There are so much hype building on to the Christmas season. The whole world is talking about it, from the TVs to the ads to the radio to the Tweets and of course, all the blogs.

The hype builds itself like a bubble up since a month or two before Christmas, and it grows like a bubble going bigger and bigger.

And when Christmas finally came, POP, the bubble bursts in a day, and what’s left behind is party leftovers, unwrapped presents, an empty wallet, and to many, a void of loneliness and emptiness inside.

So that resulted in a lazy weekend, and even harder Monday blues, and if you’re really into Christmas, a sad month after recovering from the burnt wallet.

Like, ouch. What are we gonna do about it?

Hard Hit After Midnight

Most of our parties began on the 24th, during the Christmas eve. After midnight coundown, it’s Christmas, woohoo!!

Then our parties go on until 25th, the Christmas day. We had fun all day and all night, then when it hits midnight, Christmas is over. Some of us went on partying, but the sad thing is, it all eventually have to come to an end.

Then suddenly reality comes crushing down on us, that Christmas is over. What we’ve been looking forward to for 2 months is all over. As much as we wished for time to freeze and stop at that blissful moment of Christmas, time goes on, and life moves on.

Yup, time goes on, life moves on.

Spend, but spend wisely

It is said that Christmas is a world consumerism spree. There’s no reason to buy and spend oh so much on Christmas, other than just because, well, “It’s Christmas!”

It has become a trend to buy and shop and spend on Christmas time, because everyone says so. Even for non-Christians people buy and give gifts because that’s what the shopping malls ads and music are telling you to, “It’s Christmas, buy gifts and celebrate now!”

Well, that’s not exactly a bad thing, because giving is a gift by itself, but when you spend, spend wisely. Don’t go for the rush and use up all the cash until you have nothing left after the season, then the post-Christmas depression is gonna hit even harder.

“Oh gosh, I spent that much? I don’t even know!”

Party ends, but life goes on

The bad news is that as the party ends there’s plenty of crap to clean up, a bad hangover to deal with the next day, or worrying about the sticky make-ups and the oils that stayed in your hair from the barbeque. That adds up even more to the depression.

The good news is that no matter how shitty the party goes, you will still want to do it again next year.

And next year is something to look forward to.

To some of us who lives in a country with plenty of festivals to look forward to (yeah, Malaysia BOLEH!) we have always set our targets a few months prior to the event. It’s Christmas now, and Chinese New Year is already creeping up. Some of us has already made plans on what to do and where to party already.

“Alright, Christmas is over, now what’s the next party?!”

So instead of sulking in what had happened, look forward to the next best thing. Life is a giant playground by itself, so the fun never ends if you know where to find them.

Post-Christmas Blues, We’ll Get Over It!

The pictures from last-night’s party sure are real fun, aren’t they? So cherish them and upload them to Facebook and lets all have a laugh over it!

Laughter is the best medicine for everything, no? :)

So, what’s the next plan?! New Year party, anyone? :P

P/S: In case you haven’t notice this post is a conspiracy set to post my Christmas dinner pictures. You’ve been conned, wahaha!

As a devoted Netizen we use emoticons everyday. Of course you use them too, right? It’s much more easier to just do a :) compared to doing *smiles* or D8< to doing *I’M GODDAMN ANGRY*.

Well I got kinda interested in the world of Emoticons, and as I dwell further into researching about it, the emoticon world is really far bigger than what we think!

There are probably hundreds of emoticons out there, and what we use is just like 3-5% of them!

Yup, the MSN or Yahoo emoticons aren’t just the only emoticons you can find. You can emote even better using your own keyboard!

So come in here to learn a little history about Emoticons, the difference between Western and Eastern Emoticons and have a look at the list of Emoticons around the world!

It all started during the 1970s

When the Internet was born and all the emails are flying around the world, people eventually felt the need to express themselves better than *OMG I’M SO HAPPY NOW*. There were little support for graphics like that time (yeah, we live in a lucky generation with MSN emoticons!) and all they have were the typographic tools of the keyboard.

So a guy named Kevin Mackenzie at 1979 proposed that the punctuations of our keyboard to be used as means of gesture and facial expression. He wrote that:

In regard to your message a few days ago concerning the loss of meaning in this medium:

I am new here, and thus hesitate to comment, but I too have suffered from the lack of tone, gestures, facial expressions etc. May I suggest the beginning of a solution? Perhaps we could extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e:

If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:

“Of course you know I agree with all the current
administration’s policies -).”

The “-)” indicates tongue-in-cheek.

