Okay, I haven't updated in a while, so I'll just write the recent stuff.

First of all, I've bought YOTSUBA&! VOLUME 4!!! I've been waiting for YEARS for them to release this volume, and man oh man I can't wait to read it. :D Actually, no, I'll wait for a nice rainy day for me to open the book. :D

The other book I bought today, Kashimashi, was precisely the kind of gender-bender lesbian comedy that I expected from a story that involves a shy cute feminine boy accidentally getting killed by aliens only to be resurrected as a shy cute feminine girl. It is, however, unexpectedly entertaining, and a lot less cliched than I expected. I think I'm going to get volume 2 of this lovely manga.

Also, today I received my business cards from the Star. Hurrah! The first thing I did was to change a few cards so instead of reading "Shaun A. Noordin: Multimedia Developer", it read "Shaun A. Noordin: Lightning Pokemon", complete with Pokemon stats. And then I went around the office asking my colleagues if they wanted to trade business cards, chanting "gotta catch 'em all!".

There are two downsides to my otherwise great job at The Star. The first is the choice of nearby lunch locales is limited. The second is that working for a Malaysian newspaper, I'm often on the frontlines of really depressing Malaysian news. People getting robbed, stabbed, raped, and not always in that order.

So I was relatively pleased to hear some good news instead; recently a Malaysian teen managed to send off an SMS message to her mum when she heard noises at night, and this saved her life when the intruder burst in. This is great - the bad guy got scared off, and the innocent was spared.

But then I thought: wait, if it was an emergency, why did she send a text message instead of a call?

It has been an awesome week. Monday saw iStar's annual department lunch (since The Star's far too large to have a company lunch), and I enjoyed lunch with my friends and colleages at the D'Tandoor restaurant as well as, of course, an afternoon free of work. :D I was also - much to my surprise - voted as iStar's "Coolest Geek". I didn't see that one coming!

Work's been coming along great, but in addition to the usual programming and coding I do at the office I've also been going to Wendy's apartment (a nice place, I might add) to help her revive her desktop. It was a simple HDD failure which was resolved through a series of repairs, reformats, recitations (of magical incantations that would fix the HDD) and, finally, replacement with a shiny new HDD.

Next week: Me and Wendy vs her new website design.

Oh yeah, a pair of hot Japanese girls came round to the office yesterday, and I wrote something about it:

Yesterday at the office we were visited by a pair of sexy Japanese Race Queens. At first I didn't realise why they were there - not that I'm complaining - and I just assumed this was one of the unmentioned perks of working for the Star. It turns out that they were there to promote some racing thing that's going to be held at the Sepang race circuit. I'm still not complaining.

"Come-mu to Sepangu, desu!" said the sexy Japanese girls in their cute Jinglish[*1] accents as they handed out flyers and posters advertising the "2007 Autobacs Super GT Round 4 - Super GT International Series Malaysia". As they approached me, they handed me some promotional materials, smiled at me and said something I didn't quite understand, but I'm sure is related to me going to the race.

I nodded at the sexy girls (or rather, their anatomical features which I was staring at), flashed my charming smile and said,

"No thanks, I'm not interested in cars that don't transform into robots."

I am so smooth.

- Shaun A. Noordin
20070525

[*1] That cute albeit bizarre mix of Japanese and English. At first I wasn't sure if they said Sepang, or if the Malaysian race was being held at Shinjuku.

Attention, sexy Race Queens! If you're reading this blog, please drop me a line detailing your contact details and, of course, measurements. I know we didn't exchange contact details when we met yesterday even though we had ample opportunity to do so, but that is okay - I realise that you were too shy to ask me for my phone number.

Oh, and yeah you know that Coolest Geek award? I just found out today my boss voted for me in that category. XD

PS: Special thanks to Wendy for driving me around so much, including sending me home today with Mental2 in tow. Also, congrats on getting your new Dell laptop!

I haven't seen the movie myself, but Snow Patrol made a song for Spiderman 3 called Signal Fire. The song is nice, but the video itself features the most adorable rendition of Spiderman done by children. It is a good watch; Steffi herself couldn't finish watching the music video because she couldn't stop laughing.

The video is here because I don't feel like embedding videos on my website.

Mmm, I love my work. ^^

Anyway, I just got around to reading Mahoraba volume 10. (Volume 11 has already been released on the scanlation channels, but my philosophy is to not finish reading all the volumes I have unless I have the complete set. The reason is, should I ever run into a cliffhanger in, say, Volume 10, I'll know in the back of my mind that I have Volume 11 sitting unread on my HDD so I won't have to die of suspense, waiting for weeks until the conclusion of the cliffhanger is released.)

I was reminded why I loved this series to begin with. It's not only the way the author portrays the characters and the developing storylines (which often involves the interwining story threads of different characters), but it's also the creativity he puts in his comics. Previously, he's introduced (at least to me) 4-panel 'comic strips' in the middle of the normal-manga-layout and littered the spaces between chapters with 'extras' (including a Mahoraba-based dice game). This time, he actually did 28 bonus pages of a choose-your-own-adventure Mahoraba game!

Remember those gamebooks where you had to go, "Turn to Page 14 if you want to pick up the sword" and "Turn to Page 3 if you want to exit the room"? Well, he successfully did it in manga format AND it's a hilarious parody of detective games.

Akira Kojima, you're a genius.

