Unhealth VS Health! Food fight!

When I was still in Junior College, I used to have this habit of eating the same food for lunch day in and day out for a month. I think it was because the school was somewhere in, like, nowhereland, where good food was hard to find. I used to eat Nasi Lemak EVERY SINGLE DAY until one strange and fucked-up day when the Nasi Lemak woman gave me THREE ANCHOVIES with my Nasi Lemak. THREE. I counted them in front of my friend. THREE FUCKING ANCHOVIES, can you believe it?? I mean, one is supposed to get... at least... ten? At least more than it would trouble you to count anyway. I was quite offended, really. Maybe they had some kind of anchovy shortage in the stall but still, aren't I a regular? A valued customer? Apparently not.

Anyway, it was because of this that I started eating... THIS.




Uh oh. What is that? This, my friends, is the space oddity known to man as a MODANYAKI OMELETTE. It consists of chemical yellow noodles fried and wrapped inside an omelette which is then drenched with mayonnaise, Okonomiyaki sauce and fish flakes. You know, the stuff you find on Takoyaki balls. It is sold in a shop in Jurong Entertainment Center known as KOBAYASHI which specializes in terribly cheap, badly done Japanese food. And it's terribly cheap too. Four dollars will get you this plus a drink. Anyhow, it's one of the most TERRIBLY UNHEALTHY things I've ever tasted in my short life. Halfway through you start to feel... oh maybe this isn't for me... but you keep eating! You just keep eating! And you buy it again! Why?? Why?? I ate these for a week straight before I fell sick. I actually fell sick eating this. But I went back and bought it AGAIN!




WHY?? My gut instinct tells me it's because... THE PLACE IS CALLED KOBAYASHI.

Since everyone should watch Star Trek, everyone should already know about the KOBAYASHI MARU. The no-win scenario test which was made popular in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. A NO-WIN SCENARIO TEST describes this dish perfectly. Eating it makes you sick. It's not so much that it can make you full. There are other cheaper things around. BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO EAT IT because somewhere... there exists the possibility that maybe... just maybe... your stomach can best this beast.

Speaking of besting beasts... is it JUST A COINCIDENCE that the Japanese competitive eating champion's name is TAKERU KOBAYASHI?? I think NOT! Imbued with his spirit (watch him try to best a beast HERE... i'm not kidding, his opponent is a giant bear) Kobayashi draws people into itself and they all become possessed with... um... eating. Yes! EEEeevil! But good for the first five minutes. So go! Go and eat this! If only for the experience of being possessed. And it's only four dollars! So the money you save, you can use for detoxing with....





ULTIMATE HEALTH COMBATOR OF FREEDOM! HAKKA THUNDER TEA RICE!!

Feeling fucked up after eating the Modanyaki Omelette?? Then you need this! And right away! This paragon of health consists of a bowl of healthy brown rice topped by healthy vegetables, tofu and nuts (amazing isn't it) and to eat it, you pour this thick green tea all over it and mix up until it becomes like so.




And then you eat it! And feel the healthy flowing back into your toes! For about five minutes.... and then you start thinking... why am I eating rabbit food? This is a traditional Hakka dish that can be found in Suntec City's Food Empire. It's not that cheap... maybe 5 dollars? I can't really remember. Only one dollar more BUT it doesn't come with a drink. NO THE TEA IS NOT A DRINK.

It's pretty interesting because the bland natural flavours of this dish is in complete contrast to the fucked up artificial flavours of the Modanyaki Omelette. It's better to eat daily, by far, but you'll probably get sick of it sooner. Though you'll be healthier for it. Eating this dish is like walking down a nice, bright, cold lane in China. Lovely but boring. The Modanyaki, however, is like listening to Para Para music. Fun but sickening.


Anyway, what is the moral of this story?? Hmm... Unhealth VS Health, do we have a winner? I seriously cannot decide this on my own. Why don't you go and eat both and tell me?

Uziga Waita VS Suehiro Maruo! Guro death match!

