Okay, shooting was way better today. 159 for ten ends of 3! Yay!! Passed.. haha. But there's no grouping whatsoever. So within one end, the score is highly polarised. My first arrows tend to be really shitty, either scoring in the white or black or M, and then the last arrow will land in 10, 9 or 8. Weird, isn't it. It'd make more sense the other way round.

Anyway. Sighting tomorrow. AAS admin are a bunch of mentally incapacitated morons. With less than five days before the competition, first, they change the scheduling of events, then they change the timing of those events, and THEN, they change the nature of the events themselves, from 20 ends of 3 arrows to 10 ends of 6 arrows. At least I think it's 10 ends.

It better not be TWENTY ends of 6. I WILL DIE. My arm will drop off and in the midst of writhing in its death throes on the ground, will be spitting venomous curses at me for overworking it to its death.

Watched "Blade Trinity" today with Ben and Zhan Tao after training. Don't ask me why I did that. None of the "Blade" movies are my usual fare; in fact, I've never watched the first two. Maybe I just needed something brainless to do. And maybe I wanted to see a compound bow in action too. Haha. Think it was the same with the two guys too. :D

I mean, for about the first half-hour of the movie, we were only mildly interested in the proceedings; then came along Jessica Biel and this really fancy weapon which looked like a bow, but where the string was supposed to be, there was this thin, bright blue band of light; like a laser, really. And all three of us got really animated and excited about how cool her "bow" looked-- we found out later that it wasn't a bow, but some unique weapon that'd been specially developed for use against vampires, coz that blue band of light is really UV light. Which vampires are.. um, allergic to. You know. Sunlight and all.

Oh, but later, there came this scene where Hannibal King's saying that he "can't shoot around corners", and she responds with "I can", and all three of us were like "Oh, yeah, compound bow.."

And she whipped it out, with a skillful jerk of her arm, unfolded it from its collapsed state, loaded up the arrow and fired.

Whoa. Fun. :D

Seriously, the highest points of the whole movie for us must've been when she was shooting. With the bow, that is, not with the guns. Of which there were plenty, I assure you. Expensive things too, since they all apparently had silver bullets.

Later after the movie, Ben and I were even debating about a scene where she shoots a series of arrows through a sensor which detects their speed, and slowly, the speed of her arrows starts to get faster; she goes from 274 feet per second to 320 feet per second.

We were debating the possibility of increasing the speed at which the arrow travels; something which obviously isn't possible unless you pull back further on the string, but the thing is that your draw length is supposed to be constant. So I figured that the only way that you could control the speed of the arrow would be to tighten or loosen the strings; something which I figure would have a greater effect on a compound bow than on a recurve bow.

On a compound bow you'd have to tweak all those gears and such, while on a recurve, all you can do is twist the string to shorten its length and in so doing, pulling the limbs further back.

Here's something to help with your visualisation:


Diagrammatical representation of a compound bow 


Compound Bow 


Compound bow with stabiliser; the stabiliser is the rod which you see extending from the lower part of the bow. 


And here's the bow that I use in archery: the recurve bow, so named because its limbs curve away from the archer, and which is supposedly harder to master than the compound bow.


Diagrammatical representation of recurve bow with V-bar and side and central stabilisers 


Wooden recurve bow. This is the kind that I use. These don't come with (or need) a stabiliser. In this picture, the sight is not present on the bow. 


Metal recurve bow. This is the type that my seniors use, replete with V-bar and side and central stabilisers. 


And Jessica Biel has muscles, man. You can see it really clearly in the movie, but more towards the end when she's fighting off the bad guys and she's wearing this tank top. Specifically, it's the muscles in her upper arms and back, around the shoulder blades. Must be all the archery training. :D

And Ryan Reynolds as Hannibal King was a riot; he was verging on being another Jim Carrey half the time with his strange jokes and funny behaviour and expressions, but I loved his quick wit and humour.

The film didn't have much in the way of a storyline (hey, what did you expect??), but it was worth the $6 to see that wicked compound bow and watch Hannibal King's character.