First World Problems

Subtitle: Shopping and Long Term Goal-Setting 
Sub-subtitle: Katrina Being Whiny

Today I had a day off work for study leave, however I spent this time shopping (at two different shopping centres) and I actually didn't study a single bit today, which makes me panic a little as exams are looming ever so closely. However I feel that scoring an internship with a multinational technology company and needing more business attire was an adequate excuse for dropping around $150 on new clothes. However, that makes me panic a little more as Christmas is coming up and I'm very much hoping I'll have enough money for awesome presents for everyone.

My philosophy when it comes to Christmas presents is "who doesn't need more cookies?" Today I saw a particularly nice tin of cookies in the local supermarket (it was large for one, and tastefully decorated in pastel colours instead of the usual garish designs associated with Christmas cookie tins) and mentally marked it for later purchase. I'm not sure who exactly I'll give the cookies to, but I don't know anyone who doesn't like cookies, so it could be anyone at all. In another shop (an upscale department store) I saw a huge clear jar of cookies (I'm talking HUGE jar, bigger than my head), which I think would look classy in any kitchen or pantry. I also saw many classy collections of jam (or jelly, for American readers!) I love jam, and one day hope to have some kind of jam business. I've been thinking of business names and logo designs. Perhaps when I retire I can become one of those old country ladies who make jam!

Anyway this brings me to the second topic of this blog post: my long term goals. At the moment the list looks like this (I've numbered them but really that's just so I can reference them in a later list, they are really in no particular chronological order):

1. Do some international travel (having a weekend away in a small Australian town is nice and all, but I'd really like to go overseas again)
2. Buy a home (i.e. not live with my parents forever)
3. Get married (but not just to anyone in general)
4. Have children (three would be nice)
5. Have a puppy (though there is contention as to which breed)
6. Be a really successful marketing executive (in FMCG food and beverage, or technology - such different industries but both with very unique challenges)
7. Finish my law degree (at this rate it is probably going to take ages)
8. Have my own business where I sell jam or baked goods. I'm on Etsy at the moment and notice quite a lack of Australian jam/baked goods sellers (and American sellers can't ship jam or baked goods to Australia, for obvious reasons, so I am using my marketing degree to notice a niche, however by the time I retire and set up my own business, a whole bunch of other people will have probably noticed this niche and filled it, or worse, over-saturated the market. Such is life). 

Now, I'm the kind of person who loves to make excuses, so here we go: 

1. Travelling costs money, and I don't have money.
2. Houses cost money, and I don't have money.
3. The timing of marriage is not completely within my control, and anyway weddings cost money...
4. Children cost money (and I'd rather have a house first, so the children and I have somewhere to live that doesn't involve taking advantage of my parents)
5. Puppies cost money (and not just the price of the puppy upfront - remember puppies need ongoing love, time, food, toys and medical treatment - this is just a side note - people should not impulse-buy a puppy!)
6. Well I have secured the above-mentioned internship with a multinational, household-name technology company so I could be on my way to a successful marketing career, and also on my way to having money with which to achieve my other goals, but I don't start working there for three weeks, and anyway I've just gone an spent all my current money on business clothes, and also I'm on exam leave right now so that's a week of pay missed out on.
7. My law degree is probably going to take much longer than anticipated as I'm moving to part-time study in order to work more, to develop my career and also earn money.
8. This goal is specifically for my retirement so I won't worry too much about it now. 

Yes I understand the irony in starting off a blog post with a recount of how much money I've spent on clothing, then moaning for the rest of the blog post about how I have no money with which to buy houses and puppies, when I understand that lots of people don't know where their next meal is coming from, or are unemployed or legitimately homeless (instead of living comfortably, albeit guiltily, with their parents). 

Oh, the woes of having to simultaneously balance tertiary education with employment, and the stresses of having so many wonderful people in one's life for whom to buy Christmas presents for!

Hopefully I will blog before Christmas time, to discuss (among other things) my upcoming weekend away, my birthday, and Christmas preparations (FOOD) so I will talk to you all again later! It would be interesting to know (if it's not too intrusive): what are your long-term goals and what's stopping you from achieving them now? Perhaps we can all work through this together!

The blog post where I review the Nintendo 3DS and Professor Layton

Hi everyone, hope you have all been well over the winter and avoided getting sick as much as possible!

Embarrassing fact: I haven't blogged in so long that I couldn't remember the URL to my own blog, so I tried to Google it, but my blog doesn't show up on Google for some reason, even when I type in the exact title of it (which I wasn't 100% sure that I completely remembered). I couldn't even remember what my blog was supposed to be about until I read the description (over on the right hand side column). So, I used to review Nintendos games. Now I think I might review a Nintendos product!

