AGE OF REBELLION The Intelligent Tree Whisperers It was mid-semester break. Although the students are on a week-long break, we teachers still have work to do. So we set up a Tabletop RPG Workshop for any teacher to join, stretch their imagination and communication skills and have a bit of fun. So I ran an Age of Rebellion roleplaying game session for my colleagues using the Beginner Box material. Dramatis Personae Fal – a Human ace pilot who once lived on Ryloth in the same city as Oskara. (Nana) Lorick – a Wookiee hired gun, whose family was taken to be science experiments and slaves to build Imperial cities. (Shih Min) Oskara – a green-skinned Twi’lek bounty hunter, whose home city on Ryloth was bombed by the Empire. (Farah) Pashten – a Human smuggler, who was rebelling against cruel Imperial taxes. (Faten) Reyhana – a Mon Calamari engineer, whose people […]
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A Second Wave of Posts
The blogging muse also hit me hard this weekend and I struggled to post backdated articles as many as I could. So many things I ignored over the last two years. Here are all the blog articles I posted this past couple of days: ART: Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks (3 Dec 2020) Anya Visits Lakes and Mountains (26 Dec 2020) The Cousins at Kangar Street Art 2.0 (27 Dec 2020) A Woodball Weekend (13 Mar 2021) VTR: The Atlanta Requiem (12 Dec 2021) Aidiladha in Selangor (12 July 2022) More Aidiladha in Selangor Tales (15 July 2022) Kangar Jaya After Dark (22 July 2022) Alien RPG: The Mei Mei Scenario (7 Mar 2022) A Book Writing Project on Pulau Pinang (25 Feb 2022) Ten this week. I don’t know if I can maintain my backdated work output in the coming weeks…
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A Wave of Posts
Some months ago, I threatened to post new blog entries after the long pandemic-induced funk I was in. I have seriously not been writing new blog posts this last couple of years. Perhaps posts on social media were easier to write. Whatever I wrote on this blog was not enough to fill out the happenings over the year. Until this past weekend. This Past Weekend I sat down, picked the blog entries I wanted to write, resized photos, and made a number of posts. More than a few. In this blog entry, I wanted to document all the posts I made over the long weekend so I would remember that these posts belonged to this batch. Anya the Co-teacher – 2021/12/27 Anya Surprises Irfan – 2021/12/31 A Translation Project on Pulau Pinang – 2022/01/23 Old School Mates in Lumut – 2022/05/01 An Aidilfitri in Sitiawan – 2022/05/04 Lazy Unboxing of […]
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Our Grandparents’ House
By “our”, I mean Sila’s and mine, on Atok Irfan’s side. As children, when Sila and I balik kampung, one of the locations we would go to was to visit our grandparents. We would sleep over with our parents here, celebrate Hari Raya here with cousins, and it used to be surrounded by fruit trees. Coconut trees were of course plentiful, but there were mango, papaya, rambutan, jambu air and even nam-nam trees. We used to pick and eat the fruits off the trees. Some required a galah for us to reach, but some were accessible to us. Under the house, I used to fish for ant lions. Sometimes, I used tall grass or weeds. But sometimes, I used an actual live kerangga. There used to be a well behind the house, but early on when I was still a youngling, they built a proper bathroom. They also reared chickens and […]
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Purplish Finger
According to the online system, Irfan is registered to vote in Pandan Indah, Ain in Pasir Mas and I in Sitiawan. It appears they set our locations to default to the addresses on our identity cars. This is after I have changed my voting location to Perlis over the counter several years ago. In any case, we will need to change or addresses before the next General Elections. Later that day Ain and I caught up with our old friend Mei, who also returned to Sitiawan to vote. We saw Eva (and her little brother Connor) who last appeared in this blog when she was a little baby. At the time Eva had yet to develop locomotion. Then later that night we continued our gossiping at Chicketory. Why Chicketory? Because its name was Chicketory. We talked about the General Elections of Malaysia, old times, new times, a better Malaysia and […]
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First Face-to-Face Class Since March 2020
The last time I taught a class face-to-face in a classroom was March 2020. It is now November 2022, almost three years later. In the interim, I have had the Remote Teaching tag for all the online teaching posts in my blog. I cannot believe it had been so long. It was good to meet students face-to-face in class. For the longest time, I thought perhaps the students were all AGIs designed to fool teachers into thinking students existed (just kidding, my students reading this!) Click on the image below to expand it. We are still in blended teaching mode, so only 50% face-to-face. Most of the classroom teaching are weighted towards the end of the semester. But it is a start!
