Georgette Tan

Category: life

  • The January 2023 Review

    The January 2023 Review

    My January was a contrast between fairly social and somewhat reclusive.

    Work

    It was quiet on the work front. If the week between Christmas and New Year is a “lost” week, meet the weeks between New Year and a Chinese New Year celebration that fell in January.

    Much of 2022 was pre-production for a TV show, in which I am a producer. We are currently in post-production, and I’m not needed full-time, leaving me with a lot of time to myself. You’d think this is the time I’d get started on other things (*cough* novel), but no – it was essential time for resting and getting bored.

    CNY

    My family are not big on celebrating the festive seasons, and both the dog and I are not big on fireworks. We had our usual reunion dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. I received an angpow from them because in our culture, pocket money is an adequate consolation prize to not having a spouse. I visited two close friends, spending the entire afternoon at the home of the second because all her visitors were also my mutual friends. Great time catching up. Quality over quantity. The dog spent most nights hunkered down under my bed in her new firework bunker. I have an upcoming post about this.

    Digital Migration

    I’m in the midst of migrating my passwords from LastPass to BitWarden, and my notes from Evernote to Obsidian.

    I’ve been subscribing to LastPass for maybe 2 years and their recent security issue meant that people on Mastodon were sharing alternatives. BitWarden caught my eye, not only because it’s open source, but because on a free account, I’m able to use it across all my devices.

    I didn’t realise Evernote was going through some issues as well since I barely use it anymore, but I did have notes that I want to transfer out to another app that supports syncing across devices for little to no money. Obsidian has a clean layout and a workaround that allows me to use it on several devices.

    Storium

    I kicked off a series of intro games for writers from Nanowrimo Malaysia, with some help from a local Storium friend. The new players did wonderfully, and I hope they’ll stay. We also started the new Nevermore (yes, the Netflix Wednesday one) game, which takes place in 1998 and featured the staff rather than the students. This one didn’t even require an open submission. We recruited a full cast on Slack.

    Tarot

    I’ve been reading tarot for a few years but I’ve not spoken about it here. I’ll make a proper post about it one of these days, but true to my nature, I’ve gathered several tarot readers I could find in Kuching and had a get-together. It’s a small niche community, which is my speciality. We had one meet-up in December and another one in January, simply because Andrea was back for the festive season. We added a couple of new faces and reconnected with some old friends, and it was a good time!

  • Hello 2023

    Hello 2023

    “Hi.“

    I hate it when people text me that word and stop there. I’d look at it, and go back to what I was doing while waiting for them to state their business. If they do not, their “hi” get buried below the scores of other messages I get in a day. I forget their message even arrived.

    A woman sits in front of an open laptop. She is looking at her phone.
    Don’t “hi” me and leave me. (Photo by Anna Shvets | Pexel)

    It was hard to ignore when 2023 arrived. The dog cowered in misery under my desk while our neighbourhood erupted in fireworks.

    While I’m not the new year’s resolution type, 2023 feels like a clean slate. Last year felt like I was trying to reacquaint myself with being out of the house and among other people again. The pandemic changed the way I look at things. I lost the desire to go further than my immediate neighbourhood market. I gained bad habits such as ordering Grab Food far too often.

    But last year also brought an unexpected opportunity. I joined a TV show, bringing on board my experience in crafting stories, storyboarding and writing scripts. While I was officially billed as a producer, our small core team meant that it was all hands on deck. This was fine with me. I enjoy trying everything out, and there was great satisfaction in a clean floor, although next time we’d have production assistants for details like that. More stories in good time. We are not finished yet.

    There are many things I want to achieve or get started this year:

    • Update my website
    • Finish editing Bahagia Park and get a publishing process going
    • Finish a Storium project I’m co-writing with a friend
    • Learn how to run games for my all-women TTRPG group
    • Read more books
    • Read more tarot and Lenormand
    • Release some of the stuff in storage
    • Blog more
    • Produce more podcast episodes

    Having a few key goals listed down gives me a sense of direction, because it’s so easy for me to fall back into the days of “pandemic brain”. Like a message in the middle of the day – “hi” – quickly forgotten from the lack of follow through.

    (Post for Bring Back Blogging – January 2023)

  • A Gallery of Car Plates Lost in a Flash Flood

    This week, I learned that newer cars have their car plates stuck on with double tape. This is an utter ripoff, if you want my opinion, because this happens:

    (Photo from Uni Garden WhatsApp Group.)

