Why Are You Here?

The fundamental difference between the Non-Sequitur and Jyllands-Posten controversies.

2006-02-24T10:08:00.000+08:00

The difference is between losing face and having your principles violated.

It shames me that we cannot tell the difference. It should shame you too.

Long Time No See, Eh.

2006-02-23T18:40:00.000+08:00

Why axe Non Sequitur at this juncture, one might ask? Is it an admission of guilt for having published a controversial instalment on Feb 20, and defiantly re-published it on Feb 22 despite having caused much furore among the Muslim community in Malaysia?

Admission of guilt, huh? So much furore, huh?

The Only People Who Make It An Issue

I think it should be said out loud: Jeff, you’re batshit. The only people who have made any kind of disapproval known about this comic are the same people who approved of PAS’ police report, or who have a bone to pick on the NST.

And let’s face it, pussy-boy, you have a bone to pick with them. Not because the NST are unprofessional, or that the NST have engaged in plenty of unethical acts against you, but because you don’t like them.

A matter of convenience

And so, because it is convenient for you, and because you get to kick the Big Beast while it’s down, you ally yourself with twerps who don’t even know what ‘freedom of expression’ means.

Congratulations. You are a blogger.

Small fish

Forgive me. I’ve forgotten my place. I mean, who am I, after all, but some small-time quasi-pundit who has barely any audience, no advertising revenue, and zero awards from anyone? I mean, that’s what we are, of course, according to you: a big fucking disappointment.

Well, you know what they say; what does the little guy know? I mean, compared to me, Jeff has so many contacts, so many accolades poured on to him, and a prestigious career spanning more than half a decade. Siapalah aku. Why should I dare criticize King Jeff?

But then again, to the NST, who is Jeff? Compared to the Jeff, the NST has literally more contacts, more resources, more people, more money, and a history that spans more than a hundred years. Siapa Jeff Ooi? Why should he dare criticize King Paper?

He made a fucking reputation out of that, by saying he had the right. Chew on that.

Don’t play the game the way the big boys play it

Jordan actually made my feelings for it pretty clear here:

I used to think the major difference between my blog and Jeff’s (other than the traffic, which I remain childishly jealous of) was the fact that my blog is all about me whereas his was all about issues. Now it seems more and more apparent to me that Jeff Ooi’s blog is really all about Jeff Ooi, only he’s still trying to disguise it as a blog about issues.

I chalked his behaviour towards his commenters and fellow bloggers (okay, to me, specifically) as, you know, big guy too busy looking at the issues to pay attention to the huwt widdle feewings of some nobody pariah blogger. So that’s why I kept quiet after the initial expression of shock, and went on my way.

Sure, I admit spending less time on my blog—life’s pretty busy, and it’s not as if I disappeared off the face of the planet. If you take some time, folks, you can find my tracks all over the place on the Internet.

But now this shit happens. No way in hell would someone who was really commited to “Thinking Aloud, Thinking Allowed” stoop so low as to seek the alliance with people who are, right now, building an injunction to stop perfectly relevant and not-quite offensive comics from being published.

The issue

People have restated the issue, but let me try, just one more time. What the people who made that police report may not know and Jeff has, in his zeal to excoriate and persecute the New Straits Times, has deliberately forgotten¹, is that there is a difference between the Danish cartoons and the Non-Sequitur ones.

The Danish cartoons caricatured Muhammad and reduced him to a figure of fear or mockery, an unalterable Other. To reduce Muhammad like that was an insult, but it also hurt, because so many Muslims were brought up to believe in Muhammad as an ideal.

Butbutbut we’ve done this before…!

Aisehman ’s argument should be addressed as well, when he says this:

I have blogged on this before but for those who are not aware, there is a frieze that includes the Prophet on a wall inside the US Supreme Court building.

It has been there since 1935, and I’ve yet to come across reports of large-scale protests against it, although there have been calls for it to be removed.

That’s because, smart guy, the frieze does not depict Muhammad in a negative, stereotypical way. It violates taboo, which explains why the calls are there for it to be removed, but protests? Whatever fucking for? It represents Muhammad as a figure of Justice, which is why it is at the Supreme Courts of the United States.

Losing the cause for the fucking fight

Ironically, his blog led me to this quote, by Usman Bawang:

What kind of message are we sending the Government by continuing to harp on NST’s mistakes (if it ever was).

We all are getting confused about the reasons why we hated the NST in the first place. And now, judging by our response, we are all going to encourage the very culture of journalistic cowardice that we ourselves abhored.

Yeah, fucking irony, geniuses. Is this a question of journalistic integrity, or is the idea of fucking NST up the ass getting your e-penises up and throbbing, waiting to spear the scarred, vile and onerous hole that is NST’s anus?

Oh, and in case you think you can get away so easy…

Let’s get back to the Representatives of Islamdom, who are calling that the NST be whipped in public for, Ya Allah, insulting Islam.

How dare you use my voice to state offense over something I do not find offensive. The particular work, have you seen it, or did you avert your eyes, the way they teach you that ‘good’ Muslims should do?

Did you see Muhammad’s face? Did it imply that Muhammad was, in any way, evil? Did it imply that Islam was a violent religion, or that Islam was wrong, or that Islam is inherently stupid?

Get it straight. Non-Sequitur insulted you and your zealot counterparts on the other side, with your querelous little hearts and shallow little minds, for flipping out and burning shit and killing people in your quest to show the world that Islam is a force to be ~~feared~~‘respected’.

Words of wisdom from a “munafiq”

Funny, because I am reminded by this little thing Farish Noor, the Great Traitor to Your Religion, said:

The victory of Islam, it should be noted, is not necessarily the victory of Muslims. The victory of Islam is only secured if and when the universal values of Islam are realised in the wider contex…

How can you be considered fighting for Islam when all you care about is how our community is perceived by others? It is not just we who are marginalized; others are as well. It is not just we who are insulted in day by day language; others are as well. The world does not consist of just us and others against us, it consists of small people oppressed by big people, and we are one of those small people today.

Fucking perspective, bitch!

How can you claim in one breath to be upset over a cartoon that insults you, not Islam, and yet turn a blind eye to the fact that married women in this country can be metaphorically and literally fucked over, when poverty still hurts the poorest of you, and when your kin do injustice towards others and kill themselves and others over a religion you keep claiming is the “Universal Way of Life”?

How can you, after all this, be so arrogant as to “defend” your religion’s honor? There are bigger things to fight for! Fight for them!

Fütnotes.

You’d think I’d leave Jeff the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think so, Mister Press Freedoms. Top

Those Reptile-Brained Maniacs.

2005-12-08T18:55:00.000+08:00

I’m not a hardcore gamer.

I don’t think I ever was, really, when you get down to it. When my brother and I were younger, we’d compete on videogames, and I invariably lost most of the time. I never had what it took to win, and that lack of winning spirit always ensured that I always ended up on the losing side of any competitive endeavour.

I wasn’t hard enough. I was a pussy, soft, a carebear, a sopping wet vagina doomed to a life of being screwed over by dicks. In other words, a loser, a big socialist pinko, a liberal tree-hugging hippie.

Fear and Self-Loathing In Petaling Jaya

I didn’t exactly understand it myself, honestly—it was either a combination of a disinclination or an inability to optimize, to plan the perfect solution, or just to see The Thing One Must Do. It was my biggest weakness, and frankly, it still is.

I liked taking my time, I liked hanging around, I liked spending my time immersed in something comforting, like an overgrown baby missing the comfort of his womb. And I generally hated myself for it.

Look at that. You’d never guess by the way that sentence was arranged, with its wishy-washy qualifier and neutral, conversational tone, of the depth of loathing I had for that failing.

Those Damn Gamers.

So it didn’t really surprise me when I saw this over at the Escapist:

I believe the seemingly endless popularity of these particular games, in which players take the role of soldiers, spies and other enforcers of government policy, can be attributed to the inherent appeal of a particular ideology. The practical implementation of this ideology can include myriad bureaucratic and cultural details but whose fundamental appeal to the human animal comes down to the notion that might makes right.

He’s talking about fascism, folks.

The Essential Division

When you get down to it, the pure mechanics of gaming is about one thing: who wins. There is no room for losers or the honorable in a game—only a winner and the chumps.

You can lie to yourself about the honor of sportsmanship, you can blind yourself to optimal strategies with your misguided injunctions against manipulating and exploiting your fellow man, but all that that allows you, in the end, is a sense of comfort before someone without your delusions comes by and eats you alive.

Pray That Isn’t As Simple As That

I hope to dear God that games aren’t like real life, and so far evidence is supporting my claim. Society, frankly, is inefficient. Trains do not, in general, run in time. You are not, one hopes, an expendable cog in a machine. You can still express yourself with relative impunity. Might, for now, does not make right.

Because god help you if it did:

A friend of mine studied political science at Yale. In one class, the professor posted a game scenario: You are the newly empowered dictator of a third-world country. Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend’s solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them. Bring the workforce and the job market into sudden alignment. Reconcile the mouths to feed with the supplies of food.

Nature Brown In Rust And Dried Blood

If this sort of strategy worked, even once, it would have spawned a state far more successful than any other, and by the Darwin’s laws of evolution it would have replaced all other states. Death camps would have been the norm.

Instead we have this tangled, paltry mess.

A Nasty, Vicious Theory

I have a theory. It’s a nasty, vicious theory, and it goes against my somewhat (ha, pussy!) liberal leanings. It goes on like this:

Jack Thompson is a lunatic, but a lunatic with a point.

He talks about games being murder simulators and trainers for a new generation of psychopaths. It’s completely batshit, but perhaps it has a grain of truth. Perhaps games don’t train psychopaths, but instead cause gamers to self-select; the ones with the winning drive go to the top, and the ones without it lose and eventually give up.

Don’t Stop Them Playing!

Maybe that’s all there is to gaming, and the best players are those with no clear scruples: people who would, without blinking an eye, defraud fellow players of approximately 16,000 US dollars of in-game property... and then brag about it later, justifying their actions as being completely within the rules of the game.

Maybe the best thing we can do to prevent a generation of psychopaths and sociopaths from taking advantage of people again is to not take these games away. Design a game that will optimize the selection of psychopaths and sociopaths, latent and obvious. And then, force everyone to play them. With each other.

Why? Because then, the best, the nastiest, the most vicious will possibly be the most successful people in that game, and you’ll know who they are by their performance.

That Won’t Work This Time, Buddy

No point hiding behind complex layers of manipulation. No point behind trying to fool a battery of psychiatrists. No point in suppressing their desires, because there they’ll be, out there in the open, in the top ten rankings.

We gamers have had the training. We’ve learned the mindset. We know the score. We are efficient, deadly, methodical. If only we were in charge – then, oh then, we could show the world how much we care about it.

Maybe if we knew who these people were, we could stop them before they get their hands on other people’s lives and cause some real damage.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to take down the next reptile-brained, psychotic maniac before he sinks his teeth into people’s lives and really cause some hurt?

And Now, For Something Completely Different

2005-12-01T23:25:00.000+08:00

Right, okay.

I just took a look at three of the last significant blog posts I’ve done, and they were dour, solemn and wanky.

This is not good. I belong, first and foremost, to the geek-dork-nerd spectrum: I need to think about feeding that part of my Internet Soul, really.

So here’s the deal.

I would like to run a role-playing game campaign in the near future. The idea is mostly embryonic, and largely impulsive—I’ve yet to think about when to do this, how many people will want to do it, et cetera.

But I’ll let that worry come later. I’ve got other fish to fry.

Okay. Here are the games I have, separated by system and continuity:

White Wolf’s Storyteller System
1. Old World of Darkness
  - Mage: the Ascension 3e
  - Werewolf: the Apocalypse
2. Æon Trinity
Wizards of the Coasts’ d20 system
1. WotC’s Dungeons and Dragons 3.5e
2. White Wolf’s Ravenloft
3. WotC/Lucas Licensing’s Star Wars RPG
Other Systems
1. Mongoose Publishing’s Paranoia

Now, there are a couple of games I’d like to get, both in PDF format:

Atomic Sock Monkey’s Dead Inside
Lumpley Game’s Dogs in the Vineyard

Sadly, these seem to be in the future.

Now, take a look at these games. Ask questions if you want, in the comments, and I’ll answer them ASAP—if you need more description of what each game is like (though honestly, I don’t really know—never did find the players to try them in detail).

All right. Fire away.

I can feel my sense of humor draining away.

2005-12-01T18:29:00.000+08:00

I don’t like the kind of questions that popped in my head when I read this:

...I was more upset seeing the ugly side of a foreign-owned private hospital in Cheras, which doesn’t even wink staring at a life dying at its doorstep.

(Read the post from Jeff’s blog)

Get Angry, Moralize.

The predictable response to this is readily obvious—anger, shock, disgust. It is the worst thing to happen to one’s child, and the feelings of helplessness and anger and sorrow that the parents of the victim and our feelings are real. Let us not deny that.

I’m going to talk about my own personal reaction to this post.

First Impressions

The first thing that popped into my head when I read the news was this—“How many other people have gone through something like this?”

What drew my eye to this whole post were these parts:

Two nights ago, as I was following TV3’s news coverage on Noh Omar, I stumped onto visuals of DPM Najib’s wife, who was sobbing uncontrollably.

[...]

I was told Khairul’s family was known to Rosmah Mansor, wife of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, as Khairul and her daughter were classmates at the international school in Damansara.

The Stain

Understand this. I am not belittling the death of that boy. What happened to him was horrible, unexcusable, and a terrible stain for Malaysians everywhere.

But the thing is, if the classmate of the daughter of officially the second-most powerful man in Malaysia can die from simple, criminal neglect, because that’s what it is, how many other people have gone through this, have died because of this?

Jolted Awake

It should not take the death of the child of someone influential to jolt us out of our fucking sleep. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t take the death of someone known to influential people to get our ministers to say that they’ll revoke the fucking license of pricks who put profit before ethics.

It should take a crowd of angry people several decades ago to say, “Fuck this. We don’t want to be treated like bags of money with a straw in it.” The market should have caught this error and fixed it.

But it didn’t, so here we are. The system failed. Quelle surprise?

Ugly rumors, uglier truth?

I’ve heard tales of bodies of the recently-deceased held by private hospitals who refused to let the body be treated with dignity and respect, the way human beings are supposed to be treated. Hell, there were dying people, fellow Malaysians, who were, apparently, refused treatment because they didn’t have time to pony up the goods.

How many times has this happened? How many times were the people involved in it ignored, threatened or cajoled to shutting the fuck up and letting this pseudo-hypercapitalistic piece of shit we call the status quo continue? Hundreds of times? Dozens? A few? Once?

Once is too much.

It is a tragedy. It is terrible. Here’s something to chew on, though: the story wouldn’t have gotten such big coverage if the boy’s family was poor or not well-connected. Ministers would have said nothing if the boy was some poor nobody from Klang. Nothing would have happened if this was some old guy who died of a stroke because groups of tight-fisted cunts who have the fucking gall to call themselves hospitals refused treatment.

So. Where does that leave us?

Edited: I’ve realized that some of you might have misconstrued a couple of my statements as racist and unnecessary. Frankly, since I didn’t intend it to be that way, I have removed a significant portion of what looked like racist remarks. Remind me if you see any more, why don’t you?

A Quick Update

2005-11-28T17:00:00.000+08:00

Okay.

I just got back to my computer, and I find that I have six emails, count them, six emails, from various sources.

One email was a comment confirmation for this particular post. That’s cool. Nah, Elizabeth, I don’t think I’d be cut out to be a columnist. The pay sucks, I’d end up getting my posts edited, and I’d have to run against a deadline, and I hate deadlines. I do this for a hobby, and I’d like to keep it that way. Also, I think you’re very pretty. Thanks for visiting!

One was from equalmarriage.ca, a website advocating same-sex marriages, and another four were from DesiringGod.org, apparently a Christian website that apparently spreads the Word of God (the Christian one, apparently). Both were attempting to confirm my subcription to them.

I’m going to assume that it was a honest mistake by someone else who was named Tariq Kamal who has a gmail account, and I’m letting it slide for now. I have, however, placed these emails under my ‘Spam’ folder, and these emails, and future emails like it will go under Spam and will be summarily ignored and flushed periodically, without them being opened.

Nothing else has changed. Have a nice day.

What the hell hit me?

2005-11-25T17:43:00.000+08:00

Okay, so I sent a comment to Jeff Ooi’s blog about this particular post :

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the reason why I didn’t talk about the technology behind the whole leak was because I didn’t give a damn on the authenticity of the video, or where it came from. I instead focused on the rather sorry state of the relationship between the police and the community they were supposed to be protecting.

The fact that technology uncovered this means nothing. The issue was that we were, and still are, so willing to believe it, because that’s how we view the police. Whether this was because of the actions and the integrity of the police or the administration or something that is inherent in Malaysians, I don’t know.

Oh, and Jeff… I am a reader of your blog, I admit that. People have called me your h0, and there’s a grain of truth in what they say. But you know something? Sometimes you can be a big jerk. This, matey, is one of those times.

Thumbs down.

Here’s his response:

JEFF OOI says: I don’t make a living out of blogging, much less am I here on a beuty parade or on a popularity race. So, must I give a damn as to what/how you feel so long as I keep my e-space serene and rational? If you urge to hand down decree, go jerk it elsewhere. Here, you play by my rules.

Huh. Intellectual masturbation reference, and then implied insult to my ‘lifestyle blogger’ position. Which I don’t even care about, since I’ve never really done the whole “blogging as a lifestyle” thing.

I honestly don’t know how to think about this. Okay, so… I come into his blog, knowing full well that I do play by his rules. Yeah, okay, so probably I walked into that.

For some reason I keep getting the feeling that the response I got from him was not proportional to the “attack” or decree I made. I made a decree? What, who voted and made me Member of Parliament?

I am, actually, kind of in shock. Mind you, Jeff’s always struck me as a bit of a robot. I’ve never had any meaningful interaction with him, other than the usual rare, curt and brusque reply. His posts tend to be impenetrable, or at the very least, not aimed at my target market. Maybe because I’m a popularity race or beauty train blogger. Yeah, that’s probably it.

I’m still thinking about whether this crossed the line between firm reminder and Going Too Far.

Hell, I’m still thinking whether what I said or did was wrong or not. I guess this is what happens when someone big bitch-slaps you around. You stagger around, in shock.

Naked Woman Police Brouhaha

2005-11-25T07:23:00.000+08:00

I heard the news. And worse still, later on, I saw a series of stills that purpotively capture the act, as it is, with its pants down. There is, predictably, even commentary about the whole issue.

I’m going to take the best-case scenario and assume the video is fake. Not because I believe it is, or I want to believe that it is (quite the opposite, actually), but I want to show you how effective my argument is, even if the video was proven to be fake.

Malaysians And The Law.

Malaysians have an interesting relationship with the law. The best way we can describe it is, very probably, “If we can ignore it we will.” We’re not very law abiding—pirated goods still sell pretty strong, traffic laws are mostly optional, and generally we’re free to do what we like so long as we pay the monetary price.

It isn’t exactly cynicism, really. Take a look at the news, and you might suddenly realize that if you do have the money and the right connections, you might even get away with murder. Allegedly.

What, Us?

Is there something wrong with us? Some fundamental flaw that makes us incapable of following the law, either through the letter or its spirit? Are Malaysians, genetically, incapable of following the law?

I don’t really think so. Part of it lies with the impression we get from the news—that yes, if you’re clever enough, and if you’re subtle enough, you can escape from anything, on a technicality and public prosecutor incompetence. Crime doesn’t get punished here, not really.

The other reason, the one I’ll be going to at length, is our relationship with the police.

Bad Boys Bad Boys…

The police have been trying to get people to trust on them more for the past few years. You’ve seen the posters and signs—“Rakan COP”, and the like. They’ve been trying to bring the message that the Royal Malaysian Police are competent, transparent, and especially, especially, don’t fucking doubt it or we’ll fucking sue you, bitch, not corrupt.

They’re not succeeding. Partly because, hey, the aren’t exactly competent, transparent and not corrupt, but the solution to that one is particularly obvious—stop being incompetent, not transparent and corrupt. The second reason is a little harder to deal with, and involves a paradigm shift not only in the RMP, but in Malaysian society in general.

What ‘choo Gonna Do When They Come For You?

The police force owes a lot to the Communist Insurgency. When you have an insurgency, folks, your police force needs to be good at several things to enforce the law. One of these things is that you start getting good at—specializing in, even—controlling the populace by fear.

You’ve got to give credit where credit is due, of course—the police are amazingly skilled in some things. If you want someone to handle riot control, you really can do much worse than Malaysian police. If you want checkpoints, same thing. Ditto suppressing terrorism and the like. Our cops are just that good¹.

The problem is, the real problem behind all of this is that they haven’t moved with the times.

Cops, Actually.

If anything, what I loved the most about my time overseas was to see a different relationship between the police and the local community.

The police in the London Metropolitan area don’t, let’s face it, have an awesome reputation either. They shot some kid dead without due process, didn’t they? But the fact was, they responded well. The London community trusts the police to a degree, and the police find that their work in enforcement is a lot easier.

Yeah, it is actually easier to obey the law when you know that the police are on our side. It stops being a matter of lawbreaking being something you do to “stick it up to the man” and more that lawbreaking becomes something that goes against your interest in the end.

Bad Attitude

It boils down in the end to our attitude towards the law. The law, imposed by an external force, is a burden. But the minute a society realizes, or is made to realize, that obeying the law, all the time is to their best interests, they do. This isn’t foolish optimism—the idea in itself is based on Skinnerian psychology. Rewards are better than punishment.

It’s something that not only our police fail to understand. The music industry here fails to understand that as well, with their campaign against media piracy. It is pointless to try the legalistic argument in Malaysia—no one trusts or necessarily obeys the law.

Who cares if it’s fake?

Who cares if the video is fake? The fact is, the video is seen as conforming to our view of what policemen do. You may have, no doubt, heard some stories. They don’t exactly protect and serve in those tales, do they?

The thought of cooperating to the police for your own good is alien to the mind of many Malaysians. What we do instead is cooperate because of fear of greater punishment.

What kind of incentive is that?

fütnotes

¹ Or maybe not, if you hear rumors about how we’re supposedly the terrorist hub in the region. We might actually be, you know.

