• The Steampowered Globe
• Nanowrimo stats and everything report
• Book reviews feat. Low Kay Hwa’s stories
• New plots, new adventures of real life!

It’ll be posted in due time. There’s a lot and I don’t want to put it all at the same time!

I managed to attend the McDonald’s Monopoly Grand Draw thanks to omy.sg! I was there as a blogger and really I wanted to know who the winners are and how it was going to be conducted. Plus, it was the first time someone won the grand prize!

It was held at Clarke Quay and the fountain square was decked like a Monopoly game board. The crowd there were already winners since they had registered their chance card so it meant that they’ve won at least something.

They just didn’t know what something that they’d win.

In any case, McD’s had good served around like nuggets and such with a large fridge stocked with Fanta sodas for anyone to grab a can from.

The draw would start at 7.30pm but before that and while people registered their numbers, people could play at the various areas, like Chance in which you had to roll giant dice and get a double. You’d then win the actual monopoly games!

Mr Monopoly also made an appearance briefly as he surveyed the area. Did you know the original name of Mr Monopoly is Rich Uncle Pennybags?

If you didn’t, now you know!

THE MORE YOU KNOW~~~

There are 270 Chance card winners this year. However, at the event only 224 was registered. To those who didn’t register, tsk tsk so sad. The prizes are great! Why, why didn’t you register if you had the card? You could have given it to meeee.

Before the main draws for other prizes like the car, the Wavehouse package and such. We got to know who won the trips to Atlanta and Prague! Mostly, they bought the food for their family, like the breakfast meal.

And then the grand prize winner was  Mr Sankararama Subramanian receiving his prize from Managing Director of McDonald’s Singapore, Ms Judy Harman and Head of Business Development of VISA Singapore, Mr David Fowler and well, Mr Monopoly. Apparently, he said he wasn’t going to take the money for himself, instead he will use it to donate it all to hungry children in India! :O Oh my!

That’s very charitable of him.

I know a lot of people were going “Nooooooooooo!” when they heard that the money was won.

And so, it was break time after that. Just a five minute one so they could set things up properly and I could take the opportunity to grab a drink. In between these too, there were quizzes with prizes of the Monopoly houses in the size of a hand since they were actually radios.

Those were cool.

Anyway, next up was a loooooooong wait since numbers were drawn out for a lot of the Denizen voucher winners and then, also the Wavehouse package winners and well, the ultimate package winners too (which I like to call that since they had Wavehouse and movie tickets etc. It was a lot of things in that package).

Those with their number called up could collect them at the redemption counter while the “bigger” prizes collected theirs at the registration counter. Bigger prizes like a freaking Macbook air!

I was impressed with Daniel Ong, the emcee for the event because he had to call out at least a hundred numbers continuously. By the time when the number to be drawn to win the car, people were either going YAY that they hadn’t won the previous prizes or not.

For if you didn’t win the previous prizes, you would either win a movie ticket package (which was still like woah) or the car.

Of course there would be only one winner of the Volkswagen Touran 1.4 TSI.

And that was Ms Tan Wen Xin! What I noticed from the winners of the “big stuff” was that the winning meal was a McSpicy or a double McSpicy! HMMMM. Well, it’s all up to your luck anyway but it seems like the McSpicy is a winner’s favourite.

And that was the end of it with everyone going to the redemption counters to pick up the prizes they’d won. Since really, everyone of them got a prize no matter what! Everything indeed must go as McDonald’s Monopoly had said.

Hnnngh. So the chance cards are really cool. Next time hopefully I can get one! Well, unless I get the winning pair to win the grand prize of course…

While Sarah is off doing things (like guest podcasting/blogging/adventuring elsewhere), here’s a song from today’s recording!

It’s Marceline’s Daddy Ate My Fries song from Adventure Time.

Or, check out the next post of N.E.mation here. It features… THE TOILET GAME.

