Music Monday - Woo-Sah

I'm a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series, so featuring this song is inevitable. The soundtracks to the various games are superb, and all crafted by a woman by the name of Yoko Shimomura, lending a certain constant quality to each game. Of all the songs, though, my favourite has to be "Dearly Beloved," the home screen background music of each game.

Why do I love it so much? With the very first chord I am instantly relaxed. My shoulders drop, my lungs heave a soft sigh, I close my eyes and let all the tension leave me.

It's something I need every now and again, as I'm a rather emotionally closed person (comes with being a Green!). I bottle emotions up, and music is my most favoured form of relaxation. That's the reason I have a 'down tempo' playlist on my iPod, with five different versions of this particular song. I admit, I'm a little obsessed, but you will be to after giving it a listen!

Below are the two versions from Kingdom Hearts II, probably my favourites, but I love all the versions for different reasons. Enjoy!

Rediscovered Pleasures

The other day my sister voiced her longing desire to play the Sims for PS2, a game she thought her boyfriend had lost. Almost immediately after the words left he mouth, I quipped that the disc was in the CD binder with all the other game discs. Of course, she didn't believe me. Long story short, I was right, and we've been playing the Sims for a few days now.

If you don't know, the Sims is an Electronic Arts property based on guiding a single person or multiple people, called Sims, through life. I don't really care for that part though. What I enjoy is the short part that comes before you take over the role of god: building and furnishing the house.

I love building things. This love probably resulted from a childhood filled to bursting with Lego, but that's another story.

Architecture and building design in particular have special places in my heart. When the family takes a trip to France or the Czech Republic and tours around the old castles, I'm not reading the information panels on local history. No, I'm staring at the walls and ceilings and staircases and the entire built form of whatever it is we're visiting. I guess that's why I've started to lean toward urban planning and community design as a career path.

I also have a casual interest in interior design, the way spaces are made and composed. A good portion of my high school years involved back-to-back episodes of Trading Spaces and While You Were Out, two design shows that were television and cultural phenomena in their day the same way cakes and cupcakes are now (I still don't understand that).

Again, long story short, I now have a design itch. I want a house to put things in. I want an unlimited budget, or unlimited time and skill to DIY anything and everything. I want to be a greater part of consumptive society!

That, or I want the first couple seasons on Trading Spaces on DVD.

both photos by Andrew Dupont

a Few More of those Favourite Things

Haven't posted any "real" blog stuff in a while, so I might as well do a list post. Here's what's keeping me going right meow:

Tim Horton's coffee and donuts are a Canadian staple. I love my double-doubles, sour cream glazed, chocolate glazed, maple dips, and turkey clubs. Unfortunately I can't get those in Singapore. I'm trying to do the math on how many Tim Bits (donut holes) I'll need to buy in Vancouver for my flight to Shanghai.

McDonald's Dollar Drink Days are one of the first signs of summer. As terrible as it may be, I love going into the drive-thru and coming out with a large Diet Coke for a little bit of spare change. I'm in at least four times a week. I may have an addiction.

Adele, particularly her song Rolling in the Deep, is one of my go-to summer playlist favourites. Even better are the amount of great covers of her material, so I can have multiples of the same song on my playlist and sing to each one. Also, I finally figured out what all the background singers' lines are. Victory!

Roller Coaster Tycoon became one of my favourite games the moment I started playing it. I recently reinstalled it on my family PC and have been glued to that machine ever since. My only problem is that I tend to make the rides "too intense" so no-one will go on them. Boo on you, wussy AI.

Living on an island and being able to hit the beach and the fact that it is finally hot outside. I love beach combing, suntanning, swimming, having bonfires, and all that good outdoor summer seaside stuff. Thankfully my next move will be to a tropical island. I might have plotted this in advance.



images by flamster2468, StayProud, jprice325, Mike Overall, and me

the Gaming Post

My main game right now is Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Now, I'm one of the many addicts of this franchise, and I know this. Heck, I bought a PSP for the sole purpose of playing this game. Dissidia Final Fantasy was just a nice coincidence. What I'm loving about KH:BBS is the fact that I don't have to play as Sora or Roxas! There are adult characters! RAD.

