Ive changed my gender

As you guys can recently see from my new facebook profile picture, i have changed my gender and became a woman.  I feel that in this world, the subject of homosexuality is frowned upon in a very negative light.  I for one am against this, because I understand the trauma and prejudice modern society homosexuals are subjected to on a daily basis, mainly due to my new found sexuality in that I too am a gay.  Due to the stereotypes and image projected by society, I find it hard to truly express my deep feelings towards my male associates, and as a result have fallen into a deep depression.  My friends are no longer close to me, and are wary around my presence, scared that I would touch them.  Yet this is what I lust for, a man to touch, a man to lean on, a man to hold.

This life is too hard for me to live, thus i have taken some appropriate steps towards changing my position. I underwent gender surgery to get my penis removed, and some boobs modelled out of silicon, which fit nicely on my well proportioned body.  I have also long since felt an affection towards more bigger frames in both men and women, thus i have adopted a bigger sized body.  I hope this will help me find love.

Every movie I've seen since the HSC

A list of movies I've seen through these holidays, with a brief comment on what I thought about it. Underlined ones are movies I would highly recommend other people to see.

Midnight in Paris: Owen Wilson plays a charming protagonist as he is treated to a parade of artistic legends. Chortles to be had.

Kung Fu Panda 2: Slickly animated action and an efficiently presented plot which culminates to scenes that are visually and emotionally brilliant. This really exceeded expectations.

Laputa, Castle in the Sky: (below) As expected of a Miyazaki film, it creates a rich, fully-formed fantasy world in which protagonists who are pure of heart experience magic and romance. Greatly enjoyable.

The General: Silent comedy star Buster Keaton gets into wild shenanigans with plenty of slapstick humour. If you like funny silent films, this is considered one of the best.

Bicycle Thieves: (below)A father and son search for their stolen bicycle, which the father needs to do his poster-sticking job to make ends meet for his family. This film is heartbreaking.

Metropolis: An old German silent movie containing many great iconic images of cinema. It builds up to a thrilling finale which may be the most exciting thing I've witnessed on silent film.

Goodfellas: A movie which follows the life of a kid who grows up to become a successful gangster. Kinda like Raging Bull though, I didn't really connect to this one. I'm too busy trying to keep up with the plot to feel much for the characters.

The Godfather: (below)I rewatched this because I barely understood what was happening when I saw it in Year 9. I suppose now I have a slightly better attention span because this truly is a great film.

Bridesmaids: A chick-flick directed by a director who usually makes films like. This was funnier than I thought it'd be and was a pretty good movie.

Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides: Given all the bad reviews, I was pleased to find that I enjoyed this movie. It's all more of the same action-adventure fluff but Jack Sparrow remains entertaining even at his fourth movie.

Larry Crowne: I watched this on the cruise planning to sleep but instead kept watching this movie on the little television in the cabin until it was over. It's a story with quirky characters but no real drama, tension or even purpose. I wouldn't recommend seeing this on purpose.
Captain America: The First Avenger: A solid superhero action movie worth watching, if only to get ready for the upcoming 'The Avengers', which I am really looking forward to.

Fitzcarraldo:  (below) In this film, an enterprising businessman with an obsession for opera pulls a steamship over a steep hill in order to reach unclaimed rubber trees and make his fortune. What's amazing is that this was filmed on location and to make this film they actually did pull a steamship over a mountain using nothing but logs and ropes.

The Bourne Trilogy: I may well be the last guy to watch this series. Matt Damon plays a quietly intense hero who blazes his way through series of cleverly constructed action scenes to find his identity and purpose.

War Horse: As he did with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg explores a large historical tragedy through the journey of his small cast of characters. This is quite a sentimental film but is done well enough to be satisfying rather than cloying.

The Third Man: Watching this the second time, I once again failed to get drawn into it. Give it a try if you like old movies.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: A well made action movie with generous helpings of humour that let's it all go down nicely. 

Winter's Bone: (below) A seventeen year old girl with a missing father and a catatonic mother struggles to support her two siblings while facing the hostility of the local drug business. Not the most exciting movie but it has a very admirable protagonist and provides a look into the isolated community of the Ozarks, which before this I had not even known existed.

Melancholia: (trailer below) This movie features Earth being destroyed after colliding with the fictional planet 'Melancholia'. This is not a spoiler because the movie depicts this spectacle right in the beginning and instead focuses on the story of two sisters in the weeks preceding the collision. This is a powerfully executed movie and I shall write more about it later so as to convince more people to see it.

Hugo: I expected this to be another very well-made children's movie but I think that it speaks more to older audiences who are interested in film. In Hugo, director Scorsese breathes new life into films from the beginning of cinema.

Battle Royale: I watched this because I had just finished reading The Hunger Games trilogy which I thought was great. I found this movie disappointing though. The characters are crudely formed and unconvincing and the violence is more gratuitous than unsettling. I suspect the success of this film lay in the novelty of its idea.

Some stuff I wrote but never bothered posting before...