Hey all! While Sarah Does Singapore is off for this season, check out my posts at N.E.Mation here!

Or you can watch the video that comes with that post too here:

Ps. YES, I did get in top three for the N.Emation ambassador competition.

Don’t forget! Come join our Nanowrimo Thank Goodness It’s Over Party/Steampunk book launch!

The Little Happy Shop is a little shop of happiness at Holland Village Shopping Mall. With the new station open, it was easy to get there. Well, relatively easy cause it was raining like heck when we were there.

THE CAST LIST:

Avariel

Joelyn

Raven

Plus me of course. We were going to attend a rubber stamp making workshop! This is apparently a super popular workshop since the slots get filled fast since it is freaking fun and that really, it’s called The Little Happy Shop, it isn’t that big.

We get a pack of things! The workshop we attended was the BEGINNER’S one. It was $29 at the time of this post and we got tools, materials and the rubber block we would be carving on. Joe (not our Joelyn) from Monster Gallery was our instructor!

From the patterns we got, I chose to do the one of a girl. Here’s Joe showing us step by step to do our stamps with his pattern of a glass of soda.

IN THEORY, it is easy but in reality, I think we all need a lot of practice and I see why he gave us a set of simple vector designs to copy from first.

It is time consuming too and huzzah for our group since he told us that we followed instructions properly and did it quite fast compared to other sessions. I ATTRIBUTE THIS to us being good with instructions and having experience in other artistic endeavours in our previous adventures.

So as we silently carved our pieces, I finished my outline with my pen knife and then started using the scraper. And then I kind of accidentally poked myself on the thumb with it.

IT WAS BUT A MERE PRODDING OF THE TIP.

How did it start to bleed like woah?!

And then Joe was telling us to be careful with the scraper for it was very sharp (he was checking on the others/carving more details on his stamp to show how it looked like).

Ha… Ha… Haaaa. I pressed my thumb (it was my left hand) to my palm to prevent it from bleeding over my rubber block while saying, “Uh huh, yes okay!” in my super casual way.

So for that moment, I continued casually carving on since everyone was concentrating on their pieces and I really wanted to finish my design in time since I had places to go after that. It stopped of course, it was a small cut like a paper cut after all.

Test print time! Instead of the usual placing the stamp on an inkpad, we press the inkpad onto the stamp itself! It’s not the usual inkpad either, it’s pigment ink of various colours.

I chose pink and we could keep any one colour that was on the table there since it was included for our pack.

Tada! Mine is the pink girl.

So even if the actual stamp looks a bit messy and not so smooth, the bits that needed to be stamped is there! Raven’s ship got windowless since she accidentally cut it off…

Yay! Clockwise from my stamp of a girl is, Avarielle’s ship, Raven’s windowless ship and Jo’s bear on a rocket!

I still had a left over piece of rubber block so I could make another stamp from it. In any case, the Little Happy Shop does sell them in large blocks and other sorts of inks that can be used for various materials like cloth, tiles etc.

This is sooo fun. Since I took the beginner’s workshop, I have the tools to make the stamps on my own now.

There’s an advanced class and it has more funky techniques and more detailing. I’m not going to attend that yet, at least not for this year but I am totally going to practice more on my own and hopefully make a proper set of Assassin’s Creed stamps.

The Little Happy Shop has more classes on other arty fun things to make, just check their facebook to see what they have! Sign up early too cause of limited spaces.

I need more EXP points and rubber blocks to make more stamps. RUBBER BLOOOCKKSSSSS.

Yes! Spread the word on our Nanowrimo Thank Goodness It’s Over party and our steampunk book launch! Come along if you’re interested in Nanowrimo (even though it’s ended by then) or if you’ve tried to do it an either succeeded/failed/gone meh and will try another time. You can bring your friends too in case you feel alone but from the previous parties, pretty much everyone become pals with each other very quickly.

On our steampunk anthology book launch, it is titled The Steampowered Globe and available for just $15 at the event!