Hard Science, Fuzzy Belief

2005-11-21T17:48:00.000+08:00

I agree with a lot of what Richard Dawkins says, especially with his views on pseudo-science, New Age beliefs, and the current obsession with combining science and religion into one coherent, harmonious whole.

I think, like him, that it’s a load of crock. It’s bullshit, it’s stupid, it leads to bad science and even worse religion.

I’ll get to that bit a little later. Here’s the funny clincher, though—I think Dawkins, and atheists in general, have gotten religion wrong.

The Un-Nameable Cause

The ironic thing about my beliefs is that I am a hard scientist. I like my science hard and deterministic, the universe devoid of any intrinsic unifying meaning, there being no Great Bearded Being in the sky.

And yet, I am a Muslim. Yes, I hold witness to the affirmation that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.

It seems like there’s a contradiction there. Let’s leave that contradiction for a bit and revisit it later.

Reason and reason alone.

Listen to the fight between the forces of Reason and Enlightenment versus the forces of Faith and Superstition and you’d think that there was only one way of seeing the world, One True Way, and all other ways were… well, stupid. Foolish. Misguided. Nonsense, meaningless.

This of course fails to take into account on what role faith and reason have in the modern world. We know reason has a role—take away reason and you can see the immediate consequences, economically, politically, militarily. But it seems that if you take away faith, nothing happens. Apparently.

Which is ironic, since religious fundamentalism and New Age quackery is on the rise, despite our best damn efforts to leave superstitious claptrap behind. The promised fruits of abandoning Old-World Superstition—the end of killing, the abandonment of war, the elimination of self-righteous blindness—seems even further than ever.

One of the arguments that anti-religious people seem to trot out—that religions inspires people to do horrible, horrible things—looks hollow in the face of this cold historical fact: that the driving force behind the the biggest human and technological catastrophes of the past 100 hundred years wasn’t even religion.

The Real Killer

It isn’t. Take the top five catastrophes. And I mean the top five, in terms of what impact it had on how many people. You’d be surprised. September 11th, however horrible it was, doesn’t even come close to what we can do to each other.

Hiroshima. Chernobyl. The Soviet Gulags. The Killing Fields. The Great Leap Forward. Exxon Valdez. While to say that religion didn’t play a part in at least some of these is preposterous—but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. There were other causes—technology run amuck. Nationalism. Racial hatred. Ideological insanity.

Even the even that shaped our national policy today—the May 13th riots—was less about religion and more about the politics of race and economics of inequality. Religion wasn’t fashionable then, as it is now. We did not need to cry out for ‘jihad’ then as we do now.

But the parade of horrors I’ve just shown you was meant to tell you one thing—you do not need religion to justify your horrors. We thought it was, once. We were wrong.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about something else.

Meat and Bread.

But what good is religion? It doesn’t explain the universe—it’s terrible at it, and attempts like Intelligent Design and trying to justify universal events through Scripture just read like a rather pathetic attempt of stealing the throne science wrested away very recently—at least in historical terms—from religion.

You’ve lost the throne, children. Move on.

Science does a great job in giving us explanations. It doesn’t do a lot good for meaning... at least for me. Some people don’t need it, which is why they can find wonder and joy in the real world. But those people aren’t everyone, at least not yet. Maybe not ever.

For others, there’s always those nagging questions: “Why? What are we doing here? Do we need to do anything? What is the sum total meaning of my life, really? Am I here merely to exist, to breed until I cannot, and then, to merely die? Why should I?”

And here’s the moment where you think I’ll sell you religion, right?

The search of meaning

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what preoccupies us a lot these days. We look for something to anchor us, to give us context in our lives, to make some sense of it all. Yes, we are a collection of baryonic particles held together by coincidence and goo, transient and evanescent.

Try getting out of bed in the morning for that. Believe me, I tried. For two fucking years. Didn’t work. Got diagnosed with depression.

The Real Use of Religion

Religion is a tool, much like anything else is a tool. I am a Muslim, because, you know, that’s what I am. I tried atheism for a while, you know. I couldn’t do it—I was raised a Muslim, and turning away from God felt impossible. Rather than tear myself away from Him, and risk damaging something, I came back. I made peace with myself.

I could never hope to be a good Muslim, so I settled with being just a Muslim. I relearnt the language of my religion, the cadences that spoke to me¹ in a way that philosophy and reason didn’t. I moved away from the absurdity and the contradiction inherent in any religion, and found that that contradiction masked a deeper meaning that really can’t be expressed in words. You have to experience it to get it.

Meaning?

When you don’t have meaning, life is empty, pointless. It doesn’t have to be religion—you can believe in your fellow man, in a political ideology, in your family, in your culture, in something, anything—we’re adaptive that way. But look for something, and hold on to it.

I chose Islam, Hani and my family. centerpide chose Jesus and Christianity, and hey, that works for him. Other people choose mystical and magical paths, others choose relgion, a few adopt a philosophy of life, others devote their lives to serving others or escaping desire and pain.

Everyone has their own goddamn path, and there’s not a lot you can do to convince the other person to your way—only to guide them into whatever it is they need.

It isn’t religion that’s the danger, to be honest—it’s being blind to the truth, that there are other people around you, and that not all of them share what you believe. To live in the modern world means abandoning any kind of ideological certainty, or to be in danger of repeating the same meaningless horror over and over again.

No, it’s not pleasant or easy. But since when has life ever been that?

Fütnotes.

¹ And that was the thing that people don’t get about Osama bin Laden. He used language, at least in the early days of him in hiding, in a way no non-Muslim or moderate Muslim could. They were good at it. We had a lot of catching up to do. We still do.

Angry Religio-Cultural Rant #646,242.

2005-11-16T21:02:00.000+08:00

This is an angry rant. If you don’t like it, leave. If you want to talk about it, leave. If you don’t like that, you know what to do.

I’m a Muslim.

Being a Muslim isn’t just the intellectual acceptance of what I believe—I leave that to other people, really. It’s not just me growing up a Muslim—but sure, that played a part. I’m a Muslim because that is my identity. Body, heart, mind and soul, that’s who I am, and I suspect a significant portion of Malaysian-Muslims are like this, but don’t care to admit it.

Too Much Time On The Net Is Bad For You.

And I go on the Internet. It strikes me how ironic these two ideas can be, especially when you consider this:

There isn’t a lot of criticism about Islam for Malaysians IRL. It simply isn’t allowed, mainly because of hypocritical bullshit about avoiding racial disunity. Yeah, it’s hypocritical, especially when you hear those fucking xenophobes you call UMNO Youth rant. Bullshit racial disunity. We’re pussies about criticism, fellow Malay-Muslims. Face facts.

The Great Muslim Shock.

Because I’ve been on the ‘net for seven years and I still can’t get over the Islamaphobic bigoted shit that keeps cropping up. Significant portions of it are dressed up as if they’re the voice of reason and civilization.

The worst part about all this shit is how it attacks Islam. I mean, it’s hard enough to deal with shit when your own belief system gets treated like a fucking pathogenic meme.

Pathogenic meme?

It’s not, fuckers! I don’t see people other than certified nutjobs say that Catholicism is responsible for the actions of the IRA or that fundamentalist Judaism is responsible for Palestinian oppression¹.

I don’t need to drag out the reasons why Islam is not “inherently violent”. Most of the 1.1 billion people who profess to that religion, some of them living, like, next door to you, go through most of their goddamned lives without a single violent impulse in their head. Or, if they do, they deal with it the way you do. Some of these self-same people are religious. Traditionalist religious. You don’t have to be liberal to be peaceful.

What Do You Want, The Moon?

Are you saying that that’s not enough for you? Well, then, fuck you. Go fuck yourself, you pansy-waist armchair crusader-academic-or-general-manque. I’ve had enough of your pontificating. I’m sick of it. Pontificate by your fucking self. Assholes.

There is no room for discussion. Feel free to send an email whining about how I’m oppressing you by shutting comments down.

¹ But then again that’s what Pusat Islam always says during Friday sermons. But shit, you want to listen to Pusat Islam for an unbiased view of global events?

23/5

2005-11-07T01:35:00.000+08:00

Got it from here.

Hey, what’s the harm, right? Besides, I was curious.

The 23/5 Meme via percolator’s ‘the mudpond’.

Dig into your archives
Find your 23^rd post.
Find the 5th sentence (or closest to) and post it in your blog along with these instructions.

~~fnord~~

And here it is:

How many of them can spell properly again, much less spell “Jalan Riong”?

Mmm, feel the burn!

On Being Multi-Cultural

2005-10-27T13:50:00.000+08:00

I had a fairly angry blog entry before this, but something in minishorts’ blog changed my mind. So I’ve decided to make a rewrite.

Fitting into Multicultural Societies is Hard Stuff

You might not think there is a link between what MENJ says here and here with a certain MP’s so-called ‘racist’ statements in parliament. Admittedly, there are fundamental differences—the Member of Parliament in question is a cretin (not unlike many of his counterparts), while MENJ is, by all indications, of above-average intelligence and education.

But both have one thing in common. They do not fit into a multicultural society.

You Tak Suka?

I don’t say this to mean as if it is a bad thing. I don’t mean to go at the MP or MENJ and say, “You Tidak Suka, You Keluar Dari Malaysia!” —although admittedly, it would be fun and ironic to say to the MP himself, who has made himself inadvertantly famous by putting his foot in his mouth with that statement.

But the fact of the issue is, you live in a society where not everybody thinks and lives like you, and it is not likely that they will ever do so.

In An Idealized World

Not because it should be this way—let’s face it, in an idealized world, everyone would have his own space, everyone would belong, and there wouldn’t be any conflict between anyone at all. But let’s face it—there are about 23 million people crammed by history and circumstance into an area approximately 330 thousand square kilometers big. That isn’t a lot of space.

And when you’re all crammed up like that, one of the last things you want to talk about is how people should behave and where they belong and what is the true truth. You’re just struggling to not push the other feller into the sea (where they could probably sue your sorry ass for being an ass), or get pushed in either.

Priorities, Man, Priorities.

I’m not saying that what you believe and what you say is unimportant. I’m saying, look at your other priorities first. You don’t live in an all-Malay (oxymoronic—have you heard of a ‘true Malay’?) all-Muslim country. You live in a multicultural one, which means that you must accommodate. Not should, because frankly I’d go somewhere else if I could, but must.

And if you don’t, well, why should the other guy?

A Fairly Serious Announcement

2005-10-17T14:27:00.000+08:00

Right. I’ve got something important to say.

Most of you know about me and Hani. For those who don’t, we’ve been dating for five years, which is a decent chunk of time to date before taking any kind of next step.

Well, guess what. We are taking the next step. Hani and I are getting married.

Both our parents know, and have already began planning for the event already. I’m not sorry to say this at all, but it’s going to be invite-only—there are too many people who may want to come, and frankly, it devolving into a circus is the last thing I want.

But the dates? Well, we’re both getting engaged by the end of this year, and we’re hoping to tie the knot by the middle of next year. We may post dates. I’m betting that Hani wants to post photos—frankly I shan’t stop her, though I must wonder why we must submit you lot to the indignity of me in a pelamin, but that’s the way things go.

And yes, some of you will get invites. No, I haven’t thought of who yet. I will.

That is all. For now.

YARP 2005: Remember the Forgotten

2005-10-04T21:59:00.000+08:00

“You know,” I told my dad, while we were having dinner last night, when they announced that Ramadan would begin on Wednesday, “For a little while, I forgot what fasting during Ramadan was for.”

“That’s an odd thing to forget,” he said.

Yeah, it was.

Less Than the Best.

I’m not even close to being a devout Muslim. I know what being drunk feels like, I’ve done things with the ladies that could be described as… interesting and educational¹, I occasionally blaspheme, and sins upon sins, I am often liberal and irreverent about my religion.

I could put blame on it on my upbringing. My dad’s pretty much a liberal Muslim too, with pockets of conservatism. But hey, he grew up in the sixties, and idolized Tariq Ali².

But I’m not going to. It was a decision I made, I guess, a long time ago.

Times Change.

Yeah, and it’s harder to be a Muslim now. I mean, they blew up fucking Bali again. I mean, what’s the point of it? People die, Muslims take a PR hit.

Farish Noor ’s article, as usual, stands out as a fairly good piece of writing from a fairly moderate Muslim, but he’s lost the point again, hasn’t he?

Yes, it’s about the Muslims versus the West. It just gets to the point where you bring up the litany about how the West wants to bring down Muslims, force it to assimilate into what it believes is the global culture, and go along in its business.

Well, maybe that’s true.

Justice.

But that’s not the point again, is it? Yes, focus on the conflict. Focus on the ideological battles Muslims have with the West, and with themselves and each other. We’ve entered an age of soul-searching, we Muslims, and it’s often not pretty.

But what has this got to do with forgetting what fasting is for? Well, everything. What is the Ramadan fast for?

The Ramadan fast is an injunction from God. Oh, great, argument settled, let’s go home. But that’s not just it, is it? When I was a kid, we were told that the fast was to remember the suffering of the poor, of those people who often did not have enough to eat and drink, the ones we walk on past whenever we go to work, or go home from work, or on Jalan Sultan Ismail, on our way to a night of debauched revelries.

Forgotten and Forsaken.

The fast is for the forgotten. Yeah, I know, it’s symbolic, but we’re weird that way. Humans, I mean; not Muslims. We’re weird in the sense that we need symbols to start something. Reason doesn’t cut it, and frankly, I don’t think it ever will.

So we commemorate the sufferings of those we forget so often by depriving ourselves of what they are every day deprived of—food, drink, comfort and pleasure. And every year, we do it, and try to become better people, by remembering.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily happen any more; but that’s semiotics for you.

Forgotten, and Forgetting That We Have Forgotten.

It’s easy to forget these things when you’re afraid, or defending yourself. It’s easy to just say, “Oh, we’re Muslims, we don’t do this sort of thing,” or “Oh, those Muslims, they’re always doing this sort of thing,” or whatever.

When we’ve got elephants running around in our heads, important things—like democracy and freedom, real freedom, not this McDonalds-Starbucks piece of shit we’ve got masquerading for freedom—get forgotten.

And life goes on. And people get trampled. And no one remembers.

Safe Fasting, ya’ll.

So. That’s a reason to fast—it’s not necessarily a religious and cultural thing Muslims do, but also a political thing³, a social thing anyone, Muslim or not, can do. Sure, you’re fasting because it’s an injunction from God, and you must do it if you are able. Think less of the ritual, and more on the mindset behind fasting.

But that isn’t it, as well, is it? Remember the poor. Remember the people who don’t have anything. Remember the forgotten. Farish’s article was a call to not forget what Islam stands for, and to fight for those things.

And to never forget.

Fütnotes.

¹ And quite, quite private. No luck getting anything out of me about that any more.

² And it was no suprise where he got my name then.

³ Muslims don’t usually separate religion from politics, which usually scare the shit out of people who are experienced with Christianity, who’ve had shitty several hundred years worth of religion and politics mixing together.

We Don't Need the Fucking Water.

2005-10-01T23:08:00.000+08:00

This is for you, centerpide. Don’t take it too hard.

I don’t go clubbing too often.

But when I do, really, I go out with Hani and we go out with a couple of her friends to a club or a show and what not.

She’s the one who taught me to club, see. I had never been to a club before with friends or alone until I met her, and she taught me several things about clubbing.

I’m going to talk about them now.

Dance motherfucker, dance.

They’re rules that apply to anyone—from newbie clubbers to old vets that have done this shit since god knows when and have seen shit come and go. They’re good rules of thumb. I like them.

Remember what you’re there for.

You might want to go clubbing for the music. You might want to go clubbing for the drinks. You might want to go clubbing for the chicks, or the dancing, or to pose around looking beautiful. Fine.

But know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it before you enter the club, and keep at it until you leave. While in the club, Doubt Is Not Your Friend.

Imagine—you’re dancing, and suddenly, you see your girlfriend laughing at you, or a bunch of people laughing at you, or something. There are two things you can do:

Feel self-conscious, and thus angst about it.
Ignore them.

The club is possibly the most forgiving environment you can be in. You don’t need to fit in; that’s something only the Outside World needs to think about, not you. Not while in there.

The rules apply when you dance and get laughed at, or when you flirt and get rejected, or when you pose and people throw paper umbrellas at you (and you probably deserve it as well, you bastard), or if you puke your guts out and get kicked out, or if you’re listening to the music and the music suddenly starts sucking, or whatever.

You’re there for a reason. The minute doubt starts, take a break; go outside. Relax for a minute. If it doesn’t go away, stop. Go somewhere else. Or go home.

You’ll be fine.

Pay Attention to the People Around You.

You really do need to. While ignoring people’s reaction to you is great, please try and remember, you’re not alone. Pay attention to something we call “personal space”.

Dancing is great, but don’t start hogging into people’s space. No one needs an asshole—least of all a drunk asshole who’s having fun at other people’s expense.

Go With Friends You Trust.

Friends are great. They support you, they bail you out of shit, they dance with you, you have fun with them. But who do you trust?

Clubbing is the acid test of a friendship. No matter how nice someone is, no matter how accommodating they are outside the club, they can be the worst piece of shit ever inside.

I swear—that nice girl outside who is nice until she’s in a club, and she disappears and you find out later that she spent hours dancing with complete strangers while you and your friends panicked, worrying if she’s the next Canny Ong or what, or that guy who’s great while sober but kept trying to sneak vodka into your drink, and you’re Designated Driver and the only thing that’s stopping them from taking a fucking cab home and/or a fiery death they probably deserve….

The worst thing is, really, that you’ve never clubbed with them before. Fine, so go clubbing with them once. If you enjoyed yourself, do it again. But if you don’t, then stop going clubbing with them. No, I don’t mean stop being friends with them. Remain friends! You can still be close to them!

It’s just that you’re not going to run around behind them and getting them out of trouble yet again, or you don’t really fancy getting fucking stood up while your friend goes and tackles that hot specimen of the desired sex.

Reward Trust

Mind you, if someone takes care of you while you’re smashed, and if they’re good at it, and patient… hold on to them. Be nice to them. Buy them drinks when they’re not being Designated Driver. Keep them, don’t let fate or ill fortune take them away.

Trust me on this.

Take Care Of Yourself

Practise a few precautions, and generally you’ll be okay. Going clubbing to dance? Remember to drink a lot of water along with that Red Bull+Vodka you’re having.

Going clubbing for the music? Okay, but don’t stand too near to the speakers if you value your hearing (then again you might not. What? Eh? Speak up!)

Going clubbing to flirt and score? Condoms and a small bottle of lube, and lay off the sauce. You’re going to need all the control you can get.

Going clubbing to drink? Learn the adage: “Beer before liquor, never sicker; Liquor before beer, in the clear.” Pace yourself. Don’t binge.

Going clubbing to not get raped? Go in a group of people you can trust. No, that cute guy you just met in Economics class is not someone you can trust. Your friends. Someone who has her head screwed in. Someone not stupid. I know, that last one is a bit of a tall order.

Have Fun, Go Somewhere Else Or Go Home¹

Really, it says it all. If you’re not having fun, go somewhere else. Tapped out all the locations? Go home.

There’s no shame in it. So you’ve decided to spend the rest of the night asleep, or eating a tub of ice-cream and watching the Three Stooges, or online, blogging. So what?

Sometimes clubs suck. Sometimes it’s the music. Sometimes it’s the crowd. Sometimes the police have raided the place ~~for more coffee money~~ to catch people using drugs and shit. It happens. Place sucked? Go somewhere else. Clubbed out? Go home.

Fütnotes

¹ Well, doesn’t really apply if you’re being a Good Friend. Tough it out, mate, and I feel for ya. Hope they appreciate what they’re doing, or else you might be going out with some new clubbing friends….

100: Never Forget the Craft.

2005-09-26T10:20:00.000+08:00

Well, post #100. Wow. I missed my 1-year anniversary on blogspot, but I still have this.

Shame to waste it.

On Priority

I’ve always wondered what is it I find most important about blogging. It isn’t the fame (I’m secretly horrified that too many people will know who I am, and I am often horrified when they tell me that they read my blog), or the potential of freedom of speech (I spent several years in USENET, which cured me of wanting that), or the potential advance in technology in the sharing and reporting of views that blogging allows us (as opposed to every technological advance before this?).

There are those who see blogs as a form of personal expression (I do, too). Or a vehicle for a cause. Or a technological wonder. Each of these have their adherents.

The Craft

But then it hit me—it’s not about the technology, or the political, emotional, or cultural freedom. None of that matters to me. It’s respect to the craft.

Come off it, Tariq, you might say. Blogging is hardly an established medium. It’s been around, what, less than a decade? We’re still experimenting!

So what? You don’t blog an entry, do you? You write it. That’s the skill you use, and just because you’re in a newfangled medium changes nothing. The medium isn’t even all that newfangled. It’s sobering to realize that the medium is not at all new—that it owes so much to older, more traditional media.

You’re not just a blogger when you’re writing an entry, you’re a writer. You agonize over word order or sentence structure, and whether your ‘voice’ will hold the reader, or what rhetorical device you can use to get your reader (who may just be yourself) to be interested in you and not just skim through your article out of sheer boredom or confusion.

That’s why I have certain blogs in my list and others I visit infrequently. There’s no point in naming names for blogs that I don’t at all read regularly because they suck at their craft, but there are those whom I read almost all the time.

And why? Because reading them gave me pleasure. Because they were accessible, and when they weren't they were works of art. Or, in this case, craft.

An Issue of Respect.

The blogs I love may not the most popular blogs in the world. They have a dedicated fan-base, but that’s about it. They may not talk about The Latest Hot-Button Topic. They may not even be regular, which the rest of this community treats as a deadly sin.

But that’s it, you see.

If you want to be a good blogger, learn to respect the craft. Technology can compensate for irregularity, rhetorical skill can reduce the ennui of mundanity, and nothing warms cold nights like being cult and not mainstream. But nothing replaces craft. Mastery of the craft may not get you the hits, it might not get you the newspaper articles or interviews, it may not even pay the bills, but it’s priceless for one reason—nothing else replaces it.

Writing, Even For An Audience Of One

Respect your readers, even if the only person who reads this is you and a small group of friends. Or just respect yourself if you don’t have friends.

It isn’t enough to have a clever, rational argument—you’ve got to present it clearly. It isn’t enough to just have a passion for blogging—you’ve got to tighten your rhetorical voice, your cadence. It isn’t enough to be famous—you’ve got to have a balance between introspection and observation.

