Well, this is certainly annoying

» Written on February 2, 2007 at 9:02 PM «

I haven’t actually made good on my promise to bring a second update forthcoming, but as I will now lamely attempt to rationalize and explain, it was unavoidable, though I consider it still unforgivable. I’ll get to that later. First, let’s go back to where I was; the Asean Football Championship match between Singapore and Thailand. For those of you twiddling your thumbs over your keyboard in lands spanning the globe out of Asia (Or South-east Asia, for that matter) will probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

Let’s begin, shall we?

I promptly arrived at the train station nearest to the stadium to meet up with two pals who were also going to the match at around 1830 hours. The place, as I had predicted, was already filling up, with red-clad supporters around the area being told to wait outside the station instead of clamouring about inside. Linus and Lester (yeah, twins) eventually arrived, albeit slightly late, upon which we went to grab ourselves a quick dinner and promptly hopped into Linus’s dad’s car (His dad came down to give us a lift) for a quick drive off to the stadium.

Once we got there, problems ensued with water bottles and such (we’re not allowed to bring them into the stadium as they’re worried about them being used as ‘missiles’ against the players), but I managed to sneak in 2 bottles to avoid the exorbitant cost of the mineral water that they were selling there. (2 fucking dollars for a cup of water is a fucking rip-off, and they should be ashamed of themselves for so blatantly selling out) This was the last-ever match that would be played at the National Stadium, however, and I guess I thought it’d be an interesting experience. Naturally, my bag had the D50 in it, along with my telephoto and brand-new flash unit. I opted not to bring along a tripod or my kit lens, both to relieve weight and to see just how fantastic my 50mm prime lens was.

The match, well, if you read the news reports, you’d know that it didn’t exactly go very well, though my country still managed to squeeze a favourable result in the end. 2 – 1, through a controversially-awarded penalty and after a dramatic walk-out by the Thai players, which still kind of pisses me off. So much for being professional players from a vibrant and wonderful culture.

The match supporters (yes, my own country’s flesh and blood-filled scumbags), on the other hand, are really the highlight of my experience, and when I say highlight, understand that in actuality, they’re actually quite fucking amazing in terms of managing to almost piss the living daylights out of me. It’s really disgusting, almost revolting to watch them at work. Spiff seems to think otherwise, but he’s crazy, so I guess that’s a moot point right there.

Anyway, they were really fucked up. Throughout the whole match, they were basically chanting vulgarities without regard for others who might actually want to watch a match and not a racial slur contest. And I’m not exaggerating; the whole fucking stadium was chanting along, booing at just about fucking everything, the Thai players, the referee, heck, even the Singaporean players were booed at. It seemed as if whenever the ball wasn’t in motion, the supporters would immediately interpret that as time-wasting and start yelling all sorts of stuff that I refuse to reproduce in written or typed format. Basically, understand that it was a very, very nauseating experience for me, and I had half a mind at times to just walk out of the stadium. Especially when things like biscuits, crumbs of bread and even fucking water started raining down from above. For fuck’s sake, I have a camera! Is there some sort of rule, perhaps, where things thrown would somehow give your team an advantage?

Even more ironic is the fact that when the supporters booed the Thais while they were singing their national anthem (Seriously, what the fuck? They should have just opened fire on any fucking retard who dared open his goddamn mouth while the players were singing their national anthem), I was thinking, well, at least they’ll shut the fuck up when singing our own anthem. Guess what? When it was our turn, it was all I could to stop myself from laughing as I watched countless grown men and women falter at singing our very own national anthem, forgetting lines, phrases and even the damn tune, in their ownfucking language.

Honestly, I could understand if you don’t sing your national anthem because you forgot how to. I can’t understand how you manage to distort a single song of pride into a complete farce, as if it were something you sing along to at a karaoke. It was both amusing and saddening to actually witness. In fact (and I quote), “How do you sing the anthem again arh?” (sic)

Sometimes I wish my D50 could record audio to go along with its pixels. At least I got to give my telephoto a workout, and it was interesting, to say the least, how it performed under the weak lighting conditions. While I perhaps don’t have stop-motion shots, I did manage to capture a few gems.

Such as this one.

DSC_0071

Anyway, for the full album of shots, it also marks something significant; I’m switching from Photobucket to CNET’s Webshots for my event photo dump., which I’ve been planning to do so for some time. Yes, their downloadable software looks like a piece of crap, but at least it offers me a much better and quicker way to batch-upload my photos, so I guess it’s not all bad. It’ll make my uploading and photo management much, much easier, in any case, and Photobucket has gone to hell anyway, even with their recent overhaul of their website. I’m not sure if I’ll be re-uploading all my previous albums over to Webshots though; I would really like to, but I doubt I’ll have the time or patience to.

You may have heard that Adobe Lightroom has finally gone commercial, out of its beta stage, and as such, I expect that this will be the last album I process with said application, unless I somehow manage to get my hands on it. Truth be told, I can’t really see what new stuff they’ve added to the application for commercial release, but I guess a product is a product. At the moment, my beta license hasn’t expired yet, but I expect Adobe to pull the plug pretty soon.

And while I’m on the subject of photos here, my Flickr webstream has finally hit the 100 mark, which I thought I never would hit before shutting my account down. This also brings the thought of ordering some Moo mini cards back into my head.

Also, Flickr hacks are fun. Observe.

sonictk. Get yours at bighugelabs.com/flickr

I think I’ll have a lot more on my plate in the days to come. Also, remember Processing and Scriptographer? I’m going to be working on that pretty soon, as soon as I get my own knowledge of its Java functions up to scratch.

And as for why this post was delayed and still seems lacking in terms of its promised content, let’s just say that Friday wasn’t a very good day for me thanks to an incompetent education system, and that I have two tests on Monday and Tuesday, followed by a class test prepared so lovingly by our Chemistry tutor, who appears to think that anyone who didn’t manage to score an A or B grade can handle a fuckload of additional work.

   

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