Saturday, June 26, 2004 @ 15:40
number twenty-seven
hello. just finished the science e-learning assignment. yes. there was one. and yes, there's a lot to be done. at least seven pages of worksheets and quite a lot of powerpoint slides to download. it was by chance that i stumbled across the assignment thanks to somebody's question on it. whether was there any science homework. well, there was. if you are reading this and you have not done the assignment, please kindly go to the e-learning website and complete the assignment instead of incurring your teacher's wrath on the very first day of school. thank you. haha. i've had a lot of feedback on my new blog layout. thank you very much and i must agree with some of you that it is "filled with agony and melancholy" and "it is very very sadistic". thank you for your kind feedback. well, what can i say. hmm, the layout basically reflects how i felt when i made the layout. yes i was feeling very sadistic at that moment and although i am not now, i have no wish to change the layout anytime soon. but the picture will occasionally be changed and i must warn you that the following few pictures might not be very pleasant to those with with a weak stomach. let's change the topic shall we? i do not think that you all would like to hear me describe the next few pictures that i will put up. you all want to be surprised, don't you? i'll talk about what i am doing now. i'm tyoing as you all can read when i post this up. alizee is blasting through the speakers and i must say that the bad static interference do not spoil the music at all. french songs are nice, although i do not know what in the world they are talking about. but i would dearly like to learn this elegant language. recommend a teacher if you don't mind ,dear readers. thank you. let's talk about the weather. it's chilly. the way i like it. cold, frosty, chilly, ice-cold, any type of cold weather is fine with me. i don't like rain unless i'm in a shelter. but the period just before the rain falls in my favourite. you can smell the rain in the air, the clouds overhead leering at you, and you, back down, not knowing when the first drop of water will fall, the anticipation and the fear, mixed into one. wonderful isn't it, the feeling? you never know what will happen to you the next moment. let's think shall we? who knows, after you off this computer, the monitor might explode? as you step out of your room, what would happen to you? we live in a world where we don't know what might happen to us the next moment, and this is what makes living scary and enjoyable at the same time. i'll go now. enjoy your time.
so come on, tell me.
Wednesday, June 23, 2004 @ 12:49
number twenty-six
good afternoon. i have a new blog layout as you all can see. the picture is beautiful. it shows a guy in pain. overall, i feel that the layout is fine, albeit the small font. bye, for now.
so come on, tell me.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004 @ 13:42
number twenty-five
yo. back to blog again. so cool. i went to library@orchad yesterday. this library is on my list of "must-go" libraries. although i did not find what i was looking for, i still did. let me explain. i was looking for the three book by thomas harris and anne rice's latest book, blood canticle. i found the books by harris but not the one by anne rice. apparently the national library board's website is not updated. i checked up on the book and it was still available on the day i went to the library. tsk tsk. by the way, was my last entry THAT difficult to understand? it was nothing but an extract from a storybook. don't look difficult to me at all. nothing to do now. i have completed all the homework that are realistic and reasonable. in other words, i have not done my chinese book report. i plan to copy it. yes, copy. i don't think that it's wrong because what you have to learn is in the book itself and if you really know what the book is about, there is no need for a book report. furthermore, the books that we were made to read was not a story, but stories. so how the heck are we supposed to write a two-and-a-half page book report on a story that is only about 4 to 5 pages long? perhaps some might say that it's not that difficult, but hey, look at your standard of chinese and those of others. this goes out to chen zehou in particuliar. i mean so what if he is a chinese teacher and his chinese rocks? he is a TEACHER, he is supposed to make learning creative and fun. i don't think how he is teaching is fun or creative. here we are, frantically trying our darndest to pull up our chinsese and there he is nagging and setting unreasonable standards. why the hell can't he(they) see that not all students sre made to be the best or to meet their expectations(often unreasonable) in whatever subject they teach? it's quite pissing really. we are trying our best and they are trying to break us.
so come on, tell me.
Sunday, June 20, 2004 @ 15:23
number twenty-four
i don't feel like posting anything for the time being. meanwhile, i have a sample chapter from blackwood farm here. for those that do not know, it's written by anne rice. here's the chapter. it's quite long so if you have the patience, i advise you to read on, for it is a very nice story. anyone who wants to read the rest of the book can ask for it from me.
"Lestat,
If you find this letter in your house in the Rue Royale, and I do sincerely think you will find it—you’ll know at once that I’ve broken your rules.
I know that New Orleans is off limits to Blood Hunters, and that any found there will be destroyed by you. And unlike many a rogue invader whom you have already dispatched, I understand your reasons. You don’t want us to be seen by members of the Talamasca. You don’t want a war with the venerable Order of Psychic Detectives, both for their sake and ours.