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A Vampire Librarian Named Terry
After the end of our mini Vampire the Requiem RPG campaign, in which our pregenerated characters won the civil war in Atlanta, we started making new characters for a new campaign. It is now 2032, 10 years after the Vampire revolution that overthrew the old blood… I now play Terry McAllister, a Mekhet librarian. He hails from Perthshire, Scotland but was turned while he was on a vacation to the United States. It sucks for him that he cannot return to his homeland… for now. But for the time being, he has a job with the library at Georgia State. Loads of students burning the midnight oil there, easily charmed for nourishment. He does not leave bodies as the victims are not killed. He sucks enough blood to survive, but leaves the students alive though dazed and charmed. Sometimes, he also helps them to study for their exams by pointing […]
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Year 22: An Anniversary
It has been twenty-two years since we got married. Nothing to report other than a family dinner. Earlier that morning we had breakfast at a new place that appeared from the abandoned site of an old. Located in front of a nearby orphanage, it has become our new go-to place for breakfast. Their nasi kerabu is delicious with a lot of very fresh chopped vegetables. That evening, we had dinner at Ana Burger. Here are the images of the event:
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SCALLOP’s First Programme
And so it came to pass, a bunch of us teachers came together to form a team to do CSR for our department at the university. It took some time, but ultimately we came up with a group name: SCALLOP, short for Strategic Communication And Language Learning Outreach Programme. Our First Thingamajig Our inaugural site for our CSR programme was the secondary school Sekolah Menengah Sains Tuanku Syed Putra here in Kangar. We made arrangements with the teachers and administrators to have our event with the school’s Form 2 students. On the morning of the first of October, our team gathered at SMSTSP and proceeded to greet the students, then we split into three huge groups for further things to do, such as ice breaking. Irfan was on site to help me with photography. The big event was Creating Your Own Island, where the students get to use their imagination […]
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Two Decades of Irfan
It seems incredible. Our son is twenty years of age today. Where did the time go? Oh, I forgot. Time was sucked in and consumed by the singularity known as the Covid-19 quarantine, also known as the plague year. In any case, our mic testing, Vietnam roll making, galactic smuggler offspring has been alive in this space-time continuum for two whole decades. In any case, here are some photos of the celebrations tonight.
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SWD6: Voyage of the Magma-3, Part 1
Once upon a time, I ran a Star Wars D6 campaign for cadet pilots at Perth Aerodrome while I was studying to be a greasemonkey. The year was 1992. The party created a custom freighter they named the Magma-3. In fact, a lot of details about this campaign has been lost from my memory. However, I have retained some notes and photos of our shenanigans from that time. Before I lose more details to the ravages of time like tears in the rain, I should transfer as much information I have from my notes to this blog post as capsule write-ups of each session. Caveat: I do not recall most of the NPCs, locations and situations in these sessions. Heck, I can barely remember the players’ names. Star Wars D6 Voyage of the Magma-3 In any case, here are the first four session. Episode 1 The Mining Cauldron Earl Metolkian […]
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RPG Webinar for Mahsa University
After the meeting with MAHSA University last month, it was finally time to speak at the webinar that they organised entitled: Tabletop Roleplaying Games for Teaching and Learning Languages This was the first time I did an RPGs in education talk for an inter-university programme. Despite how I seemed, I was nervous as heck and spent a lot of time coming up with the slides. A lot of the pages I wrote for it are brand new, requiring not just new text, but also new images. To view the talk on MAHSA University’s YouTube channel, click here. I hope this will be the first of many programmes where I attempt to convince educators of the benefits of employing RPGs as teaching tools.
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Kangar Jaya After Dark
Tonight we went to scout the new township of Kangar Jaya at Seriab. We stopped for some ice cream at Mokti’s Signature, located beside Lepak King. Sometimes (well most of the time) there are no messages behind my posts, just pictures which I thought are pretty enough to be posted.
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More Aidiladha in Selangor Tales
After the MAHSA visit, it was time to take it easy. The penultimate day of our visit we scouted Kuala Lumpur, checking out Pandan Indah though there were no photos taken there. We did have lunch at Burger King at the Petronas near Lotus Ampang (formerly Tesco). We also checked out the new (relatively new for us) KL East Mall where Irfan bought shoes and got some books. One of them was a gift for Anya. Then we visited cousin Razlyn’s house. We had not seen her for years. We expressed our condolences for the passing of her father and my uncle, whom we called Anjang. When I travelled to KL after SPM for various interviews and such, I stayed a lot with them. Anjang was nothing but kind to me. At home, I gave the book to Anya and that night we had a family dinner out in Nilai. […]
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Visit to MAHSA University
Several weeks ago, I received an email from MAHSA University in Selangor. They would like to know more about using tabletop RPGs as teaching and learning tools, especially for their language classes. I set a date to meet with their faculty members earlier today, as we would be on vacation in Sepang. I also called my former student and current research assistant (not mine, actually) Aidil and we went for the meeting. Meanwhile, Irfan drove and waited in the car. During the meeting I introduced them to the world of TTRPGs by bring with me a bunch of books and starter sets which included maps, cards and pregenerated characters. Aidil helped a lot in explaining. No, I did not run a game for them, but I did explain to them how I ran RPG session in my classrooms with students. A request by them for me to talk in an […]
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Aidiladha in Selangor
It was Hari Raya Aidiladha. We drove down south towards Salak Tinggi to Anya’s house even though they were spending their first few days in Kelantan. They would return home when we were still there. For the first few days, we were at their place with Cik Su F as company. On the third day of our visit, I went to call on Shide at his office/events space Area 27 Events and Co-working Space in Bandar Baru Seri Petaling . Then, then next day I met up with my former student Aidil to plan for the MAHSA University meeting. Here are the pictures of the first few days in Selangor. The next day, we visited MAHSA University.
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