i found this really wonderful website full of quirky, vintage, strange, whimsical, etc etc illustrations from all over the world, some in watercolour, some in black-and-white (or cream, as the pages have yellowed in time), some in stranger mediums like the airbrush (i never knew they had airbrushes back in 1930!), but they’re mostly a group of pictures from artists ranging from the well-known (van gogh) to the relatively arcane (dutch children’s picture books illustrators). there’s no real way to describe this website, but maybe if i could describe it in one word it would be “intimate”, as if you’re taking a peek into a book from a shelf of a person from the past. i love the ones of animals and plants! nobody really draws that anymore, which i think they should, at the rate all of those animals are becoming extinct. and also i love the details on the mushroom illustrations!! i never knew there were so many! (and they all somehow look delicious, even though they’re mostly poisonous. idk maybe that’s just me being ravenous at 4 in the morning) here are some examples that i liked a lot:

watercolour illustration of france

old but cool looking illustration of a town from the 15th century! (that’s jerusalem i believe) the blog calls it “travel literature”, how refined!

an artist in the 1930 imagines what life would be like in 2030, using airbrushes. love how art deco this is! and i don’t mean the modern type illustrators try to replicate with using computer software

check it out here!

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i wanted to type something else, but i changed my mind because i didn’t know how to go about expressing myself. and i don’t know what to say. see i just deleted the paragraph i typed. this is so frustrating. this is the first time in my life that words have failed me? hm. i shall sleep on this and hope it gets better tomorrow.

yesterday we celebrated with a yummy (but slightly expensive) buffet at straits cafe @ rendezvous hotel! had fun chitchatting and eating with tony, shoban, guang, ham, edsee, pam! gosh it was hilarious. first of all tony and his alfalfa, basically it’s this moss like thing that tasted like grass. pam was throwing him eye-rolls and grimaces when he was eating it like some bovine organism. and the disgusting durian creme and puff. oh god if i ever have the pleasure of eating (forced, tricked, accidentally or otherwise) anything with durian in it i swear i will use one whole bottle of listerine in one sitting. then we watched a movie called gomorrah at cathay picturehouse (it was between that and christmas carol 3D, but since pam’s 18 we chose the former m18 movie LOL). it apparently won the top prize at the cannes film festival (plus certified 91% fresh via pam’s rottentomatoes), but it turned out… as i quote the birthday girl “this movie was such a milestone for me” well. i still prefer the heavily-stylized 40s american mafia movie a la the godfather. gomorrah was too hyper-real imo. :/ anyway have fun in malacca girl!

edit:

birthday girl!

fewd!

edsee laughing at at tony eating his alfalfa

group shot! slightly blurred. (and my face looks like the full moon lol)

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anyway i’ve finally gotten down to listening to the fame monster. gaga is a genius. perhaps i should consider turning from a free-thinker to joining a pagan occult that worships her, LOL. i’m joking, i’m joking, don’t stone me. anyway alejandro is my favourite on the album!! best thing is, it samples czardas (the very hungarian gypsy tune we learned for guitar) at the start. and i love the intro of dance in the dark too!!

hmm i got john mayer’s new album battle studies. spent the whole morning in bed listening to it. i gotta say it’s my favourite album by him yet. the whole thing feels so raw, unpretentious, and intimate. especially love friends, lovers or nothing and the title track, heartbreak warfare. and i shall leave you with the former! the lyrics are really meaningful imo (i’m sure many of us will have felt like this at some point in time or another). the perfect album for single, lonely souls out there, heh:

anything other than yes is no,
anything other than stay is go,
anything less than i love you is lying

and it hit me

poetry and all its associated froufrou only comes when you’re down, or lonely, or dejected, or feeling shitty. like when you wake up from the wrong side of bed and feel like the whole world is against you when it really isn’t

and never when there’s sunshine and rainbows and unicorns (at least for normal people… sans when you’re on drugs because i think when you’re happy and on a trip you might actually make something good… like walt disney)

because the best form of art comes when you’re struggling with something*

think owen facing war and death, soyinka facing racial discrimination, woolf battling depression…

rarely do you get a poet or artist who gets famous because he/she makes happy art

and i look at my xanga and think

wow, i can’t even remember what half of this is about! (but i guess i must’ve been really depressed when i wrote these)

i guess my life must’ve been more dramatic and exciting when it’s viewed through rain clouds.

and in other words

strike when the iron is hot, or protect your ego and retreat back to ground zero

god i need a magic 8 ball to answer all my questions

and random, but i think zune is killing my laptop. that lousy piece of junk! it’s been whirring non-stop for the past hour. or maybe it’s just because i’ve been on for 12 hours. bleh.

