chaka chaka

it’s terrible that i never pay attention to event names and such. just found out what it was called today. i don’t know, i was too busy oggling siau’s designs to have a look at the event details. free flow was supposed to go on for 2 hours or when it ran out, whichever came first. who knew the lapsap crowd is a thirsty crowd. i only got 2 beers the whole night and random sips from various drinks. felt a bit high though. probably due to the absolut kurrant still making its rounds in my blood stream.

super girl and mr. a’s super coaster hat.
the coasters were one of my favourite things of the night.

me and cat. we bonded while shooting a tvc and now we’re gossip girls. haha.

more of suet’s cool shite. godzilla. haha. inside joke. :p

blink: errrr… what song comes next?
xu: i don’t know. did you see a little girl stalking me? O_O

xu: speak of the devil…
baby: nak fringe macam xu!

boys from IF Interactive (cool site).
i heard rumours that our agencies have beef with each other. whatever. how childish.

lovelies and our new “sis-in-law” ;p
from l-r: baby, just, kellie, al. wayhan in background, wtf!

mmmmm… 2-headed giant 3D godjira with light show.

at the entrance we were all given 2 badges each and were supposed to collect all 11.
wtf. i just ganked them behind ivan’s back. wheeeee~!

lainie can has badge?

ronn’s supermodel stance.

damn badges were clacking away with every step i took.

i thought this was kellie’s collection. but… the top ain’t the same. who is this??
baby la! kellie’s is a little too obscene to post up :p

dell is really awesome. i admire clients who are open to fun stuff without sweating the anal details. i’d say people enjoyed it, and while the branding was everywhere it was nice to look at, not overpowering. good job, guys. love you all!

dedicated to the poor boys and girls and angry men who are still living in this nightmare of (mis)management and, as someone succinctly put it, “going apeshit”. can you hear my commiseration (and guffawing) all the way from here? :D

as alternative reality games go, this was supposedly one of the larger scale ones: Perplex City.

do read it, it’s too cool. i have to do one!

a brief and overly simplistic desciption of an ARG:

Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) is a relatively new genre of games that encourages players (you!) to interact with a fictional world using the real world to do it.

For example:

You’re spending some time exploring the internet and someone points you to a couple sites and tells you that it’s a crazy mystery about some missing monkeys. The first site you visit is everyonelovesmonkeys.com. There, you see pictures of the monkeys doing funny monkey things as well as a list of the monkey zookeepers. All of the zookeepers have email addresses that are something like name@everyonelovesmonkeys.com aside from one. His email is listed as crazymonkey@crazymonkeyman.com. Intrigued, you decide to visit crazymonkeyman.com and see that he mentions concerns that the monkeys have been replaced by robomonkeys! (everyone’s worst fear, of course, is the eventual destruction of man by evil robotic monkeys…maybe that’s just mine?)

What you have done is used your real world computer to explore a bit of a fictional world. You also solved your first ARG puzzle…yay you!

On the high from finding a second website, you decide to send a little email to crazymonkey@crazymonkeyman.com asking him why he thinks the cute little monkeys have been replaced by evil robots. In a few minutes, you get a reply.

Now you are communicating with the fictional world using your real world email. Funky.

While you were waiting for your reply from the crazy monkey man, you poked around a bit more on the everyonelovesmonkeys.com website and happened to notice a phone number and address on their contact page. Out of curiosity, you decide to use a few of your free cell phone minutes to call the number. Convinced it’s a fake, you are completely surprised when someones answered the phone. In a panic, you hang up as fast as you can. (ok, that’s just me… you actually talk to the receptionist and learn that all of the monkey keepers are outside monkeying around… oh, comeon, it had to be said.)

Now you are interacting with a fictional world using your real world phone and your real world you. Wild, no?

