Time to Lose

In a Gamespot interview, Tomonobu Itagaki (the head ninja of Team Ninja) had some insightful words for the rest of the world.

TI: Well, let me tell you the misunderstanding of most other makers of fighting games. The most important thing for a fighting game is that it has to be fun, even when you lose. In other words, you know, if you win or lose, it needs to be fun.

So many have forgotten that losing can be fun too.

People have built their identities around their victories and their trophies. They speak as if a victory is something they can own. Perhaps in a zero sum game, trophies will matter. But life and meaning structures have never been a zero sum game.

Not many can understand that, in the face of worthy opponents, winning and losing is secondary. It is especially difficult for those not involved in competitive sports to understand that the joy actually lies in the struggle and the journey. Often, the meaning is in meeting worthy opponents and in overcoming or succumbing to them.

When two teams fighting for the last decisive point, tired to the bone, each unwilling to concede and the game dragged on for what seemed like an eternity.... at this point, no one can discount each other's pain, grit or skills, and no one can deny the kind of respect they hold within, no matter how much they would hate to lose.

So many of my worthy opponents are now my friends, and as opponents they remain. But allies, they are, to my greatest opponent: myself.

 
Cats and Equanimity

I still remember a scene from the movie Krull (now everyone knows how ancient I am) where the cyclops despite knowing his ultimate fate pursued it to the very end, which is to be crushed between two rock walls...

I wonder how that feels like... besides being painful.

A few cat lover friends told me that cats, even domestic ones, do not die in the house. Somewhat slightly more sensitive to their own mortality than human beings, as if in possession of the knowledge of their impending doom, they will usually disappear from the house and never return.

I guess cats, like old soldiers, do not die, they fade away...

I believe Buddha said that since death is certain and our time of death is unknown, there is no need to fear it, or to worry unnecessarily about it, or to make elaborate preparations for it.

But for a moment, let us assume that cats are slightly different. Being blessed or being cursed to be aware of the train they have to catch out of the material plane, or to be aware of an oncoming one that will take them from the material plane, they left the house in search of their demise, to meet their end and to fulfill their destiny.

I wonder how it feels like to leave a house, which is never theirs, or to abandon four walls that seek to suffocate the freigeist; or to desert a castle that is a poor substitute for safety of any sorts; or to escape a containment that provides security for one that does not need it; or to leave a spatial point of transit that one does not call home; even if in the leaving, one heads towards the end of the journey.... the end of the known.

Perhaps in leaving the house, they are once returning to their playgrounds since young, returning to the hunting grounds of their ancestors, it will mean having one's barefeet once again on the solid ground... it will perhaps be somewhat similar to the smell of the wet earth after rain... familiar yet, refreshing.

Perhaps to them, that would be home.

Perhaps for predators, anywhere with a sky above the head is home.

Perhaps for prey, anywhere with four walls is home.

I cannot answer for the world, but if I am to die, it will be at place where infinity lies above and below me...

... to remind me how little it all means, whatever it is.

 
Chamomile Tea

It is 100% caffeine free, the closest thing I can get to tea. And it is possibly equally good. I just bought a pack, thinking that the supposed calming effects would be good for me. I have been rather hostile lately.

I figure that before I unleash my sarcasm on the wrong person, I should do something about it.

Ingredients: Chamomile
Copyright and made exclusively by Celestial Seasonings
The Hain Celestial Group, Inc.
4600 Sleepytime Drive
Boulder, CO 80301-3292
USA

Sleepytime Drive?

It certainly sounds like a place I want to live in.

 
3 Sets to Exhaustion

I was complaining to M the other day that I am somewhat used to my back exercises and I no longer feel the soreness that accompanies my training sessions. He told me it was time I switch my exercises as I am no longer a beginner per se.

He had repeatedly told me that chin-ups are very important. And that people who reached a certain level of training, usually do chin-ups and dips before they start their regular gym sessions. He advocates 3 sets of chin-ups and dips, to exhaustion...

...as warm up.

He in fact told me that it would be "very good" if I have the discipline to do 3 sets of dips and chin-ups to exhaustion every morning. In fact, he told me that I should do chin-ups and as many push-ups, be it hundreds or thousands every morning.

Once in a while, I feel faint just talking to these people.

In any case, I was feeling really good on Saturday and so I did 3 sets of dips and chin-ups as warm-up. And the conclusion was as expected....

I was exhausted before I started my training.

I proceeded to do my usual back exercises, which included lateral pull, cable row and other machines which I have no name for. The result was was expected... pain.

For the next few days, I could be spotted leaving the men's room with a look of relief, holding a tube of muscle cream (which incidentally looks a little like hand cream)...

