yjsoon

My friend Andrew asked on Facebook:

Anyone keen on writing a “The Student’s Guide to…” book? Let me know.

So, who had useless suggestions for Andrew? ME ME ME OOH YES CHOOSE ME PLEASE! The Students’ Guide to:

• Creating senseless online comics in under 2 hours a week (bonus: How not to feel guilty about neglecting the site for weeks at a go!)
• Making actually-light-hearted-but-which-may-come-across-as-sarcastic Facebook comments (sorry)
• Making PDF selling websites that you don’t have time to develop further and which don’t net your only client any sales. At all. (Sorry)
• Apologising through Facebook comments
• Making lists
• Extending lists
• Overdoing a joke

I’m actually really happy for Andrew and his two wonderful books on “The Student’s Guide to Life” and “The Student’s Guide to Exam Success” (buyable from Aktive Learning or the aforementioned neglected PDF-selling website experiment). Back in 2008, he’d given me copies to give away to my graduating form class, which covered for my thorough lack of imagination in graduation gifts. I’m happy to see it’s doing well on the Popular Bookstore charts.

Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Andrew is publishing “Diary of a Taxi Driver” by Dr. Cai Mingjie, Singapore’s most educated taxi driver and blogger. Good stuff. I hope Dr. Cai’s writing finds the audience it deserves – his poignant memoirs are always among the first articles I consume from my Instapaper reading list.

This is going to be a pretty drastic departure from my usual flippant (and brief) self… but bear with me for a few minutes on this, because it bothers me so very much and I really need to get it off my chest. I’m writing this because I’m genuinely worried about what work is doing to my dad. 

My dad’s an old Chinese teacher who’s near retirement age. He’s been Chinese-educated all his life, and never quite managed to get the hang of English. He’s been teaching for at least 25 years by now – I’m honestly not sure when he started – and I sincerely believe he’s done his job to the best of his ability. 

In the last couple of years, he’s been facing what must be an unbearable amount of pressure at work. From his (naturally one-sided) perspective, he’s been given some of the worst classes, and yet he’s been consistently chewed out when his students graduate with B3s and C4s. He’s been assigned non-teaching duties that he just can’t seem to perform well in – just today, four days into the new academic year, he was yelled at by one of his bosses (so loudly his ears rang, he says) for not writing a good emcee script… in English. For this, his boss threatened him with a D performance grade (i.e. no performance bonus) for the year. Four days into the year. This hasn’t been the first time he’s faced such threats and humiliation, either – it’s been this way since last year, and it’s made him so worried about his performance bonus that he slogs extra hard just to get things right. Which, as today proves, hasn’t turned out very well. 

I’ll be the first to admit he’s not necessarily easy to work with, especially at this age. He can’t hear well, he has trouble adapting to new situations, he can’t really figure out his computer beyond email and photo management, and he can be awfully stubborn about things. I’m sure that, in the eyes of school management, he doesn’t hold a candle to young teachers who can come up with innovative teaching strategies and who can truly click with the students and who can drive their students to do their very best in their academic and sporting competitions. Worse, he’s probably paid nearly twice as much as one of these amazing young teachers.

But… this doesn’t seem right. I know, it’s all meritocratic, so maybe he’s truly under-performing at work – that wouldn’t be too surprising, given some of his traits and maybe the language barrier. But is this how you motivate one of your 60-year old staff – by tearing apart his dignity and heightening his stress levels until he becomes a bundle of nerves? According to my dad (again, one-sided, entirely biased, all that), the same boss drove one of his peers to quit the service after he got D’s two years in a row, before turning her attention to my dad. I’ll stop here and not insinuate anything about his boss’s personnel management strategies with regards to older staff, but his story really disturbed me.

Of course, I’m only hearing his side of the story. Well, not only his side – I’m also hearing my mum’s side of the story, where she tells me how my dad yells at night from recurrent nightmares, and how he talks to himself all the time but doesn’t realise it, and how he’s so constantly wound up about his performance at work and just comes home looking so defeated every single day. She asks him to just leave the job, but he can’t give up his salary, he can’t give up the retention bonus at the end of the year, he’s even worried about how this will impact me as a young MOE employee. We try and tell him it’s okay, it’s just a month’s salary, we don’t need it to get by. But my dad is the way he is, and he won’t just give up and do something badly, and he’s going to push himself even harder and I’m just so afraid that, at his age, he pushes himself too hard and snaps.

