– “M16A1”, Girls’ Frontline
There are a couple of ways to interpret this quote:
I got fired from my job with immediate effect from 5pm today. Out of respect for my former employer, supervisor, and colleagues, I don’t think it’s professional to reveal the full details of what happened. The main summary is this: I made some serious job-related errors, our customer wasn’t happy, and someone has to take the fall (me).
When I was hired for this job, it happened on the spot. I finished the interview and got a phone call about 30 minutes later that I was to start work immediately the next Monday. So perhaps, by some poetic reversal that usually only happens in a videogame, I was fired with immediate effect today. I had come in for work, done most of my tasks for the day, and even managed to vanquish a seemingly impossible task (search for an extremely difficult to find image). And then by 5pm I was fired. It came very suddenly like a bolt of lighting, and it was As Fierce as Fire.
All I will say is this: I did my absolute best, I honestly tried. I had two colleagues who were also doing their best to assist me, but I still made those mistakes. It can’t be helped because I was really overworked — I put in overtime for two consecutive days straight, and even had to come back on one Saturday. The chances of errors drastically goes up when you are mentally exhausted.
I guess I am typing this post to give myself some mental closure. And also because events and occurrences like these deserve to be documented. As I am listening to “Between Heaven and Earth” for the millionth time, I am reminded once again of Edelgard von Hresvelg’s immortal quote:
I have no regrets. But I sometimes wonder if things might have been different.
This post is six days overdue, but I’m putting this down for posterity anyway.
22 June was Edelgard’s birthday. I celebrated by purchasing a cake and taking a photo of it next to a wall scroll of Kaejunni’s superb artwork. The cake tasted fine and my dad liked the filling.
Since the release of Fire Emblem: Three Houses 11 months ago, I’ve sunk almost 950+ hours into the game. After spending so much time fighting alongside (and against) Edelgard, I just simply wanted to celebrate my favourite character’s birthday. Nothing too fancy, something straightforward was good enough for me.
Maybe next year, I’ll play “Between Heaven and Earth” on my violin and record it.
While walking down a moving escalator at the MRT station several years back, my shoelaces accidentally got stuck on the grooves at the end of the escalator — the part where the steps flatten and disappear. The escalator was still moving fine, it’s just that my laces were somehow trapped. I spent a few seconds trying to yank my laces out, but to no avail. I quickly realised that such a feat would be impossible because of the opposing force working against me. I was trying to pull the lace towards me, but the escalator steps were moving away from me.
I took a quick glance around me and calculated my options:
I chose no. 2 without hesitation. Lo and behold, with the escalator no longer moving, I was able to remove my shoelace easily. The lace was slightly frayed and damaged, but still usable. I moved away to one side and started tying a shoelace knot, when suddenly this middle-aged auntie, who was descending from the elevator, walked past behind me and said bluntly to my face:
“HOW CAN YOU DO THAT???”
I absolutely despise such flippant, insensitive, and selfish remarks where my intelligence is insulted. What the hell did you expect me to do?? Stand there like an idiot, tugging away at my shoelace, obstructing everyone behind me? Or find a solution to quickly get free?
Instead of asking me: “Sir, are you ok?” or “Do you need any help?”, the first damned thing to come out of your damned mouth is “HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?”. I was extremely livid, and dangerously close to shouting back at her. But I just wanted to finish tying my shoelaces. By the time I completed the task, I stood up and walked to one of the platform doors, all the while glaring at the auntie.
If the auntie were in my position, she would probably be stuck there for several minutes. Maybe someone with the foresight to press the emergency stop button would pass by and help her. Maybe someone else will scold that passerby with “HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?”.
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When I was in the army serving my national service, a commander that I really respected told my platoon: “The best way to judge a person’s character is to see how they react during a crisis.”
The fact that the auntie’s reaction was one of annoyance because someone else had inconvenienced her into walking a few extra steps, all because that someone’s shoelace got stuck on the escalator, instantly tells me a lot about her character — no empathy, no foresight, and no understanding of the bigger picture.