 
Humbled

I was reading on the Chaos Theory and realized that chaos does not arise from simply the infinite forces at work, it does not arise because we are unable to take into consideration all factors in play, it does not exist in the absence of our knowledge it does not arise at all, because it is inherent in the natural world.

Yes, it is inherent in our daily lives.

According to what I am reading, chaos will manifest itself even if there are only three objects orbiting one another in isolation. In other words, we are unable to predict the location of these objects in the future even if there are no other forces at work aside from the gravitational forces of these objects alone.

We are not even taking into consideration quantum uncertainty or the van der waals forces or the relativistic effect of gravity or even the expansion of the universe yet. This is because chaos does not simply arise in real life, it is also a mathematical entity.

It is indeed a humbling experience. Professing to be a child of the Enlightenment, I never expect nature to draw a line to where our understanding can go. If we cannot even predict with precision the future movements of three objects, I suddenly have doubts as to where we can go.

I am humbled, but hopefully not defeated....

 
A Reminder

A couple of weeks ago, an old friend reappeared on my contact list.

I am not going to pretend that I am not the least excited about this, because I am, for it seemed like years (and I think it has really been years) since we last chatted.

Even in this age of technology and interconnectedness, she is very much like a rare random encounter.

She has been studying in Melbourne since forever and only drops by Singapore with her family once in a long while. She is another one of those friends whom I have never met and it is quite possible that I never will; the kind of friends whom I already have quite a few.

And after years of silence, when I thought I would never get to chat with her again, she reappeared, on ICQ, the tool which we started out on, the only tool I have known her to be on, the tool which many forsaken for the spanking new MSN.

We did a little catching up throughout the next couple of days which she was online, after which she disappeared again. According to current trends, it will probably be months, if not years, till I will get to talk to her again. These are people whom you cannot forget, but yet cannot really contact. There is always this chance, and every meeting is by chance, which you cannot discount, that they will once again reappear in your life and that you will reappear in theirs. It is always this idea of "perhaps", that you will one day get to interact in cyberspace, a non-dimensional space that holds mutual memories.

It is because of this "perhaps" that they occupy a place in your future.

Hard as I tried but her first nicknames on MIRC eluded me and there is no chance that any remnants of her details would have remained on my computer, given that it has at least crashed 10 times in the past years.

So I checked up my Yahoo! addressbook, and there it was.

Nickname: AngelRain
Last Edited: 03 November 1998

 

In the absence of other reasonable alternatives, I caught Saving Face last week. It starred Joan Chen, among others, and therefore by Singapore standards, it is under the restricted, artistic category.

The plot is not something you have not heard of. There have been too many movies made about culture shocks and cultural differences. This one is no different, depicting the trials of a lesbian couple in traditional chinese families in America.

It has the ingredients of most of Mediacorp family drama; the authoritative, conservative, paternalistic figure, the young, lovestruck highflyers who are socially deviant, the maternal figure torn between the love of the child and her own standards of acceptability.

It is, once against, love against all sods; against all the dinosaurs that survived the meteor and not knowing that the world now belongs to the mammals, the warm blooded and the young. One of the protagonists is a young, female, geeky, doctor who came from a strict, conservative chinese family; not the usual computer nerd kind of geeky, but the kind of pleasant, nubile, bright-eyed, innocent kind of geeky that you see in Dirty Dancing, the kind that is begging for someone to deflower her by the fifth minute into the show.

I think Wilde once said that "Innocence is the best aphrodisac."

The other is an uber attractive ballet dancer who later got a place in a prestigious school of ballet in France, whose father happens to be the director of surgery and the direct reporting head of the first protagonist.

Talk about cliches....

Talk about stereotypes....

They have more cliches and stereotypes than Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In the most expected manner, the liberal artist (once again, a dancer) brought out the courage out of her and the lesbian tendencies out of the closet. They proceeded to have a really sweet and romantic relationship peppered with thoughtful gestures that only teenagers freshly in love will do.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

Of course, there is a scene where one stood the other up due to an important event, work related, important event.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

If there is still anyone reading this post, I thank you for your patience. In short, it is just a horribly boring movie that is simply beyond redemption; a movie that should not have been made.

And I paid for it.

I wish they had more sex scenes.

While watching the movie, lesbian acts seemed almost natural. It is only in retrospect that I realized the problem with it. Face it, which male would have a problem watching two lithe, young bodies having lesbian sex?

But imagine two bodies sporting stretch marks, excess pounds, cellulite and freckles doing the same and 50% you might lose your appetite. Now imagine (my mind came short of other examples) Lydia Sum and the old Oprah Winfrey (the version 1.1, the original, upsized one) going at it like the cast of Hamtaro in heat.

90% of you would have lost your appetite.

Now, imagine them with facial hair and hermaphro...

Nevermind, you get my point.