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*quote courtesy lady gaga

yakshemash. my name is bao cheng. my hobbies are dance like bboy and shop with my eyes. haha ok i’ll stop laming. as you can tell i’ve been watching some borat (on youtube, which is practically my homepage;  but more on that another time) – he’s a really funny bugger. haha did you know that the expression of surprise “wawawewa” (that pam so oftenly uses, although the joke is lost on her) comes from his movie. anyway i think that there are many similiarities between borat and a typical acs boy. for example, they both crack jew jokes, they are both dirty-minded, both like to wrestle randomly, both like to disco dance and play pingpong etc. etc. weeeeell actually after comparison that’s not very similiar. but what do i know i’m just a china girl zzzzzz. anyway i should totally make my own version of borat and film a movie with the name of the title of this post. vary naice. i think it will sell millions butttttttttt i think my mother will probably disown me for sullying the namesakes of the great motherland.

school’s been not so intense recently, probably because i’m missing so many lessons because of… guitarrrr! (say that like in i believe in a thing called love) i swear i don’t understand anything/cannot absorb anything in class anymore because i just don’t understand ANYTHING the teacher(s) is saying!!! it’s like her mouth will be moving and she speaking in english but when it enters my head it all sounds like greek or martian or something. like cannot register one.

hopefully i’ll stop slacking soon and revise during the weekend. anyway speaking of slacking the chinese a2 ib exams are in 2 bleddy weeks! ahhhhh!! and i think we’re going through the prelim papers this week but because of syf practice i’ve been missing chinese a lot so i’m not sure!! omg siewmoy is SO gonna kill me. and omgomgomg my EE!!! (what ee, you mean that thing she returned me 2 months ago??) i just remembered it. wawawewa. okay here i go rambling on again.

anyway the point of this post is to talk about guitar syf(even thought the title and everything doesn’t seem like it). it’s pretty intense recently; my fingers hurt a lot, and i think gwh might be a little wishful thinking for us. not to curse our syf or anything but i really hope that one-week-chiong-everything ac spirit will help us this time. but it’s okay. at least we have the sexy bass solo for subaru to make things better. haha we blue ocean man, no other school will have  a sexy harmonic solo on bass guitar. but shhhh you didn’t hear that from me! ;) and a little bird just told me there’s practice until 8pm tomorrow!! wth man, that’s so not cool. i’m starting to tire of the syf pieces… kinda. oh yeah and we got the syf costume today. let’s just say that my dreams of performing a musical intrument on stage in a floor length black toga gown with rose embellishments and a mermaid train are dashed. and that the girls totally blend in cos the suit makes us look like butches. no seriously we are wearing a bleddy suit, like those weather reportmen!! :( :( :(

sigh. wishful thinking indeed. bc you gotta get your head out there man, it’s like, a totally bottomless endless pit if you’re to fall into that well again. it’ll sap all the energy out of your brain and wring your concentration dry. sid and nancy my foot.

haha this year’s vday falls on a saturday, so today was the unofficial well-wishing day. i’m so stuffed from all the chocolate/sweets/brownies/cookies/truffles man, and i don’t think i’ll eat any chocolate for a whole month! heehee .12 is the best, guess what the girls got for our vday presents:

(the balloon flower is from astro) a personalised shirt from all the guys in class! haha you can see the lipstick kisses aroud the heart! i can’t believe they actually sacrificed their ego to put on lipstick to kiss a shirt, no less. they’re so sweet my gosh. 

really, today was such a fun/great day! even chinese lesson was more interesting than usual. and i didn’t fall asleep, cos usually on friday’s it’s zhang so it’s just commentary analysis, but today we got our 3rd essay back and i improved by a lot. i suddenly have this urge to work hard for a2 yeah? despite all these hard feelings i sometimes get. yup, time to prove to myself that i can do it.

hmm then i took a long bus ride home and planned part of the guitar camp games. haha me and pam are gonna make it damn awesome i swear (but her initial ideas were pretty sadistic, lol).

hmm and i found this random thing while researching for tok op (really!):

if i had kirby, yoshi AND pikachu in my bento, i woundn’t even want to eat it. i’d just wanna stare at it all day and admire this work of art. but is it even edible?? this woman has damn a lot of free time to make lunch la. but this seriously just made my day; a nintendo bento. or maybe i am just easily entertained haha.

oh my gosh i sound like a kid; no where sounding like an 18 year old, despite being this close to graduating from high school. talking about pikachu bentos sumore, lol!

p.s. today i saw something interesting; it made me smirk, but i know i shouldn’t. cuz i think it’s like a way of looking down on them, which goes against me being non-judgemental (i try). so i guess he is quite the chick magnet (never really thought of it that way though)! aaaand i think i know why. it’s kinda sad that i pick up on all of this itty-bitty stuff from people. girls, you must learnt to share. still, not saying anything (though i doubt you guys know what i’m rambling on about anyway).

p.p.s. happy early vday people! <3 (another disjointed post, whoops)