So as not to get too short a word in the anagram like "a" or "an" and have too many results returned, I set the maximum number of words to be 2 and the minimum number of letter in each word to be 3.

For my own name I entered "Khairul Hisham" because I get zero results from my full name and I entered Ain's full name without the " binti".

Apparently I am MAHARISHI HULK and Ain is NONHUMAN RITUAL. Cool beans.

When the maximum number of words is increased to 3, I also get HIM RAKISH HULA (can one be dashing and stylish with a hula) and HUH SHARIA MILK (so, drink up) - none of which are particularly funny or makes a whole lot of sense - but Ain gets to have awesome anagrams like MANUAL RHINO NUT (what do you need to do manually to a rhino's nut?), INHUMAN LOAN RUT (Ah Long or what?), HAUL AMNION RUNT (I'm going to have to draw this) and MONAURAL HIT NUN (cause maybe, nuns do not usually produce chart-topping hits in stereo audio).

Sadly, Irfan's name yielded no results even after some tweaking of the settings.

Anyone else want to give it a shot with their own names?

There's so many bait-and-switches in this story, you just can't predict who lives and who dies. You kind of know someone will buy it, and you sort of figure out which ones would, but you think, "No, maybe it's another bait-and-switch."

Then wham! When it happens, it happens right in the middle of that song which had stood for something else when you heard it in previous episodes, and was sung in this episode for a totally different reason. But the melody and the timing of it just interposes with each other perfectly, and despair and sadness hits you squarely in the guts.

One of the best shows on TV right now, I'm thinking.

(As always, hover over the pictures for captions)

It has been an exciting, sleep-deprived month, but it has definitely been a lot of fun. Every day is new, and every day Allie grows a little more, learns something new, and begins to respond more to us. As Vin put it, she has reduced all of us adults into a bunch of babbling fools, but if she babbles back in response, that just stokes our fire and we renew our babbling efforts!

There have been good times...

...and bad times...

Mostly, she's been observing us and learning the ropes.

Sometimes she feels like napping like she was still in utero:

She has been practising her smiles:

Also increasing her CQ (Cuteness Quotient)

And lots of eating and sleeping. Here's one of Vin's favorite poses:

It's been a blast! Tok and Opah have had lots of time with Allie, and without Opah to make sure we all eat and nap during the day, who knows what we would have done. Thanks for all the help, Opah and Tok!

Recently I've had to write a pretty long email to Irfan and Alya's Atok and Opah who are still in Ohio playing with little Alya.

I should try to summarize the email here, however I will just let you read an excerpt from it.

From the Federal Highway we decided to take the Sprint elevated highway that would cut across the University Malaya hills to PJ.

As we went up the highway a speed sensor tagged the car in front of us at 65kph. It moved sideways into the left lane and slowed down. The speed sensor tagged the Alfa as going 60kph which then was replaced by a 85kph. A look at the rear view mirror indicated that a white van was barreling at us at high speed. I couldn't immediately change lanes because of the previous car. So I accelerated a bit, perhaps going to 70kph to overtake the car so I can change lanes.

There was a corner. Suddenly the car skidded and started to spin clockwise. I tried to regain control and did for a second. We started to spin in the opposite direction and the front and left quarter of the car hit the left side of the road, which was a chest-high concrete wall with a railing on top. We skidded backwards and the rear right quarter of the car hit the wall on the other side. Then we stopped on the left side of the highway, nose pointing in the wrong direction just above the University Malaya entrance, with Ain's old apartment building in view across the Federal Highway below.

Also, another person stopped to help call Sprint highway services and flag oncoming cars. He said that a lot of cars crashed here because of wet roads. Not because of puddles, but just because the roads were slightly wet.

It began to rain again. I noticed other cars were slightly skidding. Most regained control and went on their way. However, while I was inspecting damage to the front of the Alfa, one Waja driven by a Mat Salleh made a very loud-sounding emergency brake. He was heading my way. I ran closer to the Alfa and the wall, but he kept on coming. I jumped onto the railing to avoid being hit. And the Waja stopped a foot or two from the Alfa and the wall. He apologized, reversed his car and went on his way.

After waiting another five minutes, a red Gen2 safely overtook our crash scene. But about 30 meters down, it spun counterclockwise and hit the left wall of the highway full on smashing its engine, folding its hood and cracking its windscreen. It slid backwards to hit the opposite wall as well. The person who helped me also went to help the driver.

Soon after highway services arrived and helped direct traffic. Still there were minor accidents, fender-benders occurred causing three more cars to stop to check for damage. Afraid that Ain and Irfan would get hit by a car, I flagged down a minivan where a Chinese lady and her family agreed to take the two of them away from the crash scene. She took them to SS22, I learnt later.

It happened on the 18th. Everyone is okay. Car is at the mechanic's. The adventure continues.

Gah.

