The Skeptical Boffin

Our concert on Saturday night went... a little better than I expected, really. On my part, I managed *not* to mess up the opening for West Side Story (even if it wasn't as legato as it was meant to be because I sacrificed a little smoothness to make sure I managed to hit the notes at all), and didn't panic when the trumpets somehow missed their re-entry in E.T. The Extraterrestrial (how did that even happen...), leaving me to carry the theme on my own for eight gut-wrenching bars. Public reception was generally good, and it was nice that the people I invited enjoyed themselves, even if my mother never managed to work out which parts I was playing. (I was playing the duet with the trombone for the German Carols, mom!).

Went out and got myself two books yesterday: 

1. Andras Szunyoghy's Anatomy Drawing School: Animal. Szunyoghy's (I hate typing his name >.<) Human Anatomy for Artists is my personal bible, and sits on my music stand when there's no music on it, so I was delighted to find this other volume because this man *rocks* at anatomy. I've always had trouble drawing animal movement, mostly because I've never actually had the chance to observe said animals but also because I knew doodly-squat about their musculoskeletal systems. This book not only illustrates the complete skeletons and musculature of select mammals from various angles, but also separate bones and muscle masses as well as the movement of their limbs/bodies and the corresponding position of the bones during said movement. It's too bad the book doesn't cover avians as well; *that* is another area I know very little about, and could use an anatomy book to help me with.

2. Geoffrey Abbott's Execution: The Guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey, and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death. Probably not everybody's choice of bedtime reading, but I've always been fascinated by methods of torture and putting people to death - from a purely educational viewpoint, of course. (It's all research!). That, and I suspect that macabre/gruesome books, movies and games are a coping mechanism for when the world gets too stressful or upsetting. [Wait, I already know this: whenever I get upset, I go and kill hordes of zombies with headshots, and feel massively better afterwards.] A bystander should have no claim to distress, but it's nevertheless highly unsettling to watch chaos descend and claim casualties, particularly when they're not anonymous but have names that mean something to the observer, and having no right or business or way to do anything about it.

... I'm cowering behind a cushion. Really.

I'm no stranger to survival horror, seriously. One of my two favourite arcade games has always been House of the Dead, particularly the third installment, where you're armed with shotguns powerful enough to send things flying. I can cheerfully run around in Left4Dead (1&2), spraying bullets at the infected while calling them names, and crowing every time I score an especially neat kill (like decapitating one with one smack of the skillet). At midnight. Ditto Resident Evil. And I certainly have no problem with stuff like Bioshock and Nation Red and Killing Floor either. Zombies? I eat 'em for lunch. With a side dish of bullets. Ghosts, like in F.E.A.R.? I just shoot them. Never mind that ghosts can't eat lead.

But then you give me *one* game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where I don't catch more than a glimpse of what is stalking me, where I hear things walking around everywhere I go, and where my vision warps and goes blurry when I stay in the dark for too long, and I turn into a pathetic, whimpering wreck. Part of the reason might be that, up until now, I've always gone around with a powerful enough arsenal to raze half the continent, with more on the wayside. Take the weapons away, and there goes my security blanket. Not to mention the horror of having something stalking you unseen is far, far more traumatising than repeatedly coming face to face with the same monsters. I mean, after you get over the shock of seeing a zombie, the novelty sort of wears off, and you start treating them like just so many more bugs to squash... but how do you deal with your own *paranoia* creeping up on you?

For what it's worth, the developers of Amnesia have gotten the formula right. It *is*, as they promised, completely immersive: there's no introductory movie and no cutscenes to remove you from the action, no image for you to identify as the protagonist (or, for that matter, the antagonist), and nothing at all to prepare you for what awaits when the game starts. It forces you to experience Daniel's amnesia firsthand, and discover just what is going on through voice-over flashbacks and notes and journal entries that you find lying around the castle. The action is physics-based and seamlessly integrated into the gameplay: doors, boxes, drawers are all opened by drawing back the hand cursor; similarly, things can be tossed (especially to distract the monsters!), levers can be pulled up or down, and wheels are turned by making circular motions with the mouse. There aren't any pointless puzzles to distract you from the gameplay: where there are puzzles, they're in the form of locating parts to repair something, or chemicals to mix into a detergent, or something as simple as dislodging a stick obstructing a pulley.

