Gave into the hype train and headed down to Changi's brand new mega mall, Jewel. It really is a giant shopping centre with a huge terrarium in the middle.

The indoor waterfall is very impressive. The torrent of water plunging down to the atrium below will kick up a huge splash and you can feel the droplets on your face in spite of the football field wide perimeter at the base.

Some obligatory waterfall shots with random people heads inside. (Hey, it was crowded ok)

Specifically went to Jewel to have Shake Shack lunch at 11am. Saw the queue and noped out. Went to Muji cafe instead.

They said Muji cafe food is like expensive cai png. 

So I made sure to order as un-cai-png as possible.

Shake Shack, I will return.

Toa Payoh is just filled with cats.
There's one under every block. Well fed by a host of cat ladies whose sole purpose in life is to fatten up the little critters like nobody's business.

I may grow up to become a cat lady too.

I hope not.

But the odds aren't in my favour.

Look at that cute bottom sticking out from the petals. The bees in Singapore are much smaller than the typical western honey bees. Not so furry as well. But still very cute.

I notice they frequent certain flowers more than others, and the flowers featured above are particularly attractive to the bees.

I'm on a quest to capture the elusive black carpenter bee. Far rarer than the apis cerana. But much easier to spot due to its massive size.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Yeah, this camera does not do well close up.

And by close up, I mean aprox. arms length from subject.

Got a boatload of blurry shots.

See the perching giant dragonfly right in the centre of the frame?

Yeah, me neither.

Stunning flowers all out-of-focus.

This camera does best on a blazing bright day, for long-range landscapes.

I realised just how soft and pastel my film turned out with a $10 Taobao plastic camera. Too bad it started to light-leak badly after the 2nd roll.

Hmm... 

On second thoughts, I actually quite like the light leaks.

I'm always underestimating the amount of stuff I need for other stuff. Especially space, physical or digital. We buy more books than we have bookshelves for, we download more songs than we have gigabytes. I started buying those thick (and expensive) Playstation magazines when I was 14 and kept them in a drawer under my bed. Back then when all I owned were Playstation magazines and a pencil box, a drawer under the bed worked just fine. Now? Heh heh heh, it's like playing tetris with all those junk. Anyway, as I was browsing through pinterest for inspiring shelving ideas, all these photos popped up:

Who, tell me who, arranges their shelves like these? WHO??!

Look at how much space is wasted. There is a reason why books are never placed horizontally. It's a pain to take out. Also, the decorated tissue box gets a whole aeroplane-tray-sized seating area? That shelf can easily hold the whole encyclopedia britannica plus room for the Harry Potter series. Except now it can only hold 10 sad tomes and a few pretentious "art-forms".

Unrealistic shelving is unrealistic.

Argh. Goosebumps.
My favourite score from the movie Interstellar. Compare it with my favourite score from the other amazing sci-fi film, Gravity.



No comparison. They are both sublime. And speak about hope in the face of impossible odds with very different styles.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. 

— CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain  

To love and forgive is painful for us. But I often forget that it is deadly to God.
In a sense, Nietzsche was right: God died; and we have killed Him. I have taken him and nailed him to a cross and he bore the punishment that I rightfully deserved. What terrifying love is that which would make a cosmic king lay down his life for the murderer that I am? And what stupefying joy it is that he has risen and conquered death? And how utterly bewildering that the object of his affection is me? ME? Me the coward? The liar, hypocrite, bigoted, petty, unkind ME?? If this is a lie, it is a frightening lie. But if it were true, it is infinitely more terrifying to behold. Because this means my life is no longer my own—it was bought at a monstrous price—with the life of a God. Who loved me enough to think it a worthy exchange.

Some colour names get way more attention than others. It's not fair that pretentious things like Ebony (meaning black), Crimson (meaning red), Scarlet (red), Obsidian (black) and plain ole' black (... I'm seeing a pattern here) gets used in every other movie/game/book title while colours like Periwinkle, Brown, Mauve and Aquamarine gets little love. Prejudice exists in colour-name-selection too!

Rule on hipster cafe logos:
Colour: Black
Font: Orator
Plus, have a cross somewhere in the design encased in a circle so it looks like a a billion other hipster cafe logos with crosses somewhere in the design. Encased in a circle.