It’s usually $18++ at Kino and other stores cause they’ll add in GST. Anyway, the first anthology of steampunk short stories by Two Trees and I could probably guess, the first in Singapore too since I have never seen another one like this before.

Bring even more friends and support this book by buying it cause the bulk of the writers are Nanowrimo-ers too!

The stories:

Ascension by Leow Hui Min Annabeth

No, They Dream Of Mechanical Hearts by Claire Cheong

Morrow’s Knight by Viki Chua

Colours by Yuen Xiang Hao

The Morning Glory Incident by Mint Kang

Help! Same Angler Fish’s Been Gawking for Eight Minutes! by Ng Kum Hoon

Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia by JY Yang

So yes, anyone is free to come. If you know people who like writing or reading, double plus if they like steampunk, they should come. ALSO, the dresscode will be steampunk. Or at least, that is encouraged.

You can wear whatever you want, usually when visiting a library if you don’t have any steampunk attire but really, when else besides conventions can you wear it?

Here, for you own blogs, to retweet or anything like that, the files for the poster in JPG version, PNG version or even GIF version for you to download and post (right click and save file). Plus the text below for you to copy paste!

Nanowrimo TGIO Party & The Steampowered Globe book launch

Location: National Library, Multipurpose room (basement 1)

Date & Time:  3 December 2011, Saturday at 6.30pm

Entry: Free (as always)

Dresscode: Steampunk (if you have any)

PS. If you want the other books available by Two Trees, hit us up an email/comment here and we’ll bring it there for you if you don’t want to buy it from Kinokuniya etc.

Woah. Interestingly after the official episodes for season 3 are over, we had some more adventures that were really fun and also arty. I’m going to put that in Random Encounters. Pluuuus, there’s something that I’m going to be posting about to after this series. So while the episodes for Sarah Does Singapore is over for season 3, heh heh heh, watch out for more ridiculous things. Something else is taking over for Mondays. Still adventure but a lot more weird things.

And now the play list!

The Playlist (season 3)

• Tomorrow Never Knows by Carla Azar (season 2 opener)
• C’mon N’ Ride it by Quad City DJ’s (Tanjong Pagar Railway Station)
• Written in the Stars by Tinie Tempah feat. Eric Turner (Asian Children’s Writers and Illustrator’s Conference)
• Rolling in the Deep by Adele (Velocity Urban Attack)
• Like a Stone by Audioslave (Marina Bay Sand’s Arts & Science museum feat. Salvador Dali)
• Perfect by Pink (Pink Dot Day)
• Reflection by Christina Aguilera (Cosfest X.1)
• I Believe I Can Fly by R Kelly (iFly Singapore, indoor skydiving at Sentosa)
• The Resurrection Stone from Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Part 2 Official Soundtrack (Harry Potter finale party)
• Black or White by Michael Jackson (Ode to Penguin books exhibition)
• The Scientist by Coldplay (Science fest at Suntec by the Science Centre)
• From Out of Nowhere by Apocalyptica (Mini comic art exhibition)
• Harder, Better, Stronger, Faster by Daft Punk (Ceramic mug making)
• Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce (Game of Thrones HBO screening private event)
• Here It Goes Again by OK Go (Singapore Toys Games Comics Convention 2011)
• Letters to You by Finch (Singapore Philatelic Museum aka the stamp museum)
• Waiting for the End by Linkin Park (The end of Borders in Singapore)
• Frozen by Madonna (Terracotta warriors at the Asian Civilization Museum)
• Speeding Cars by Imogen Heap (Go-karting at *scape)
• Fire by 2NE1 (Waterfire at Bedok Reservoir park’s festival)
• Take on Me by A-Ha (Comics Xchange conference)
• Yellow by Coldplay (Opening of the circle line, or rather the rest of the stations on it)
• Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice (Ben & Jerry’s Chunkfest at Marina Bay’s promontory)
• My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors by Moxy Fruvous (Nanowrimo Singapore’s kick-off party)
• Trogdor by Strong Bad (Singapore Writers Festival)

So that’s it for season 3.

