365 Tomorrows
The site began posting on August 1st 2005, so you have a lot of stories to read through in the archives and more coming each day until July 31st 2006.
The site began posting on August 1st 2005, so you have a lot of stories to read through in the archives and more coming each day until July 31st 2006.
Illustration Friday: Remote
Ramadhan Activity Updates
It's already almost the last week of the month and it's the longest time ever before I actually checked how many days were left before Aidilfitri. There're only two more days before I'm out of town until after festival season. Tomorrow is the last exam of the mid-term season, and on Saturday it's balik kampung time.
The itinerary is such: Saturday (Oct 28th) we'll be driving back to Pasir Mas, Kelantan. There we will stay until Deepavali on the following Tuesday (Nov 1st), when we head on down to Sitiawan to spend the last days of Ramadhan. It's been a while since we did long distance travel (more so this year, since money is tight) and I'm very excited about it.
Irfan really can't wait to get to Sitiawan to play with a train set and a bus that his grandparents bought and showed off to him in an e-mail. He's been asking to go balik kampung all week.
So will there be any posts while I'm away? Of course there'll be. Both Ain's and my parents homes have the internet.
In the meantime, I'm finishing up the final round of illustrations for Future Players' Companion 3: Tomorrow's Evolution for The Game Mechanics during this period, which means I have to bring back the graphic tablet along. And finally, I've learnt that Tomorrow's Evolution's cover has been illustrated by Weta Workshop's Ben Wootten, who was a designer in the Lord of the Rings movie.
Chronicles of the Wild Gundark Part I
A Star Wars fiction, based on the Chronicles of Wild Gundark RPG campaign.
It all began when the crew of the Wild Gundark was commissioned to deliver twenty tons of bantha milk to the backwater town of Prosperity on the cold tundra of the planet Dellalt. The job went without a hitch, apart from the little tussle with the crew of an Imperial customs corvette (the two-pronged, sleek affair that many tramp freighter captains love to hate) in the Vaxal system. Unfortunately, the result of the little encounter was the spillage of approximately half of the delicious blue milk because of gravity plate failure. Things could have turned out real bad for them, but instead their contact, a imposing and tattooed Herglic named Dapp only paid them fairly in half and left peacefully.
There was only one thing known to them as they left Dellalt: They had taken on a passenger, Tell Sabarin, a stately and noble-looking person, who paid them a huge sum of twenty thousand credits to convey himself and his cargo, a cryogenic bio-containment crate, all the way to his homeworld of Kuat in the Core Worlds.
***
But there were two things unbeknown to them.
One: While they were away from the ship bargaining with Sabarin for the transportation fee in town, a shadowy figure slipped quietly into their ship followed by a shuffling metallic figure. Five minutes later, the shadowy figure slipped out alone and disappeared.
Two: A few minutes later, two more shadowy figures sneaked onto their ship.
And never came back out.
***
University Exam Hijinks
Last Friday, I was all prepared and psyched up to head on down to Unitar for my first mid-term examination paper for this semester. It was LAN 0023 Islamic Studies. I double checked the Excel file they'd emailed on the 11th and confirmed that the time and place for the last time.
Left the house at 8.10 am to make the 9.00 am exam. Made it there with 15 minutes to spare because it was Nuzul al-Quran, Selangor had a public holiday and the streets weren't that filled with Kuala Lumpur's accursed traffic. Got a great place to park right in front of where the exam is to be held. Then I walked up to the exam timetable Excel printout they posted on the bulletin board.
I discovered to my horror there were no exams scheduled for last Friday. (Though it took about 5 minutes for the horror to set in, for some reason.)
Passing of the PM's Wife
Datin Seri Endon Mahmood, the wife of our Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, passed away at 7.55am this morning, after succumbing to her battle with breast cancer since being diagnosed with it in 2002. Condolences to the PM, and make he take comfort in the fact that her passing occured in Ramadhan, the holiest of months.
Our prayers will be with her.
