Anyway, it reminds me of the stuff I type here. I'm sure there are many things you'd scan through and forget, if you'd scan through them at all. I'll not mention what I expect you to find boring because it's a matter of preference. Listing anything may add them to your own mental list.
Cashmere is expensive stuff. My mum's woolen imports are partly made of a mixture of cashmere and other materials. Cheaper importers look for cheaper goods which have small proportions of cashmere, maybe around 10%. Such clothes are little different from having no cashmere at all, but in their tags they can honestly indicate the presence of it.
Cashmere is like the ultimate insulating hair material, or whatever you want to call it. It is very warm and incredibly soft; touching a piece of good cashmere is like feeling the clouds in heaven.
But noobs, know there are 2 types of cashmere - the coarse and the fine. My mum only imports the finer stuff, which explains why she doesn't import anything made pure cashmere. Few people in Singapore (and the world) can afford a jacket or sweater made of pure soft cashmere and only the wealthy go for such luxurious items.
My mum aims to sell her goods at the middle-aged middle class, people old enough to discern quality with their fingers and not too concerned with the need for flashiness. Plus fashion for the younger generation gets outdated too fast. According to her experience, goods that aren't sold in the one season they were trendy in cannot be expected to be sold.
For the middle-aged people, clothes can be sold slowly because their fashion don't get outdated within 3 months. This gives time for my mum to actually design her goods, order it and wait for it to ship to Singapore from China and Hong Kong.
Ordering goods in China is a tedious process because it requires a lot of checking. Just because you gave them a perfect picture of what you have in mind (eg by drawing with all measurements done and colour specified to the very shade) doesn't mean you will get it.
Generally speaking doing business with Chinese people requires a lot of travelling, both to entertain each other to improve relations and to check on your goods. Seriously, the price my mum pays for not travelling to China every month is to have to check every single piece of clothes she imports and make minor repairs to around 80% of the imported items.
Also, the next time you find out that the cost of making clothes in China is actually much lower than what you pay in Singapore, don't blame the middleman. Fuel costs are up and so shipping costs are up. Established shops in Singapore also take a comission of at least 30% while the really branded ones take 60% or more. Not 100%, but even 70-80% is possible.
Finally, normal wool is cheap shit; plastics are worse. If you can afford it, go for cashmere. It's worth the price.
I'm a failblogger. I just found out I can change the date and time of each rant. This is already the 380th rant.
A Game of Thrones is confirmed to be made into a TV series by HBO. Actually, not really. They're now about to make the pilot episode which will help HBO decide if they want to continue with the rest of the book. So far progress is still too slow for me. They've only got the director and an actor for Tyrion. I mean, Tyrion's a dwarf and so there can't be many options to choose from anyway.
I joined an Empires game at around 3am, just in time to vote for a commander before the round starts. No one wanted to comm, including me. After the voting period, absolutely no one got into the Command Vehicle (CV) except for a newbie. Apparently a shy one too, because he didn't even dare to ask everyone how to comm. He got into the vehicle but didn't go into the command interface (the bird's eye view of the map). Repeated it a few times before alighting and running away.
I was watching him next to the CV because I decided if no one wanted to comm I'll do it. When he got in I wanted to make sure he didn't suck. After seeing his inability to find out that F2 is the magic button, I was ready to vote to kick him out. Just when I was going into the menu, he ran away.
I went in and did what I always do. My team had an affinity with the highly defensible center of the map, which also gave me extra resources. We abandoned all the surrounding areas except the northwest corner, where our main base was. This gave our opponents about as much resources as we got from the center.
My team camped the center for so long we had almost everything, but they just couldn't go further into the other side of the map. Meanwhile, the enemy comm had a cool idea and got Depleted Uranium Machine Guns (weakest anti-tank machine gun) and Reactive Armour (3rd best armour out of 6 possible). This combination, in the early game, gave incredibly effective light tanks.
As for me in the early game, I did my usual and got Heavy Caliber Machine Guns (which also has DU MG as part of the package) and Reflective Armour. Reflective Armour has slightly weaker HP and its specialty is in reducing damage proportional to the angle at which the projectile hits. A shell hitting the armour perpendicularly would deal 100% damage but half damage if it hits at 45 degrees.
In simpler terms, Reflective Armour requires more skill to use. Just like mortar, it is very good if the driver is good. My team turned out to be mediocre drivers. We had more than enough resources for everyone to get tanks, but our tanks just weren't effective enough to push out of center and northwest.
I also researched other helpful stuff like Extended Range Cannons, but they just weren't enough. The enemy later went for Salvo Missiles, ie 4-8 missiles per shot, which I didn't get. We still managed to hold on while getting attacked on two fronts at main base. Somehow the enemy just didn't bother with the center.
After a long stalemate I eventually got Heavy Tank Chassis, which allowed heavy tanks to be built, just in time to see my Vehicle Factory blown up by enemy tanks. So my efforts to let my team build the best (and most fun) tank were in vain. The two VFs that I dropped later were also destroyed by the tanks before they were built.
So I lost just when the game got fun.
In the following game no one wanted to comm again and they asked whoever had just commed the last game to do it again. Apparently they thought it was not my fault that we lost and I boarded the CV again.