It doesn’t matter if your subject is mundane or dull; it doesn’t matter that the thing you’re talking about is so far away from the cutting edge people wonder why you’re talking at all.

If you can respect the craft of writing, you’re worth reading.

Screws On It All

Screw freedom of speech. Screw the sharing of ideas. Screw new technology. Screw innovative, revolutionary ideas. Return to the base of it all, and learn the craft.

There are books out there that will help, and web articles—go out and find them, because they’re valuable resources (I'm a fan of William Zinsser myself—his book, On Writing Well, is one of my favourites). Blogging is a tool of communication—learn to communicate!

Because if you haven’t got respect for the fucking craft, what else can there be?

The Blog Meet.

2005-09-25T20:15:00.000+08:00

Did you know, Hani and I nearly missed the blog meet?

Honestly, we thought it was going to be held at the 3rd floor food court. It was fifteen minutes later did we realized that that court wasn’t called Oasis, and we went downstairs.

First impressions.

You know, you can tell when a grouping of bloggers are sitting together. When a bunch of people are huddled together in a food court, not eating but instead just talking about stuff and fondling digital gadgets, you know you’ve got a meeting of bloggers.

But yeah! I got to meet with Peter Tan (he waved at me! OMG! That’s so cool.) And I met Sashi for the first time. Man, he’s skinnier than I expected. Yeah, I guess he does write like a fat guy.

Surreality

Oh, and I met Claire for the first time. Oh, oh, oh, and MENJ, I got to meet MENJ. That particular meet was surreal. See, the guy had apparently waged some kind of covert war thing on me when I first went on this blog. He took it the wrong way and there was some name-calling.

Yeah, it was surreal.

There was this other gir!! She had come from her ballet exam, so she was really sweaty and ~~hot~~ warm! I didn’t have a problem with that at all. Nosir.

So Many People, Cannot Keep Track

And then there were so many people! And two people shoved their recording devices to my face, and interviewed me. That particular bit was weird and scary.

But it was fun! I guess. Wouldn’t mind doing it again. Only, er, next time, can we do it somewhere other than a food court? Oasis had this weird smell, and there were all these people….

Mack, Back The Hell Up

2005-09-16T17:43:00.000+08:00

I mean, really. Just back the hell up.

I don’t disagree with what he says, no, at least the core message—what goodman did was wrong, he shouldn’t be abusing freedom of speech the way he is, if you shit on someone else’s lawn you deserve at very least a tight slap and at the very most legal proceedings.

But the minute he started bringing up Nazis my wank sense started… tingling…!

Mack, here’s what I think you did wrong:

You Broke Godwin’s Law.

Actually, you didn’t; your argument instead matched the observation that is postulated in Godwin’s Law. But that’s not as catchy as saying that you broke it.

Not that you’re not supposed to, mind you—but remember what Godwin’s Law is supposed to do:

[Godwin’s Law]’s memetic function is not to end discussions (or even to classify them as “old”), but to make participants in a discussion more aware of whether a comparison to Nazis or Hitler is appropriate, or is simply a rhetorical overreach.

Your argument was a rhetorical over-reach. The Nazi’s murdered 6 million Jews. Racists in our country have not yet killed anything close to that number. Neither are they in power the way the Nazis were, and neither did they dominate the nations the Aryans did.

The Nazis are semiotic poison. Unless the groups that are being compared to them bear more than just a passing resemblence to Nazis and Naziism, or are as virulent as the Nazis, avoid using them in comparisons.

You Went For the Groin.

Seriously. While ad-hominem attacks are generally de rigueur in situations like this, implying that goodman’s arguments are the results of insanity diminishes the whole edifice of people who do have a grieviance, however imagined, against Malays.

I’m Malay, with Chinese, Javanese and Indian blood in my veins. I can’t claim to be as rojak as you, but you do know that non-Malays have a legitimate grieviance.

And, to top it off, you called him a pathological liar. That’s wank material there.

So You're Getting Fucking Persecuted.

2005-09-15T23:17:00.000+08:00

There was once a time when Jeff called me contrarian¹. I was flattered²! And then people forgot forgot me and I had to abandon my plan to make money of blogging, and instead get a real actual job. That sorta sucks.

Serves me right for not being regular. I wonder if bloggers have their own kind of bran.

Anyway! Enough reminiscing. We’re here to talk about the Freedom of Speech!

Getting Started / Get Retarded

Yes, it’s a post referencing that event!

First off. It’s interesting to note that while there’s a lot of reacting to what happened in the news, I didn’t actually see what those two forumgoers posted, so I have no idea if what they said was racist or not.

Secondly, assuming, of course, that the statements made by the two defendants were actually racist in nature, then all I’ve got to say, again, assuming that what they said was racist, is that those they had it coming.

Being Harsh On The Ones You Love Mildly Dislike

I’ve never been very kind to my fellow bloggers. I’ve heckled them, mocked them, belittled them and, in general, challenged them to actually prove that what they say is important in the general scheme of things.

My argument is that blogs are intrinsicly uninteresting—dull, even plebian and horrible at times. You get what you pay for in terms of low cost of ownership, and sometimes you may get overcharged.

Quality Oxymorons

Nothing gives you the right to be important, least of all being a blogger. Most of us will be trapped in the personal limbo of being uninteresting to all but the closest and most obsessive of our readership, while a select few will get to be the next Kottke or Ooi, or whoever it is that is popular.

While being read and respected by thousands is nice, it certainly helps to realize that while Jeff gets another fucking award from yet another international organization and Kottke gets his six billionth reader, you and I will be filling up what we can charitably call Sturgeon’s Bottom Ninety Percent.

If you’re still dreaming about making it to the big-time by blogging, get over it.

That ‘Fundamental Right’

And then there’s the ‘fundamental inalieable right to Free Speech’. While many people focus on the right to say whatever you like without fear of censorship, I say “bullshit”.

Freedom of Speech means freedom of living to the consequences of what you say. While you can say what you like online, you’re never, never free from consequence.

The government may not be able to do a thing to you⁴, but that doesn’t mean that what you say can’t get you fired, or get you verbally slapped around like a two-buck whore online, or cause your friends or lovers to leave you.

Welcome To The Land of Shut The Fuck Up

And so you do and must censor yourself. You think to yourself, “Can I say this? Is this right?” before posting your vitriol across the public wire. Of course you must. Being free to speak doesn’t mean you are free from being told, in very firm words, to be quiet.

As a matter of fact, as a Citizen of the Internet, you are allowed to speak whatever you like. Freedom to speak doesn’t mean that you must be listened or that your words deserve immortality. You are free to speak. What happens next is not up to you.

And frankly, like religious bigotry and outright stupidity, racism is hardly a defensible thing. You want to get in trouble, get in trouble by yourself. I’m not defending you, not because I do not care about free speech, but I have better time defending the right to the free speech of others who are more deserving.

Footnotes

¹ And my work eloquently-crafted, but I’m a crafty bugger, and I can spot a backhanded compliment a mile away!

² And yes, I know what it means! It means he thinks I’m on crack³!

³ Do not deny it, you crafty old bastard! You know it in your bones to be true!

⁴ But it can, and did. Oh dearie me. That’s so unfair! Whatever shall you do?

Rememberance.

2005-09-12T20:18:00.000+08:00

Pick Yin did this, and she tagged me. I had an odd time doing this, really. I haven’t thought about my childhood much, much less talked about it to anyone here.

But anyway, here it is.

1985: 20 years ago.

My earliest memory. I am in my grandmother’s house. It is late morning. I am walking in, and I see the family dining table. I see old photos, medals, rememberances. The floor is terazzo.

My grandfather calls to me, calling me by a name no one else uses: “Muhammad Tariq”. He is a jolly fat mamak man, who dotes on me and spoils me.

I have a younger brother, just two years old. He is chubby and cute, and I bully him often, as older brothers do.

I love the television; often too much, as I often stand in front of it, blocking everyone else’s view. It’s a bad habit I will eventually abandon.

I start kindergarten this year. My first day, and I see a beautiful, blond-haired fair-skinned girl and fall in love with her, thus setting a rather unfortunate trend on my relationships with the opposite sex.

The only times I will ever feel this way again will happen after harsh bouts of illness, when I am young and fragile again, and the world feels fresh and renewed.

I am 4 years old.

1995: 10 years ago.

I am a Cempakan, and I hate it here. It’s probably the hormones, and some of the isolation. I don’t feel like I belong here.

I have seen death visit twice; once to take my baby sister away after seven months of life, the second time to take my grandfather away.

I have another baby sister. She is 4 years old. After the death of my late sister, she comes into the family like tinkle bells and the spring breeze. Everyone loves her.

I have established a reputation of being an underachieving social outcast. I am often lonely and frustrated. My parents note how angry I often seem to be.

My brother is now taller than I am. He seems more popular as well. We don’t get along too well.

If Simple Plan was popular, and if I cared about music, I would have been their biggest fan.

I discover the Internet, and at almsot the same breath, thanks to the article in Time, easy access to pornography. Really easy. A love-hate relationship begins.

I am 14 years old.

2000: 5 years ago.

I am in INTI College Subang Jaya, which, after Cempaka, is a welcome change. I lose some of the rage, but the loneliness remains. A string of stalky “relationships” begins.

I move from my house in Ampang to a place in Petaling Jaya. At least we don’t have to wake up at bloody daybreak to get anywhere now.

I discover Half Life and Counter-Strike. I am not as good as I used to be, back in the days of Quake Multiplayer. But I have fun for quite a long while.

Not knowing what to do, one of the women I… well, ‘stalk’, gets the help of one of her more confident and aggresive friends to either scare me off or distract me. We start dating.

My parents aren’t exactly pleased; having had no experience in dating or what to do or behave, I screw up introducing her, among other things. The mistake takes years to rectify.

I am 19 years old.

2002: 3 years ago.

I have been in London barely four months, and my girlfriend calls and shatters my world. I don’t recover for a long time, but the aftermath leaves us stronger.

I have really long hair now. It reaches below my shoulder, and is the envy of hippies all around.

I’m beginning to doubt what I want to do for the rest of my life. Programming and computing science doesn’t seem as attractive as it used to.

Homesickness takes its toll. I’m beginning to realize, outcast that I believed I was, nothing compared to the sense of alienation I felt when I am alone here.

The isolation, doubt, and homesickness eventually will cost me my degree here.

Thanks to the urging of my friends, I begin blogging here. It was for friends, and was very sporadic. It will eventually die from lack of support, and a few HTML comments-based bugs.

I am 21 years old.

2004: Last year.

I come back, after two years of trying. Sometimes people need to go away to realize what they’ve already got.

I start a LiveJournal, mainly to keep in touch with friends who use this service.

Why Are You Here? comes to life. It doesn’t get at all regularly updated, disappointing people for some damn reason.

This is a time of relearning—I re-enrol to HELP and major in Business Information Systems. I begin feeling some degree of reverse culture shock, which is a shock in itself.

Hani and I spend more time together, getting a feel of each other after two years of no physical presence. She introduces me to bloggers. I get along great with a some of them.

I do something I’ve always fantasized about, but thought I’d never do. It’s fun, but exposes me to feelings that I never thought I’d feel from doing it. A couple more incidents like it, and that’s it.

My first birthday at home in two years is held in a Swedish Pizza parlor.

I am 23 years old.

2005: This year.

I graduate this year, with Second Class Upper Honours. My parents are understandably very proud. So is Hani.

I start looking for work, and I eventually find it. It’s a change from being a student.

I break the news to my parents, who are understandably upset and taken aback by my decision. Much negotiating begins, and the rest of my family becomes privy to something I have kept secret for almost half a decade.

My sister grinned and gave me the thumbs-up when she found out I had done the deed.

I call my brother, who is in Australia. We both talk. He expresses concern, and asks me if I think it’s a good idea. I say it is. He wishes me good luck.

I’m looking forward to Christmas.

I am 24 years old.

2006: Next year.

Performance Review Time. I get past that particular hurdle, and another stage of my life begins.

Another major event the middle of this year. It’s a frightening prospect, but I look forward to it. Probably more than some people, though…

I am 25 years old.

2015: Ten years from now.

“Daddy, what are you thinking about?”

Oh, nothing, kiddo.

Well, that’s that. So now, I’m tagging…

Hani (which she’s done, but not on her blog).
Jordan (he done been tagged)
Ash
Jay
~~Sashi~~ Well, he did it already.

And, for the hell of it, these people:

Rajan (or, once you read what he's written, “My Descent Into Alcoholism, Drug Addiction, and Eventual Starvation”.
MENJ
Aminuddin.

Feel free to take it up, if you’d like. It’s a free-ish country.

I Respectfully Request For: Yet Another Blogger's Manifesto

2005-09-07T08:26:00.000+08:00

Hey, a call for a manifesto! Sounds like fun; I think I’ll do one!

The Malaysian blogging community is, while not very large, very active and quite diverse. You get all sorts of people, from generally one walk of life—the well-educated English-speaking people who can afford semi-regular access to the Internet¹.

Anyway, as a Malaysian blogger and well-known small fish, here’s my manifesto. Feel free to steal and modify it; I’m releasing it to the public domain.

I Respectfully Request For…

The Freedom of Speech and Consequence.

Anyone and everyone has something important to say, at the very least in his eyes. While being allowed to speak whatever and whenever is one facet for this, so is the right for other people to slap you in the face for being an ass.

The Right To Control Our Medium.

What about those bastards in those comments, then? Should we just empower them to spew their hate-filled vitriol, or worse still, their advertisements for Viagra and casinos?

No. Emphatically so. While the space you own on your blog may be free, it doesn’t give others the right to come in and shit on your lawn. If we want to screen comments, let us screen comments. If we want to use CAPTCHAs in our comments system, inconveniencing others and spammers, well, I guess we’ll have them whether you like it or not. If we want to have no comments in our blogs, then no comments it is. Stop whining.

The Right To Perspective And Humility.

We aren’t new newest and greatest experiment in journalism and democracy. We’re not even real journalists. Big Media is not, despite all appearances, all-evil and should be replaced by a cadre of a bloggers.

Don’t be stupid. We’re poorer, less accountable and not at all edited. EPIC 2014 will never happen, because there is a market for reputable, vetted news. There will always be a market for somewhat trustworthy bastards. And no, we’re not even near trustworthy. If that pisses you off, at least know that we're quite good at being bastards.

We’d like to be judged at this standard, please. Please stop looking at us like we’re the new Nanyang Siang Pau. The people in Nanyang Siang Pau get paid to do more shit than we’d ever bother doing³.

The Freedom of Diversity.

No, I don’t mean diversity of opinion, or language, or culture. We’re very diverse, opinion, language or culture-wise. That’s not the problem.

Diversity in medium is our problem.

Face it. When you’re a blogger, you tend to be:

A journoblog, scavenging news link and providing commentary, or not.
A personal blog, all ranting and opinion and precious little else.
Kahsoon.
A mix of all three.
Other.

It’s the size of “Other” that’s so bothersome. Funny enough, a lot of it can be pretty brilliant.

Shame there’s so little of it.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I think so. Name me one who isn’t well-educated, rich enough to afford Internet access or fairly proficient English²

² Well, okay, maybe not the last one.

³ Unless you’re Jeff Ooi. Come to think of it, where does he get all that free time anyway?

Addendum (2:33 PM KL Time): After a string of rather suspect comments, have decided to test that whole CAPTCHA system. I wonder how well it works. Apologies for those inconvenienced!

Because It Needs To Be Done.

2005-09-02T12:48:00.000+08:00

When it comes to the battle between traditional mass media and bloggers, I don’t usually take either side. I still don’t; both are sleazy and stupid in their own ways, and I don’t feel like I need to comment about their foibles any more.

But I need to link you to this.

Why? Three reasons:

It’s on LiveJournal, a service typically associated with angsty diarists and fen who write all sorts of crap. I happen to like LJ, so having this happen on it is something that pleases me. The service doesn’t matter, only the content.
It’s an important news item. It needs to be seen, it needs to be told.
It’s being written by the people who are there. You'll never get better coverage than this; and from people who have a stake at it, not some armchair wanker like me or slick media pirate.

Go. Now.

Hey, You Malays!

2005-08-18T21:06:00.000+08:00

Did you guys see the PETRONAS ad that was aired on TV3, just after the news?

You know who made that? My dad. I know, it's disgraceful how gleefully proud I am right now.

The ironic part is that I have, for quite a while, wanted to talk about the state of my own ethnicity, what with calls to bring back ~~Bumi-centric favoritism~~ affirmative action and our kris-waving ~~demagogues~~ leaders….

And I was beaten to the punch by my dad! Sure, even he admits that the ad was “preachy” (I think it's a little cheesy myself), but hee hee hee! What a message!

“It's better to step forwards than to take a step back”? How's that for a kick in the nuts, you fuckers?

Hee hee hee. I've been pwned rather comprehensively by my own father. That's not the unusual part, no sir — what's unusual is that I'm quite enjoying it.

How's that for a kick in the nuts, haa? Heh.

Now Even The Man Can Blog

2005-07-27T11:26:00.000+08:00

This was inspired from this from this post at Jeff's:

Hey, Jeff, I think what Mahathir needs is a blog!. You think you can help him create one that he can administer and run and of course write all his comments and of course we shall have a link to it from your blog. And then we can all talk directly to Mahathir. Might perk him up a bit and I think it will be really good for his health too.

Excuse me while I giggle madly. The Mahathir Blog!

While our local politicians blogging is about as likely as me winning the next General Elections single-handedly and blindfolded, here are some considerations to future politician-bloggers:

Make an effort to post on a regular basis. Either learn the tools yourself, or dictate it to someone, but whatever you do, you must do it yourself.
Spend some time track-backing. It would be considered ‘interacting with the Malaysian blogosphere’. You may not have time, in your busy schedule, but it's not something an enthusiastic research aide will do. Be sure to vet each link before you go — the last thing you need is a link to Something Objectionable.
Get your own provider. While Blogger is good for plebians like us, famous people like you will require a medium that can provide an effective spam-fighting platform and yet be accessible enough to be interacted with. We recommend Wordpress, ourselves.
Want to post something private and personal? I recommend LiveJournal. Not only will your entries be relatively safe, but there is a rich community that you might enjoy. Invite other fellow politicians and statesmen, and form a community! Squee at the latest Larry King episode, or whatever it is you old fogeys do to pass the time.
Oh, and when you do get your own hosting solution or whatever, make sure to either register it yourself, or get someone with a clear and visible link to you to do so. Leave clear communications details, so that people can communicate with you if they whois you. Make sure that you're able to prove that you are who you are.

That's about it. Good luck with your foray into the horrid morass that is blogdom!

JK Rowling and the HP Fans.

2005-07-17T19:17:00.000+08:00

We bought two copies of the book; the ‘adult’ edition for this house, and the ‘children’'s edition for my mother's place in Bangkok.

Yes, cost a fortune. Yes, it was worth it, because my sister and I could read it and not squabble over it.

My sister and I have finished reading the books. Took me about 12 hours, but I took breaks, unlike a certain fellow blogger, who did 7 hours of non-stop swotting.

Can't say I'm too upset by the death of the major character. For one thing, we already knew she was going to do it again, after book five. No big deal.

Okay, granted I was hoping the feller would come back to life again, but that would have been cheap. So I guess that's that.

Mildly disappointed by the Judas, though. It seemed so obvious, hindsight, but I didn't exactly want to believe.

Oh well. Looks like Book 7 will be interesting.

Mind you, the whole series is beginning to get the feel of a teen movie. Which sucks, because I hate teen movies.

The Joy of Disconnection.

2005-07-17T02:47:00.000+08:00

I blog.

I could say, “I'm a blogger” and that's true too, but I'm also a son, a brother, a co-worker, a lover and a friend. I'm all of these things, but not completely any of these things. I have parents and siblings; I work with people; I love someone; and I am glad to call a number of people my friends.

But I blog. This everyone knows. And I've been blogging regularly for the past… while. I don't keep track.

The Hollowness of Being A Computing Student.

It's uncomfortable. I don't mind admitting this, and since I've already my made my confessions about the veracity of my statements on this medium, I don't need to enlighten you about the truth in this statement. But yes, I find the notion that I've returned to regular blogging to be… uncomfortable.

I was trained in Computing Science, and I graduated with a degree in Business Information Systems. Before beginning my training, I was obsessed with computers — so much so that my father had to enforce what seemed, at that time, punitive measures against me abusing my time on the computer. I was a computer geek, as anyone could have seen, and everyone knew I wanted to work with computers when I left secondary school.

Several years of feeling like I was being trained for nothing but computer and software repair, and I've somewhat revised my view. Part of it stemmed from the fact that Malaysian tertiary education, frankly, is terrible; it was outdated, slow, old-fashioned and tedious, and I did not feel what my parents described as being educated and illuminated; only the sinking suspicion that I was merely being trained.

Post Coitum Omne Animal Tristis Est

It always felt like I was missing something, even though I felt overwhelmed at the new things that were being crammed in my head. Useful things, no doubt, but like a person who spent his life anticipating and desiring something, and, after having done it, realizing that it was not as spectacular as I had imagined it, I realized that I wanted something more than this.

So I changed my mode of study, and eschewed computers. When I unplug myself, either voluntarily or by the cruel sisters, Fate, Line Quality and Crappy Customer Service, I did not experience the panic or the emptiness most bloggers I know seem to describe. I felt… free.

Without the Internet, I found I could do more; not because of the materials I had, but because of the lack of distraction.

Any Choice But The Choice of Walking Away.

Like a man who loses extensive, infintely useful toolbox, and was left with naught but a pen-knife, I realized I could do more with a penknife than I could imagine, simply because my choices became clear.

But that hasn't happened of late; mainly because I haven't had the chance. When I work, I am, by necessity, connected to the Internet. When I am home, out of a desire to distract myself and unwind, I find myself on the Internet. The only times when I'm not wired is when I'm with friends, or family, or by myself, away from the umbillical cord that connects me to the big Wide Wired World.

I'm missing that clarity. I want it back.

(post inspired by this).

Completely Missing The Point

2005-07-16T14:55:00.000+08:00

I'm not going to deny that 100,000 people died in Iraq. Let's not fudge the issue, okay? Iraq's a fucking mess, and it shouldn't have happened at all.

We Know, Already.

I'm not going to even quibble about the scale of death that's happened in what we all facetiously call the ‘civilized world’, compared to the death we see in, oh, I don't know, Iraq, Israel, the ten thousand military hot spots around the world where life is very expensive but hot fiery death is free and more often than not comes jumbo–sized for the whole family. Because it's true.