Okaaaaayyy... I finally got HoMM2 working on my computer. NO. WAY.
All those memories. All those sleepless nights waking up at 2am to sneakily play this beast on my dad's Win 95 com. So many memories! Heroes 2 is my very first real experience in playing a proper computer game. Even first-er than Red Alert Command & Conquer (of which I'm still trying my hardest to find a version that will install well on Windows 7)  And, oh man. Words cannot describe the intense nostalgia this game brings me. What year did it come out? 1996? That's when my age was still a single digit!
Look at the world map screen. Look to the right menu bar. They used a FLOPPY DISK to indicate the save button. A. FLOPPY. DISK.

 

Wizard in da house!

 Back in those days, I'd play as the Sorceress class every single time. What a fool I was. But the Sorceresses' get up looked so cool, hey. Style over substance.

Hero stats with only 5 army slots. Man, they were stingy with the slots.

But the best thing about Heroes 2 was the music. Hands down better than Heroes 3. This is 1996 remember, but it won't sound out of place in a Lord of the Rings movie. That's how epic it was.

I recently downloaded some survival horror games, Dead Space and Amnesia. I played Amnesia first as I heard fantastic reviews on this indie game production-and man, even the trailer scared the crap outta me. Sadly, it was in 1st-person camera; which I know gives a more personal, claustrophobic feel to the game. Unfortunately, yours truly is allergic to 1st-person camera and puked after playing for 30 mins. (Granted, I got through 30 hrs of Skyrim gameplay on 1st-person; but strolling along idyllic nordic scenery is a different ballgame from creeping around a monster-infested, god forsaken castle with only a LANTERN for protection)
I am currently waiting for my guts to regenerate before I go back to play that sanity-sucking thing.

Speaking of monster-infested, Dead Space is the epitome of that.
And it's 3rd-person, so I can actually play it meaningfully without a bucket. Although I may need to sit on a toilet while playing because the scares, oh the scares.
Look at this:

Nope.

When that thing crashed through the elevator I was riding, I literally exited the game and breathed very loudly at my computer screen.
And the music. Oh, did I say music? I mean sudden violin shrieks accompanied by eerie metallic scraping noises that could either be the rickety ship acting up... ... or a monster waiting to burst out from the vents and chomp on your intestines like a fat kid loves candy.

So while Amnesia is a foreboding game that winds up tension by an ominous atmosphere, Dead Space is jump-scares galore and gore aplenty. Compared to Resi 4, the last 3rd-person horror game I played - Dead Space is a ton scarier and far more claustrophobic. I do miss playing tetris with the inventory though.

See this survivor crying for help? Well, you won't have time to make friends. Dead Space is one lonely game.

For the past books in the series we've always had trusty sai kang warriors to draw the neighbourhood maps for us. Now, they are no more.
Now, I take up my pen and do the sai kang myself.
Now I know their pain.
Satisfying pain. But pain nonetheless.

 

So I will call upon Your name
And keep my eyes above the waves
When oceans rise
My soul will rest in Your embrace

The days are hot as soup and my skin has melted into the bedding. I'll need to scrape myself off the pillow in the morning to get to work, leaving bits of lydia here and there like confetti.

Oh Apple, Apple, Apple. Why art thou iMovie so utterly intolerable?
I don't understand, it's a really decent amateur video editing software with a super-easy interface (much like most Apple software)—then why in the world did you remove the SAVE option? Look at this. Look at it!

Where's the SAVE button? Did it take a holiday from the dropdown menu? I know you guys are all about "less-is-more" and proved that by removing the disk drive from the newest just-as-expensive iMacs; but this is getting ridiculous. Apparently, iMovie doesn't have the SAVE function because it autosaves any project edits on the fly—which is all good if the autosave actually works. Which it does—92% of the time. Saying the autosave works 92% of the time is as reassuring as a skydiving instructor informing her student just before the jump that his parachute is in 92% working condition.
I woke up this morning to find out that a video project I've been working on had its changes reverted to the old file 2 weeks ago. TimeMachine didn't help. There wasn't ANY traces of the recent edits I made (and substantial edits were they). iMovie simply saves over the file again and again so there is only one instance of the project anywhere. Apparently, many people have also suffered from the iMovie not saving their changes and Apple hasn't done much about it. No plugins, no updates, nothing. Can you believe if Microsoft pulled that move on MS Word—universities will implode as everybody loses their thesis papers. Apple, if you're gonna remove the SAVE button—the Autosave better work 100% of the time.

If I feel bitter toward those who condemn me, as it seems to me, unjustly, forgetting that if they knew me as I know myself they would condemn me much more, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

-Amy Carmichael

Here's something about designing a book cover. It's not designing a book cover. It's designing twenty and killing off nineteen so that one may live.