That said, my addiction to the franchise is forcing me to take forever to actually finish the game. I'm doing all the side quest things, getting all the weapons and abilities. Y'know the drill. I'm unsure why I bother, though, especially when I'm rewarded with a weapon that looks like the most epic sundae ever. Not that effective, either, as you probably guessed.

Besides that, I've also been playing Soul Calibur 2 casually. One of my roommates brought his Game Cube down, so we fight it out every now and again. Fortunately we're evenly matched, between my frantic button mashing and his attempts to correctly input combo sequences. As a note: long combos tend to not work when your opponent is flailing beside you.

I've also become a big time mobile gamer, now that I've got an iPod Touch and an Android at hand (no pun intended, sorry). While Angry Birds is a paid app on the iPod, it's free on Android. I've got both, but I've been playing the holiday editions on my HTC quite a lot, especially the Halloween one.

On the iPod I'm mostly playing Cut the Rope, and adorably rad and addictive game that's super easy to pick up. I had beaten it once already, but updating the firmware on my iPod erased all that data, so I've been working through it again. No complaints, though. I live to see Omnom make his candy quota.

Back to my Droid. Remember my Kingdom Hearts addiction? Guess what. I installed a Gameboy Advance emulator on my Desire Z, so now I'm playing through KH:Chain of Memories for real. Previously I just wussed out and bought the two volume manga to get me up to speed before playing KH:358/2 Days. Gotta love the power of Androids!

Finally, but not on the mobile gaming front, I'm waiting on Battle Engine Aquila to arrive in my mailbox. It's an obscure Playstation 2/XBox/PC game that I adore above all others. I had it for XBox previously, but my console and games were stolen a year or so back. Figured it was time to fork out for a PS2 copy, a whole $8 including shipping. Yah, really breaking into my savings, eh?
photos by: Square Enix & Disney, Namco, Rovio, Chillingo, and Atari.

Still Alive, I Swear

A couple weeks ago, Bell bought out my contract and upgraded me to a smarphone plan, complete with smartphone. What does this mean? It means that I'm not the very proud (and slightly giddy) owner of an HTC Desire Z! It does everything a phone should do and then some; it even has a GAMEBOY EMULATOR, which means I've been using it as a Gameboy more than I've been using it as a phone. Heh.

Other happenings in the world of me? It's officially reading week now, so I don't have classes next week. So instead of shuffling around here in the snow, I'm heading down to Mexico for a few days to get one of those things they call a tan, on these things called "beaches" that are covered in sand. They don't even have snow, why do they need sand? Huh.

photos by HTC and me.

Making Connections - Molly Millions & Quorra

Being a university student with some background in Literature and focusing on Culture Studies, I'm accustomed to making connections between and among texts. For instance, the character of Molly Millions in Gibson's novel Neuromancer. In his vision of the cyberpunk future, she is the definition of a femme fatale, a former prostitute turned "Razorgirl," a cyber-samurai if you will.

Of course, the only representation of Molly is on the cover of the novel, where we only see her face. The descriptions in the various books she appears in, though, have allowed fans to conjure a likeness that is more-or-less accepted.  Anyway, Neuromancer is one of those novels that influenced a great many things. Heck, it included the internet before it even existed (Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" himself).

Enter the world of Tron, a community existing within a computer system. The parallels between the Tron franchise and classic cyberpunk are quite apparent. I'd like to look at the character of Quorra, though: she's the Molly Millions of the film. Her appearance is similar, her fighting skills are similar, and she, too, is taught amidst an Asian-inspired aesthetic. Huh.


art by deadinsane, Neuromancer cover art (c) Ace 1984, Tron: Legacy movie still (c) Walt Disney Pictures