This winter I bought David a Nintendo 3DS because I'm pretty awesome like that. And also because I suspected that if I bought David a 3DS I could get his old, regular-type DS as a hand-me-down, a ploy which has totally worked. And also because I thought it might be cool to play Nintendogs in 3D (although I haven't gotten around to that yet because I'm still pretty attached to my 2D Nintendogs and I don't think I can handle another one at this point in time).

To go with the 3DS I also bought Street Fighter and Pokemon (I can't remember if it's Pokemon Black or Pokemon White). The Pokemon game came with a cool 3D Pokedex feature, which for the longest time, I used to call a "three-Pokemon-dexter". The best part of having a 3DS is probably having this 3D Pokedex, which regularly gets updated with new Pokemon. Anyway, moving on now (because I don't want to alienate any of you readers who aren't into the Pokemon franchise)...

One negative thing I'd have to say about the Nintendo 3DS is that it uses a different battery charger to the regular-type DS, which is of a minor inconvenience because both of us have regular-type DS chargers at home so no matter whose place we're staying at, there is never a problem with running out of battery. It's also different to the regular-type DS (that I'm used to) in that the power button, volume button, and stylus are all in different places. This means that I often randomly grope the side of the 3DS to get the stylus out. But I'm sure the men at Nintendo had their reasons for making these changes.

Another negative is that the 3D vision only works if your head is at exactly the right angle in relation to the screen, which means that if David is playing and I want to look over his shoulder, the display will be stuffed up and blurry for at least one of us. However this is mitigated by a handy function with which you can use to turn the 3D feature off.

The third negative is that there is a feature on the 3DS that takes a photo of your face and turns it into a Mii, which I initially thought was pretty cool, until it turned my photo into a really ugly Mii. But Miis don't resemble humans anyway, and I suspect that any person who actually gets a decent looking Mii out of it looks pretty freaky in real life!

Anyway the positive points are that the 3DS comes in a rather fetching electric blue cover and it provides us with hours of mobile entertainment.

On another note: I just played Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (Professor Layton 3) and I can't wait for the next instalment in this series! The story was quite moving, but I won't tell you in which parts exactly, because I know that not everybody enjoys spoilers as much as I do! I was pretty chuffed with myself because I managed to find every single puzzle in the game (in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I couldn't find every single puzzle and had to resort to Internet walkthroughs to find the last couple that I'd missed).

The Professor Layton storyline was impeccably well written and nicely balanced and interspersed with puzzles. I found the difficulty level of the puzzles to be quite good (challenging but not impossible to solve). The worst puzzles for me are the sliding puzzles, I have very poor spatial awareness and can't do things like read maps or tell my left from my right, but I found that even the spatial-type puzzles were easy to solve with Hints (I suppose I'm a little older than the target audience for these games though).

However, the puzzles were sometimes a bit repetitive in that many relied on the same kind of trick (e.g. the number 6 can be flipped upside down to become a 9, etc). But I must say that in this Professor Layton game there were fewer "gimmicky puzzles" than in either of the previous Professor Layton games (by 'gimmicky puzzle' I mean trick questions).

Anyway, hope you have enjoyed my reviews! Tell me what you thought of the 3DS or Professor Layton! Next blog post I might review some Xbox games like Portal or L. A Noire. Until then, peace out everybody!

Musings: on being a socially unacceptable height

Do you ever read a book and come across an innocuous phrase that completely jumps out at you and makes you realise something you never realised before? I was reading a book at Borders (making use of their lovely leather couches to read their books without purchasing them, of course - is this why they went into receivership?) and the phrase that jumped out at me was: "dancing cheek to cheek with my partner".

I've never danced cheek-to-cheek with my partner, or anyone, for that matter. I've danced with my cheek against my partner's solar plexus, but that's as high as it goes. I'm sure most of you have worked out why (because if you're reading this blog you probably know me in real life): it's because I'm 160 centimetres tall. That's 5'3", for all you Americanised readers!

Last night I was inspecting the sizing chart on a pair of stockings I'd purchased. I noted with some amusement that the sizes were "Medium", "Tall" and "Extra Tall". This company must have realised that no woman will buy a pair of stockings labelled "Short". But when I looked further into the sizing, I found:

• Medium = 170cm tall
• Tall = 175cm tall
• Extra Tall = 180cm tall

This means that I, at 160cm tall, would not actually purchase "Short" stockings (were such a thing to exist). No, "Short" stockings are for women who are 165cm tall! At 160cm, according to a natural extension of this sizing chart, you would be classified as "Extra Short". 

Now, this I don't mind. They are just labels, after all. Sticks and stones, and all of that. I know I'm short, and there's nothing I can do about it at this point in time, so it's just who I am and you can take it or leave it. But when society operates in a way that actively discriminates against short people, that's when I start to see red!

