s-s-SHAOCONG

Friday, October 03, 2008

Friday, October 06, 2006

Hey, I love my shoes...

Thursday, October 05, 2006

A change of image:

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Title: Apart from the Above...

...I'm going to talk about my internship. I'm a temporary labour hand at a big plant offshore this holiday, which is a departure from what most law students do in their holidays. My job is to sift through coarse sand, which is the product of a complex process fusing metals and silica. Don't ask me about the hows and whys, I have no idea. Well I just know that the mixture is known as a new substance called (from combining the words 'metal' and 'silica') 'Metallica', and that my official label is the 'enter-sand' man.

It's a far better job than the guy who has to chemically test and evaluate this substance. I have to admit that he's good at his job though, so much so that people call him the 'Master of Pipettes'.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Title: Enjoy the Pr0n, Ladies

The laws of logic and the silent principles of male friendship dictate that if you let your friend take pictures of your naked sexy torso and allow him to keep aforementioned pictures on his phone, he will one day set them loose upon the net and sabotage your career by showing a side of you that you'd rather keep private to your mirror and your, er, nipples.

Well, I've decided to do that early. Without further ado, here's shaaaanie!

What a stud! Anyway, tell me what you think *wink*

So I gave her two tubes and a powdery packet of henna for our anniversary, and today she immediately applied herself to henna-ing her family members and her boyfriend. The boyfriend was very satisfied with the results.

However, being an idiot and a person who refers to himself in the third person, I asked whether I could henna in some of my own designs on my upper forearm - namely a kitten and a ding dong tra la la tally whacker. Both are still carried proudly on my arm as a tribute to my mighty band, The Kittens, and my less-than-mighty trouser trout. Even at home I do not shy from baring my modest purple-headed monster to all who would stare upon it.

The one occasion my man muscle had to retreat was today, when I went to my darling's place, but that, i'm sure you'd agree, was one of necessary. It is a testament to its dimunitive size that a single band-aid could cover it.

In other news, I came very close to death by trawler last week. Or at least I almost got killed by being run over by the hull of a rather large sea-faring vessel. Not only this, I stupidly endangered my girlfriend's life by insisting on rowing far offshore by kayak on stormish waters, which is not something to be proud of. However, we did survive miraculously, thanks to my girlfriend's strong gymnast arms, and a method of double-single-kayak rowing - this involved Fiona lying flat on her belly, and hanging onto a rope at the the back of my kayak for her dear life, while I peddle like a madman simple to avoid being cast out to the mercy of the open sea. Dramatic words, but it was a scary situation, and rare drama in my mostly landbound existence.

That said, though the whole experience has taught me a few lessons about respecting the sea and watching the weather, it hasn't turned me off fooling around in the sea. I still love the water, but now I swear I will use my head when I have my beloved luv luv rowing by my side, so as to not put her into a life-threatening situation at sea.

Due to my flippant nature, the gravity of such situations hardly register. Sadly, I'll most likely just remember it as another anecdote in almost losing my life to random stupid circumstances. This includes the time Wenxiang and I went kayak surfing during a thunder storm back in the old days, standing on our upturned kayaks for god knows what reason. Still, I must be strong!

Talking about being being strong to protect my gorgeous girlfriend, what has she been up to lately? Since she doesn't have a blog and indeed pines for one, I have to be the person to post up pictures of her prettiness and tell the world how drop-dead beautiful she is. Well, she's a model now.. alright, not really, but she modelled for her friend's label, Astriel, if i got that right.

The clothes were really fantastic and so were the models, both her and Ducky. No stylish pictures have reached me yet, but i do have a few poor shots of my delectable darling on my phone, thank goodness. I leave all ye faithful readers and Fiona stalkers with one in the style of a Wong Kar Wai movie.

Of course, there aren't any Fiona stalkers except for that one guy.

...and probably Shaun. Ok, well, here's the pic:

Love you Fiona Darling!

Ooh and I still owe the brothers a full posting of my 21st birthday pictures with running commentary. Well, as soon as I finish the books I borrowed from the Orchard Library, several recommended by my very dear penpal who's keeping me onto really good books despite being in the States and extremely busy with work and generally confusing people relations. Good luck there, you.

Alright, that's absolutely it. Henna, near-death experiences, and a model girlfriend. God I love my life!

Thursday, December 01, 2005

And in the spirit of more truly godawful music jokes,

Merry Christmas indie-d!!

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

After making countless puns about emus and emos, I find this, and suddenly the world seems a more beautiful place.