Ummm.... Do I have to read something to review it? I wanted to review some guro manga tonight but I couldn't get through Uziga Waita's Death Panda. I know! Let's just do a quick run-through of some of the artists I am familiar with and choose the best one!

Ichi wacha mucho la! Who's the best guro mangaka?

Well, like I said, I couldn't get through Uziga Waita's Death Panda. With a title like Death Panda you'd expect me to like it, right? Right? The first chapter is about a panda who kills people in gruesome ways! A panda! How can anyone not like it?

BALDERDASH!

And let me tell you why.

Uziga Waita's work has the dubious honor of being the only guro manga I've ever gagged at. It wasn't that it was 'too graphic' or whatever nonsense like that, no. I mean, gore is gore is gore and the more graphic the better and besides, his style is soooo anime-like it's sickening, however my introduction to him was through this manga entitled Schoolgirl In Concrete which was a fictionalized dramatization of an actual incident in Japan where some crazy teenagers caught a girl and tortured her to death over a month or so. I was semi-aware of the incident and knew that most of the tortures depicted actually happened and although it's not THAT wild (like, say, compared to de Sade), the overall style of the thing was so inherently exploitative that I gagged at the indignity of it all. It was as if he was trying to back up his torture fetish with some kind of philosophical moral pornographer crap.

And so it is with Death Panda. Yes, yes, it's supposed to be funny... BUT IT'S NOT! This guy just likes drawing people getting tortured and humiliated and the way he enjoys it comes through so clearly in his art. It's a lascivious, leery, yucky kind of enjoyment that is just... not... ugh... graceful? And no amount of teh (fake) funniez is going to hide it!

Compare this to Suehiro Maruo's work with its natural poetry. Maruo can draw people eating each other's excrement and there'll still be something poignant about the whole thing. There is no sense of exploitation, just... expression.

Let's talk a bit about Maruo, since I already picked him out as my favourite 4evaz gur0 mangakA.

My first Maruo was a compilation of shorts entitled Rose-coloured Monster. From the very first page, you can see that it's something entirely different. The art strikes somewhere between Japanese woodcut and Fritz Lang film. A lethal combination, to be sure. The stories are... kind of nutty in a silly way but man, it's all about the art! The way he juxtaposes certain elements in such an elegant way... It's beautiful. One chapter in particular, The Secret and Sad Story of the Camelia Girl, manages to convey the kind of madness Fritz Lang portrayed in M from another, more extreme angle. In a few short pages, with almost zero character development and a thin excuse for a plot, one manages to get a sense of how absurd the world really is. It feels like a lot of negativity smushed into a crucible and heated up until it comes out a gem. When one reads Maruo, one feels like the more he sinks into the mire, the more beautiful the world is.

Or is it just me?

Anyway I wish I could talk more about a couple more guys, Jun Hayami, Juan Gotoh, Shintaro Kago and the non-guro-man-but-my-second-favourite-next-to-Maruo - Machino Henmaru, but I think it's time for me to sleep/play more games. This whole thing has turned into an indictment of Waita and lauding of Maruo anyway.

So, sleep tight! And don't take shit in your tea while enjoying your Maruo!

THE CHZO MYTHOS

What makes a good film? Why, I would say editing and direction, for no film is good without a good lot of those. But, what makes a great film? Why, I would say an interesting plot and memorable characters.

And erm... why am I talking about this? Because the Chzo Mythos is not a film, or even a series of films.... It's a bunch of adventure games. BUT THEY ARE A BUNCH OF WOW ADVENTURE GAMES WHICH ARE BETTER THAN ANYTHING HOLLYWOOD HAS PUT OUT IN THE PAST TEN YEARS!

The Chzo Mythos is a tetralogy of games revolving around some strange, ancient, supernatural horror. It's your basic point-and-click (with the option/risk of dying, something quite strange in the genre) puzzle-solving, AGS-scripted affair but what sets it apart from other games is the sheer scope of its plot. The series spans many centuries and each successive addition manages to expand the plot more and more.