    On Friday morning, we were met with flash floods after a night of solid downpour.

    Canine Drains Inspector Girlie Tan surveys the swollen drains to assess the danger of it overflowing into our main street.

    While my immediate neighbourhood was fine, parts of our surrounding areas were under about a foot of water or more, including the UniVista neighbourhood which is currently under EMCO following a COVID-19 outbreak. In some parts of Kuching, it was chest-deep.

    After our neighbour mentioned losing his car plates and another neighbour sharing photos of found plates, I made it a point to go plate-hunting with the dog during our evening walk, after the waters receded. This was what we found.

    I doubt if there are still there by the time you read this, but I am heartened to learn that people do collect them and lay them out somewhere central in case owners come looking. If you passed through the flooded main Jalan Uni Garden, you may find your plates leaning on the curb along the main road in front of Golden Dragon, or at the Lorong Uni Garden 2 signboard.

    (Photo from Uni Garden WhatsApp Group.)

    Here’s another collection from an unknown location in Matang:

    (Photo from Uni Garden WhatsApp Group.)

    What happened to needing a screwdriver to take your car plates off?

  • The Little Hitchhiker

    The Little Hitchhiker

    I had a peculiar experience on Dec 30, 2020 that I want to put down somewhere for reference.

    Woke up with a slight pinch on top of my right Achilles tendon. I don’t remember if I went to sleep with the last night before or just acquired it that morning. Nothing painful or debilitating; I’m at an age and fitness level where such things are not unusual. Took the dog out as usual and forgot about the pinch although it lingered.

    Walked a short distance and my right shoelace came undone. Stopped to re-tie it. Walked a bit more, not even very far. Shoelace came undone again. Thought I didn’t do a good job the first time. Re-tied it. Walked on.

    Shoelace came undone again. Now I’m starting to suspect something was up. Stopped to re-tie it, making sure to pull it tighter this time. Resumed walkies.

    Shoelace loosened and sat in a very loose knot. I re-tied it while the dog and I were waiting to cross the road, making sure I was doing it properly. We crossed the road.

    Shoelace loosened again when we were on the other side of the road.

    “Very funny but that’s enough,” I said aloud. “Leave my shoe alone.”

    Two things happened instantly and simultaneously:

    1. The pinch on my Achilles tendon vanished.
    2. The dog jumped as though startled, raised her right foreleg, and started licking the spot that corresponded with where my Achilles tendon is.

    “And don’t bother the dog!” I added.

    Dog fussed with her leg for a bit while I re-tied my right shoelace for the fifth time. I kept an eye on her for the rest of the walk but she showed no discomfort.

    My shoelace stayed tied for the rest of the walk.

  • Love and Related Magick

    Love and Related Magick

    It’s been pointed out to me that I have great friends. This I know is true.

    I have friends that go back a long way. I have friends who are fairly recent. I have friends whom I don’t see much but we can always pick up where we left off. I have friends with shared interests or circumstances. I have friends with whom I feel a deep connection with. I have friends who surprised me by stepping up and helping me with things when I need it.

    I have been blessed with great friends, and I don’t know what I did to deserve you all.

    We humans tend to be suspicious creatures, especially if we’ve been hurt by other people before. Who hasn’t been? We also tend to talk ourselves down, saying shit like, “I didn’t do anything meaningful with my life to deserve anything nice in return.” We even go as far as denying ourselves the nice things as a way of punishing ourselves for whatever wrong we think we did to the world.

    I spent the last few months learning how to love. It is both difficult and easy at the same time. Those of you who have seen my dark side know what I mean. I’m not always joking when I make elaborate threats. The reason I don’t make good of them is because I like staying out of jail. But this is not who I am anymore. I’m not sure who I am anymore, but I’m not the same person as I was six months ago.

    This should be confusing and scary, but it isn’t. It’s a journey I’ve been getting ready to make, as soon as I was ready to let go of the emotional and psychological baggage that has defined me for so long. It is not a journey anyone CAN make if they are not ready or willing. Ask me. I’m one of the most stubborn people I know when it comes to deciding who I am and what I’m willing to put up with. But I’m tired of staying in one place. You can’t get different results if you keep doing the same thing.

