blind faith

Heya everyone.
I've been so lazy recently! Have hardly left the house in the past week or so. Disgraceful!
Uni starts next week. :S This week is O-week. So there'll be lots of newbies around. I need to go on tomorrow to get a new student card! I might also check out some clubs and societies stalls on Thursday :)

On Saturday night I went to my theatre company's 21st birthday party :P It was pretty fun, but it was so hot and humid inside the hall. The band playing there (consisting of old men doing old cover songs) weren't that great though! Me and some of the other people from the play dressed up like pirates! :) I love dressing up, I shall have to do a post on all the past costumes i've worn. :P However I didn't take any photos. We had a few rounds of trivia and my table won! Unfortunately I didn't actually contribute to any answers since they were all quite difficult, but nevertheless I walked out with a mini candle as a prize :)

Sunday night was dinner at a restaurant with my family and *gasp* my boyfriend and his parents. It was the first time our two families have done something together, even though Dan and I have been together over two years!! We just ate at a Chinese restaurant, and luckily it all went well. Not too many awkward silences, and no embarrassing stories or anything so it was all good!





Outfit: Sunny Girl dress, black faux velvet cropped blazer from Nookie, Coo ca choo over the knee floral lace tights, Diva necklace (birthday present from lovely friend!), second hand shoes, and belt which used to belong to my mum.

And now for a whole new section... A Book a Week! I mentioned something about it in a previous post. I'm trying to read at least one new book a week! :) Shouldn't be too difficult as I've already read a few and i've got some more books lined up. And I have to read a different work of Literature a week for a subject in Uni!
The first book I read in the past couple of weeks was Blind Faith by Ben Elton. I have read one other Ben Elton book before, Dead Famous which I really enjoyed- it was a murder mystery where a contestant on a show similar to Big Brother was murdered during the show.
Anyway, about Blind Faith. It pictures a dystopian future after the world is flooded by Global Warming, and is set in London. The population now believes that privacy is the ultimate sin. They constantly blog about their lives, and have video cameras trained on them at all hours, so that anyone can view what they are doing at any time. Science is condemned as lies, and instead society is founded upon compulsory fanatical religious faith, the "Love." The population is constantly told to celebrate themselves and their bodies by having numerous sexual partners, eating junk food and wearing ultra-revealing clothing. The norm for women is to have breast implants. There is massive overcrowding, heat, and babies rarely survive their first few years.
The main character of the novel is Trafford Sewell, who seems to be the only person who (silently) disagrees with the society he is living in. By meeting a group of people with similar thinking to him, he begins to push against the system while trying to stay undetected by the authorities.

I enjoyed this book, although the concept of a dystopian society -where all of modern day society's luxuries have turned into something more sinister- is not new. Much like Elton's other novels, it is comically cynical and it is quite obvious what he is targeting with the book, I found it a bit moralising, although I agree with lots of it. For example, the whole Big-Brother/Blogging phenomenon is evident through the constant voluntary surveillance of the citizens- I think today people want to be famous, they want to be surveyed and to have people looking at them. In the novel people can be 'Goog'd' and are required to post all sorts of intimate video 'Tubes' on their blog. Sugar and junk food is everywhere, so much that McDonalds is seen as a classy restaurant. It's definitely an exaggeration of today where nothing is sacred, but I think there's some truth in there- today we have people posting photos of their baby's birth on Facebook, writing break up messages for the whole world to see, posting videos of themselves doing dumb things of Youtube. The number of people who are obese is rising, and some might say so is the sexualisation of society and children.
It's a funny novel in parts- and other parts are rather disturbing, and although it may point to something darker about society, it's still an entertaining book, I wouldn't take it too seriously. However I would probably recommend Elton's Dead Famous over Blind Faith!
Ok so that's my review for now, sorry if it doesn't make sense.. it's about 2 o'clock in the morning.. XD

Have you read the book before? Have any other books you'd recommend to me? Looking forward to your comments!

