Domo Diaries : Mobile Blogging!

Annyeong! Long time no see everyone. I've been feeling super guilty as Cookie has been the only one blogging. I've been soooooooo lazy to transfer the photos to my lappy :/ BUT IN MY DEFENSE, when I tried to transfer my pics the phone wouldn't connect to my pc...

On a whim today, I decided to search for the blogger app and here I am! I'm not very sure as to how it works yet... This is basically a trial post along with a fotd for some content lollol. I don't even know how to add in pictures!!! .___. Okay I do but I don't know how to position them but it's just my face. No harm in it being randomly placed!

Re-positioned it with chrome browser!

If this works out you can expect to see a looooooot more posts on Domokie just because blogging has gotten more convenient!

Love,
Domo

Domo Diaries : FOTD + Mini memories of Bangkok!

*Inserts guilty and nervous laughter*

Hello Domokies >_<

We sorta came back for awhile, blogged a little, explained our disappearance and then disappeared again... We've been living our lives as normal, boring human beings and I went on a recent holiday trip to Bangkok!

It's my first time going to Bangkok without a tour guide so I'm kinda a noob and thus I didn't take note of any details or locations or whatsoever. I have some pictures randomly pooled together so feel free to take a look~ I'm returning in November for another shopping spree so I'll do a proper detailed post then!

I'm sure some of you have heard of MK, otherwise you're just like me :D It's not that bad, we're still exploring! Basically this is just... Steamboat. I can't remember much of it for it wasn't very impressive to me. The soup was however, one of the sweetest I've ever tasted in my life, probably because of the amount of veggies dumped into it.

I think this is beef. Nothing too amazing, it's just meat.

Some kinda platter. See that white doughey thing at the bottom left? That's shrimp wanton and it's awesome!!!

More meat, pork I believe.

And bla bla bla fast forward to my next meal on don't remember which day, here's my samurai pork burger!

Only picture I took before gobbling it. It's not like the samurai beef/chicken burger we have in SG though. This one doesn't contain black pepper and it's not spicy at all.

Super delicious kway chap.

Loads of intestines and tender pork that melts in your mouth~

From here onward, viewers' discretion is advised.

Heh heh bugs stall!

Frogs! Deep fried whole. I have close ups but they're slightly disturbing so I won't post them here. These taste like really crunchy chicken. And yes, you can eat the entire thing with the eyes...

Grasshoppers.

These things are HUGEEEEE. But they don't taste as bad as you think. Still, it takes courage to bite into one, especially for a girl with a mega phobia of anything without legs or with more than 4 legs ><

Here we have some crickets.

These are a lot less intimidating than the grasshoppers and I personally find them tasty :/ They're a healthier and more nutritious version of potato chips! Super crunchy with a slightly milky aftertaste?

Last but not least, here are my loots! Snapped them up at fantastic prices and I promise to do a more detailed post next time /.\ But for now, dresses as cheap as $3-4, belts for about $2? And $8 bags!!! Plus I bought a HUGEEEE tub of hair mask to try! It's like 1litre and received positive reviews on the internet. Time to pamper my hair.

And randomly...

How I've been doing my make up recently! Super natural and suitable for work or school! (I don't mean primary or secondary school or JCs, you're not allowed to use make up there!) And of course, it's inspired by the Korean make up trend~

And then RANDOMLY, AGAIN, I'm ending this post! Hopefully I won't go MIA again~

Love,
Domo ❤

New layout + Quick update!

Hi Domokies, it's been a while~! I've been busy with work but we've finally managed to find some time to have a photoshoot, and change the layout. Tell us what you think about it and what we can improve on as well.

Domo returned from a family holiday in Korea recently. So stay tuned for an exciting travel log of her trip.
^ w ^ (Domo is seated beside me and she says "It's not that exciting, actually." and also "I've recently became a barrel again.")