But please, I beg you, before you come in search of me, read what I have to say.
My name is Quinn. I’m twenty-two years old, and have been a Blood Hunter, as my Maker called it, for slightly less than a year. I’m an orphan now, as I see it, and it is to you that I turn for help.
But before I make my case, please understand that I know the Talamasca, that I knew them before the Dark Blood was ever given to me, and I know of their inherent goodness and their legendary neutrality as regards things supernatural, and I will have taken great pains to elude them in placing this letter in your flat.
That you keep a telepathic watch over New Orleans is plain to me. That you’ll find the letter I have no doubt.
If you do come to bring a swift justice to me for my disobedience, assure me please that you will do your utmost to destroy a spirit which has been my companion since I was a child. This creature, a duplicate of me who has grown with me since before I can remember, now poses a danger to humans as well as to myself.
Let me explain.
As a little boy I named this spirit Goblin, and that was well before anyone had told me nursery rhymes or fairy tales in which such a word might appear. Whether the name came from the spirit himself I don’t know. However, at the mere mention of the name, I could always call him to me. Many a time he came of his own accord and wouldn’t be banished. At others, he was the only friend I had. Over the years, he has been my constant familiar, maturing as I matured and becoming ever more skilled at making known to me his wishes. You could say I strengthened and shaped Goblin, unwittingly creating the monster that he is now.
The truth is, I can’t imagine existence without Goblin. But I have to imagine it. I have to put an end to Goblin before he metamorphoses into something utterly beyond my control.
Why do I call him a monster—this creature who was once my only playmate? The answer is simple. In the months since my being made a Blood Hunter—and understand, I had no choice whatsoever in the matter—Goblin has acquired his own taste for blood. After every feeding, I am embraced by him, and blood is drawn from me into him by a thousand infinitesimal wounds, strengthening the image of him, and lending to his presence a soft fragrance which Goblin never had before. With each passing month, Goblin becomes stronger, and his assaults on me more prolonged.
I can no longer fight him off.
It won’t surprise you, I don’t think, that these assaults are vaguely pleasurable, not as pleasurable to me as feeding on a human victim, but they involve a vague orgasmic shimmer that I can’t deny.
But it is not my vulnerability to Goblin that worries me now. It is the question of what Goblin may become.
Now, I have read your Vampire Chronicles through and through. They were bequeathed to me by my Maker, an ancient Blood Hunter who gave me, according to his own version of things, an enormous amount of strength as well.
In your stories you talk of the origins of the vampires, quoting an ancient Egyptian Elder Blood Drinker who told the tale to the wise one, Marius, who centuries ago passed it on to you.
Whether you and Marius made up some of what was written in your books I don’t know. You and your comrades, the Coven of the Articulate, as you are now called, may well have a penchant for telling lies.
But I don’t think so. I’m living proof that Blood Drinkers exist—whether they are called Blood Drinkers, vampires, Children of the Night or Children of the Millennia—and the manner in which I was made conforms to what you describe.
Indeed, though my Maker called us Blood Hunters rather than vampires, he used words which have appeared in your tales. The Cloud Gift he gave to me so that I can travel effortlessly by air; and also the Mind Gift to seek out telepathically the sins of my victims; as well as the Fire Gift to ignite the fire in the iron stove here that keeps me warm.
So I believe your stories. I believe in you.
I believe you when you say that Akasha, the first of the vampires, was created when an evil spirit invaded every fiber of her being, a spirit which had, before attacking her, acquired a taste for human blood.
I believe you when you say that this spirit, named Amel by the two witches who could see him and hear him—Maharet and Mekare—exists now in all of us, his mysterious body, if we may call it that, having grown like a rampant vine to blossom in every Blood Hunter who is made by another, right on up to the present time.
I know as well from your stories that when the witches Mekare and Maharet were made Blood Hunters, they lost the ability to see and talk to spirits. And indeed my Maker told me that I would lose mine.
But I assure you, I have not lost my powers as a seer of spirits. I am still their magnet. And it is perhaps this ability in me, this receptiveness, and my early refusal to spurn Goblin, that have given him the strength to be plaguing me for vampiric blood now.
Lestat, if this creature grows ever more strong, and it seems there is nothing I can do to stop him, is it possible that he can enter a human being, as Amel did in ancient times? Is it possible that yet another species of the vampiric root may be created, and from that root yet another vine?
I cannot imagine your being indifferent to this question, or to the possibility that Goblin will become a killer of humans, though he is far from that strength right now.