My mum’s asked him to speak to another of his bosses, who’s been fairly neutral about this, and we’ll see how that goes and hope for the best. She’s ready to march down there and slap someone, which is what I love about my mum (happy birthday, mum!). As for me, I just really needed to get this out there, and for someone to read it, and if you have any advice to offer to me or my dad, I’d love to hear from you – please email me directly. Thanks for reading. I hope I’m over-reacting, I really do.

Afternote: And people wonder why I don’t want to stay in service. I mean, if I did, I could be a principal one day! Ick.

Posted from Posterous

The iPhone 3GS has made me take many, many more photos this year, and it shows on my flickr account. I guess it’s true what they say: the best camera you have is the best one you have camera with is you is have best have camera camera camera. Or something like that.

After trying out an overly wide range of iPhone photography apps (my $$! boo-wah!), I’ve settled on using Tilt Shift Generator for most of my iPhone photo post-processing. I really do like the way it makes my photos turn out, because I’m a complete sucker for overly-saturated, unnecessarily-vignetted and puzzlingly-blurred photos.

Here are some from my recent trip to Korea: Statues, Wheel and an adorable wooden round pig. More as I get around to post-processing my photos (this is also something I find myself doing far more with the iPhone, since I can do it anywhere. Like, er, not while on the toilet).

I’ve realised it takes quite a bit of discipline to draw stupidchicken on a regular basis. Yes, I usually just end up taking existing drawings, making small modifications, adding some senseless text and pretending it’s funny. It’s still tiring. Be quiet.

This last half-year of doing the webcomic has been quite rewarding, though. I’ve set up a Facebook page for it (factoid: biggest fanbase – teenage girls from the UK. Go figure), and a nice commenter went “love these comics, really make my day, keep it up!”. A nice comment! On the Internet! Probably a sarcastic troll. Anyway, thanks, nice commenter or sarcastic troll. I’ll keep it up as long as I can.

I also found drearyweary recently. The creator is a Singaporean comic artist who does some really, really amazing work, and he posts entire long (and coherent) comicbooks online (Creative Commons licensed, even). I need to buy some of his stuff, if I can find it. I’m really enjoying The Resident Tourist – it’s a (presumably) autobiographical story about the life of a returning Singaporean who feels displaced in his home country. Speaks to me more than a little, I guess. And the crisp art is just awfully impressive.

Finally:

Evil Tofu is a character from the webcomic, who showed up here and here. Drawn for Toru, my evil friend who’s in Nairobi or Narnia or something.

I’ve set me up a tumblr page, for all the linkblogging and photoblogging which seems to be all I do nowadays on this blog. I’ll reserve this one for the long, insightful articles. (Snicker)

It’s at, unsurprisingly, yjsoon.tumblr.com.

I managed to rush out today’s new stupidchicken comic only an hour before my self-imposed deadline. I imagine this will become more common as work gets busier, but I’m glad this Wednesday-Saturday update schedule is forcing me to be disciplined about drawing regularly. 

New chickens since the last update (also, you can subscribe to stupidchicken by email or RSS!):

• January 17 Chicken vs. Grenade
• January 14 Chicken vs. The Treachery Of Images
• January 10 Chicken vs. Fable 2 Chicken-Kicker
• January 7 Chicken vs. Causality Dilemma
• January 3 Chicken vs. Chicken Soup
• December 31 Chicken In Conversation: Introductions
• December 27 Chicken vs. Shrieking Chicken Toy
• December 24 Chicken vs. Eggnog

Before the internet grew up and ate all my free time, I doodled a lot. I bought reams of white A4 paper, laid on the floor, drew with my cheap fountain pen while dreaming up all kinds of ridiculous story arcs, left my drawings all over the house, and got yelled by my mom who threw away the drawings. This sequence, repeated regularly until I enlisted, made me happy. I even entertained thoughts of drawing and making comics for a living, half-aware that I really didn’t have the talent or patience for it.

