EXAMS!!! THEY'RE OVER!!!

Yeah. They are. So now I begin doing all of the shizz that I haven't had the time to do. Anyhow, for now maybe I'll just put down the bucket list of ALL the stuff I want to try to get done. Let's see how much I'll be able to achieve within a three month break.

Cosplay:-
Human-scale Wing Zero Custom
Black Rock Shooter (Kaito version)

Dance:-
Generally: Get Rag dance done (ok, this isn't really a project since I HAVE to get this done anyway)
B-boying: Get some floats (e.g. crikets, turtles, etc) and some air freezes (e.g. Nikes)
Locking: Clean up my EVERYTHING
Tricking: Get a clean butterfly twist

Art:-
MOAR wallpapers!

Games:-
Finish Portal 2 (my inner gamer appeals to anyone who plays video games, YOU HAVE TO GET THIS GAME!!!)
Finish Ace Attorney series
Finish Machinarium
Play MapleStory again

*Update*
All in all, it seems that I did not manage to strike a lot of the things off my holiday list but at least I managed to get half of it done-ish >.< (I blame Rag for eating up all my time).

A Personal Tradition

Today was the last day of the semester, which means today I put on my last day of semester clothes. Now what the heck does that mean? To put it into perspective, last semester I wore a beret, my Lion Heart necklace, a short sleeve shirt, a skinny tie, black jeans and sneakers. This semester I decided to kick it up a notch.

So this time around, I walked into my first lecture wearing a white fedora hat, a white long sleeve shirt, a black velvet vest, a black skinny tie, black working pants and black leather shoes. To say the least, it was a surprise for all my friends in the lecture hall (and the lecturer himself). And such was the rest of my day. Every time I passed by someone I knew, they would give me the 'woah' look and ask me what the occasion was, to which I always replied, "They're my last day of semester clothes =D".

So what is the point of this celebration of the last day of the semester? Well, for one, it's to mark the last official day of the semester in which have to go to uni (save exam days). Other than that, it's my personal excuse to crack out my good clothes because I always found it a waste to have nice clothes in my wardrobe but never actually having the chance to wear them. Perhaps I also take a little inspiration from a friend of mine who used to dress up practically EVERY SINGLE DAY last semester. And maybe, just a little, I want to make my daily life a little more special than usual.

Then again, what's wrong with dressing up and looking good for no reason every once in a while =D

Post-SUAD Thoughts

Well, it's finally over. Shut Up And Dance 2011 comes to a close. Okay, fine. It actually came to a close last Sunday but I've been spending the last week picking up the pieces of my life. Just a little bit of context for everyone. Shut Up And Dance is a concert put up by the NUS Dance BLAST! club. This year in particular is really special since it marks the club's 10th anniversary so the scale of this concert was A LOT bigger than anything I've been a part of before.

It's really on hell of a crazy ride for me. I'm only a junior this year so I was only a part of the finale item in which they shoved all 40~ of us juniors plus another 20~ seniors into. That plus the fact that I'm practically a bottom feeder within the club, so I had a nice cozy time in the back corner of the stage. So to make use of this situation, they committee decided to make use of the extra muscle and drafted all the junior guys into the backstage props team while we were not dancing.

But that didn't make the experience any less awesome. I've been in concerts in secondary school before and recently I was also a part of the CAC concert as a b-boy but the scale of those concert do not even come close to SUAD. It's an inspiring experience watching the seniors and alumni dancing on stage. Almost breathtaking when you watch the sheer level of quality in the choreography and execution.

It's one thing to be blown away by professional dancers from the comfort of a nice cushioned chair but witnessing a performance of that level from the wings just takes it to a whole new experience. Sure I don't get to see the big picture of all the blocking and there will be a lot of instances where I can't see what's happening on stage because I'm blocked by the wings but there are nuances of a performance that can only be witnessed up close.

