You shall Christmas!

So many happy Christmas greetings here on FA. It makes me happy!

My chest pains have lessened in intensity and frequency, and I feel much better.

Also, good thing lethargy kept me away from FurAffinity earlier. What a nightmare that was!

Things have escalated from chest pains and sores to nightmares startling me awake with rapid heart palpitations and numb left arm. I walked all the way to a hospital in the early morning to get examined. Yet again, the ECG came out alright and I mumbled my way through descriptions. To alleviate my symptoms, I have been prescribed diazepam, which I should take only if I lose sleep to nightmares again.

I really want to live, because there's so much to life I'm looking forward to.

Happy 28th birthday to me! Now to celebrate with tracker music, murtabak, pizza, My Little Pony: The Movie and Thor: Ragnarok!

As expected, the pendulum of life swung back to the shit zone. I have been suffering chest pains since August and feeling tired like never before. Feels like symptoms of a short life.

It's holiday season again where I'm at! Revisiting relatives around scrumptious buffets has been such a joy! Also, this year has been a pretty good year for movies so far, and it's only July! There is much good to look forward to this 2017.

The pleasures of

having a local bird fly up to your window sill to peek through the curtains to watch you browse FurAffinity,

watching school kids practicing good table manners at a pasta restaurant,

riding long-distance bus rides past beautiful sea sides and posh housing estates,

watching and listening to baby Weddell seals ♥

The torment of

losing £800 of savings to debit card theft,

watching a delivery truck driver run out of his truck before collapsing onto a side walk from a heart attack,

watching Mum fight her way out of 2 cancers.

Life's SNAFU.

My gosh, so many adorable, cute, funny and pun-ny Valentine's Day art here!

The setting Winter Solstice Sun shines its light through my bedroom window as I type this.

2016: an awesome year for a few, SNAFU for me and most of us, FUBAR for more than enough people.

Sure, sports, movies and music brought us wondrous moments this year, but more than enough horrors managed to strip away the façade of drama, glamour and splendour they set up, revealing the festering moral and ethical wounds that most of us have little to no means of healing.

From now on, I will always feel a tinge of terror on top of fleeting bliss every time I hear someone greet "Merry Christmas!" and "Happy New Year!". If 2016 was a happy year, I would hate to see what 2017 has in store.

After 4 rounds of monthly chemotherapy, my mom's leukaemia is in remission. Blood counts across the board are pretty low right now but it looks like her immune system can keep the cancerous myeloid cells at bay just fine. She is very happy and upbeat about it, and so is my family.

As my family prepare to be tens of thousands of dollars in debt, I try to stay cool by running 1 mile every weekday and practicing cooking some pasta recipes my mom showed me. So far the pasta has been coming out pathetically bland, but I am a bit hesitant of adding dollops of salt in it.

And to top off the most awful April ever in my life, my Mom has been diagnosed with cancer.

What is this April?

Repaid undeserved salary, overspending on a sports ticket and suffering a wumbo-combo of influenza and norovirus simultaneously. 8 days later, I am looking at 2600 submissions to clear.

Aprils have been awful for much of my life, but April 2016 AD takes the cake.

My night terrors ceased the day I felt my stamina reinvigorated by 5 days of mild aerobic training. On top of that, climbing stairs is more manageable.

Kept myself entertained by ROFLMAO-inducing TASes (tool-assisted speedruns) of Hyper Olympics (ハイパーオリンピック) from Nico Nico Douga and YouTube. 1.8km javelin throws and 16km-high jumps, anyone? XD

Jolted awake with a racing and probably murmuring heart after a nightmare. Again, strenuous aerobic exercise like swimming, cycling and running during the day induces nightmares at night followed by high heart rate and chest pain. And I'm only 26 years old.

Kinda good news is that I may have a good excuse to have myself excused from compulsory fitness regimes. Bad news is that my future doesn't look like it's going to last long.

Have a Merry Christmas/Winter Solstice, everyone!

Now that I have finished Bioshock, I am going to play Undertale once and for all and blare out Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Bruce Springsteen and 80's music over my headphones!

I am now 26 years old, 86 kg, and getting tired and irritable easily.

Here I am again, browsing FurAffinity listening to demoscene music and Deep Purple again. I finally got my hands off Sven Co-op and played through the Medical Pavilion in Bioshock, and what a rush it was. To think I missed the chance to play such gaming goodness for 7 years because of inexperience and financial hardship...

Anyway, I got tickets to watch MUSE live later at night. This will be my first time listening to a band live that was popular in the mainstream within the last 5 years. I've heard many good and bad things about them, but I'm confident they'll be a blast to watch.

So much happened globally this past July, I cannot fathom. Too much work happened at my work place too. It's so hard to wrap my head around the scale of work I have to do. Fortunately, assistance has arrived and I can focus on 1 project at a time.

