The unlikely duo

Doraemon is not a Pokemon. But who says he can't befriend one?

This is also my very first proper drawing done on my new toy - the smallest Wacom Bamboo! And of course, I don't know how to blend colours properly. I hope they teach that in art school.

Home Exchange sounds like a good idea

Watched The Holiday with Harlina quite sometime ago, on DVD. Not a good show. It was a long boring affair and doesn't warm you up with emotions at all. Warcrime draggy! Harlina and I were impatient to the point of frustration, constantly checking how much longer the show is, and yelling all the Chepat!s and Get on with it!s at the TV Set when Cameron Diaz falls into another long draggy monologue about discovering love as she tumbles around in bed with Jude Law.

An interesting find in the show would be the concept of Home Exchange! The story goes a little like this: Amanda(Cameron Diaz) just broke up with boyfriend. Iris (Kate Winslet), also same same, love problem, ex-boyfriend getting married to another char boh. Both ang moh char bohs needed to get away for awhile, and they both stumbled upon the same website, HomeExchange.com, found each other, and the very next day they were crossing the seas and staying at each other's house.

Amanda's the successful movie trailer cutter with a huge house in Los Angeles, blessed with a huge, technology-driven house which Iris benefits from. Iris' place pales in comparison though, living in a little village in Britain. But what the heck, the small little village house is frequented by Iris' brother, played by Jude Law. And that's when the show started to get draggy.

To summarize the concept of Home Exchange: Person A goes to live in Person B's house, vice-versa (Person B lives at Person A's) for a period of time. A great holiday idea: you'll save on hotel/hostel accommodation, and you get to live among the locals for awhile.

Check out the list of Singaporeans offering their homes for exchange: mostly landed-property and condominiums. No HDB Flats though. Weird that not many HDB-dweller want to exchange their living premises for awhile. I wouldn't mind. My house got reservoir view loh.

In other matters: imagine, offering Bed and Breakfast in your HDB Estate. Discussed this with a friend, and we were saying that if that was such an option, we wouldn't provide breakfast and would just tell them "Erm, breakfast is kaya roti, please proceed to the kopitiam downstairs only". Shopping can be done at the estate's shopping mall (Bukit Panjang Plaza, West Mall, Jurong Point, what-have-yous) , and the town is simply a 20 minute bus ride down. Not that bad, actually.

Someone might want to start a Facebook community for this.

Cross-Stitching

I'm now in the midst of doing cross-stitching. My friends responses range from why suddenly so effeminate,ah? to who do you like now and what are you making for him?. Joyce also asked what happened to you, why you doing auntie stuff?

Arrgh! You people are god awful lah! It's actually for an art project I'm working on now, which I wouldn't reveal much about yet (or rather, I haven't really conceptualized it in proper yet)

Now cross-stitching is the kind activity suitable for your retired moms and grannies in their rocking chair, sipping their English Breakfasts. It's Yawnsville. It's Boring with the capital B. You'll need both your hands and your eyes. Since the only things that's left free are my ears in this really mindless activity, I'll have my music on, catching up on songs that I never knew existed in my mp3 collection. I also listened to the podcast the mrbrown show. The only way to keep going was telling myself that this is going to be an interesting piece of work lah.

I've checked up on some of these software that lets you plot the pattern digitally, such as PCStitch. It's pretty cool as it allows you to convert your photographs into cross-stitch patterns.


I remembered watching a show about a Singaporean guy who actually does this kinda cross-stitch portraits for a living. Must kowtow, the guy had the patience. And for people who wouldn't mind cross-stitching for a living, you could probably take his idea and do something similar too.

But anyway, it's not like I've got a complicated design to work on, so I didn't think I'm ready to purchase one of these cross-stitching software instead (around US$79 each). The trial version of the software also didn't allow me to save any of the designs I've plotted.

Some people actually painstakingly planned their pattern by plotting them on graph paper, but I'm far too lazy for that.

Instead, I've found a free, and not so painful method: By plotting the cross-stitch pattern on an Excel Worksheet. Ingenious, huh?! I don't have Microsoft Office, so I use the open-source OpenOffice instead, which has their version of Excel, Calc.

And here's a preview of my pattern on a spreadsheet.


I actually converted the cells to have the same height and width (0.15cm x 0.15cm) to make the spreadsheet similar to graph paper, and changed the colour of the cells accordingly.

And no, I didn't come up with the font myself. I bought the font pattern, called Garfield Font,from a shop for SGD$2.00 (the shop auntie photocopied it from a book). Audrey thinks I'm stupid for paying for the pattern when I could just get free ones online, and she threw me this website for free cross-stitch patterns for numbers and alphabets.

Now who else wants to join the cross-stitching club? We can gossip while we fiddle with needle and thread.

Some other links you can check out:
Cross-Stitching Softwares at Download.com
DP Software - Cross-Stitching Software

Fuzzy Animal Farm is archived.

Here's my dormant Web Comics, entitled Fuzzy Animal Farm, a lame attempt at remaking George Orwell's Animal Farm, really!

I started them after graduation from NP in 2004. Used to have them up at fuzzyanimalfarm.blogspot.com . Then I stopped updating, and find no point in continuing them :P

The beginning stages of playing around with vectors on then Macromedia Fireworks, so its real damn ugly.

I'm restarting them again, but they will come in another form, and another title :P

Archived Fuzzy Animal Farm on a Flickr set.

The Contest

The bestest Seinfeld Episode EVAR

I need money to fund my dreams

An idea: wouldn't it be nice to have a gig with people singing Red Hot Chili Peppers covers? Acoustic set, nothing too loud, and people sitting around on carpets and smoking on sheesha pipes, while someone sings Under the Bridge. Quite cliche sounding, really: Under the Bridge must be the easiest song to cover.

But I don't know anything about funding gigs. The last gig I was involved in 2 years ago, we had managed to get school funding, inviting local bands. We didn't pay the bands, though, and thinking back now, hell, they must be pissed.

Now that I've left school for awhile, I haven't done any of such projects - drama, gigs, whatever. I don't know how these gig organisers get the money to do their stuff. How much corporate sponsorship can one even get? We can't just rely on that.

My ex-boss had given me a postcard for my birthday last year, something that said "If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done", and his own little motivating message written behind. At that point I had though it sounded real cheesy, cheesiness accentuated with the photo of a boy looking out at the mountains.

But now I kinda got the message from the card. In order to do this gig I guess I'll have to do something else to get the money to fund it. Wash cars? Sell Insurance? Teach Tuition? Wait at tables? I arrived at the idea of funding art that are inspired by RHCP songs. Someone rich buys the art and then there'll be funds. Problem is: their lyrics are close to gibberish at times, and where am I going to find the money to fund them, the artists that might be keen?

With people (narrowing down to Singaporeans) only willing to spare their loose change for projects that are having tie-ins with the word Charity, this might not be easy afterall. Ideas much appreciated from people doing such 'indie' projects.