I calculated the best course of action to take, even though it would cause a temporary disruption. But that small sacrifice will lead to a good outcome in the end.
This is why I will always respect people who know how to make tough decisions for the greater good.
Wonderful video detailing why the Sonic the Hedgehog movie works, while also explaining why other videogame movies like Warcraft: The Beginning were absolutely terrible. A movie needs to stand on its own, with competent characters for the audience to care about and a plot with interesting themes and conflict to hold our attention.
The moment you lean too heavily on the source material like Warcraft or Rogue One, then you have failed completely as a film.
Hana Kimura’s death is all over the news, even mainstream news outlets that don’t normally cover pro wrestling like Channel NewsAsia and BBC News have reported on it.
I’ve not followed Hana’s wrestling promotion, Stardom, for about one year. There’s just too much wrestling to watch every week, so I was forced to be selective in my viewing. However, I did watch Hana perform live last year at Shinkiba for their New Year shows, and I continued to follow Stardom’s shows on their streaming service, Stardom World, for a few months.
If you’ve never watched Stardom before, imagine Japanese female wrestlers similar in size and build to Riho (from AEW). Now imagine each of them coming out to flashy, gaudy, and over the top entrance themes. I remember the first time I watched Oedo Tai (a faction in Stardom made up of delinquents dressed in goth gear) coming out for their entrance. I was seated in the front row when Kagetsu, Oedo Tai’s leader, flashed an angry glance at me and my friends. She was followed by the rest of her gang, who entered the ring and proceeded to perform a choreographed dance.
I was both perplexed and enthralled at the same time. That’s when I understood what Stardom’s wrestlers were all about: They are both athletes and idols — they kick ass in the ring, and then do whatever else they want for the sake of entertainment and showmanship. Japan’s pro wrestling scene has a predominantly high male viewership, especially if it is female pro wrestling. In Japan’s entertainment culture, it is not uncommon for female performers to pander and win over their male audience.
I’m one of the very few male spectators who is not interested in pandering or idol pageantry. I just want to watch good pro wrestling, and the Stardom girls are on a totally different level. Many of them are not even legal adults. There’s a trio of sisters named Hanan, Hina, and Rina. You can tell that all three siblings are just high school students who haven’t even turned 18 yet. Utami Hayashishita, widely touted as Stardom’s next prodigal talent, is only 21-years-old. Utami is lighter than me (I’m hovering around 56 kg) and packing less muscle than me, and yet she is able to suplex bigger opponents more than twice her size.
I remember watching a title match on Stardom World between Utami and Piper Niven. Yes, the Piper Niven from NXT UK. Utami won the belt after delivering a lifted, suplex finisher to Piper. Utami is 40+ kg while Piper is billed at 95 kg. What should be physically impossible for someone of Utami’s size, looked effortless and easy. Stardom is the sporting world’s paragon example of how size does not matter. As long as you have the technique, skill, and coordination with your opponent, anyone can be a pro wrestler. Even an underage high schooler.
Hana Kimura’s wrestling style is best described as all-rounded. Like many of her colleagues, her smaller size requires her to focus more on speed and technique. I found no problems with her wrestling and enjoyed her antics with Bobbi Tyler, her tag-team partner from the Tokyo Cyber Squad faction.
I never imagined that the word “cyber” would come back to haunt Hana in the last days of her life. Again, I’ve not followed Stardom or Hana for close to a year, so I will let my pro wrestling friend and No. 1 Hana Kimura fan, Naufal, explain:
She has been harassed on Twitter for months over the costume incident in Terrace House [a Japanese reality TV show], where she went on a verbal rampage on Kai for ruining her wrestling costume, although Hana was also partially at fault due to her carelessness. This resulted in Kai leaving the show.
Every time she tweets something, Terrace House fans will slander her. And unfortunately it took a toll on her and broke her. She posted photos of herself slashing her left forearm. There was blood all over, and she said sayonara (goodbye).