At first Kevin proposed this as a joke, and we don’t really use the “-)” expression to mean “tongue-in-cheek” really today, personally I don’t really see the connection. :P But apparently the Net had taken it as a great suggestion and since then, emoticons begin to take a life of its own.

The Western Emoticons — :-)

So, as for when did the colon, hash and the close bracket become the basis that means “a smiley face” has not been properly recorded in the history of men (aka. Wikipedia), but well Wikipedia did record how the emoticon kinda works.

As the Western language, commonly English or other European languages typically reads from left to right, it makes sense for an emoticon to be registered from left to right too. So you will see the : represents the eye, the - representing the nose and ) representing the mouth. Like, well, this!

Well, as lazy Netizens eventually we’ve decided to take off the nose all together, and that leaves us this:

In case you still haven’t get it, well just lean your head to the left of your shoulder and you should be able to see the faces there. See the eyes there and the mouth doing all the different expressions? Yup, that’s it! :D

Which leads us to another main characteristic of the Western emoticon, is that they emphasize a lot on the use of the mouth to tell an expression. Without the mouth you can’t really tell what are you trying to emote with just two dots, right? So here are even more variations of the Western emoticons:

And hundreds of others more! With just a few combination of keys you can make so many faces, now isn’t that the wonders of emoticons? :D

The Eastern Emoticons — ^__^

Well the Net is a global thing, and global is all about cultures! While the Western people made so many cute faces by looking sideways, the Eastern people preferred to just show a face straight on, without having to tilt the head! This is also partially influenced by the East-asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese which reads each word as a block, instead of alphabets. So here’s how some famous Eastern-influenced emoticons look like:

As you’ve noticed by now, the Eastern emoticons uses the eyes to tell an expression instead of the mouth, which is pretty different with the Western emoticons. So if you’re familiar enough with these type of emoticons, we can replace the mouth with a dot or omit the mouth altogether and come out with:

Now, isn’t emoticons beautiful!

Even more complex Emoticons

Well, apparently we Netizens are not satisfied enough with these easily created emoticons, and we wanted more, and more! So the king nerds had come up with these beautiful Emoticons that combines the ASCII art. To put it simply, these emoticons uses glyphs that exist in the computer world but cannot be typed on our keyboard easily! So these emoticons are popular in the Japanese forums as they are preset onto a database and all the users have to do is to apply them by pressing a button.

Well, don’t ask me how they did it, you probably know it better than I do!

Due to the limitations of the blog’s display language I couldn’t show this in a copyable format such as the ones above, sorry! But really, if your computer supports the language, you really can type these emoticons out! :D

Aren’t they really cool??

3 Letter Words Emoticon: OTZ

Well it may baffle a lot of us at first, but OTZ really is an emoticon. Well to the Eastern world, at least! I first heard of the word orz from a song by Mayday, and it’s only today that I’ve found out what does it mean!

If you tilt your head sizeways, imagine the “O” as a head, then you should be able to see a man like falling onto the ground, the “T” or “r” like the hands, and the “Z” or the “L” like the legs crunching on the ground. It’s like the pose when you do push-ups, but this is when you’re wayyy depressed and tired!

So when you’re very so T_____T, you can do OTZ or orz to show that you bow down to the person, either full salute, or no energy!

Whoever who made this up sure is a genius! STO!

Before we come to an end!

And phew, isn’t that a really long post! :D Well before we come to an end, imma leave this one emoticon for you to find out what does it mean!

Well, no prizes this time, but it’s for your amusement really. :P
Tips: It’s a 3 letter emoticon similar to OTZ!

Of course, leave your answer! I’d love to see what can you come up with!

So what are the emoticons that you use most frequently? ^__^

Well, its been months since this blog had started, and honestly I didn’t talk much about myself, as much as I wish I do!

To get rid of the anonymity between you and me, I am for once dedicate this post to talk all about me!

Yay, all about Grey! The blabbering bastard that gets high on listening to a guy singing like a girl and talks about sex all the time. Yeesh, what kind of a person is that?

I will not bore you with how many hairstyles I have changed in my life or how many pets I have at home. Instead, I will share with you my interests and thoughts that means a lot to me of who I am.

Well, lets just keep it short, come and learn all about me today!

Warning: Really, really long post ahead!

The Basics First

Grey got a new haircut, like yesterday!

By the time I write this post I’m still 22. In 4 months time I’m going to be 23, and oh, time flies! 23 years gone in my life, and what have I done? Catching up with all those porn probably.

It felt like yesterday that I have just graduated from Confucious Private Secondary School and moved on to KBU International College. I graduated from college in Graphic Design, and now I am working in Piradius Design as a web designer.

