Bleach: Blade Battlers

Bleach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleach_anime) is a popular Japanese anime I’ve just picked up during the past couple of months.

As I am a gaming enthusiast, I went to do a search and found this PS2 Bleach game, called Bleach: Blade Battlers.

Official game site: http://www.jp.playstation.com/scej/title/bleach/blade/

*Note: Remember to enable Flash for your web-browser when viewing the site for the game!*

The game-play is pretty simple and straight forward: Pick your character, and pit him/her against other opponents (you can have up to 3 opponents per battle). Just like every other fighting game, every character has his/her unique set of combos and special-moves at his/her disposal to defeat the opponent(s).

At first sight, many people would think that this game is some skill-less button-masher. However, the game-play actually requires timing and a careful balance between offense/defense, or else you will be defeated in no time. In my opinion, the game designers did a pretty much job of balancing the power of the 23 characters in this game.

While not the newest and the most complicated of the various Bleach games out there, this game has all of the characters’ trade-marks moves that Bleach fans will certainly love.

Need a Job?

Are you a fresh grad out of your college/university? Looking for a job, to challenge yourself and also to prove your worth to our competitive society?

Well, look no further, the Multimedia Design course in local Arts school “Laoya Asylum of Fucked Hearts” recently “lost” 3 of its lecturers, who left the school on an act of mass defect to another company (or so I’ve heard). These lecturers (code-named “Alien”, “Cheese” and “Godzilla”) were originally in the middle of a Degree semester, but due to their “great sense” of responsibility, they had to leave and the students were left to deal with the resulting problems themselves.

Anyway, feel free to apply for a job as Multimedia lecturer in their place! There are many attractive perks that await you:

i) You can hide in the staff office the whole day! When students appear to consult you about school-work, you can tell them that you are very busy and have no time for them. When other students appear to chat with you about where to go out for lunch, you can invite them into the office and chat with them all the way till lunch-time!

ii) If a student asks you how to use certain Multimedia tools, you can scold him and tell him to find out how to use them himself, via books in the library! After all, it is wrong of him to ask a lecturer on such things; it is not within a lecturer’s job scope to enlighten a student on subjects which are relevant to the course module.

iii) Many students will suck up to you and tell you how capable you are (even though your only capability is to award them with good grades, regardless of how fucked-up their work is, as long as they worship you), and how wonderful you look (even though the only celebrity you look like is “Ugly Betty”). Your social life will never look better!

iv) You can have little or no knowledge of the modules that you are teaching, yet you are free to give totally ridiculous and pointless (also known as un-constructive) criticisms!

There are many more perks, you only have to be creative (Design lecturers MUST be creative, ok?) to know how to use them.

So what are you waiting for?

Apply today!

Sebastian

There is this female lecturer in my Multimedia Degree course, who is in charge of our thesis-writing module.

She is “supposed” to be female, but she spots short cropped hair (though that has grown slightly longer recently), always wears a shirt with a singlet inside, always wears cargo-pants, and sneaker shoes. On top of that, she blatantly favours female students over male ones. If you tell me that isn’t an obvious butch (definition of a “butch”: lesbian who takes on the male role, usually by dressing up in a masculine manner), I don’t know what that is.

Due to the fact that we all know how anal Singaporeans can be, and I would very much not want to be sued, I won’t be using her real name here (obviously), so I will be referring to her as “Sebastian”.

Sebastian is probably one of the lamest lecturers I have ever met in my whole life. She practices blatant favouritism (as mentioned earlier) on the female students that she “loves”…. For example, if some male students come to class 5 minutes late, she would give a hell of a scolding; but when those beloved female students come to class 30 minutes late, she would greet them cheerfully instead! The ironic thing is, Sebastian is always bitching (or butching, to be more precise) us about “professionalism”, but as you can see, she herself is hardly spotting any!

Like most butches that many people have encountered, she is the standard “emo-wreck” type, who is constantly going on ridiculous mood swings. She can be happily briefing the class on our thesis at one moment…. Then all of a sudden, she would get angry for no bloody reason and start raising her voice and losing her temper for fun. I get the impression that she expects everyone to be “yes-men” and always shower her with attention and everything, but for fuck’s sake, this is a design Degree we are talking about here. If she really wants students who obey her every whim and fear her authority, she should just fuck off and go teach a primary school instead!

I’ve heard that she graduated with an “Interior Design” Degree, while other sources state that she graduated with a “Fine Arts” Degree…. To this very day, no one is even sure what Degree she has obtained, so as you can see, her education background is as confusing as her sexuality!