According to Naufal, Hana is also of mixed heritage (half-Japanese and half-Indonesian), and this might be another contributing factor to her depression. In Japan, citizens of mixed heritage are ostracised by both the older and younger generation. The most famous example is Ariana Miyamoto, the first half-Japanese to win the Miss Japan beauty pageant in 2015. Even after her victory, she continued to receive hateful remarks and scorn from her fellow citizens on social media.
Ah, fucking social media. I’ve blogged a few times in the past about how social media discourse has changed dramatically in the last several years. Twitter especially, is notable for being far more toxic than other SNS platforms. What should be an online hangout for sharing artwork and discussions, of seeing what your favourite celebrities and idols are up to, has become the death sentence for a 22-year-old. I’ve not seen the negative comments posted about Hana, and I am not going to bother searching for them. If we respond to hate by giving attention to the haters, if we react with even more hate, then it becomes a neverending cycle of suffering.
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On the way back from Shinkiba last year, me and my two friends boarded the train at Shinkiba station to return to our hotels. After taking our seats, suddenly, we saw Hana standing near us in the same train car. She was still in her ring attire, dragging her luggage and wearing a face mask.
My friend’s very prominent “LOS INGOBERNABLES de JAPON” t-shirt was a dead giveaway that we were all wrestling fans. Hana was using her phone, and when she saw us she very quickly and nonchalantly headed to another train car. It was never our intention to stalk her, it just happened by pure coincidence.
“See lah, your LIJ shirt gave us away!” my other friend joked. It was a small, slightly amusing chance encounter. But I imagine that it wasn’t amusing for Hana — someone of her prominence, a popular pro wrestler who would become a future reality TV celebrity, must have had her fair share of stalkers and overzealous fans. She was just being street smart.
Rest in peace, Hana Kimura. Thank you for that fun memory at Shinkiba. May you finally find peace in that starry heaven in the skies. We are Stardom.
This post contains spoilers for Resident Evil 7.
I still vividly remember the first time I fought a zombie — or what most gamers would interpret to be a zombie — in Resident Evil 7. I don’t like to rush through games, preferring to take my time to slowly explore and check every corner of the map. That explains why it took me three hours to encounter my first zombie.
Three hours of build-up to that moment, when I saw that black, humanoid mass materialising from what seemed like a cocoon festering the walls. After attempting three headshots, and only managing to land one successful hit, I retreated to the previous room to put some distance between me and the monster. This was a wide and spacious living room, with a large taxidermic deer placed right in the middle. Maybe I could use the deer as an obstacle to block the zombie while I attempted to take it down. After a few more panicky shots from my pistol, the creature’s head exploded just a body’s length away from me. It finally crumbled to the floor.
I was victorious, but used up 10 bullets, an entire pistol magazine’s worth of ammunition, just to kill a single adversary. I realised at that moment, what Resident Evil 7 was truly all about: Classic, no-nonsense survival horror. Every enemy encounter was going to be like that, a life-threatening duel where landing headshots was difficult, and ammo management was going to become a key tactical consideration. Making the effort to properly shoot the enemy’s head consumes a lot of precious time, allowing the zombie to close the distance further. But if I panic and start firing wildly, more ammo is wasted. And if I emptied my clip while the zombie was still alive, I was a sitting duck until I could reload new bullets.
Acquiring the shotgun in RE7 requires the player to solve a simple puzzle, but there is one major obstacle blocking your way: Jack Baker. Jack is Nemesis from the original Resident Evil 3 done right — a persistent and annoying threat that stalks the Baker household in the early parts of the game. You can try to shoot him to put him down temporarily… but he always gets back up. Obtaining the shotgun is both a relief and reward — you now have a great equaliser at close range. I quickly learned that a single, well-placed headshot at point-blank range will instantly kill those humanoid zombies. You could save pistol ammo by trading those bullets for a single shotgun shell to the face.
And then the game suddenly throws non-humanoids at you. The next enemy type you encounter are four-legged crawlers, similar to the lickers from Resident Evil 2. I was playing RE7 in PSVR, and after learning how to shoot standing humanoids with the motion controls on my headset, now I had to learn how to look downwards in order to kill those damned things. My previous tactic of luring zombies closer towards me for a shotgun-headshot was no longer viable — these crawlers can lunge at you from a distance.
