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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A Moon of Blood
It was an evening of something quite unexpected. True, I did hear about the coming of the “Super Blue Blood Moon” which was talked about all throughout social media. Bu I never thought it would look breathtakingly spectacular. Ain alerted me to the start of the lunar eclipse during the full moon. It was a clear night. The stars were out. The moon was gradually and visibly being devoured by the shadow of Earth. When it was completely engulfed in shadow, the moon turned blood red. The photo I took above does not do it justice. Soon after, the light of the sun began to shine upon the moon once again, slowly revealing itself to the night sky. The evening began with me underestimating how the lunar eclipse would look like. In the end, I felt fortunate that Ain called me outside to view the phenomenon.
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Patreon: Doomed Surgical Team
Perfect for any horror tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), these paper miniatures of a doomed surgical team with a swarm of patients who are clearly hostile and infected with… something. Those stains on their medical smocks are perhaps blood, or infected vomit, or perhaps paint – because of a catastrophic hospital painting incident. Yeah, run that session and let me know how it turns out. Download the paper miniatures from Patreon for free!
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Further Gastronomical Adventures with Atok and Opah
More photos from Irfan’s grandparents’ visit chronicled two further sojourn to sample food at eateries nearby. I should think it was a collective celebration not just of their anniversary but also of Sila’s birthday which as you know falls on the same day. Additionally, my birthday would raise its head several days later. First we would treat them. Then they treated us. Bottom line, though, I am still astounded that we are able to afford these types of food these days. Granted they are cheaper than similar food in Kuala Lumpur, but we would not be able to afford these prices back then neither. Enjoy the photos. First we went to Kangar for these dishes. Then we went to Arau for these ones. The next day, Atok and Opah headed back to the hometown.
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Celebrating an Anniversary
Irfan’s Atok and Opah came for a visit this week. And their anniversary will be up in three days! On this fine Friday, and you can tell it’s a Friday because Irfan and I are in Baju Melayu, we went to the food court at Kuala Perlis for an early celebration of their anniversary! Here are some of the selection of food we ordered. Also, Irfan was explaining something and gesturing with his arms when I took the following picture:
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Bored at Work But Not Really
Between semesters, I need not head to classes to teach. I do have a lot of work at the office though such as grading papers, planning for the next semester, employee assessment forms, workshops to attend and things such as the previous day’s brochure to create. So, alone in my room sometimes I just set my RPG gear and paperminis on my table just for kicks. Classes will start soon, so I will not have the opportunity for this again in a couple of months hence. Click on the Paper Miniatures category on the blog to see all the available Star Wars paperminis.
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Crafting a Brochure Once More
It has been decades since I made an actual three-fold brochure for real. The workplace needed one for an upcoming postgraduate programme they would be running. Using Inkscape (and actually running around the office building to take fresh photographs) I managed to hammer a design out. The photos above are of the mock-up I printed out. These brochures would be first brought to Bangladesh for an event there.
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Happy Birthday Ain
Because the extra teaching work I took last semester earned me some extra Republic credits, I was – for the first time in our lives together as husband and wife – able to buy Ain a real birthday present! I ordered it online and it arrived much earlier than it had announced it would. Happy birthday, my darling wife. I love you very much.
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FAE Printed and Bound
I downloaded a copy of FATE Accelerated Edition even before I moved up here. But I never got it printed out until today. I had sent it for printing the previous evening and the print shop called me up today as we were getting the car’s tyre replaced. So we picked it up. It did not cost a lot of Republic credits even with perfect binding at A5 sized pages. The output looks and feels amazing. The Needless to say, I might print more stuff I downloaded from DriveThruRPG / RPGNow at the print shop. All I need now is some FATE dice.
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