Irfan's learned to not only draw and colour pictures digitally, but he's also learnt to use layers. I'd create a file for him with two layers, and he'll do the rest. He select the top layer to draw his line art. Then, he'll select the bottom layer and choose the colours he want to paint.

Let's go through one artwork at a time:

Take for example this piece here, some kind of a plant based monster complete with petals and legs. Bewildered by the roof like structure atop the monster's face, he finally revealed to me today that the creature was based on Constance's final incarnation in Monster House. The antennae apparently receives television signals.

Obviously, this artwork is of a car which has some strange colouring choices alongside a potted plant.

After only a couple of days, Irfan has mastered proper human body to leg proportion (compared to his portait of his parents two articles ago). But somehow or other, this person who wears a blue shirt and red pants is named "Sxomqil". He might possibly be an Aztec.

I don't know what this is but I'm sure I've seen this on Penny Arcade.

Finally... It's a hoofed, metal fuselage with fins and three yellow-red eyes. It might be a monster, or a robot, or some inconceivable concept from the depths of Irfan's imagination that would bring madness to those that understands the finality of what this image represents.

Here's Abah Irfan's eye.

And then, here's Irfan's Ummi's eye.

Here's Irfan's Abah.

And then, here's Irfan's Ummi.

WALL-E is the acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class, a trash management robot designed to clear the immense volume of garbage from an uninhibitable Earth, and left behind when all Humans have evacuated into ships in space. We also see two WALL-As - Axiom-class robots later in the movie.

However, it's been seven hundred years since he first started his job and all the other WALL-Es are damaged beyond repair and dead. Over the course of seven centuries, the remaining WALL-E is still doing his job, has developed sapience, emotion, and a hobby of collecting interesting trinket. Also, he has a fondness for his pet roach who follows him around, keeping him company on his job rounds.

Light spoilers will follow. But it's not as if you can't figure out what's going to happen just looking at the trailers.

One day, while working a ship lands and deploys a floating, white, egg-shaped object which turns out to be a robot named EVE, who already appears sapient and enjoys Earth's open sky before going about its work scanning the trash heaps and derelict buildings for something. Among WALL-E's stash at home - an immobilized truck - is a VHS copy of Hello Dolly! which he watches very night and enjoys the romantic aspect of the movie. EVE, being a robot of female personality, attracts his attention immediately.

But after WALL-E shows EVE a growing seedling, she goes into automatic mode, grabs the plant into her internal storage compartment and floats dormant waiting for her pickup. He does everything he can to keep EVE comfortable while she's disabled. When the pickup arrives, WALL-E attempts to stow aboard the ship not willing to let his love out of his sight... which leads him to an adventure in space and rediscovering Humanity. In the process he causes a chain reaction that creates an upheaval, and ultimately brings an end to status quo among the society of Humans and robots there, all because of love.

Just like any Pixar movie, WALL-E is highly enjoyable with a storyline that is easily understood as well as addressing some issues such as monopoly in capitalism and transhumanism in the form of a Humanity pampered to the extreme by robots. All in all, a solid science fiction adventure story. However, I was disapointed that they did not expand on whether WALL-E's sapience was pre-programmed 700 years earlier or he developed it naturally by existing far longer than he was designed to. I liked the fact that they showed many other inactive WALL-E units strewn about in the deserty landscape, and he probably cannibalized them for spare parts over the years.

WALL-E's pet cockroach stole almost every scene it appeared in. It appears that almost a thousand years from now roaches have an increased dog-like intelligence, invulnerability and a longer lifespan. There's no way the roach could learn what it appeared to know over the course of a year. Also, it got squished by WALL-E twice in the movie and came out of it undamaged! Milquetoast the Cockroach would be proud.

After the movie ended I really hoped that the cockroach and its kind would be intelligent enough not to be a pest to Earth's returning populace or it'd be promptly exterminated by them.

The robots of the starliner Axiom are great characters in their own rights. After 700 years, you can see a discrepancy of design and technology between them and WALL-E. While WALL-E uses servomotors to move his parts and travel using treads, the Axiom robots can float about on antigravity (though not all of them, some still use rollers or are mounted on ceiling rails), can emit forcefields, have parts that hinge on invisible forcefields and are all more antiseptic clean-looking (except for the WALL-As for obvious reasons). Finally they all seem to have been manufactured with an artificially sapient mind and have different personalities ranging from the sinister to the neurotic.

The Axiom's welder robot BURN-E will be appearing in an animated short for the WALL-E DVD later this year, and I hope we get to see more stories featuring the rest of them.

Also, I hope to see a definitive happy ending for the cockroach.

All I remember is that I picked up the gentlebeings in the first photo below, had some refreshment at Woon Seong's house before we all went to Teik Sing's house where the big daytime gathering was planned.