But what really makes it work is the oppressive atmosphere. The game takes part in Brennenburg Castle, from its grand halls and cosy studies to dank cellars and flooded basements. The graphic's nothing to shout about, but who wants a game like this to be *pretty*? This is the sort of castle Lovecraft would have loved: dimly lit, with strange sounds and stranger fogs and winds blowing doors open and snuffing out the lights. Lit candles and torches (this *is* set in the 19th century) are few and far between; for the most part, you have to light your own, with tinderboxes you find all over the place, or shine your lantern, assuming you can find enough oil for it. Light is good - Daniel starts to go crazy if he's in the dark for too long (like The Call of Cthulhu, this game has a sanity meter), but slowly regains it in the presence of light - but then again, light can also be your worst enemy if you have one of the horrifying monsters, who roam the castle, on your heels. And, given that you have absolutely no defence at all against the monsters, you have three options when one spots you: run, hide or die. The shadows are a good place to duck into, but closets - thank the force for these! - are even better. I tell you, at the first sound of danger, I run and stuff myself into the first closet I find.

And if all this weren't terrifying enough, there's Daniel himself. It's bad enough running down dark corridors without knowing what awaits you at the end; when you have Daniel gasping and panting and whimpering in your ear every time he sees something scary, soon even the sight of your own shadow makes you jump. This game really is the worst of your fears come to life - and more.

[This game should, by all rights, be played late at night, in total darkness, with headphones. But I readily confess: I simply don't have the nerve. I play it while there's still sunlight. And even then, the damn game freaks me out.]

Is Amnesia worth playing? Oh yes. And it is a terrifying experience - even *after* you've saved and exited the game. If anyone needs me, I'll be cowering in my closet.

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Amnesia Diary

1. An invisible monster in the water chased me around the flooded cellar, while I threw books and decomposing body parts to lure it away, and opened and slammed shut something like a hundred doors behind me. Harrowing, I tell you.
2. While checking a study for tinderboxes and other usable material, I opened a cupboard, and out fell a pile of human skulls. Daniel gasped in fright. I simply jumped out of my skin.
3. Alexander must have been performing all manner of hideous experiments in his study. There are anatomical charts and bonesaws and stuffed animals all over the place... and the distant sound of dogs barking while I wandered through the rooms. I'm hoping said dogs are only the hallucinatory product of a deranged mind. Daniel's, not mine.

Would anyone like a drawing, or would like to suggest something for me to do? I really need to get my painting muscles going again, but my brain's still frozen thanks to all the meds and peppermint drink.

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I actually went out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant tonight. California temaki, and a whole plate of salmon sashimi all to myself. [Yes, I'm greedy. Yes, my degree was in microbiology. Yes, I eat raw fish. Deal with it.] It's officially my first real meal for the week: I'd been eating very poorly before, thanks to the cough (which was clearly opposed to my having anything digesting in my stomach), and everything had been pretty repulsive anyway. So yeah. Score one for me this time.

It's ridiculous how long this cough has been going on. It even got *worse* at one point, if anyone can believe it, and my mother became desperate enough to try the remedy from her friend, which she insisted would get rid of the cough. This was the remedy: coating the soles of my feet with Vicks VapoRub, and then stuffing said feet into a pair of very thick socks. Obviously, I hate having my feet touched more than the rest of me combined, and I protested vehemently that the day it worked was the day our sun rose from the west and set in the south, but she insisted anyway, so we wound up wagering an iPad. The result? Not only did I keep the neighbours up all night with seemingly never-ending paroxysms of violent coughing, the soles of my feet were so well lubricated that I spent the next day slipping, sliding and skidding around the house like a demented dog on an ice skating rink. At least my coughs are now respectable sporadic bursts, rather than the hacking variety with enough power to forcibly pop out my eyes and eject my brain through my nose.

Still waiting to regain hearing in my left ear, though. Left ear currently feels stuffed with sound-absorbent material; I lost a great chunk of my hearing earlier this week, following the ear infection. On the one hand, it's much easier to tune out and *not* hear things I'm not interested in (eg. market noises, horrible music from the radio); on the other hand, if I'm sleeping with my good ear in the pillow, you could detonate several bombs in our neighbourhood and I'd still sleep right through it. That is, if the coughing didn't keep me awake. Haha.

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A good friend of mine - whose taste I never had cause to doubt up to now - recently started reading Twilight and, believe it or not, actually liked parts of it. After getting over my incredulity, I decided I would give the book the benefit of the doubt (I did read Harry Potter, didn't I? even though I had no intention of doing so?) and actually read it for myself before I passed judgment. And now, having finished it, I can really, honestly say:

It's not a bad book. It really isn't.

It's unspeakably horrible.