Happy Chinese New Year :)

Hello! Happy Chinese New Year everyone :)

Sunday was Valentine's Day, however it was also the first day of Chinese New Year. Since Daniel really isn't into Valentine's Day at all :P we decided to go to the city to check out the celebrations. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera so I didn't get to take any photos which was irritating as everything in Chinatown was full of life and bright decorations. First we went to Chinatown on Little Bourke and Russel St, and checked out the stalls, saw some lion dances and heard the firecrackers. After awhile we walked towards Southbank. We checked out the Sunday Market and also went into this multimedia exhibition at the Arts Centre that was on for the weekend only. It was called "Experimenta Utopia Now," part of the International Biennial of Media Art and showcased media works from artists all over the world, and a lot of the works were interactive. It was really amazing! And again I kicked myself for not bringing my camera!
We then walked down to the Casino where there was another Chinese New Year Festival with lots of food and merchandise stalls. We bought some honey pork and chili beef jerky, and chicken satay sticks to eat. Although my mum says traditionally i'm not supposed to eat meat on the first day of CNY. Oopsies! :S

Anyway this is what I wore on the day. Again I turned out to be a bad judge of weather, I had to take the stockings and bolero off after awhile cos it was way too hot! Haha.
And argh i've been having so much trouble taking photos recently. I find that if it's really sunny out (and it's like that every day), it's difficult to take good photos because the sun can wash the colour out, plus I'm all squinty in the photos. But I tried taking these photos in the shade (and not even in the house or anything- outside in front of a garage door, about 2 metres away from direct sunlight) and they still end up really, really dark and I have to edit them heaps to make them decent. :S Then I tried using the manual setting on the DSLR to take lighter photos, and on the screen the light looked really good, perfect even. But when I did upload them to the computer they were still really dark! wtf?!??? I seriously took about 80 photos all a few different locations and they were all horrible. Argh. So this is the best I can do, and hope it is good enough for the style gallery on Chictopia- I really love this outfit. My last outfit photo got deleted from the Style Gallery again. Poo. I thought it was good enough as well, so doubly disappointing!
I'm wearing: Denim floral zip up dress from Bardot, $20- a recent splurge of mine. Can you believe $20 is a splurge for me?? :S Purple bolero, cream floral stockings and cream shoes all secondhand from Savers. :)

Attempted pics from in front of my garage door, and also neighbour's garage door.

Photos from inside the house and one from outside, in the sun.

Closeup of my tights. Love them!

Anyway, we had a nice dinner at my house on Saturday night for Chinese New Years Eve. It was just my family and Daniel. My mum cooked lots of nice food! I love the decorations we have for the occasion, and also the special packages of sticky cake, biscuits, nuts, sweets, etc that we have for new years. I also made some jelly using some moulds I got in Stockholm :)

haircut + polka dots + rain!

Hey hey!~
Yeah.. i'm kind of awesome staying home on a Friday night... o_0

I got a haircut this morning! First proper haircut in about a year. Lol! I guess it looks the same, only shorter. But i'm so glad to be rid of those split ends! So the day started off well, but when I got home I started taking out the washing and then realised this yellow tshirt had completely stained a beige skirt I have. Argh! It was the only thing in the whole wash that had gotten stained D: grr. So I spent ages trying to get the stain out. Got a lot out but it's still quite obvious... and then when I was finishing hanging out the washing I accidentally cut my ankle on a bike and it bled quite a bit. Haha.

By the way, my younger sister (but not the youngest one who usually takes my photos) is freaking lazy. I ask her to help me take a couple of outfit pics and I have to ask about 20 times before she says yes, and then makes me wait for an hour while she watches damn anime. And then when she finished she tries to put it off for another 15 mins. I'm like, "wtf it will only take 5 minutes or less!" Ack. I guess the photos are alright though. tried editing them a bit but i'm not too happy with the results. Oh well.



