A VERY UNFORTUNATE MESS

Just a quick update about my internship: yes apparently my "job" has evolved to a temp project manager for this week! But its for a rotten problematic acc that has been abandoned by some retarded "something something director" (and strangely nobody else seems to know what she does in her job).

Anyway to cut the long story short, there was a series of convoluted events(made worse by rather slow witted designers and partly my lack of knowledge abt lots of stupid tedious process) that is making everything into a complete mess. That said, I can say that its really not my fault and everything was probably not going to work out anyway.

Partly why this account is so difficult is because its like a cross-departmental issue with too many layers of administration and accounting to do. And now I really think i'm quite lucky to be in redworks digital department with nice and sensible people.

And when the original pm comes in next monday I am so going to throw this back to her and that her retarded something something director.

Just need to survive one more tomorrow though. Sigh.

THE SEASON FOR MYSTERIES

Here’s my latest craze – “Dangan Ronpa (Dangan Ronpa: Academy of Hope and High School Students of Despair)”.

It’s a  japanese PSP game that was released in 2010 by Spike Chunsoft (the same company who released the very epic “9 hours 9 persons 9 doors” on NDS previously). Dangan Ronpa is like a whodunnit kind of game (with some Japanese brutality and psychoness) with lots of text and conversation and some investigative/reasoning gameplay.  Japanese trailer below:

Unfortunately, it wasn’t translated into English and I don’t really own a  PSP or a PSP emulator so I can’t play it. BUT someone has been kind enough to post his playthrough of the game (complete with english translations, pictures and videos) on a forum and I have been actively following all his posts for the past few nights. And I must say I have been rather good at solving the cases thus far although the game does give away important clues and hints quite liberally =) And I really like the way they present/design certain parts of the game – like how they presented a summary of the solution to the 1st case (with english translations):

I caught up to the forum all the way until the middle of the 3rd case now, so I will have to wait for future updates in order to “finish” the game =X

Additionally, there’s actually many Japanese detective/mystery dramas nowadays but after filtering, I ‘m only watching 2 of them – “Mikeneko Holmes no Suiri” and “Kagi no Kakatta Heya”.

“Mikeneko Holmes no Suiri” actually irritates me a lot due to the extremely incompetent and unappealing main character as well as a very “turn-offish” cross-dressing cat. But I’m still watching in hope of some good mysteries although it hasn’t been very exciting thus far.

“Kagi no Kakatta Heya” focus exclusively on locked-room mysteries and it is so much better than “Mikeneko Holmes no Suiri”. The cases are generally quite good although I’m not sure whether they were repeated from elsewhere cause some of them felt quite familiar, and the last mystery I watched was just a little far-fetched, but otherwise, an exciting drama for me to follow.

And I’m waiting and waiting for the sequel to “9 hours, 9 persons,  9 doors” to be translated and released! And Diablo 3? Although I must admit I’m not really hyped up about it that much and as of now, there are no plans to buy a copy for my house so we shall see how it goes.

THE SKY CRAWLERS

I came across this anime movie previously but didn’t have the motivation to hunt for it until today.

A really slow and heavy movie to watch, but its something I would like I guess, cause it gives you a lot to think and ponder over. I’m not sure if it is confusing and difficult to understand cause I already had some background knowledge before watching so I kind of knew what’s going on haha. But I think this is one of those movie where such “spoilers” doesn’t really matter cause its more about “how” the movie conveys the idea rather than “what” is going to happen in the movie.

My favourite scene in the movie (or at least it seems to be the most memorable). An animation/gif will probably do it more justice but I’m lazy to search for or figure how to do it.

Additionally, the flight/fight scenes in the sky are done very nicely – sometimes it looked as if its almost real to me, so I guess it was worth downloading a 8gb 1080p blu-ray mkv file to watch this haha.

There’s always this heavy sense of loss after watching stuff like this, when it feels inappropriate to do anything (there’s suppose to be a box of durians in the fridge but I don’t really feel like eating them now). Coming across the excellent theme-song on youtube just makes it worse, cause when its super nice, I will be stuck looping it for a long time.

And I came across this comment on youtube -

“After watching something inspiring from Japan its impossible to watch anything from Hollywood for months. two different worlds.”

Although it’s a very big generalization, I can’t help but think that it is exactly what I feel.

人生的某一面

人生也许就是这样

输一点的同时 却又让你得到那一点点

它从来不会十全十美

也从来不会让你彻底地绝望

其实有时干脆一点反而比较好过

大大方方地得胜

干干脆脆地失去

这样的安分 也许永远拿不起也放不下

INTERNSHIP ARC – BEGINNING

1st day of internship at Ogilvy!

I can only say I still don’t really know much about my internship or the company for that matter. In fact, I still don’t know how much is my pay, or maybe they are not paying me at all. There really wasn’t much of an opportunity or anyone appropriate for me to ask actually. I didn’t know what account I was doing or who was in charge of me or anything at all. That’s the problem when I get the internship without going for any interviews. Surprising, there were many other interns from NUS and 2 from NTU but most of us ended up in different departments in the end.

After squandering away 1/2 the morning sitting somewhere in the Ogilvy offices, I was told that I was supposed to move to another Ogilvy office in another building elsewhere and it was a good 10min walk away, which is slightly more inconvenient for me in terms of transportation. However, the entire office will move into the main Ogilvy building in another 2 weeks so I should be working in the main Ogilvy office again soon.

Anyway, I am supposedly working in REDWORKS (one of the many Ogilvy’s companies) helping with the Tiffany and Co. account. Including me, there’s about 4 of us in total. However, although they never specify any job-scopes for me, based on my conjunctions, I won’t really be doing much with the client, but more of helping out in administrative work =X In a way, it will explain why they didn’t interview me. When I asked Larry (the print project manager working on the Tiffany account), he said they didn’t do interviews and chose based on “gut feelings” (why am I writing in NM2220 jounrnalistic style anyway). Anyway my direct supervisor or the person whom I'm helping out is this other Takai person (the digital project manager, very nice and approachable but relatively new and just 3 weeks into the job). I didn’t really have the chance to leisure-talk or 闲谈 with him much today so I don’t really know much about him yet.

Other misc stuff to write about includes the horrible travelling times and conditions(relatively crowded and about 50min to 1h one way). But a positive point is that they seem to be slightly flexible on reporting time (bet 9 to 930) and very flexible on dressing. I actually bought some new business wear for the internship but now I don’t even think I will need business attire at all. I was so over-dressed today and everyone else was in casual except me and a few of the other interns. Oh and I’m using a winXP desktop =X

As of now, this internship seems to be the kind where you won’t really learn much but then again, its still a bit too early to say. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my job is going to evolve into something more worthwhile and fun haha.