Doesn’t show through huh? Yeah I think so too. I’m a designer that talks and craps more than design. ;)

Besides that, I am also a choir singer for around 9 years now, and a crappy piano player for around 7 years. I started late in my teens, I’m not greatly talented, but I still enjoy playing it as a hobby. As I always say, if you start now, when you’re 50 years old you’ve probably played for more than 30 years! Isn’t that an achievement? :D

I love my Chinese and English

My mom thinks that the whole family are bananas who can’t read chinese, so it’s a wise thing to send me to a chinese secondary school. I appreciated that, of course! The Chinese culture is fascinating, 5000 years worth of culture is not something that you can feel in matter of minutes. There are so much Confucianism and Taoism values that I had absorbed and learned to appreciate today.

Many people make the “Confucianism is confusing” joke. Well it’s funny a little, but Confucianism is a very highly respected set of moral values to the Chinese. Go read about it and you will see why, it determines almost 80% of all about Chinese culture today, from values in filial piety to relationships. Mostly everything.

Grey is so desperate he'll eat anything. Really!

Then there’s the English world that I’ve come across in college. Thanks to the banana friends and the English nature of the course, I had to brush up my English language skills like from zero to hero. Well not really hero now neither, but you get what I mean. :P

My banana friends had introduced me to the world of the Western culture. They listened to Rihanna and Lady Gaga, they watched Heroes and Harry Potter, they followed American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance… None, and I mean none of these I have ever come across during my secondary school life. And I love them for doing so. I was a total Taiwan and Hong Kong follower back in secondary school, now I guess I’m a global guy.

An Open Mind

I'm in Second Life! If you're in, look me up, the name is Dadaist Gears. ;)

A mix of both worlds had opened my eyes to many things indeed. And with a mix of a third world it really got me going to have the urge seeing the world even more.

What third world, you say? It’s Second Life. For a time during my college I was so free and I came upon this online 3d world community/game thing. And I was hooked, very hooked. There are so much cultural diversity in there that you can never explore it all. I tried, and I was amazed.

Second Life showed me that the world is not as simple as what the media wants us to see. There are so much other subcultures that we can never know from the TV or radio. There are the furries, the Goreans, the steampunks, the goths, the adult scenes, the nekos. There are so much room for experimental developments, so many groups to look into, so wide the spectrum that I was overwhelmed initially.

Then it came to me that the world is really much larger than what we think it is. There are so much to see, so much to learn, the only way to get through all of it is to embrace the differences.

Perhaps this is why I am so open to talk about just anything, because I have a real high threshold for shock factor and differences.

Classical music, the alternative music today

Whenever I tell people that I like classical music, they will give me the look of detest, “Oh that’s some boring crap!” or the trying-very-hard-to-feel-the-same, “Oh I like classical music too! The violins and what’s that thing again… flute? Yeah, the blowy thing. I like that.”

The thing is that many young people don’t listen to classical music anymore, because it is difficult music. It is harder to relate to compared to those disco beats or Top 40 tunes. It has a much more complicated form and if you’re not used to it, you’re prone to fall asleep because of its relaxing effects.

I like relaxing music. Classical music does that for me, and I love it. They may be difficult to catch at first, but if you spend some time reading about it you will appreciate them much more. After all, classical music had always have the dramatic effect that can bring you so much up and down. Listen to these music here, here and here. Each of those music are written 100 years apart, they still are really good today, aren’t they?

Classical music is evergreen, because they’re the essence of history. They reflect the spirit of their times, and can still reflect the spirit of our times today. We love classical music because of it’s power to bring joy and excitement just about anyone, as long as you open your ears to it. Really, try it. ;)

I Love My Sex

Grey is with Sugar. Well not really a sweet mouth!

In case you haven’t notice by now, I love my sex. I’m very vocal about my porns and I am not afraid to share about sex. I guess one of the reasons why there is that I think that sex is a very human thing, yet most of us are afraid to talk about it due to our Confucianism teachings (see above!).

Sex makes us all happy. And let’s be honest, the word “sex” itself makes you feel curious already. All of us are attracted to sex because of it’s status of being a taboo in our society, it’s like a secret interest that is not so secret anymore.

This blog is made to be an open conversation to be just about anything. I bring up many interesting and sometimes controversial issues so that we can share ideas. And sex is part of it. And I love it. ;)

The Net Is My Life

Without Internet, I will probably rot and die in minutes. I spend almost 15 hours of my time online every day, well partly because of work, but it is pretty much my love and passion.

There are so much to watch on YouTube, so much to share on Facebook, so much to explore on StumbleUpon, and so much to read just every else. Call me addicted if you must, but if addicted is what I am being coined to enrich my life with, I’m really proud and willing to be an addict.