    Giving and accepting love is one of the most difficult thing I had to learn to do. Let’s not even think about the kind of love portrayed by Hollywood and manipulated for profit. I absolutely did not love myself for a long time. People made me feel stupid and ugly. I had few people to tell me otherwise. Those who did… well, they are probably just being nice.

    The first time I freed myself from this mindset was to stop caring what other people think and did whatever I wanted. If changing myself to please others didn’t make a difference, I might as well do what I want. I was a Christian then, with a lot of Christian guilt and feeling of unworthiness. Allowing myself to hate people who earned it and cut them from my life was powerful. There is freedom in saying, “I’m not going to let you make me feel like shit again. Fuck off forever.”

    And then I did whatever I wanted, which surprisingly didn’t consist of wild orgies, murder, drugs, Satanism, or all the forbidding things that the church swears you’d get into when you quit believing them. I did shit that I love, spend time with cool people, tried not to be too much of an asshole, explored the world and the kind of person I am when my thoughts and moves were not being controlled by organised religion. I collected some good friends along the way.

    I left the church nearly 20 years ago and I’m only starting to learn how to love myself. Learning how to accept love is part of it. If you don’t love yourself, it’s hard to believe anyone else would. While our brains automatically link love to flowers and hearts, it comes in many forms … most show that your friends and family are thinking of you and want to help make life a little easier for you.

    Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages is an amazing resource that I go back to every now and then. I recommend that you check out the website so that you can get a better understanding of what I’m talking about.

    The original book was aimed at life partner-type relationships, but the principles are easily applied to other types of relationships. There’s already several variations out there for teens, the work place, etc. So you don’t have to be shagging someone for this to be applicable to you.

    In a nutshell, Chapman said there are five ways to express or experience love: receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch.

    Mine has always been ‘acts of service’, followed by ‘quality time’. This means that I value things like practical help (ie when I moved houses recently, several friends offered their larger vehicles and helped me move big items), and I like spending quality time with people whose company I enjoy. It also means that I give primarily the same way too, but understand that other people may have different love languages, so it’s always helpful to discover what they are.

    For example, I’ve never place much value on ‘words of affirmation’ because people can say whatever they want and still do the opposite. Burnt too many times, I suppose. But I’ve learnt to accept compliments without questioning the motive behind it. If there is a motive, it will make itself known sooner or later. But there are sincere reactions or feedback that builds a person up. Store it in your folder of ‘Shit That I Did Right’. Pull it out the next time you feel low or when you can use it as a building block for something greater.

    Accept the love. Accept the compliments and the help. Accept that you probably did something right, although it seemed like nothing to you. Be you and you will attract your tribe.

    And when you accept the love that comes your way, you will have love to give.

    Don’t get me wrong… if you cut me off recklessly in traffic, I’ll still scream “Cuuuunt!” in the direction of your car, but I won’t hunt you down and murder your family in cold blood.

    And I’m 40, for fuck’s sake. If I don’t love me first, nobody is gonna do it either. And I’m still learning.

  • [Review] The Escape of Princess Madeline – Kristin Pulioff

    [Review] The Escape of Princess Madeline – Kristin Pulioff

     

    This reading copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

    madeline

    Stars: 2/5
    tl;dr: It’s fine if you’re in the Middle Grade (8-12) age range. Anyone better read will overthink it.

    I think the thing I’m most confused about is the target audience versus the actual protagonist age and theme in this book. Isn’t Middle Grade supposed to be the pre-teen era where pimples, cracking voices and training bras are suppose to be the main problems?

    On her 16th birthday, Princess Madeline is rudely surprised when her father informs her that she will pick a husband from a selection of royal suitors coming to her ball that night, not unlike how Cinderella’s Prince Charming held a ball to meet all the eligible young ladies in the kingdom. This immediately tells you why she had to be 16; another day closer to Middle Grade and this book won’t have seen the light of day.

    Like all fairy tale princesses, Madeline is headstrong and wants to make her own decisions but the King was not hearing any of it because she is clearly a pawn piece to be married off for better kingdom perks. So she runs away, a plan she cobbled together in maybe an hour, and made up the rest of it as she went along. She gets kidnapped by bandits, who menaces her as menacingly as possible with readers whose average ages are just rolling over into the double digits. Which is to say they barely did anything except save her from the trouble of where to run next.

    Meanwhile, her love interest is a young knight who fell in love with her at first sight. She wasn’t aware he existed until he won the role as her champion. And naturally they ended up together because he was the least repulsive choice in the end.. Sigh.