Several hours later, by the middle to late portions of RE7, it’s not uncommon for the player to face both the humanoids and crawlers at the same time. Fighting groups of three, sometimes four zombies at once becomes the final test of skill at the endgame. It’s challenging, but the difficulty curve is gradual and there is always a proper build-up and set-up to those encounters.
This was one of my biggest problems with Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6. I have no qualms about a more action-oriented RE series, but action sequences in a videogame must be properly paced and timed at the right moments. If you keep bombarding the player with action setpiece after action setpiece just for the sake of doing so, it becomes very tiring and stale. Look at how Naughty Dog handled it in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, widely regarded as one of the best action games of all time. After a huge setpiece or an intense firefight, this is always immediately followed by a lull period, where Drake has to do some platforming or puzzle-solving. Or a short cutscene where Drake interacts with the members of the cast to advance the plot. It makes the player feel like they have earned a well-deserved breather, while simultaneously allowing the game to slowly set up the next action sequence.
Another gripe I had with Resident Evil 4, 5, and 6 was how enemies could drop ammunition or healing items upon dying. If that adversary was human, like the Ganados in RE4, then I guess it makes sense. But a zombie dog? Or a giant zombie housefly? Dropping machine-gun ammo? It completely breaks the immersion for those games.
Resident Evil 4 is more action oriented and while I greatly enjoyed it, if you stripped away all of the action, boss fights, and setpiece moments, it has very little substance underneath. The story is uninteresting, the villains are pantomime stereotypes, and neither Leon nor Ada have any good character development — they have no character arc or journey.
Playing through RE7, especially the second-half of the game, you start to feel the emotional arcs of every major character in the story: Mia’s desperation at protecting Ethan from suffering the same fate as her, to keep her husband safe from the horrors of the molded infection; The tragedy of the Baker family as each member becomes an innocent victim of Eveline’s corruption; and finally Eveline’s entire motivation for carrying out her atrocities.
I do not consider myself to be an aficionado or expert of the horror genre, but I could recognise and appreciate many of RE7’s references and nods to other games and horror movies. The opening found-footage segment of Clancy is a direct homage to The Blair Witch Project. The flashback “ghost” sequences experienced by Mia and Ethan is a reference to System Shock 2 and its spiritual successor BioShock. Eveline’s appearance as a pre-teen with a long black fringe, wearing a creepy dress, and who possesses supposedly supernatural powers, was very obviously inspired by Alma from the F.E.A.R. series.
RE7 is a superb survival horror game that is greatly amplified by the technology of VR: Poking your head forward to check around corners; using your head to line up the crosshair to make shots; walking in one direction and then quickly glancing behind your shoulder to see if there’s anything creeping up behind you — it’s a unique videogame experience that perfectly captures the potential of VR gaming. It’s one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in a long time, and I’m not even a fan of horror to begin with. Hands down the undisputed, best title in the series, and I am looking forward to how Capcom is going to follow up with Resident Evil 8.
– Steve Jobs
As seen in this ColdFusion video on YouTube. His quote starts at the 8:40 min mark:
– Franz Kafka, as seen in Resident Evil: Revelations 2
via: The Guardian
William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about several young boys who are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Many secondary school students from my generation have studied this book for literature. If you’ve never read it before, then I won’t spoil what happens. All I will say is: It’s a seriously messed up book that made me question whether the author had a dark childhood to conceive such a story.
Turns out that in the 1960s, something similar to Lord of the Flies did transpire in real-life: Several young boys accidentally shipwrecked themselves on an uninhabited island. However, the exact opposite happened: The boys all worked together to survive, they did not descend into anarchy and succumb to the darkness in their hearts. They were all rescued, alive, some 15 months later.
It’s a fascinating tale that offers us a glimmer of hope in these difficult times. Humanity is capable of both incredible evil and incredible good.
Playing videogames and reading about videogames consumes most of my free time. I try to play everything except for rhythm games. Also enjoys sports, animation, comics, Japanese language studies, and the occasional American TV drama. Learning violin.