The point is that the media has messed up our ideas of what is beautiful and what is not. It is as if everything should be poster perfect and aesthetically pleasing people gives more meaning to a meaningful act.

I believe Wilde did say that "life imitates art".

And reality becomes somewhat of a disappointment.

I know, because I am still coming to terms that not all girls look like those in Baywatch. It is hard living life looking at 99.9% of the population only to see their flaws and not their strengths. But it is the picture that media paints, the scene of normality that excludes all the common people, one that has every strand of hair in place, one that the sun is always in her hair, one that he does not have garlic breath when he mutters, "I love you." in your ear, one that he never has erectile dysfunction or performance anxiety when you first have sex....

But shit happens.

We cannot live in Hegelian hegemony that does not allow for flawed beings. Perhaps it is time we go back to our existentialist roots and to better understand ourselves, accept our flaws and learn to love ourselves more.

What really bothers me is that chinese film makers continue propagate the stereotypes of chineses, packaging them with attractive images, using the old formula for the sake of profits. It is all about chinese film makers using chineses to make a film for the non-chinese market, just as in The House of Flying Daggers.

I actually prefer the Warriors of Zu and the other crappy Hong Kong swordfighting movie, both of which I caught with ^dante... both of which he actually made extensive complaints about. But at least they had a more genuine feel than with The House of Flying Daggers.

Somehow The House of the Flying Daggers was a big budget production that failed terribly to capture the essence of the chinese swordfighting genre. It wanted to add a dash of aesthetics, a touch of sophistication and yet retain the ambience. Sadly, it turned out to be extravagant and artificial. There are many aspects of art, there are many kinds of art, but it is a fine line between fusing and bastardizing them. The movie experience was one that was inauthentic, leaving the asian audience as empty as when they walked into the theatre, and one cannot help but feel betrayed.

And I paid to watch that one too.

 
Where One Plus One Does Not Equal Two

I love the rain.

I love Sunday mornings.

rain + Sunday morning = me as an absolute monster.

Basketball usually starts at about nine. Being the main point of contact, I usually wake before half past eight to check on the weather. If there is a rain that lasts past a quarter to nine, I will usually have to tell the guys (about 6 - 8 of them) that the game is cancelled.

It all sounds pretty simple and straightforward, right?

It is not.

To decide whether to cancel a game, I need to understand where each is coming from, understand their usual arrival times and then plan who to call or consult first. Some lived far to the east or north and they might have set off earlier. Others, given their usual lack of punctuality, might not be awake yet.

Imagine me sending out the first SMS to cancel the game at a quarter to nine, to find out that most have already left their house, and to have the rain stopping five minutes after.

Now, imagine me flipping the bird at the heavens.

What should I do? Do I cancel the game or not?

Or imagine, I message one of my players at half past eight, to ask him about the rain. And he replied telling that the cloud cover in the north is darker than that in the south and the winds are blowing in the north easternly direction, and that the rain should be over soon. All these time I cannot see shit because I live on the second floor of a building surrounded by other buildings.

I have limited time to make the call; the faster I decide, the lesser the chance that the players have left their house.

Or imagine one in Thomson telling you that the rain has stopped, another in Sin Ming telling me that there is still a slight drizzle, and one living nearest to the court is still asleep. Or imagine me trying to determine what cloud it is that is bringing the rain and the kind of rain, and through all that, predict the likely duration of it.

Imagine doing all the above within 20 minutes of you waking and your mobile phone going kookie on you.

I usually have gym on Friday and Saturday nights and the last thing I want to do is to drag myself out of the bed on a Sunday morning to talk about the weather. No one deserves to wake up early on a Sunday morning aching all over, to be forced to make intelligent and informed decisions and be ethically responsible for so many others.

Even if the game is to go on, I have to coordinate disaster relief efforts. We need to get people to bring newspapers to dry the courts, and ensure that there is enough newspapers at that. There was a time, we actually bought a mop for the purpose and broke it on the same day.

After drying the court, I will be praying that the rain does not return.

I fell asleep at a friend's after gym last night and was rushing back home this morning in order to change and go for ball when it started raining. To make things worse, my mobile phone was flat and I was isolated from the rest of the world. The only other sentient creature was the cab driver.

He was hardly encouraging, predicting that the rain will last till late afternoon.

The game was later cancelled but the rain stopped and it got so hot you could fry an egg on the road at ten.

What was worse was that being totally insensitive to the frustration and the anger seething from his backseat, he gave me my change of two dollars ten cents in a two dollar note and two five cents. At that point of time, I felt like bashing his face in, in the manner of Irreversible with my umbrella.

I should really take things easy. All these frustration accumulated during the lunar seventh month and the monsoon season will kill me, or kill someone one day. It is time I look for another hobby which will be less of a test on my patience.

Maybe I will go organize line dances.