It's true that more people die in these places, and that the climate has been so soaked in death and misery that the only sane response to people who live there is to throw their lives into the furnace, and feed the flames. Yes, it's fucking insane and it's fucking tragic.

The “Yes, Massa” Reflex.

And yes, let us not forget how sucky it can be to be on the losing side of history. Let us rekindle our grudges against our Great Western Former Masters and repeat the same old story about how we always invariably get the shaft. Look, our anuses are sore already, but feel free to fuck us with your Great White Dick, O Gweilo, it's not as if we can stop you anyway.

Whenever someone brings up those numbers, and starts whining about how it's all the West's fault, I roll my eyes. Any more rolling and I'll look like an epileptic, but that's what I do nowadays. Because that's what it is, whining.

Stupidity, 70% Off

Stopping terrorism isn't easy. It's never easy, because it means not doing the stupid and cheap thing and packing as much explosives as you can conceal, getting into public transportation, and blowing the shit out of your fellow citizens. Or sitting down on your ass and calling the Other Dude “barbarians”.

It means not looking at your enemy like he is Satan, Dajjal, Safari-Hat Dude with Pipe and Goliath and deciding, “Hey, he doesn't want to listen to us. He'll never listen to us, because he's That Way”, thus exalting his power and debasing his humanity. Because exalting someone's power and debasing his humanity is the cheap way of doing things, and stupid, because the only thing that'll come out of it is more dead people, and possibly a dead you.

No Thinking, Act Only?

So yeah. Talk about Western Imperialism. Never realize that you know, for once in our long and sordid history as a people, a race, a religion, these people are offering a hand in friendship and trying to listen. They're polite enough to not convert you first up; they can try that later, and if we're strong and secure enough in our faith and culture we can say no.

Sit on your ass and whine. Or plot to kill more people to fuck them up so that they can fuck us up and continue the cycle. Don't think, or listen. Don't stop, and don't listen to these people, these barbarians. Ironically, in calling them barbarians, we repeat the same mistake they did, long ago — the mistake of not listening, of thinking we know how they will think and act, the way their great-great grandfathers were certain of what we were and what we were capable of and what was good for us.

They're paying for it now, in terrorism and death. I wonder what the bill for our foolishness and arrogance will look like.

More Kudos To Where It Belongs.

2005-07-15T21:11:00.000+08:00

I wanted to blog about Aizuddin and his Petaling Street, but reading this was more pleasurable to read than fantasizing about running Aizuddin over with a bus.

It's a nice blog. And another Londoner.

Shit, Tariq, are you missing that wet and depressing hell-hole¹?

Well it was. The people are great — well, apart from what seemed like an alcohol dependency to having fun — but I wouldn't be able to stand living there for at least another half-decade.

Thoughts on Project Petaling Street.

2005-07-14T00:02:00.000+08:00

Looks like spam in PPS is making an appearance, and people are noticing.

I've got a few things to say, and not all of them are nice.

The Vikings are already inside the café.

If that particular ping is spam, it's spam, and it'd be best if we assume that the horse has been let out of the stable. It might not have happened already, but let's assume it has, and thus act proactively to stop it.

No, I don't mean lynching the buggers who are responsible for this. Wouldn't that be nice? Gruesome, but nice.

No, don't panic either. It's not the end of Petaling Street. Geez, get a grip, people.

Rethinking Petaling Street.

Aizuddin Danian is a great many things to a lot of people. I don't exactly like or hate him; I've never met him, though Hani has, and hasn't got a bad thing to say about him. I've heard people slagging him off, but who hasn't? Femes blogger syndrome, what did you expect?

Petaling Street, for lack of a better term, is the centre of the huge, messy megacollaborative gestalt that is Malaysian blogging (I think I just out poyo-ed ‘blogosphere’… quick, someone get the Poseur Police!). It wouldn't have been so coherent, so focused for so long without PPS. Face facts, ladies and gentlemen. PPS is our NEP.

It's Here and You Use It.

No, no, don't laugh. Seriously. Without it Malaysian bloggers would've been forced to assimilate themselves into the global blogging community. Instead of one megacommunity we'd have dozens of small communities interacting with Everyone Else and getting blown around by External Forces, oblivious to our fellow countrymen.

We're still dozens of small communities, but at least we're talking with one another on a regular basis.

And frankly I like it. Kinda. I can leech off the careers of bloggers who have made it good and use it to enchance my readership (hey, I just admitted to being a faker last post). And others can do so as well. Most of the time we know when a Malaysian blogger posts something — they usually post, and then ping.

And that may be threatened, not by the forces of globalization, but by spam.

Wait, that is a force of globalization. Nevermind then.

The Future of PPS

But the issue is that PPS is kinda sorta under attack. Well, not yet. Probably. Let's not just over-focus on trying to warn people not to give up their ping addresses. Like I said, too late. Let's start looking at ways in which we can solve this issue — not reactively, but proactively. Perhaps a way to get community members to determine which post is spam and which post isn't? Or something simple (theoretically; I understand that it's pretty damn difficult to implement) as a Bayesian filter?

Then there's the issue of who owns Petaling Street. Aiz does, there's no question. Is that a good thing? I mean, not to diss you or anything, Aiz, but what if you got run over by a bus? PPS dying with you… would really suck.

It's not at all related to spam in PPS, but it's worth thinking about.

Your Life Was Never Your Own

2005-07-12T23:11:00.000+08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I announce to you all that I am a faker.

A fraud. A prevaricator. Someone who projects a face across an impersonal medium. A charlatan, a poseur; One Who Is Not Truly Himself.

My admission of guilt, and horrible guilt it is, comes from the realization that I have never been true to myself on this blog. I have never been true to myself, and will never be true to myself; not here.

You want to know the shocking thing? I never meant it to be in the first place.

Oh, you look at poor Minishorts, and her wondering where her private space went. Or to mrbrown, who posted something about how potential employers now use blogs as an assessment tools. Oh, woe! Where hath the blog, the private space where we pour our hearts, gone?

It was never there, children. You just pretended that it existed, when in truth all the world did was pretend that your little place didn't, and ignored you.

But that's not true any more, is it?

You ever wonder why Jeff never talks about his life? Or why all Mack does is talk about the actions of others, only representing himself as a detached observer, even in the most poignant of moments?

That's because they know, kiddies. Tie yourself to your blog and you tie yourself to a potential anchor.

I had to learn the lesson kinda the hard way, but I learnt it, as all bloggers eventually do. But instead of mourning the loss of a private den to kvetch away, I made my own.

It lives in a little place called LiveJournal — a placed scorned by many of the cognoscetti of the Digital Realm. It's a place of losers, they cry. Emo boys and goth girls writing shit poetry and whining about how dire their jobs in Hot Topic are! No self-respecting entity goes there! Even Google avoids it!

Exactly. And LJ provides the technological tools to limit participation and viewership. Notice how I never, ever talk about my opinions about my workplace and my colleagues. Where do you think it goes? Go ahead and take a look, you won't find anything incriminating apart from extremely fanboyish stuff.

Unless I trusted you.

Bloggers, do not mourn. You want a private space? Find one. Make one. Make an effort at it. Get your friends, people you trust to join the service if you want to spill your heart to them occasionally. Whatever.

Don't come whining to us about how hard it is to keep your private life, well, private.

Of course it isn't private. You fucking blog it.

Because, Frankly, I'm Curious.

2005-07-09T14:36:00.000+08:00

(from here, here and here)

Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Yang.

That's it.

YALAP

2005-07-09T08:36:00.000+08:00

I was disembarking at Heathrow the day New York burned.

I was in London to continue my studies in the final year, and I had my parents and my sister accompanying me — sending me off, they said, and let my sister see the city they called home for four years or so. Our first indication that there was something foul afoot in New York was this old lady behind us, who said that there was terrible news — someone had blown up the Empire State Building!

We thought she was nuts.

Four years, one failed and one successful attempt in getting a degree later, and I'm in Malaysia, on my way home from work, when the news breaks. Someone's blown up London.

It was terrifying. I really hate to admit this, but for two years, London was home to me. A wet, miserable, overpriced-but-grotty (I lived in North-East London, which explains everything) home, but home. I remembered my time there — not too many pleasant memories, but I made friends there.

Jennifer and I were close buddies, when I was in London. She drank like a fish, and thought me the differences between whiskey and whisky, between Americans and the yankees. She was from the South; I was from KL. She was a Republican, and thought Bush was doing the right thing. I was (and still am) a liberal, and thought Bush was a sub-sapient idiot.

We got along fine. And here I was, trying to call her.

She was the only person I kept in touch with after leaving London. But she wasn't the only one I remember. There was Socrates, my landlord — a sleazy Greek guy, but good and relatively honest. Adonis the kosher deli owner, at Oakwood. I don't think he knew I was Muslim; he just thought I was some crazy Asian guy who came in for the salt beef sandwiches he made (and they were great, I swear). Stratos, who shared the house with Gemma and I for six months, and probably going through London's gay population, making both me and Gemma somewhat jealous. He got more action than we both did, combined.

For two years, I lived in London, half-afraid of telling the world I was Muslim, not after what happened in New York, and the backlash. I shouldn't have worried, not after the way London's religious communities stood together after the attack. You only learn these things in hindsight, I suppose.

I remember falling down the stairs and smashing my arm through a glass door — and being rushed to the hospital, which was understaffed, and overcrowded. I remember the doctor looking at my wound and asking if I needed more local anaesthetic. I said, no, I was fine. I still have the scars. I remember Gemma wanting to scold me for using her bath rag to wipe tomato juice, until she found out it wasn't tomato juice, and didn't seem to mind when I apologized for bleeding over her coat.

Poor Gemma. I don't have her number, but I hope she's all right.

In some ways I'm proud of London, for what they're doing. I'm proud of what Ken Livingstone said, that this wasn't an attack towards the rich and powerful, but an assault on the working-class. I'm proud that London didn't flip out and lose it. I had forgotten that it had survived the Blitz and bombings in the IRA. I suppose flipping out is the American thing to do.

It's all in hindsight, but I'm glad I lived in London. And as sad and upset I am about the attacks, I'm happy to see that Londoners are coming together, not apart, after the attacks.

I don't need to talk about the people who were responsible for this. We know what they are. We know what they want. I sincerely doubt they'll get it. Their kind will be dead in a hundred years, and very possibly forgotten. They're monsters. Monsters and demons come and go.

People stay.

I Guess I Do Have Something To Say.

2005-07-07T21:23:00.000+08:00

It's still unsubstantiated, but I guess it's made me want to say something about it.

From here:

“The Secret Organization Group of Al-Qa'idah of Jihad Organization in Europe (Jama'at al-Tanzim al-Sirri, Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Urupa)

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and the dauntless fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters.

We have repeatedly warned the British government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahidin exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused.

God says: ‘(O ye who believe!) If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly.’”

All you've done is made me feel ashamed for my fellow Muslims.

Fuck you, you beasts in man's flesh. Fuck you.

07/07/2005

2005-07-07T20:35:00.000+08:00

I've spoken all I want to about this here.

Now Is The Time For Tea!

2005-07-07T12:32:00.000+08:00

No more ill-advised and barely-researched posts that were done while waiting for the bog to clear up¹! Enough Interacting With The Community, it's getting boring already. Break time!

More kudos! Found this one, it's a gem. We likes it. Enough to put him into our feed-reader, yes.

Go visit. Mmmm, it's good. Nice blogging.

Footnote:

Well, it did take a while.

More Slagging Off Mister Sia!

2005-07-06T21:02:00.000+08:00

…alah, not really lah. Kesian the poor bugger.

Actually, the whole brouhaha started from this one snippet:

We talked about the Singaporean blog culture, the upcoming Blogger's convention, the commercial aspect of blogging, among other things. One thing I realised from our conversation is how much more mature and serious the blog culture is in Singapore compared to the rest of Asia. Its evident from the facts. Mr brown, Miyagi are writing for Today; Wendy is writing for The New Paper, Maxim, endorsing LocalBrand; and most interestingly, commercial entities are APPROACHING the Bloggercon organizers for sponsorship, instead of the other way round.

All these are happening while Malaysian bloggers are still gloating over how they got their first cheques from Google Adsense.

Aduh, zing! And then suddenly all these people hentam him for being traitor to Malaysian bloggokind. Oh noes! What to do?

Actually, Kenny has a point.

He's got a point when he says that Singaporean bloggers and Malaysian bloggers are different. Of course they are — there's a slew of differences between Malaysian and Singaporean culture that are remarkably evident, especially if you cross the Straits. There's nothing mysterious about that.

What Kenny flubs in his explanation is in his use of the word “mature”. You know, for a Big Name Blogger he sure made a poor choice in using that word.

Malaysian blogging aren't less mature than Singapore blogging — what Singapore blogging is that Malaysian blogging isn't is mainstream.

A medium's maturity isn't defined by how easily mainstream culture absorbs it. Examples that come to mind, at least for me, include comics (when don't they, when it comes to me talking about media?).

Comics enjoyed this remarkable spike in popularity in the popular conscience, way back in the early 20th century, with the works of Winsor McCay actually gracing the pages of newspapers, not in the strangled comic-strip syndication deals we get nowadays, but as full-blown works of art, as a feature.

Look at McCay's works, and compare it to Singapore bloggers writing appearing in print publications, and the wooing of bloggers by Singapore mainstream media. There are a few differences (McCay engaged with the news media as as himself, and not in their own terms), but the similarities are there, and can be made into pretty good comparisons.

But were comics in the early 20th century considered “mature” media? Hardly. That period showed an incredible proliferation of two kinds of work — experimental works ala Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, and imitatory works, ala Batman, Superman, and other early superhero works.

Seriously. Early Batman comics, for example, were straight (somewhat) translations of traditional detective fiction — the only difference being that the detective in this case wore spandex. Superman was modeled after mythical heroes, and its tales were straightforward morality plays that appealed to pulp fiction fans, who more often than made up the new audience for comic readers.

It's the same kind of tale for other kinds of media as well — early stories were more often than not transcribings of oral tales, early prose fiction were essentially epic poems forced into sequential text, early computer game efforts resembled board games and serious literature.

And ‘early blogs’ resemble… what? Diaries, made online? Editorials, made online? Journalistic pieces, made online? Academic dissertations, simplified and made online? Ranting, made online?

Dude, blogs and blog culture are nowhere near mature. I suspect, at any rate, that blogs and blog culture anywhere won't start becoming mature until years from now, when people finally know what to do with blogs and what blogs are best at, the way people know what to do with comics and what comics are good at.

Until then, wait with bated breath.

Addendum: Hmm. Pinging both Kenny's and Paul's blog nets me with a big fat zero. Pages won't update.

…hmm. Oh well. Their loss. I've got better things to do with my life. And besides, Hani wants my attention now.

The Bystander Effect.

2005-07-05T23:45:00.000+08:00

There's been a lot of moralizing lately about the bystander effect. That the thing that causes large groups of people to… well, become bystanders.

I won't join my fellow bloggers in lament, thanks. Done to the death (pun not intended). Why not look at the problem instead?

“The bystander effect (also known as bystander apathy) is a psychological phenomenon where persons are less likely to intervene in an emergency situation when others are present than when they are alone.

Solitary individuals will typically intervene if another person is in need of help: this is known as bystander intervention. However, researchers were surprised to find that help is less likely to be given if more people are present. In some situations, a large group of bystanders may fail to help a person who obviously needs help.”

Fucked up, kan? Turns out it's something that happens a lot, nowadays, especially once we move into the disconnected po–industrial society we live in. We've had it since the murder of Kitty Genovese, and we'll continue having it. It's been studied extensively, and all that, and now we may know why….

“…with others present, observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so they each individually refrain from doing so…

People may also assume that other bystanders may be more qualified to help, such as being a doctor or police officer, and their intervention would thus be unneeded. People may also fear ‘losing face’ in front of the other bystanders, being superseded by a ‘superior’ helper, or offering unwanted assistance.

Another explanation is that bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Since others are doing exactly the same, everyone concludes from the inaction of others that other people do not think that help is needed…”

The good news is, however, that it might be possible to counter this effect, by

“…picking a specific person in the crowd to appeal to for help rather than appealing to the larger group generally. [Doing so] places all responsibility on that specific person, instead of allowing it to diffuse… [it may also show] that all bystanders are indeed interested in helping; and it kicks in social proof when one or more of the crowd steps in to assist.”

Here's hoping you may never need to do this, but if you do find yourself in trouble and surrounded by a crowd of rubber–necking idiots, the best thing you can do is pick out someone, and appeal to them, not the crowd in general.

Hey, I suppose it's risky, but in some cases there ain't much else you can do….

Maybe what we need are victim classes, in which ways to break that apathy barrier are thought. Hmm.

And This is Surprising How?

2005-07-05T18:58:00.000+08:00

Got this from a typical Malaysian, apparently:

KUALA LUMPUR, July 4 (Bernama) — Information Minister Datuk Seri Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadzir has acknowledged difficulty in getting government messages across to the people because the public was more interested in entertainment matters.

He said the ministry's budget was increased every year but the messages it delivered lacked impact.

“Although the role of departments and agencies under the ministry appears comprehensive, there are still many people who have little understanding of issues and problems that are reported.

“This has resulted in the public often questioning and not supporting government policies,” he said at a briefing conducted by the ministry for Barisan Nasional Members of Parliament here Monday.

Ministry Secretary–General Datuk Seri Dr Arshad Hashim, in his briefing, said RTM faced tough competition on dissemination of information from VCDs and the internet.

He said the problem was compounded by the popularity in using SMS to convey information.

The Malaysian Government having a hard time trying to get their messages to the rakyat? Quelle Surprise! No, really? Wow, who'd have thunk?

It's amusing to see. How many of you feel as if you are working with the government, instead of working around or against it? Is it our fault that we perceive the government to be obscurantist, obstinate, dangerously mercurial and mostly irrational?

And we have high–ranking executive officers of the Law of the Land wondering why we won't listen to them — why, whenever they say something, they're met with indifferent silence or protest, protest, protest.

Well, the protesters are the newbies, the idealists — they're protesting because they don't know any better. The silent ones aren't silent because we're happy with what we're told — I don't think so. It's just that we've learnt, through trial and painful error, to not listen and work out ways to do what we want.

No one wants to listen to crap they don't have a stake in. Apart from the obvious, essential thing like Law and Order, and food, utilities and shelter, I don't think we really don't care what the government does, simply because no matter what is done, I'm pretty sure the rakyat don't get to give any kind of input, apart from the token, “speaking to the rakyat” kind of deal. Say what you want about policy, morality, religion or whatever.

No one pays attention because so few people have a say in this.

Contrast this with, say, Akademi Fantasia. With Akademi Fantasia, who wins, essentially, boils down to ~~how many idiots can vote for Mawi~~ how many people will vote for your favourite ~~character grinning nitwit helpless pawn of Corporate Malaysiana~~ artiste. It doesn't matter if the judges call ~~Mas~~ your favourite artiste a talentless nincompoop! You just vote ~~like a fucking lunatic~~ and your artiste will win! ~~And be subjected to hilariously stupid advertising deals!~~

That, ladies and gentlemen, is ~~mob rule~~ democracy in action. If only the government could do something like this. Combine the dreaded SMS, villain of every governmental agency ~~and washed-up and/or budding music superstar,~~ with governmental policy, and watch people (at least some of us at any rate) take an interest.

Imagine! Proceedings of Dewan Rakyat, televised with live chat, with the requisite “MP PERMATANG PAUH POYO!!!!11” messages! SMS votes on the news, not only about important yet incredibly brain-damaged policy decisions, but also if Sharizat should continue talking to Rafidah, who's dissed her on ‘confession hour’! Fistfights in parliamentary debate! It'd be so disgraceful it'd bring the ratings up the roof!

It'll happen in Bizarro Malaysia first, I suspect.

Come to think of it….

Most-Abused Word in the Malay Language?

2005-07-04T21:54:00.000+08:00

Let's first begin this session by declaring that, you know, I'm not exactly the world's best practitioner of Malay. Despite being born Malay. At least I'm better at it than my parents.

Okay. It's about a word. A Malay one. Ceria.

This has been bothering me for years — a single word used so often that people take its existence for granted. I mean, you see it in government and Malayo-corporate mission statements. You see it in advertisements. Youth movements designed to capture the Malay mind use it to a nauseating degree.

Occasionally our artistes are called it. Sometimes the foreign ones, too, especially the happy, perky ones. Siti Nurhaliza sometimes. You know, that kind of thing.

And yet, all these years, I still have no idea what it means, exactly.

I mean, okay, you know what it means, right? Think ceria, and think a procession of perky, happy, cheerful and sunny dispositions walking down the aisle. These are the New Malaysians — without a care in the world, cheerful, perky, with nary a care in the world.

I'm pretty sure that's what it means. That's why I have my trusty old friend here, Kamus Dewan (edisi 1994). Together we'll sort out this mess.

And when the sorting out happened, we were kind of disappointed. I mean, I read the definition to my mother and sister:

“It isn't cheerful?”

“You're kidding me. Aren't there other definitions?”

“That's messed up.”

Seriously. Look into my dictionary, and not a single happy, perky, zesty and active word in it. You know what it says? My dad didn't believe me either when I read it to him:

“What rubbish. Are you sure?”

Positive. Not a single word of it.

Here's the definition:

ceria I sl tidak bernoda, bersih, suci, murni; menceriakan membersihkan, memurnikan, menyucikan.

I don't get it. I think my Kamus Dewan is broken.

Though actually, it makes a sinister kind of sense.

You're So Vain.

2005-07-02T01:21:00.000+08:00

I was going through Petaling Street, trying to find something to stave off this desire to go sleep, and I stumbled across this.

You walked into the party
Like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror
As you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner
They'd be your partner, and

Yeah, that song started popping up in my head. I mean, it's true, isn't it? Pretty people are vain and self-obssessed and boring and stupid and dull. That's the stereotypes pretty people face, in much the same way that the technologically blind always turn to geeky looking people hoping that they can fix whatever ails their busted commercial gadget.

Think geek, and you imagine some loser in glasses and tatty clothes, who ~~plays~~ lives for World of Warcraft or tabletop wargaming or frenzied masturbation. Think pretty, and she's just some idiot woman who spends a fortune in Strüdels to be insulted by shitty pastries, or Bangsar or Sri Hartamas or wherever it is that the ‘hip’ congregate to spawn, fornicate, network, prevaricate and perform other nefarious and otherwise mysterious deeds that only Hip and Happening people do.

