white space, white noise

mewithoutYou has absolutely got to be the best band I have heard for a very long time. Sure I've heard of them before, but I never did bother to look into it or even take a listen to their songs, but man, these songs, while not featuring any singing in the strictest sense but actually talking or vocalisation, are awesome. Plain awesome. The brutal honesty and emotion, you can feel it piercing through the lines and notes; it's some seriously outstanding poetry, it's art.

Not one motion of her gesture could I forget
The prettiest bag lady I ever met
Pushing her cart in the rain
Then gathering plastic and glass
She watched the day pass
Not hour by hour
but pain by pain.

I was a basket filled with holes
And she was the sand I tried to hold
That ran out behind me
As I swung at some invisible hand.

I stopped believing, you start to move
She was like wine turned to water then turned back to wine
I stopped my leaving and the better man bloomed
And you can pour us out and we won't mind

I was dead, then alive
She was like wine turned to water then turned
back to wine
You can pour us out - we won't mind
As stretched around the mouth of the glass
my life is no longer mine.

If you're still looking for a blanket, sweetie,
I'm sorry I'm no sort of fabric.
But if you need a tailor
Take your torn shirt
Stumble up my stairs and
mumble your pitiful prayers
And in your tangled knotted sleep
Our midnight needles go to work
Until all comfort and fear flows in one river
Down in the shelf by the mirror where you
see yourself whole - and it makes you shiver.

I stopped believing, you start to move
She was like wine turned to water then turned back to wine
I stopped my leaving and the better man bloomed
And you can pour us out and we won't mind

I was dead, then alive
She was like wine turned to water then turned
back to wine
You can pour us out - we won't mind
As stretched around the mouth of the glass
my life is no longer mine.

Even the wind lay still
Our essence was fire and cold and movement;
And if they're asking for the sign of the Father in you
Tell them it's movement and repose.

Paper Hanger - mewithoutYou

Words really don't do much justice, you'd have to listen. Whoever that said Christians make uninspired and lousy music; thought Christian music is all about Hillsong United and is hooked onto mainstream radio should be rethinking their stands and wake up right about now. Oh, and something not quite related but still related in some ways, Copeland's releasing Eat, Sleep, Repeat come Tuesday but I've already heard it and I'll say it, there's some pretty good stuff on that album, it definitely sounds different, but it's still the same band and they've only gotten better.

Weird
(Click to enlarge)

What's That!?
(Click to enlarge)

From Friday at NJC where they were having this year's coursework exhibition. Gotta agree with William that it felt quite underwhelming, which makes it a total opposite from last year's display. A few good works here and there, but the rest just came off as pretentious or underworked, maybe the fact that we arrived when the show was about to end with nobody in sight to explain anything also factored into this conclusion.

Crimson Haze
Photoshop 7
(Click to expand)

Painted this last weekend for Dawn of Victory, a mod for Star Wars Empire at War. It basically places World War II factions and an alien race in a science fiction setting, a la Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization novels, which served as inspiration for the team. I found the premise rather strange and interesting, that and also I've been dying to paint something spacey for the longest time since Homeworld 2 was released without success, plus the fact that Slipstream has lost its flagship mod and I felt like giving them a boost in morale of sorts. Think it came together rather nicely, it's also comparatively the fastest piece of work I've ever done, taking into account the amount of detail poured into the frame; if anyone wants to see work-in-progress shots I've listed them below.

Shot one.
Shot two.
Shot three.
Shot four.
Shot five.

Don't panic, everything's back to normal! What a week it's been, nothing quite like getting a text in the field at 8 in the morning about your website getting hacked while you're already trying to deal with an unexplained unchangable punctured tire and incredulous deployment timings that have left you with no rest through the twilight hours and realising you can't do a single thing to make anything right. Crazy I say.

In any case, this site wasn't hacked, I shouldn't think so anyway, by reason that the dubious self-spawning messages left behind by so-called Muslim hackers indicated no specific target. What actually happened was that the security of a site hosted on this server was breached and from what I understand, a script was allowed to replicate itself, replacing all index files with said message. For security reasons server owner and friend Mastermind decided to reinstall the OS and the data reinsertion explains for the long delay in things coming back up. Well, cutting to the chase, all my stuff's intact so there really shouldn't be any worry.

Anyways yes, went out on exercise deployment again but thank God it was just for a day (more like 18 hours) because so many bad things happened and we got so frantically tired trying to fix it all, including that punctured tire that we couldn't change without special equipment because it probably weighs as much as I do. Things are getting hectic about camp, in three weeks I've gone to range and learnt that luck is all that matters when shooting, been through chemical defense class getting a taste and feel of tear gas, fallen sick from the maddening haze, and faced numerous unfeeling command decisions which continuously treat us as invisible beings and push daily physical training in our faces.

Life's unchanging in some ways; still disgruntled and unhappy, and it's killing how the world looks so normal, happy and welcoming out here, out of camp. Seemed especially so when I revisited Nanyang JC yesterday, what a good feeling it is to talk to people about shared memories, opinions and interests. But life's changing so much too, too much perhaps, and ten months into the life of being a conscript I wonder ever more if normality is ever retrievable, or that it was even ever there to begin with.