And then it came to pass a couple of weeks back that a number of Star Wars Twitterfolk began talking about an animal. Specifically, the carcass of the creature that was the bait which drew Chewbacca and resulted in him, Luke, Han, Threepio and Artoo being captured in an Ewok net trap on Endor. Since its appearance in Return of the Jedi, the critter has been named, and is known as the verkle. In the midst of the discussion, I thought it would be amusing to sketch a conjectural design of what the whole animal would look like. Using inks and markers, I came up with the following: According to its wiki article, the verkle “prop is a white tailed deer with fake teeth added to the deer’s anus.” The original tweet: Return Of The Jedi is on #TNT right now. Has there EVER been a name given to that […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: September 2018
The Dice Motherlode
Lazada offered 15 sets of polyhedral dice of various colours online for about sixty local bucks including shipping. It even threw in a velvet dice bag which could be of benefit. In any case, Here are pictures of the colourful dice that arrived at the office. These dice will serve me well with games like Eclipse Phase, The Laundry and Dungeons and Dragons.
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Campus Sunset
One of the most rewarding things about having to teach from 5 to 7 in the evening is the view. Sometimes the sky just lights up on fire. Yesterday, the following view was what I beheld when I was heading home. I tweeted the photo immediately. No brightness or saturation modification was done on the image.
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Irfan is Sixteen
Once again, the arbitrary day based on an arbitrary timing system returns after a long cycle known as a year. Because we appear to honour the system, it was time just like last year to celebrate Irfan’s birthday. He turned 16 today. Atok and Opah visited from Perak to celebrate their grandson’s birthday with him. Irfan’s birthday cake was an ice cream cake with lychees, peaches and cherries on top. The thing about the cake during his birthday was that Irfan also shared it with other patrons of our eatery. He would have shared it with the local cat if cats ate cake. We went to a restaurant whose name could be translated as “The Cafe Beside Our House”. This was our second time at this restaurant. Earlier, we tried going to the pizza parlour that we celebrated Irfan’s 14th birthday at, but it appeared to be closed or undergoing […]
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Dice of Purple and Blue
I forgot to mention this last week. A set of polyhedral dice I ordered online arrived at the office. I used them during the D&D game last weekend and they look like this: I have actually ordered a larger set of dice and hope that they arrive soon.
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Otherworldly Creatures of Issyka
Christopher Mennell aka The Secret DM, commissioned me to create a host of otherworldly creatures for his fantasy setting of Issyka. It had been a while since I drew fantasy creatures. So I thought it would be a great for me to flex that cluster of creative muscle. Long after the ancient Shapers have gone extinct, their bio-factory are still creating new creatures that continue to roam the wilds of Issyka. Click on the images to expand them: An adult zegak-zoti grow anywhere from three to thirty feet tall. This type of creature has an armoured hide which could turn the best arrows. The largest of these beasts could be made into a mobile fortress if they could be tamed. However, the problem many find is that zegak-zotis adore the taste of human flesh. Sysakuunds are aquatic hunters that can grow up to fifty feet in length. They hunt prey […]
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DnD: Abduction at the Ancient Ruins
Finally after almost 30 years of gamemastering roleplaying games, I finally got to run Dungeons and Dragons. Setting background: 130 years in the past, a fleet of jongs, perahus and lancang led by a Laksamana of the Sultanate of Melaka left their port for the Kingdom of China. As they approached the island of Temasik, a mist of green and purple descended upon them. They sailed in the mist for three days without the sun or blue sky. After the mist vanished, they found themselves in unknown waters. At night, the stars were different and the moon had a different face, and shone blue. The flotilla sent scouts north, south, east and west. The scouts discovered an archipelago to the east and led the fleet to an island that took them two days to sail around. The Laksamana decided on building an encampment at a river delta protected by a […]
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Long Weekend in Perak
We headed to Sitiawan on Saturday after my Research Method class. It was a long weekend. Really long weekend. Monday and Tuesday were holidays for various reasons. After lunch it would be 3 pm before we finally departed from town. We stopped at the highway rest stop to refresh ourselves. We had arrived early in the night in Sitiawan. I was dead tired. The next day we spoke for an hour with the away team online. On Monday, we headed upstate to visit the Kompleks Sejarah Pasir Salak. We stopped at Batu 10 for breakfast. The view of the Perak River is a rare view for me. It would be kind of therapeutic if we had a place by the river to unwind. There was also a large dead monitor on the walkway by the river, heading towards the complex. It looked fresh enough to be recently deceased. There was […]
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First Week of Social Social in Class
The first week of the first session of the 2018/2019 academic session has begun. Do the students possess the not-very-instinctive ability to position words in an adjective phrases — specifically the positions of the noun and the adjective? I would like to happily report that this semester, the students have this ability… mostly… as these Kahoot quiz results show among six separate classes: At least no one answered “social social” or “media media”.
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Rat Disposal Weekend
One other thing that occurred over the weekend was the success of our household in apprehending a rat. We heard it scritch-scratching once in a while in the attic and Ain set up a trap as usual. Saturday evening we took it out to a deserted spot by a main road and let it loose into the wild. On our way back to the house, the sky displayed quite a spectacular wash of bright, lively colours. (Click on both images above to expand them.)
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Weekend Before Classes Begin
It was the long weekend, which started on a Friday. We thought of filling up the weekend with some activities before my semester with a new batch of students begin next week. First, we headed toward Taman Sakura on the way to Kuala Perlis. (Click on all the images to expand them.) At first, a stream. Then WHEEEE! pic.twitter.com/ap0WdDcHD7 — Khairul Hisham (@hishgraphics) September 2, 2018
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