Writing a detective novel

Yes, as the title suggests and as you might have noticed, I'm not really the kind of guy who excels at writing romance novel. I'm thinking of writing a detective novel. In Bahasa, of course.

In order to do that, I need to get a good grasp at what normal people actually feel when reading crime/thriller. (I don't consider myself normal since I actually enjoy watching Happy Tree Friends).

Anyway, if you guys can take the survey here, that would be really great!

Flappy Bird: a game from hell

A lot of my friends (and by "a lot," I mean A LOT) have posted a screenshot of their highest score in Flappy Bird. And due to this and my curious by nature, I decided to give Flappy Bird a shot. DO NOTE THAT THIS POST CONTAINS A SHITLOAD OF SWEAR WORDS AND IF YOU ARE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO ARE EASILY OFFENDED BY THEM, PLEASE GO AWAY. There. That was my "Viewer discretion is advised."

This would be my phone, if I had an iPhone and if I were stupid enough to break my phone because of a stupid game.

I was told that the game was very addictive (and frustrating and stressful and impossible to beat and and makes you want to throw your phone on the floor), so I was really surprised when I searched the Play Store only to find that the game was less than one megabyte in size. Due to my competitiveness, and since I see myself as an avid gamer, I shrugged --thought about how hard can a less-than-one-megabyte game be-- and hit "Install."

Hitting the "Install" button was easily the biggest mistake of this month so far.

The game started without a hitch and I was greeted by a very nostalgic Mario-esque scenery and the same 8-bit graphic. No, seriously, the scenery is like a rip-off of Mario games. The only difference between them was that Flappy Bird features a shitload of skyscrapers. Maybe if Mario lived in Jakarta instead of some random green pastures, there would be literally no difference between their background.

Anyway.

Flappy Bird was simple. Painfully so. The tutorial consisted of just a flying bird and the word "TAP." And if you do tap the screen, the bird will bounce a bit and raise in altitude. If you don't tap, the bird's altitude will continuously decline. And there are pipes everywhere (like, Mario Bros' pipes, the kind of pipes that we always tried to go into when we still played Mario). And since birds are retarded and fragile creatures that are not able to keep their altitude constant and die at the slightest touch of a mother fucking pipe, you have to tap the screen every now and then in order to keep the fucking bird alive.

The bird isn't even cute. Shouldn't we be happy if the motherfucker hits a pipe and die?

That's it. 

The amount of pipes you managed to fly through without killing your bird then becomes your score. In the first 20 tries I did, I only managed to pass through two pipes. TWO. Two effing pipes. And thanks to my competitiveness (and while we're talking about it, allow me to say fuck you to my competitiveness, because without it I wouldn't be bitching about this game here), I played for another half an hour, and managed to pass through 17 pipes. I heard some people managed to reach a score of hundreds. Yeah, I would much rather believe that unicorns exist rather than them. 

So the game was developed by Dong Nguyen. Now, I don't speak Vietnamese, but I know that Nguyen is the surname of at least 2183646723121 Vietnamese people I know. I would take a guess and say that Dong means "Satan" in Vietnamese. BECAUSE I BELIEVE THIS GAME WAS MADE BY SATAN HIMSELF, AS A WAY TO CAPTURE OUR SOULS. 

This game (much like all games, really) is a pure waste of time and prolonged playing would result in a desire to tear your arms and claw your eyes out because the game (or Satan himself) makes you think that you are so idiot (and retarded and have an IQ lower than a fucking Chihuahua) since you could not guide an ugly-as-fuck bird through a labyrinth of pipes.

If you haven't played the game and are thinking of downloading and playing it now, here is my advice to you: don't.

If you still insist to play, fine. Here are some advices I can give to you:

1. Play on your bed, this minimizes the chance that you will go full retard and throw your phone to the ground, possibly causing it to disfunction forever.
2. Don't tap unless you have to. Most of the time, the cause of death was because unnecessary jumps that lead to hitting the top of the pipe. 
3. If you're like me and your dominant hand is right hand, tap on the lower side of the screen in order to prevent blocking the view of the next pipe with your own fingers. 
4. You cannot win. So relax.
5. If you have any desire to tear your arms off and/or claw your eyes off, immediately stop playing and count to 10. Afterwards, continue to play and indefinitely hate yourself. 
6. After prolonged playing, feel free to uninstall the game and curse your dominant hand forever.

Do yourself a favor and do not download this game.

On your quest to find someone to copulate with.

You see, I have a good friend who went by the nick of "Blacky." Because he is black, duh. Not black racially, more like the kind of black that would make him a really good spy as long as it's dark outside. But not black racially.