Grey loves his food! Really!!

Oh no, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life. I go out with friends regularly, I enjoy a walk at the mall, I enjoy traveling, I enjoy great food at great places, I enjoy dating with my boy. Just anytime other than that, being online is what I will do.

Thats why I love my broadband too. I probably use it to the max. Without it, I’ll probably sleep till it’s there.

And online is where you can find me!

Grey trying to act cute. Fail!

If what I have written here is not enough for you to feed your curiousity, well you can always catch me on the Net!

My net nickname is Conancat, it’s a mixture of my love for both Detective Conan and cats back in my secondary school days. Apparently it had become so catchy that I decided to keep it forever. ;)

So thats why you will find that my Facebook, Twitter and Plurk all goes by the name of Conancat.

Even my MSN has conancat on it! Like, conan_cat87@hotmail.com!

So does my Gmail, conancat@gmail.com, and of course the new Google Wave, conancat@googlewave.com.

So hey, lets not be strangers, shall we? :) Let’s talk, like, really talk!

Add me anywhere above, or even better, everywhere above, and buzz me to drop me a tell me more about you! :D

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should save the comments for yourself neither. Drop a comment below, and tell me what you think about me! :)

“Being gay” is a joke. Having a gay friend is fun.

Really being a gay, now that’s real fun.

No kidding. There’s a whole YouTube series dedicated to how fun being gay really is. Bring on the gay, babeh!

gay adj
1. Of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.
2. Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry.
3. Bright or lively, especially in color: a gay, sunny room.
4. Given to social pleasures.
5. Dissolute; licentious.

Well, the dictionary definition says it even. So being gay must be of real excitement, real cheerfulness, real happy, real gay, isn’t it?

Really, when you make fun of someone being gay, it’s real fun for you as you laugh at their gayness. But when you find out one of your friends being a real gay, there’s where the real fun begins.

Gays will always cheer up even the most depressed.

Gays will gay up even the most boring conversations.

Gays can have the most exquisite, refined, flamboyant or alternative tastes in everything that you can admire or laugh about. And they’re proud of it.

Gays can turn a straight to be gay. Ouch, that isn’t really a fun, is it?

Questionably Gay?

Seriously, I find gay life is fun. The ladies are more open to joke around with the gays, while the lads while might seem reluctant at first, still thinks of you with another guy, sans the man-to-man-naughty-funs or discussion about cars and football, plus the advice seeking in fashion and love life.

It’s not as bad as you think, really. As long as the gay and friends respects limits and understand each other mutually, that’s all that is needed for a happy gay life.

After all, gays can really be the best friends you’ll ever have!

Attention to details?

“If you want to be successful. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing, and believe in what you are doing.” – David Venter

I have always believed that simple words or quotes, by anyone on the net, shows the zeitgeist of our time.

No matter how funny, how sad, how philosophical, how boring, how exciting, how stupid, how smart these quotes might seem to be, they do mean a thing. It might seem to be meaningless at first glance, they might not mean a thing to you, but when you’re looking at it, closely, how many things are happening around us, all of us, each second, each minute?

I am here to share some of these quotes that I find interesting and come upon every day. Perhaps such, it will open your mind and have a different perception towards my world. Their world. Our world. :)

Net Quotes Of The Day - 13/10/2009

“It’s a sunny day shining upon the english countryside. And my train is delayed due to line problems. Been a while since i rode a virgin” — Ren Woofie

“Post Processing over 3000 pictures taken during the weekend. I love my work, I love being busy, I love photoshooting!” — Melvin Foong

“please appreciate your time~~~!!! manage your time well~~~!!! do what u want to do~~~!!! ok!!!???” — Kevin Chin

“I hope tat morning will hurry and come, appearing when i cant hide my weakness and cry out… It is only cuz when u are not here, its strange the nights are so lonely…” — Sam Shiro

“Formal shirt + Boardshort to a wedding: It’s like Bob Marley & Peter Tosh just peed on me from heaven. Jah, it’s skanking time!” — Freddy Tan

“Can someone take out de MONDAY from the calendar~!? superb hate MONDAY!” — Kenji Keong

“Well Amah, some people have the luxury of shopping all day while some are inspired to design when in the total comfort of pjs.” — Cynthia Lye, on wearing PJs in the afternoon

“(Mark Ooi) is hit hard by the Monday blues, like the fat drunken man who decided to cross the railway tracks at night and got his foot stuck while staring blankly at the blaring lights of the oncoming speeding train.” — Mark Ooi

If you see a good quote around the net and would like to share with everyone, don’t hesitate and send it to submit@caramelz.my. I will post them on the next update :D