I think you will understand when I say that I’m frightened for those whom I love and cherish—my mortal family—as well as for any stranger whom Goblin might eventually attack.
It’s hard to write these words. For all my life I have loved Goblin and scorned anyone who denigrated him as an “imaginary playmate” or a “foolish obsession.” But he and I, for so long mysterious bedfellows, are now enemies, and I dread his attacks because I feel his increasing strength.
Goblin withdraws from me utterly when I am not hunting, only to reappear when the fresh blood is in my veins. We have no spiritual intercourse now, Goblin and I. He seems afire with jealousy that I’ve become a Blood Hunter. It’s as though his childish mind has been wiped clean of all it once learned.
It is an agony for me, all of this.
But let me repeat: it is not on my account that I write to you. It is in fear of what Goblin may become.
Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broken yours.
I want you who were kidnapped and made a vampire against your will to look kindly on me because the same thing happened to me.
I want you to forgive my trespass into your old flat in the Rue Royale, where I hope to hide this letter. I want you to know as well that I haven’t hunted in New Orleans and never will.
And speaking of hunting, I too have been taught to hunt the Evil Doer, and though my record isn’t perfect, I’m learning with each feast. I’ve also mastered the Little Drink, as you so elegantly call it, and I’m a visitor to noisy mortal parties who is never noticed as he feeds from one after another in quick and deft moves.
But in the main, my existence is lonely and bitter. If it weren’t for my mortal family, it would be unendurable. As for my Maker, I shun him and his cohorts, and with reason.
That’s a story I’d like to tell you. In fact, there are many stories I want to tell you. I pray that my stories might keep you from destroying me. You know, we could play a game. We meet and I start talking, and slap damn, you kill me when I take a verbal turn you don’t like.
But seriously, Goblin is my concern.
Let me add before I close that during this last year of being a fledgling Blood Hunter, of reading your Chronicles and trying to learn from them, I have often been tempted to go to the Talamasca Motherhouse at Oak Haven, outside of New Orleans. I have often been tempted to ask the Talamasca for counsel and help.
When I was a boy—and I’m hardly more than that now—there was a member of the Talamasca who was able to see Goblin as clearly as I could—a gentle, nonjudgmental Englishman named Stirling Oliver, who advised me about my powers and how they could become too strong for me to control. I grew to love Stirling within a very short time.
I also fell deeply in love with a young girl who was in the company of Stirling when I met him, a red-haired beauty with considerable paranormal power who could also see Goblin—one to whom the Talamasca had opened its generous heart.
That young girl is beyond my reach now. Her name is May-fair, a name that is not unfamiliar to you, though this young girl probably knows nothing of your friend and companion Merrick Mayfair, even to this day.
But she is most certainly from the same family of powerful psychics—they seem to delight in calling themselves witches—and I have sworn never to see her again. With her considerable powers she would realize at once that something catastrophic has happened to me. And I cannot let my evil touch her in any way.
When I read your Chronicles, I was mildly astonished to discover that the Talamasca had turned against the Blood Hunters. My Maker had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I read it in your books.
It’s still hard for me to imagine that these gentle people have broken one thousand years of neutrality in a warning against all of our kind. They seemed so proud of their benevolent history, so psychologically dependent upon a secular and kindly definition of themselves.
Obviously, I can’t go to the Talamasca now. They might become my sworn enemies if I do that. They are my sworn enemies! And on account of my past contact, they know exactly where I live. But more significantly, I can’t seek their help because you don’t want it.
You and the other members of the Coven of the Articulate do not want one of us to fall into the hands of an order of scholars who are only too eager to study us at close range.
As for my red-haired Mayfair love, let me repeat that I wouldn’t dream of approaching her, though I’ve sometimes wondered if her extraordinary powers couldn’t help me to somehow put an end to Goblin for all time. But this could not be done without my frightening her and confusing her, and I won’t interrupt her human destiny as mine was interrupted for me. I feel even more cut off from her than I did in the past.
And so, except for my mortal connections, I’m alone.
I don’t expect your pity on account of this. But maybe your understanding will prevent you from immediately annihilating me and Goblin without so much as a warning.
That you can find both of us I have no doubt. If even half the Chronicles are true, it’s plain that your Mind Gift is without measure. Nevertheless, let me tell you where I am.
My true home is the wooden Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island, deep in Sugar Devil Swamp, in northeastern Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi border. Sugar Devil Swamp is fed by the West Ruby River, which branches off from the Ruby at Rubyville.
Acres of this deep cypress swamp have belonged to my family for generations, and no mortal ever accidentally finds his way in here to Sugar Devil Island, I’m certain of it, though my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred Blackwood did build the house in which I sit, writing to you now.
