The above is Goodsprings, which is Good Springs in real life and is the starting point of the game.
Above is the real Primm, complete with the Buffalo Bill casino and its roller coaster. In the game the Casino is called Bison Steve's instead, probably due to copyright. The other casino in the real Primm is Whiskey Pete's, which is named after a bootlegger of the same name. In the game that place changed into the Vicky and Vance Casino, also named after a criminal couple of those names.Not sure about Novac though.
I'm aware that I should have known these, but I thought it was just the Strip and Hoover Dam that was copied from real life. It wouldn't be incredibly strange if the towns shifted and changed so much they became unrecognisable after 200 years. The nuclear war would have caused all sorts of large scale economic and social changes, hence small towns would have grown and died in different places as time passed. That's how ghost towns are created! Not because of nuclear wars, just economic and social changes.
So after a while of not looking at my blog's Stats, today I decided to take a peek at the numbers, expecting traffic to die a little due to my recent absence.
Well, it hadn't.
Something else did catch my attention though.
Something that actually worries me.
Someone was searching for Rant 588 specifically multiple times in the last few days. How did I know that? I used 2 Ouija boards, 4 decks of Tarot cards and 8 Moon Blocks. Results should be reliable, but it was hard work.
Those Ouija boards kept dancing under the planchette I was holding and the crappy Customer Support on the phone didn't help either. The made-in-China Moon Blocks weren't as effective as I was led to believe - they kept landing on their edges.
Shit sucks, seriously. Next time I should just hire a bomoh. Btw do they charge hourly rates or something?
Anyway I had discreetly un-published it some time before I went MIA when I noticed that traffic to that particular rant had been rising recently for unknown reason. That post was 98% about my NS days and should have been pretty boring. Plus I'm very sure I was told that I could say anything I want after 3 years.
So why the sudden rise in traffic in a post that's already 2 months old?
Certain logical guesses made me remove that post indefinitely. No harm not posting it anyway.
But now I'm getting more searches for that specific rant than most of the other rants. And they likely aren't referrals from other sites.
Now that is a real reason to feel suspicious about. Why would anyone need to return to it repeatedly? Yet there's absolutely no frivolous reason I can think of for spreading it.
Maybe I should remove it from this blog altogether and store it elsewhere.
Or am I just being paranoid? It's possible someone merely found what I talked about familiar.
No wonder I've always felt that Singaporean actors always sound like they're reading!
原來新加岥的口語和書面語很相似﹐所以話說起來和讀劇本的分別不大。比如說 "骯臟" 是口語﹐但我們講華語時也會說到這個詞。其實口語只用"臟"就夠了﹐例如"這東西很臟。"
Or maybe they just suck. I don't know.
Linked page also discusses many other differences between Singaporean Mandarin and Chinese Mandarin. Bet most Singaporeans who speak Chinese all the time don't even know some of the ways they phrase their words originated from the Yuan and Song dynasties and are no longer in use today in the PRC.
Also﹐
华语的基数词“万”，英文里用''ten thousand''。新加坡人受英语的影响，也将“万”说成“十千”。但是，这么用是近期的事，我这一代华校出身的新加坡人，没有人是这么用的。这也是学习不全面所造成的结果。
XD
But my Chinese still sucks. If you think I'm trying to insult anyone, I'm not. I'm just stating what I found as I did my research for assignments. Apparently the assignments don't just cover what's in the textbooks. For example, Qn1b of the assignment I'm doing is asking for 10 examples of Chinese phrases that differ in meaning when used in Singapore and China. This is why I found and read through the linked page above.
I had no idea there were so many differences. How many years did China isolate itself? 50 years? 30? It's amazing how the Chinese language changed in just a few decades in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong as compared to China.
Shit, I'm not even that good at Singaporean Chinese, let alone PRC Chinese. Those 10 marks really aren't easy to get. Fortunately I'm not alone in this opinion. My class was pretty vocal about the difficulty of this question last week.
My instructor (that's the term they used in the evaluation forms) kept telling us that there are definitely more than enough examples even though he had explicitly told us not to use the examples he had raised in class, which were quite a lot, like "書記" which means "clerk" in Singapore and is a high rank in China. It's not used to refer lowly clerks there. That would be "秘書" or something.