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

I mean, really, folks. Get a grip. So what if minishorts calls you a fucking beggar? So what if the most you'll achieve in the community would be a five-second quote from Great Big Men, and then it's back to Iowa for you? Why are you in here anyway, for the fame and fortune?

What fame and fortune?

You had me several years ago
When I was still quite naive
Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee
Clouds in my coffee, and

Forget it. You came in here to be loved and adored, you're in the wrong place. Don't hope you'll end up like the people you see in the news, all bright-eyed and shiny and hopeful and idealistic and brilliant.

It's an unrewarding hobby. For ninety percent of you, you'll never get an audience beyond a thousand people during the whole lifetime of your blog. Even then you'd be lucky. The only to be famous is if you're obsessive-compulsive, exhibitionist _[NSFW] (nice ribs), or just plain offensive. And frankly, that might just net an arrest for all you know.

Why do I do this? Because I want to have my say. I love having my say. And because I have this problem with avoiding eye contact in real life. It's a bad habit I'm trying to break, but I don't have it online. And I can talk here, sort of. Well, actually, sometimes not here, but this is where it's safe to just drop my pants and moon the rest of the world. And no one will give a shit.

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

It pisses me off when people talk about blogging as a ‘Great Way to Meet People And Experience New Things’, thus giving a whole new generation of bloggers Exactly the Wrong Idea. You blog, children, because you are compelled; either you can shut up or they can't cover you up, either way's fine.

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee
Clouds in my coffee, and

Blogging isn't the new journalism. It's the new “Screaming At The Sidewalk While Everyone Around You Tries To Avoid Your Eye”. It's not about who hears you, but what you say. Stop listening to the audience. You won't starve to death if you suck — unless you're stupid enough to try blogging for a living.

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

I don't have blog-tracking software. I don't know how many people visit. Or care. I don't care if you do or don't care. That's not my business; I'm just here because I've got something to say and this is a great place to say it.

Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun
Well, you're where you should be all the time
And when you're not, you're with
Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend
Wife of a close friend, and

I mean, seriously. Hani loves checking her stats. Once in a while Jeff and Aminuddin occasionally post their stats online and tell the whole world how great ~~they~~ the blogosphere is getting, and how their blogs are ~~tedious wastes of newsreader real-estate~~ valuable avenues of discourse among young Malaysians. I'm sure some of you wonder how many people come into your blog, and how often they come.

Honestly, I don't know how many people come here. Nor do I care. What I do care is their answer to this question — why are they here?

Do you expect me to perform for you? Because I don't. Do you expect me to listen to your cares and sympathize? Because I don't. Do you expect nipplace and nudity? Sorry, try somewhere else.

You're here because of coincidence. You find my shit interesting, and I write, to you anyway, interesting shit.

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

Incidentally, I blogged about it because CS's comments page seemed broken. Oh well. Congratulations, CS. I'm your whore.

Huh. His TrackBack's fucked as well. What the hell is up with that?

I've Noticed A Disturbing Trend

2005-06-30T09:34:00.000+08:00

I've got news for you, 'cause I've Noticed Something Disturbing about The Great Men of Malaysian Bloggers.

For Men of Great Stature, these guys sure cry a lot.

I mean, seriously. Sure, corruption is vexing and upsetting, and sure, stupid brutality is brutal and, well, stupid. But weeping? You'd think they'd all do a Kassim Selamat by now, by the amount of tears they shed.

Really, feeling sad and down about it, or engaging in an act of public ululation to jolt the Malaysian public consciousness to do something is… well, it's an acceptable trick. We all do it, especially if 1) The republicans won the damn election again 2) They've banned gay marriage yet again 3) another cult TV show gets axed by greedy network executives again or 4) some other tragedy of public conscience happens yet again.

But that's the thing, see. It's a gimmick. A trick. If you must think of blogging as an art (please do, being the bastard demi-nephew of journalism is odious), then think of the whole weeping for your country for your countrymen, for your peers, for your profession as a stylistic device.

Sometimes you get mad. Sometimes you point and laugh. Sometimes you respond with weary cynicism. And yes, sometimes you cry.

Weeping for your nation once in a while marks you as a serious, intense visionary with high ideals. Doing it dozens of times makes you a drama queen, and people will be hard-pressed to treat you seriously.

So please. In moderation. Vary your devices. We don't necessarily want to see the same old crap over and over again.

I wonder if this will break the layout

2005-06-27T09:07:00.000+08:00

Take it.

Reason and Hollow Lives.

2005-06-20T18:53:00.000+08:00

I've been reading this book while at work, to while away the hours.

It was on my father's shelf for months now, and I've been wanting to read it forever, since I've been a fan of Karen Armstrong.

And Ash's post made me think about it, today.

Fundamentalism. Let's face it, if you're here, you hate fundamentalists, or at least have some kind of dim view about them. So much of what fundies are promotes bad science and even worse religion, and has ruined and made the lives of people around the world difficult.

I've always known, reading from her writings, that fundamentalism was tied to modernity — that it was a harsh rejection of modernity, and a literal reading of scripture, at least for Abrahamaic faiths. What I didn't know was the fundamentalism was a modern movement — yes, a movement that was born in modern times, but also incorporating modern ideas like the separation of mythos (the irrational, mythic component of ideology) and logos (the rational, pragmatic component of ideology).

What Armstrong explained to me was why and how modernity created fundamentalism, and the deep-seated neurosis that persists, even to this day, among rational scientific thought.

Let me be clear. Neither Armstrong nor I, as far as I can tell, think modernity is evil. It was necessary, because it helped us out of a deadly resource trap that plagued pre-modern agrarian societies. But to get to it, its progenitors had to, in a sense, separate myth and rationality.

Let me put it to you this way. To ask a man, who lived in the Middle Ages, or a man who lives and still lives in a pre-modern world whether the events depicted in the Qur'an or Scripture actually happened is to miss the fundamental point. To a pre-modern man, there is no distinction to what happened in myth and what happened in reality. Yes, God did make the Earth in Seven Days. Yes, Man was an evolved ape. Both ideas could be accepted, with little or not contradiction.

And we're not talking about mud huts here. We're talking about civilizations that invented algebra, number theory, and shit like that. Yes, the Classical Greeks, yes, the Caliphate Muslims, yes, the Ming Dynasty and yes, the Egyptians. They weren't primitive idiots, but they were pre-Modern.

What makes a Modern man is, or at least, was his reliance on reason and reason alone to get the truth. That's a great way to succeed politically, economically and socially, by the way — look at the Europeans and Americans. They drive scientific and political discourse, and dominate the world's economy. That's something you cannot run away from.

But to get there, for them, took 300 years of bloodshed, pain and suffering. Now think of the Muslims who were their neighbours, and later, their vassals. They were forced into Modernity, and were made to adapt it in a span of less than a century.

We're still struggling. Look at the people in your life, who hover between scientific rationalism and their older, mythical and traditional lives. Living a modern life meant abandoning your culture, to the early modern Muslims. And if you were trained in a non-traditional way, you'd look at your culture askance.

I know I did. I know Hani does, at least in some points. Many bloggers, good people, would dearly love to be Good Muslims or Good Christians or Good Whatevers. Sometimes, retreating into reason could not be enough — while reason is good at the what, it isn't very good at the how.

We need myth in our lives. It isn't enough to feed the mind and intellect and body and pocket; man needs to feed his soul. Some retreat to magic. Others retreat to music, or art, or love, or pleasure, or pain, or reason. Many more retreat to religion — at least, they used to.

Sadly, being a religious typically means being antithetical to reason, at least now. Many people now have a hard time reconciling religion with science. It should be the case — if anything, myth and reason are good at two separate things. Myth, taken into a practical context, leads to disaster and pain; reason, in an attempt to give meaning to one's life, leads to despair and pain.

Is it fundamentalism's fault? Hardly. Fundamentalism is a new development, postdating modernity by decades. Was it modernity's fault? It seems that way, but I don't think so. What was at fault is a recurring tale in human history — human foible and frailty causing pain and death. Proponents of modernism were not to blame — what they merely sook was the truth. Conservatives were not to blame — what they sook was certainty, in a world that seemed intent on falling apart around them. It simply happened; no one factor is responsible for our sad state today.

And what a sad state it is. Torn between madness and hollowness, most Malaysians and members of developing nations stand adrift. We yearn to be fed from one spring or the other, and in pursuing both, gain neither.

Mind you, I'm only halfway through this book. And it's a gloomy read. It's a tragic tale of loss, arrogance, madness and ignorance. Not only from the poor, the religious and the ignorant, but also from the so-called enlightened, both religious and secular.

Geekdom? Bah!

2005-06-19T22:42:00.000+08:00

Yes, this is me, picking a fight with someone else for no reason. Don't like? Go away. I promise to give you something better some other time.

It's about this particular blog entry, really.

Man, talk about shallow understanding. Being a geek is nothing about the shit you read, the crap you do and the stuff you know, it's an attitude.

And before you start:

Slashdot is bullshit.

The stereotypical slashdot activist is someone who thinks they are the hot shit because they have a Linux box and know how to use it properly.

It's the same attitude that spawned kuro5hin, and it's the same attitude that'll spawn people sick of kuro5hin and split off to form their own geek mecca.

Know how to use it? Fine. Know how it works? Great. Read it once in a while? Okay. Read it everyday? You sad bastard.

And yes, I've been banned from it's RSS feed at least once, for updating it too often. Cemented my attitude towards that piece of trash faster than anything else.
I think. A lot.

I'm not as delusional to think that I think logically and rationally all the time. Logical thinking happens naturally to some people — sometimes you don't notice it, but you've already split the problem, categorized its components, and worked out a solution. That happens 50% of the time for me.

Mind you, it makes it hard for you to learn salsa.
I can't honestly program a “Hello World” program in 10 programming languages.

Not without actually getting another four programming language specifications and spending 15 minutes each on reading each one up.

It's something I can do, but don't bother to.
No, I don't use l33t, sTUdLYcAPs, or txt.

But I know when to use it, often as a satirical weapon. It's part of geek and fen culture; you use it when you need to use it, to drive a point. There's no point saying “zOMG! u f4g!!!1111one” every time some dweeb misplaces a vowel and drops a 3.

Yes, that was a point.
I don't have a real blog
This is Blogger. It's nice, easy, relatively free and effort-cheap. I like it for that reason. And if you don't like it you can use shit like nucleus.

I tried it. Got tired of it. There's a reason why we're all using GUIs, you know, it's not because we're shallow stupid fucks. Mostly.
I don't boast. Usually. Possibly.
Instead I talk about incomprehensible shit that no one outside of my geekdom can grasp.
And yes, I'm on LiveJournal. So is everyone else who would like to blather on about stuff without having everyone reading behind his fucking shoulder.
Yes, I am lazy.
Being lazy has nothing to do with thinking. Mind you, I'm lazy and inefficient, unlike Hani, who is lazy and efficient.

Being a geek means your intellect isn't yours to control — you cannot bring it to focus, unlike other well-adjusted people, on the important things in your life. So you'll fill your life full of extrenous crap — Computing. Science. Mechanical Toys. Comics. Tarot. Role Playing Games. Miniature Wargaming. Typography. Anime. sf. Fantasy. Accessibility.

It's not about toys. Toys are commercially available, and cost very little, nonmaterially, to obtain. Toys anyone can get if they got money.

It's not about dedication. Ultimate dedication is monomania — geeks are almost never monomaniacal. It's about being omnivorous and adaptable, at least in the most limited of ways. That's why Steve Jobs is a geek, and that loser who collected stamps and did nothing else in class was just a dork.

It's not about being Elite and showing off. Dorks in slashdot do that. Sure they're geeks. They're dorks too, though, because it's not about the recognition, it's not about being listened, it's all about doing something and speaking out. Who cares if no one listens? You're doing what you like and that's all that matters. That same attitude that got you through high school will get you through life, while everyone else does what you won't — probably breed and have well-adjusted, ordered lives.

It's about having a dozen or more projects in the back burner, a baroque life and a mind that isn't just omnivorous, it eats the weirdest things.

And I dare anyone to find a way to quantify that in some goddamn checklist. Mind you, people will try.

Two Women.

2005-06-18T23:13:00.000+08:00

Women! O Man, Have I Got A Story To Tell You.

Well, actually, not really. This entry got me thinking, actually, about the women I'm surrounded with.

Most people who know me know that I spend an inordinate amount of time with this particular blogger. I mean, come on, it's quickly evident if you meet up with us or something. And it's typically an ‘us’ — it got to the point that this sarky bugger calls us “T-Unit”.

I'll have you know that it's TH-Unit, excuse me.

Anyway. Pick Yin wonders if she could be classified as a ‘difficult woman’. I don't think so. If you have a problem with intelligent, independent women, you'd have a problem, yes, and frankly your problems won't stop there. But is being frank, intelligent, independent a problem?

Hani's been described, even by herself, as someone difficult. If anything, actually, Hani's not. She's probably a lot less difficult than Pick Yin is, because if there's anyone who is uncomplicated about life, it's Hani.

Mind you, I'm not accusing her of being simple, or stupid. She's not. I'm saying that she's complex, sure — you'd probably not scratch her surface the first time you meet her. Yes, even though you feel like you have, because Hani broadcasts her attitude towards life and her opinions loud and clear — no pussyfooting around her.

That's the uncomplicated part of Hani — you could probably condense her philosophy to life into a handful of fairly straightforward directives, and you'd realize that she'd follow then almost all the time. Yes, Hani's American.

Anyway. Pick Yin? She's a lot more reserved than Hani is. Of course that means you've got to get past that layer of reservedness that she uses. It's a very Asian thing, very Malaysian — I'm not embarassed to admit that I couldn't remember her the first time we met.

But I got to know her, and she's been one of my better friends in the blogging community. She and Hani have one thing in common — both are frank, both are honest, both are relatively uncomplicated. Both do not manipulate overtly. In my dealings with the both of them, I have never felt like a fool. Not once.

You have no idea how rare and precious that is to me. Most women here, I've noticed, labor under the delusion that they must be… something else. They're not satisfactory enough; they must become more demure, more kind, more loving, more beautiful, more fair, more sexy, more polite, more moral… whatever. But suffice to say that they themselves are not enough. Yes, even those who are ‘liberated’.

I've never had a problem with either Pick Yin or Hani. If both were equal, I'd marry either one, or both (haa! Cries of horror from the audience! SCANDAL!). Hani's got the advantage of knowing me better than Pick Yin does, and we both trust each other implicitly. There's a reason why we're called ‘T-Unit’ by waggish fellow-bloggers, but that's another post altogether.

But it's a close call, relatively. Besides, I don't think Pick Yin looking for matrimony anyway… ;)

Things You Say.

2005-06-15T03:12:00.000+08:00

Let's start this particular session with me saying first-hand that I don't think Mack is dishonest.

That's off my chest. I don't think his opinions of the latest flavor-of-the-week is in any way right, but I just realized that ‘dishonest’ is inaccurate — as a matter of fact, using it is sort of provocative and confrontational, and not conducive to talking.

On the plus side he commented on my blog. Before anyone starts passing out the ad hominem attacks, do note that you're several months too late.

Anyway. So what did I really mean, then, when I commented on his post about the whole fiasco? Hmm.

I believe, as I still do believe, that he, and a fairly significant proportion of other bloggers linked and related to the Malaysian and Singaporean blogosphere, are highlighting the wrong thing.

It was never about the nudity, ladies and gentlemen. Face it, you and I have access to nude pictures from the Internet on a daily basis. It's not impossible to find; they've been around since the Internet was able to carry pictures. Just because the naked woman ^[NSFW] we see on the Web could be the same woman we see on the street every day does not make a difference. She's not brave or unusual — brave or unusual would have been if she had bared all in the fifties, or the Victorian Age. Nudity, ladies and gentlemen, is old hat.

What is of concern is that she bared all in a public commons. Sure we can find pornography on the Web. Sure we can find tasteful nudes on the Web as well. But before we're allowed to sample the delectable delights, we must go through a time-honored ritual: the “This Material is For Consenting Adults Only, No Minors Allowed Past This Point” Page.

It's there for a reason, folks. You use it to warn people who can't take freeform nudity into their consciousness. You use it to warn them that the thing you're going to see isn't exactly something that isn't exactly kosher. It separates the border between a public commons and a private gallery. It informs users about what they see, and gives them a choice.

It matters not that it isn't art — while I'm sure you can bend the rules for Venus de Milo and David, but those are cultural icons. While the SPG is many things, a cultural icon she isn't yet.

That's what the press is highlighting. They're not after bloggers this time, lads and ladettes. They're after a woman who couldn't be bothered to warn her users that what she's posting may not be palatable to some. And look at how we're portraying it. Another David and Goliath metaphor? Aren't you guys tired of that same old yarn?

It's something that crops up every once in a while, in the wonderful world that is Malaysian blogging. Once in a while, we must find justification in ourselves and our work by portraying ourselves as oppressed and marginalized by Daddy Media. Once in a while, that's true. Not this time.

A blogger made a mistake, and is paying the price. The press plays unfair because they reported and editorialized? Wow, can they ever do anything right?

Sometimes things aren't as clear-cut as it may seem.

Hey. Do You Know What You Are?

2005-06-13T21:21:00.000+08:00

You're a blogger. And, possibly, if you're like me, you're a young blogger. And if you're not like me, you're a young female blogger.

How much shit does a young female blogger go through, on her daily tromp through the Internet?

I mean, really. I got a friend, who's American. She's a fan of Digimon, loves Japanese miniature dolls, and has a membership with OkCupid. She also gets, you know, the occasional creepy missive from some young buck who wants to have sex with her.

She doesn't blog. She's also a teenager.

And this is just a teenager; we're not talking about some woman who decides to, you know, for personal reasons, expose herself in a public medium ^[NSFW]. Which she is perfectly entitled to. Hey, it's your body, do what you like with it.

I can't possibly imagine Hani doing it, for example. She's got her mother, whom she lives with, who is conservative in many ways. You tend to restrict yourself in many ways when the lady you might offend controls your purse-strings and your freedoms.

But Hani's been famous for being seen, once, long ago, as one of the tell-lots exposé blogs on the Internet. And there were no pictures in that one of her nude. There were plenty of requests, hey, sure. Young bucks who want a quick lay. Or geeks who wanted to be friends. Some of them made for quite good friendships; safe ones, with no scandalous behaviour in public or private.

That's not what her mother, or the parents of any young lady who blogs, might see when they get a load of this.

Oh, great. And you'd think that blogging would be respectable by now.

The best part was that you know, readers who came in her blog would have immediately, without being warned, seen her naked self on the blog. No NSFW tags. No warnings. Nothing. Just a post, and then TITS! YAY!

If you were a young, hot-blooded guy. It's a different story if you were, say, underaged. Or at work. Or not attracted to women. Or surfing the Internet when your father's walking behind you, looking over your shoulder. Or if you're a blogger, and your father comes to you and says, “Ah Jay, do you do these things on the Internet? Are you mixing with these kinds of people?”. Or if you're a blogger, trying to look respectable in a field that has a reputation of being full of attention-whores.

No, no, no. Nothing rosy, I'm sure. No one was hurt, sure. No tears were shed.

Oh, tough. We live in a conservative society, with moral axioms seemingly cast-iron hard except when expediency and discretion bend the rules. Oh boo hoo hoo, your father doesn't understand you. Oh boo hoo hoo, people are judging you, calling you names. Oh boo hoo hoo, stupidity reigns when you suddenly decided to disregard the society you live in for what might now seem like a case of poor impulse control. Let me play the world's smallest violin.

Times like this, I always bring out a favourite axiom of mine.

“There is a line between being slutty, and being stupid.”

Guess who was stupid.

Edited: I added in a [NSFW] tag on a potentially offensive link. My apologies to everyone who weren't informed prior — the pictures were not visible during the time of posting due to bandwitdh overrun on the site.

Huh.

2005-06-13T20:55:00.000+08:00

Let's see….

Oh look! Tits (which means that, obviously, it's Not Safe For Work!)!

Oh look! Moral panic!

Is it six to eight months already since the Internet's last scandal with the press? (Hey! I'm there! Fighting with some guy! … How embarrasing.)

I tell you, like fucking clockwork. Sheesh.

Edited: Added warning. Yes, I know! Practise what I preach, ne?

Slam, Bam, Thank You Ma'am.

2005-06-13T19:35:00.000+08:00

Take a box of these. Refrigerate them, since they're bound to be melty in this weather.

Make a cup of Milo, the way you like it.

Bite off opposite corners of one of the aforementined confectionary. Put it in the cup of Milo.

Suck up some Milo with it, like a straw. Wait for it to just fall apart. Pop it into your mouth. Realize that you should have put in a lot less sugar.

Repeat four times. Feel sick. Call friend, who was asleep from trying to do her MyKad application all day. Listen to her swear at you.

Lie down and wait out sugar-induced headache.

Tweaked.

2005-06-13T00:41:00.000+08:00

Noticed that I didn't want the Blogger icon on my blog. Not that I disliked it, no, no. I just didn't think it suited the blog.

Tried some things. Decided to be boring.

So I've got a new favicon. Used IrfanView and The Photo. Crop, crop, resample, add border, add border again, done. Not that big a deal to make, actually.

Edited: How interesting. It doesn't work with IE.

Ahh, Love.

2005-06-11T15:19:00.000+08:00

Hani: I just realized that you don't link to me!!!! Hani: where is my link!!!! me: ... me: er? Hani: on your blog me: ... me: I don't blogroll me: I never have. me: yes, I don't have your link. Neither do I have anyone else. Hani: pout Hani: you should at least put ME Hani: pout me: ...no? Hani: pout pout pout pout me: ? Hani: you link RAJAN Hani: LINK ME!!!! me: ... me: you want be placed in the same category as MENJ. me: that isn't Rajan. me: that's MENJ. or his crony Hani: I want a link Hani: LINK!!! me: ... Hani: I don't care under what category me: okay, fine. I will. Hani: LINK!! Hani: yay!!!

There you go, Sayang. Love you!

Addendum: And here's how she responded:

me: tengok the tagline Hani: oh :D Hani: yayy!!!! me: refresh it once, because I had to refine it, and then hold your pointer over the link Hani: but you put rajan as a nascar on navbar Hani: why not me? Hani: *laughs* me: you're a horrible person, you know?