I'll just try to retell one example that sent chills down my spine. One of the dances used the song "Love The Way You Lie" by Eminem and Rihanna and featured one of the most amazing solo dancers I've had the honour of meeting, Chun. Her solos by themselves are already insane enough with the amount of energy she puts into her performances. Still, the thing that totally knocked me off my feet was how into the character she was. In the silence after the song, just before the stage completely blacked out for the next segment of the dance, I heard the faintest of whimpers coming from Chun and I was like taken aback by how immersed she was into the role to the point it almost became real.

Still, as inspiring as watching another dancer is, nothing can replace the feeling of being the one on stage. 60 people on stage forming the biggest 'dance armies' to grace the concert. Standing in front of a sellout crowd, there's a feeling that drives you to throw out everything you have and leave it on the stage floor. After an emotionally charged choreo to an equally emotionally charged song (Eminem's solo in B.O.B.'s Airplaines Part II), I ran into the wings and for a few seconds I almost thought I would puke after just throwing out so much energy during the performance. A really super crazy 4 minutes.

But I think my greatest takeaway from this concert is not the inspiration or the time on stage but the new friends I made. When I first auditioned for BLAST!, I went in alone and got in not knowing anyone at all. For the longest time, I went to weekly practices without actually getting to know 90% of the other people in the studio but thanks to this concert, I finally managed to sit down and attach names to the faces I've seen for so long. Like Pat (our resident choreographer) said, the concert is sort of a 'baptism of fire' and that we are now inducted into what is the BLAST! family, soon to become the seniors I so greatly admired.

To wrap up my thoughts, this concert for me is really a rite of passage as a dancer stepping onto the next level of my dancing life. So onwards I go, to become the senior who inspires juniors like I have been inspired.

1600 people in the audience, 10 years of BLAST! history, 1 unforgettable experience.

Art: Crash - Durarara!! Wallpaper

As I continue on with the expose of my life, I'll begin with my first anime wallpaper post. Given that this is my first post about anime wallpapers, I should type out a bit of background to my Photoshop-ing past.

I've been Photoshop anime-related images for about 5-6 years now. It first started with just making simple web banners and signatures for a forum I used to frequent back in the day, back when I simply extracted stock images using the magic wand tool and pasted them onto filter spam backgrounds. Humble beginnings much. Eventually I ventured into the realm of making composite anime wallpapers, stumbling upon the amazing website, animepaper.net

Recently, I've been dwelling with the wonderful world of vector graphics, vector tracing and Adobe Illustrator. It's really amazing what one can do with vector graphics. Since most anime art is drawn in a style easily mimicked by vector graphics, vector tracing really opens up a lot of restrictions since vectors can be resized to any arbitrary size I want without any loss of detail. And for those who are wondering, the huge anime picture staring you in the face at the top of the blog is one of my older works.

Now onto this specific wallpaper. The underlying concept of this wallpaper is essentially an attempt to mimic a movie poster. Specifically, I was trying to sort of spoof the movie "Crash". Those of you who are familiar with the anime Durarara!! will be able to immediately draw the link between the anime and the movie. For those who are not in tune with the anime universe, quite a bit of context will be redoubtably loss.

I don't really want to talk too much about the wallpaper. I'll just let it do the talking for itself. In the future, I hope to be able to post all my future projects on this blog. For those who may be interested to see some of my older works, I have a deviantArt account at http://infernova.deviantart.com as well as an animepaper.net account at http://nova-kun.animepaper.net. Do pay me a visit if you have the time =D

Once A Dreamer

Have you ever had dreams?

Like those from your childhood, when you dreamt you could be a superhero saving the world. Like those from your adolescence, when you dreamt of being to coolest kid in school. Like those from your adulthood, when you dreamt that you could just be a better person.

I was once a dreamer, embracing dreams in hopes that one day they will come true. Living life as it was because I knew that whatever else happened, I still had my dreams. That nothing in the world mattered because I lived in the world of my dreams.

I was once a dreamer, till one day I realised that dreams are not enough to defeat reality. Realised that the world I live in is the real world, not the world of my dreams. For dreams alone are not good enough in real life.

I was once a dreamer, till I gave up simply dreaming because dreaming alone is not enough for anybody.

