Excuse the horrible language right there, though; I’m currently rather busy with other endeavours at the moment. I’ll try to explain in a few days, but even that’s looking mighty unlikely. I’ll see.

I must say, though, it has been a rough couple of months. I was recently involved in my Army Open House held at Pasir Laba Camp from the 3rd to the 7th of September, which preparations required me to (finally!) get out of my normal holding area in Sungei Gedong camp and over to the much-more inhabitable world of the School of Infantry Specialists.

Well, at least outside of the school, at any rate. Anyway, long Army rant ahead, so yea, if you want the really juicy bit, scroll all the way down.It was a pretty goddamn crazy two months (and even now I still have to settle some retarded issues related to the fallout from its less-than-stellar ending which I’ll elaborate on later) and I’m sure I can even describe all of it without getting charged with breaching some retarded SAF Act or other.

Which is why I’m going to attempt to give as detailed a summary as is possible with mere words. It’s feeble, I know, but this story must be told.

Where to begin? At the start, no less.

So anyway, basically it all began when mon capitan from my depot called me and another driver into his office and asked us to volunteer for the Army Open House event. As we’re kind of short-staffed on drivers (or vehicle operators, as they like to glorify it) and none of the new drivers had anything approaching what we’d call experience, the experience necessary to survive in the harsh/hostile (humid?) environment of the outfield, both of us would have to go.

Now I was apprehensive about this. For one thing, I wasn’t sure whether this gig would be a stay-in/out tasking, which would mean that I would to have, for the first time since my Basic, stay inside a goddamned camp overnight for more than 48 hours consecutively. Additionally, the Army Open House has not had a very proud tradition of being awesome for the little people, meaning, us.

But really, there was little choice in the matter. I could not, in good conscience (I didn’t know I had one, incidentally), send out my understudy to drive vehicles for which he had little experience in and shown already to be extremely reckless in. It would not be so.

Therefore it wasn’t.

The Army Open House was not designed to be an actual representation of our Army. It was designed to be pretty. It was also designed to appeal to the big shots who would be dropping down to support our 3rd-generation force. For all intents and purposes, it was like staging a photographic portrait shoot for a model, only with tracked vehicles, choppers, guns, small arms and lots of green uniforms.

Unfortunately, the designers were them. You know who I’m talking about.

The kind of people who, during the photo shoot, will constantly bitch and whine about every single fucking detail that the photographer has already taken into account (and deemed irrelevant, I might add), will change their minds according to something as prosaic as the weather, ‘Oh, let’s have that prop over there instead’, causing a clusterfuck as the photographer has to reposition the elements in question, recheck the lighting and shadows and basically waste a fuck-ton of his time. Oh, and they have absolutely no idea what the fuck they’re talking about, or even where the shutter release is on a camera.

Now replace ‘people’ with ‘people wearing stripes’, ‘bitch and whine’ with ’shouting and screaming’, this whole photo shoot with a Combat Safari (I shit you not, that’s the exact name they used) and you should have a pretty clear picture by now of what the experience for us was mostly like.

My part in the event would consist basically of driving visitors around a pre-determined course in the jungle, where they would get to ‘engage’ targets with, for my vehicle type, a FN MAG. They’d be using blanks, and while I imagine they probably enjoyed themselves a little, I can’t really say the same for me or my vehicle commander, who would be standing in the turret cupola and trying his darned best not to fall asleep from boredom.

It wasn’t all bad, though. It was stay-out, thank fucking God. And our direct superiors for the event were pretty cool people (though they were honestly fucking lazy and more than willing to push their work onto each other). It was pretty sweet to drive outfield, on your 10th round, look up at the turret cupola and see your vehicle commander reading Sherlock Holmes. Pretty fucking boss, if I do say so myself. If only he was allowed to smoke a pipe and wear a paperboy cap instead of those goddamned CVC helmets.

On retrospect, though, it was a pretty good thing HQ Armour requested our presence (my driver and I are actually attached to a maintenance depot, but we’re still technically part of the Armour division) for the event, because everyone pretty much had no fucking clue what you need to do when you have vehicles going outfield. Especially our vehicles.