Monday, November 28, 2005

OMG this was my 8 mth relationship prezzie from fiona - the very marvellous Observatory album Blank Walls! I can't wait to tear into this cd. The packaging is incredible, it must be the most fun I've ever had with a cd cover. I don't want to spoil the surprise for you guys, but seriously, pick up (literally like hold it in your hands) a copy of The Observatory's Blank Walls and watch the magic unfurl.

Thank you darling! It must be said, my girlfriend doesn't just rock.. she indies.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Sunday:

Singapore's turning more post-rock by the moment, what with the painfully loud gig I attended today promising a post-rock line-up (they lied), the forefather of post-rock visiting earlier this year (Tortoise), and a local post-rock band releasing two well-received and widely distributed albums to the welcoming public (The Observatory).

I heard from Mark that Concave Scream (Concave Scream!!!111-OMG!! the best local band I've ever supported, ever) is releasing a new album, and they're post-rock.

All this good news and good music is putting me in a beatific state of zen. And Mark too, as you can see from the photo. We're totally zoning, or we could be deaf thanks to loud KL bands who go onstage, build a wall of bloody loud textural distortion with loud deliberate melody lines, apologise for not being loud enough, and proceed to turn it up somemore. Well, at least they were good.. wouldn't want the last band I'm able to hear properly be, well, emo or something.

Oh hell, I wouldn't mind emo. Want to see an emo photograph? These were the tickets for the gig today, and no, I couldn't just put them on a table and take a picture like a normal person. Because normal persons do not listen to Dashboard "you man tit" Confessional, y'all.

Anyways, exam is over, and I can do all sorts of cool things, like hang out with my girlfriend, catch up with my friends and penpal, play Halo 2 till I vomit, tralala. It's awesome, and you shouldn't really be reading this if your exams are not over.

How's life? Well, after spending the afternoon in kayaks circling around the sea trawlers Lubstar and Sea Swift, I say it's pretty swell, just ask Mark -

See? Pretty Swell.

(and happy 8 mths, sweetheart!)

A preview of my eight anniversary prezzie for my darling.. let's just say soon she can henna herself everyday if she'd want.. for at least a month or two..

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Nice one, man. Above is from Junde, but don't think he's the only one who can come up with stoopid jokes.

Here's an mcq question for you:

Which of the following persons, in the context of a church setting, is female?

(a) The priest

(b) The choirboy

(c) The Pope

(d) .. Nun of the above

Ahh the benefits of being dropped on the head as a baby. May I have more good luck like the Irish, and less stoopidity, during my Environmental Law paper later! I pray!

Friday, November 18, 2005

Carl's Jr racy tv advert never got shown in Singapore, or anywhere in fact, but that doesn't stop it from combining the most desirable subjects of a man's imagination - juicy, succulent beef between crisp lettuce and fresh, hot hamburger buns, paired with Ms Paris Hilton, relishing the burger like a big cat relishes its prey.

The effect completely slipped by me though, cause I'm not so keen on meat, being more of a veg kinda guy. I did appreciate the primal power of the commercial, and Paris Hilton's amazing way of making messy, huge meat burgers sexy as hell by leaving them all over her chin and chest..

It is a testimony to my extreme nerddom and loserhood, then, that I think this picture would likely be far more effective on my demographic.

I got to get me some of that.. aw yeahh..

(Disclaimer to Fiona: It's not about the Hilton, it's about the XBOX 360.. heh.. love you!)

www.churchsigngenerator.com

Man, I'm glad I resisted the urge to make something inappropriate! Haha, you couldn't possibly imagine how hard that was.. think of all the possibilities! I'd won't even be able to choose which hell I wanted to go to if I didn't restrain myself.. what the hell did that mean? I don't know, lolololol

...

Aw hell, I can't resist. This one's for all the brothers! *wink*

If you were to ask me for advice, I would usually advise you to approach another far wiser person. For example, to the question "hey dude my ex-girlfriend's upset because [insert something genuinely upsetting], so what should I message her in reply", I would meditate on your query for a good few minutes, and say, "girls are sensitive. you'd better type 'lol ok sure' and she'll know you care."

"whoa! that's great advice, thanks a lot bro."

Well, the point is that I'm a shitty advice giver, and the only sort of relationship advice you should risk taking from me should be strictly the sort that has already ended by your own inept means. That is why when I came across

http://www.warninglabelgenerator.com/

I immediately jumped upon the opportunity to pick a warning sign and apply myself to making the world a better place, by creating something that says hey man, that thing you're doing, it's gonna hurt real bad.

Try it yourself, and I'd love to see what you would come up with!

Here's my solid piece of wisdom and experience, for the ages. Doesn't it feel fantastic to have saved countless lives with sensible legal restrictions?

It's bad for your health, kids.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Who's back in Singapore?? Yay, my girlfriend!!! wheeee~

Who has a red pole sticking out of his head?? Yay, me!!