The entire thing kicks off in 5 Days A Stranger, where you play Trilby, a 'gentleman thief' who breaks into a house only to find that you can't break out of the house. Supernatural events ensue. It's a simple premise and the game has only around 10-15 rooms but Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw, the game developer/designer, manages to use each and every one of them so effectively, sooner or later you just get caught up in the whole thing and suddenly the little pixel blob graphics take on a life of their own and everything manages to become unnaturally spooky. The dialogue is witty and funny and Trilby, as the only one who keeps his head while everyone loses theirs (metaphorically), is a pretty endearing character. The gameplay is fantastic. The puzzles are just the right level of difficulty and the controls are smooth and suit a laptop's touchpad pretty well. All in all, it's a very, very enjoyable game with subtle nods to classic horror films here and there. What a perfect introduction to the world of adventure gaming! Ahhh.....

The 2nd installation, 7 Days A Skeptic, is where everything reaaaallly speeds up and takes off. This time the supernaturality is happening in... space! That's right! Space horror! A genre that has not been fully explored methinks (remember how good Solaris was? TARKOVSKY NOT SODERBERGH PLEASsseE) and a shame it is too. The inherent claustrophobia of being on a spaceship makes it the ultimate setting for TERRORIZATION BY A WELDER! Anyway, it's set around 4 centuries after 5 Days and you play a psychiatrist (Kris Kelvin much?) on a ship of DOOM. It's wonderful, it's magnificent, it's like Event Horizon done right! The puzzles are harder this time around and some of them border on headbanging. There are also really wicked moments of... DOOM. There are actually MANY instances in which you can die and in some sequences you even have to run and shoot, which feels weird in a point-and-click but serves to kind of up the DOOM factor (MOVE FASTER YOU PIXEL SON OF A BITCH) and makes the whole thing even scarier. Scary as hell, in fact. I was jumpy for two full hours after playing this. The controls are kind of fucked up for this one as they were probably optimized for mouse-play and none of the characters in this are even remotely as cool as Trilby. However, everything else is superior to the first. The story loses some of its humour but gains terror momentum fast.

The 3rd part of the series diverts from the usual 'blah blah days a blah blah' title-formula with a brand new fangled title called Trilby's Notes. Ahh... good old Trilby! How I love thee! Anyway, this time you get to play a more mature, less cavalier Trilby who has been recruited into some kind of special government agency investigating the occult. Set a couple of years after 5 Days, this one is to The Shining what 7 Days was to Event Horizon. With a new 'shadow realm' full of blood and guts and meat and scary dudes that you can phase in and out of (that makes for some really jumpy scream-out-loud moments) and the incorporation of a more text-based interface than its previous two counterparts, the puzzles are magnificently hard. Trilby's Notes is also, hands down, the freakiest game of the lot (unlocking doors with LIMBS???) and maybe the best of the lot. The story is fleshed out even more with significant nods to Hellraiser and the beginnings of the CHZO MYTHOS BACKSTORY start to drip in and it's really quite good.

The last of the tetralogy is 6 Days A Sacrifice and it's set smack dab in the center (chronologically) of 5 Days and 7 Days. 196 years on each side, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, this time you play a severely injured building inspector. Definitely the most ambitious of the lot, this one tries to tie up all the loose ends in the previous three games and give it a satisfying, crunchy ending. There's a lot of time-travelling, a lot of flashbacks and even a sort-of sex scene. The plot becomes all twisted and a little philosophical (just a little) in a Hellraiser-meets-Donnie-Darko way and the puzzles are just mindbogglingly hard. Trilby also makes a re-appearance in this one and, although I won't spoil the plot for you, there is a HUGE nod to God-Emperor Of Dune here which I didn't quite enjoy because I love good ol good ol Trilby. This is the game where the series reaches for CLASSIC status and kind of gets there for awhile before falling off into the GREAT GAME pit.

There are also a couple of text-adventures that can be downloaded along with 6 Days that try to swell the story even more. They are also pretty good. If a little short. And painfully easy. They're worth it just for the story, really. It's a good story.