I mean, when an ‘Engine Pressure’ warning light comes on, do you really need to ask whether the vehicle can still keep going? Even better, when the ‘STOP ENGINE’ and ‘CHECK ENGINE’ lights go on, do you ask whether the vehicle can make it until the end of the day?

And don’t get me started on the other issues, like diesel. It’s almost as if they think tanks/APCs can function on the pure willpower of the driver. I even saw a sergeant get yelled at while guiding a vehicle because he apparently wasn’t’ using the proper hand signals’ with a glow stick at night. (There are no official signals for glow stick guiding, by the way: we’re supposed to use torchlights.)

We even got our lieutenant in a spot of trouble when our vehicle ran low on engine oil. (Yea, we got the ENG PRESS light of death as well and a crappy transmission to match) They kept questioning him why we didn’t perform Before Operation Service on the vehicle in the morning, which would have prevented this problem. I didn’t bother telling them that there’s really no point in checking whether you’re low on oil if you have no fucking oil.

(The oil ended up being drawn from our tech store back in Sungei Gedong.)

I think the most telling part of this whole sorry exercise, though, was the resulting chaos when one of the Bionix (BX) vehicles threw a track during the actual event.

(Basically, tracked vehicles don’t function the same way as a wheeled vehicle does. Instead of wheels, sprocket wheels much like gears act as the final drives. The teeth of the sprocket wheel hooks onto the track links, and the tracks move the vehicle forward. When the vehicle throws a single track link, the entire track will pretty much unravel and shoot off sometimes, which can be pretty exciting if someone’s standing directly behind/forward of the vehicle. You pretty much have a 50/50 chance of getting a Bruce Lee-punch of track in the chest.)

The entire command area went berserk, making frantic calls over the radio for the maintenance team, yelling at the driver for going too fast (keep in mind this was at a 90-degree tight turn and thus his speed was probably less than 5 km/h at the time the vehicle threw the track) and from the way they acted in general, you’d think that a bomb had gone off.

Anyway, that’s not really the point. Until this moment, the entire open house had not really mentioned the service and support side of the Army, the side that really keeps the entire armoured division going. Well, when I saw my sergeant finally earn his pay as he set about re-connecting the vehicle track, all I could really think of was maintenance represente!

And that’s the problem here. It took a downed vehicle to finally get our open house, of all things, to finally admit, grudgingly, that sometimes, it’s not all about spit-and-shine on boots that matters. That sometimes, painting vehicles that are about to go outfield to eat dust is not really the Army. That, really, it’s the minor NCOs that form the backbone of the armed forces, and not the stripes/officers.

That, just maybe, our Army isn’t really all as cracked up as it’s touted to be.

(Also that a 3G moniker that they’re applying to everything is fucking retarded. Who the fuck even came up with that?)

This story isn’t over yet, though. Not by a long shot.

On the final run of the last day, there were only a couple of public visitors left to go for the joyride. A couple of lieutenants from command decided that they might as well have a ride in one of the LSVs (Light Strike Vehicles), which is essentially a car with a rollcage for its upper body and nothing else. One of them was from my platoon in Basic.

When my turn came to proceed on the final run, I made all of a klick before the warning from one of the marshal stations where the road meets jungle came. We were told to halt, and, after a while, to let our passengers down to head back to the waiting area. This wasn’t anything unusual: usually when there’s an extended delay the passengers are allowed to leave before the end of the ride and are brought back to the start point in a conventional SUV.

The delay turned into a very long delay, however, and then bits of information started trickling down in the typical Army manner (from random people): the LSV vehicle had overturned, meaning flipped over. Apparently they went over a bad bump on a 40-degree slope and the driver fucked it all up.

Let me say first that I have not heard of a single incident where a tank/APC overturned in which no one was killed or seriously injured, so you can pretty much understand the possible consequences here.

Luckily for them, however, the injuries were pretty minor, culminating in a broken wrist for one of the el-tees and a severely sprained back for the other. The driver was fine, save for surface scratches. I guess those things weigh a lot less than full-size tracked vehicles, though.