I was once just a dreamer, now I turn my dreams into reality.

Trials and Errors

Fear is a necessary evil. It keeps us safe. It keeps us sane. Like most other developed instincts, fear stems from our need for preservation as a species. Without fear, we would lose our inhibition for self-destruction altogether. However, fear itself isn't perfect. It cannot completely distinguish what is truly detrimental to us from what isn't. So as a safeguard, fear takes effect against everything in the grey zone. To protect us from what will harm us. To protect us from what might harm us. To protect us from what won't harm us.

It is necessary for us to take control of fear, not let fear take control of us. As a boy, I was deathly afraid of failure, deathly afraid of embarrassment, deathly afraid of being an inconvenience to others. Thus, that little boy never tried, bound by the invisible grip of fear. But one day, that boy realised that not all fears are to be feared, that death was little more than an exaggerated figment of his imagination. Thus, on that day the boy made a resolution to live a life of living, even if it kills him. For even if he died, at least he died living, not died dying.

It is necessary to live not inhibited by fear, nor ignorant of fear but alongside it. Fear is a necessary evil because it is by definition, necessary. To live a life without fear is stupid but to live a life governed by it is sad. Thus, I walk, hand in hand with fear, into the abyss of the unknown, so that one day I may meet the face of what I so feared.

Because it is necessary to understand that in life, if we never try, we will never fail but neither will we ever succeed.

Conversations With A Stranger

Today was supposed to be a day most like any other Sunday. I was on a bus on my way to have dinner with friends, sitting alone in a seat designed for one adult and one child. As the bus stopped to picked up more passengers, the usual stream of people walked past me as they made their way to the back of the bus in of more space but on Indian man decided to attempt to squeeze onto the one and a half chairs that I was occupying. Attempting to be considerate, I tried to squeeze in as far as possible, given that the chair was not made to seat two grown men. As I was squeezing in, the Indian man said something that I interpreted to be some form of gesture to say that it's okay but I took off my earphones to make sure anyway.

Then after a moment of silence, out of the blue the Indian man spoke to me in slightly broken English, "What's your name?". Caught off guard, I only managed to voice out a "huh?" in response to his question. "Your name?" the Indian man repeated, apparently conscious that his lack of grasp of English might be hindering the conversation. "Desmond," I responded, as I normally introduce myself to people whom I don't want to take the trouble with to explain my oddly spelled name.

And just like that, my conversation with a complete stranger began. The Indian man I speak of is a construction worker from India named Abu (I suspect that this is not his real name, rather a name given to him by his foreman in order to simplify his presumably complex Indian name). He's been working in Singapore for the last three years and is currently working on a construction project opposite NUS (the university I study at).

If anything, this conversation was enlightening. I've had my experiences talking to polytechnic students and secondary school dropouts while I was working as a waiter but this conversation was on a whole different level. It was most interesting to have an insight into how a foreign worker's life is. He didn't exactly recite his life story to me but it was obvious there were large discrepancies between his ideas and my ideas of normality. Like how immediately after asking if I was still studying, he proceeded to ask me if I was married, as if it was the expected norm to be married while still in school.

Some of his other questions gave me a more sobering insight to what his world is like. He asked me if I was working, if my job paid me at least $1000 per month, if I still send money back to my parents every month. He asked which "construction site" I'll be working at in the future, if I'll be working as a "technician". Without actually telling me anything explicitly, the phrasing of his questions alone gave me a brief insight what constitutes 'normal standards' for a foreign worker.

Another sobering thought is how Abu saw education as a pipedream. "How much is your education?" Abu asked. "About ten thousand." I replied. Immediately Abu dismissed the thought of studying. "Too expensive," he said. Yet, there I thought to myself, there are hundreds, if not thousands of students in NUS who are content with cruising through university just so they get some random degree and get out of university as quickly as possible, without batting a thought about the cost of their university eduation.

All in all, it was a really eye-opening conversation, even if it did only last for about 5 minutes, passing 4 bus stops.