Also, I finally watched The Running Man in full. I'd never thought I'd laugh quite a few times watching it, especially at the one-liners and real-world implications behind some conversations. I guess that happens anyway with a lot of quality 1980's action movies. Glad to know it is more fun than I thought it would be.

Watching the FIFA Women's World Cup and Under-20 World Cup reminded me why I love (association) football/soccer. It is only in some parts because of the gameplay, strategies and tactics that are executed with both aplomb and clumsiness. Rather it is mostly because watching players fighting for glory, sometimes succeeding under David-Goliath circumstances (U20 Mali defeating Germany, Serbia defeating Brazil), sometimes failing in heart-breaking manner (Women's England losing to Japan), really engages me. It's 90 to 150 minutes of the struggles of human life played out on a mostly controlled stage.

Of course, most football matches are pretty drab, but once the level of skill, passion, emotion and stakes to win and lose are heightened, 'magic' happens, sweeping me off to emotional heights. I love that feeling.



Coming home from work today, it broke my heart to know that one of the most memorable personalities in furry culture is no more. Her colourful mix of happy and sad art work first caught my young dorky eyes all the way back in 2006, circa sparkle dog bonanza on deviantART, and still did as recently as last month. Seeing her closest friends on deviantART and FurAffinity grieving about her broke my heart too. She was taken from loved ones too soon. Alas, feeling that I don't know her well enough to type a meaningful eulogy, I will settle for one short last goodbye.

"Requiescat."
 foxholliday

2015 has been a VERY eventful year, as if 2014 wasn't enough. It's one of those years which makes me wish no news is good news.

Blargh! Another case of food poisoning after mixing bad chicken eggs with cheese. No eggs, dairy products, nuts and legumes for 2 weeks!

Also, I started playing Typeracer on my new Filco Majestouch 2 keyboard. What a blast putting my fingers to their paces. Still flabbergasted at how one types over 100 words-per-minute, not including 330 WPM bots of course.

Hey Singapore, whatever happened to equality for all? It looks like the thought of two grown Singaporean men making love to each other has done you in. It is alright if you feel icky about it, but when you

start saying out loud that you would like to burn all fags in a pyre with every book about gay penguins and flamingos,

threaten to take down from TV, rape and kill a celebrity, who once graced my own house with her cheerful disposition, just for publicly supporting LGBTQ people,

and parrot gay panic bullshit cooked up by US American Christian fundagelicals who fear the NAZI gay army will take over the world and purge all cis-het humans,

I lose hope with you and start seeing that you want the good image and money Europeans, Americans and Australasians give you when they work with you, but you would rather they shut the fuck up about liberty and equality.

When otherwise nice Christian, Muslim, Hindu, hell even atheist Singaporeans, for fuck's sake, unite to shout down LGBTQ freedom activists, I lose hope and become more detached from Singapore's hard-earned glamour, prestige and pedigree.

Having lived much of my life never fitting in with everyday Singaporeans, seeing such behaviour has only convinced me not to bother trying to fit in anymore, and just fly away to Australasia, North America or Western Europe. Too bad I don't know how.

Gosh, how do I even?

Today I went swimming and water sliding again. While it was strenuous, I felt surprisingly relieved at the end of a 200-metre swim. I feel the same way after walking 8 kilometres, finishing a gym session and completing a check-out of over 600 books. Perhaps this is 'good' stress that I am feeling.

I also walked around a quiet part of the country, watching eagles, waterhens, RC planes and rivers. Very nice.

On Thursday I decided I have to stop eating more than 1 20-cm plate of rice every dinner time. I look like one of those grotesque giants from Attack on Titan.

A few incidents in my country have unleashed its citizenry's inner demons once again. The slightest plea of greater freedom of sexuality ignites a meteor storm of key phrases like 'Western Values, get out of my country' and 'they are waging a war against Asian Values', 'the fall of Man is nigh' and 'soon we will devolve into monkeys again'. Sure, my country is an oasis of sorts for trade, academia and diplomacy, but that is only when upper class, world-weary white-collar intellectuals take the stage and strut their stuff. Once they're off the stage, the majority middle and lower classes will show you the country's true colours:

"Come make merry and lots of money, but keep your mouth shut about your liberal values."

At least they are now treating foreign workers with more respect, and one incident this week really made me happy that this is so.

It looks like the thumbnail cache stopped working today sometime around 0510h GMT. Full images and descriptions are still accessible, fortunately.

Today I went swimming for the first time in over a year. It was so refreshing but also tiring, swimming and paddling 200 metres. I completely forgot how much water pressure affects my breathing. What a workout! I also had fun with the water slides the swimming complex had. Short, yet terrifyingly fast!