Our ancestral home is Blackwood Manor, an august if not overblown house in the grandest Greek Revival style, replete with enormous and dizzying Corinthian columns, an immense structure on high ground..."
so come on, tell me.
Sunday, June 13, 2004 @ 18:02
number twenty-three
hello. it's been a long time since i've posted. weel, my schedule's been quite full lately. first the new zealand trip, then the SPARKc camp, and the rest of the days peppered with NCC training. and not forgetting the dreadful holiday homework. i just can't seem to complete the two chinese books. and it is because of these two book that i can't get to read other books. i don't like reading two books together, you see. well, the camp was quite fun. not as boring as it was made out to be. but even so, they did not have to treat us like people that never ever read newspaper at all. besides that, the "specific racial group" that i taught would act badly, did not do so. surprisingly, their performance was much better than that of our own kind. not entirely their fault, i guess it's just their poor neighbourhood school environment that moulded them into such simple-minded and ignorant fools. i might be insulting them, but please realise that i'm just using my right to air my views and who can argue with me that i'm speaking the truth? neighbourhood schools, there is such a huge difference between their students and those of better schools. the way they act, speak, think etc. it's so different. but it's not going to change soon, is it? so i guess i will have to bear with these people for the time being. well, what can i post about now? yes. red dragon was on HBO last night. it was a truely magnificent show. i don't know how to describe it but it was real cool. it was basically about this man who thought that he was the red dragon. what's the red dragon? well, it's actually a painting by william blake. the red dragon that the man thought he was, was the red dragon from the painting "the great red dragon and the woman in the sun". the man, basically, was a serial killer that killed the family using mirror shards and he would remove the eyeballs and place mirrors in the sockets and in front of the corpse, torture and bite a remaining woman alive until she died. the movie from the book of the same title by thomas harris. his famous character? Dr Hannibal Lector. the man who was a genius as well as a murderer/cannibal. if you are interested, which i very much doubt, you might like to read the stories by mr harris. the first book is "silence of the lambs", second, "hannibal" and third is of course, "red dragon". well, i'm off to type some e-mails now. see you soon, and feel free to comment on this post. bye.
so come on, tell me.
Sunday, June 06, 2004 @ 14:20
number twenty-two
what should i put in this post? hmm. ya, today's D-Day if you all did not know. it's the day sixty years ago when the British and American troops landed on Utah beach. it's the day which marked the beginning of the liberation of France and the turning point of World War 2. tonight on central at 2100hrs and 2200hrs, there are shows about D-Day. you might want to go watch it. so bored now. i read the first few stories in the chinese book already. actually it's quite dumb. liking here, liking there. that's why i say that liking a person at the wrong time is troublesome. tsk tsk. brings you so much trouble. but i have to admit it is fun. but you have to pay a price too. haha. straying in to chim-ness again. ya, i bought a book called blackwood farm in N.Z. it cost about $30 in singapore, but i bought it for $9.95 and it is not second-hand too. what a bargain. it's by anne rice and it's about lestat de lioncourt. don't ask who he is. well, i'm off to slack now. bye.
so come on, tell me.
14:00
number twenty-one
back from new zealand. actually i am not going to blog anything about my trip there. why, you ask. well, i don't think that it can be blogged. even if i do blog, it would just be words, words and more words. and new zealand and the trip cannot be described by just words alone. you would have to be in the country and there in person to know how it feels. i've learnt many many things from the trip and to appreciate some things. i also saw the faces of some of the people whom i thought i knew. in short, this trip was a holiday as well as a time which allowed me to reflect. i also discovered more about the other races that co-exist with us. now for the not-so-formal version of the trip. well, the trip rocks. every aspect of it...except for a few glitches. i'll name some of the good things first. we were exposed to many things: cows, cows, cows, sheep, farms, maoris, cows, more cows, and beautiful secenery. and the bad things: NOISE!!! from the very very very noisy girls(no offence). they just had to talk/speak/screm/shout at every moment which they are conscious. you would not be able to have silence with them around. really. and there was also the person whose behaviour absolutely disappointed me. not stating names and i'm not telling. so don't ask. utterly disappointed at her/hime/it. but heck. i guess the best part was the horse-riding and the night walk through the farm and the stables and the fields-with-poop and the muddy-shitty-spot-in-front-of-the-stables. the night walk was cool, except for the NOISE!!! bought some cools things there too. but first, SORRY TO ALL!!! I DID NOT GET ANYTHING FOR YOU ALL!!! okay. i only bought things for my family. i thinks that's all for the trip. bye, for now.
so come on, tell me.