The Tortoise and the Hare

Theatre Arts: Third Time Around

UniMAP offered my English Theatre Arts co-curricular class once again this semester. This would be my third time teaching this class in which the number of participants have risen from just under 40 to 50 students. Like the previous class two semester ago, I started by giving the class an Introduction to Theatre Arts lecture to get them in the right frame of mind. Then we went right to it: The 50 split into 5 groups and each group had to come up with a short play in an hour. This was only for our first session. Ultimately the students performed their play at the amphitheatre in the Lecture Hall Complex. There were five plays in all, where three were adaptations of classics and two were original works. There were two adaptations of Cinderella, while The Tortoise and the Hare got only one. The first original work was a comedic […]

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Something broke

Lower Control Arm Goes Even Lower

Today Ain needed to go to for her scheduled medical check-up. She was along the kampung road out of our housing area when something when BOINK under the car. Immediately she felt the tyres pulling her steering wheel towards where she did not want to go. So she turned around and headed back to our taman perumahan and just as she turned into a main road in our area – 50 metres or so from our home – the car stopped and refused to move any further. She walked home, distressed by the occurrence, and I went to have a look. The closer I got to the car the more dire the damage seemed to be. Also, there was a large puddle of fluid forming under the car and gravity was pressing down the wheel well onto the tyre. We called our regular mechanic and he came an hour or […]

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Cthulhu Hack player and GM

Cthulhu Hack: The Woodson Estate

Cthulhu Hack The Woodson Estate Today at work I ran Cthulhu Hack for the first time. I have the rulebook with me for some time now and had not tinkered with it last weekend. Then, Irfan and I went through character generation and the dice basics, just to get the hang of it. Later I read several of Michael LaBossiere’s online scenarios, after which I decided to adapt “Woodson Pond”. Here is the story from the game I ran for my colleague Robert who like me also teaches English. The Letter The year was 1980. It was on a Friday during one of his lull weeks when Sean Columbo received the letter. The Seattle-based private eye discovered that the letter was from his former high school classmate Margaret Hilton, a real estate broker in Tallahassee, Florida. Margaret had was set on acquiring and selling a land to a developer as […]

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Riding shotgun am I

The Third Driver

Once upon a time, Irfan needed us to carry him around for mobility. Now he has the ability to drive a car. This means there is a third driver in our household which will be very convenient. I like the way he drives. It appears he attempts to be perceptive when controlling the vehicle on the road. May he keep out of harm’s way when driving cars in the future.

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This cover takes guts

Lorn Song of the Bachelor

My friend Zedeck sent me his latest tome. It was a tabletop role-playing adventure inspired by the Bujang Senang myth of the last century from Sarawak. The book is digest-sized but its 48 pages are packed with a plethora of descriptions, creatures, maps and illustrations (wonderfully produced by Nadhir Nor). The prose provides the gamemaster the information needed to referee any such campaigns based on this book. However, Zedeck has crafted a well-balanced text. The information hangs between very evocative and economical. It is dense enough for gamemasters to craft adventures and encounters in a fantasy Bornean riverine campaign. But Gamemasters could also easily inject their own ideas in-between the information given in the text. Here are some photos of the book. What is a wet corpse and why is a catfish there? To find out and forge your own campaign from the book, get it at DriveThruRPG here.

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ISOL 2020 title card

With Students in Songkhla

For the first time since joining the Centre, the International Soft-skills and Leadership (ISoL) camp programme committee invited me to chaperone students for two nights in Songkhla, Thailand. The camp was a joint programme between UniMAP and Rajamangala University of Technology Srivijaya. I thought we would go as a family (along with Syamril, the other language teacher on duty) not just to escort these young minds for their event, but also to learn from the trip. Not only did we learn quite a bit and gain new experiences, we also made new friends there. Add this event to things I never thought 5 years ago that I would be doing. We stayed at the Lake Inn Hotel with the students. Some day we would like to visit here again. Here is a short video on our trip there. However, there were more activities that were not captured on video. There […]

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We arrive at this peculiar cafe

Birthday Dinner in Pauh

I am now a couple of year short of 50 years old. We celebrated at a café that we have never stopped at before in the town of Pauh, between our home and my workplace. It seemed like a nice place to celebrate a birthday. Well, two birthdays, as Ain’s was 11 days before mine — although we had dinner by the sea then. This was more of a birthday bash as Irfan had ordered a birthday gift for me online. Click on the photos in the gallery below to view full images. Here’s to making it through it all one year at a time.

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