Consider the following situation:

One hundred random innocent people are selected and imprisoned. You are provided with two choices. The first is to personally execute fifty of the prisoners, allowing the remaining fifty to walk free. The second is to walk away, resulting in the execution of all the prisoners at the hands of someone else.

I think most people would agree that the first choice is the right thing to do. It causes the least total amount of suffering and since the only disadvantage of the first choice is that you may bring mental distress and social condemnation to yourself by becoming a murderer, then you could even consider it as a selfless choice. However, does doing the right thing necessarily make you a good person?

Let's say a homicidal maniac (a bad person) and Mahatma Gandhi (a good person) are both faced with this situation. Homicidal maniac picks choice one (the right choice) because he wants to kill fifty people, being a bad guy and all. Gandhi picks choice two (logically now, the 'wrong' choice) because he is opposed to killing, being a good guy and all.

So in this case it seems that doing something that is wrong can indicate that you are a good person while doing something that is good can indicate that you are a bad person. Something's obviously wrong here since by definition, doing something right should indicate that you are a good person and vice versa.

The problem here is that we've defined good and bad in a different way to how we've defined right and wrong. We've defined a righteous decision as one which causes the minimum amount of harm to human beings and therefore a wrong decision as one that causes a greater amount of harm. We've defined a good person as someone holding benevolent values and intentions (e.g. Do not murder) and a bad person as someone with malevolent values and intentions (e.g. Murder is fun). The allocation of these definitions to each word pair doesn't really matter since we could've switched 'right' with 'good' and 'wrong' with 'bad' for this entire post and nothing would change. What's actually important is that we now have to wonder what's more important when it comes to one's behaviour: consequences or intention?

I planned to expand on this topic more but it now seems more complicated and less interesting than before. I may try this again when I think of an interesting real life example to apply it to.

Stuff I've been doing since the HSC

Loyal readers may have been growing concerned that I have begun to neglect and forget about this blog. Unfortunately, being on holidays for so long has made it difficult to get out of procrastinating and get something done, even something as easy as a blog post. Anyway, here is my return to blogging with a recount of everything I've done since the HSC.

Schoolies!

Spent with a lot of guys at Byron Bay. The (possible) highlight was the intense mafia games where everyone played very seriously, resulting in daytime votes that would last for up to twenty minutes before someone got lynched. Fun was also had on the beach and we played a lot of video games. I watched the first season of Suits. I also spent at least 5 hours trying to make a song using GarageBand on Alex's laptop. Pretty cool

Formal!

Pretty cool. I had a good time.

Medicine Interviews!

Nothing too interesting to note here. At the UWS interview while they gave us a briefing, me, Jinghang and either Falko or Clement were sitting on dodgy chairs in the lecture hall and we kept swinging on them and nearly broke them. It was pretty funny if you were there. Went to Newcastle as well and saw the stupid Clement there. He was very stupid. Also went to Monash interview and flew to Melbourne with mum and dad. My sister was in Melbourne too for some volleyball tournament and we saw her there. We ate at a restaurant there and I had something nasty that (literally) gave me the shits.

Cruise!

Went on a P&O cruise to New Caledonia and Vanuatu with some family and family friends. At first I was disappointed because it didn't seem as big and luxurious as I imagined. But then we had dinner and I changed my mind. There's a buffet and a restaurant and you can eat as much as you want! The food was quite good and there was a large variety. Spent time at sea playing board games, cards, table tennis and watching movies. I had to take care of my eight year old cousin the whole time because he was attached to me and followed me everywhere the whole eight days.

At each port of call we would get off the ship and the general routine was to sightsee and then spend the day at the beach. New Caledonia was interesting because it was weird to be in a French-speaking country. In Vanuatu there was a beach with sea cucumbers littered across the sea floor. What an array of sumptuous delicacies! There were also lots of crabs and large fish. The asian parents got quite excited.

Also something I remember is going above deck at night. The sky was cloudy so there was no light coming in from the sky nor reflecting off the ocean. It seemed like the ship was just surrounded by pitch black. It was quite terrifying to imagine falling overboard into the darkness.

Here are some nice photos.

 It cost us $2 to take a photo with this sign.

 My cool cousins.

Eating food.

HSC Results!

Pleasantly surprised by 4U maths state ranking. ATAR 99.80. Actually a little disappointed because my estimate was 99.90. Let down by Band 5 English like an asian stereotype.

Macbook Air!

My uncle bought me a Macbook Air which I am using to type this up. Hooray!

Wilson's Party!

The amazing race thing was pretty fun at first but for our group was really slow and so we gave up when we found out we were coming last. Roger and I stayed behind to watch a busker juggle some knives and an axe and then everyone had dinner at a Chinatown food court. Afterwards some of us went to karaoke. I had only been to karaoke once before and I didn't really like it. This time however, everyone was really into it and we started dancing on the chairs and coming up with really dumb moves and it was actually really really fun.

