But what I SHOULD be doing is either going to sleep or continue my research on online censorship (the topic I chose for my IT law essay). I think… I’ll go to sleep. *snooze*

Watched
On the night before my Corporate Law assignment was due, rather than working on it, I instead watched the documentary The Dying Room that’s basically an undercover report on orphanages in China. It’s well worth watching, though incredibly depressing. All the children in the orphanages were girls (except for a small number of handicapped boys). The living conditions in the state orphanages were absolutely appalling, with toddlers being literally tied to chairs to keep them from moving around. The looks of lifeless boredom in many of their eyes as they rock back and forth was absolutely horrible.

One of the commentators interviewed blamed the One Child policy for the huge numbers of baby girls being left in the streets because their families don’t want them. While the policy no doubt exacerbated the problem, the real problem is 1) the cultural disregard for the sacredness of human life and 2) the treatment of women as second class citizens. My mother once said that the more people there are, the more expendable they are. When we’re dealing with more than a billion of people, I guess it is easier and easier to think of people as just a number.

In regard to sexism, it’s kinda weird. In modern times, every since the Cultural Revolution, it at least seems that there is more of an equality between genders. I’ve seen a number of women in parliament in China, and women are encouraged to work as much as men. But watching that documentary, female children are despised whereas male children are infinitely more desirable. This can’t be just an anomalous finding as generally speaking, there’s already way too many men in China because of people’s persistent desire to have male children over female. It frustrates me beyond words that there’s no movement in China to counter the mind-numbingly stupid cultural traditions of how women ought to be viewed and treated. It’s probably better now in the city areas of China at least but it is problematic that the idea that women are not as good as men are allowed to be trickle through.

Oh and yesterday I watched Moulin Rouge. I’ve never seen it before, and wow, talk about disappointing! :P I first heard the soundtrack from a friend when it was released and I quite like the songs on it. But watching it was excruciating at parts, the acting was bad and the choice of song was at times just bizarre (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”? Really, Baz Luhrmann, was that necessary?). And this is coming from someone who generally like musicals.

I finished watching xxxHOLiC, I have a review of it up. I watched the beginning of the first episode of Code Geass, but so far, the story hasn’t really sucked me in. I’m really not very into political conflict type anime. But yay, CLAMP artwork.

Games
I watched Tim play Portal (well the beginning and end, I fell asleep halfway through). It’s an awesome game to even watch. The finale was one of the most memorable I’ve ever seen, just in how funny GLaDOS is. I love the taunts she’d throw at you, oh and her ending song is just fabulous. More games should put emphasis on their scripts! The game itself looked fun to play, but given how un-coordinated and crappy at spatial tasks I am, I think I’m a little too intimidated to play it.

Site stuff

I finished this a little while ago. Mwaha, yay the Pucca fanlisting is finally mine! :D Heh, I love that little broad. Yeah, the layout isn’t very good, but I was in a hurry and I had a huge brain freeze. Why is it that I use image rollovers whenever I make bad layouts? Spin has also finally gotten an update after 11 months of no activity. I’ve got a bunch of other site updates that I need to make as well.

Right now, what I should be doing are my Uni readings though. Bah.

I finished the fanlisting to “My Fair Lady” (awesome movie!) yesterday as it’s due on the 17th. Rush job! I didn’t mean to, but I just didn’t feel like designing I suppose. Yes I know it’s very pink, but that’s honestly the shade of pink of the DVD cover and at the time, it seemed like a good idea to make it the base colour. I’ve… never done something this saturated before. So yeah… oops. At least it’s done!

Secondly, I finished converting all the old greymatter pages into actual post entries. Yes, manually, and yes it was incredibly tedious but it’s done! Officially this is the 341st post with 2,541 comments so far. It was interesting going through the old posts back in late 2002-2003. I was so… hyper! I used to think I was quite clever for my age, and now I realised that everyone must’ve been humouring me; the posts were mostly random, filled with typos and would spontaneously become INCREDIBLY EXCITABLE!!!!!!! Also, emoticons like “^o^” and “^_^” were everywhere, as was descriptions of actions: *demonstrates*. I can’t figure out whether that’s a good or bad thing. *is puzzled* >:P

The people who used to visit my site had a different style of commenting from many that I get nowadays. Not only was there also more emoticoning and descriptors of actions (like “*whacks Belinda with a frying pan* ^o^”), everyone was also quite hyper! Lots of exclaiming, glomping, hugging, “love you!” etc… it just seemed incredibly fun and boisterous. I bet that’s in no part due to the anime influence on bulk of the visitors of those days. I guess I kinda miss that.

Oh and I used to quite frequently and expressly fangirl over anime/manga/gaming men. While this may be reduced some what, images like this still gets an automatic “teehee :3″ from me. :P I guess it’s not true to say that I spent my teen years not liking guys, it just so happens the guys I were interested in aren’t living.

Oh and one other thing! I used to plug people ALL THE TIME!! Every day was blog day! Maybe I should take that up again. Also, many of the more amusing posts concerned my wacky family. I think I’ll install a plugin that highlights my favourite posts or something. More work needs to be done!

Anyway, I’m on a two week break from Uni, which means I now have two class-free weeks to do some super-cramming to get my notes together, doing all the readings I’m behind on and completing two huge assessment due right back after the break. So I guess, “happy holidays” to me!

I want to watch the BBC series of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth). I’m trying to catch a good deal on ebay but I’m no good with that blasted site. -_-;

Oh I’m finally watching Moon Child (I’ve had it in my cupboard for about four years now) staring Gackt, Hyde and Lee-Hom Wang. The movie is set in the modern day, where they are VAMPIRES who are part of a GANG. And they use lots of guns. And Gackt is able to DODGE BULLETS when he’s a mortal, young, gangster. LOLOLOL.