For example, studies have shown that the height of the average male CEO is significantly higher than the height of the average adult male. (I believe if you replace 'CEO' with 'American President' the statement is still true) Now, I'm not in a position right now to be considered for any CEO roles, and I definitely won't be becoming the President of the USA, but it riles me that a lack of height seems to severely disadvantage you. Researchers have attributed this phenomenon to the fact that people subconsciously find taller people to be better leaders and more authoritative, regardless of reality). And yes, perhaps being short is a bit more of a disadvantage for men than it is for women. At least short women can be considered "petite". But it's damn well hard to be intimidating when you're "petite", let me tell you. 

Speaking of "petite" brings me to another area in which short people are discriminated against. Clothing! It's nearing winter right now, and I have exactly zero pairs of trousers or jeans. For a couple of years now I have been wearing stockings (hence the stocking sizing guide referred to above) with my mini-dresses to combat winter, but I really feel that I want to invest in some work trousers, and a couple of pairs of casual jeans.

The problem? Any jeans that fit over my ample butt are way too long for my legs, coming several inches over my feet. "Oh, but you can always bring up the hems", people tell me. Well, if you knew me in high school, when I brought up the hem of my school uniform skirt with disastrous results (I sewed all the pleats closed), you'd know why I'm averse to purchasing clothes that I'll later need to alter. And don't get me started on the exorbitant fees tailors pay for clothing alteration; if a 5'8" woman doesn't need to pay that extra amount, I don't see why I have to!

When I'm a mother, one thing I'll definitely do is sign my daughters up for the local basketball team. Then, they can grow nice and tall, because all basketballers are tall! (I wish my mother had made me play basketball when I was little. I just found this factoid on the Internet: "the average height of a female basketball player is 5'10". Taller players are 6'4" while the shorter players are 5'7"". So even if my daughters inherit my short-genes, they could still grow to 5'7", which is significantly taller than I am.)

And if my daughters don't enjoy playing basketball, I'll simply show them my feet (deformed now, from years of wearing high heels) and say "you don't want to end up like me, do you? Because if you're short, you'll have to deal with a lifetime of painful blisters and calluses and dodgy ankle and knee joints, from wearing high heels every day". That should do the trick. 

At the end of the day though, whenever my feet are in pain from high heels, I feel thankful that I even have feet, at least. Being short is not the end of the world, and it is definitely not the worst thing that can be 'wrong' with you (for example, you could be a psychopath). Being short just makes you slightly less socially acceptable, but since when is becoming socially acceptable something to strive for? 

How I became a hardcore gamer!

The adventures of David, a hardcore video gamer, teaching Katrina, a n00b-type video gamer, how to play Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Katrina's perspective:

Previously, the only vidjo-games I ever played were on Nintendo consoles (such as the Wii and DS) as Nintendo has recently started to target 'casual gamers' (or, in hardcore-gamer speak: n00bs) with easier and mote intuitive control layouts. You may have already read my blog posts on Nintendogs and Scribblenauts, both on the DS - if not, you might want to read them here and here.

Besides these games, I have also played Pokemon (Diamond version), Professor Layton, and Super Mario Bros. On the Wii, I've played Wii Sports Resort, Super Mario Galaxy, and Wii Fit Plus, all very entertaining games (even the Wii Fit Plus, despite its endless anti-fat guilt trips).

Yesterday, David taught me how to play a Xbox 360 game - Call of Duty: Black Ops. Despite the fact that I sometimes erroneously refer to the game as "Spec Ops", I think I am pretty good. I have had Kill-to-Death ratios of over 1 (meaning that for every time I die, I also kill someone), however most of my KD ratios are around 0.2 to 0.5. We have been playing the game "Team Deathmatch" which I realised refers to the fact that the teams are competing in a death-match against each other - at first I believed that it was because my team was called "Team Deathmatch".

I have played against enemies on the 'recruit' level (meaning that the enemies are easy to defeat), and I think that the 'veteran' enemies should come much, much later. I already know which multi-player maps are the best (the ones where the environment is not all one colour, like Summit or Jungle - ideally I like the more colourful maps such as Nuketown, or at least the maps that feature a little more built environment), and I know that if I were to ever play against real people I should not reveal that I'm female, otherwise they'd demand to see boobs.

After learning Black Ops I think that combat games that involve killing people and just generally being super-competitive and aggressive are not my cup of tea. I much prefer games where you solve puzzles, train puppies, or work on your fitness. The Xbox console is not as user-friendly or intuitive as the Nintendo Wii or DS consoles. Many games have different controls to each other, which is quite cruel. The hardest things to learn are using the dual joystick controls, one which controls your movement, and one which controls your vision, but I am getting there!

The best part of Black Ops Multi-player is killing people and the worst part is getting killed yourself. Once I actually did kill myself by falling off a bridge. The most annoying deaths are the ones where you are standing off with an enemy, and they manage to kill you before you kill them (mostly because you have forgotten to reload your weapon after discharging all your ammunition into a point somewhere next to the enemy's knee). Other annoying deaths are the ones where you die unexpectedly, for example, if your killer was standing behind you, or was a sniper and was a long way away from you.