As for myself, I have been sewing fat cats, working like a kami-sama and trying to grow eye bags. I've got a couple of DIY posts in the backlog that's way overdue, but fear not! Ghostbusters are here. (But fear furbies, they will be the cause of an apocalypse.) I mean, my new year resolution would be to blog more often, is what I'm trying to say.

Alas, the end of the world hath not befallen us, but the year draws to a close. For those thinking 'WTH have I been doing this year?!', take heart, for we are the survival of a (non-existent) zombie apocalypse.

Domo here, I think Cookie has gone nuts from editing the layout all day. She has short circuited or something.

Anyway, happy new year in advance (and a belated happy new year if you're reading this after 1 Jan). We wish everyone future zombie survivability and a good year ahead. Stay human! (I SAID 'HEALTHY'.)

Goodnight! (depending on your timezone)

Love,
Cookie, and Domo

Domo Diaries : What I've been up to

Hello my lovelies! I'm trying to blog as much as I can but as of now I have not have time to edit the product shots and stuff. So here's a snippet of my life and what's been keeping me busy :)

There's stuff like work that's been escalating to a whole new level of busy as plenty of new courses are starting and I have to handle all the registration, the orders and the ka ching! I'm constantly in fear of losing the money as it's more than a few thousands and if it goes MIA... I'm dead meat.

There's also my preparation for the BTT. It may be simple for some but I've not been reading or memorizing stuff for quite some time and this is a killer!!!

But here's the main reason why I'm occupied.

I've been preparing myself for the Safra PK Challenge 2012 and am currently awaiting results if I get into the Quarter Finals or not. This one was sent for the online submission screening and I've already passed that. I sang 蔡健雅(Tanya Chua) 无底洞 for the qualifying rounds and the video is below!

I didn't do very well because once I got up on stage I was soooo nervous my chest hurts from my pounding heart. Yea it was that bad it actually hurt. Nevertheless, I've did what I can and I hope to be able to make it through to the Quarter Finals(Results announced tonight omgomgomg!).

Feel free to comment on the video or even here to give me any feedbacks that you might have :D Please please please be nice!

Also, I found someone's video for the first 40 minutes of the competition so here it is for you to look through all the contestants.

Hope this new blog post is acceptable for you all :x Did anyone go for this competition as well? If you did, show me your video!

Have a nice day my lovelies~

Cheers,
Domo

Our explanation

Hey Domokies,

So here it is, our explanation, or more specifically mine, towards us being MIA for so very long. If you have noticed, most of the beauty reviews are done by me thus when I went MIA, Ringo slowly slipped away too. Why did I just disappear?

Firstly, it's not easy being a beauty blogger. I know of people who thinks that being a blogger equates to freebies, sponsorship and an easy life. Nope, it's not like that at all. Domokie started out with our love and passion towards all things nice. We stand by our values of giving 100% honest reviews. This made our blogger life tough. After all, the purpose of sponsoring us products is for us to advertise about their products on our blog. And not all products are that great to us. When we give our honest reviews, we have sponsors who get upset. Okay mainly just ONE big sponsor who's in charge of several brands. They've emailed us before, requesting for us to change our reviews, or stick to their format of what we should emphasize about their products. We didn't comply and thus you can see, our sponsorship with that sponsor is gone with the wind~

Secondly, not following the "orders" given by the sponsors also leads to gossiping among other bloggers. Unknown to most of you, there are unfortunately some bloggers who blog according to what their sponsors have instructed. You'll see that there are a lot of bloggers who rave about how magical a product is these days. Or one entire blog flooded with advertorials.

No, Domokie's not just about that. So we kinda got "outcast-ed". Blogging is a form of social media, so without the social part, it's sometimes a little hard on us. We buy our own products, but latest products are usually given to bloggers to review before it hits the market. Despite that, we have came to a decision that we will no longer be actively participating in sponsorships whatsoever. We'll review the products that we have and love and if you think it's good enough for you, go ahead to try it. We do not want to lie to our readers.

