I was so tempted to bid for the New iPod Touch 32GB. With only an hour remaining, it was only at 4700 PTZ. At this rate it would probably wipe out my PTZ but I'd get it.
It was illogical. I didn't need it. I didn't actually want it so that I could use it. The only reason I wanted to bid for it was because it was valuable and has a relatively low PTZ price compared to other stuff of the same monetary value. A bargain, in short.
And this is one reason why I dislike TV, magazines and newspapers in general. They are all filled with ads designed to make me want things I don't actually want for any practical purposes. Even on Facebook I sometimes close the ads indiscriminately and pick "Offensive" as the reason.
Yes even this is illogical. Should I blame my own greed or should I blame them for exploiting it?
Logged in to Friendster the other day. Apparently after it got taken over by a Malaysian company it had a makeover and required users to verify their emails. No account deletion though.
As it turns out, Friendster is surprisingly alive. I'd have thought I'd get no updates at all but a few friends are still using it.
I've really been playing Warband with the Prophesy of Pendor mod, which adds more stuff to the game.
I keep getting pwned. Of course now that I've gained a few levels I'm starting to hold my own against random cultists and etc who try to attack me. Still, I believe it's because it's the updates that have nerfed crouched lance damage and this is making it harder to kill. I don't know. It could also have been that this mods adds some insane armour to certain units.
I'm saying that because I've been encountering units, eg knights, who do not die immediately when they get skewered by my lance. In the past, nothing survives it even when I hit their shields. Now I get knights that simply deflect my attacks with them.
Because of this and the FPS problem, I lost 80% of my army in the last war. Like in ME2, I need to change my style here.
Also reducing all graphics settings to the barest minimum. Let's see what this will do.
I feel like eating that baked chicken breasts with sage that I made some months back. I think I'll go to Cold Storage when I go pay my course fees. This time I'll try one batch with the sage replaced by a generous dose of the dried basil I can never seem to find a use for.
It was only after that day that I learnt that when using dried basil, I need to add a lot more compared to fresh leaves. Kind of counter-intuitive actually since my original logic is that when the herb dries, it shrinks and therefore becomes denser and creates a more intense aroma per unit volume.
Wonder what other herbs go well with chicken. Apparently thyme and rosemary are two possible options. Yes, I'll get both sage and thyme then.
Btw the other day I think I tasted sage in that sausage in my Big Breakfast.
I can finally identify one herb by taste! Yes!!
My sleep schedule has been royally screwed from the last two overnight stays on Christmas and New Year's Day. I'm currently extremely sleepy at 1-2pm and wake up at 9-10pm. If I could switch the PM to AM, I'd be a very healthy person.
In conclusion I now have jet lag of 12 hours and 2 weeks to fix this. I don't mind sleeping in the day, but I can't sleep during the hours I have classes in.
The Wikipedia article on the Korean War surprised me. Saw something about it yesterday and noticed I know almost nothing about it, so I read a bit of it.
On hindsight, it should have been obvious, but the idea that the current split of the Korean peninsula was caused by reasons dating before the downfall of the Qing Dynasty never crossed my mind.
The story, as summarised by me, is as follows:
As we all know, once upon a time China was huge and strong. Most of the smaller kingdoms and such around it were its vassal states at one time or another. In the case of Korea, it had been a vassal state for a century by the time Japan was forced to abandon its self-imposed isolation.
When Japan grew strong enough to look outward, it noticed that the Korean peninsula was in a rather strategic spot. More specifically, anyone who gets that bit of land will have a balcony with a great view of Japanese sceneries.
Hence, the First Sino-Japanese War. In 1895, Cixi lost the war and Korea was freed. Two years later, the Greater Korean Empire was formed. Cool name but doesn't mean a thing, just like a 30cm-long epeen.
For seventeen years it prospered and modernized, a young empire growing up in a time when all the big bad wolves were busy eyeing the bulging flesh of the dying morbidly obese China with a bad heart. Then in 1905, the Russian Empire lost the the Russo-Japanese War. As a result, the Russians pulled their burnt hands away from the region. Meanwhile, the US had quietly agreed not to interfere with Japanese actions in Korea.
Seeing that all the big boys in the neighbourhood were backing off and having no political clout of its own, the teenage Korean Empire signed a treaty in the same year to become a protectorate of the Japanese Empire. One might call it a pre-emptive surrender.
Whatever you call it, this arrangement lasted all the way till the end of WWII. During this period of time, the Koreans were basically the servants of the Japanese. The latter exploited their fertile lands and able men to create both a large army and workforce. In fact so many of the workers in the Japanese Empire were Koreans that they made up 25% of the victims of the two nukes.
In the aftermath, the Allies decided to do the same thing to Japanese lands as they did to German lands - they split everything up like pizza and everyone gets a slice.
Hence the line right in the middle of the Korean peninsula, with the Russians getting the north and the Americans taking the south. In time, each of the countries' influences turned the two halves into very different political environments. While the northern half began to turn to Communism, the south converted to Democracy. Don't forget, this was during the Cold War, hence all this fuss about these two political ideas.
Meanwhile some Korean politicians were in China forming their own government-in-exile but nobody gave a fuck.
Eventually Korea (they weren't split up that badly then) was told to have some elections so that they could have a leader and be an independant nation again. However, the political ideologies of the two sides were so different by then that they decided to behave like Africans (and currently, Iraqis and Afghans) instead.
In the end, both sides got so pissed by all the killing that in 1948, they both spontaneously set up their own official governments of the whole Korea. In the north, we had Kim Il Sung, father of the current Kim Jung Il, while in the south we had the relatively unknown Syngman Rhee. Is that supposed to be "Simon"? Oh never mind. His name was Yi Seungman.
Then in 1948, the Americans left the South for various reasons including their lack of popularity. Pretty similar to why they left Iraq some years ago.
Anyway the moment they did, the North decided to strike. With the USSR and PRC on its side, shit, even I would have done the same thing in that situation. I mean, the South was poor and wasn't supported by anyone while two big shots, who were also the North's nextdoor neighbours, were backing it. Kim Il Sung would have to be incredibly stupid not to!
After that things got really messy, so let's skip that. After all, if you wanted actual descriptions of the events you wouldn't be reading this.
So they kept fighting blah blah blah...
And they lived happily ever after. Other than all the soldiers along the border, the artilleries aimed at Seoul and the occasional sabre-rattling of course.
I wish historians would write history like this. It would have been more fun to study the subject.
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