This person needs your help. Click on the image below to see who, and then you’ll understand why. [[popup:cylon01.jpg:(thumbnail)::center:1]] This priceless image was found at this costume and props page.
Continue readingAuthor Archive: hisham
Pangkor 1992: Fu Lin Kong Temple
I was back on vacation from studies at the end of 1992 when Woon Seong, Shahar and I went on a trip to Pangkor. It was disconcerting times in those days, when I haven’t seen any of my Sitiawan friends for almost 2 years. When I met them during vacation, there was always the fear that things would not be the same as they had been in ACS. We were all experiencing new things at separate locations, far apart. My fears, I discovered, were not unfounded. It was true, things had changed. Not for the better or for the worse. It’s just that things were now different. But we adapted. Once upon a time, I feared that our fellowship might be broken after long periods of being incommunicado. Now I know that even after years of absence, one can still be as wacky as before, when meeting old friends long […]
Continue reading
Pivot-Blacklist: Now Installed
Once in a while I’ve had spammers cluttering up the comments in the blog. Usually they get deleted whenever I log on and check on the site. Now I’ve gone and installed Pivot-Blacklist, a fantastic spamkilling extension for the Pivot CMS. For now, all comments are enabled with an anti-bot question field. The question might look idiotically simple to you (and would be changed periodically), but all automatic blog comment spamming bots wont be able to answer it. There are other features to Blacklist which I will experiment (and have fun with) with later. Here’s to a spam free blog in the future.
Continue readingSome Neil, Some Saddy
Briefly here are several things on the net that made me go “Wow! Cool!” in the last 48 hours or so. Well, the first is pretty cool. The second made me laugh out loud so hard, my nostril hairs complained. But then, many people have complained about my strange sense of humour. The Neil Part Gaiman is his surname. The news isn’t that the follow up to his novel American Gods, Anansi Boys, is out. It’s that the nice people at Harper Audio has allowed Neil to post the first track of the audiobook of Anansi Boys (read by Lenny Henry) on his site. It’s a 16mb mp3 file, if anyone’s interested. Mr. Nancy’s back, yo. The Saddy Part Dumpington is his surname, and he’s the, uh… folk hero created by everyone’s favourite depressed character, Strong Sad. [[image:dumpington.jpg:Isn’t that great?:center:0]] It’s a tragic lttle tale, but tragedy seems to wrack […]
Continue reading
Hockey Time at ACS Sitiawan
PE time in ACS Sitiawan during our time was usually the PE teacher asking us football or hockey, or if you’re an Amerikaner, soccer or field hockey. I remember 70% of the time we opted hockey. Here is a rare photo of Form 3A1 in 1988 on the field during PE. This picture was taken using a disposable camera. I vaguely remember taking about a dozen pictures in school with this camera, and this was the only exposure that survived some sort of cosmic cataclysm. Because the lens quality of the flimsy camera was terrible, this was the best resolution I got on standard photo paper. From what I can tell, from left to right, we have (forget the guys semi-blocked off in the background) an unidentifiable Indian guy, Khoots, T’sing, Sathya, Keith Lee, another unidentifiable Indian guy (maybe Vernon), and Warren. Since most of the hockey sticks at the […]
Continue readingA Fantastic Tale of Old
I realise that since this blog went online, there hasn’t been any entry that features some sort of fantastic anecdote that happens to me during the day. Like being at the zoo and a herd of rampaging rhinos escape their pen, or my needing to jump from one rooftop to an adjacent rooftop to save my life, or a meteorite that crashes and irradiates me, ultimately endowing me with super powers… One of the reasons is because I’m working full-time to get my e-book website online, I don’t go outdoors as I much as I used to anymore. The good old days were when I was working 5 days on, 5 days off in Terengganu on the east coast. 5 days off time and being aimless gave me a lot of opportunities to get into adventures. And when I worked in marketing at the advertising company in 2000, I was […]
Continue reading
The Blog’s New CSS Layout
So now our blog is mostly dark blue and greens with dark red links. I thought we needed some sort of a change, and I thought I’d have a go with the css and the Pivot templates. I also put one of the nifty non-IE codes that gives a small radius to the corners of the blocks on the right and left columns. So if you’re on IE, you’ll only see the normal sharp corners. I’ve also tried my best to format the pages so that anyone with 800×600 screen resolution would have no problem with the frontpage. But although it works with Firefox, IE seems to make the right column overlap with the centre column a bit. Also, I’ve reduced the number of entries on the centre column to 10 and provided 20 most recent entries on the block at the right column. And finally, each entrypage is given […]
Continue readingSuperman: A Dick and Loving It
When you think of Superman, the first thing that comes to you mind is a virtuous, heroic, superbeing who strives to save innocent lives from disaster, and defeat the devious plots of super villians and invading aliens. But Superdickery.com has a collection of images from early Superman comics (some not so early) of Superman being a dick. Not just an annoying dick, but a real self-centered and dangerous asshole, even to his closest friends. And not once or twice, but repeatedly. For instance, can you imagine Lois Lane actually finally marrying him in the 90s after putting her through things like this dozens of times? [[image:superdickery1.jpg:Superdickery1:center:0]] There must be an easier way of not wanting to get married. Which, of course, would lead Lois to fabricate mind-bogglingly bizzare schemes in order to get Superman to notice her as shown thusly: [[image:superdickery2.jpg:Superdickery2:center:0]] For God’s sake… deal with the devil??!? Haven’t she […]
Continue reading
Illustration Friday: Reflection
After two straight weeks of cheerful pieces based on the titles given by Illustration Friday, I present to you something that’s on the other end of the scale. Here’s this week’s Reflection. Hope you like it. Or not. Medium: Digital painting
Continue reading
Hishgraphics.com is Now Online
Good news, everyone. Well, I hope it’s good news to at least my 5 regular readers out there. (Okay, 4 regular readers I admit. Happy?) It would appear that hishgraphics.com, the website I’ve been working on is 90% finished. I’ve removed the “Under Construction” label on the index page. I still need to work on the copy on most of the pages here. CSS and some of the site design are still screwy to me, but it should be transparent to you. But most important of all, the first product, the e-book named The Secret Library is finished. You can check out the black and white free download of the book on the site. Check it all out at www.hishgraphics.com.