Funnest discovery of the season is the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station episode. The one that made most of us go “GAAAASP, WHAT IS THAT?” in a Lara Croft/Indiana Jones manner. It was kind of a lead up from our random encounter expedition through the Bukit Timah tracks. It was the bit of going there, checking things out and also learning the history of the place and knowing that wiki or the archives was… wrong.

Going on the Velocity Urban Attack was the splashiest and fun since there was a lot of falling. NEXT YEAR. Next year perhaps I will get through all the stages or at least half of it. They always cange it so we’d never know what’s the obstacles would be like.

Another fun one? Expensive compared to the rest but it’s freaking indoor skydiving at the iFly in Sentosa. That day was fun since besides iFlying, there were places to go there like the luge and checking out the shops at Resorts World Sentosa.

Seems like season 3 is more action packed along with more arty stuff. No idea how season 4 will turn out or when it will start. What we learned in season 3? We like to make our own stuff and investigate things like woah. In the meantime, we still haven’t gone to the birdpark yet and tons more places. See you guys in my random encounters!

Jo and I got invited to the opening of the Singapore Writers Festival. Since it was evening and we could make it, well, we decided to go! As we approached the tent, we glimpsed Dave Chua of Gone Case but ALAS, he disappeared as we entered for that evening was also the opening of an exhibition by Sonny Liew elsewhere which I didn’t know and also the launch of the Gone Case 2, the graphic novel.

NO MATTER, so we bust into the tent like the writers we are.

Which is to say we pushed opened the doors and pretty much walked in after saying our names at the sign in area.

In the corner of the festival pavillion (that part is free for anyone to come) was an exhibit on Kuo Pao Kun’s lifetime achievements while the middle-ish part had black and white leather benches in front of a mini stage. The perimeter of the whole pavillion was pretty much a bookshop so there were shelves of local and non-local books. As usual, it is le literary people who are there. We recognized faces but we are shy girls not really so we just decided to check out the spread.

We are but PEASANTS for out of the whole affair, we liked the vegetables, salad and potatoes best. POTATOES AND VEGETABLES. Such simple tastes we have! The other dishes were too sweet for us even if it was sea perch soup, fish and Jo tried the chicken. It’s… sweet which was kinda weird. NO MATTER, we scoped out the people there while we stood around with our plates.

For those who didn’t know, there was a dresscode in the invitation to SWF. It was “literary chic”. There had been a lot of questions on Twitter by others who had this invite too. I decided that “literary chic” meant to dress up like a writer but not a hobo writer. It worked and as you can see from the pictures, everyone pretty much just wore whatever the heck they wanted.

We saw the NAC people too! They were busy so we didn’t want to disturb the people so we just shovelled more potatoes and enjoyed the air con there. So yes. We just spent the opening eating potatoes and vegetables before we decided to scram since well, everyone had their own person to mingle or speak literary chic and it was getting late for us. It was a preview night after all and there would be panels and such the next day.

I purchase my festival pass via Sistic when it had the early bird special so it just cost me $11 then. The thing is that you were supposed to exchange it at the festival pavillion to get your swanky proper pass! A lot of people were confused about this bit and eh, this was the first time the Singapore Writers Festival is being charged. Hopefully the next one would be less tedious.

For one thing, the ticketed events like workshops and stuff, you needed to buy via Sistic first since it was separate from the festival pass. And the festival pass was for everything else. Mostly, people were also confused on where to exchange your Sistic festival pass into the red plastic one since it wasn’t really obvious at the counter of the festival pavillion (it was said to be Info counter and was sharing with the bookstore’s cashier).

As Jo and I waited (we went to the fest the next day, so imagine a time lapse here instead of us camping in the festival) for the launch of Ceriph’s issue 4, we found this! Bubble G.U.M and Happiness at the End of the World was available! So was an Irish Tour of Singapore which you could buy it all at Two Trees too!

