The Sinanju Irfan gave me for my birthday has now been relocated to my office. Maybe it’ll make friends with the other stuff on my table.
Continue readingMonthly Archives: February 2018
A Wakanda Weekend
We got a bit of a windfall upon my sacrifice of Saturday mornings teaching the previous semester, so I decided we would take a break and head down to the mall in Alor Setar. For the first time since moving here we had food at the Chicken Rice Shop. I think the last time we had some were at Berjaya Times Square. We also caught our first movie of for the year, which is Black Panther. As with other Marvel Studios films, this one also eludes a particular genre being pinned on it. It was definitely more than just a superhero movie. The story is enjoyable. I wish there was a Wakanda sourcebook that features all the peoples and cultural elements they created for the fictional nation. Shuri and M’Baku were scene stealers and I was glad to learn that they would be back in Avengers: Infinity War later in […]
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EOTE: Dude! Where’s My Starship?
It began as a impromptu invitation to a roleplaying game (RPG) session. Suddenly there I was running a short Star Wars Edge of the Empire scenario for my colleague Rizal at my office. Commandeering Oskara’s character folio, Rizal became the human male bounty hunter known as Riz who owns the YKL-37R Nova Courier named Glamorous Hedgehog manufactured by Gallofree Yards. Edge of the Empire Dude! Where’s My Starship? The previous day, Riz arrived at Port Emerald in the Ord Mantell system. He accomplished a mission to retrieve a family heirloom for a local entrepreneur and earned four thousand credits. He was gleeful of his new-found wealth and booked a nice room at a two-story old tavern-style bed and breakfast at the very edge of the mesa that housed Port Emerald, overlooking three landing platforms. The Glamorous Hedgehog was parked upon one of the platforms. Money The Bright Jewel sun was shining […]
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A Sunday Morning Walk
This morning Irfan, Ain and I went for one of our rare morning walks. We took the path through the kampung and circled back to our house through the countryside. I will let the photos do all the describing.
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Sinanju Assembled!
Irfan had presented me with a Super Deformed Sinanju (MSN-06S) gunpla for me birthday a couple of weeks earlier, and I did not have the time to sit down to assemble it… until tonight. Both Irfan and I worked on it until it was complete. In the above pic, you can see it back-to-back with the SD RX-0 Unicorn Gundam 02 Banshee. I discovered that it is quite the robust figure and decided that will adorn my table at work in the future as the Second Coming of Char.
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First Class of the New Semester
The second semester for the 2017/2018 academic year has begun! And here are photos from the first class of the semester. Wait what? What are the students doing fiddling about on their phone, you ask? Why are they not listening to me in class? Well, it’s because they were… …signing into Kahoot to do the quiz I had set up for them. The full question is, “Oh my God! Amir and Sathya ______ finally arrived!” For skimming and scanning exercises, I asked the students to identify the general location of the events on the page displayed above. Then I asked them to identify the weapons mentioned therein. Thankfully the students were not affected by the protomolecule.
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Sunset Dinner by the Sea
After I returned home from the academic workshop we decided to have dinner at the beach. So we took a trip west towards the sea. Before exiting the car, we had a video chat with Nia Nia on the phone. Then we enjoyed the sun which was dropping fast onto Langkawi Island, from our point of view. The last time I had some seafood here, by the way, I had a really bad gout attack. So, no seafood for me. So with seafood out of the way, I only had “food” to deal with. This one is quite… gravy-ish. The colours splashed onto the sky and sea this evening was unique, not like any sunset I have seen before. Click on the above pic to expand the photo of the non-binary sunset. Click on the pic above to expand the silhouette of Irfan in the fading light of dusk.
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Photos from an Academic Workshop
Once upon a time, the entire department was invited to attend an academic excellence workshop in which it was hoped that we would all be much more excellent than we were at being academics. Here are some photos from the programme. Perhaps some mouseover text will be provided as well.
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Photos from a Keynote Address
The university’s vice chancellor was slated to hold his annual keynote address before the entire staff, and I was given a new task some weeks earlier. I visited the site a day earlier to help prepare the multimedia guys to run an online Kahoot quiz for the audience. I handed over my set of questions to them and ceded the table. I hoped that they would use at least one of my questions. The next day, everyone assembled at the main hall. I sat with a coterie of departmental colleagues. Ultimately I discovered that they only used three questions for the quiz session and one of them was mine! It made the effort worth it. I suppose we would assemble again at the hall next year!
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Mini Six: The Vanishing at Kuala Perlis
Plans are underway at work to create a tabletop RPG actual play video web series to be posted online. Initiated and managed by Bazli, it would be our push to promote role-playing games (RPGs) as language learning tools that would not only be holistic and comprehensive, but fun and immersive when done right. My task is to run the session as a gamemaster (GM) and Bazli will cut the video into encounter-sized bits to be uploaded. To begin with I ran the participants an impromptu session of Mini Six using the pregenerated templates I created for the Doom Agents class. Like the students before them, the participants took the roles of international agents sent on a mission to investigate extraordinary occurrences. Mission Report (in brief) Six agents were sent to Kuala Perlis to look into a phantom island that appears after sunset between the Kurong Tengar beach and Langkawi. A fishing […]
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45 and Counting
I am now 45 years old. For the first time ever my family threw me a small birthday celebration. It began with Yaya and Adik’s family calling from the other side of the planet. We had a good talk. Yaya and Adik had plenty to tell us after they sang me the birthday song. When I got home from work Ain and Irfan sprung me with an unexpected birthday present. Besides the present Ain had also been working hard to make the above when I was at work! This nasi rempah with the spiced chicken lauk was delicious. To cap it all off, they even got me a birthday cake. The present Irfan got for me was a Gundam Super Deformed Sinanju which I thought I would assemble when I have the time and place it on my office table. We have never really celebrated my birthday before because it […]
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