You know I love bows and polka dots. Wearing: CKM red skirt, about 3 years old. Black boob tube with white polka dots, from Valleygirl, about 4 years old. :P Living Doll white bolero, about 3 years old as well! belt, from op shop. Novo shoes from op shop. and white tights with black polka dots from an op shop! they were 20c! I love op shops run by little old ladies :)
btw, chictopia won't let me upload outfit pics at the moment. argh!

So yesterday there was this crazy huge thunderstorm in Melbourne. (and yes February is supposed to be the hottest month of the year.) I was out in the city and I knew it was gonna rain... but whoa I didn't think there was going to be flash floods and lighting strike! Was pretty crazy going home on the bus and it took twice as long. It seemed pretty freakish to me. I don't think I remember another storm this bad at this time of year before!
Anyway yes it was crazy. Check out these pics, found on The Age website!

So much rain some people were even swimming down Flinders St in the city. :O There's even a video of it- check the link.

Pic from Footscray: would suck to be the owner of that car.

In the CBD. Lol at the random thong floating away!

I guess even those with umbrellas got soaked :P

Pic from Sunshine. That looks like fun! wish it was flooded where I live :P

Anyway that's just a quick look at the worst (best?? :P) of Melbourne weather :D Hopefully in a few day's time it'll be back to being hot and sweaty and over 30 degrees c!
The thunderstorm in Melbourne caused a facebook fan page to start, "That thunderstorm was crazy Melbourne" and it got 25,000 members in the first 6 hours of the page being created!!! Currently it's got over 32,000 fans and it's only been just over 24 hrs since the storm.
It's an amusing page, but if only other Facebook groups such as "1,000,000 Aussies Against Racism" could get that many members in that space of time. Maybe because it's a 'serious issue' that it doesn't get the members and recognition it deserves, compared to all the lighthearted groups there are. It doesn't even have 28,000 members yet when it is aimed at the whole of Australia!(and beyond I guess) compared to the other page where i'm assuming it is mostly Melburnians who are joining it. Hmm.

Anyway don't want to get too serious. Hope you all have a fantastic weekend! One of my best friends is arriving back home tomorrow after spending 6 months in China for uni. Can't wait to see her!! It's also my mum's birthday tomorrow and Chinese New Years Eve so there's lots of stuff to be done. :)

some people

Hey again :)
How's everybody?

I'm really enjoying the holidays at the moment. But it's only a couple more weeks until uni starts again!! Actually, I've been pretty lazy recently. Though I did clean out my closet/drawers today in preparation for Chinese New Year :P (and damn I have a lot of clothes! :S I really need to get rid of stuff, but somehow I can't bear to even give away stuff I haven't worn in a couple of years. I'm a serial hoarder. Anyone else have this problem??)

Anyway I'd like to share this story with you which happened while I was wearing this outfit.
My two best friends were going to a Lily Allen concert a couple of weeks ago, and it was the day after I got back from overseas- I thought I was getting back that night so I didn't have a ticket. But I actually got back the day before, and because I love Lily Allen (have seen her perform once before!) I checked a website called Gumtree (a site where you can place ads to sell/buy stuff) on the off chance that anyone was selling a spare ticket. I found an ad from a girl who said she was selling two tickets for $50 each which is a lot cheaper than the original $95 a ticket, so I called her up and we arranged to meet near the venue that evening.
So I rocked up with a friend that I had invited as well... and guess what, the damn biatch never turned up to sell us the tickets. We were so angry! We had gotten there at the time we were supposed to meet, and we waited for an hour. The girl selling the tickets told me to call her when I got there, so I tried calling her several times, but her phone wasn't even on. And then when it did go through, she hung up on me. Argh!! I seriously don't understand why she would go through the hassle of putting up an ad and arranging to meet me... and then not bother showing up. Freaking irritating. Oh well, somebody would have originally bought the two tickets for $95 each so that's just a huge loss of money for them. Ended up having a good night catching up with my friend anyway, we had dinner and went to a bar.