This map was different. My main base was at southeast and the enemy's at southwest. In between the bases was a highly defensibly dam containing only a single refinery (for earning resources). Again, the map was separated with a ring and a circular piece of land in the middle, separated by canyons and connected by bridges. Our bases were on the ring and the giant piece of land in the middle contains nothing and serves as nothing but land to walk on.
The main focus of this map was to take the dam and the north plateau. The dam was the midpoint between the main bases while the plateau is a large flat land with 2 refineries. Holding it would mean holding 2 refineries with one base, which is very desirable.
Initially my team took the dam and tried to get a foothold in the north. Most of the enemy team went north and razed my forward barracks there after a while. I got desperate because losing north usually means losing the entire game, so I built a VF immediately and told them to get a few weak tanks to conquer north. Meanwhile, research was the same as always.
The tank raid worked! I managed to take back my eastern half of the plateau and got a forward barracks up again, this time with tanks to defend with. I also built a wall on the western side of the barracks to block incoming projectiles from the western enemy base.
But within a minute enemy tanks arrived to rescue their dying base. A long tank battle ensued and my team won eventually. But a ninja raid group attacked the lightly defended dam to the south and wrested control from my two guys who were guarding it. A few small attempts were made to retake the dam but to no avail.
Meanwhile, our tanks were slowly encroaching on the southwest side of the map, aka enemy territory. I was planning to get heavies, then nukes, seeing that we were doing quite well. However, our tanks died too frequently at the enemy main base and needed too many replacements. This placed a huge burden on my economy and soon I abandoned the plan to get nukes.
All of a sudden, I hear the automated alert saying that my Vehicle Factory was under attack. I scrolled to my base and witnessed the complete destruction of my main base. It seems a very talented Scout had infiltrated my main base and sabotaged everything. Sabotaged buildings lose health over time and eventually blows up. My Radar and Vehicle Factory blew up just when I looked at my base.
I panicked. I spammed 'MAIN BASE!", "SAVE MAIN" and "KILLSPAWN TO MAIN" (killspawn refers to the act of typing /kill in console to suicide and respawning somewhere else) but it was too late. So I told the team to forget it and drove out before they could wall me in or sticky stun me.
Luckily I escaped amidst the capslocked screams of my team telling me to get out of there. I went north and rebuilt a main base on the plateau. There, I watched as my team suppressed the enemy in their own base while a few other tanks attacked my old main, where the enemy had fortified their position with a new base.
When the heavies got out, we razed our old main and retook the dam, leaving the opposing team with nothing but their main base. At that point, we were running out of tickets, which are used whenever a player respawns. They told me to get Biological Weapons because it helps with the situation. The "situation" refers to the enemy having no ticket left and 11 tickets on our side.
For a team of 16, 11 tickets is NOT a lot. We had started with 200. =(
So I cancelled the current research and went for the Biology section. Biological weapons do average damage when they hit and additional damage over time. Infantries die from this unless they receive medical attention. Tanks too, but at a much slower rate. This means either they focus even more on repairs or they die more quickly. The logic is that without tickets, each engineer who dies cannot respawn, hence becoming even more effective overall.
The research was wasted though, because we destroyed their base before I could finish the research. The enemy CV saw its doom when we took down the VF and tried to run, as any comm would do. Running never turns the game around, but it is fun for the comm and for everyone else to watch. It is basically a live car chase with TANKS.
This comm wasn't a good driver and drove into a dead end. In seconds, my tanks surrounded it on all sides and gangraped it to death. I think there were at least 6 tanks in the writhing mass of steel, some of which were heavies.
We had 0 tickets left.
Just finished Ghostbusters. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it really is an interactive movie. There's a cutscene for every 10-15 mins of gameplay, so it's not easy to get bored. The graphics and voice acting are pretty good, except for the Ghostbusters' secretary in her final appearance, where she did not sound panicky or anything during the cutscene.
Near the end of the game, there are also several puzzles that are more like the BS you get in point-and-click adventure games. Normal puzzles have rules and clues. BS is just BS because all you're given is the objective. You'll have to find out on your own which parts of the environment you can interact with and which objects are useful at all.
There is also some eerie stuff at the end where I had to explore on my own without the rest of the Ghostbusters. It's like one of those Ghost Train rides in typical amusement parks, except you can move at your own pace. There are a few of such solo trips near the end of the game.
Because these trips are totally harmless, the replayability value of this game is very low. Part of the fear that the atmosphere creates is that I may die and no one would be there to rescue me. During the first run, I wouldn't know that I can't be killed during the solo journey, so it keeps me on my toes and make me go cautiously and slowly. If I play this again, I'll know that there is nothing to harm me so I'd just run through it. I'm not saying there are no ghosts/monsters though.
The game is rather short too, compared to most of today's RPGs.
There are also quite a number of references to previous Ghostbuster movies, so it is advisable to watch them beforehand or, at least, read Wikipedia's article on the Ghostbusters. In fact much of the game happens in the same places as those in the movies.
Music videos back then were so different.
Weird. 2 famous American celebrities died suddenly this week. First was MJ, now it's Billy Mays. Billy Mays was a TV salesman who was amazingly good at what he did. If you watch his informercials on Youtube you'll definitely get hooked and want to buy the products. Just like MJ, no one really knows why he died.
It's as if someone is using Death Note in the US.
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