Holes in the Wall

After the marathon 11pm session on Monday, I decided to give Tuesday a miss. WTF I'm already sleep-deprived enough I'd never be able to survive the rigours of lectures and long marathon clinic sessions.

Was all set to do some overdue revision, but ended up lazing around online, reading about aerodynamics, then being all inspired to try out my theories.



What better way to test out aerodynamic principles than folding paper aeroplanes? Was trying to get an optimal lift-to-weight ratio, which proved to be rather hard.

Try to emulate the shapes of aeroplanes too much, and you'll lose too much stiffness. Have too much lift without a counterweight to balance it out and you'll get a plane that shoots upwards and stalls. Get rid of the winglets and tail and the plane won't fly stably. The slower the plane flies, the more difficult it is to keep it going straight.

And just when you think you've got a decent shape, you realise it's so damn hard to launch the aeroplane without it nosediving or stalling because every little change in attack angle changes the amount of lift drastically.

Enough. I'm not learning to be an aerospace engineer anyway. But it'd be quite cool to make a cardboard glider that can glide a payload of a can of Pringles across a field, no?

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Watched Transformers eventually, after, like, getting totally desperate and MSNing and SMSing close to 10 people asking if they'd watch with pathetic loserish me.

At least my secondary school mates didn't ditch me. They've been planning Transformers for a while so it was convenient for me to just turn up. Yay! Haven't met up with them for a while but no awkward moments, so as long as I put up a good show and act like Mr Nice and Funny Guy.

As for the beef itself; the movie. Hell yeah it's good. The plot (or the lack of it) flows really well, which is expected when you got Michael Bay (of Armageddon fame) and Spielberg at the helm. The robots are animated really well, to the extent that you can actually think that Frenzy is cute and that the party of Autobots are more human than robot. There's quite an intimate collaboration with Hasbro (the bastard stepbrother of Takara which produces the inferior toys for the American market) so don't expect too many acts of travesty. But it's sad how they created a bastardisation of Soundwave and called it Frenzy just to fit the role.

Oh! The plot. Well, there's one, and it's admittedly clever in some parts - a goofy high-school kid who had almost sold the future of mankind on eBay and a huge dollop of conspiracy theory. Most of it is cheesy fodder though but hey, it's a Transformers movie, not a drama epic. And while the ueberly corny ending had incited the derision of many, it's not half as bad as the ending of the Matrix trilogy.

There's not too much to fault about it from a critic's point of view, but it just doesn't do enough to impress. As reflected by professional critics giving it a much higher appraisal. Maybe it's the cracks in the plot's logic that are huge enough for even Optimus Prime to fall into - why did they fight so long and hard, when the final finishing move could have been done way earlier? Or that it depended on a series of divine coincidences - the college kid who holds the key to saving the world somehow happened to come across Bumblebee; everyone somehow happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Or maybe it's just the cheese. But if you suspend your disbelief just for that two hours, I promise you'd enjoy yourself in the world of majestic-yet-fluid robots even if you're not a fan of the Transformers.

Grade: 4/5

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Sleep? Bah. Never got any until 3.30am, and I guess it's from the hyperness that rubbed onto me from my exclassmates and from the movie.

I hate not being able to sleep. Too groggy to do anything productive, yet awake.

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Wednesday was a marathon day in school. Learned how a baby is delivered, and it's so DAMN FREAKING SWEET AND LOVELY WHEN THE BABY POPS OUT AND HERALDS ITS EXISTENCE WITH A KAWAIIIIIIII CRY. It's so beautiful, I swear I almost cried.

And yay, I'm ahead of schedule in terms of the seemingly-impossible quota of evaluation forms I have to get done. I've been so lucky lately I'm convinced I'm gonna get a really bad spate of rebound bad luck anytime from now.

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Yay.