Further Addendum: Yes, there's a new Nascar on the navbar. Making it was fun.

So It's Like This.

2005-06-11T12:57:00.000+08:00

I've had this happen a couple of times before. Actually several times.

It's like this…. A member of my gender (NOT SPECIES! SPECIES CANNOT INTERBREED WITH ONE ANOTHER!) is seen doing something disapproving to women. It could be anything from stupid sexist comment, to you know, being shitty and emotionally abusive to girlfriend. Or, you know, movie characters or romance novel males being idiots to their loves.

Let's not get into the argument about how wrong those men are, okay? It's general knowledge that Richard made a boo-boo in public radio, not the way Nik Aziz used to boo-boo about anything in front of the Press, but somewhere on the line. And the prick who's emotionally abusive to his girlfriend? Not worth talking about. Ditto movie characters or romance novels.

No, no. Let's get into the fact that when the conversation always somehow, some way, women say this, or words to this effect:

“Men suck!”

All men?

I've learnt some things in the past half-decade or so. I really have. Five years ago, I adored women. I mean, you folks could do nothing wrong. It's the always the Men who have erred, the Men who are boors, the Men who are unenlightened, the Men who should change. Not enough Men make women happy.

I've since learnt that this is apparently inaccurate. Imagine my surprise.

Look, men have done stupid things. Sure. Folly follows the actions of men throughout the ages. We're now, in popular culture, regarded as a cross between boors, idiots and beasts (you don't think so? Go watch a sitcom). That's fine; as a society, we need to get that off our chests, for the things we have done, historically.

But stupidity and folly isn't the only province of Male-dom. I've seen women do some pretty stupid things myself. Folly follows everyone.

It's not Men that suck. No, no, no. It's people who suck, not men.

You want to sit around and bitch about how stupid the men are in your life? I can't stop you. Hell, I've been known to listen with at least a sympathetic ear about everything apart from the gender-bashing. But it all sounds a little bit like Jordan's Two Solitudes, you know? It just does.

Morality? Pshaw.

2005-06-04T00:11:00.000+08:00

Poor Mack. For months I ignore every single one of his posts, and then, the one post that moves me to act doesn't even get me to comment on his entry. I have to blog it here, and steal off traffic from him by Trackbacking him. Oh well.

It's like this. Government asks the people if it's a good idea to distribute free condoms and hypodermic needles. Of course, predictably, religious authorities flip out. I was guessing that the Muslims authorities, typical of them, would flip out. Oh, and possibly the Catholics. But it looks like they're all flipping out. How nice. Makes you want to be an atheist, it does.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of difficulty for me. I don't have to flip out. Maybe because it's because I'm used to feeling and doing immoral things? You never know.

While it is immoral to endorse and condone the act of premarital and extramarital sex and intravenous drug use, it is far more immoral to refuse treatment and prevention to people who may need it. And by prevention, yes, that means needles and condoms, no matter how distasteful it is to our sensibilities.

It is a matter of who is most harmed by what we do and endorse. And as far as I'm concerned, we harm more by not trying to prevent it and reduce its scope for harm. Distributing condoms and free hypodermic needles, with the proper education for its use, reduces the scope for diseases like AIDS to harm. Not reducing harm tends to be an immoral act. Therefore, preventing the spread of free condoms and needles tends to be an immoral act.

There's definitely a leap of logic over there, which no doubt will be tediously discussed by wonderfully tedious people, who may not realize that by the time that they hash out their Logic 101 books I will no longer give a shit. That's apathy for you.

While it may be a spurious argument, at least I take comfort that while I have leaps of logic, nothing beats “spreading the use of condoms and hypodermic needles == condoning and encouraging immorality”. Whatever let's you sleep at night.

That's all there is to it. The lives and deaths of sinners do not come anywhere near to the issue. That's up to them to decide — we can only do what we must, which is to try and prevent more harm from happening to people who may not deserve what may happen to them.

Now, was that so difficult?

The Five Questions Meme.

2005-05-17T22:05:00.000+08:00

Pick Yin sent me these questions, and hell, since she's such a nice gal, I decided to answer 'em for her.

What is the status of your role playing game? Do I get to watch or what?

That's a very good question. For those who have no idea what Pick Yin is talking about, go here.

Anyway. What's happening? Well, as of today, I've heard and begun work on getting five out of the six player's paperwork sorted out. The last person, who apparently will be Ash, I will see sometime later this week so that much hammering and negotiating and interviewing can be done. After that, planning for the session itself.

The final date's not set yet, but it will tentatively be Sunday, May 29^th. It's a Sunday because everyone's free then. I'll tell the people involved, which I hope will include you, Pick Yin, as the observer. Anyone else interested will have to wait — it's already crowded enough as it is.
If you're given a chance to lead any country, which will it be and why?

This one. Because it's my home and it could use some improvin'. Now, about those work camps….
What is your opinion on hypocrisy?

I don't like it. I could rant and rave about how despicable and undesirable it is, especially in our Great and Exalted Leaders, but that's in a sense a kind of hypocrisy, isn't it? I mean, talk and talk, but what do you do?

So, I say I don't like it. And leave it at that.
Do you still look the same? I haven't seen you and HANI for months. What happened to our appointments?

My god, you're right. We've been neglecting you like totally. I've tried messaging you over YM, but you don't seem to be replying. Maybe I should just give you a call….
When is the next durian pigout? I'm waiting.

My god. I still have rashes and pimples from the last one.

On a more serious note, I don't know. The nice lady who took care of the orchard for us has decided to return to her grandchildren up north, so I have no idea what's happening to my dad's orchard in Langat. All I can say is that we still have it, but as for its state… I don't rightly know. I really should be asking my dad about it, but I think he just quit smoking, and he's been a bit… cranky of late, so, uh….

Anyway. Here are the rules:

The Official Interview Game Rules
(copied from Idlan Zakaria)

If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying “interview me.”

I will respond by asking you five questions — each person’s will be different.

You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.

You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.

When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

And that's that.

….

2005-04-29T22:02:00.000+08:00

I really don't know what to say.

T-Boy (9:57:32 PM): WAH T-Boy (9:57:34 PM): SO PENAT T-Boy (9:57:36 PM): DAN SLEEPY Najah (9:57:49 PM): yah.. me and meesh in bed already. T-Boy (9:57:59 PM): O_O T-Boy (9:58:06 PM): O_O;; T-Boy (9:59:13 PM): does your fiance KNOW? Najah (10:00:37 PM): he;s coming over to join us in a few minutes T-Boy (10:00:51 PM): O__________________________________O' T-Boy (10:01:02 PM): I'm SO blogging this. Najah (10:01:17 PM): that's a really geeky comment. T-Boy (10:01:30 PM): yeah, and I'm having second thoughts about blogging it. Najah (10:01:42 PM): :D T-Boy (10:01:45 PM): seriously, where's meesh? Najah (10:01:57 PM): rightnext to me. on the bed. T-Boy (10:02:30 PM): ask her if she minds if I spread horrible rumours about you and her and Fische. T-Boy (10:02:35 PM): on a blog. T-Boy (10:02:40 PM): come to think of it, are you okay with it? Najah (10:02:43 PM): sure T-Boy (10:07:10 PM): hey, can I link to both yours and meesh's blog on this particular post, or shall I leave it to the imagination of the readers? Najah (10:08:16 PM): up to you. :D Meesh (10:08:52 PM): oh btw my new url is themeeshexperience.blogspot.com Najah (10:09:28 PM): we're logging off. we've got better things to do w each other... ;)

What the hell am I missing?!

Conversations With My Father.

2005-04-28T19:08:00.000+08:00

“Bah?”

“Yes, son?”

“D'you know Krishen Jit?”

“Yeah. Why? He died?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.… Well, he's been having heart trouble.”

Silence, a nod.

He turned back to his bills. I went back to my room.

Oh, For Fuck's Sake…

2005-03-08T04:15:00.000+08:00

I had a nice long post about something that wasn't at all interesting or deep, but it was nice and virulent, and it summed up my feelings quite well over the so-called ‘intellgence’ of my fellow bloggers.

Except that Mister Internet ate it.

Fuck this for a game of skittles.

I swear. This time I was working.

2005-01-31T21:09:00.000+08:00

I'm too canggih

With apologies to Right Said Fred

I'm too canggih for my owner
too canggih for my owner
my owner doesn't use me

I'm too canggih for my package
too canggih for my package
so canggih it's a cage

I'm too canggih for Bangsar
too canggih for Bangsar
MSC and Putrajaya

And I'm too canggih for the Internet
too canggih for the Internet
no way I'm synchronizing

Chorus:

I'm a cellphone you know what I mean
and I make a bloody dent in your wallet
in your wallet
yeah in your wallet
yeah I make a bloody dent in your wallet

I'm too canggih for your brain
too canggih for your brain
I could drive you insane

And I'm too canggih for your ‘lah’
too canggih for your ‘lah’
your 'lah' makes me ‘lelah’

Chorus: (x2)

I'm a cellphone you know what I mean
and I make a bloody dent in your wallet
in your wallet
yeah in your wallet
and I shake in Silent Mode by your wallet

I'm too canggih for Datuk
too canggih for Datuk
poor Datuk, and Datuk's staff!

I'm too canggih for my owner
too canggih for my owner
my owner doesn't use me

And I'm too canggih for this blog.

This entry, and only this entry, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Blogs and Estate 5: The Whys of Blogging

2005-01-20T00:50:00.000+08:00

(The tone of this post will be personal. It cannot be helped, but if you were looking for the same thing you got yesterday (or, since it's just past midnight, the day before), you're not going to get it.)

The truth is, I can't do yesterday again. I don't know whether it's a feature of my psychology or my personality flaw, but my mind travels from one thing to another with a speed that occasionally unnerves and frustates me. Try getting a significant project done when your mind flits from one thing to another.

An Area of High Pressure Just Off the Frontal Lobe

Yesterday, my mind was clear about new media and blogs. Yesterday, my mind was focused, razor-sharp, on my opinions, and I could cogently discuss them like the armchair academic I clearly am not. Yesterday was good for discussion.

Not today. Today my mind is focused, razor sharp. But not on new media, not on blogs, but on a silly little game I can only play at Hani's house.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. I'm thinking about building a clubhouse.

She's gone berserk, captain

I saw Jeff Ooi's reason for why he blogs. Hani and I spoke about that today — well, specifically, why Jeff Ooi blogs. Many flock to it because blogging, to them, is a panacea for troubled minds. Hani guessed right, and said that Jeff Ooi has something to say — actually, come to think of it, he has so much to say that others can't stand it.

Some do it because they, apparently, enjoy it. And they want to communicate with loved ones Back Home. Hani started off that way, come to think of it, before switching to blogging therapeutically.

So why do I blog? When you ask me that question, you'll probably get this stock answer: “Because people get sick and tired hearing about me blather on about some obscure thing no one else could be interested in”.

Let Off Some Steam, Matey

And that's true, most of the time. Blogging is an outlet for me. A valve that I turn everytime my creative impulse gets too much, and twists inside me like a wild beast struggling to get free.

So I might be exaggerating, but that's what it feels like, right now. Even now I see images of Avon Hall, the way I want it to be built, with red brick on the outside, sumptous luxury within, and a graveyard with ghosts outside to tempt the unwary and the unwise.

Building Them Up So You Can Tear Them Down

It's actually a very pretty cemetary. A bit too bloody well lit for a spooky cemetary, come to think of it, but I can fix that. And yes, I did manage to get tombstones and funeral urns into my community lot.

If you know the game at all, you'd know that there's only one way to get a tombstone or a funeral urn, and it's pretty goddamn grisly. To give you an idea how grisly, let's just say I spent about two hours designing four different families (the de Avons, the Cavendishes, the Suryawahyunis and members of Avon Hall), each with eight members, mostly adults and teens, with a few elders to round out the score. No children (which is a shame).

And then I spent two more hours turning them all into tombstones. And funeral urns, for those who were interred indoors.

It's a lot easier than it sounds, but it gets repetitive after a while.

Possession of Obsession Leads to Depression

A friend of mine, a Lacanian psychoanalyst-in-training, once diagnosed me as an obssessive. That is, my mind is structured to a propensity for obssession. I never got the concept as well as she did, but I understood that bit. Which is interesting, and more often than not, true.

There are plenty of obssessions with my life. Computer games. New media. Writing. Science fiction stories. Pornography. The Internet. They're obssessions. And like the good obsessive, I have a hard time pulling away, even mentally, from the objects of my obsession.

And more often than not, this propensity can propel me away from what others may consider ‘important’. Which is probably why I find blogging so forgiving, if I stick to a few simple ground rules — ground rules I learnt from my first few years in my first participatory medium — USENET.

Do-It-Yourself Thinking

When you get down to it, you often write for yourself. It is, in a restricted sense, the same when you get down to blogging, or journalism, or non-fiction work, or fiction-writing, or any endeavour that requires even a smidgen of creativity.

You do it for yourself.

Blogs and Estate 5: Why One Is Not the Other.

2005-01-18T13:59:00.000+08:00

(Like many Internet users, I adore novelty. The following response to this particular flashblog would have looked better if it had more flash. But I don't have the time, skill or means to purchase and use the required authoring software effectively. I can write, though.)

We're here to talk about what is now known as, perhaps, the Five Estates. It's a nice name, with a lot of history under it — the first three Estates made their appearance during the old French Estates-General: they were, in essence, the Nobles, the Clergy and Everyone Else.

Edward Burke, claimed Carlyle, named the Fourth Estate as the Press itself, in the context of explicit advocacy and in its ability to frame political issues. And, if you've been reading up on your blogs, someone decided to name us bloggers the Fifth Estate, and placing ourselves in what seems to be an implicit competition with the venerable Fourth.

Estate Boyaz in da Hizzouse

The the first two estates are cute anachorisms, of course — the way society has changed in the past three hundred years has ensured that nobility and piety take, at most, an advisory position in governance. The Third Estate — Everyone Else — makes the decisions now, with the Fourth and the Fifth influencing and informing the Third.

The Fourth Estate's influence is obvious, and their reach powerful. There's no need to deny that they do not exist. The Fifth exists as well, but they aren't blogs. They'll never be blogs. The Internet, another contender of the Fifth Estate, will never be the Fifth Estate. Even the Internet is too small to comprise the whole of the Fifth Estate.

On the nature of blogs

Asking bloggers to define what blogs are, and you'll get as many answers as there are bloggers. It is, however, fairly easy to define what a blog is based on its ‘physical’ characteristics. A blog is a web site, or a web application. It is made of individual entries, arranged chronologically.

That's it. A blog is a medium — an “intervening substance that carries messages or information”.

Incompatible Ideas

I said, earlier on, that blogs were too small to encompass the entirety of the Fifth Estate. I'm still right, but that's not the only reason why blogs are not the Fifth Estate. You see, blogs, like many convergence technologies, straddle many fields.

One of the many fields it straddles is the Fourth Estate.

As much as Jeff Ooi would hate me to say it, he is a Fourth Estate Blogger. Not because he has political or monetary connections to press agencies (I doubt it), not because he pushes for their agendas (quite the opposite), but because he practices a form of journalism. He reports.

Differing Views

In a sense, my opinion is a product of my worldview. I am no Mack Zulkifli or Jeff Ooi. I am barely mature enough to express my ideas coherently, but express them I shall.

Blogs like Screenshots and Brand New Malaysian, as well as thousands of other news sites and op-ed peddlers and commentators and reviewers and hate-mongers and rumour-spreaders, all belong to the Fourth Estate — not because with who or what they are associated with, but because of what they do. Their task is to inform. Or comment. Or influence the Third Estate with the use of information, both right and wrong.

It is less of who they are associated with, and more with what they do. This is an important distinction to make.

Whither the Fifth?

So what is the Fifth Estate, then? If you want a good example of a Fifth Estate blog, take a look at TV Smith. Yes, he does have one foot in the Fourth Estate — the things he writes about are based on current events, and his goal is to influence you partially, with reason. But then again, he and Jeff and Mack are members of Estate 3 as well; as am I. We're all law-abiding, vote-eligible citizens. What separates TV Smith from Jeff and Mack is that he parodies while informing.

The distinction between Estate 4 and 5 is imagination. Both use it to an extent, but Estate 4 uses imagination sparingly most of the time. Estate 5's bailiwick is imagination.

I suppose you can guess what I think Estate 5 is. Estate 5 is art.

The Fifth Estate Revealed

It sounds too crackpot to be true. The domicile of pretension, the Fifth Estate? But artists are about as pretentious as journalists are dishonest, or bloggers are elitist. While some are the above, it does not mean that others should be tarred with the same brush.

Art refers to all creative endeavours, excluding survival and reproduction. Any product that is of the creative impulse is art. Which of course mean that rumour-spreaders and hate-mongers belong to Estate 5 as much as they do to Estate 4, but that's convergence for you.

Art influences Estate 3 in different ways than Estate 4. While Estate 4 may engage in the faculties of reason and knowledge to influence Estate 3's decision-making, Estate 5 speaks to Estate 3's emotions and fears. Art reflects and directs the energies of The People, and allows them Understanding where Knowledge barely suffices.

You can read about the Holocaust, and know how the Jews suffered and died. Or you can read Spiegelman's Maus, and finally understand its horror. You can read about Palestine, and know its history and the links between the disparate peoples there. Or you can read Sacco's work, and finally understand its insanity. You can read about the Iranian Revolution, or you can read Satrapi's Persepolis (book I and II) and finally understand what it was to grow up in such an time. You can read news broadcasts, op-ed columns about 9-11. Or you can read, again, Spiegelman, and understand the anguish of living through a time when all your illusions died.

You'll have to forgive me. My comics bias is showing.

Where do we belong?

So where do blogs show up in all of this? Where do blogs fit it?

Everywhere. Blogs pepper the space, like every other media you can define, between Estates 3, 4 and 5. There are diaries, some open to the world, some not, that straddle the space between 3 and 5. There are op-ed columns that straddle 4 and 5. There are journals, from men and women On The Scene, that swing from 3 to 4. Some diaries never stray beyond Estate 3. There are newsblogs that wholly belong to Estate 4. There are art-pieces that wholly belong to Estate 5.

Just like any other kind of media.

VCDs, guns and dangdut tempatan.

2005-01-17T13:12:00.000+08:00

Check it out. Shit hitting the fan.

Actually, if you check out Jeff Ooi's blog entries, it looks like more than one piece of excrement¹ hitting more than one electrical contrivance for moving air for ventilation via rapid rotation of rigid vanes using an electrical motor².

I guess it isn't a good time to be a cop in Malaysia right now. Or is it?

If I have to be cynical³, I could be saying, “Cops fuck up! Innocent people get hurt! Film at 11!”. Seriously, how is this anything other than ‘business as usual’?

I'd really be exaggerating if I said that Malaysians live in fear of the police. But I wouldn't be exaggerating that far. We don't trust the police. Not with our lives. Which seems a terribly wrong thing, but what're you going to do about it?

The land of the knee-jerks

Amusingly, Malaysians reacted to the whole scene the way they usually do: with moral indignation over what was seen as the abuse of power by the powerful⁴, and cries of radical change that is sorely needed to rectify the Great Wrong That Has Already Happened.

Except that banning cops from using guns, as some people have already suggested, is impractical, not to mention predictably knee-jerk. That's what we do when we Malaysians see something that threatens us, and our way of life. We move to eliminate it.

It's the same with long hair in television, movies that portray The Enemy in a sympathetic light, groups of people who deviate from the Great Norm. We try to stamp it out. Well, actualy, the Government tries to stamp it out.

We're just very good students.

Ban it 'til it glows

We've learnt to deal with things that scare or unnerve or frighten us that way. We try to edit it out of our lives. Sure, a certain amount of denial is healthy — certainly to mend bridges, to forget past hurts — but this isn't a healthy amount of denial. Police-men need guns. Enforcement officials of Ministries and municipal councils don't. Certainly not against VCD sellers.

On the extremely insensitive but humorous point, though, you could really say that we're dealing with the piracy problem in a strict manner. What's next, roadside executions for copyright violators?

Man, there goes the Malaysian tertiary education community.

Making things right, Malaysian style

Of course, the Innocent Bystander now has to pay 15,000 ringgit to get a bullet off his back. A bullet, mind you, that got fired because an enforcement officer fucked up. People are urging the ministry to do something, and so far, all they've offered is their profuse apologies. Which is obviously not enough, so people are telling the ministry to pay the guy's bills, to demonstrate our how loving and caring we are.

Load of crap. The Ministry should pay the surgical fees before the factory worker decides to get Ideas Beyond His Station and sue.

Of course, the Ministry has a great chance of winning — our justice system is far from perfect, and we're not as litigation-happy as, say, the Americans. But seriously, the guy has everything to gain, and the Ministry has everything to lose — even if the Ministry wins.

I'm sure Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh are cackling away, at Opposition Headquarters…

Lim Kit Siang: Ha, ha, Comrade Karpal, an opportunity to make those idiots at BN look like fools!
Karpal Singh: Why yes, Comrade Lim. And I can look extra good doing (quotation mark gesture) ‘pro-bono work’!
LKS: Mwahahahahaha!
KS: Mwahahahaha!

Settle out of court, and get the guy back on his feet. It's better than getting your ass hauled into the fire with the press. Or with bloggers. Who aren't ethical, as a rule⁵.

Footnotes

Shit. Go Back
Fan. Go Back
Or, perhaps, more cynical than usual…. Go Back
Which it was, but let's not go there. Go Back
Not that the press are paragons of ethics, mind you. Go Back

The Great Malaysian Blackout.

2005-01-13T16:04:00.000+08:00

I was in Kinokuniya KLCC when the lights failed.

It started when the lights flickered, while I was looking for a travel book (it was an errand for someone). I had found my book the minute the lights failed.

At first I thought it was, just, you know, a normal power outage — one shop, or a part of the building at most. Turns out that the whole building was out.

As I took a cab back to Bangsar (I had learned not to park in Suria KLCC's car parks on weekdays the hard way), I realized that I was in what seemed like a city-wide blackout. Wow. We haven't had one of those since Paka.

On my way to Bangsar, I observed that the amount of pedestrians had doubled. Figures. KL is a city built on air-conditioning and artificial lighting. The minute the lights and artificial ventilation failed, no one could be persuaded to stay in their offices as their cubicles become dark, stuffy hothouses.