It's also pretty fun to experiment with the various face paints you can wear. However, Call of Duty: Black Ops does not give you the opportunity to play as a female character; something that most Nintendo games I have played allow. (Even Super Mario Bros. where you play as Mario - at least he is portly and stylised enough to pass off as non-gendered, despite the impressive moustache). All of the Black Ops avatars and enemy characters are testosterone-charged macho soldiers and therefore can be a little alienating to female players.

David's perspective:

I've been playing videogames for as long as I can remember; they were a big part of my childhood, and still eat up a lot of my free time. A lot of people consider videogames, particularly the "hardcore" or "violent" kind, to be the realm of male players, and "casual" games the domain of female gamers. This is a complete fallacy; 50% of gamers are female, and the disparity in preferred genre is near nil. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce Katrina to the "hardcore" videogame; as she mentioned above, Katrina has played plenty of DS and Wii games, and I felt it was time she graduated from these "casual" mediums, and moved onto something a little more intensive.

I thought the end goal of this experiment would be to foster an appreciation for the games that can really be considered art, games with plots rich in theme and meaning (like last year's brilliant Red Dead Redemption, or the cyberpunk classic Deus Ex), games that tell masterfully crafted epics and fairytales (like Mass Effect, or Majora's Mask). I realised however that these games weren't things that could be readily experienced like books or films. There's a lot of assumed knowledge in videogames, common practices, conventions and terminology, but most importantly controls; without understanding how to navigate a game, it would be impossible to appreciate. So our training began with a game lauded for its perfection of first-person shooter gameplay mechanics and control, an inherently popcorn experience, though one widely considered a pillar of the "hardcore" gaming experience: the Call of Duty franchise, more specifically Black Ops.

Introducing Katrina to the basic controls of an FPS, I realised that it is far more difficult to pick up a controller and start playing now than it ever was when I started gaming in my formative years. When I started playing shooters, they didn't exist on consoles; you played on a home computer, with a keyboard and mouse, controlling your avatar with the W, A, S and D keys, using the mouse to pan and control pitch (if such a feature was included - in early shooters the concept of vertical gameplay was entirely foreign, and you could look neither up nor down). There was no sprint key, no reload key, no alternate fire, no crouching, proning or diving, no picking up weapons, no grenades, no alternate grenades, no radar, no melee/knife attack. Furthermore, there was no great multitude of weapons, attachments and gadgets, nor the confusing process of character creation and modification. The modern-day shooter is the product of an evolutionary process, and gamers of my generation have had the fortune to be part each step of that process. We learnt piece by piece; Katrina had to learn it all on day one.

And learnt it all she did. The two-stick control system was certainly the greatest barrier to control mastery; it's not a particularly intuitive system, but in less than an hour Katrina was circle-strafing admirably. A couple of one-on-one rounds on Firing Range, and she was ready to fight some bots in Nuketown. A couple of matches later and she had a 1KD, (Kill to Death ratio) a very impressive score for a beginner.

While it was rewarding to see her playing competently so quickly, what really made me smile was the way she picked up the terminology and language of competitive gaming, a lingo I had been speaking since those first days of four-player GoldenEye on the N64. Whether she was scolding me for "stealing a kill", blaming a loss on slow reload, or lamenting a "spawn kill", Katrina was naturally developing an understanding of decade-old competitive gaming convention; it made me realise that gaming isn't just a cult hobby. It can be enjoyed by anyone who gives it a chance, and I found that very encouraging.

It will be a while before she's making a name for herself in New Vegas, lassoing bounties at the Hanging Rock or strategically dismembering Necromorphs, but I think this has been a greatly successful first step on a very exciting path.

A rant on bus etiquette

My main modes of transport are bus and boyfriend-taxi, since I live a 50 minute walk away from the nearest train station, and don't own a car.

Apart from the occasional trip with the boyfriend-taxi, I catch the bus to and from work, uni, the city, and my nearest shopping mall. That's four different locations, serviced by three different bus routes, available from two different bus stops near my house - gosh this sounds like The 12 Days of Christmas! I should have ended with "and one garish but very visible shade of lemon yellow" (in reference to the colour of the buses, if you didn't get that!).

On most long bus rides, I am that person who leans my head against the window and promptly falls asleep, often with my mouth hanging open. But other than being vaguely unpleasant and embarrassing to look at (and I don't think people have the duty to be good-looking while catching a bus!) I try to not interfere with the comfort of other bus riders.