The gathering was quiet enjoyable. As I remembered Teik Sing just got back from Austin... Hang on. I can't remember if he's back for vacation or for good.

After the daytime gathering was over, we reconvened at Yu Hoe's house that night for more festivities.

Of course, the other explanation why I can't remember a lot of details is because I've gone nyanyok.

Naturally, the Imperials attacked during the investigation. Radio communications on and around the planet was jammed. It turned out that the Imps had deployed a Diamondback droid which is designed to jam planetary and interplanetary communications. The group borrowed the local defence forces' CloakShape fighters to attack the droid, which had its own defences in the form of anti-fighter cannons.

I 've rewritten down the D6 stats slightly modified from my original pencil notes and uploaded them to Phil Hatfield's site D6 Universe for posterity's sake.

I've reproduced it here for my own reference.

ARAKYD DIAMONDBACK

A lesser known droid manufactured by Arakyd Industries is the Diamondback orbital jamming droid. Used almost exclusively by Imperial Ubiqtorate, the small shieldless Diamondbacks are usually ejected into orbit around planets where it is crucial that their intra- and interplanetary radio and hyperwave communications are to be disrupted, pending arrival of a proper Imperial military incursion force. Usually enough droids are deployed around a planet at synchronous orbit to ensure full disruption coverage of the world. No calls for external aid nor communications to coordinate surface forces to repel an incursion can be made.

The Diamondback is primarily a dome with built-in photoreceptors and other EM sensors. The jamming antenna is mounted at the end of a pylon which extends downwards from the bottom of the dome. Also fixed upon gimbals on the pylon is a small but effective anti-starfighter quad laser cannon, whose power is fed from a generator placed within the pylon. Finally, smaller comm rectennae allows for the droid to communicate with other Diamondbacks or a command ship.

Type: Arakyd Diamondback Orbital Jamming Droid
Scale: Starfighter
DEXTERITY 2D
Blaster 4D, dodge 2D+2
KNOWLEDGE 1D
Language 3D+2, planetary systems 3D
MECHANICAL 4D
Communications 5D+2, sensors 4D+2
PERCEPTION 1D
STRENGTH 3D
TECHNICAL 1D
Equipment:
-Communications Slicing Packing
-Fourth Degree Droid Brain
-Built-in Comlink & Communications Array
-Quad Laser Cannon (1-3/12/25) Damage: 4D+2
Space: 5
Size: 3.27 meters tall

GM Notes: The Diamondbacks uses the blaster skill to shoot at incoming ships when their cover are blown. To attempt to cut through the jamming, roll your PC’s communications skill against the droid’s communication skill as the difficulty number. The jamming only works in line of sight. If only one droid is jamming the planet, a person on the far side will still be able to communicate.

I should reproduce some of my game notes here and at D6 Universe so that they don't become lost in case of a second wave of termite attack.

The topic for Illustration Friday for this week is "sail", as can be seen above. Now what would be weird is if the camera pans down and we see the mast planted firmly on a field instead of a boat. A higher resolution version of the image can be found here.

What I have to do is to fill out the form with 5 lines below to reveal my secret superhero identity and come up with an image of my alter ego.

So, a superhero, eh? Here goes nothing.

1. I’m called : Sink
2. I will save the world by : looking for and beating up crooks, and sending them to jail whenever and wherever I find them. However, it's not this crimefighting act which will directly save the world. I have to do this because if I don't my real superpower will activate, and would be disastrous to put it mildly. (See item 5)
3. My mode of transport is : walking around, or maybe the train, because I can't afford anything more than that.
4. My archnemesis is : Myself, because I fight crime without any augmented strength, speed, reflexes, any kind of superhuman powers, nor do I have the money to protect myself with special weapons and armour. Therefore, once in a while, sometimes more often than I like, I get beat up pretty bad and required medical attention. In any case, I have to do what I do despite the injuries or my power will subconsciously activate.
5. My kryptonite is : a mixture of despair and my real superhuman power. The former will activate the latter, which would be catastrophic. Crime and injustice elicits the feeling of despair in me. The more I read about it the more I feel that the world is not worth saving, in which case my subconscious will activate my power. And my real power is to increase three fundamental forces within my own body, which are the strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force and gravity, to near infinite levels. This will convert my body into the strongest black hole ever in the universe. Not only will my body be destroyed, but atoms will break down in proximity and every subatomic particle in and of the world will be immediately sucked into the super black hole, exponentially increasing its size and strength even more. This will pull nearby astronomical bodies like the moon and NEOs into the black hole. Then would come the unravelling of the sun and the gaseous structures of the outer planets of the system. The structures of nearby stars, like Alpha Centauri trio, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359 and Sirius will break down and their gases will be pulled absorbed as well. Eventually the entire galaxy will be eaten up, causing nearby galaxies to be destroyed and pulled in as well. Eventually the black hole will cause the end of our spacetime continuum.

Beat that.