My holidays so far has been utter bliss. I’ve watched so many movies (most rented) and I’ve been knitting heaps.

Quick movie reviews
Riding in Cars With Boys – Wonderfully sad but adorable movie. Unlike what the Gilmore Girls might suggest, teen pregnancies are not a piece of cake. There is a terrible amount of sacrifice and lost opportunities involved. There were parts of the movie (like the wedding scene) that almost brought me to tears (and I don’t tear up often!) because of how understatedly tragic the whole thing was. Highly recommended.

The Boondock Saints – Quite a funny movie at parts. Very violent, but it’s just so… ODD to see Billy Connolly’s play an incredibly badass, gun-toting character. Willem Dafoe’s flamboyant cop character was pretty hilarious too. Still… I don’t quite agree with the ending, with it’s seeming advocacy of vigilante behaviour. It was a nice touch on the end of the movie of this acknowledge controversial stance. Recommended.

Bowling for Columbine – Nice documentary about gun control. The most striking part of the documentary was the parody cartoon that breezed through American history and highlighted the way fear had always played such a big role in American mentality. This could be one explanation of why so many people think guns are so important so to protect themselves. It seems that other nations do not share America’s quite unique paranoia about each other.

Requiem for a Dream – MOST DEPRESSING MOVIE I’VE EVER SEEN. Not a teary/sad kind of depressing, but the type that makes you agape and sickened by the sheer tragedy of it, giving you a punched-in-the-stomach feel that’s guaranteed to last the rest of the day. The movie isn’t just about “drugs are bad”, it’s about problems that exists for some people; loneliness, disconnection from the world, frustration and probably some degree of nihilism that make substance abuse so desirable. The results are devastating and life destroying. All four stories are distinct in their own way, but the one that Jennifer Connelly plays was the hardest to watch. It really struck a chord by how earlier in the movie, when she was relatively drug free, she said that money wasn’t want she wanted, contrasted with the ending where she’s blank, drugged up and defeated, rolled up and protectively clutching a wad of money. Highly recommended but don’t say I didn’t warn you!

I haven’t been commenting much on people’s blogs, doesn’t mean I don’t read them though!

Also I’ve closed down my writing site and plan to tweak it for this blog’s next layout. Yay, recycling. :P I’m half-contemplating actually moving this site (with a name change) to its own domain that was intended for the craft blog (and the craft blog becoming a subdomain). It’ll be quite a big step since this blog has been the way it has for about 4 years so I’m still uncertain. Also, will be changing hosts soon, might be going with Host Nine.

Anyway, I’m sick of this layout already! I might recycle another layout that I had up before and liked and maybe close a site. See how productive I get when I’m supposed to be doing assessments?

Oh yeah, nearly forgot! The other day I had lunch with Eileen. It was pretty cool, we had pancakes and I basically bombarded her with questions about the US education system. GOD, EVERYTHING COSTS MONEY! I was flabbergasted to hear that college APPLICATIONS costs money! What the? :O

What do I put in my “About Me” section?!?! Argh I’m so incredibly stuck! Do I just… put stuff about my history? My growing up? My personality? My beliefs? My dreams? I mean *I* know all about me, how and what part of it should exist online?

This is harder than writing an essay. -_-

NOTHING MUCH WORKS AT THE MOMENT. Only the recent posts and commentage works. Few of the pages are up properly, and for some reason I’m having pages repeat themselves over and over again in older posts and with some older pages. I have no idea why that happened and further investigation is needed. I noticed the problem after the wordpress update so I don’t know if it’s a script problem or a database problem. BLARGH. I’ll get to writing and updating pages soon, including more things about this layout. Here’s a clue, I used chocolate, strawberry and vanilla ice-cream as inspiration. :P It’s debatable whether this layout or the more plain, older version is better but at least this one is (majoratively) created by me. And, yay the blog is back. :)

I do like the autosave feature in 2.1.2 of wordpress. Handy in case things go asplode. And with that, I go to bed.

Edit I updated the Post Levels plugin as well as updated my permalinks. I’m not sure which of these made it work, but I can tentatively say that the repeating entries problem is gone… I still need to make sure though. I can’t get the threaded comments to work at the moment. I thought that was a convenient script too. -_- Maybe I’ll try again some other time.

Does anyone actually clean behind their ears? I always forget that there’s a place that require cleaning behind the ears. I guess most of the time soapy shampoo water that trickle from my hair around and behind my ears is the only form of hygiene it gets.

The layout I was planning for my crafts blog has been remade to be the layout for this blog. I cannnot stand how generic and plain this current layout. I figure that given how much Uni work I have to do, I wouldn’t have much time working on crafts any time soon anyway. I’ll probably work on that in the holidays which would be sometime in April I think.

I don’t think I’ll be started the site though until I’ve finished knitting my (first) scarf. I’m really excited by how lovely the yarn is; it’s 50% mohair, 50% acrylic and literally silver in colour, not just grey. It has a slight texture to it that makes it look slightly shiny and metallic. Pictures when I’m done.

My Neverwinter Nights 2 fanlisting (first fanlisting!) has been completed and approved. Bah, don’t mind the layout, it’s pretty hideous. Seriously ran out of layout ideas though. :(

I watched Mulholland Drive a few days ago and it’s a really good movie, more so once I hit the internets and looked up how the seemingly confusing timing of the scenes fit together. It’s interesting how its twist is something you need to figure out rather it being in your face.

Anyone seen Pan’s Labyrinth yet? I’m a really really big wuss, can anyone tell me if it’s scary? If it is, what kind of scary? My wuss-meter pretty much explodes even with movies like Juon/The Grudge and The Ring, so if it’s anything like that I’d really rather not watch it. But the trailers make it look intriguingly fantastical so I am curious.