And after reading the stuff I found, here's my list of 10 words and phrases that are 同名異實.
Should be correct. If there are any mistakes, I'll mention it when the instructor returns it to me provided I remember to do it then.
There are also many others that I found that I couldn't use because he had already mentioned it in class.
After reading some of my older posts, I've noticed a difference between them and the more recent posts - I used to think. Now I just observe.
RT first session on Sat. Ugh. In Bedok some more. UGH! Booked RT too late, in the end Maju was full. Left only 1 choice - Bedok. Fuck!
Fortunately I can change the venue from the second session onwards. If go Bedok for entire 2 months I'll be really pissed. Next month exam some more.
Not going to defer because I think the exercise may help me revise. I don't really know, so it's just an experiment. It's only 2 sessions per week and I can shift the days as I wish. Only 4 papers, so probably won't get too many clashes anyway.
Raise the retirement age in Singapore to 68? I know medical technological advancements are allowing people to live longer, but their brains aren't staying young. Not being offensive or anything, just stating the truth. They could raise it to 75 for all I care, but until they can actually prevent natural neural degeneration I'm not sure if raising the retirement age is going to help.
Been making croutons. Very easy to make and good for soups. Also can be eaten as snacks or used in salads like Caesar salad.
For my first batch I just cut 4 slices of bread into 16 cubes each. Didn't matter to me if they were flattened in the process. Then I poured them into a bowl and cut out some frozen butter onto them. When the butter softened I tossed them to mix them while warming up the oven.
I turned my oven to 110-20 degrees Celsius so that it's easier to handle. Didn't want to burn anything when I wasn't watching. Baked them for a while until they were golden brown, can't remember how long, maybe 2-4 mins.
Poured them back into the bowl and added pepper and salt. Tossed them again and they were done.
That wasn't so good. I didn't have very fine salt at home so there were bits of coarse salt stuck to some of the croutons.
Next batch was much better.
I basically did the same thing except instead of salt and pepper I sprinkled a bit from this bottle of Italian Seasoning I bought when I tried to make Bolognese sauce from scratch. Also added two packets of parmesan cheese from the pizza orders I had in the past. Haven't been adding them onto my pizzas, don't see the need for that much cheese.
Might have been too much cheese because there was a lot of it at the bottom of the bowl at the end.
These cheese croutons tasted even better when I re-toasted them the next day. Somehow the seasoning goes really well with the cheese.
Anyway I was really looking for oregano but I didn't have it. The closest thing to it was the Italian Seasoning which was a mixture of a lot of herbs including that.
This is a good way to use bread that's going to expire soon. That's the reason why I started making croutons in the first place. Even if I made mistakes it didn't matter as much. Explains why I didn't state the amounts I used. I just guessed everything and it turned out well.
Just proves that cooking is an art. Precise amounts aren't always necessary.
Those croutons I made are really just bite-sized toasts with herbs and cheese. Nothing special but theoretically it can lengthen the shelf-life of the bread plus give me a cheap snack out of stuff that are going to be thrown away anyway.
Those double-toasted croutons are good.
I agree that Singaporeans need to strive to be exceptional. There really aren't many Singaporeans who are seriously successful. Today's exceptional Singaporeans are rare. I really can't think of many right now. Sim Wong Hoo? Chee Soon Juan? Annabel Chong?
The Al-Qaida only has 500-1000 members, yet they can produce 1 guy that the entire developed world can recognize - Osama bin Laden. If Singapore can do it at their rate of 1 famous person out of every thousand, we'd have 5000 Annabel Chongs!
Five thousand!
Now think of what 5000 Annabel Chongs can do.
5000 X 70 men = 350,000 men!
A gigantic orgy involving 355,000 people for over 10 hours would break quite a number of records!
If you can't imagine how many people that is, think of the Singapore National Stadium.
It has a capacity of 55,000 people.
Don't forget Annabel Chong did a total of 251 sexual acts on the 70 men.
5000 X 251 = 1,255,000
Now how many Terabytes of space would a video of that fill?
Yes, Singaporeans should strive to be more than just above average. DO IT!
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