Yes, I know it's a book for teens. Yes, I know it's romance. But even with the knowledge that all teens are angsty and have percolating hormones, and believe in soppy things like One True Love Forever... it's still horrible. And it's not just the romance because surprise surprise, there *is* actually such thing as - thought it hurts me to say this - tastefully written romance. (Which, incidentally, you won't find anywhere in this book). For one, Bella Swan is about the most spineless, lamest, most vacuous and insipid protagonist I have ever come across in the world of teen fic. Apart from her name, which should already send alarm bells ringing (beautiful swan???), she's a Mary Sue who doesn't even bubble and dazzle like her sisters; she's like a Mary Sue with all the fizz and glamour taken out of her. She's supposedly a disaster magnet, an accident waiting to happen - but apparently that adds to her charm because she manages to attract people (particularly boys) like flies, never mind that she's a new girl in a little town where presumably everybody has known everybody forever. Her range of emotions range from angsty/snivelly to needy to blindly enamoured to more-depressed-than-a-wet-mop. And that's just her.

It gets worse once Edward the sparkly glampire enters the picture. If you have read Les Miserables, and were annoyed by how Victor Hugo kept reminding his readers about how beautiful and statue-like Enjolras was... well, at least Enjolras was still human, and he did die at the insurrection. Not to mention Enjolras would've looked like a drippy wallflower next to Edward Cullen. Seriously, every few pages we are treated to Bella's fawning descriptions of how devastatingly beautiful and gorgeous and perfect Edward was. It was nauseating. And really? If a boy, in real life, kept breaking into your bedroom to watch you sleep at night, and stalked you everywhere, and claimed that he was nothing until he met you, and that his whole life revolved around you, you'd get a restraining order. But apparently it's perfectly all right if the boy is a vampire? Eh?

The tragic part is that there *are* interesting fragments of the story that, perhaps, in the hands of a much better writer, might have become midway readable (especially, say, if it had been written in the 3rd person rather than the 1st). But this isn't it. It's a jagged mountain of painfully clunky narrative, unrestrained blathering and angst and emo and angst and emo. And major characters so two dimensional they could've been printed on floppy typing paper. And at the end of the day, all there is to he book is a perfect, smouldering, angsty sparkling, stalky vampire, and a girl whose only purpose in life is to be around him, and be rescued from danger by him. It's as if someone collected the dreams of every sad, lonely, overweight, deluded teenaged girl who wanted to be loved by a perfect guy, and distilled it into a 500-page novel. *facepalm*

It terrifies me that not only teenaged girls but also middle-aged women all over the place are reading (and loving) this because, really, what does that tell you about their evaluation of love and romance and desire?

I am currently harbouring fugitives. Their names are Martian and Debilitating Cold, and they're currently in hiding, probably somewhere in the vicinity of my lungs.

My first clue that my body had been invaded by rogue microorganisms was when, following lunch on Thursday, I developed an annoying persistent cough. By Friday, said annoying cough had blossomed into a conspiracy to keep my erythrocytes from effectively transporting their little oxygen passengers to the gazillions of cells populating the Sprawling Nation of Far, and thus just as effectively kept me out of the gym. Said pathogens apparently seized control of my communications centre yesterday, which probably wasn't hard to do at all since I practically handed it to them on a plate, having spent two consecutive hours burning a hole in my throat by talking non-stop at Biology class like a Chatty Cathy on stimulants. Meanwhile, my respiratory tract, sensing the inevitability of war, was busy stockpiling mucus and phegm in some remote part of my throat that no amount of throat-clearing or coughing could dislodge. Come evening (and my aunt's party) I was viewing the food served at dinner as unspeakably vile little buggers that would, if given the opportunity, cheerfully invite the contents of my lunch to join them on the serving plates; indeed, vile little buggers with the general appeal of large lumps of celery-flavoured booger. Left in time to get to orchestra practice, where we spent a very merry night playing Various Christmas Songs With A Liberal Sprinkling of Phlegm, and then returned home to play my own Death Rattle Concerto, Opus 44, featuring a very impressive Hacking Cough Solo. To add to the mood, the local temperature dropped to several degrees above absolute zero - and when I say "local" I actually mean, "restricted to the area confined by my skin", since outdoor temperature was registering a nice balmy 27 degrees Celsius - thus necessitating the application of a long-sleeved denim workshirt, socks, one very warm silk floss duvet *and* one comforter the thickness of several loaves of bread. Which, as you may have guessed, did absolutely nothing to bring the perceived local temperature back up to normal, while actually steaming the covered person (ie. me) to palatable tenderness.

However, am very pleased to report that my internal thermostat was fixed by very grudging molecular repairmen early in the morning, and, after spending most of the day comatose, I am reasonably back up to speed (though pieces of my lung are still coming up with each cough...). Except that I was astonished to find, upon waking up today, that I had been transformed into a frog, and thus can only utter the words *croak* and *ribbit* - something that will probably require a kiss from some member of royalty to rectify.

Perhaps the strangest book I've read this year:



( Review here )

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Want to know more about quorum sensing, or what happens after death? Check out these articles:

Small Talk in the Microbial World
The Processes of Death and Decomposition



[Yes, I wrote those as a student.]