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I am taking a Multimedia Degree course. Even though she is an insignificant thesis-module lecturer, she often demands that we (the classes) show her our work-progress constantly so that she can give us her advice. That sounds fair enough, right? I thought so too! However, the problem is, since she didn’t graduate from a Multimedia course, she has no bloody idea about many Multimedia stuffs! For example, when I showed her my work, she made some comments about some changes that she felt that I should make. I explained to her that the changes wouldn’t make sense, due to technical issues of my 3dsMax program. She obviously didn’t get what I was talking about, and insisted that something could be done, one way or another. In the end, I ignored her suggestions and she actually took offense to it. Just to let you know, I have consulted my Animation lecturer (the main guy in charge of my project), and he agree with what I have mentioned about the technical issues. So as you can see, trying to explain Multimedia issues to Sebastian is something like trying to teach a turtle how to sing.

To further prove Sebastian’s deluded mentality, here is another incident…. After hearing most of the technical problems that my classmates face, and not understanding what we were talking about, Sebastian got pissed off and asked us, “How can you all keep using technical terms to explain your works? What if the project assessor is someone who doesn’t know anything about Multimedia?” I then replied “If that assessor doesn’t know anything about Multimedia stuffs, then he shouldn’t even be there assessing our projects!” Sebastian got pissed off with my reply, and went on to throw her temper, as usual. My dear Sebastian, sorry that the truth hurts, but that is reality… There is a reason why we don’t get a building-architect to perform a surgical-operation on a hospital patient, you know!

That isn’t the end…. Sebastian also has the mentality of a sad child. She is naïve as hell, and truly thinks that those students who suck up to her really like her. She has no idea that some of her favourite students actually bad-mouthed her constantly (behind her back, of course). Apart from that, she extremely detests those students who don’t suck up to her. I have never seen someone who has such a great need to be accepted. That shows a lot about her personal well-being.

I know I know, some of you are going to tell me that the working world out there is pretty much like this, but the difference is, in the working world, you suck up + get paid… I am not going to stoop so low in school as to suck up to some useless butch, and then paying her money for that, on top of it! Where has all the integrity gone to?

I really feel sorry for Sebastian…. All her current “beloved” students will undoubtedly dump her from their social circle as soon as they graduate (cruel fate of someone who is merely a stepping stone)… And she’d probably go on to look for more love from the next batch of students. Where has all the love gone to?

I can go on and on about more tales of Sebastian, but it’ll never end, so I shall just stop here, maybe for now.

Speaking of love, since it is coming up soon, Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!

Adios! ^^

Your Upbringing

I am sure that everyone has encountered people who have weird habits, or are down-right self-centered, obnoxious or [inset horrible behaviour here]….

I myself have met a fair share of such people…. For example: that arrogant no-life sergeant in the Army, that snobbish rich girl who acts like she is better than everyone etc… I am sure that many of you have your fair share of such unfortunate encounters too!

As I have a low tolerance for such behaviour, I usually get pissed off and get rather worked up. Those nice people around me would then tell me to calm down, and come up with reasons for those unruly behaviour, the most common one being “They grow up behaving like this! It’s their family upbringing! You can’t blame them!”

Oh really? So let’s take a look at this picture….




Get my point?

The accursed terrorist Osama bin Laden (I hope he is really dead!) grew up in an environment whereby he learnt to believe that acts of violence (blowing innocent people up, telling his own men to blow themselves up etc) and the abuse of the Islamic religion is the way to get things done. However, does that mean that we should forgive him, since “that’s the way he is brought up”?

Yes, I am very aware of the fact that some people are spoilt by their parents (or whoever brought them up), and they are probably so used to being pampered, that in the end, they develop the mentality that the whole world owes them something. However, the last time I check, I am not their parent (or whoever spoilt them), so why must I give in to these spoilt brats?

If you grow up with a screwed-up attitude, I don’t care if it’s your parents’/guardian’s fault or whatsoever bullshit excuse….. The fact is: You are still screwed-up. Don’t expect everyone else to bow to your demands. If you cannot handle the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around you, maybe you should stay home and continue to live in your fantasy realm where you are the King of the World!

Haha!

Hello 2007

Happy New Year everyone!

Just caught "Death Notu 2: Da Last Notu", and I must say that I am rather impressed with the movie! The plot is very smart, the pace is good (no long boring parts where the characters go blah blah blah), and the actors are surprisingly solid.

I hope that the "Death Notu" movies would open up the gates for a new genre of movies. For too many years, our theatres have been infested with various incarnations of horror movies that were produced by the Japanese and the Koreans. Hopefully, with the success of the "Death Notu" movies, producers and scriptwriters would put more interest into investigative stories.

As I personally enjoy investigative plots (Japan: Conan the Detective, Kindaichi; US: CSI series), it would be good for me (as a movie-goer) if the more of such movies were to be released.

*Poof*