Plus, it amused me that Low Kay Hwa’s book that I bought a week or so before the fest was there since I was corresponding to him currently. That meant that they didn’t just stock the literary stuff at the festival bookstore.

Also, we found a book that was going to be launched the following week there. I had to buy it because the first line was:

Tara first met him at the Singapore Arts Festival in Moscow.

You have no idea how many people picked up that book there, stared at that line, looked around and back to it again. Worry not. I will read out parts of the book and reveal to you what it is since it is queued in my bunch of books to be reviewed.

Meanwhile, it was time for the launch for Ceriph issue 4. This issue is divided into different paper types and if you want to hear her reading, just click the video below since I would rather let her explain it herself!

One of my favourite stories in this issue is titled $trategic KPI + %Synergy% = Love by Mary-Jane Leo. I refuse to believe the ending. I believe that it was AMBIGUOUS, SINCE it was just merely a squashing. MERELY. It’s just a squash. You can get this issue and the previous ones at Kinokuniya, Books Actually or just check their website on where to get it.

After that, we went to the panel on Adoring Fans and Stalkers: Relating to my Readers, featuring Randy Taguchi and Fira Basuki. It was a super engaging and fun session. Very informative too on what fans they got and how they related to them or handled the really extreme ones. This was in the transaction pavillion which is to the left of the festival pavillion and needed the pass.

Before this session though, Jo did attend another panel and considering the layout of the tent, there was a distracting spider involved? The place is a bit dark too.

After that fan panel, we left to eat prata since there was quite a bit of prata talk somehow. Meanwhile, Vertical Submarine were responsible for these. Hahah, I always like Vertical Submarine stuff. It’s a mysterious case and another is called the UnderWriter’s Table. Yes, the book there says “How to write a blank cheque”.

Time lapse to the next weekend! It was getting quieter and the white board was getting more insane with art. You could get free fans too. Hah! Fans. I don’t think the bears at the info counter were for sale but they had mini versions of the festival’s programme. Anyway, it was a super hot day and I headed into the festival pavillion since the session I wanted to go was an hour away.

I must say that it was really quiet. There was also half hour readings and besides me and the bookstore staff and some of the NAC people, there wasn’t much visitors at the pavillion (unless they were buying books). I found out from my friend (not Jo. Check out the 1st prize winner for the Malay short story for Golden Point award, that is him) that the panel he was interested in was pretty quiet too, like around 5 or so people including him and the writer.

I think most of us attributed it to the fact of the festival being spread out in 3 places instead of The Arts House in which it made everything feel livelier. Plus, I didn’t know there was such thing as half hour readings at the pavillion. So sad for authors being slotted in the timings then.

Meanwhile, I was going to Is Facebook killing the Blog? Featuring: Pat Law, Gilbert Koh, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow at The Salon of the National Museum before I met my friend to find all this out. This panel was talking about finding your voice and write what you want to. Plus, more insight on how the panelists blog or intergrate facebook by linking to their blogs.

Their take away point was that if you are a serious writer who wants to write articles etc, choose a blog. Facebook is too spammy and your words might disappear if FB keeps changing. At least you will have an archive somewhere if you have your own blog.

The reason I met my friend cause HOHOHOHOHOH, I got a ticket to Joe Haldeman’s science fiction workshop. He had bought his before the start of the festival and I got mine in the last minute cause another friend of mine couldn’t make it and so I bought it off from her.

Heh, heh, heh.

As we bought headed to SMU, there was a performances, Words in Motion by breakdancing crews and other dancers. The whole thing was organized by Soul Theory Studios and there you can see Sheik Haikal being the emcee for it all. He was certainly entertaining for what brief time I was there.

