I Am Legend is the Worst. Show. Ever, beating out even Crank as the worst show I’ve watched in recent memory. Let me copy and paste the sypnosis from someplace so I don’t waste my time recounting that wasted 100 minutes.

Robert Neville is a brilliant scientist, but even he could not contain the terrible virus that was unstoppable, incurable…and manmade. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last human survivor in what is left of New York City…and maybe the world. But he is not alone. He is surrounded by “the infected”–victims of the plague who have mutated into carnivorous beings that can only exist in the dark and that will devour or infect anyone or anything in their path. For three years, Neville has spent his days scavenging for food and supplies and faithfully sending out radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. All the while, the infected lurk in the shadows, watching Neville’s every move, waiting for him to make a fatal mistake. Perhaps mankind’s last, best hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood. But his blood is also what the infected hunt, and Neville knows he is outnumbered and quickly running out of time.

Sounds pretty darn decent doesn’t it? This is the third movie I’ve fallen asleep in in my life and the 2nd one didn’t really count because I was re-watching it. The show starts with Will Smith as the lone survivor guy walking around in New York City doing stupid unfunny things like talking to non-living things and his dog. About half an hour later, I fell asleep and when I woke up at around the 65 minute mark (I looked at my watch), he was STILL WALKING AROUND doing the EXACT SAME THING. It’s like reality TV gone wrong.

Some time after I woke up (it was hard staying awake), some semblance of action began and his dog got killed by Killer Mutant Dogs. More repetition later, we see him saved by the Sole Surviving Mother and Her Kid who are later, predictably saved in return by our Sole Survivor Hero Dude who gives up his life. Mother and Kid find a small crowd of survivors and proclaim Hero dude a legend. The end. The events in this paragraph took up about 30 minutes of the movie.

Since the show’s headliner is every mom’s favorite squeaky clean black actor, there needs to be some morals embedded in the show. Cue the brief morality talk that implies that the hero guy idolises Bob Marley because he’s a) black and b) peace-loving. It’s of course, only appropriate and coincidental (not the film’s intentions to be stereotypical!) that the last man on earth HAPPENS to be a black cop and the damsel saved HAPPENS to be white and spouts lines like “We are his legacy” bla bla bla at the end of the show. Or that, at what might qualify as the epic moment in the show (which is about as epic as the show itself), Will Smith’s character faces off with mutated humans and tries to reason with them before blasting everyone to bits with a grenade (dare someone say ‘Suicide Bomber’?). All that is definitely not to provide racial contrast I’m sure.

I laugh in the face of critics like this one from Entertainment Weekly and this from Rolling Stone which gave it 75/100 scores. Take away Will Smith from the movie and it’s a 1 star movie. His celebrity - not his acting - adds an extra star. Boooooring.

I borrowed a friend’s 24″ uni yesterday. The same one I used to own before I sold it off to get my current 20″. Which means I now have, rather ridiculously, 4 unicycles at home (including the Impossible Wheel which really shouldn’t be considered a unicycle because you don’t really cycle on it).  And after riding the usual 5km route to work, I’m reminded of why I sold my uni to begin with.

It’s more advantageous riding a bigger wheel over distance than a smaller one because you don’t need to pedal as much to travel the same distance. Travelling up slopes is easier for the same reason why you’d switch to a lower gear on a regular mountain bike (that’s 2 wheels). Also, your ride tends to be less bumpy because your wheel is large enough to absorb the shock.

I’m using my own seat and post for the 24″ and at its minimum, my legs are at full stretch. Supposedly this is the ideal configuration so you won’t suffer cramps and knee aches. However, it seems that there’s extra pressure on the groin area because of the weight distribution and I seem to be feeling a lot more abrasion on my thighs. It’s more painful riding that 5km than it is to ride 40 on a 20″ and that’s definitely surprising. The uni has on 170mm cranks which are ideal for mountainous terrain (with possibly a lower seat post). For regular road riding, there’s waaay too much leg lifting involved and it’s plain uncomfortable. This would probably explain why I had skinnier legs when I still had my 24″. Interestingly, what caught me most by surprise was the stability of the uni at a standstill. It doesn’t feel as stable when I’m riding it possibly because my seat’s way too high but it’s rather effortless to pause and balance on it as compared to doing the same on a 20″.