Try of Volume 10, Extra Chapter 4, from mangadownload.net. Or just check out the HnG forums.

I received my first payslip recently (hooray!) so the first thing I did with my pay was treat my family to dinner.

What? You want to order fish? No way, chicken is good enough!

We ate at that yummy Thai restaurant near Section 3; I fail to remember its name.

STOP EATING SO MUCH, SACHA!

The whole family was invited, including mum, dad, Nana, Nekteh, grandma, Sacha, Fiona, the two maids - Yuli and Sumi - and, of course, my wallet. We even had takeaway for Uncle Zain since he wasn't around.

You only get one refill of your drinks, that's it.

I'm glad everyone enjoyed my first ever treat using my first ever paycheque.

I'm no miser; everyone gets dessert. Of course, you'll have to share.

Man, I enjoy having a second weekend dropped into the middle of the week. It's some sort of Malaysian national holiday so I had Tuesday and Wednesday off. I caught Wild Hogs today near the Curve, and I had the pleasure of Wendy and her little sister Carmen's company. I must recommend the movie to anybody who enjoys a good comedy, and I must thank Wendy for dropping me off home today and yesterday. We failed to catch the movie on Tuesday, possibly because everyone was crowding the cinema to watch Spiderman 3.

Also, Nana now has a white PSP for the sole purpose of playing her recently acquired Innocent Life. My family's gaming console collection grows.

Edit: Super Paper Mario for the Wii combines fantastic visuals with a creative two-dimensinal 3-D gameplay that causes players to go insane. It is therefore heartily recommended to my fellow friends.

(This was another one of my e-mails, but Steffi C suggested that I put it up on my blog. ^^)

This is the second part of my TV rant. For those of you who missed the first one, here's the summary: TV is dumb.

I can't remember how my aunt convinced me to watch Gerak Khas, but I think it involved her telling me that "Gerak Khas has totally gone action movie! In a two-part special, they raided an LRT train from a helicopter."

Anyway, I bit the bullet. I tuned in to Gerak Khas on Friday and watched the fast paced, action-packed Malaysian cop show. In that episode, evil criminals have taken a bunch of innocent civilians hostage in a house and police have surrounded the area, yadda yadda. Nobody was getting shot at yet, but tensions were high as a sudden plot twist started to twist the plot, suddenly.

For some reason, the cops thought it was a great idea to bring the sobbing wife of one of the criminals - along with their 6-year old daughter - onto the crime scene bristling with pistols and SMGs. (She was basically the only person in the line of fire that wasn't wearing body armour; I assume her tudung was made of kevlar.) Anyway, their gamble paid off because as she turned on the waterworks, pleading for her estranged gun-wielding husband to come back, said husband/criminal mastermind saw the light, repented and surrendered to the police.

He was subsequently shot by his partners.

This is where the fun starts, because once the bullets start flying they just don't stop. The police start raiding the house (pausing only to remove their shoes before entering the household, because it's not polite to wear shoes in a Malay house), the hostages start fleeing and the criminals start firing at people.

One armoured police officer, taking cover behind a corner, moves around the corner, possibly to find out from which direction he will be shot. He takes a bullet to the chest - which inexplicably vanishes in a puff of smoke - and this prompts him to go back around the corner to take cover. He pauses for a while, analysing his options. He then moves around the corner again, gets shot in the chest again, and moves back around the corner again.

Where did these people learn to fight?! Time Crisis??

(According to my sources, a deleted scene shows said police officer saying, "Thank goodness I still have two hearts left!" He then shoots a medical box hidden in the corner of the room and that restores his life back to maximum.)

The police officers' apparent invulnerability to bullets scare the criminals, who run into the woods located conveniently nearby. The police officers give chase, the hostages overpower some of the criminals, and pretty much all the criminals get shot in the end.

It was happy ending for everyone, except for the repentant criminal who got shot, the mother/daughter that watched her husband/father get shot and the dead criminals who shot at everybody.

Gerak Khas is indeed fast paced and action-packed, although I am hard pressed to make sense of the narrative. What really gets to me is how everybody is so freaking polite. You get scenes like this:

Police: "Assalamualaikum, kami pihak polis. Tolong lepaskan semua tebusan anda. Terima kasih."
Criminals: "Waalaikumsalam. Tidak, kami akan bunuh semua orang."

- Shaun A. Noordin
20070430

One day, I'll learn how to do backgrounds. But for now, I'm really quite happy with how the Apples vs Oranges short comic came out. This is the first time I've illustrated (outlines and colours over a scanned-in sketch) a coloured comic mostly using my Wacom tablet. It was pretty hard considering I couldn't easily twist the 'paper' around to sketch those hard to do angles, but the end result is that is that I've discovered an illustration style that I really quite like. Hooray for the pseudo-cartoon look!

Friday was a good day. Udon for breakfast, McD's for lunch in the company of attractive colleagues and dinner was a pot of rice baked with Japanese vegetables and clams. Probably the only thing that could have made it better was if I had ordered a happy meal.

So, today I went with Nana to Kinokuniya to buy the Japanese version of Mahoroba, vol 1. I was earlier directed to a thread on the Hiyoko no Gao (Mahoraba's scanlators) forums which helped readers learn Japanese while reading the comic, so naturally I was rather excited.

But then, when I got home, I realised I bought the MANDARIN version.

...

I think the powers that be are really insisting that I finish learning Mandarin before picking up a new language. T__T