And the last ticketed event for the evening was Building Other Worlds – The Fundamentals of Writing Science Fiction Featuring: Joe Haldeman. Mostly we got to listen stories from him, how he wrote his books and I did get to learn the difference of the types of science fiction written.

Not really sure how to explain it but okay, I did get to learn quite a bit and that it is tough to write science fiction nowadays.

It was certainly a sold out workshop and it was overrun a little bit since we wanted to listen to him more.

Lastly, my friend and I managed to listen to the LAST argument for the  Closing Debate: This House Would Trade English for Singlish at the transaction pavillion.

The well-acclaimed SWF Closing Debate is back! This time, the two teams of mystery speakers will debate on the motion: “This House would trade English for Singlish.” Singlish, Singapore’s colloquial English, has always provoked much controversy in a country torn between its commitment to a global and a national identity. Now who will make the most kilat (polished) argument for or against it? Who will conversely kena whack jialat-jialat (get trounced) for talking too much rubbish? Hopefully, all of them! Join us for a session of side-splitting, nose-bloodied, rowdy fun that will bring this festival to its irreverent close!

Members of the public could comment and well… WOW.

Singlish versus English debate

Although I’m sure there were official videographers, I know that footage won’t be used in… official videos or anything like that. No point for me to put up a video of the last arguments since it was really THAT packed. The audio’s good enough for you to listen.

Choice quote from the English camp:

In a nutshell the Singaporean identiy is about the acquisition of personal material wealth.Thank goodness our ministers are not like that.

There’s more leading to that but you got to listen to it, hahahaha.

Choice quote from the Singlish camp:

These days ah, we are told to speak English cause they are powerful international language, correct? But then ah, government also tell you nowadays you must speak Chinese because Chinese now very powerful. Right? I can guarantee ten years time they tell you to speak some Indian language because India also powerful. But you think ah, ok? English, Chinese, Indian, when put together Singlish already what.Correct? We are already in the future!

And that’s the end of the SWF. It was judged by how loud you clapped and thus both won. Hahahah, that kind of ending. In any case, that was great. In summary, SWF was fun. The venue needs to be worked out a little more since a lot of people have commented on not being able to switch rooms if they’re not interested in the panel and the ticketing needs to be a bit more clearly. That and the scheduling of panels. There was quite a lot of clashes with hot topic panels at the same time.

We’ll see how it is next year. For now, I’m going to keep my pass since it’s the first pass ever for a paid SWF here. COLLECTOR’S ITEM GET!

The kick off for Nanowrimo in Singapore was at the multipurpose room of the National Library. Somehow even though it was to be on at 6.30pm, there were a lot of early comers filling up the seats in the front and it didn’t take long for other people to stream in too.

Yes. This year’s cake.

As you can see after the programme ended, there was cake, cookies and whatnot. We didn’t have much goodie bags this year since we didn’t have a grant or anything like that but we did have the stickers from Nanowrimo’s HQ aka Office of Light and Letters and free notebooks from the Speak Good English movement cause I had a bag of the given to me on one of the events. Prizes were included like a toy squishy banana for the Awkward Banana Award by entering late into the room.

Everyone seemed to be at various part of the room discussing different things but it was still generally fun. I don’t have much to say cause the pictures pretty much are descriptive. Just imagine them talking about Harry Potter or gasping about Star Wars.

And then after we asked the people to help us move the chairs away, everyone sat on the floor? Heh, we still had time there so we could have a little game which started out of nowhere. It’s spin the bottle but with no kissing and more questions about what you’re going to write for Nano. Questions like what genre, how does your main character look like etc was asked!

The library would be closing in thirty minutes and it was time to shoo them off. There was an after party meet too since everyone decided to get McD’s. It’s the only place where it was close by and had space or easy/cheap to take away. So that’s it. The Thank Goodness It’s Over Party will be on 3 December, same place. Plus, it will also be the launch of our steampunk anthology then! It’ll be called the Steampowered Globe.

More pics of the kick off, at the flikr stream here.