There are a whole lot of art projects I should be working on (the barricades thing has gone nowhere!), and what do I do instead? Draw zabraks.



At least it's less embarrassing than the original, which I did four years ago?

Steve celebrates Halloween with intimacy, his own way.



Happy Halloween, y'all!

So I was going through some of my old backup CDs tonight, checking to see what was in them, when I found a number of truly horrible things that served to remind me that some things should *never* be unearthed again.

On the other hand, perhaps this will serve as a lesson for everybody else who reads this post.

Now, as anybody who's known me from the old KotOR Fan Media Forum days, I was first inspired to learn to draw properly in December 2005 after seeing all the incredible fan art by the likes of Aimo and Eji. But what people didn't know, and what I apparently blocked out for the past five years, was that, two months before *that*, I attempted to do a digitally coloured picture:



[the reference for the woman's face was Kate Beckinsale. Yes, that's how bad I mangled it]

And there's this, drawn in the same month, which I didn't even remember drawing until I found it in my old folder (another case of suppressed traumatic memories? haha):



Don't ask. Just don't.

I also found a couple of equally horrible pictures dating back to my early days of portraiture and digital painting, both time-stamped February 2006:



I'm assuming it's so bad you can't even tell who that is; it's Uma Thurman from The Producers...



[Also known as, "The time when the women Far drew didn't even look female", according to Natalie. Or, for that matter, human...]

And of course there's this truly hideous portrait that everyone from KFM knows, which dates back to the same period (and which was actually referenced from a photo and a couple of pictures, believe it or not):



[it kills me that this picture channels "Jimmy Smits" more than "Carth Onasi". ROFL!]

Mind you, it's not as if I even paint particularly well these days, but back then, if you'd told me that, in four years, I would be painting things like


Invictus by =DarthFar on deviantART

or


Sun, Surf and Espionage by =DarthFar on deviantART or deviantART

or


[my latest, not-yet-finished project for a friend]

I'd have said you were bloody fucking insane.

Which goes to show that *anybody* can learn to draw and paint reasonably enough, given enough time. Because if someone like me, who was never regarded as having *any* talent or ability in art when I was in school, can go from "sucks like a black hole" to "adequately mediocre" and learn to draw humans who actually *look* human, there is no reason why *anybody* else can't either. [And claiming, "But I have no talent!" is just a fucking lazy excuse for not working harder at it.]

Oh, and one last, ghastly picture I accidentally unearthed:



Seriously, what the hell was it with that horrible hair?! I can only thank the Force that no larger copies of this photograph exists *anywhere*. [facepalm]

So I'll come clean and confess it: I'm a fan of Noel Coward's songs. Have been since I caught Mad Dogs and Englishmen at the end of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (which, incidentally, was the only part of the film that I found interesting at all); anyone visiting me during study hour in college would've heard my Legends of the 20th Century 01: Noel Coward CD playing over and over and over ad nauseam. (Unless of course it was the Pet Shop Boys -- which gives you a pretty good idea of the sort of stuff I listen to). It's almost impossible to get sick of Coward's wit - it's almost like PG Wodehouse set to music - and the songs still make me snicker in spite of the fact that I've just about worn a hole in the CD.

A few years ago I caught a rerun of the 1999 BBC Proms featuring Jeremy Irons - singing Noel Coward songs. I've just found them again, and thought I'd share the videos because Jeremy Irons, while obviously not camp, has a coarser, more nasal timbre to his voice, and has trouble with the high notes, nevertheless manages to more than do Coward justice in his own rough(er) way:



The arrangement for Mad Dogs and Englishmen is hilarious, and sent me into an apoplectic fit of laughter at one point. You'll know it when you hear it.



While the songs Irons picked are among my top Coward favourites, I can't help but wish that 20th Century Blues could've been replaced by The Stately Homes of England... but that would've made it one comic song too many. I would've killed to hear Jeremy Irons sing it, though.



The build-up of frustration and hostility! That last verse!!! It wasn't in my CD; god, I wish it was. (Damn the public sensibilities of the time). The song was awesome enough with Noel Coward singing it, but Jeremy Iron's inflections and body language are *gold*.

Every time I go out for drinks with friends.... I come home stone cold sober. Without even any change in colour. Without any behavioural changes, or even an increased tendency to talk. (Still about as chatty as bedrock). I wonder if that spells some kind of Social Fail. Haha.

I guess I definitely score fail points tonight for spending the better part of three-quarters of an hour playing math games on my phone. Not the most social of behaviours either, although, when one has nothing to add to the conversation subject and is not included in it anyway, one finds more interesting ways to engage oneself.