For example, when I catch the bus, my teeth are brushed and I do not breathe my stinky breath over the poor passenger sitting in front of me. Some balding man sat behind me the other day, sighed, and I was instantly assaulted by a gust of stale, smelly air! I thought I would be able to tolerate this (even though this man seemed to sigh unnaturally frequently)... until a few bus stops later, when his friend got on the bus, sat next to him, and they promptly engaged in a conversation that lasted the entire trip. Every time this guy spoke, the same stale, smelly breath wafted over to my seat. By this time the bus had filled up and it was impossible to move seats.

The following day, this balding man took the seat directly in front of me! Stemming from the belief that his breath could travel backwards as well (since the bus moves forwards), I quickly changed seats before his friend came on and while empty seats were still available.

Secondly... when I catch the bus, I put my bag(s) on my lap or by my feet on the floor, if it's a peak-hour bus that I know will fill up! (If it's the midday bus that only ever fills up a third of the way, if that, then I'm a bit more lax.) And believe me, I catch enough buses, at different times of the day, on different routes, to be able to figure out these patterns.

The only thing worse than putting your bag on the seat next to you on a peak hour bus that will fill up... is putting your bag on the seat next to someone else! This morning, while I sat on the bus with my bag in my lap and an empty seat next to me, some man sat in the row behind me and plopped his backpack on the seat next to me (the seat in front of him). I felt like turning around and giving him a greasy but decided against it, since I'd have to be on the same bus as him for another hour.

I just kept quiet and thought to myself "great, now people are going to get on the bus and think I'm some inconsiderate fool who takes up seats that are meant for humans, with inanimate objects, like bags!" Never mind that I was on my way to work and therefore in business attire, so it would have been very incongruous for the grotty backpack next to me to actually belong to me. But sometimes people don't notice small details the way I do.

Anyway I can really only think of two rude things that I would never do on a bus, whereas I can think of three rude things that I routinely do on buses, so perhaps I am in actual fact, the rude passenger! The annoying/obnoxious things I sometimes engage in include:

• Carrying on a loud conversation with the person next to me (if they happen to be a friend or acquaintance)
• Engaging in public displays of affection with the person next to me (back in the day where David worked in the same area as I did, and we caught the bus in to work together)
• Carrying on a loud conversation on the phone, in an Asian accent (if I'm speaking to my parents)

So, in a shocking twist my rant on bus etiquette has ended with the revelation that *I* am the quintessential annoying bus passenger! (Maybe M. Night Shayamalan will adapt this blog post for his latest movie?)

Hmm... I would hereby like to issue an apology to any fellow bus riders I have been annoying to, especially that nice Indian lady who always smiles at me at the bus stop. But this apology does not extend to Smelly-Breath-Man or Grotty-Backpack-Man! You have felt my virtual wrath!

Peace out everybody!

A new direction for my blog?

Suggestions for new names for my blog are very welcome! I feel that the name I have right now isn't completely representative of my whole blog since not even the majority of my blog posts focus on food. For example there are blog posts about bedtime stories, video game reviews, and cryptozoology. David suggested the name "Katrina Wong's All-Purpose Blog" but I don't want my blog to sound like a hardware store.

I have toyed with the idea of taking this blog in the direction of... fashion! Okay, so I don't work in anything to do with fashion (at the moment I work in a software company, you don't get much further away from the fashion industry as that!) and most of the clothes I buy are on sale (because I'm Azn, yo... and also a student). BUT maybe that's the whole point! Maybe I can introduce the world to the joys of buying cheap clothes, and haggling to the death in countries that permit such things.

As a side note: tips for people who are considering going to Malaysia for the wonderfully cheap clothing...

• Always aim to pay no more 50% of what the vendor asks for
• Buying in bulk seems to work pretty well, in terms of reducing the price for ya. For this reason I have lots of dresses that are the same but in different colours.
• If you can get away with it (i.e. if you appear Asian, even the tiniest bit so), ham up the accent to seem more like a local, you will get much better prices than you would if they knew that you were a tourist from a relatively wealthy Western country
• Lots of clothes are sold in outdoor markets, which don't have fitting rooms, so heaps of the dresses are one-size-fits-all! Amaze! It's just a matter of cleverly inserting elastic into things, really.

Ahh, another digression!

I've been surfing the net and browsing all manner of fashion blogs for inspiration, but one thing that they all seem to share is a penchant for expensive fashion (I'm talking paying more than AUD$20 for a dress, so really, I mean "pretty affordable fashion but expensive by my cheap-ass standards"). But you don't HAVE to spend $20 on a dress! There are lots of good ones out there for $10! Perhaps I buy the occasional dress at full price for $24.95, but that's when I *really* can't wait until it's on sale. (Seriously I am so cheap that I didn't even buy a new dress for my 21st, instead I recycled the one I wore to my 19th, and hoped nobody would remember).

Edit: I have a guilty confession to make... I actually bought a dress for $29.50 yesterday. I was in Melbourne and took the opportunity to indulge in some proper shopping. Also, everything happened to be on sale anyway and I got this particular dress at 50% off, reduced from $59! So it was a bargain.