I hope I can find my shorter (135mm) cranks  to use on the 24″. That would potentially solve the seat height problem, make distance riding slightly easier AND reduce leg lifts. Otherwise, the 80km rides this weekend would be a pain in the ass. Quite literally. I know the new uni I’m getting will come with 170s. I’ll be calling them up to request for shorter cranks in a while. Wish me luck.

I was looking through old photos because it’s fascinating (and yes, very narcissistic I know). I’ll explain the fascination in a bit.

Random facts of the pictures -

2003

- Freshmen year of uni; sleeping at 1am daily

- Living off 4 or 5 meals a day of a blend of home-cooked food and school (read: crappy) food.

- $10 haircut

2005

- Final year at uni. Bedtime is at 3-5am daily.

- Living off 3-4 meals a day of school food, instant food and whatever crap can be found at ungodly hours. And coffee. Lots of it.

- $30 haircut

2006

- Workplace is 100 minutes away from home. Clocking an average of 6 hours of full sleep a day and an additional 2-3 hours of naps on buses.

- Living off 5-7 meals a day of beautiful beautiful pizza, pastry, buffets and whatnots.

- $140 haircut + highlight job

Recent

- Sleeping an average of 7 hours a day

- Living off 3-4 meals that actually consist of both fruits and vegetables.

- $35 haircut

———————-

I think there’s a point to be made about the correlation between lack of sleep, improper diet and an increase in testosterone somewhere in the above.

I’ve been meaning to mention the new pets I have at home. My neighbor gave us three of the fluffiest hamsters ever. Two are white and one’s sandy and their hobbies include running around in their wheel, biting each others’ noses (and squeaking a hell lot), shitting and eating (sometimes both at once).

Their gender’s still a mystery though because they’re apparently not the slutty type and don’t show off their genitalia to me. My neighbor reckons that we’d find out soon enough once their instincts kick in and they start making babies.

It’d be easy to blame the rain. This week, I’ve registered 10km in jogging distance and another 10 in unicycling. Which is half of what I’ve planned but there was an excuse. Kinda. I had to do Christmas shopping and it did rain most evenings which made jogging a rather messy affair. That and the stairs-climbing that I got distracted by one rather cloudy evening. Still.

I don’t think I’m going to wait for my 29″ to arrive or the shop dude to call me up. I’m just going to do the qualifiers on a borrowed 24″ over the next weekend since there’s a 4 day break for me, given it’s New Year’s Eve on Monday and all.  My route would be going round this new 42km park connector that has a section located conveniently smack in front of my house. That’d cover about 84km which, in the weather these days, should more than satisfy the criterion set forth.  I’d have to do that 2 consecutive days.

Having never in my life cycled more than 40km (and ironically, I’ve never cycled even a quarter of that at a go on a bicycle), this should be pretty interesting to say the least.

I should bring along

- A camera

- Water

- A cap

- Sunscreen

- Some energy bars

- My mp3 player

- Some money for a cab in case I get tired or if it rains

I believe a distinct advantage of the route is that I can get a stopover at my house on the 2nd round for a water break, hence, saving me the need to bring along a lot of water.

I’m hopeful I can complete the ride in 8 hours given I’d take roughly an hour per 10km on my 20″.  Still, it’s good to have allowance time so I guess a good time to start out would be around 7am in the morning so I can finish my ride by dinner time.

Well, given I’m not exactly excited about going back to work on Wednesday (it’s a holiday season thing), this is something I’d be looking forward to. I think.

Ride report to follow thereafter.

Pardon the crappy camera phone.

Found at a beauty salon. Whatever that service is, it doesn’t make much sense in both English or Chinese.

Along with chewing gum, resting is an offence in some places apparently.

I like this poster best. It’s this huge advertisement (almost my height) for some clothing brand that gives you a hard-on that makes everyone around you celebrate. Even the occasional guy.

