http://senorhybrido.blogspot.com/2010/02/rant-493-human-larvae.html#comments
Anonymous said...
Amiable dispatch and this fill someone in on helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you seeking your information.
All I can understand is that that pointless rant helped someone in his/her college assignment. Was he/she writing on Gibberlings or getai?
It doesn't look like a spammer either because it did not advertise or even mentioned any links and was anonymous. Instead, it looked like someone translated what he/she wanted to say through Babelfish.
My response to this comment can only be...
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
Has it been so long already? Six hundred rants?
I know, I know. It's more than six hundred but wow, I think I've changed a lot since my first rant.
When I re-read the old rants I felt they were more varied in terms of style and word usage. I can explain that by the fact that even today, I'm still searching for my style.
Noticed I keep using the same conjunctions a lot nowadays and I almost always skip the "I" when it's at the beginning of a sentence, as in the case of this very line. I thought it was too troublesome since it's so obviously implied when you read the sentences as a whole.
My language was also more formal back in the beginning. Obviously I had something different in mind but now I really don't care. This is my memory of myself and what I see. In things like this, I don't trust my organic memory. Too tinted with feelings. Through this blog, my future self will be able to see clearly what I have been. Closer to the objective truth than by remembering.
This morning while waiting for my room to be cleaned, I watched this documentary about salt.
Prosciutto, which usually refers to the Parma ham I usually buy (but in Italian it just means "ham"), is really pronounced as "pr-uh-shoot-oh". I've always thought it was pronounced as "pro-skew-toh". I was never corrected at Cold Storage where I buy it because I call it "Parma ham", which is also correct.
Didn't know that salt can be mined with 2 methods (at least) - dry and wet.
In the wet method, they pump hot water into the salt deposit and then pipe it back up to be filtered and dried. Certain additives are also added to make sure it doesn't absorb moisture from the atmosphere and clump together.
The dry method is the same as coal mining - dynamite the deposit, dig out the pieces. Takes 20 tons of salt to make a US dollar (probably net profit, but it was not mentioned), according to the narrator, so salt is cheap.
Compare this with the Roman era, when salt was precious because there weren't these heavy machinery. Roman soldiers were actually paid in salt, which is saying something about its value. Remember that the idea of a government issuing a currency that does not have an intrinsic value was never used in ancient times until the Song dynasty in the 12th century.
I was finally getting annoyed by the slow horses in the Blood and Steel mod for Mount&Blade: Warband, so I got some other single-player mods to try.
Turns out most of them are not as good as I expected. In fact, B&S was pretty much perfect for me if not for the slow horses. I just like the large number of troops, for example.
So I'm getting bored. Making changes to the game for the mods is causing too many complexities for me. Download this, download that, change these lines in that file, add those files to this folder, etc etc. Interesting at first but after too many disappointments, I'm somewhat fed up.
Bought some chicken breasts last week but never got around to cooking them. Never got the motivation to go to Cold Storage to shop for sage and parma ham. They're in the freezer, so it's okay. Still, when will I ever use them?
I'm so unpredictable.
Here's an idea for couples - skip the diamond ring.
Moissanite looks just like a diamond; the difference is undetectable with the naked eye. In fact, moissanite is actually more brilliant. If, for whatever reason, you're stuck on the diamond ring idea, synthetic or "cultured" diamonds are the real deal. They're made in a machine that replicates the environmental forces that make diamonds. They're real diamonds, only with less flaws. A synthetic 2-carat pink diamond costs just a few thousand dollars, and a 1-carat moissanite ring is under $1000.
Hmm...
An assembly line to assemble iPhones, from the top management to the bottom workers, takes 50,000 people.
Now trying out 1257AD, a mod for Mount&Blade: Warband. Judging from the number of comments on its thread at Taleworlds.com, it's probably the most popular single-player mod available.
This mod is about Europe in the year 1257, when the Germans were still the Holy Roman Empire and Poland was a major European power. I'm still at the beginning phase trying to make a fortune through trade, so I haven't seen much fighting yet.
Still, it looks quite good, other than the lag when travelling in the world map. I'm fine with this because I'm doing other things while I go between cities.
1 mod to give all women huge boobies.1 mod to change most women's clothings into skimpy/low-cut/open clothes.