Anyway, the incident was pretty much kept hushed-up, and I have to say, I’m more than a little pissed off by that. When I got back to camp and told my warrant officer about the incident, his reply was essentially that as long as it wasn’t a member of the public that got injured, it wasn’t that serious.

I’m not even fucking kidding. That was exactly what he said to me, and I seriously had to restrain myself from smashing his bloated face in yelling at him. I mean, what the fuck? What kind of attitude is that to show towards your own fucking army? How does someone even think this isn’t serious in any way possible?

And it’s not just him, either. Mostly it’s REMFs who have the same response, to be fair. Most of my sergeants were pretty shocked (in the typical Army manner, meaning holy shit, good thing I wasn’t that guy) that such a thing could actually happen at an open house, let alone at an average speed of 20km/h.

Is this really what our Army has become? So dedicated to putting on a front for everyone, even within the Army, that we’re willing to forgo everything we stand for? Professionalism, ‘Care for Soldiers’, Honour; are these values, or just that, words to be repeated over and over in the vain hope that they actually mean something?

I’m sorry, I know it seems a little abrupt as to how I’ve suddenly gone off-tangent on this, but I will say that this is only a small example of what happened during the Open House that makes me want to mouth off. And when you take into account that this incident is pretty serious, the implications thereof are, I would say, pretty fucking big.

I’m glad I get out soon.

Recently, though, I’ve been in a design rut of late (no thanks to my current stint in the Army), and after receiving some inspiration from several sources, I’ve decided to start again at a steady pace.

So I loaded up Illustrator and got to work. Here’s a small sampling of what I’ve come up with so far.

Firstly, something everyone should know: there are few things more terrible or deadly than parachuting bears. This is a fact confirmed by the fact that if you don’t agree these beasts will land on top of your ugly, misshapen hunk and proceed to chew/rip your brains out, depending if they land with their mouths poised to attach themselves to your dumb head.

Next up is a piece inspired by my fellow driver compadres from the army, with their obsession with F1 racing and their contempt unconditional love for their assigned armoured vehicles. I had real fun designing the aftermath on the back of the shirt.

And to round off this post, here’s a titular illustration showing the classic example of why I should stop playing Day of Defeat with the only guy I know of who still plays it for some reason. Interesting tidbit: I actually wanted the back of the shirt to be a top-down/isometric view of Omaha Beach, sort of RPG-iconic style, but I was trying to look for reference photos of how the defenses on Omaha, or hell, any of the Normandy beaches were arranged, and my search wasn’t very promising. So I decided to go with my classic protagonist/antagonist approach.

I learned a little about using less colours and working with shapes instead to convey more information, very much contrary to what I’ve been mostly doing. Hopefully it’s working, though I think I’m putting in way too much details in certain areas for shirt design. Oh well. At least they make great wallpapers.

Also, when I say detail, I mean-

-level of detail. Yeah. For reference, some of those strokes will be apparently printed at 0.5 points on the shirt.

I don’t even think the tracks will be visible when the shirt is printed out, let alone the ventilation grilles. Call it OCD, but I like the way I did T-72 a lot. I just shiver when looking at those ventilation grilles.

This is far from being over, though. I have a couple ideas for a totally different series which I’m fleshing out right now. And no, they won’t involve the military/guns anymore. At least, not for now.

It almost mirrors film and digital photography, where in the former you expose for the blacks and develop for the highlights and the latter vice versa. Really, it’s not that obfuscating once you understand the actual workings behind the smokescreen. Sort of.

Anyway, I was looking around for a good set of watercolour brushes that actually made use of Photoshop’s paint engine (mainly because I hate Corel Painter’s user interface) and happened to chance upon these about a month ago.

I just got to testing them out today. Yes, I am a failure.

Concept art. For what? I don't know!

I think I have to work on it some more. Or maybe work on something else that doesn’t visually make me want to hug it and vomit simultaneously.

This is a little short, I suppose, but recent events in the army and at home have come together in a most unpleasant combination to, uh, impede any attempts I make at actually doing something constructive, both physically and mentally.