1. Cameras suck. Makes me nauseous, blocks the action, switches suddenly so I fall to my doom, can’t see anything.

2. Controls suck. Bart’s supposed to grapple hook objects. Can’t see the hooks, no prompts (and subsequently, you can’t attempt) to grapple EVEN when you’re in front of it. Same goes for shooting at enemies or objects. You need to be at a certain spot to be able to trigger the aim function.

3. The collecting game sucks. There are 4 playable characters in the game (Marge, Homer, Lisa, Bart) and 4 sets of tokens to collect. Very repetitive to go through the SAME OLD LEVELS AGAIN AND AGAIN.

4. Can’t skip cutscenes. You die. You repeat the level. You watch the same cutscene again. BORING.

5. Your partner is stupid. It’s meant as a co-op game. In 1-player mode, the AI follows you sometimes when you don’t want it to (eg. when you position it at a switch and run to a platform) and doesn’t follow you when you want it to (eg. when you run to an area and find out that the other character’s needed to open a door).

6. Weightless physics. You grab a crate and throw it. It bounces like a paper crate to somewhere you DON”T WANT IT TO BE.

BTW, Metacritic registers a 7.1 score for the game. The story’s funny, the visuals are good; I like how the characters mutter to themselves (with facial animation) funny lines every now and then. BUT I’d probably give it a 6.

One morning, my dad made breakfast. I thought I’d share the pic.

That’s butter by the way, not cheese.

After picking up Mass Effect from a friend en route to my hopefully-regular-from-now jogging routine, I lost interest in jogging (hey the ground was wet!) and decided instead to scale the stairs at the apartment building I live at. With the game in hand of course (because I’m too lazy to drop it off).

I’d get from ground to the tenth floor, walk down and repeat. I’ve now decided that that’s a great exercise routine for rainy weather and also a good warm down/warm up routine in addition to boring ol’ jogging (not that climbing the stairs is interesting or exciting, really). Also, I’ve heard that stairs are great exercise for your butt so in some months, I totally expect to be cracking walnuts with my ass cheeks instead of having them disappear between the folds of flab (I keep losing nuts like that!).

Someone just commented that I should do a documentary about my butt. It’d be epic I’m sure. The show, not my butt.

Why won’t the unicycle guy call?

There was this company function over the weekend at this local club where drinks flowed freely and we could bring a guest if we wanted to.

So today there’s this new thread in the company newsgroup about this mystery guy in the afro.

Post #1:

Does anyone know who was the guy with the afro??

Reply:

That guy must have hated me… I went pull his hair because I though it was a whig

1. I hate going through the same stupid ‘temple’ (read: dungeon) after every single mission to get at some area that was previously unaccessible to me because I didn’t have some tool.

2.  I hate going through abovementioned ‘temple’ with a time limit to (I’m assuming) induce excitement and having to repeat the motions FROM THE START if the time were to run out. Which doesn’t happen because the limit’s too generous. Which makes the timer redundant to begin with.

3.  I hate having my progress through the temple / dungeon / cave /assorted dark spooky places reset to the starting point each time I start my saved game. Or die for that matter. Because I could spend that 15 minutes fetching the same keys on more meaningful activities. Like buffing my nails.

4. I hate stupid storylines involving memory loss. It might be intentionally corny but it bores me.

5.  I hate how it takes 5 minutes to travel from island to island by ship (the ONLY way of travel for much of the game). It’s stupid and boring and the obstacles along the way are only there to stop you from putting the game down and going to the loo in that time. Oh, and your ship does the reset-to-beginning crap when you lose all your hearts too. Fun.

6. I hate the treasure-hunting minigame where you guide a mechanical claw to the depths of the sea to grab a treasure chest. Because if you lose all your hearts, not only do you NOT get the treasure, you’ve to go back to one of the islands, fix your claw, THEN spend time travelling to the same spot to try again.

Dear Me,

Stuff to do this week includes (please let the weather be good)…

- Unicycle 20km (that’s to and fro work on Mon, Tues or Fri)

-30km run (that’s 10km Mon, Tues, Fri or Sat)

- Shop for Christmas stuff

- Pay my bills

- Read a frickin’ book and be literate.

- Get well from flu

Please remember. Thanks.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

On the day my eyes feel 3 times bigger than they are because of the flu. And on the day I FORGOT to bring my running shoes home from work.