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July 23, 2004
Heroes of the Pacific
Well, most of this week has been fairly dull actually. Tuesday was a good lazy day, with not having class and all. I spent a few hours doing laundry though. Like Gustavus, Monash has free washers & dryers for its residents (score!), but the dryers here at Monash totally suck. It usually takes a minimum of around four hours to get a load dry, sometimes as much as seven (I managed it in four). Apparently what some people here do is throw a load in the dryer before they go to bed, and then it'll hopefully be dry when they go pick it up when they wake up in the morning. I have a feeling it might be faster to just dry stuff on the clothes-horse that Monash supplies in all our rooms... After all those adventures, Tuesday evening I went to the Roberts Hall Trivia Night. We were broken up into four teams, and they had four 10-question rounds, interrupted by four "challenge" rounds, where a member from each team had to go up and do some strange activity. For instance, what I ended up doing was a blind taste-test (given a sample, we had to identify what it was). I correctly identified maple syrup and black licorice (I figured that one out just from the smell, yuck!), but failed to identify mushy moist fruit cake or worcestershire sauce. Most of those tasted bad enough, but with a blind taste test I was anticipating much worse.
On Wednesday in between a couple of my classes I went to the market (Monash has an open-air market for all sorts of goods and wares every Wednesday and Thursday right outside the campus centre), and bought the "Dune" trilogy by Frank Herbert in a one-volume hardcover (but it's kinda old, the cover says that it's "being prepared for a Christmas 1984 release" as a major epic motion picture, hehe). It was marked $10, but the guy sold it to me for $9, woohoo (that translates into about $6-7 in the US)! What a steal! Of course, now I'm gonna be obsessed with reading this book instead of reading my textbooks, so it's probably a bad thing, but I'll manage somehow. I've been meaning to read "Dune" for a year or two anyway, mostly on Carl's recommendation. :-) Wednesday evening was the Roberts Pasta Night, with a free cooked meal, yay!
On Thursday after class I walked down to the Cole's at Pinewood (a good 20-minute-plus walk from Halls) for some groceries, as I was running out of food. I really didn't do much else yesterday, apart from finishing getting my photo albums ready for upload, along with updating some other pages on my website.
This morning as soon as my Fluid Dynamics class finished, I hopped on the bus and then the train, and headed for South Melbourne to make a quick buck. Here's the deal. Back on Tuesday while I was doing laundry, I saw a flyer in the Roberts Common Room that said, "Wanted: American males for voiceover work, starting week of 19-7-04 and continuing for ten days, call xxxx for details." So I called the number, and they told me to come down to their studio in South Melbourne midday Friday (today). 
I thought it was gonna be sort of a job interview-type thing, but actually what they were doing was having quite a few American guys come in and read the dialogue lines for different characters for a new X-Box game called "Heroes of the Pacific" about World War II that's due to be released in North America sometime around Christmas or February or so. They had me read a bunch of stuff, and recorded me for the lines for "Wingman Hank" (one of several "generic" wingmen in the game; most of Hank's lines were while he and his squadron were in a mid-air dogfight against the Japanese) and then for an air traffic controller (whose lines come in a completely different mission than Hank's lines), running things either from a tower on the ground or from a command center on an aircraft carrier, I'm not quite sure which. Since the majority of the lines were in a combat situation, I had to shout nearly every one of them, which took a few tries to get used to. But they seemed quite pleased with what I did, which was a relief. And I even got paid $50 for doing it! Both of those characters are definitely very minor characters, but I had a total of around 40-50 lines between two different missions in the game! I just may have to buy myself a copy of "Heroes of the Pacific" when I get back to the States, hehe. And maybe an X-Box too. :-)
Anyways, after the voiceover session, I went to an internet cafe over by Flinders Street Station, and spent two and a half hours uploading some brand new photo albums, so now there are links to five new albums on my Photos page, beneath the 'Australia' heading. And in addition to re-doing my Contact and Schedule pages to make them use the same template as the rest of my site, I also made a brand new Movies page, complete with two short (10-second and 20-second, respectively) movies available for viewing! So check all that out! All this is what I was spending several hours on this week instead of going out and meeting people. ;-)
I came back from the city to go to Overseas Christian Fellowship here at Monash, which is a group of all foreign students. Actually, I was the only non-Asian there, as most of the students seemed to be from Maylasia or China. I met some cool people there, so that was nice. They had some worship and supper as usual, but since it was "welcome night" for the new people like myself, they just had some games (and a skit, which was mostly in a language that was a very strange mix of Maylasian & English, so I could only pick out every fourth or fifth word, making it just a bit difficult to follow what was going on), so I'm gonna go back at least once more when they actually have a Bible study and see what that's like. I'm gonna try to also visit the other Christian groups here on campus to try to get a feel for them, and which ones I want to keep going to. But some of the kids from OCF tonight invited me to go along with them on a trip tomorrow morning to Mount Dandenong, an hour or so east of here, so that should be fun. It beats sitting in my room all day!
Posted by Jared at July 23, 2004 11:52 PM