Not all ARGs have those exact features and most are much more original than my quick little example. The one thing that ties all ARGs together is that you are interacting with the fictional world using things that you use every day to interact with the real world. Also, you aren’t interacting as a character, as you would in most computer and video games. You also don’t need any special equipment, as you would with most console games. Most games take advantage of computers and the internet (websites and emails) as well as phones and even the occasional live event (finding something hidden in your city, gathering around payphones, or even live parties with character interaction!).

looks like the same thing everywhere.

half-assed briefs are totally pointless.

if it doesn’t say anything useful, you might as well throw a stack of sanitary pads on my desk.

i feel so sluggish. am returning back to work after hibernating my days away playing games games and more games.

it still hasn’t sunk in that i’ve left my old agency. meeting up with people, there’s still a tendency to use “our” and “us” instead of “you” and “yours”.

old colleagues are warning me against my usual blur tendencies to not come back to IGB tower.

oh well. we still can coffee. :)

talk about keeping an impersonal blog.

anyway, we’re nearing the end of the 2 month countdown since i threw in my resignation. ‘threw’ perhaps being too strong a word. rather, i meekly slid letters with an unsteady hand under the doors of the MD, GM, GM, ECD, CD and finance director on a (working) sunday night.

i’ve given my best (well, mostly) these 2 and a half years at bates, and i can give it no longer. time for a change i guess, which my soon-to-be-ex colleagues should understand seeing as how “change” is their new favourite annoying catchphrase of the century. :p

admittedly i’ve had fun despite alleged mental and physical torture (puhleeeez, bitch). i’ve met and befriended some lovely, funny, warm, cute and wonderful people most of whom made their grand exits much earlier, been to enough parties and launches (invitations to which would not normally be extended to my unimportant self) learned, and loved, the ropes of production work, and yadda yadda yadda of course i like to believe i’ve actually learned something and become a better COPYWRITER.

all in caps too, motherfucker.

why? because i don’t shy away from that label. it’s not like i imagine myself some new budding seed author, out to revive the malaysian writing scene or some blue-eyed twat graduate from 95% (don’t terasa, hex. love you!) who works on a telco account and hence is too good for the world. advertising is as horrible and soul-stealing as you make it to be, and as much as i kvetch and moan about the late hours and horrible budgets (and especially the dead weight) i really think i love what i do.

new beginnings are scary, but i cling on to my “same same” belief that i’ll still be treading familiar territory.

kisses to the people who made my life a happier, shinier one. and a big “fuck you” to the small, petty people who went out of their way make a young girl at her first job miserable. you may have succeeded for a while, but come on, we all know i’m way bigger than that.

ciao, bella.

get hands on
there’s no use emailing changes to the music house or spending hours circling/marking revisions on a visual and then bitching about it when things still aren’t “perfect.” get your ass down there and camp behind your music engineer or your DI artist. they’ll work faster (since no one dawdles with someone breathing down their necks) and you can then throw yourself a fit when if things still don’t meet your (or your eccentric ecd’s) standards.

never just throw in an option you don’t like to “make up the numbers”
scientific studies of the positioning of the moon during the 13th day of its lunar phase in relation to client deadlines have churned out cold hard facts: the one single lone option that you don’t like / that “bugs” you somehow / that isn’t quite there yet / that is a hideous assault on the cone photoreceptors of any rational homo sapien will be the one that the clients will lurve. really.

don’t miss deadlines
client gets pissed which leads to servicing getting pissed which gets the gm pissed, which inevitably and shockingly (oh no!) gets the cd pissed, will lead to your life being miserable.

don’t ever miss deadlines
no really. you’ve suddenly earned a tardy mark on your perfect record filled with shiny gold stars. you lose bargaining power. you lose credibility. and now you have to fight tooth and nail to get your crappy little promo ideas even looked at. forget getting it out and running.

meet the clients
cos some people might take your boards, visuals and headlines, and they might just chuck them on the boardroom table while mumbling something that vaguely resembles a combination of french & thai with a smattering of urdu (it’s definitely no english i’ve ever fucking heard before) to explain your brilliant idea. then they might come back and shake their head sadly, and you might decipher their grunting to mean “i dunno why la. they rejected.” then you’ll have to kill him/her. and despite all the horror stories, clients can be sane and rational and reasonable. they’re human too (most of them anyway).

know when to give up
one round. two rounds. three. still ok. 10 rounds of new ideas and we’re still at loggerheads stuck in no-man’s-land. you can choose to write something shorter, or make the product bigger, or add in another call-to-action, or adapt the regional visuals unquestioningly or open the window of the smoking room and defenestrate yourself (is that possible?). i like to give in sometimes. i’m wimpy like that.