I stayed over at the penthouse with everyone else. Before the karaoke people got there, Raymond had been a pyromaniac chucking flaming tissues off the balcony. Later I suggested we shaved the powder off all the sparklers to make a sparkly bomb and that was pretty cool. When we ran out of sparklers, Raymond kept chucking more tissues. One time the wind blew back and the flaming tissue landed on someone's balcony and we may have scared the shit out of someone because I think NY said she heard someone scream.

The morning after I had breakfast at McDonalds and ate a NY Bagel, a Hash Brown and some orange juice.

Maplestory!

My sister started playing Maplestory and said the new Mercedes class was really cool and I should try it. So I did and now I have joined Vincent Tran, Jinghang, Edwin, Edward and Allan as a Mapler (the dumbass Arthur plays too but he's in America or something). I decided to make a female character called PastrySwirl to be ironic and funny but Vincent Tran keeps bagging me out for it. In fact, he decided to get Edward to broadcast across the server that I was looking for a BF and that I was hot IRL. I got hit on by some guys which was really weird and blowing them off gave me an enlightening insight on how it's like to be a girl. (I'm not serious.)

Christmas!

Spent it with family and family friends at Blaxland Riverside Park, the new playground/cycling track area in Olympic Park. The playground is cooler than the one in Bicentennial park though the park itself isn't as nice. Not much to say besides that we went bike riding a lot.

New Years Eve!

Went with a bunch of people to see the fireworks from the Opera House. Really good view though whether it is worth getting there at 10am to secure a seat is debatable. It was fun though, and Wilson cooked mountains of tasty of food so we had a nice picnic all day.

The Dentist

You know how people usually say, "Oh, going to the dentist doesn't actually hurt, you're just scared of the drill?". Well those people can just go screw themselves. Call me a pussy but going to the dentist really hurts. First of all the cleaning bit is just uncomfortable. Then when the drilling starts it just hurts a lot. And what's with the porno jazz music they play in the background? Apparently its supposed to be soothing, but seriously you can't even hear it when there's a drill boring into your teeth. Probably out of all the specialists, dentists are my least favourite because they involve the highest degree of pain no matter what procedure they're doing. One of the reasons I do not look forward to getting old is that the dentist visits will get progressively more complicated and painful.

That is all.

Midnight in Paris

I do not know who Gertrude Stein is. I've heard a lot about Ernest Hemingway but have never read one of his novels. Midnight in Paris requires for its full enjoyment a degree of cultural literacy which I unfortunately did not have. This is not really a failure of the film. The film is made for a cultured audience charming it with a playful parade of artistic legends and unfortunately in this process, alienates those who have no idea about the characters on the screen.

There is still much to like, however. The film tells the story of Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of writing a serious novel. He visits Paris with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her wealthy parents and is enamoured with the city, walking its streets and fantasising about the great artists and writers who inhabited it in the 1920s. On his walks at midnight every night, he enters a carriage that actually transports him to the 1920s where he meets people like Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Salvador Dali.

Even if you don't know these people, it's still easy to get caught up in Gil's enthusiasm. Owen Wilson creates a very likeable character whose adulation for his literary idols makes them look good on the screen. He has a charming relationship with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), mistress of Picasso and a student of fashion. However, though their relationship is enjoyable to watch, it is not enough to sustain the movie.

Which brings us back to the first point. There is a scene where Gil sits in a café with Dalí, Buñuel and Man Ray. He tries to explain to them that he is travelling in time between the 21st century and the 1920s. Dalí, without humour, explains that this is perfectly normal and he states that he often feels similarly himself. Exasperated, Gil replies 'Yes, but you're a surrealist!'. If you find that kind of thing funny, then this may be your kind of movie.

Drive

Drive makes you think you're getting one type of film and then gives you another completely different one. This is one of those films that at the end makes you realize that you just watched something great and by the end of the week you thought you watched the best movie in a long time.

I don't want to give too much away but I'll give a general outline. A man who is a stunt driver during the day and is a getaway driver at night helps his neighbour and her son when she gets involved in some deep shit. Thats really all you should know about the movie and not much else. I wouldnt reccommend you read up anything about it (apart from the Roger Ebert review which also doesnt give much away). This is however, one of the few movies I would recommend you watch the trailer for because it tells you nothing but sets up your expectations. In fact I encourage you to watch the trailer because it gives the movie much more impact.

One of the main highlights of this movie is the use of music, which perfectly matches the mood and meaning the director is trying to convey. Also effective is Ryan Gosling as the Driver. Even though he doesn't say much in the movie, he exudes cool and style and makes driving gloves seem fashionable. Whereas his character is subdued and silent, the other characters are a complete contrast. Nino, played by Ron Perlman from Hellboy, is particularly loud and rude.

I think this movie has the potential to gain a cult following in the years to come. The way it blends so many genres together and its use of retro definitely make it more timeless and I'd go so far as to say that this might be considered as a great film as time goes on. I watched this movie maybe a week ago and I can still remember how I felt watching the film and after I left the cinema. Its emotional impact stays with you.

That is all.