Continue readingNYC 2123
[[image:nyc2123.gif:NYC2123:center:0]] We’ve seen online graphic novels before. But we haven’t seen one like NYC 2123, which is the first to be optimized for and downloaded for viewing into a PSP. Like the title implies, the story takes place in New York City in the year 2123; a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk dystopia which is a cross between William Gibson’s Neuromancer and current computer and information technology trends. Who needs a brain jack when you have wi-fi neural connection? Everything is open source, even drugs. The bodysculpting subculture is also briefly seen. If you have a PSP, download it and view it whenever you have the time to read. If you don’t have a PSP, like me, just enjoy the online version of the story.
Continue readingIrfan’s Aunt Emma’s Graduation
As was reported in an earlier post, we were all at Universiti Malaya for Emma’s graduation ceremory. Irfan’s grandparents along with assorted uncles and aunts were there for the occasion. They spent the night at Rumah Universiti, booked many weeks earlier to avoid being sold out. I was worried of the day being ruined by thick, smothering haze that’d been plaguing us for the previous two weeks. But like a miracle, the air cleared. Not a bit, not even moderately… it cleared almost totally. So we had blue skies and could clearly around us during graduation day. [[popup:um01.jpg:(thumbnail):Coming down Rumah Universiti:center:1]] After eating lunch in the hotel room, we headed down toward the crowd surrounding the Dewan Tunku Canselor. Irfan was curious about the drains as usual. Because the the crowd hasn’t surged yet, I was on photography detail. Later, to ensure Irfan’s safety, I had to take him in […]
Continue reading
Illustration Friday: Wisdom
Someone with great wisdom would be revelling in relaxation, high above the hustle and bustle of the tedium of mediocrity that is the life of regular people. Medium: Physical 2B pencil, with digital colours.
Continue reading
Future Player’s Companion: Tomorrow’s Foundation
GenCon Indiana will be on later this week at the Indiana Convention Center, Indianapolis. That’s when The Game Mechanics will be launching Future Player’s Companion: Tomorrow’s Foundation, a game supplement for d20 Future. Where my professional artwork in the game industry will be published. The document will be an e-book for now, and will have two other volumes following it later in the year. To see five of my ten illustrations created for the book, click to read the rest of the article.
Continue reading
More Like His Old Man By The Day
There were thousands of humans swarming the area before the Dewan Tunku Canseler in Universiti Malaya today. I swear if I didn’t know there were individual consciousness behind the motile meatbags I’d say they were subject to nothing more than Brownian Motion. And so it came to pass that it was Ain’s sister Emma’s graduation convocation today at UM, or commencement, as some of you might call it. Ain, Irfan and I were at the Dataran Canseleri during the afternoon waiting for Emma and my in-laws to be let out of the Dewan Tunku Canseler, the university’s main hall, so we could take pictures, just like the several hundred or so other families that were there today. At this point, the number of people swarming the area was phenomenal. Also because of that the noise level of the crowd was ear splitting. Irfan was running around, weaving in and out […]
Continue reading
Haze: Returning With a Vengeance
One of the things I hate most about living here is the periodic invasion of unhealthy particulates that floods (and I mean floods) the entire region, known in local jargon as haze. Once I thought why not call it smog cause that’s what it essentially is, but know I know that such an evil, soul-sucking phenomenon should have its own unique name. Now, I’ve reported this before back in February but that old thing was nothing compared to what we’re experiencing now. This haze should have been declared a major disaster, starting early this week. The haze and I go a long way back. The last major haze activity occurred in 1997, but that was caused by burning in Borneo to the east. West-blowing winds smogged up the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which bore the brunt of the onslaught. Of course I had to be working there at the […]
Continue reading