This might be Irfan’s final year at Semsira, his secondary school, and mine as the vice president of the PIBG (Parents Teachers Association). I was invited to attend the school’s Sports Day and I took some time to head there before a class. I was invited to sit up on in the gazebo with other members of the executive committee. Later, I even bestowed medals to winners of some events. The parade marched by and Irfan was with his scout group at the back of the column. Ain moved closer to snap a photo. The effects of dry season is apparent from the brown grass on the school field. There were five Sports Houses in his school, namely Bendahara, Laksamana, Temenggung, Penghulu Bendahari and Syahbandar. Each were named after titles in historic administrative titles of the region. Addendum (March 9): During an annual general meeting, the PIBG was dissolved and […]
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Tasik Timah Tasoh Shines
As I was heading home from classes with Ain, we stopped by the lake. We though that the sun descending behind the hills reflected on the water would look superb. We were wrong. It was not superb at all. It was spectacular.
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It’s Still Chinese New Year Season
I guess everyone is still on vacation this week.
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Posthuman Pals
POSTHUMAN PALS RPG IDEA This article was first written and published on my Google Plus account on Jan 27, 2012. Once upon a time, humans flourished on this planet Earth. They found newer and faster ways of doing things and moving information around. They developed not only computers, but computers that could think, speak, communicate and observe like a human. They developed ways of duplicating an individual human’s memories and thought patterns and transfer them into machines, as well as transferring artificial intelligence entities into cloned human bodies. For many centuries, humans and machines lived together peacefully. Then one day, for some now-forgotten reason, humans and machines began to believe themselves superior to the other and a war broke out, beginning with the deaths of organic minds in machine bodies and machine minds in organic bodies. Then they started tossing nukes at each other. Billions died every night. Some servers […]
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To Sitiawan and then Home
And so it came to pass that our vacation came to an end. But before that, we had to depart from Nia’s house. There was a flurry of furtive but sad goodbyes. We headed north towards Sitiawan using the old road we used to travel from KL. I thought I would try using the back roads via Kampung Kuantan. Ultimately we stopped at Sabak Bernam for lunch. Ain drove the rest of the way to Sitiawan. That night Atok and Opah treated us to dinner. The next day we went to Lumut. There might have been a fatal accident at the Lumut junction near the local Shell station. The next morning, we had breakfast at the Padang Astaka of Sitiawan before we geared up and headed home. We bade Atok and Opah farewell and hoped they would come visit us soon. We arrived in Beseri just in time for the […]
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A Gamification Workshop
On this fine Saturday morning, we drove to Taman Tun to the NeoOne Centre for Accelerated Learning. I had previously booked a spot in a workshop entitled “Facilitating Change via Gamification“. The workshop was organised by the Malaysian Association of Facilitators. The event focused to introducing gamification to the various industries in the professional world and I had the opportunity to describe my work in the field of education. Besides that, we played a number of board games, namely Blokus and Decrypto. By learning the rules, the participants were able to express how the game, and the process of gamification, would be able to help in their own fields of work. Perhaps someday I would be able to cooperate with this group of facilitators to further introduce role-playing games as training tools.
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More of Melaka
After the zoo exploration, we left our fate in the hands of Ayah Cik Farid and family as we journeyed to further nooks and crannies of the state of Melaka. We had lunch and stopped for zohor prayers. Then, our next stop was the Submarine Museum at Klebang Beach where the Ouessant, formerly of the French navy, resided. It was our first experience in a submarine even if it was a decommissioned one. Ain tried to shower in the sub’s head. Meanwhile, there were also a pair of old military fighters parked as exhibits at the museum, an A-4 Skyhawk and an F-5E Tiger II. Irfan and Nia inspected the fighter’s undercarriage closely. Later, we headed to the tourist district of Melaka town. By this time, our cash and phone batteries were running low. I hope we are able to visit the Flora de la Mar Maritime Museum next time […]
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Zoological Exploration of Melaka
Today is not only my birthday, but it is also Federal Territory day. Kuala Lumpur day. Ayah Cik Farid and Cik Ma both work in Cyberjaya, so they both got the day off. They invited us for a drive to Melaka. Since they live in the south of the Klang Valley, Melaka is just a hop skip away via the highway. First, we went to the Melaka Zoo. The zoo impressed me because at some points it seems like we were really in an equatorial jungle surrounded by real foliage. There were areas that were landscaped, but a lot of the exhibits were designed around what seemed to be old jungle terrain. Although it was our first time there, Nia’s family had been there before, so they took us around the zoo on foot. We opted not to take the motorised tour because we would not have the opportunity to […]
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Where We Used To Eat
Ain did not venture into Pandan Indah the last time we were here. So, this time, we thought we would take a look. Specifically, we drove by the restaurants we used to frequent when we lived here. The entire suburb was busier than ever. But as you can see some of old regular restaurants are still there. Except for Restoran Lima Bintang. RIP Lima Bintang.