However, as much as I would like to start a fashion blog, I also have several hurdles to overcome:

• My wardrobe isn't the *most* interesting or stylish you'll ever see... Basically it's just a collection of dresses. I don't wear trousers because I'm a shorty and can never find trousers that I won't trip over in, and I don't seem to feel the cold as much as the average person does, so there isn't even much diversity in my wardrobe in terms of seasonal clothing. My winter wardrobe is essentially my summer wardrobe, with the addition of cardigans and tights.
• I don't have a whole bunch of fancy looking jewellery or accessories to complement my clothes. Last year we were the victims of an unfortunate incident of theft whereby my jewellery box got stolen. But I found the silver lining! Now I am finally able to do that thing that all the magazines say, that's it's best to have a small collection of classic, timeless pieces that will go with everything. So my jewellery collection is small but pretty classic and timeless, and I am trying to restrain myself from getting too many pieces of costume-type jewellery that isn't as versatile.
• I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of taking photos of myself and posting them up all over the world wide web for all the world to see. There are creepy people out there, including people who get creepy when the whole concept of photos-of-an-Asian-girl is involved.
• Even if I did get more comfortable with the idea of my photos on the web, I don't have a camera so as to be able to take said photos.
• Even if I did have a camera, I don't know how to do that thing where you get photos off the camera and on to the computer. Something to do with USB cables? Or Bluetooth? Though I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who do know how to do this, who wouldn't mind explaining the process to me.

Anyway maybe these are all excuses... maybe the world needs a fashion blog about affordable clothes that your everyday-Jane type of person can wear, as opposed to clothes that only uber-stylish people wear.

If anyone has any suggestions for a new name or direction for this blog please comment and let me know :)

GIRL V. FOOD

There is a show on TLC which I love (I only just discovered today that TLC was actually called "Travel Channel", to me it had always been TLC... hey, what's the L for? Is it the L in "Travel"? Weird).

Anyway, this show that I love is called... MAN V. FOOD!!! Check out the website here: http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Man_V_Food

If you are unfamiliar with the premise of the show, it's pretty basic: some guy travels around the US and participates in eating challenges, you know those ones that restaurants have, where, if you win, you get your photo on the Wall of Fame. The challenges might be volume challenges (e.g. eat 4kg of pancakes) or heat challenges (e.g. eating ghost chillies and other incredibly spicy things).

Anyway now I've decided that I want to have my own show, which pretty much follows this exact same premise, except I'm a girl, and I'll probably confine my travels to Australia. The show will (unimaginatively) be called... GIRL V. FOOD!!!

I've already begun some basic training for my new show, which I am not going to pitch to TV stations until I have everything down pat. For my volume challenge training, I ate a whole 4kg watermelon, but could only really finish half of it, so I re-scaled the challenge down to eating a whole half-watermelon. You see, with volume challenges you might think that it's, well, the volume of food that will getcha. You'd be wrong! What I couldn't stand when I did my challenge was the fact that every single mouthful tasted exactly the same and there was no variety at all! After eating about a quarter of the watermelon I felt like I was going into sugar shock from all the sweetness, so I had to cut it with some salty popcorn.

Anyway, my next volume challenge training session will involve me eating a whole butternut pumpkin... I'll update my blog when I've accomplished this!

For my heat challenge training, I ate a whole birds eye chilli (chopped up and with other foods), and a whole larger chilli (that isn't so hot) just by itself! Just bit into it like it was an apple! My goal is to work my way up, chilli by chilli, until one day I can eat like 10 birds eye chillies in one meal, THEN will I pitch my show.

A lot of people who have noticed that, as part of my training, I'm trying to eat a chilli with like every single meal, have said "but how can you enjoy the food when your mouth is totally burning?" My answer is... "It's not about enjoying the food! It's about beating the challenge and proving that I'm a man!! (Because it's the 21st century, come on, girls can assert their masculinity these days too!)"

On being Asian and eating alone

I'm Chinese-Malaysian, which means that for as long as I can remember, the words "eating" and "socialising" have been pretty much synonymous. You're considered to be very strange indeed if you do one without doing the other! None of this "we'll meet up for a measly coffee" type thing that Western people tend to be into, no, Asian friends will meet at a restaurant to partake in a banquet, then spend 15 minutes arguing loudly about who gets to pay the bill (I've seen many of these fights during my childhood and they're pretty funny in a 'they-would-be-more-funny-if-I-wasn't-actually-sitting-on-the-same-table-as-these-people' kind of way).

Anyway, today (after my exam finished and I had a couple of hours to kill by myself at a shopping centre before my partner finished work) I realised that I had to have lunch. So I spent a few minutes indulging myself in my favourite past-time, which is imagining all the lovely things I would eat (much more fun than actually eating those things, because my physical stomach has a limit, but my mental stomach is bottomless!)