don’t presume
being prepared and replaying every single bad meeting and living your life around an imagined disaster that might never happen are two different things. if you don’t get to the bottom of things and assume everyone hates you and your budget and your idea and your face while you sit at your desk for two weeks waiting for the nuclear bomb to drop, it will. it’s called missing the deadline. (ref. point 3 & 4)

writers get the short end of the stick
no one really knows what we do. we merely write headlines and copy that “no one reads”. how sad. art directors will get cool freebies from studios and image banks. servicing gets cool invites to cool events with lots of alcohol. and no one will share them with you. ha! nyeh nyeh nyeh. also,

writers get their visual ideas rejected.
“what do you know about visuals. you’re supposed to write copy only mah.”

writers get their long copy ideas rejected.
“no one reads long copy ads la. so boring. cannot do anything other than write copy meh?”

everyone thinks you’re goofing off when you’re really doing 5 jobs at once.
“very busy meh? writing copy only mah.”

everyone thinks you’re overrated.
“why ask her for briefing? it’s for ideas. she only copywriter mah.”

you don’t get invited to shoots even if you came up with the whole damn thing.
“writers need to go for shoot meh? no copy to write also mah.”

you don’t get credit for anything.
“job well done, art director. you should learn from him instead of only writing copy mah.”

deep breath.

add to this two copy-based creative directors who have a firm idea of what your scope should be. and you get work + responsibility - credit = misery (woah woah woah misery)

don’t depend on your art directors
directly from the last point, you’re still responsible if things fuck up. no forgetting that. i’ve been lucky to have worked with two wonderfully quirky chili padi superwomen art directors who didn’t know how to go home, gave tons of options and worked photoshop and illustrator like they were extentions of their fingers. they’re gone now. i am damn sad. like daaa-yum. yoni, ah siau, i miss you… SOBS
so look for your own damn images, scamp out your visuals no matter how horrible they are (trust me, mine resemble the scrawlings of a 5-year old with motor disabilities. no joke.) and don’t forget to come up with a zillion tv scripts (you can so totally pwn in that area).

real crafting takes approximately 3 days worth of writing 3 5 pages of copy to get 3 lines approved
i don’t even want to talk about this. -_-”

no idea is a bad idea… when you’re brainstorming
yeah, there are many lame ideas from lame people who fuck up packaging so badly (with typos and bad grammar and inconsistent spelling) then leave after 6 months citing torturous working conditions like staying after 7pm and (god forbid) working on weekends. (well, fuck you too!) but when you’re working with a good partner, lame ideas and discussions can lead to catching a better train of thought and a better solution. so i may have thrown in some ideas that made suet’s left eyebrow twitch or made janet cry (with laughter) but we did end up eventually with something workable.

some things i know in theory, but suck at the application. especially now. i’m kinda in my slacker-whiner mode. ;)

hwe was briefing us on a internal regional job. his first point was some balderdash about a multilayered society. he then singled me out (smoothly i might add, the suave bastard) as a great example.

i’m chinese. i club with my malay friends whom i’ve known since secondary school (that’s high school for you non-malaysians). i speak fluent mandarin with some (ronn would argue MOST) of the office colleagues. and i’m an english copywriter.

his delivery was very convincing and i was sold on myself before he was even done.

hell yeah, i’m awesome. :)

this is almost the exact truth. just that i don’t always think my work is shit ;p

so i’m wearing this cute little number baby gave me (cos her boobs too big).

“got such thing too big meh?” i hear you heathens gasp in disbelief. well, i struggled with that concept too, just as i struggled to get my anorexia-ridden body into the dress, rendering my 2 minutes of ironing totally useless. so yeah, anything bigger than a 32A will definitely not fit in that dress.

moving past the mandatory preamble: it’s buttoned down the front, more for show than any practical use. and it impractically reveals peeks at everything underneath. so i decided to don a pair of grey cycling shorts.

i love this job for the wardrobe freedom it affords me.

to avoid any sexual harassment suit methinks, my cd scribbled a note telling me my undies were visible. only they weren’t undies, get with the program, dawg, they’re cycling shorts!

had a good laugh over it with the 7-11 boys over the post-tag-in, pre-lunch, morning smoke.

me: mr drinker thought i was only wearing panties underneath this.
little 7-11: i knew they weren’t la. wrong shape. panties, triangle; shorts, square.
me: yeah la!

later. much later. like 7 and a half hours later… it hit me.

WHY IN GOD’S NAME WAS LITTLE 7-11 LOOKING AT MY CROTCH?!