Nothing is more arresting than a well-groomed lass in a suit sharp enough to cut yourself on. Esther Quek is a fashion editor at The Rake - and my new girl crush. And she's Singaporean. Like, no! Singaporeans aren't supposed to be this well-dressed! But look at how she rocks that suit. Just look at it!
Has it really been almost 6 years with that old blogskin? Yes. Now it's time to change. Time to update myself. Time to throw away the kitsch and make way for some minimalist layout that uses a lot of black and another strong colour. Ahahaha. Read Shoo's excellent post about newness here.
Anyway, the old blogskin was really giving me a lot of trouble in terms of the awkward column width that required me to scale the fonts down and manually HTML image sizes so that anything will fit. Also, quite a few of Blogger's functions are no longer compatible with the old HTML/CSS. It's all Java and PHP now, incomprehensible to me.
Plus the old layout looked incredibly ugly. Well, ugly BUT with personality.
Let me upload some random image to see if Blogger still screws up.
You know how you walk into an IKEA showroom and some fancy table set catches your eye?
You happily purchase it, lug it all the way home, bust your butt assembling the thing then stand back to admire your handiwork only to realise how awful it looks in your room.
It's like a hot voluptuous princess posing with her moth-eaten cousin of a bedpost and her psychotic messy sister study table in an Adam's Family mansion. It sure makes for some jarring, awkward viewing.
My room faces the sun in the afternoon, which is great if you like the sun in your eyes and the greenhouse effect all year round - but bad for anyone else. I would paste large black A3 papers all over my window to block out the sun but felt slightly self conscious as this made my room look suspiciously like a psychopath axe murderer's cubby hole. At least that's what I think my next door neighbour would surmise looking out of her window just 3 metres away from mine. I tried to use fancy washi tape to do the pasting - now it's psychopath axe murderer with polka dot fetish.
I decided to invest in some solar film. Having absolutely no experience in mounting large window tints with only a youtube video for guidance, I think I did fairly well in getting the tinted film plastered onto the glass.
That is until I idiotically used the window I just worked on as a place holder to rest my other film sheet. The 2 sheets stuck together like the stickiest things that ever existed. I have wrestled with ancient price tags stuck on old book covers and had more results than trying to pry the 2 solar films apart. The thing is, by themselves the film is not sticky at all. The only adhesive is the water I sprayed on so that my paddle glides more smoothly over them. How water managed to make magic cement between them is beyond me. I ripped and ripped. Jumping up and down trying to tear the wretched film off the glass - I cringe at the thought that my neighbour would look out of her window that moment. Hello Freddy Krueger meets jumping jack! No!
I managed to get the film off but now it's all crumpled and creased and I don't have enough film left because AHAHA, there are 2 windows worth of film in my hands now! I was so angry that I decided to mount the ruined film all the same on one window - as punishment for my stupidity. Because foolishness like this must be glorified. And it wasn't cheap.
So now I have a pockmarked window in my room. It looks like Frankenstein had a baby with patchwork quilt - there is no other way to describe it. On the bright side, it actually looks like the surface of the moon with an interesting topography of rivers and valleys. Urgh no, it just looks ugly.
Books that I need to get:
1) The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories Vol.1 - Joseph Gordon Levitt
2) Malay Sketches - Alfian Sa'at
3) The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
4) 我的路 Vol. 1 - 寂地
5) 找到这颗星星 - 卤猫
6) Amazing Everything - Scott C.
7) Anything by Oliver Jeffers
Oh, and Steven Brust's Hawk will only be out 2014?! That's infernal ages more. I shall hate it, knowing that I'd have waited 3 years for a book only to finish it in 5 hours. At least this beats the time frame between Issola and Dzur - half a decade for a book 1/10 the size of a Harry Potter novel is just plain evil. Maybe it's in all writers to be a bit evil. After all, writing is an impossibly painful job, all you do is stare at a piece of paper until your forehead bleeds. The same could be said for designers. And artists. And musicians. And painters. Isn't that's why it's called pain-ting? Who said that? I forgot. Some artist illustrator, I think. Someone who said that creators must suffer for their work. That must mean all the books and all the pieces of art I've ever enjoyed and hated must have been pieces of invisible blood and broken bones of their authors. And every act of consuming these goods are an act of cannibalism. I've been eating the ghosts of authors' past.