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

This is the b-b-brothers' night out! w00t! From left: D.J. Nick, S-s-me, 'No-more-drinking' Wenxiang, TONGKAT DRAGON INTERNATIONAL CLUBBING KING RYAN, and Metal Gear Adrian.

Brief explanation for the monikers:

Nick does kick-ass techno mixes that he carries around in his mp3 player, and spins techno at all the brother gatherings! It's a shame he doesn't have a record deal with some German dance label, yet. Soon though, I hope;

H-h-hey!! I'm just r-r-retarded;

Wenxiang has drank himself into needing a spare liver from drinking with the rest of us. Anyone's got a spare organ to let? Contact us. Oh, but you should have seen the man in his prime. Not even a Russian could take him. I used to suspect he had 6 livers and they all died one by one because of us.. sorry man;

OMG TONGKAT RYAN!!!!!!!!111one11 This practically requires more than one paragraph, but you can be sure the story's going to appear here somehow, sometime. heh heh heh;

MGS Adrian once donned an SBO at one of our class gatherings to crawl up uncomfortable sand dunes, roll in shallow salty sea water, and run around East Coast in the dark with plastic guns, just so we could film him for a class video. That is dedication to art, fellow readers - uncompromised, bloody, primal Adrian-ity. That night clubbing, however, Ryan did the MGS.. but he's always the man..

Heh again I reiterate to the people involved: we better meet up soon bruddas!!!

Bonus: Am I Retarded, Or Just Brilliant?
Ans:

I'm wonderfully blessed in that my parents provide me with all the love, care warmth and hi-tech purple thumbdrives I could ever want in the world as a spoilt, materialistic consumer whore.

I'm naming it Lil' Prince, short for "the thumbdrive previously known as Lil' Prince". After a while its name will be abbreviated to "the thumbdrive". Such is the fickle nature of sexy purple things in this modern life.

Lovely Girlfriend and Some Embarassing Arse-hole in the Background

She's pretty and she's stressed to bits in Bintan right on holiday right before the exams. She's pretty and probably very embarassed to see her picture online. Aww, don't be stressed darling, you'll do fine..

Man, I do miss the sun. Oh, by the way, this is what a sunny day looks like taken by my handphone - looks like the bloody foggy London you see in movies. Is pollution really that bad or is my phone a monument to mediocre technology? Maybe the finger tracing technology compensates in this sense.. even a doodle would capture the scene slightly better.

He's into men and mantits. He plays ps2 games about making love to little girls' corpses and murdering docile creatures. You want to escape the shadow of his colossal wang, or what he likes to call his teeny tadger. How's Tiny Tim doing down there, Shaun?

Oh at least the camera's good enough to catch useless details like this, lololol.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Spoon - Gimme Fiction Review #2

My word processor crashed just when I was closing it to go to sleep, so I lost half the night's work just 4 days before the exam. So what do I do, rant about it? Hell, no! I'm going to tell you how much I want to spoon with this perfect Spoon album, and listen to Maximo Park's Apply Some Pressure which has a line about starting over when you lose everything. Why dwell over spilled milk? hahaha

Anyway, onto the main subject of this post, where I would like to assert, with absolutely certainty, that Spoon's newest album Gimme Fiction is about ten hundred times better and less sucky than losing half of your work 4 days before the exam to a faulty word processor.

Monday, November 14, 2005

An Attempt to Review my Phone
(inevitably ending in incoherent ranting and sadness)

I can't imagine who would want a phone not filled with 100 incredibly useless features. And frankly, these days, you can't find a normal phone without at least 80 of such pointless doodads anymore. But, the point is, my phone absolutely takes the cake in this area.

Now, what I actually do use on this sweet liquorice puppy are its abilities to disturb people, be disturbed by people and to listen to the sound of my girlfriend's melodic voice. Standard features, you hear? Open up the tools and settings pages, and a whole plethora of unfamiliar crap stares back at you. Why is there a chat room, a tone editor, etc etc, in my phone? I do not know... I do not know.

Half the games on this phone are pointless, one being a bad version of pacman where you control a farting car (serious), a bad version of snake where you control the helpless and snake-edible pixel, and a puzzler involving mines that would be half ok if it weren't laggy as hell and unresponsive to boot. That's a criticism that could extend to all the games, in fact. The other half, or less than helf, are two decent games that don't measure up to the awesome port of Tetris that I had on my previous phone, which drowned in the salty waters of Sentosa, and for which I still weep for from time to time.

What I also use is the camera, which gives a incredibly high resolution while incredulously remaining blurry and grainy (see photo below). Within the camera function are several related thingies that I'll never explore, like photo stitching and video taking, though Fiona's played around with those. She's also composed some rocking ring tones with the phone's melody composer, including hot indie hits and the katamari damancy theme song (thanks darling - kiss).