I hope I’ll have time to explain further soon. In the meantime, yes, Chinese New Year just passed me by, and I did perform the required duties and such. I also received the customary monetary packages, which, if all goes well, should be well on the way to financing my collector’s edition of Street Fighter IV. That’s at least one tiny bright spot in the distance that I can look forward to.

So my first roll of black and white film was pretty much an all-around positive experience, my second roll of  film decided to truly and completely fuck me over, and yesterday I finally got my film scans back from the new photo developer I’ve decided to try out, because the first one I went to was closed on Sundays and that just happened to be the day I would head all the way to the city just to develop my film.

As you can probably tell, I was more than a little frustrated during the shooting. A whole fucking 36 exposures and $6.90 down the drain due to a camera malfunction is, admittedly, nothing particularly serious, but goddamn is it fucking annoying to have painstakingly composed, thought about and decided on 36 (actually more like 72 since the roll fucked up twice) exposures, only to have the entire effort for naught.

It’s like you were playing with a toy camera the whole time. And that feels worse than any other stupid mishap that could have befallen oneself.

But enough of this self-pity. Pictures! These have had some post-processing applied to them unlike the previous roll, because mainly my choice of a new developer was evidently a poor one; my entire film roll was mostly overexposed and I had to bring down the exposure quite a bit in Lightroom.

I realize that I over-compensated for the overexposure in some of the shots, but that’s partially because I was half-asleep when editing these and I only had about an hour to finish up all 35 shots (1 shot was unusable as I used it to test whether the film was loaded correctly)

Overall, I’m pretty disappointed with my shooting this time round, though I did grab some shots that I’m proud of, and I learned a lot more about my F-301 and its lying, stinking viewfinder. Oh, and I guess I learnt a bit about texture in black and white too. Gogo gadget chiaroscuro.

Imagine my surprise when I found myself at the nearby coast, on my bicycle, clutching an unfamiliar Nikon F-301 to my chest, Fuji Neopan ISO 400 black and white film loaded within.

36 shots, and a whole length of beach to cover. It’s a monumental task.

at the beach

I have to say, after all my experience with the D50, being asked to shoot with a film SLR is pretty intimidating, especially when the adage of ‘one shot is all you get’ becomes even more important than ever, since I am shooting in black and white. Having to think about how colours will actually appear after development, on top of an already complicated-as-hell process doesn’t help make things any easier. I can only conclude that I would have gone insane had I actually owned contrast control filters to go with the lens.

I’m happy with the first batch of stuff that I shot, though, if not the unbelievable prices of film development and film scanning. Maybe I should try a different photo shop or something. Yes, I am currently working my way through a second roll of the stuff, and hopefully I should have it done with by the end of the week, fucking stupid mistakes notwithstanding.

Elaboration on it would probably cause me to wither and die in embarrassment, but let us say, that perhaps, there is a camera. This camera requires film to be loaded into it. We shall then assert that the film was loaded, and loaded well. Then we shall say, perhaps, that the film jammed during loading and the film leader (the bit that sticks out of the roll) mysteriously receded back into the canister through the darkest of magiks, probably involving the thralls of the Underworld somewhere in this sad, sorry tale.

flower

Basically the loading fucked up, the camera didn’t give off the warning bleeps during loading like it should have, and imagine my surprise! When I turned up at the photo shop all ready to develop a roll of shots and trying to rewind the roll only to find out my error grevious.

It’s quite all right; those previous shots were garbage anyway. Maybe it’s my subconscious at work once again. In any case, though the first few frames of the film are probably ruined (I personally stretched it out and left the back open to make sure the film loaded properly), as the photo shop assistant put it, 33 usable exposures is better than no usable exposures.

Also, after hearing both my D50 and the F301’s shutter whir, I have to say, there is is a certain flair that the film winder gives to the overall sound. Sure, it may be slower, and my D50 is king when it comes to serious situations that call for a camera with capabilities, but when it comes to pure, unfettered spirit, being reduced to shooting film is where you learn the most about photography.

I’ll be back with more tales from behind the viewfinder soon.