Anyway, THE CHZO MYTHOS is a bunch of games that beg to be played. And played chronologically. In a day. Taken separately, each game is a fun, well-made adventure game. Good games. Taken together, the whole thing becomes MASSIVE ENTERTAINMENT. GREAT game. There is such a heavily cinematic feel to all of it that you can't help feeling like you're watching a fantastic Hollywood horror film DONE RIGHT. Like The Exorcist or something. As written by Junji Ito. With Ewan McGregor as lead. It's a well-written, excellently directed story that you can really lose yourself in... for a day or so. Unless you absolutely refuse to check any walkthroughs, for in that case, my friend, YOU WILL GET STUCK. I guarantee you WILL get stuck and bang your head against the wall forever.

Whatever. All the games can be downloaded HERE and by God, you should download them RIGHT NOW. DOWNLOAD ALL AND PLAY NOW and donate the cash you're going to spend on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Redux Redux Redux OR WHATEVER to Ben Croshaw.

Hannibal Rising

Oh dear. What a way to kick off the movie reviews, with a trashy mainstream film that's not even recent. Well, this is what you get when you stack up your library fines and they bar you from borrowing until you pay up. That said, let's get to it.

I picked Hannibal Rising out of my dusty, mountainous pile of cheap unwatched DVDs on a whim and stuck it into my DVD player fully expecting to hate it. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I did not end up hating up. I didn't end up actually liking it either but at least... you know. It's not all that bad.

Hannibal Rising, in case you didn't know, is based on the first (in the fictional chronology) of Thomas Harris' tetralogy of serial killer novels and the first one to focus on the character of Hannibal Lecter, who in the the other books is a peripheral character, though easily the most memorable.

Anyway, why am I rambling on backstorily about this as if you, dear reader, have been living under a rock or something? On to the film!

Again, I was fully expecting to hate it. The 'hype-feel' that I got from Hannibal Rising was kind of similar to the one surrounding Memoirs Of A Geisha (which I absolutely despised) and the very color of the film convinced me I was on the road to hell.

But, as it continued, I realised that the editing was actually pretty solid, without any random and weird jumps in continuity and also that the treatment of the film served to create a pretty enjoyable atmosphere. So what went wrong? Ha. Ha. Ha.

THE ACTING.

Hahahahaa. Oh my god. The acting was hilarious. Imagine forcing every single person involved in the film to speak with a fake Russian accent. Umm... yeah I guess they forced everyone in the film to speak with a fake Russian accent. Except Gong Li who is barely intelligible through her fake Japanese schmaltz. It's insane. And it's actually not as bad as having the editing screw up because the plot, with it's air of self-righteous seriousness and themes of 'WHAT IS BARBARISM'?? is MADE TO BE CAMPY. And the acting totally kicks everything in the pants and brings the whole edifice crashing down on everyone's heads.

So, in a nutshell. I didn't hate Hannibal Rising because the acting sucked balls. END.

The Manuscript Found In Saragossa

Thus, our journey into books begins with a novel that I have been obsessing over for a good couple of years, albeit mostly in a distant way. Like, watching The Adventures of Baron Munchausenon TV when you're a kid and holding certain scenes close to your heart for years and years after but completely forgetting what movie it was. Yes, that happened to me. It always happens to me with Terry Gilliam films for some reason... Brazilwas another one. Anyway, yes. Now we've understood the concept of 'faraway obsession', let us begin to tackle this sprawling novel.

I picked up this book quite by accident in the library and was completely entranced by it for two weeks before totally forgetting what the author and title of the book was. Then, I searched the same place in the library, found it again, and forgot again. And this happened yet again. And again. Until one day, over the course of many years, I took it upon myself to sit down and memorize the title until the words were burned into my brain. THE. MANUSCRIPT. FOUND. IN. SARAGOSSA. BY. JAN. POTOCKI. Yes!

Ah! And now we can begin talking about the book! The book! The book! Oh my! Oh oh! Okay!

Having been brought up on a diet of Dostoyevskyand Tolstoyhas gotten me used to novels with IN YOUR FACE CONCEPTS and plots which conform quite closely to the message the writer wishes to convey. Don't get me wrong, I'm not painting any of this in a negative light, they do it well. With style and pizazz and a lot of passion. But that said, it's easy to understand how something like The Manuscript Found in Saragossawas a shock to my system.