I could go for sushi? Or maybe Indian? Or eat at a fancy cafe? Or Noodle Hut? Or just get something cheap at the food court?

Then I realised that all this imagining was actually making me pretty sad. Because I'd be eating lovely things, sure, but I'd be eating them all alone, and I kept picturing myself as a lonesome figure at a table for one, just generally being lonely. But why shouldn't it be considered acceptable to eat alone? I gave a little thought to this then concluded; it's because eating is embarrassing, and when you're doing something embarrassing, you generally don't want to be the only one doing that embarrassing thing. And believe me, the way I eat is pretty embarrassing because it generally involves spilling a lot of food onto my clothes, and getting sauce all over my face and even sometimes in my hair.

But yes, in the end I ate alone. I finished Good Omens while nomming on a chicken wrap with spicy sauce, and it was generally an okay experience, except the wrap was pretty spicy indeed (once I ate a whole birds eye chilli, but that story doesn't belong here...). So I concluded that, contrary to popular belief and conventional wisdom and Asian sensibilities, it's cool to take up a whole table meant for four people with your little lonesome self.

Nintendogs review!

People who used to follow my blog back in 2009-2010 (I believe this is a grand total of three people, including my boyfriend, who only read my blog because I made him), would remember that I reviewed the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts. (I would put in some cool hyperlink over the word "Scribblenauts" that would take you to the relevant blog post, but I'm frankly not tech-savvy enough for that kind of thing yet.)

Today I'm reviewing another Nintendo DS game... Nintendogs!

The version I have is "Labrador and Friends" and the breeds of puppy available include the Toy Poodle, Schnauzer, German Shepherd, Shiba Inu, Corgi, and some other breeds that I can't remember because I didn't find them particularly cute, at least not in pixelated version (in real life all puppies are cute). I've included an image of the game's cover to the right so you can have a look at other breeds available.

If you get lots of "trainer points" (for being nice to your puppy and remembering to feed it and take it on walks and enter it into competitions), the "kennel" will get in "new breeds of puppy". So far I have unlocked two new breeds, the Pug and the Shih Tzu. Both breeds are pretty cute.

I believe you can have a total of three puppies in your house at a time, and there is always the "Dog Hotel" you can send your puppies to if you find that they are too much to handle. See, Nintendogs operate in real-time, meaning that if you feed your puppy, turn off your DS, then don't play again until two days later, your puppy will be starving. This real-time aspect kind of turned me off at first; I had a bit of an "I don't have time to be playing this every day!" sort of attitude. But really, nothing too drastic happens if you leave your puppy alone for like months on end, as I have done. (It's not like the Tamagotchis we all had in primary school, which got banned from schools because if you left them alone for like six hours, they would die.)

The game advises you that if your puppy feels neglected they will run away, but this has not happened to me yet, so I suspect it's just an empty threat. Anyway the aforementioned "Dog Hotel" is a handy way of effectively 'freezing' your puppy's hunger and thirst statuses if you need to take a break from your DS for a long time.

I currently have three Nintendogs, and at the risk of sounding like a boring mother who won't talk about anything except her children, I'll give you a quick summary of my puppies:

• Henry is a tan coloured Shiba Inu (I actually want a Shiba Inu in real life!) who is very good at Agility Competitions, fairly good at Disc Competitions and pretty bad at Obedience Competitions because under all that agility he is actually a pretty naughty and hard to train puppy.
• Lucy is a white Toy Poodle who is pretty good at everything. She is also quite friendly.
• Batman is a black Pug who annoyed me from the very beginning because of his refusal to wear his ribbon as a bow tie. Ribbons are "Accessories" you can purchase to pimp up your puppy, and generally speaking, boy dogs wear their ribbons as a bow tie, and girl dogs wear their ribbons on their head. The whole point of purchasing Batman the pug was so that he could actually look like Batman the superhero (I had a vision that he would be entirely black, then wear this yellow bow tie, geddit?) But Batman the pug had other ideas in mind and preferred to wear his ribbons on his head. I have absolutely no problem with this subversion of puppy-gender roles, but, you know, he doesn't look like Batman the superhero.

None of my puppies are particularly good at Obedience because I find obedience training incredibly banal and boring because it's so repetitive! Even teaching the puppies their name is painful. Not to mention embarrassing, if you happen to be doing this in earshot of anyone.

Competing is the only real way of earning money in Nintendogs, which you need in order to buy puppy food, water, milk, treats, shampoo, brushes, and other puppy essentials. However if you're no good with the competitions there is another way to not-starve, and that is by taking your puppy on frequent walks (they can go on as many walks in a day as long as they take a 30 minute break between each one) and selling the items that puppy will find along the way. Preeeety cheap-ass.

