Finally joined HX to go to Wala Wala on a Thursday night. My Toastmasters Club meeting ended half an hour later than usual (from 9.30pm to 10pm) because it was our final one for this semester and we squeezed 6 speeches instead of the usual 4-5.
By the time I packed up everything, squeezed them into the Club's locker (it's kinda like playing Lego), and missed one bus because it was so crowded the bus driver didn't even bother to stop (seriously, 10pm and we have crowded buses in NTU. WTF are the student's doing mugging so hard into the night??) then boarded the next bus, it was already 10.30pm.
HX drove me from Clementi. It was about 11pm then.
Reached there too late to find seats on the 2nd floor where the band was playing. So we just stood around. It would have looked pretty normal except we weren't holding drinks. I was planning to mug later when I reached home, so I didn't want to be intoxicated at all. Maybe next time.
The band was good, or at least better than the band playing on Wednesdays at timbre @ The Arts House.. Maybe it's because I prefer rock music. The crowd went crazy when they performed hits like "Mr Brightside". I believe some of them were requested by the audience.
I'm quite curious how some people who were seated right in front of the band didn't move a muscle throughout the time I was there, except to clap at the end of each song. I understand those at the corners probably were less affected by the general atmosphere, but people at the centre and the front were surrounded by very happy people waving their arms and even jumping around. And in the middle of the ocean of chaos sat these immovable rocks seemingly untouched by the music.
I bet if I had drunk some alcohol (I went with an empty stomach) I would have gotten drunk and joined them. And HX would be the only one looking at me strangely, if anyone would at all.
In case you don't remember whatever the heck Mr Brightside is, here is the song, courtesy of Youtube.
It was also quite surprising to see that the place is full on a weekday night, even after 11pm. Must be the band, because the first floor was quite quiet.
So I made my Rant 309 /Child Safety And You (v1.1) into a speech, my Project Speech 7 of my Competent Communication manual. The objective of thie project was to do research and have data to back my points.
The thing is, it was obviously going to be a very dry speech if I followed all the instructions, and who would want to listen to boring speeches on the final meeting of the semester?
So I tried to do it the unorthodox way by using false data collected from my gaming and movie-watching experiences. In fact, all I did was shorten the Rant 309 a little, used some of its pictures to make PowerPoint slides and basically made a speech that was full of shit.
Unfortunately, most of the audience weren't gamers - only a 1 or 2 understood in-jokes from Left4Dead (like when I mentioned that there were no female patient zombies in Mercy Hospitals hence all women in hospitals wearing hospital gowns would survive zombie attacks). Good thing I included Godzilla because it was the only joke that got across very well.
Stuff about Fallout 3 was epic fail because Fallout 3 isn't popular in Singapore. Hell, it isn't even heard of by local gamers. Sad but true.
Stuff about Grand Theft Auto was only as successful as those from Left 4 Dead because only a few people have even heard of it.
The saddest fact was that the most successful joke I made that night wasn't even part of the speech. Here it is:
Why does Michael Jackson like twenty five year olds very much?
Because there are twenty of them.
:D Hope you're not a hardcore MJ fan or a grammar Nazi. I omitted the grammatically important dashes so that it doesn't get too obvious in written form. This joke is meant to be spoken.
How the heck do I appreciate Der Ring des Nibelungen?? In case you don't know what this is and are too lazy to click the link, it's a series of epic music operas by Wagner. Supposedly even the music itself, each instrument and each tone used tells part of the story. It also requires the usage of Wagner's own instruments, like Wagner Tubas, which were designed just for this epic cycle.
It just sounds like overrated bs to me.
Tickets for a performance of this, which is amazingly long (15 hours) and is separated into 4 nights, must be really expensive. Seriously, it means they have to watch almost 4 hours of this each night for 4 nights. You'll definitely have to be a huge fan to have to go through this ordeal, or just want to appear filthy rich.
Not only is the opera cycle itself epic, but the production of it too. To make such a huge performance, an epic amount of money is required.
Still sounds overrated to me.
The new Facebook totally reminds me of 4chan /b/. The huge amount of traffic keeps pushing down stuff to the bottom of the page very quickly. It's just like in /b/, where the moment you reply to a thread, you'll find that it's missing from the front page because over 9000 other people have also just replied to other threads at the same time, pushing your thread to the next page or beyond.
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