Thirdly, having bloggers beeching about you isn't nice at all, especially when one bunch of them "bombs" you with insults. They're all older than me but I have no idea why their maturity is so... Yea. But either way, it's not easy to survive while getting bullied. We are not rocks. Well Ringo's tougher and I'm more of a er... Softie? I take people very seriously, inclusive of friendships and whatever ships we have. Thus this whole incident impacted me harder and I went MIA. It's really horrible when you go for events and have people snickering at you. I often feel somewhat like this at events.

Image taken from knowyourmeme.com

I know that I've just been running away but I've decided to return. Thanks to our honesty, we actually have a lot of people emailing us regarding LWM especially. (That was the post that made us go down too :<) We've also had readers ask about us and truly, we're touched. All of you are our blogging fuel and as cheesy as it sounds, you give us strength.

We are restarting our blog but it will no longer be like before. We're actually rather into baking now so we'll be posting one of our successful recipes up here. (lol most of them failed cause we just self-learnt baking) We're deciding to go by our real life nics now. We used Chiharu and Ringo before because we didn't want this blog to link to our private lives. But now, we're going to be a less commercial blog anyway so now you'll finally know why this blog is DOMOKIE. I'm Domo(Chiharu) and she's actually Cookie(Ringo). Domo + Cookie = Domokie. There you have it.

Cookie's a very DIY person and she'll be sharing her knowledge with you. She's pretty busy for now so I'll most likely be managing on my own. We will be revamping our blog to go with the new us so look forward to it! :D I'll still be doing beauty reviews but mostly on products I love because I do a lot of research before purchasing a product.

Lastly, we are very sorry about our MIA. It was not nice at all to just disappear and we apologize for that. Thank you to those of you who are still reading this post for you are the reason we continued blogging.

Love,
Domokie.

An apology about the hiatus~

Gomen nasai, minna san~

Our last post was on 11/11/11, and it's been four months since. If any of you is still checking this blog for updates, I feel I must offer up some sort of explanation (though a much belated one) for your persistence. (　ﾟдﾟ)

Off the bat, I don't think Chiharu is updating anytime soon. The full explanation I would leave to her to write out, should she return. 

I guess it might be simplistic to say that we've moved on from blogging, but I suppose that's the easiest way to explain. Domokie was started out of a desire to share the things we love, chiefly: make-up, food and pretty things. I don't think either of us would stop wanting to do that -- it's what makes humans humans -- but reality's a bitch sometimes.


Certain events happened, and I suppose Chiharu's feeling a bit down at the moment. 

As you can probably tell from the post count, Chiharu is a much more passionate blogger than I am. [壁]д・)ﾉ This is predominantly a beauty blog, I guess, and I'm not quite confident or adept enough to handle it on my own. I'm more a back-end sort of person, more comfortable with HTML codes and Photoshop, more comfortable out of the camera frame than in it.

So when Chiharu stopped blogging, inevitably this blog becomes a husk. I guess I'm shirking my responsibility a little here, but these days my world consists of drawing, work, and video games, and it seems a little odd to bring that world here.


On the other hand, it seems a bit of a pity to throw everything away, so this blog shall still be here, biding its time before it comes out of hibernation eventually. I might update a little sometimes, but a story cannot move on without its full cast.


---

What I've been up to thus far:
 

I like beautiful things. I think we all do. But let's all strive to be happy and good, ja?

A Ringo A Day: Eggs

Quick update!
Sorry I've been neglecting the blog a bit. > A <
The end of the year is always a busy time, no?

Currently working on:

Still some way to go before it's done. Working on my batman sculpture as well.
Will post up some movie reviews come next week!

But for now, *distracts with song recommendations*



Emma Louise hails from Brisbane, Queensland. Currently unsigned, I think, but I'm not too certain.