Illustration Friday: Cold
Click on the thumbnail above to view the complete image. Media: Digital painting.
5 Years Ago...
It's been a great 5 years, with hopefully more to come.
Illustration Friday: Lost
Click on the thumbnail above to view a larger image. Media: Digital painting using Photoshop, with image references from screencaps of season 1 episode 4 "Walkabout".
Voyage of the Flying Couch
Doomsday Scenarios Galore
Are you feeling too cheerful or happy? Are you feeling that you've had enough feeling on top of the world? Are you sick of everyone telling you "The sun is shining! The birds are singing! Everything is smelling of roses!"?
Then check out Exit Mundi, the website that catalogues the various ways the world and/or the entire universe may end, from scientific and religious standpoints. It'll sure to wipe that smile off your face.
How do you like to read about the accidental extinction of the human race? For example, what happens if genetically engineered crop (actually created in a lab named Epicyte in San Diego in 2002) designed to be a contraceptive, escapes into the real world and are accidentally planted in farms all over the world? We'll all be eating food that induces infertility by killing all sperm cells.
If you're interested in space-based threats, what if a black hole wanders into the solar system, misses the Earth by a distance, but throws the planet off its orbit? Or even worse, crosses path with Earth?
So, what's your poison? Gamma-ray bursts? Uncontrollable nanotech? Climate shift? Mass insanity? Read, and be depressed. (Or not, if you find the humorous writing on the site entertaining.)
Arabic Star Names and Science Fiction
I've known for quite some time that major star names used in science are Arabic in origin, a testimony to the work of Muslim astronomers between the 9th and the 12th centuries, but I've never found an extensive list of current star names and their Arabic origin until I stumbled across the Jordanian Astronomical Society's website with its great Arabic Star Names page.
Since I read and watch a lot of science fiction, I found it interesting that some of the names have appeared in contemporary SF. Not the well-known ones like Betelgeuse or Vega or Rigel, I'm talking about the not so well known star names.
Referring the the JAS list in the link above:
#133 Rukbat is the star which Anne McCaffrey's Pern revolves around. It's known as Alpha Sagittarii, so she did her homework by referring it to be in the "Sagittarius sector" although in the wiki article it mentions that the real Rukbat is a B-spectral class blue star instead of a G-class yellow star.
#01 Acamar, #108 Mintaka and #111 Mizar have indigenous sentient lifeforms that appeared in various episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation.
Frank Herbert however seemed to have referred to his Dune series' Arrakis to star #45 which is Mu Draconis, instead of Canopus (Alpha Carinae) in the books.
Serenity Appreciation Entry
Once upon a time, Joss Whedon created a science fiction TV show called Firefly that had great characters, a fantastic millieux and a witty script. It got cancelled by Fox Network. Then its DVD sold faster than hotcakes. Fans wrote to revive the show. So, he wrestled the rights of the show from Fox and transferred it to Universal.
One thing led to another, last Friday saw the release of Serenity, the motion picture continuation of the TV series Firefly, was released to critical acclaim.
I can't wait to watch this because I was also won over by Firefly when TV3 showed it last year, on Wednesday night 12.30 am... sometimes pre-empting it for several weeks for football, or pushing it even further to 1.30 am. But the bad news is there is not a trace of Serenity appearing in Malaysian theaters any time soon. Hopefully we'll get to see it early 2006.
Here are some images of Malcolm Reynolds' Firefly class cargo transport Serenity at various places in the TV series, beautifully rendered by Zoic Studios, who also did some of the visual effects of Battlestar Galactica.
It's Ramadhan
I have an idea for another book, after looking at a random picture on deviantArt... it would be about kids spending the night camping, and the whole story would take place at night. The blues and the grays of the picture I saw was compelling. Now to come up with an actual story, suited for kids. Childhood camp-outs are awesome.
By the way, I updated some large artwork into my deviantArt page. Yeah, I have a deviantArt page. I left it untended for exactly a year and a month. I'll be uploading large-sized images there and link them from there, or elsewhere, to save on bandwidth, since I'm such a cheapskate.