    I think this novella is fine if you’re young and don’t have very sophisticated expectations in story plots or character development. Here’s a spunky princess with a problem. Here is a princess getting into deeper trouble outside her safe zone. Here comes her knight in shining armour.

    I like the spunk and wanting to break out of roles assigned to you by the patriarchy. It’s just that we don’t really get to know the characters enough to sympathise or relate. Perhaps the constrains of the MG category is to blame here, because the writing was actually quite pleasant to read.

  • [Review] I.D. – Emma Rios

    [Review] I.D. – Emma Rios

    This digital copy of I.D. by Emma Rios was courtesy of NetGalley.

    ID1Stars: 3/5
    tl:dr: Interesting concept but could have been better executed.

    The description of this graphic novel is interesting, particularly when gender dysphoria is gaining recognition, technology is close to perfecting full body transplants, and society is grappling with the ethics of it. Here’s the official blurb:

    A dystopian tale that analyzes the conflict between perception and identity through the struggle of three people who consider a ‘body transplant’ as a solution to their lives.

    This and the cover design was enough to perk some interest on some rather heavy topics. I appreciate where Rios was trying to go with this but a couple of things didn’t really work for me, particularly with the red-pink monochrome that the comic uses throughout (feels unfinished somehow) and the skinny text that had me frequently pinching and zooming the page on my iPad. It read better at second try, but there were parts where the panels and action was chaotic and hard to follow.

    There were three main characters – Noa, Mike and Charlotte. Noa identifies as a man but feels trapped in a petite female body that will never turn into the hulking lumberjack type like Mike. Mike claims to be an ex-convict seeking a new life. Charlotte claims to be bored. On Noa’s request, they sit down after their body transplant briefing for a chat because Noa is the youngest (17) among the three and needed some hand-holding.

    ID2

    In the end, Noa was the only one with a fully developed story line. I won’t give away what became of Mike and Charlotte, but it does leave you wondering, especially with Charlotte.

    Rios partnered with neurologist Miguel Alberte Woodward, MD for the science-y parts, including an essay at the end of the volume entitled ‘Stitching (an) I.D. Together’, which I skimmed and ultimately skipped over. Perhaps the more medical or scientific minded reader would find this more interesting.

  • [Review] Breaking Cat News – Georgia Dunn

    [Review] Breaking Cat News – Georgia Dunn

    This digital copy of Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn was courtesy of NetGalley.

    bcn1Stars: 5/5
    tl:dr: Adorable reporter cats!

    How could I have NOT heard of this webcomic before??

    I don’t live with cats, but I’m somewhat familiar with them because I have many friends who are cat slaves, and I used to work at the local animal shelter.

    Georgia Dunn’s cast of three cats – Lupin, Puck and Elvis – report on the hard-hitting issues such as “The People bought some stupid-looking thing for the dining room”, and “The house is under attack from a mysterious red dot”, or “The Woman is trying to use a laptop”. Cue some extremely predictable cat behaviours with deadpan commentary and the seriousness of getting a job done.

    Bonus points: I’m a journalist… a newspaper one, but a journalist nonetheless and I can relate to the importance of being on top of current issues such as being at the scene where bacon is being cooked or entertaining great suspicion when you are told you’re not allowed to be somewhere.

    I love this book so hard. I read it at least two more times and bookmarked the website so I can catch up with the latest news, which is further along than where the book ended. I showed this galley and gave the URL to a couple of colleagues who have cats AND a Human Pupa. This is probably my best discovery this month.

    If you are an animal rescuer or support your animal shelter, the reporter cats have a wonderful Special Report on shelter cats which is worth passing along.

    You can find Breaking News Cats here.

  • [Review] Dirty Pretty Things – Michael Faudet

    I acquired this digital copy of Dirty Pretty Things by Michael Faudet via NetGalley.

    Stars: 2/5
    tl;dr: Read this book if you “don’t like, don’t read” poetry.

    For some reason, I was disproportionately excited about finally getting a copy of Faudet’s poetry book. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read and liked Lang Leav’s Love & Misadventure, and because the nature of their relationship resulted in the expected cross-promotion on my newsfeed. You probably encountered the hype for both, even if you’re not the poetry-reading type. The promotional work was extremely well done and quite likely contributed to its great success.

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