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A Two-Day KL Reconnoitre
After the visit to the Translation Institute, Bazli and I split up. He would return north later that evening after the benchmarking, while I had more than a week left to my vacation. First thing the next day, we headed back to Nia’s place from Aiman’s place. Since we were early, we explored the area near their house and chanced upon something called MesaMall. However, it was not built upon a mesa. When Nia returned from daycare, Irfan and I introduced her to the Lion King. She was saying Simba’s name in no time. The next day, we had breakfast and then later headed to a newly-opened 99 Speedmart along the Salak Tinggi highway. Nia tried driving but she gave up as could not reach weapon and shield consoles. One thing I noticed about Nia was that she liked to perform acrobatics on my back like Irfan once liked to […]
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Return to the Institute
Three years ago or so I was sent to the Translation Institute as a student. Now I return to it with my colleague Bazli to carry out a benchmarking mission for our translation unit at the Centre. Here are some photos from our away mission.
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Coriolis RPG: Dark Flowers
Yesterday, I was reunited with the old GOKL crew for a one-shot RPG session of Coriolis – The Third Horizon RPG. Coriolis is a game published by Modiphius Entertainment and uses the same system as Mutant: Year Zero and Tales from the Loop role-playing games. Humanity has reached a star cluster known as the Third Horizon via a portal. But a Portal war has long isolated them from the rest of humanity. The Portal Builders are long gone and appear to be an ancient and powerful species. The space station Coriolis orbits the planet Kua, the hub of the Third Horizon. Also of note is that the civilisation of the setting takes on the trappings of the Middle East. The system is pretty elegant in its simplicity. Roll a pool of dice equalling your character’s Attributes plus Skills. Any dice turn up 6 is a success. Multiple sixes on certain […]
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Chicken Stalking During Lunch
Upon our arrival in the Klang Valley for vacation, we headed for Nia’s house. We thought we would spend the night there as my work appointment in KL would not be until Monday. The night we arrived, a belated birthday party was held for the three sisters whose birthdays were close to each other’s. Meanwhile, the cousins quickly started playing together again. The next day, we went exploring at the nearby new mall that was opened a couple of weeks earlier. The Chinese New Year music were piped and decorations had been raised. I was sad that there were no good bookstores there. For some reason, my lower back also began to hurt. It was moderately painful when I shifted balance from one foot to the other. After the mall-walking, we went to the café along the country road towards Nia’s house, which had excellent nasi ayam. “Nasi ayam kukus […]
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Not Ain’s Food Truck
En route to Kuala Lumpur for a benchmarking assignment at ITBM, we stopped at the Ulu Bernam highway R&R stop where Ain discovered another eatery (closed, as it was already dark) with her name on it! As an aside, earlier in the day when we had stopped at the Gurun R&R for lunch, I discovered something unfortunate. I had forgotten to bring my wallet. So with Ain driving, we headed back home. It was three hours later when we passed the Gurun stop once again. What a waste of time. Oh, well…
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Ain’s Birthday Nasi Lemak
Earlier in the day, I had an idea and exclaimed, “Tonight, let’s celebrate your birthday somewhere amazing!” She asked, “Where?” I said with pleasure and pride, “The same place we had dinner yesterday!” So this year we celebrated Ain’s birthday at a nasi lemak stall in Kangar. We had dinner here yesterday. Ain had a nasi lemak paru but Irfan and I had roti telur. The sambal that came with the nasi lemak was excellent. Perhaps, it was too much on the sweet side. The moment went up to the stall to order a long line of patrons formed behind us. I was thankful we got there early. Soon it was over, because it was just a simple nasi lemak vendor which cost us RM13 including drinks. We will return to have more food there. Maybe tomorrow night. Maybe not. Happy birthday, my wife. You will always be nothing less […]
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Corellian Starline
It has been a while since my last Star Wars artwork. In fact my illustration output for 2018 was pretty abysmal. Last month, James Spahn requested an art commission from me. The colour sketch would be of the player characters of his Edge of the Empire RPG group, known as “Corellian Starline”. It took me longer than it should because of exam grading, translation work and a host of other matters, but it is finally done. On the left is Arctis Pash. Is he related to Hondo Pash? Maybe some day we will find out. The K-series droid who wields a riot gun is K1-LRY a.k.a Killroy. The Wookiee is Chirffu and the orange astromech droid is his. We wish these four space heroes a long life, less than total-party-kills and more Triumphs than Despair.
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