Viva Forever

1800+ stitches and about 12 hours of work later…

Note: Click on the square thumbnails to see bigger images.

When I saw a promo for the first issue of CRAFT containing the pattern for the “cro-bot” I was determined to make my own due to its sheer awesomeness. I finally got my hands on the patten recently and away I went. I started a few weeks ago and would’ve liked to have gotten it finished earlier but I had work and fun hanging outs to attend to. Just as well, have done the bulk of it in the span of a day resulted in quite bad shoulder and wrist pains.

Anywho, Mox the 15cm (6 inches) tall robot is now complete, with his own set of black headphones (my mother insists they look more liked hair buns), a tiny felt heart and a scarf though arguably, robots don’t need to listen to music, have hearts nor get cold. Once again, my complete lack of photography skills coupled with my shitty camera meant that the colours came out badly and blurry. Bah. For example, the stripe around the head is supposed to be silver rather than grey but it turned out annoyingly darker than expected. Overall, I’m actually very happy with it and now Mox stands in his own corner on my messy desk.

Also, halfway through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!

Watched Cloverfield tonight. Before I spoil my fresh impression of the movie by absorbing internet opinions, reviews and criticisms, let me just say first off that I really enjoyed the movie. I think the thing I liked most is that for a survival/horror/monster movie, it actually didn’t use stupid, pedestrian directing techniques to generate cheap scares. You know the type, where the booming background soundtrack would cease, the camera zooms close over near/over the protagonist’s shoulder, all you could hear is his/her heavy breathing in a dark environment, then moments later (length of such “suspenseful” moments proportional to how much of a douchebag the director is), BOOM, some creature launches it/his/herself at the protagonist, the background music floods in and the audience is startled. It’s amazing how much I hate that.

Cloverfield doesn’t have such bullshit because it doesn’t have background music as its completely filmed in first person. Speaking of first person perspective, I was a little iffy about the whole shaky handheld camera style, having seen the dizzying lameness that was The Blair Witch Project. However, Cloverfield isn’t much hindered by it, though sometimes, I guess for realism sakes, the camera does swing to an alarming degree.

I guess the only minor gripe I have about the movie is that I do want to know more about the… thing that caused so much havoc and the movie doesn’t really provide for it. Of course the point of the movie ISN’T about the thing but about the people who are trying to survive but still, a tad unfulfilling in that respect. Other than that, the movie was enjoyably suspenseful and scary throughout.

Yay Minchin. This clip is only 1 minute and 52 seconds long, so I highly recommend watching it. Pure lolage.

I haven’t been blogging much, been a bit out of it online-wise lately. I’ve joined a second awesome D&D campaign where I’m a halfling ranger. I’m also more than halfway through Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and I’m baffled by the amount of teen drama exploding throughout much of the middle of the book. The imagery of Ron spending chapter after chapter basically just sucking face with a girl non-stop is a little nauseating. Hopefully the plot would pick up soon. I loled when one of the “random” passwords into the Gryffindor room was “abstinence”. Real subtle, Rowling. Also, I’ve started a new crafting project, fingers crossed that it’ll turn out to be a success.

My mother is a forum moderator. Lollerskates.

Two months ago my mother was completely computer illiterate. She didn’t even know how to turn the computer on and off. One day she received a phone call from a high school classmate of hers that she hadn’t heard from in well over 30 years. Apparently said classmate was trying to find people of their graduating year for some sort of reunion. A few phone calls later my mother was informed that there was an online guestbook set up where classmates of hers had been corresponding with each other.

My mother resolved to learn how to get on board the whole thing. I helped her create an email account, taught her the very basics of MS Word and she learnt by herself (quite quickly I might add) how to type pinyin. Before long, she typed up her first entry on the guestbook.

One day she came into my room excitedly, telling me that there’s been over 300 view counts on her entry and that many people told her that she should write more and they loved her writing. My mother had always secretly aspired to be a writer and so she was absolutely over the moon with the responses. I’m not actually sure what she wrote but it sure sounded like it was almost like group blogging. MY MOTHER WAS BLOGGING.

Class sizes back then involved upwards of 50 people per class and about 10+ classes per year so any reunion (online or otherwise) is pretty big. I guess the site coordinator saw how unwieldy the guestbook format was with so many people involved and s/he replaced it with a forum instead. And appointed my mother as a moderator of the “International” section of the board for classmates that now have left China and live aboard. It was so freaking adorable how bashfully exhilarated but happy my mum was to be given this e-responsibility.

It’s a pretty lively forum too. Peeking over her shoulder I see there’s always at least one or two people viewing the board at any one time. My mum excitedly shows me posts often, where she and other posters would post little messages to each other followed by what would be to us, rather tacky animated gifs (you know the ones of sparkly Korean cartoons or dancing babies) though my mum and her classmates think they are absolutely brilliant. Mum is also really proud of the fact that people tend to always reply to her messages more so than other people. xD It’s all so cute and endearing. One of the happiest times in my life is to see my mum happy. :3