The plot of this novel, if the word 'novel' can contain such an epic, starts with a manuscript found in Saragossa during the war which tells the tale of one Alphonse van Worden who is traveling through Spain and his subsequent adventures and dealings with people he meets along the way. And their adventures and dealings with other people, in the past. And the adventures of these people and the people they met. And the adventures of these people... and so on and so forth. It is hard to say the plot 'revolves around' something because it honestly doesn't. The Manuscript Found in Saragossais built more like a Russian doll with tales within tales within tales. Some which connect, some which do not, some with the same themes, some without any themes, some which are completely fantastical, some bordering on prosaic.

Although this 'style' (I think there are too few books utilizing this 'frame narrative' kind of structure to merit a 'genre' ALTHOUGH IT SHOULD BE A GENRE BECAUSE I LOVE IT) has been used to great effect in The Arabian Nightsand to pretty-good-but-maybe-not-so-great effect in The Decameron, I think The Manuscript Found in Saragossais a totally different ball game if only because of the MASSIVE CONFUSION the SHEER NUMBERS of INTERTWINING STORIES evokes. Whereas in the other books, the frame narrative is more to provide context, in The Manuscript, there are SO MANY FRAME NARRATIVES that the frames lose their meaning and melts into... into... maybe the closest word I can find for it is LIFE.

How I came to that conclusion... please, just imagine I explained to you my thought process and it's logical.

Whereas Tolstoyanishbooks aim to be ONE THING to ALL MEN (like encapsulating and EMBODYING universal aspects of the human struggle in a single tale), The Manuscript Found in Saragossais ALL THINGS to NO MEN. It is an orgy of ghosts and bandits and priests and prostitutes and their superstitious stories which, though seeming fantastical to us now, would have actually been more realistic in ye olden times of superstition. In short, they seem very much like stories that folk of that period would have told each other. And they are just stories. No reason or rhyme, just a bunch of stories which snake around each other like... like... MONSTERS.

I can't go on! I can't go on! Even writing about this book, I'm losing myself in the forking, twisting paths of my own mind!!!

ARGH. Just buy it now and read for yourself!! But beware!! This book will haunt you forever!! THIS BOOK WILL SEE YOU IN HELL!!!

HG steak

Excuse the bad photograph but I was too busy eating... Anyway, as they say over in Make Up Alley, I've found my HG (Holy Grail to all you make up philistines)! Only in this case, it's a steak. Yes! 200grams of good Ribeye, rare as FUCK and only FOURTEEN DOLLARS! GASP!

Actually, I had two steaks that day, in accordance with my good-cheap-steak search. The first was a crappy 120g minute steak at Delifrance (ten dollars). It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be! It was honestly well cooked... like, seared. But, the quality of the meat really let me down. It was terrible. 120g is just enough meat for me though, but anyway.

My friend Eugene brought me to Botak Jones a couple of days back and I was so impressed by the Cajun Chicken (photo below) that I resolved to come back and try their steak. The Cajun Chicken was beautifully juicy and, incredibly, only seven dollars. Insanity!?



Also, the beer that you see in the photo is only fourteen dollars. Again, INSANITY!?

Ok, so where do you find this land of wonders? It's actually in nowhere-land, BRADDELL, situated right beside the Singapore Press Holdings building. Do not be deceived by the industrial-looking hawker center building! It may look dirty and yucky from the outside but inside, it is actually wonderfully clean and well ventilated.

As a smoker, however, I sat outside in the little smoking area which is much nicer than the hawker center inside. It's surrounded by lots and lots of plants and is just big enough to pretend you're in some kind of jungle. Or maybe not. Anyway, it's also full of mosquitoes but that's alright. And why??



BECAUSE OMG LOOK AT HOW MUCH MARGARITA THERE IS! And its GOOD, TASTY Margarita with proper tequila, almost as tasty as Cafe Iguana's (the salt they use is MUCH tastier than Cafe Iguana's for some weird reason) and its only.... *drumroll*... EIGHT DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS! GASP!