At 19, I was being interviewed by the Public Service Commission for the scholarship (in engineering — math is easier than art, after all), and they asked what I would like to be doing in ten years’ time. I told them, all earnest and naive, that I’d really like to be drawing comics. I can’t remember what their reaction was — maybe I couldn’t see their bewilderment through my nervousness — but I remember my scholarship officer mentioning a year later that she had heard about it, and found it funny. Seemed to me it had gone around the office that some kid had dared to tell the PSC he wanted to draw comics! Not serve the public good! Just wait till he comes back and serves his bond!

So now, it’s ten years later, and I really want to draw some comics so I can tell the 19-year-old version of me that I didn’t mess up his dreams too badly. 

Also, I spent $500 on my new tablet, so I’d better use the hell out of it.

Had my last staff dinner last week, and didn’t win anything in the lucky draw for the third year. Hung out with colleagues afterward and the conversation steered itself in the exact same direction as after last year’s staff dinner. Full marks for consistency, everyone.

Met the new colleagues for the first time today. This might be interesting.

Going home more often to try and figure out how best to fit the giant TV (that I bought last year for the apartment) into the spare room when I move back home. I’ll need a sofa, a new table and maybe some way to soundproof the room so I can still hold Rock Band / Guitar Hero parties. And a new OS; the Ubuntu box is getting a bit long in the tooth (haven’t upgraded since 6.10). And a new TV. And a Mac Pro. Er, wait.

Done with having to go back to work on a regular basis, but need to resist the urge to play Fallout 3 until my eyes bleed. I still wonder if I should have planned a trip somewhere for the break.

Saw the ex for the first time in very, very long, and found out from a good friend (thank you) that she’s moved on and found someone new. Hey, it’s been nearly two years; I’m just the one who’s slow and useless like that. Felt sorry for myself for a day or so, but ran 30km in a week to not feel like crap (old post), and hey, it worked! Ignore the time dilation I did right there.

Been slowly seeing my boarders vacate their rooms to go home for the holidays. I doubt I’ll ever see most of them again, and I keep wondering if I ever got the pastoral care role of this job right. Last piece of advice I offered to them on my “Level 12 Blog” (er, post-its on the pantry wall) was to please, please use this break to do something they’d been putting off all year. Upon further thought, I think that was for me. 

I’m okay now.

I received my Fifth-Year Reunion book in the mail this week. I’d been getting (and ignoring) reminders over the last few months to fill up a personal-updates page online, which would then be printed and sent to everyone in the class of 2003.

iPod nano: Thinner than a reunion book.

The first thing I did when I got the book — after marvelling at how heavy it was, then attempting to kill a cockroach with it — was to check if my ex had submitted a page. She had, and after reading it (semi-disinterestedly, I’d like to claim), I turned to where my update page should be, as if to check if I’d submitted something and completely forgot about it.

(I hadn’t.)

Many of my best friends from college hadn’t submitted their pages, either. Maybe it’s because we know we don’t need to catch up in a book sent out five years after graduation; more likely, it’s because we’re all ridiculously lazy, and that’s why we got along so well in the first place. Anyway, I’ve been very lucky in having been able to see them pretty often, thanks to the work trips (three in just over a year!), and many have come to Singapore.

In hindsight, it would have been terribly amusing to send in a whole series of Chicken comics to put on my page. Maybe someday I’ll write a blog post answering the questions posed (“favourite Stanford memory”, “life after Stanford”, “current life motto”). Or maybe I’ll be too ridiculously lazy to do it.

The new site is up with a new URL, new design and hopefully more posts.

Subscribe to the new feed, too!

No, I still haven’t tested the design in IE.

Saw Wall-E last night (every bit as awesome as I had read), and was exposed to the trailer for what could be a terrifyingly bad local 3D production, Sing To The Dawn.

I looked up the official website hoping to find something to make fun of, and MDA certainly didn’t want to disappoint here.

Check out the horrible font choices, nigh-unreadable text size and colour contrast, the hilarious combination of drop-shadow AND outer-glow text effects on the main title, and the amazing playable “background music” involving screeching monkeys and a low-quality version of the (admittedly very melodious) theme song that builds up to a rousing climax and… stops. Even the standard Flash video controls on the trailer are mysteriously ginormous and pixelated. Aargh my eyes.