Wearing: Black and white stripy tshirt from an op shop, Black high waisted shorts from Living Doll, Secondhand belt, Black brogues from an op shop. I love these shoes so much! I had been looking for ones like them in op shops for probably over a year. And then I finally found them, and they were $4!! Yay!

I have a new resolution; that i'm going to read at least one new book a week for the rest of the year! Reading is one of my favourite things to do, however I haven't read that widely, especially in terms of classic novels and literature. (I'm more into fantasy. Ha!) So I'm going to try to read all those books by great authors that i've always wanted to, but also read popular fiction as well :P and then I guess i'll write a short review of it after I finish.

Love you guys and my new followers :)

one day

Ahoy hoy :)
How is everyone going? I'm definitely getting back into the routine of taking pics for chictopia and blogging :) now to get more people reading, commenting and following my blog!

Melbourne weather is super crazy. One day it's almost unbearably hot... and then on Friday it's grey and humid and raining for the whole day?? haha. But I got some nice photos :P

I had a good weekend. What did you guys get up to??
On Saturday Dan and I went to Savers. I got a Dangerfield dress that I saw in stores last year but I didn't buy because it was $100. It's got the Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup can printed all over it, I love Andy Warhol but Dan hates his artwork :P Anyway i'm so happy I found the dress, even though it's a different colour to the one that I originally liked, but it was $20 so yay! You won't see it for awhile though because I have to sew the sides because it's a tiny bit big. I also ended up finding 4 pairs of stockings- black stripy ones, two black ones with a seam up the back and cream floral ones. There were more lovely pairs there but I didn't have enough money :(
That evening we had some of our friends over at Dan's house and we watched tv and had ice cream :D
Today Daniel and I lazed around the house :)

I swear... 2012 (the movie) does not want us to watch it!! Daniel downloaded the (supposed) movie and we watched it last weekend. We had heard that it was really good and had fantastic special effects. So, we were watching the movie and we were thinking... "this movie is kind of lame... and the plotline and the special effects are really terrible!" I kind of kept waiting for the movie to get better. But we finished watching it and we were thinking that it definitely wasn't the same movie that came out recently, so we looked it up on Wikipedia (how I love Wikipedia) and it turns out the movie we watched was actually "2012 Doomsday", by the company The Asylum, which produces "mockbusters," which capitalise on big blockbuster/hollywood releases by making movies with a similar plotline/title.
The movie we watched was about 2012 of course, but it was really religious. :S the Apocalypse begins to happen and some American individuals suddenly have this crazy urge to travel immediately to a temple in Mexico. Their friends or family members who believe in God suddenly disappear and are supposedly transported into heaven, and the ones who don't believe in God are left behind. The film ends with a woman giving birth at the temple and this is like the second coming of Christ or something, as this amazingly stops the Apocalypse disasters. Hmm... sorry if you wanted to see this movie and I spoiled it for you! So yes... we didn't really enjoy the film so much, especially as we had been looking forward to watching the real 2012!
So as we hadn't had much luck getting the movie the first time, we again downloaded what we thought was the correct version and settled down to watch it last night after our friends had left. Turns out, the movie was right but everything was dubbed in French!! So we didn't end up watching it. Haha. Maybe it's a sign telling us that we aren't supposed to watch it.... or maybe just karma saying that we should buy or rent the movie instead of downloading it!! :P

Anyway my last outfit photo (from my previous post) got taken out of the style gallery on Chictopia. I'm a little sad about it because it's the first time it's happened to me, and I thought the photo was good enough quality. (and obviously lots of people liked it as I had dozens of comments and votes before it got taken out!) Heh. Gotta start putting more effort into my composition and photos then I guess.







Wearing: Living Doll ruffly blouse, Navy skirt which used to be my mums, Vintage belt, Vintage heels.
And omg. I'm not wearing any stockings here. My legs are so damn pale!! Gotta get some sunlight :D

Hope you had a great weekend and looking forward to your comments :)