comments) I could almost forget that I was on-call till yesterday morning, and will be on-call again tomorrow.
I guess living somewhere cold and damp like the UK does change you. It's hard to forget what it feels like to be cold - really cold, not just slightly chilly in an over-airconditioned hospital or movie theatre, which are the only two types of establishments in Singapore that are kept uncomfortably chilly for some reason. Perhaps it is a learnt response, this sensation of gratification -- and even gratitude -- maybe I'm just imagining the rays of sunlight gently caressing my skin and unknotting the fatigued muscles in my back and shoulders... but what of it? We adapt and change with time, and take from each experience elements of our choosing.
I choose to bake gently in the sun, lying down with my Principles and Practices of Surgery next to my kaya toast and teh. I don't find it incongruous that I'm south-east-asian of origin, but have have come to relish the warmth all around us that I used to take for granted.
And that's all that matters.
*****
Bad Mojo
Some of you will probably find it fitting that I'm playing a game that casts me in the role of a cockroach. And I can't say it's a bad experience either, scuttling around in the dirt and eating cigarette butts for the sake of it.
Bad Mojo is one of those games that isn't so much a game as a story. The controls (arrow keys) are awkward and your hero-cockroach tends to zoom around like a brakeless formula-one car from the PC-games of yesteryear... or perhaps those little green guys from the Apple IIe Summer Olympics games of my childhood - anyone else remember that? but what gives this game its oomph are its haunting music and storyline, and the strange but colourful hand-drawn graphics viewed from weird camera angles, that place the player "high" in the sky running along tabletops, shower-curtain rails and even the undersides of chairs and tables (beware the chewing gum!) and the insides of transistor radios.
- spoiler -
The storyline isn't exactly a suspense novel or even a high-tech sci-fi's dream come true, but it is extremely poignant thanks to the various cleverly-placed video-clips the game features. One set of clips had me a little sniffy as I ran along a library wall bumping into and triggering picture frame-videos of my "dad"'s past, detailing his love for and marriage to his wife, the boom-days of their little eatery on the waterfront, and her untimely demise in the act of giving birth to his child, and his subsequent slide into near-madness, depression and poverty beyond.
Essentially, you're a mad scientist on the brink of embezzling research funds and absconding to mexico, when your mother's magic locket transforms you into a... cockroach. You then spend the rest of the game wandering around the run-down apartment block that your human self lived in, shuttling between your landlord's apartment, your apartment, and the toilet, and making the startling discovery that your landlord is in fact your long-lost father. Your spiritual guide for this journey through the realistically garbage-strewn mess that constitutes the separate apartments of two single men from two disparate generations is the ghost of your dead mother, who died giving birth to you (spooky) and a number of assorted cockroach / rodent / ant / slimyweirdwormybug sages who speak in frustrating Alice in Wonderland-esque riddles and rhymes, but thankfully also have telepathic abilities and project images of what you're looking for directly into your little cockroach brain.
There are four endings to the game depending on how nasty you are, ranging from evil, good, buggered and really badly buggered (pun intended).
I have to say it was a refreshing change from the usual sleek, visually stunning but soul-less blow-em/chop-em/shag-em-ups of today.
*****
Four-point-One
Yet another re-minisce-ism that will someday sweep the SMS-loving-generation by storm... not.
"I was four-point-oned yesterday by a fetching young lady" (or man, if you are female, but this is my story so I'm telling it my way...)
Four point one. Inappropriately-timed sexual reference during ordinary, non-flirt-speak.
eg :
"Yesterday I four-point-one her, then she three-point-jero me back, damn jialat."
I guess living somewhere cold and damp like the UK does change you. It's hard to forget what it feels like to be cold - really cold, not just slightly chilly in an over-airconditioned hospital or movie theatre, which are the only two types of establishments in Singapore that are kept uncomfortably chilly for some reason. Perhaps it is a learnt response, this sensation of gratification -- and even gratitude -- maybe I'm just imagining the rays of sunlight gently caressing my skin and unknotting the fatigued muscles in my back and shoulders... but what of it? We adapt and change with time, and take from each experience elements of our choosing.
I choose to bake gently in the sun, lying down with my Principles and Practices of Surgery next to my kaya toast and teh. I don't find it incongruous that I'm south-east-asian of origin, but have have come to relish the warmth all around us that I used to take for granted.
And that's all that matters.
*****
Bad Mojo
Some of you will probably find it fitting that I'm playing a game that casts me in the role of a cockroach. And I can't say it's a bad experience either, scuttling around in the dirt and eating cigarette butts for the sake of it.
Bad Mojo is one of those games that isn't so much a game as a story. The controls (arrow keys) are awkward and your hero-cockroach tends to zoom around like a brakeless formula-one car from the PC-games of yesteryear... or perhaps those little green guys from the Apple IIe Summer Olympics games of my childhood - anyone else remember that? but what gives this game its oomph are its haunting music and storyline, and the strange but colourful hand-drawn graphics viewed from weird camera angles, that place the player "high" in the sky running along tabletops, shower-curtain rails and even the undersides of chairs and tables (beware the chewing gum!) and the insides of transistor radios.
- spoiler -
The storyline isn't exactly a suspense novel or even a high-tech sci-fi's dream come true, but it is extremely poignant thanks to the various cleverly-placed video-clips the game features. One set of clips had me a little sniffy as I ran along a library wall bumping into and triggering picture frame-videos of my "dad"'s past, detailing his love for and marriage to his wife, the boom-days of their little eatery on the waterfront, and her untimely demise in the act of giving birth to his child, and his subsequent slide into near-madness, depression and poverty beyond.
Essentially, you're a mad scientist on the brink of embezzling research funds and absconding to mexico, when your mother's magic locket transforms you into a... cockroach. You then spend the rest of the game wandering around the run-down apartment block that your human self lived in, shuttling between your landlord's apartment, your apartment, and the toilet, and making the startling discovery that your landlord is in fact your long-lost father. Your spiritual guide for this journey through the realistically garbage-strewn mess that constitutes the separate apartments of two single men from two disparate generations is the ghost of your dead mother, who died giving birth to you (spooky) and a number of assorted cockroach / rodent / ant / slimyweirdwormybug sages who speak in frustrating Alice in Wonderland-esque riddles and rhymes, but thankfully also have telepathic abilities and project images of what you're looking for directly into your little cockroach brain.
There are four endings to the game depending on how nasty you are, ranging from evil, good, buggered and really badly buggered (pun intended).
I have to say it was a refreshing change from the usual sleek, visually stunning but soul-less blow-em/chop-em/shag-em-ups of today.
*****
Four-point-One
Yet another re-minisce-ism that will someday sweep the SMS-loving-generation by storm... not.
"I was four-point-oned yesterday by a fetching young lady" (or man, if you are female, but this is my story so I'm telling it my way...)
Four point one. Inappropriately-timed sexual reference during ordinary, non-flirt-speak.
eg :
"Yesterday I four-point-one her, then she three-point-jero me back, damn jialat."