So, me and Blacky, we have been good friends for nine years and counting. But throughout those nine years, never have we liked the same girl, not once. The girls that I thought were cute, he deemed as flat-chested. And I saw the girls that he thought were cute as "meh." If you actually took the effort and made a Venn diagram between "Girls that I thought are cute" and "Girls that Blacky thought are cute," the intersection would probably be smaller than a typical ant. Granted, every now and then a girl came and she managed to cozily sit right in that very little small intersection, but that kind of girl was only born once every millennial or so. And even then, neither of us would want to date that particular girl. We just thought of her as cute, but not date-able. This taught me that I and Blacky have a different view of what our ideal partner should have.

Every single one of us have a mental list of how our ideal partner should look like and behave. I used to have a REALLY detailed list on what my ideal girl should have (heck, that list even contained what my preferred color of nail polish that she should use is). In fact, the list was so detailed that I was sure I would never be able to find the girl in question. I truly believed that I would sooner die a virgin before I could meet a girl satisfying 80% of that list.

God probably saw that list and decided that it would be funny to create a girl according to it. And funnier to let me meet her. So I did. I met this girl that was a somewhat perfect match of the list and, obviously, I fell for her. And I fell for her hard. To make the long story short, she fell for me too. But little did I know that she had her own list of what an ideal guy should have according to her. And I apparently was not that guy. So suffice it to say that she fell for me but not as hard as I did for her.

You see, the problem with making a too-detailed list of what your ideal partner should have is the fact that that person would be rarer than unicorns and you would be very very happy when you finally meet that person. You would literally look up to them and put them on a pedestal and cherish them. And when you put someone on a pedestal and you look up to them, they will have no choice but to look down on you. Keeping a relationship between two people is hard enough even without the handicap of one person looking down on the other.

It is perfectly fine to make a list of what your ideal partner should have, but it would be much wiser if you leave some room for flexibility. While finding someone to copulate with is definitely not an easy task (worst case scenario you can always just pay for it), it pales in comparison to finding someone to daily copulate with without getting bored. However, just remember that our quest to find someone to copulate with really comes down to a simple compromise between searching for the person we think we deserve and the person we're willing to settle down with. May you find the person that you would happily copulate with every day and night without getting bored!

On birthdays

And no. I'm writing this definitely not because today is my birthday or because I have any desire to remind you guys of it so you guys can congratulate me. Okay maybe a little bit.

On a more related note, the very idea of birthday really baffles me. I mean, Why do people congratulate someone on their birthday? It's my birthday today and God damn it, it feels really weird having people congratulate me just because I've survived another Earth's revolution around the Sun. 

I mean, sure, living on Earth is getting harder with each passing day, but I still don't think it's a feat worthy to be celebrated or --even more ridiculous-- to be wished happiness upon. Maybe when someone passes 80 year old or whatever the average life expectancy of human being is, then I believe it's appropriate to wish them a happy birthday. If they have just survived a mere 20 Earth's revolution around the Sun, wishing them a happy birthday sounds more like a mock than anything else.

While I think that the subsequent birthdays following your first are mundane and not worthy to be celebrated, I personally believe that your very first birthday (the day someone's vagina had to be cut and you were shoved head-first through it) is really important. It marks the start of your journey and is the origin of all the stupid birthday wishes you will get starting the following year. 

Not only do I find the idea of celebrating birthday weird, I find the very celebration of birthday even weirder. In some culture, people having birthday have to cut a cake with candles on it and to shut their eyes and pray their wishes before blowing the candles off. In another culture, they have to eat noodles with several red boiled eggs in it (coughchinesecough) because they believe that it is the secret to longevity. I bet you that the first person who convinced his friends that red eggs were the fucking secret to longevity actually sold eggs for a living. 

I hate thinking of myself as growing older, it's probably more appropriate for me to see myself as leveling up. But instead of getting power-ups or amazing abilities every time I level up, the only perk I get is increasing lower back pain every time I wake up from my prolonged sitting period. Ugh.

Meter per Second novel giveaway!

I apologize for the unwitty post title. It's 1:15 in the morning and I need sleep like an alcoholic needs his beer. 

So yeah, as I wrote in my previous post, we are holding a giveaway for Meter per Second. Here is what you need to do:
1. Post the above picture to your Instagram,
2. Mention me (@nyankent) and Debbie (@debbiewidjaja), put your creative interpretation as to what the title Meter per Second actually means,
3. Put #meterpersecond hashtag so we can easily filter your post from other nerds who talk about physics,
Only three most creative answers would get a free copy of Meter per Second novel, so
4a. Dance and enjoy the book if you get a free copy, or
4b. Cry if you're not lucky
5. Or you know, you can just go to the nearest bookstore and buy one yourself.

Start guessing and post away! (Twitter works fine if you feel you're too cool for Instagram and don't have an account)