1 mod to give all women oiled skin.
3 mods, then, to give this 70-year-old grandma glossy H-cups that she shows off to everyone constantly.
Behold the horrors of modded Fallout 3!
(Disclaimer: Screenshot does not capture exactly what it looks like in the game. Bodies were supposed to be glossier. Also, look closely at your own risk.)
About the recent bus fare increase, is it really that bad? All the comments seem to say it's more expensive now, but it that true for most people?
Or is it just the resistance against change in people?
I don't know because I take buses only when I have class at SP, which is pretty rare.
There are two fare calculators for the curious. One is from the LTA and the other is from Transitlink.
Even if it's really a price hike for most people, at least it sounds more reasonable than the last hike in 2008.
Still, despite the normality of price hikes in Singapore I guess it's fine for people to be unhappy about it.
Speaking of money, I like this new definition of wealth they taught in the Managing Personal Finance course I'm attending. During the first class the lecturer explained the term "wealth" to be the amount of time you can remain in your present lifestyle without working.
If I'm not wrong about my spending habits, I must be filthy rich. Then again, I really should start recording every cent I'm spending to make sure I'm right.
So today I've spent...
$6 for brunch, plus max of $0.50 worth of tea leaves for the tea
$5 estimated for dinner, plus $0.60 Milo (2 sachets, Milo Fuze)
$5 worth of electricity, water and gas ($300 bill, assuming I contributed to half)
Whoa this is getting pretty complicated. I still haven't added the cost of bathroom necessities, school and clothes, which are more suitable for calculations of monthly expenses instead of daily.
Does the rest of BC do this too? I know I'll definitely make such a list when I start to have my own income. Doesn't hurt to plan a bit.
Optimism. Although I'm disappointed with the comments I still think there's hope for the YOG. No I'm not going to fork out money to support it.
I wonder why they're all whining so hard in every article about events in Singapore. Is Singapore really that bad? Are they all eating dirt and moonlighting by selling their backsides?
How long do you think the average Singaporean can maintain his/her present lifestyle without working?
If the government wants to squeeze every cent off you, there are simpler ways to do that, like raising income taxes.
Our income taxes are low compared to other developed countries like the US, in exchange for a lack of welfare. Our people are also not as overworked as HongKongers, the place we frequently compare ourselves with. Singapore also has an almost non-existent shadow economy, as implied by this article (and personal experience), unlike the Greek economy in which 25% of their GDP was derived from black markets before their recent crisis.
If you have enough money to last at least half a year without a job, assuming you'd spend sparingly in that situation and that you didn't acquire your savings illegally, I don't see how you even have the right to whine about how the Singapore government just wants your money.
Comparing what you have with what you could have if things had happened in another way is going to do nothing but make you hate everything. I know this is almost akin to what some people call "阿Q精神", but that's only if you truly believe that Singapore isn't progressing.
“阿Q精神”简单的说就是一种是自慰精神或者是自贱精神，学者概括为：就是阿Q的自欺欺人、自轻、自贱、自嘲、自解、自甘屈辱，而又妄自尊大、自我陶醉等 种种表现。简言之，是在失败与屈辱面前，不敢正视现实，而使用虚假的胜利来在精神上实行自我安慰，自我麻醉，或者即刻忘却。
I'll do my best to translate this with the help of 2 dictionaries (1 & 2):
“阿Q精神” (transliteration: Ah Q attitude/spirit) basically describes a kind of self-consoling or self-cheapening attitude, described academically as Ah Q's way of deceiving, belittling, cheapening, ridiculing, making excuses to and humiliating himself despite being a narcissist with an absurdly large ego. Simply put, it is the act of avoiding reality and imagining success in the face of failure and humiliation in order to console and numb oneself or to forget about it.
I think one example of this happened frequently during those days when I was still playing Natural Selection a lot. Whenever the alien team managed to wipe out the marine main base at the same time as the marines wiped all their hives (and the marines having at least a secondary base to operate from), the aliens would lose but they would console themselves by describing the destruction of the marine main as a "moral victory".
So yea, if you truly believe Singapore is going downhill, then my way of thinking is kind of similar because I compared different aspects of this country with those of different places.
I wonder if I can do half as well if I have to translate a similar passage from English to Chinese.
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