Remaining features not detailed on the specifications list, which are added probably as a secret bonus, are the ability to lose reception in almost any enclosed space, blocking out incoming and outgoing communications, and the secondary ability to lose you friends via the former. Good stuff.

Not all is lost though. The alarm tool seriously gives you a good fight, refusing to back down after you turn it off sleepily by reverting to an undocumented sleep mode, requiring you to open the phone and curse at it to shut-it-the-hell-up. Also, it looks purty and has the amazing ability to be carried in your pocket, as well as in your hand, and on your desk, and...

So, how does my phone take the cake in terms of superfluous features that add utterly no value? Through it's stupidly useless finger writing technology, that's how. This amazing technology allows you to write sms-es by dragging your finger across the keypad. Wow, how cool is that, right? You don't even need a stylus, just a finger - and we all can appreciate how much harder it is to lose your finger. Yeah.. well this would be nominee and prize-taker for the Essential Phone Feature Category in the year 2005 awesome phone awards but for one thing - tracing and confirming each alphabet, one by one, is the most excruciating and aggravating activity a person can not have fun with. Trace, choose correct letter that the A668 phone guesses for you, enter, wait for phone to record selection, start again with second letter... if reading this sentence took you twenty seconds, I can assure you that it'd take me twenty hours to type it out for you on my phone. By the sheer unintuitiveness of these feature, the aforementioned prize is immediately revoked, and replaced by - the year 2005 retarded phone prize.

Alright, been rambling for a bit. Please don't be mistaken by this tongue-in-cheek faux review. I do love my phone. It's absolutely a triumph of style over substance, and I guess that's fine for me. I sure do love purty things. Purty fecking useless things.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Because who wouldn't post a picture of their pretty girlfriend in a particularly embarrassing shot on their blog?

*muacks*

(click picture to explode it)

Ans: People who don't have kick-ass camera phones

Saturday, November 12, 2005

In between sessions of studying, I think about the movies I have had the fortune to watch in my oh too short time on Earth, and which of these mean the most to me. Hipsters have their Pulp Fiction, and anime fans have their Akira. What do I have? A trio of, IMO, the most engaging, greatest films ever shot and produced, the holy tripartite of Johnny Knoxville's Jackass, Steve Oedekerk's Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, and the most treasured of all: Ed Wood's Plan Nine from Outer Space.

There's really no way to describe the ecstacy of watching this film, and the intellectual orgasm of ingesting lines like "one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible", except to compare it all to swimming in a huge basin filled with delicious, expensive Belgian chocolate, so I'll have to make do with three quick movie quotes from the greatest movie of all time. Ladies and Gentleman, my brief ode to Plan 9 from Outer Space.

"For a time we tried to contact them by radio but no response. Then they attacked a town, a small town I'll admit, but never the less a town of people, people who died."

A poignant scene, and a timely rumination on the fragility of the human state, for who can stop a highly advanced alien culture hell-bent on destroying Earth before our scientists discover a bomb which will ultimately explode sunlight at a sub-atomic level? No-one.

"...A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?"

"Yeah, either that or its counterpart. "

Sometimes, we are in such a state of profound wonderment such that we lose the linguistic.. t-the linguinity.. the linguine (!) that is absolutely necessary to convey our surprise and confusion. And it takes a person of considerable unflappability to take control of his/her wits, face up to the unavoidable facts of the matter and, indeed, helpfully point out the alternatives.

Colonel Tom Edwards: "You speak of Solaranite. But just what is it?"

Alien: "Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe. This is why you must be stopped. This is why any means must be used to stop you. In a friendly manner or as (it seems) you want it."

Lieutenant John Harper: "He's mad."

Alien Woman: "Mad? Is it mad that you destroy other people to save yourselves? You have done this. Is it mad that one country must destroy another to save themselves? You have also done this. How then is it "mad" that one planet must destroy another who threatens the very existence-..."

Alien: [shoves her roughly aside] "That's enough."

Alien: [to the humans] "In my land, women are for advancing the race, not for fighting man's battles."

---

When the aliens come in the future, both science and feminism will be dramatically and sweepingly exposed as terminal falsities by the vastly superior alien race. It is obvious now that Plan 9 was conceived in a state of intergalactic foresight, and mankind should follow that vision - it is the path to our salvation, and Tom Cruise's.

This concludes my too-brief ode to Plan 9 from Outer Space, which I assure you will not be easily overtaken as the most definitive cultural contribution to the World any filmmaker could ever expect to craft in many lifetimes.

And to address the concerns of more discerning readers: Yes, better than Halo.