Hmm, that's really all I have to say on Nintendogs, so I'll just end this game review with a bunch of random ratings of arbitrary salient points...

• "Gameplay" (not really sure what this means except perhaps the degree to which actually playing the game is fun and challenging) - 8/10
• "Visuals" - 7/10 (it's pretty pixelated and the competition commentators always look like Bill Gates)
• "Sound" - 5/10 (the music played in the competitions is pretty boring... until you get to the Championship level! Then it plays cowboy music. Other than that the constant yapping of the digitalised puppies gets a bit grating sometimes)
• "Plot" - 2/10 (there is no real plot to this game because it's meant to be a "slice of life" kind of storyline... just going through the daily motions of walking and feeding your puppy, bathing it, and entering it into competitions)
• "Replayability" (my gamer boyfriend tells me this refers to the ability to replay the game and still find it interesting after you've finished it the first time) - 10/10. Nintendogs does not really end because you can always start fresh with new puppies. Also, there are always new items and accessories to collect, and surprisingly, the other characters in the game have not yet run out of stock things to say to me when we meet whilst taking our respective puppies for walks.

In conclusion, Nintendogs is a very entertaining and even addictive game for anyone who likes basic gameplay and a proliferation of puppies. It's a tiny bit Tamagotchi but with the added bonus that your Nintendog cannot die. Highly recommend!

On allergies

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. It has certainly been awhile since I've updated! I hope you have all had lovely New Year celebrations and are looking forward to 2011 as much as I am!

I have not been blogging for awhile, having mistakenly believed that my Blogger account had been inactivated because I signed up for it using my old work email address. However, something-or-other happened and it turns out that I can still use my blog! Perhaps my old self foresaw that one day I would leave my place of work and therefore not be able to use that email address anymore, and cleverly linked this blog to my personal address. Or perhaps the whole signing-up-for-this-blog-with-my-work-address memory was a false one and I'd used my personal email address all along. But I digress. Sorry to bore you with my computer-ineptitude!

The topic ripe for discussion today is allergies. Do you have any allergies? For the past 20 years of my life I had believed I was some kind of supergirl who had absolutely no allergies except for a slight intolerance to lactose (being Azn, yo). Allergies were just another thing I thought could happen to other people, but never to me, no! I am very thankful that I can eat peanuts and gluten and other things that I often take for granted but could make other people incredibly ill. (I do love cheese, but cheese, being a dairy food, does not love me back, stupid cheese, I hate you! No just kidding, srsly, I love cheese).

I think that if you are allergic or intolerant to something your body should automatically develop an aversion to it, but alas, that doesn't often seem to be the case. Life would be a tiny bit easier if I didn't love cheese so much. My partner's dog is allergic to chicken but loves to sneak a small piece. My father used to break out in hives every time he ate seafood but loved it anyway and kept eating it until the allergic reaction surfaced no more. But there are other allergies which actually worsen after repeated exposures; I've heard that allergies to bee stings get worse with each progressive one (and I am also very thankful that so far no bee has ever stung me).

Anyway in the short space of about a week I discovered that perhaps I have two allergies. Neither allergy has to do with foodstuffs, so that's good at least (I would hate to be allergic to blueberries, or tea!). I had always considered it normal for mosquito bites to flare up into huge blisters since that has always been my experience, but apparently that's not the case... Apparently mosquito bites are only supposed to be small lumps. Well, how about that. After having a lovely night in Leura last weekend, watching a professional production of Romeo and Juliet in the park at night, I emerged covered with mosquito bites which I suppose I deserved, having worn a dress and not bothered with mosquito repellent and all. And then it was suggested to me that perhaps I had an allergy. The things you learn.

On the same weekend as this mosquito attack, I somehow developed an inability to wear my earrings because my earlobe piercings were a bit painful and perhaps bleeding a little, despite the fact that I've had my ears pierced for about ten years now. They are in the habit of bleeding every now and again which I just considered normal, perhaps I wasn't disinfecting my earrings as carefully as I should be. But then my partner suggested to me that this was not normal and perhaps I was allergic to a certain metal in earrings? I recalled an incident from my childhood which involved my drinking from a can of Coke (I'm no longer in the habit of drinking soft drinks), and getting a rash all over my hand from where I was holding the Coke can. I recall that my father may have said something about having an allergy to aluminium.

But sometimes it's just easier to live in denial. Even though my ears are still painful and my mosquito bites still blistery, I'd still like to think of myself as allergy-free, at least until it's confirmed in a medical setting or something. And while there isn't much I can do about my love for cheese, perhaps I can express said love in a different way, for example, by participating in those races where you roll a wheel of cheese down a hill? That would probably cause fewer problems for me than if I actually ingested the cheese.

Anyway I will leave you all for today, with that final thought of cheese-wheel races.