When I did get back to Bangsar (after paying an exorbitant fee for a fare ride, and sitting through a massive jam at Jalan Bangsar), I settled into my car and drove back home.

That took a while. The roads, thanks to the screwed-up traffic lights and general disorder, were clogged with vehicles. Spent a good part of an hour stuck in what was only a few hundred metres of road, near the Rothmans roundabout.

Lucky for me, at least the MacDonalds drive-thru I went to had power, and PJ, for the most part, still has electricity. The power outage, though extensive, didn't touch Hitz, Mix, Light and Easy or Radio 4 KL. It got RED 104.9 for a while, though. Pity. I kinda liked them.

They're back now. And I'm home. Saw the Wan (my maid) waiting outside, in vain, for a bus. Told her what happened, and she was surprised and peeved off, to say the least. She wanted to go to Ampang today. Anyway. Will take her tonight, if I have to.

Oh, well. That's it.

[NSFW] And now, something mind-shattering.

2005-01-13T01:30:00.000+08:00

Warning: Not Safe For Work. Contains, well, bestiality.

I got this off the livejournal linguaphile community.

Four things.

It's a Hokusai.
It's tentacle porn that's about 135-136 years old.
It's a HOKUSAI.
And here is the translation.

I'm very shocked. The things I learn on the Internet…

Why, God, Did It Happen?

2005-01-12T21:38:00.000+08:00

I've refrained from saying much about Twenty-Six Twelve for a whole range of reasons: I came in late, I did not participate in the initial debate, and everything I wanted to say was said already. But a thought, oh, a stupid, treacherous thought lingered in my head, and refused to go away.

Why did You do it?

For about 200 hundred seconds, you shattered a deeply-held illusion about our safety and our security. You showed us how vulnerable we are.

And then, while people died and lives were destroyed, you showed us how we could help others and salve their pain. You showed us how to be human again. You showed us that the Enemy may not be a true Enemy at all, and that even our foes are human, just like us, and even they feel pain and suffering. And then, miracles of miracles! Some of those foes began helping us.

You showed us how to have faith, didn't you? When the day was darkest and the winds coldest, You were there. You are always there. You could never abandon us, could You? We are the ones who turn our backs away from You, who forget You, and curse You, for the senselessness and the horror.

You showed us that others, even those we call our enemies, are like us. A tsunami can do that, I guess; it strips away the lies that we tell ourselves, the lies that say that the Hindu or the Christian or the Muslim or the apostate or the heretic or the atheist are not like us, but something else. Something less. You took that away. How many Muslims need help in Aceh now? How many Christians? Do we care? Should we?

You showed us the treachery of our so-called brothers-in-faith. The ones who exhort us the predations of our Foes, the Great Satan. The ones who urge us to turn away from them, even as they try to help us. Do our honorable brothers come to our aid? Did they hell. They tell us that what You did to us was punishment, and that we deserved this, even as we deserved our brothers turning away from us in our hour of need. Well, let them.

I hope that we will be wise enough , kind enough, human enough, to not turn away from them when they need us.

And you expect me to blog.

2005-01-12T13:31:00.000+08:00

I haven't written a thing for a while.

Call it blogger's block, call it anything you like — hell, call it Steven if you have to. I haven't written a thing for a while.

I could name any number of sources for the lack of updates — massive holiday blues. The Tsunami. The whole ~~blogosphere~~ blogging community up in arms over something-or-other. The fact that I've been more interested in layaning ~~Hani~~ The Sims 2.

End result: No blog updates. ~~People~~ Hani asking me when I'll update my blog. General malaise.

Now Hani looking over my bloody shoulder and eating a packet of crisps go away don't I not bother you when I fucking blog, you nosy woman??

No. Off. Get your hands off my keyboard. Away. Avast!

Argh.

So what goes into the last post of the year?

2004-12-31T03:57:00.000+08:00

I could always talk about…

2004, going away. Boy, what a year. I finish what amounts to a year of college. Daniel Pearl. Jeff Ooi versus the News Straits Times. I get quoted in KeADILan's newsletter. Tsunami Twenty-Six Twelve. It's been a wild ride. A wild ride.
2005, coming over. A new year. New resolutions. New beginnings for some, endings for others. The nature of change. Boy, I wonder how that will turn out.
The whole stupid blogs versus newspapers bullshit. EPIC — a future when one corporation, through its market-enforced Eternal Benevolence, will let you run free to do whatever stupid shit you want to do and listen to what stupid shit you want to hear… Yeah, sure.
Jeff Ooi versus the Big Boys. The Ugly Side of Newspaper Journalism. The Ugly Side of Blogging. Accusations from both sides, both true, about the Other Media's lack of credibility. Face facts, you two. You're both losers, and your children will use your tools with more finesse and more elegance than you could imagine. Think of better visions of the future, and stop looking up your colon.
Tsunami Twenty-Six Twelve. It is a tragedy, isn't it? Funny. I can't bring myself to feel anything more than that. I wonder what kind of person that makes me.

Or I could talk about nothing. You folks could always talk for me.

Stress is bad. Structure is good. So what now?

2004-12-22T17:17:00.000+08:00

I haven't been on the Internet for a while now.

Oh, I've been online. I've been literally connected to the Internet, and I've been working, and that requires Internet access.

But I haven't been on for a while. Not really. Not long enough to remember to catch up on stuff. Not to read my emails. Not to blog. Just been on. That's all.

It's been a stressful two months, is all.

I figure no one really misses me that much, so it shouldn't be a big deal. It's not as if I'm, oh, I don't know, Jordan or Pick Yin or Ash or Jeff Ooi or Dina. Normal lah. Blogger kecik. We pop in and out all the time.

Though I'm beginning to think that maybe it's time I should work on something new, especially since this page has been standing still for a while. I've been blogging, but not really thinking of where I wanna go. So maybe I should.

Structure is good.

Staring at a blank page.

2004-11-30T02:20:00.000+08:00

What does it feel like to fail?

Earlier this year, I did something that at that time seemed impossible to me.

I conceded defeat. I decided, after a long, painful and horribly unpleasant experience, to withdraw from Middlesex University and go back home. And I did this without even saying a word to my parents about it.

I was never born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Oh, no, it's shiny like silver, but it isn't silver — it's cheaper than silver, but only by a small margin, because the amount of craftsmanship and hard work that went to it meant that it worked as well as a silver spoon, and on the plus side you'd be able to use it anywhere without looking like a ponce.

That spoon was my family's successes. My father is well-known in the industry he works in as one of the few local film directors who can turn out international-standard works. He's the one responsible for the first few brilliant Raya ads that now spawns a million rather shoddy imitators. That's him. I'm his son.

My mother is one of the few career women in a multinational in this country to get into a high position without having to resort to Datinry — she's probably one of the few women in high positions at her age who still looks good in a power suit, and doesn't dress in a kurung.

Out of all of my uncles, almost all of them are succesful professionals in their fields. One of them is the head of the board of a very famous local corporation. I won't even go to what both my grandfathers did.

This isn't boasting. God help me, I do not feel any pride reciting any of this to you, because this is what I had to live up to since I was a child. Live up to, and fail. Repeatedly.

I am not academically brilliant, like my sister or my cousins. I am not socially ‘succesful’ like my brother. My intelligence stops just outside the realm of the practical, and the only practical knowledge I can claim is merely scant experience in about two dozen or so programming environments or software tools. Oh, I am witty, but all that wit falls apart in groups of more than six, and I spent five years as an outcast in high school.

I am, still, however, privileged. I am born into a middle-upper-class family. I am brilliant, or so I have been told. I have never known poverty, hunger, intellectual deprivation or any lack in amenities. My parents have made every effort to make sure that I got the best education and erudition their money could buy, and it was good education, or at least as good an education as anyone could get.

And yet I failed. I had, as one of the ladies who worked in the office where I finally placed the withdrawal form said not unkindly, ‘thrown away an opportunity’. One that apparently fell onto my lap.

When faced with an accusation like this, I can no longer feel any anger, or remorse, or defensiveness. All I feel is… nothing.

Yes. You're right. I threw it all away.

Goodbye.

Bork bork bork!

2004-11-19T11:26:00.000+08:00

Yuoo get it. Um de hur de hur de hur. I get it. Um de hur de hur de hur. Iferyune-a gets it. Um de hur de hur de hur.

Ooffffended, thet is. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Und frunkly, I dun't bleme-a yuoo vhee it heppens. Um gesh dee bork, bork! It's a netoorel reecshun tu uny perceeefed ettecks tu unytheeng thet is cluse-a tu yuoor heert. Um de hur de hur de hur.

Su vhenefer I need tu gu tu, sey, MENJ's blug oor vhenefer I need a guud, herd loogh I gu here-a. It trunsffurms yuoor a URL (leeke-a thees blug), intu a cumedy deeelect: in thees cese-a, Svedeesh Cheff. It's greet foon, und yuoo'll be-a tuu boosy spendeeng yuoor teeme-a loogheeng yuoor ess ooffff und tryeeng tu deceepher vhet is beeeng seeed tu ectooelly get med. Bork bork bork!

I certeeenly recummend. Bork bork bork!

Finally He Talks About It, The Ungrateful Bastard.

2004-11-10T01:46:00.000+08:00

You've heard people blogging about it. You've heard rumors and comments. You've even seen some pictures. But not a word from the Birthday Boy.

Well, that's because the Birthday Boy has been too busy to post up something decent. And to be honest, everyone's said everything there is to say. Except for a few important announcements.

I'd like to thank Hani for being such a wonderful help in organizing the iftar. Truth be told, she was the one who came up with the idea and did most of the talking, while I stressed out on work and stuff. She had work too, which meant that she was doubly amazing. I Love you, Sayang.

I'd also like to thank Ash for letting me hang around his house to play his copy of Fable, which was fun.

I also would like to thank Pick Yin for coming over Ash's place and her present, the ever-delectable B.P.R.D. I enjoyed the book, lass. Thank you for being cool and having excellent taste :D

I also would like to thank U-Jin, my old college mate for coming for the iftar. I know we were like too intellectually advanced for you, kiddo, but you handled yourself swimmingly.

Hell, while I'm at it I'll thank Nina and TJ for coming over. I especially want to thank Nina some more, since she actually handled herself marvellously during the iftar, even if she was surrounded by… perish the thought… bloggers. I'm so sorry, girl.

Anyway. Then there's Jordan and Leen, who were amazing and wonderful and funny and witty, and too far away to listen to all the time, damnit. Next time I call dibs on sitting near them. Thank you for the card, you two. It amuses.

I'd like to thank Jikon for coming over as well, and for being so damn pretty. Ha! Yes you were. Do not deny it, you photogenic bastard. I'm glad you had fun, though.

Najah and Fische, thank you. I'm guessing you two were the ones who masterminded the Kinokuniya book coupons, so I got to thank you for that. And thank you, Fische, for being such a good sport when we teased you.

Come to think of it, thanks, Ash, for not beating teh g4y outta me for what I did to you. Ho ho ho. ^o^

Thank you all, you readers who wished me well during, before and after my birthday. I used to fantasize about having a lot of friends for my birthday, and hey, it's come true. Thank you all for making a lonely, lonely child very, very happy.

Instead of going to class, I did this.

2004-11-09T10:56:00.000+08:00

From this post:

I know. I have no sense of meter, rhyme or reason.

This lyrics are a parody of Avril Lavigne's “Skater Boy”. This particular derivative is made under the doctrine of fair use; the original copyright still goes to original copyright holders.

But it was still fun to do.

Sk8tr B3nG (with apologies to Avril Lavigne)

He an Ah Beng,
She an Ah Lian,
Aiseh macha ca-an you see it or not?

He mod his car,
Jual Vee Cee Day,
Wahlau man Aiseh.

He wanted her,
We said bloody hell,
Thing was that she wanted him as well.

But all of her friends,
All shook their head
“If you be damn-careless,
You'll end up dead.”

He was a Sk8t3r B3nG
She said see you l8r B3nG
He was too dangerous for her
She had a pretty dress
(But didn't have any breasts)
She needed to come back down to Earth…

Two years from now, she sits at home,
She fail her CLP, all alone.
She bukak Fortune, guess what she see,
Sk8t3r B3nG! (wah, he dress damn fansee!),
She call all her fren, they say ya lor,
Now he a damn big kau kau tai kor.
She reads the mag, looks at the pic,
Looks at the man she once called a dick…

He was a Sk8t3r B3nG,
She said see you l8r B3nG,
Didn't you say he no future,
Now look his portfolio,
Damn big also ya no?
Too bad you not stick with the fler…(2x)

Too bad Ah Lian, you miss out,
Kesian but he's all mine now,
Go to Nuovo, dance all nite,
We tiew a lot and never fight.

Too bad that chew couldn't see,
Saw Ah Beng where Tai Kor be,
He is more than meet the eye,
When we tiew I feel like, ‘die’.

He an Ah Beng, I'm a Datin,
Aiyah daling ca-an you see it or not,
He a Big Shot, I a Widow,
And we rock each other's umm, you know…!

I'm with a Sk8t3r B3nG,
I said see you l8tr B3nG,
Nanti we jumpa at Bangsar.
Then we go to his condo,
Tiew until tomolo,
And talk about this girl he know… (x2)

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Original rights to the lyrics are reserved to the original copyright holders.

Edit: Added CC information for this particular blog entry.

First, the Quizzes.

2004-11-08T18:21:00.000+08:00

I'll post something proper later, but here are the quizzes I got from a couple of my friends in my newsreader.

This one I got from Hani and Jordan:

You Are a Snarky Blogger!

You've got a razor sharp wit that bloggers are secretly scared of. And that's why they read your posts as often as they can!

What kind of blogger are you?

Fear my snarky wit, j0.

And this one's from Nina. I love this one.

What is your stand on.....
Created by spyndakitrose and taken 15568 times on bzoink!
Abortion?	Pro-choice -- with full emotional and psychological support, because abortion can be a traumatic experience.
Death Penalty?	Prone to error and irreversible. Not to be done lightly, and most of the time, not at all.
Prostitution?	Legalize and heavily regulate. The dangers of prostitution lie not in the women itself, but the potential for diseases to go unchecked.
Alcohol?	Legalize and regulate. Personal matter.
Marijuana?	Legalize and regulate. Personal matter, but reduction of harm comes first.
Other drugs?	Legalize and regulate HEAVILY. Personal matter on matters of consumption, but should take into account that it may affect work performance. Reduction of harm comes first.
Gay marriage?	Legalize. Redefine marriage to two categories: religious and civil unions.
Illegal immigrants?	Must be legalized. They have rights as immigrants afterwards. Deportation seems uneccessary.
Smoking?	Legalize, even when I realize that smoking fucks people up pretty bad.
Drunk driving?	Harsh penalties must be enforced. However, viable alternatives like a solid public transport system should be considered.
Cloning?	Yes, but regulate. Again, personal matter, but prone to abuse and atrocity.
Racism?	HEAVILY discouraged, but permissable. Speech is speech.
Premarital sex?	I do it. I'd like it so that sexual support be there for couples who do it for the first time and get into trouble.
Religion?	Strongly support. Religion is very important, as is freedom of religion and religious expression.
The war in Iraq?	Doesn't do what it says on the tin, apparently isn't going down well with everyone.
Bush?	Apparently you folks like him. You're welcome to him.
Downloading music?	A better method of copyright should be allowed. Single-song purchases over Internet supported; if such avenues are lacking, piracy acceptable.
The legal drinking age?	Eighteen.
Porn?	Porn is expression. Suppresion of expression never went well with me.
Suicide?	Again, should be allowed, but only after extensive counselling and support from community.
Create a Survey \| Search Surveys \| Go to bzoink!

Anyway. Will post something else later.

…and Lo, the Storm Passeth Over.

2004-11-03T10:45:00.000+08:00

I've been ill for the past three days or so.

It started off as a minor cold, with sneezing and the like. It felt like hay-fever, but there were no watery eyes and it wasn't so bad. I had a sore throat, though. That worried me.

It got really bad last night. I think I lost some of the contents of my sahur, because my system started rebelling at the racking coughs I ended up getting, and it all ended when I threw up twice that night.

The worst seems to be over, though — I'm pretty sure. Today everything feels like it's covered in a golden light, and I feel like a kid again, alone, fresh and fragile, but still there. It helps that it's a nice day.

I guess a day off wouldn't be so bad, after all.

When in Doubt, Post Song Lyrics.

2004-10-28T18:18:00.000+08:00

I'll make this quick, since I'm in a hurry.

Heaven bent to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight

Truth be told I've tried my best
But somewhere along the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
And the cost was so much more than I could bear

Though I've tried, I've fallen
I have sunk so low
I'm messed up
Better I should know
So don't come round here
And tell me I told you so

We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past can be undone
But we carry on our backs the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It's the bitter taste of losing everything
That I've held so dear

I've fallen
I have sunk so low
I'm messed up
Better I should know
So don't come round here
And tell me I told you so, [no..]

Heaven bent to take my hand
I have nowhere left to turn
I've lost to those I thought were friends
To everyone I know
Oh they turned their heads embarrassed
Pretend that they don't see
But it's one missed step
You'll slip before you know it
And there doesn't seem a way to be redeemed

Though I've tried, I've fallen
I have sunk so low
I'm messed up
Better I should know
So don't come round here
And tell me I told you so, [no..]
I'm messed up
Better I should know
But don't come round here
And tell me I told you so.

— Sarah McLachlan — Fallen.

Sums up how I've been feeling, at least.

Take care of yourselves, you filthy sons of camels.

Of Real Compassion.

2004-10-26T14:43:00.000+08:00

From Jeff's post.

There are times when I want to cry. There are times when I want to scream in anger and hate. There are times when I don't just not want to play the game any more, but to also smash the board.

I've heard, over the years, about how compassionate and charitable our nation is. We've all heard the slogans and seen the striving — the talk about how helping others is a noble, kind, thing, and that charity and compassion separates us from ~~animals~~ richer nations.

But, apart from the expansive and magnamonious gestures we make in terms of charity donations and hunger-fests, I don't see a whole lot of compassion in ourselves. Not even in me.

We can blather on about how children in Darfur and our poor need our help and kindness, and yet we can ignore this until it was too late? And then, just after she's gone through this hell, we want to punish her some more?

Why? She's suffered pain and shame. She was so afraid, she hid the facts from everyone around her. You know why she hid from you — she knew what you'd do to her if you found out. She knew you wouldn't offer any help in making this all right again, or repairing what harm that's been done. She knew that if she confessed to what she had done, you'd beat her and deride her for being ‘immoral’.

She's given fucking birth. Alone. With no one to hold her hand, to support her, to lead her through a difficult, painful and terrible ordeal. So, after all this, you're going to punish her by expelling her from university, in what would curse her into a position where she would not be able to support her baby?

I know you. I've known you all my life.

Why not go all the way? Why not take away her child, give it to the Welfare Department? Why not ostracize her, publish her name in public, parade her face for all to see, shame her as an example for others? Why not put her in jail?

Why don't you just be merciful and kill her instead?

It'd save you the damn money and effort.

Thinking About the Geek Code.

2004-10-24T01:14:00.000+08:00

I've encountered two websites discussing the Geek Code recently, which was rather fashionable in geek circles during the nineties:

One was in MENJ's blog, in which he showed his particular Blogger Code snippet. The Blogger Code is essentially a fork of the original Geek Code. It also tells me that the last thing he'd want to have sex with is a blogger. Can't say I blame him.
The other was in the Y!PP Forums, in which they were discussing an addition to the Geek Code, specifically one that was Y!PP-related.

The Geek Code's nice and esoteric and stuff, but there are several things about the whole thing that rubs me the wrong way:

It's a centralized development effort, and the developer hasn't budged off his butt to work on it for years now. Presumably he's too busy with real life, which is understandable. Thing is, I think people have approached the creator to actually continue the whole thing, but apparently he doesn't like that. So, bwah.
As a result of the lack of updating, the Geek Code website is so outdated. I mean, really. This was way before IMs and P2P, and what with all the fandoms the Geek Code doesn't really represent everyone on the Internet any more. Not even the geeks, a category which has expanded.
Single developer, single point of updating, centralized decision-making… man, that just so sucks. The Code should really be extensible and linkable, with the abilty for Geeks to define their own symbols and ranges.

So it got me to thinking. What's stopping me from making a similar Geek Code system? Well, apart from pissing off the originator. I don't know, but here's what the new (proposed) code should do:

It should be compact — I mean, we could do it in XML, but XML development, from what I can see, is like a whole troop of maddened kittens thrown into a tar pit.
Plus, XML is remarkably elephantine for what should be a nice, clean code, which can be mildly comprehensible to anyone with an arbitrarily large number of neurons with active, healthy synapses.
And then there's the issue of it being extensible. I don't think anyone should be in control of the Geek Code definitions. I mean, if you're gonna do it, you might as well link a definition file to the code block to some remote file.
Again, brevity should win over completeness, though the link might be better off being a URI — everyone knows what a URI is. Well, you know 'em as URLs. Web addresses.
What we should define, however, is the code conventions themselves, and how to define the Geek Code definition files. You'd need to talk about what each symbol means, and how you'd define symbols and stuff like that…
It's too fucking late to talk about something so fucking trivial like this. Geez. But I'm obsessive this way.
Anyway, geez, I don't know.

So. Basically, Geek Code could do with being modular, Geek Code defs should be left to The People (get a central clearing-house for Geek Code defs if you're worried about malformed definitions, and get a reputation of being reliable, instead hogging all developmental rights to yourself), XML is too fat for the Geek Code, and the new Geek Code should go as far as describing the conventions and the format for definition files and no more. And I should sleep earlier, and not do this sort of thing at 1 am in the goddamned morning.

So, anyway. Rambling. Ah heh.

S***, I've been quoted.

2004-10-22T01:11:00.000+08:00

By KeadilanRaykat.org, nonetheless.

Let me first state that the reason why I said yes to answering Shin's questionnaire for this article is because I'm an attention-seeking whore. Let that be known.

And on to the two points elaborated by the article, before I go on about other things I did say to Shin. Since he did say he was getting a bunch of people to answer him, and he's writing for a political party's website, I don't blame him for not representing my view completely. To give him credit, though, he represented my view fairly accurately.