I am having spasms from the unbelievable prices, seriously. A jug costs only twenty, all day/night long. Which is better than waiting for the midnight 50% thing to kick in at Cafe Iguana...

So... what are you waiting for? Patronize this place!! I really think it's a true act of philanthropy to provide such great food for such amazingly low prices. Botak Jones, whoever he is, should be King Of Food.

Nintendo DS Lite

My experience with gaming consoles began with the SNES ages ago but the first one I started properly playing regularly was the Sega Megadrive which provided me with hours upon hours of side-scroller fun. Later on, I began to get my side-scroller fix from a Nintendo Game Boy and my family bought a Sony Playstation for home and my six-hour-stretch RPG gaming began. Strangely enough, my gaming days ended when my brother bought a Sony Playstation 2. Something about it seemed too heavy for me to appreciate. Also, he put it in his room and it was (and is) a pain to go there to play.

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite a week or so ago and have hence been returned to the rabid gaming days of my youth. Funnily enough, the atmosphere it evoked was not so much the console gaming experience as it was my early computer gaming experience.

I have always been one for gameplay. Gameplay over all else! Graphics be dammed! I am capable of enjoying text-based games ten times more than the latest crappy PS3 release... I believe its in the Sony line that one most sees the fetishizing of technology over solid concepts. However, the Nintendo line, I feel, is all about gameplay.

The Nintendo DS Lite is a dual screen portable console with touch-screen capabilities. This is brilliantly incorporated into the gameplay, lending it a kind of 'hands on' feel that one just doesn't get with the other consoles. It also makes moving around a lot easier. One plays almost all games with a stylus and the fun one can have with this is almost unlimited. There's one game in particular that I keep on playing - ELITE BEAT AGENTS - which takes the basic DDR hit-the-right-buttons-at-the-right-time template and turns it into an amazingly addictive reflex-testing subconscious-evoking... thing.

I could go on and on about the games, the adventure titles are a throwback to my IF days, the plots are so solid and so interesting that you completely forgive the linearity of the game. There are also a lot of Serious Game titles to be found here, like Brain Age which 'activates your prefrontal cortex' daily with rapid math problems and Cooking Navi, which is basically an interactive cookbook with recipes by Japanese chefs from leading hotels. In a nutshell, the games are more tight than sprawling but there's plenty here to keep one occupied for hours.

And should that fail... there's always Homebrew.

Homebrew is the term used for programs and games whipped up by individuals for the DS. Because Nintendo keeps things open, with the right hardware, it's possible to load up your own home-made programs onto the DS. Some of these programs available online are pretty amazing as well. There's DSOrganize, which is a PDA-style program with a Calendar, To-do list, Web Browser and even IRC. Another one of note is NitroTracker which is a remarkably solid music tracker that utilizes the in-built mic to brilliant effect. There also has been a successful attempt at porting Linux over to the DS. Seriously, with the Wi-fi connectivity of the DS and the open-ness of its hardware and code, its only a matter of time before the DS gains the function of a rudimentary PDA.

Of course, being able to run Homebrew also means being able to run ROMs, the term popularly used to describe pirated games. Again, with the right hardware, getting new games is as easy as running a Google search and downloading the games into your device. Never again will you be stuck with one and only one game until you can save up to buy another one. With ROMs, you can play a new one everyday. For 24 hours. Before you have to purchase the original copy, you know, like the good citizen you are.

So, there you have it. The many reasons I bought the Nintendo DS and the many reasons why you should buy one too. Actually, ELITE BEAT AGENTS is already reason enough. But another one would be, if you have one, I'll give you my friend code and we can battle over Wi-fi.

Introduction

Shoreless Reviews blog is an individual project by Shazanah Hassan, a 22 year old female living in Singapore.

I aim to provide readers with a candid and entertaining but educated and comprehensive perspectives on various products and pieces of art. Although this blog focuses on films, music and books, it is not limited to these items and occasionally things like food, technological gadgets, websites, events and etc. are reviewed as well.