The Meme Tagged thingamabob...
Since Lilian tagged Hisham and I for the meme thing and Hisham actually did his, here's my meme. Quick story about "Meme", when I first saw it, I thought "grandmother?". My friend and colleague Jo's granddaughter calls her "Meme" (pronounced meh-may). But anyway - my contribution:
I Hate People T-shirts
Chris and Derek over at CCDO are selling their world-famous* "I Hate People" t-shirt on the blog. Read the entry here. Then buy it! ;)
* Okay, I exaggerate.
Passing On A Meme (or Yikes! I've Been Tagged!!)
Thanks to Lilian over at iFantabulous, I've been tagged. So here's I am letting the meme pass through me, allowing the idea to propagate and converting it into the text on this page that you're reading. So here goes:
Blog Glitch Fixed
First I couldn't log onto the backend admin section with my correct password. (Even Sila couldn't do it with her user account.) And after 10 tries my own blog banned my IP. Brilliant, eh? I went to the Pivot Support Forums for help. Griswald there, told me to download the pv_cfg_settings.php file from the server, remove the 2 IP addresses in the php code and change the installed variable to "0". That done, I had to register myself as the Superadmin first, then try to sort out the rest later.
Later, it seemed that the database files of each blog entries weren't being detected by the index.php file. The center column was empty. The Recent Entries block was empty. The Last Comments block was empty. What was wrong?
Checking the admin section, I found out that the Categories had reverted back to 'default' and 'linkdump'... the others such as 'family pics', 'friends' and 'misc sci-fi' were gone. I tried recreating them, but they wouldn't appear, even after chmodding related files to 777.
I tried the solution prescribed in the Pivot forums earlier, with several variations, but it was all for naught. So I contacted the forums again for help, and again Griswald gave a simple solution to the problem. Just re-upload the backup pv_cfg_settings.php file.
I followed his suggestion, using the raw untouched file, which put me back to square one. I registered our user accounts, and then I found out I could finally recreate the blog categories. I did so, one by one, and allowed the 'Hishgraphics' blog to access all the categories.
*Click* Recreate all files
*Click* Recreate index file
*Click* Recreate frontpage
And everything was fine! It seemed like the glitches never happen. Many thanks to Griswald of the Pivot Support Forums. And if any of my 3 regular readers discover any errors in any of the pages which might have slipped under my radar, please e-mail me.
Worlds of the Enteague Sector
In 1989, my father bought me two books that started me into Star Wars role playing game: West End Games' Star Wars The Roleplaying Game rulebook and the Star Wars Sourcebook. My first campaign (and the longest I gamemastered) was my "Strikeforce Enteague" campaign. The players were characters of a Rebel Alliance strike team that consisted of mostly fringer types, and it took place in a sector of the galaxy I created I ultimately named the Enteague Sector (thought sometimes their adventures took them as far as Coruscant which at that time was only referred to as Imperial City.)
Here I am 16 years later, and I've finally finished a project I started almost 2 years ago: a pdf mini-sourcebook formatted for the SWRPG called Worlds of the Enteague Sector. It's not extensive as WEG's The Planets Collection or WOTC's Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds. There is a front cover, a back cover, a credits page, 22 pages of actual content and all these pages are in full colour. It's all fitted snugly in a 1.87mb zip file, free for all to download.
Apart from me writing and drawing, I also had plenty of help from my friends. Many thanks to Ryan "Cassed" Lee for designing the Ironfist emblem for the book, Phil "Grimace" Hatfield for editing it and Chris "Chris Curtis" Curtis for proofreading it.
Edit (Apr 20 2006): I've just corrected some layout errors, reworded some sentences that I didn't like and uploaded the new file. Enjoy Worlds of the Enteague Sector Ver 1.1.
You can download the book here.
Future Player's Companion: Tomorrow's Hero
The Hishgraphics Gallery can be found at http://www.hishgraphics.com/gallery.
In the meantime, here are
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