The song's title combined with the band name made this track almost impossible to find on YouTube search, until a while ago. Alpine is Phoebe, Lou, Phil, Christian, Ryan and Tim, from Melbourne, Australia. Their MVs are lovely.

Oh, the time, I gotta go to work, so ciao~ : 3

Love,
Ringo

A Ringo A Day: Practice Makes

Just some stuffs to keep my brush sharp. One of my favorite superheroes of all time is Batman, though granted, I'm not particularly familiar with all the comics as some of my friends are. I love antiheroes, and the fact that Bruce Wayne relies not on some mutant source of superhuman power, but on his quick wit and awesome gadgets endear me to him more so than most of the mainstream comic book heroes.

Speaking of which, Arkham City.



It's out on PS3 and Xbox in the Western hemisphere already, and scheduled to release on November 23 in Japan. I don't own a gaming console though (it would probably destroy my productivity totally if I did), so I'm awaiting the PC release, which is at the earliest, mid November.

Still debating with myself whether I should get it or not. I get pretty addicted to games easily. And from what I heard, the gameplay is rather lengthy. Lots of side quests and stuff. But. Oh. God. BATMAN.



The graphics is AWESOME. The cut-scenes especially, are of cinematic quality. I'm glad Mark Hamill is reprising his role as Joker. It wouldn't be the same without him. This time though, the main antagonist is Hugo Strange, mad-scientist extraordinaire, as voiced by Corey Burton.

On a irrelevant side note, the previous game was loosely based off the graphic novel Arkham Asylum, A Serious House On Serious Earth. If you haven't read it yet, and you're a fan of Batman as I am, do read it. In my opinion, it's one of the best graphic novels for Batman I've ever read (though I confess I haven't read that many).

 

It's a bit surreal in styling, I suppose. But it's fitting of the subject -- it's an asylum we're talking about, after all.

And of course, the art is awesome. And the best part? NLB haz it.

</fangirl rant>

Movie Review: Mural

Went to watch Mural with my mom and bro last saturday. Although it isn't the type of movie I would usually watch (my sort of genre being more of sci-fi, thriller, or action), it was still quite enjoyable.

Mural is directed by Hong Kong director Gordon Chan (陳嘉上) , who previously directed Painted Skin (畫皮). Mural's story comes from the sixth chapter of a book called Liao Zhai (聊斋), a collection of nearly five hundred (mostly) supernatural short stories written in the Qing Dynasty.

The story starts with scholar Zhu XiaoLian and his servant Hou Xia being accosted by swordsman Meng Longtan, who attempts to rob them. They all end up at a Taoist hillside temple where a monk named Budong calms them down. Zhu, intrigued by a painting of six beautiful women, finds one comes to life in front of his eyes, then disappearing into a doorway that previously wasn't there. The scholar, entranced, follows her through the tunnel that leads to the Land of Ten Thousand Blossoms, a beautiful place filled with fairy-like maidens, where males aren't allowed to trespass.

The environment and costumes are quite breathtaking, with Cyrus Ho's impressive sets, and Bobo Ng's filigree costuming. The attention to detail in the girls' clothing is apparent in the complex layering, though the hairstyles and glitter patterns on their arms are a little kitschy (and not in a good way).

The ensemble of actresses are fittingly beautiful, each according to the nature of their characters. The acting isn't too bad either, but the plot is quite contrived. The story goes off into tangents, with sub-plots that don't really add on to the story. Though a high-budget production, visual effects were a little lacking at times, reminiscent of old wuxia films (especially the part where the tortoise god ferries them on its back).

So while the visuals are mostly good, and the story sufficiently dramatic (essentially a tearjerker nearing the end of the movie), it falls short of being great. It feels like patchwork -- beautiful women, magical fireworks, cgi monsters, and lots of love triangles. It would probably be an epic if the effort was more focused on a single plot line, rather than that of multiple characters'.

All in all though, it's still quite an enjoyable movie, as long as you don't nitpick at the details and enjoy the eyecandy.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