Yes, I did think the whole Jeff Ooi saga was a mess. I'd even call it a fucking fiasco. Yes, the government did stretch its credibility on this one. So did other bloggers, though, for jumping into the bandwagon and mindlessly calling Jalan Riong every name they could think of.
I do try to moderate the comments here— as well as I possibly can. Personal insults to me, I generally keep, especially if I think the insult is not worth my attention. Personal insults to people I know and like, or generally racist and inflammatory shit, I delete. I can't ban you, but I'll tell you to STFU if you don't fucking behave.

Now, for the points not covered by Shin et al.

Of who and why they did this to Jeff, I don't know or care. I will, however, comment on the result: big fuckup, dudes. Not that I don't expect anything better from you, but still, you fucked up. Congratulations.

We've apparently mastered the technology and infrastructure behind the whole Internet thing, but that's easy — it's a matter of memorization and familliarity, and even idiots can do it if they put their minds to it. I mean, take a look at some of the bloggers who are online and you'll see what I mean.

Yeah. Buncha poindexters.

I also told Shin that I hate feedback in general. There's a reason why I don't allow anonymous comments, and this is it. Given the chance, I wouldn't allow comments in a blog until I see the email address of the commenter, send a message to him to check that the email account is real, and by then still hold the right to muzzle the little shit if he pisses me off. All Blogger allows me to do is screen out non-Blogger account owners. I can live with that. For now.

I also described the newspaper industry as a ‘creaky, corrupt edifice’. But I also called bloggers ‘wanky, elitist prod-noses and memetic vigilantes’. There are reasons for this; some of it is because some of you are. Or all of you are, sometimes.

Because of this, I suggested that bloggers and newspapermen learn to work together, because more often than not the both of you will find that it is better to pool your resources and work on each other's strengths rather than pontificate about how the Other Guy is Evil or Stupid or Misguided. Stop it.

Just shut up and learn to cooperate with one another, why don't you?

T-Shirts for Couples

2004-10-20T13:39:00.000+08:00

Malaysians can be so insensitive sometimes.

It's bad enough that Hani gets stared at by Malay men (who have not learned the art of sneaking a look), but people like the Scarfer and Jordan have to go through the sort of derisive howling that Our Enlightened Countrymen seem to love to subject on apparently ‘morally deficient’ people.

Jordan put up a pretty interesting idea, actually. Get t-shirts to remind other people that the both of you are legally married couples, and that actions like holding hands and displaying affection are perfectly all right. Which just got me thinking…

Why not get a set of t-shirts for the non-Normal, non-Optimal Malaysian couple? Please note that the terms Normal and Optimal are used sarcastically, which means that it's for couples that don't look like the normal sheep Malaysian couples tend to look like. These are for the freaks that deign to walk the same streets with the Normals.

Anyway:

A couple t-shirt, with the words, “DAH KAHWIN LAH” in the front, and “WE'RE MARRIED LAH” in the back. (From Jordan's Blog).
A baby t-shirt with the words “STOP STARING” or “APA TENGOK?”, right across the chest.
For guys: “YES, YOUR WIFE LOOKS PRETTY GOOD TOO”.
A couple t-shirt that says “MARRIED FOR LOVE, NOT FOR GREEN CARD”.

I dunno. They look pretty lame on paper. I wonder how well they'd do.

Evil Internet Connection.

2004-10-20T01:03:00.000+08:00

I've been struggling with my Internet connection all night.

It sporadically goes wonky, and some sites, like Petaling Street, are completely inaccessible.

Downloads would stop in the middle, and I had to restart them. Occasionally they tell me that Google.com doesn't exist.

I'm so stressed out. This is such a load of bullshit.

The Somewhat Simple Thing

2004-10-18T19:26:00.000+08:00

Tea. Not your usual Earl Grey-Starbucks-based tea, but good old plain Boh — cheaper, but harder to get, especially when you were in London.

Currypuffs. The maid, who has been in the family since I was six months old, always makes them for Ramadhan. She knows what I like, so she adds more beef than usual.

Some really expensive-but-tasty kuih my maid got from Bangsar. The kuih keladi was exquisite.

Fish fingers. Baked beans.

It isn't much, but it's always the simple things that you missed the most. I said it once, and I'll say it again — I'm glad I'm home.

YARP

2004-10-17T07:39:00.000+08:00

Yeah, yeah. Basically, this is another Ramadhan post, just like Hani's, Pick Yin's Najah's, Zsarina's, Jordan's, Idlan's, Dina's, Ash's, oh, hell, who knows. You're a Muslim? You're fasting? Post lah your YARP, before they take away your blogger's license.

Funny thing is, I can never seem to connect to Najah's and Zsarina's blogs. They always time out on me. I wonder why.

Anyway. Ramadhan. That time of the year again. Hell, what do I put in for my YARP? We've had our obligatory musings, the occasional Qur'anic verse, tales of how converts deal with Ramadhan and what not. Personally, I like Dina's Ramadhan post best — this one doesn't count, it's too short. It reminds me that the puasa is not just a religious thing, but an essentially human thing, with all the stupidities and snobberies associated with it.

I know, I know. Not happy with something until I take it down. I'm not very sentimental at all, am I? Not really. Yes, I know the significance of Ramadhan, as well as the associated hikmah that Ramadhan is supposed to teach. But every time this month comes I am assaulted not by holiness, but by memory.

My past two Ramadhans have been easy, but completely lonely. This is the first time in two years where it feels like I am performing the ibadah as a member of a community, not as an isolated Muslim in a sea of unbelievers. I didn't hang around the Muslim community in London a lot, see.

I kept forgetting how social Ramadhan was, until I didn't have that buffer surrounding me. Alone, by myself, I was reminded how precarious my situation was, and it hurt. It rubbed my soul raw, in a sense, because I felt like I had no anchor — either with family or my fellow Muslim friends.

Not this time. Yesterday we ended up having buka puasa with some friends. Blew a fortune, but it was worth it. Tonight is more or less the same, except that I won't be blowing a fortune — the food will hopefully be free. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure this year I'll never be breaking fast alone. If I can help it, I never want to break fast alone again.

I'm glad I'm home.

The Apocalypse Is Now

2004-10-15T09:24:00.000+08:00

Who said this particular quoatation?

The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

It's amazing how common this sentiment seems to apply to history, especially recent history. As anyone above a certain age can attest, the world is no longer firmly in our control. Our children rebel against us, and one's right to voice an opinion has been used and abused so often that the meaning of our words has lost its meaning and potency.

We are, as it were, approaching the End Times, where the world will change beyond our recognition, and our lives may be altered or perhaps ended forever and ever. And there is little we can do to save ourselves. The integrity of the people above and around us has degenerated in such a way that any change, any positive change, is all but impossible.

We are, in a sense, doomed. Incidentally, have you guessed where the source of that quote was from?

Well, apparently it was found in an Assyrian tablet, dated circa 2800 BCE. Of course, I've heard people saying that a particular piece of grafitti in Pompeii is similar to the above quote, so you never know.

Yes, I'm having you on. :)

So. Tell Me Something.

2004-10-13T22:03:00.000+08:00

I sin. I sin a lot. Every day, in fact. I am in no way a ‘good Muslim’, although I try to be a good person. As impossible as it sounds to some people.

I also know a lot of sinners. There are a lot of them, you know — far more than you'd like to think. I've spoken to them, read what they've written, broken bread with them, laughed at their jokes, listen to their confessions, and generally enjoy their company.

Or not. Sinners are a diverse lot, and our liking to one another varies — there are plenty of sinners out there I cannot stand.

But one thing I seem to hear a lot about are well-meaning comments about the state of sin these people are in. You'll know what I'm talking about: the sermons on pre-marital sex to those who engage in them, the castigation on drinking to those who indulge in the bottle (I have. I occasionally do. I will occasionally do so in the future), lectures on how a life of worship and humilty will do an ‘arrogant’ person good.

Perhaps you've had people done it to you. Perhaps you do that to people like me, sinners in life who have either made mistakes, or like making those mistakes and indulge in them.

For those who do, let me ask you something. I have known a friend, a woman, who used to talk on her blog about her sex life. I also know the guy she had sex with on a regular basis — have, for many years. I do know that after a while, a bunch of people started congregating on her blog and castigating her for premarital sex, telling her that it is a sin in the eyes of God. I believe she knows this, but for some reason, the castigation did not stop her from sinning.

Here's the clincher. The blog that these sordid deeds are in is no longer active; so there's no point in sending you folks a link. But on that blog, I believe, were links to her boyfriend. I believe it was to his blog (also inactive), and on his blog there were email addresses. His email addresses, I believe.

So tell me this: Why didn't you go ‘advise’ the other member of the party to stop sinning? Why didn't you lecture him on the perils of premarital sex, and urge him to change his ways? Why did you only heckle the girl and not the man, knowing full well that both share the same sin and both are equally guilty in the eyes of God? Why didn't you send him advice, however unsolicited, with the hopes that he would listen, and change?

I know he didn't receive any messages or missives from concerned Muslims. Was it because blogger was a woman, and only women are responsible for the sin of zina? Or were you afraid of talking to the man, and the only people you harass are the ‘weak’ and the unprotected?

So, tell me. Why not both of them? Why is it, that when a woman does something bad, and a man does the same something bad, the one who gets the crap is the woman and not the man? Why are women smokers lectured upon, and the men smokers ignored? Why are the ‘slutty’ women vilified and humiliated in the public, while the man ‘players’ ignored, or heaven knows, secretly envied and admired?

Is this because of the other person's sin, or is this about yours?

What An Interesting Idea.

2004-10-13T19:20:00.000+08:00

Don't have much time, so I'll just give a brief précis and a little opinion-spurt.

The Guardian Wants You Non-Americans To Make A Difference In The November Elections.

As the Guardian notes:

[T]he actions of the US impact on our lives in overwhelming ways… And yet, though the US Declaration of Independence speaks of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”, you don't, of course, have a vote. You can't even donate money to the campaigns: foreign contributions are outlawed. And you're unlikely to have the chance to do any campaigning on the ground. All you can do is wait and watch: you're powerless.
Or are you?

Damnit. Why don't they give us this happen earlier?

A Letter From Someone Famous.

2004-10-12T13:09:00.000+08:00

I've had two blogs before this; well, technically three, but the third one doesn't work as well as I wanted it to be.

I was satisfied, lurking in semi-obscurity, until I received an email from someone with my name.

My first impulse was that the email was spam (how many of you have received emails that came from you but were really selling penis-enlargement medicine?), but for once, this email is genuine.

It's from Tariq Kamal, a Palestinian-American commercial artist living in Los Angeles. He's an English major and a member of The Free Speech Show's ensemble cast, so some of you might have heard of him.

He likes the way I write. He thinks my girlfriend is hot (I agree with him). And he found this, a letter I wrote, a long time ago, compelling.

Wow. I thought only people like John Grisham and J.K Rowling were called that.

Anyway. Here's what he's got to say about this laughable circus I call my blog:

Tariq Kamal's blog is some of the most insightful and compelling material I've read on the Web, and I'm not just saying that because we have the same name. Intelligent, thought-provoking, and deeply personal, Tariq spares no effort in blowing the minds of his readers with each new entry.

I honestly don't know what he's talking about, boys and girls, but I just report what I've got in my mailbox.

Anyway. Maybe it's time I started working on consolidating all of my entries. Not looking forward to that, though.

Scandal!

2004-10-11T23:29:00.000+08:00

Oh, woe is me! It turns out that I am the victim of vote-rigging! I feel so crushed! Jeffrey, how could you?!?! T_T

To Someone Special.

2004-10-11T21:24:00.000+08:00

The smell of you, freshly showered.

Your laughter, high-pitched and joyful, when I hold you close.

Your exuberance. Do you know that other people can see that in you?

Your eyes. Did you know that when we're together, those eyes are large and deep enough to swallow me in their depths?

Your soft skin. The feel of your hands on my back. You're pretty good at what you do — no one scratches my back like you.

You're a lot of things to me. We've been together for so long; least, it feels like that.

I miss you, even when you're near. You're like candy. My candy.

And there's no one else like you.

The Jeff Ooi–TV Smith Interview.

2004-10-11T20:29:00.000+08:00

See, I'm blogging about something in TV Smith's blog. This is allowed. Shut up.

“Firstly, I'm fed up with the local mainstream media. Secondly, blogs can be serious, and fun. But tomorrow, I may blog about locomotives and old train stations again - some of my favourite things. Days ago, I blogged about music from Scorpions and my Humbucker electric guitar - the stuff I grew up with. Then, there's this crave for mee rebus…”

What did I think about it? Well, Jeff sounded a lot more human than his Screenshots persona. And you kinda sympathize with the guy after listening to him for a while. He is, after all, by himself. And it has been a strain on him, any way you cut it.

“When I interviewed Husam Musa, he told me first thing: ‘You need to be brave in order to be a PAS member.’ It's much worse when you are all alone.”

Take care of yourself, old man.

OMG lookit! Lookit!

2004-10-11T13:26:00.000+08:00

I'm'a loony blogger, momma! A loony blogger!

Wow. First it was MENJ, now this… someone really loves me up there.

I feel like squealing like a fangirl and getting choked up at the same time. I mean, look, this is what they say what people who make it into the list are:

The R.A.J.A.N. (R) Network is the Restricted [ as signified by the (R) ] edition of the original R.A.J.A.N. Network. It is a blogtal-cum-portal highlighting Malaysian (including those who think they are Israelis) blogs which can only belong to the radical fringe. Or in other words, these people have explicitly declared or projected themselves as radicals, are against the concept of universal justice and equality, and are totally naive when it comes to commenting on worldly issues.

Getting yourself awarded a listing status in the Network, which carries the title “Rajan” (eg : Rajan Tun Datuk Seri Tan Sri Datin Ariel Sharon), is a rare honour, equivalent to a Toonship from the Malaysian Federal Government.

Wow. Rajan Tariq Kamal. That sounds so cool. Thanks, nominators! Vote more for me, and get that fucker Rajan off the number one spot! Come, do it. Do it, bitch!

Does that mean that now there'll be all sorts of gold-digging women who are willing to fuck me for a moment of fame in their otherwise insignificant lives? I mean, that's what titled people get, right?

Updated: The administrator's moved his setup to MENJ's server. Very classy digs. Funny, though — he's disallowed comments. At least on my side. Perhaps… no, course not. Why would he ban me?

Updated: Guess not. Seems that incompetence was the problem, not malice. The pop-up comment windows don't work — me believes that there's a bit of slapdash coding there. My apologies to the administrators, who are doing a fine job in making sure I get the recognition I deserve.

Science Fiction By Consensus.

2004-10-10T23:08:00.000+08:00

Been wanting to write about this for a while, but I guess I never got the nerve to do so. It's basically about this:

Orion's Arm: Building a World, 10,000 Years in the Future.

Okay, so what about it? Orion's Arm is a community dedicated to building a realistic, plausible universe, with a vast setting with no humanoid aliens whatsover.

…

Wait. Why is that important, all of the sudden? I mean, yes, there is no reasonable explanation for why there are Vulcans and Twi'leks and any kind of humanoid variant, but is that necessarily a prime selling point for this kind of thing? I mean, seriously. Are there enough people out there who are so sick and tired at looking at an alien with the shape (if not the exact physiology) of a human that there's a market for it?

That's my first niggle for the whole world, or at least the attitude and beliefs behind the group of people who are doing this. It kinda surfaces every once in a while, despite the fact that this worldbuilding exercise is actually pretty fucking brilliant.

The basic premise, if you haven't visited that place yet, is actually pretty much like this:

The original idea for the series began with M. Alan Kazlev, the ‘Director’ for the OA franchise. He likes space opera, but he doesn't like what the OA community calls ‘sillytech’. Not that I blame him, but since I'm not much of a stickler for sf I don't mind it as much as he does, apparently.

So what he does, basically, is try to write a story. It's an sf tale, at any rate, but with one big difference: it's space opera and hard sf. Which is harder than it looks, to be perfectly honest, since space opera is more concerned with the form and struggle between good and evil (or less-evil and evil), while hard sf is concerned with more scientific realism and coherence. These two goals typically clash.

When you try and mix those two elements with the Singularity idea, you usually give up, since Singularity stories typically end with everyone entering a vast, blissful rapture. Alan, funnily enough, solved it, by not making Singularity the all-encompassing, end-of-everything route. What happens, in the end, is, perhaps ironically, the rebirth of the Gods.

Oh, and I didn't mention this, but halfway through this whole process he lost control over the whole story, and it kinda ballooned into the current state that it's in — from one novel to a whole frickin' community-built world.

I have mixed feelings over the whole franchise, really. I mean, it's really cool. Really, it is. Ideas like a species of gods ruling the galaxy to answering the question of what happens to old-world religions, like Islam, to technology smaller and more advanced than nanotech make me go ‘ding’. They're great ideas. They're pretty original ideas. Plus, they're under the CC, so that means that people can use it to a limited extent.

But if anything, a good franchise cannot depend on great ideas. There are thousands of series and novels out there with great ideas but poor execution, and that just ruins it all for a lot of people. I mean, I don't agree with a lot of the basic ideas behind Orion's Arm — not things like why FTL travel and the existence of humanoid aliens (which there are, only that they're not really aliens, they're humans modified over thousands of years of evolution and tweaking), but basic ideas on why you're doing this.

I mean, you can say that there are no humanoid aliens because you think they're old hat, sure… but you need to realize what those aliens were for originally. Those aliens filled niches that fleshed out a world where all of humanity was united as one, and you needed that to make the world seem deeper and realer than it would have been without them. And ideas like FTL and sillytech are there for a reason, too — they make the story epic without having to make the story over-complicated. Take away those things, and you need other things to compensate.

And in a sense, Orion's Arm does this. It does, but only unconsciously, out of habit, or by discovering that you can't really make an engaging tale about an AI God last more than a short story. You don't talk about humanoid aliens, you talk about vec, ai, splice, su, tweak and sybont allies and foes, which, incidentally, make for more interesting tales than some all American cast taking on some damn Vulcans, even if you're using those characters the same way. There's plenty of shit that don't get used because everyone seems to be focusing on the wrong things… and not on what makes a better story / game / whatever.

I like OA. I wouldn't mind contributing, myself. But the inherent wankiness of the community makes me hesitate; it's not something I want to deal with on a regular basis.

Oh, for crying out loud—

2004-10-09T02:12:00.000+08:00

Bloody hell.

And just as everything was simmering down, too.

Yuck. Just… yuck.

Now that's what I call “milking it for all it's worth”.

Another Dull Post About Blogs

2004-10-08T22:06:00.000+08:00

I'm obsessive-compulsive. You might note that I cannot leave a thing well alone. I know, I say to myself, ‘this is the last post I'll make about blogs for a while’ but alas, that's never the case.

So what is the simplest definition of a “blog”?

Defining A Blog

Here's one I skived off Wikipedia:

A weblog, or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage. Such a web site would typically be accessible to any Internet user.

It's a pretty good definition. I like it, mainly because it avoids the whole ‘content’ mess. It's a rather interesting phenomenon. When someone here in the boondocks talks about blogs in a public forum, we always seem to gravitate towards the journalistic and opinion-oriented side of blogging.

Which is, in a sense, feels as natural as having our conversations drift towards the superheroic and pseudo-mythic whenever we talk about comic books. It's something, we find, that the medium is suited to. But to do so is to ignore the rich possibilities of what that particular medium can do. In a sense, it's like concentrating on the X-Men and the JLA, and ignoring works like Maus, Persepolis, and Eisner's post-Spirit work.

But what else can blogs do? When the above-average user thinks about blogs other than journoblogs and opinioblogs, their thoughts drift towards the somewhat murky world of quasi-private diaries, as well as works made by the fen.

Ugh, There Goes The Neighbourhood.

And frankly, I don't blame them if they think the world of fandom, as it is called, is full of chaff and muck, and that only sad obsessives with a fixation towards something incredibly silly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Raymond E. Feist, Harry Potter and the many incarnations of Star Trek find any real value in it. It certainly seems that way, especially if you delve into the world of fandom, with its strange terminologies, customs and traditions.

I don't understand it completely, but I have a small circle of friends that do. It's both egalitarian and insular at the same time, both obsessive and open-minded, and often creepy as often as it is fascinating. As a matter of fact, the longer I look at it, the more I'm convinced that both factions, that is, fen-bloggers and “Real Bloggers”, have something to learn about each other.

What Legolas And Jalan Riong Have In Common

It's not immediately obvious, since there are so many differences between Jeff Ooi's last tangle with the law and, say, how hot Steve Jackson's Legolas is. One is seen as a watershed moment in the history of Malaysian press, the other seen as a rather disturbing obsession over a character that doesn't really exist. One found its way into the RSF's main page; the other is expressed hundreds of thousand times over the Internet, mainly in fan pages and forum posts. One is seen as serious: the other is not.

But both focus on the main defining characteristic of many bloggers, and that seems to be obsession. It is hard to deny the fact that Jeff is a driven man, some might call him obsessed. It's also very hard to not say that Legolas fans are driven as well; hell, it's probably easier to call them obsessed, if only to feel superior over them.

Now, not all bloggers are obssessed; it seems to be a common characteristic, not a defining one. Aizuddin seemed to imply that bloggers require some kind of discipline to continue blogging for long periods of time; I say otherwise: a long-term blogger needs only to be obssessed. There are exceptions, of course, but I'm pretty sure that a significant number of bloggers are obsessed over something.

Another commonality that bloggers from both sides share is the obssession over something that is, at least according to a strict view of reality, illusory. Jeff Ooi's tangle with the Law is not something new; Malaysian history is littered with the ruined lives of people who dared to speak up and were harshly suppressed by the government that is supposed to protect them.

The Jeff Ooi Brouhaha: So What's It All About, Really?

That Jeff Ooi did not finally get arrested under the ISA is an interesting development, but merely a novel one: not many people narrowly escape the ISA the way Jeff did. And even then, his escape may actually be merely a tactical retreat on the part of the Malaysian Authorities. Speculation abounds about all of this; again, this is normal for our Malaysian society, a society that has its fair amounts of secrets, shadows and prevarications.

And yet, this novel encounter between the Big Guy and the Little Guy sparked a remarkable frenzy in blogging circles around and in Malaysia — everything from frenzied media coverage to blantant, overwhelming support of Jeff Ooi from people who may not even look at him twice if he crossed their way. To say that Jeff Ooi's rights were abrogated by an irresponsible press is a fairly accurate statement. But again, this is hardly an unusual thing, especially for Malaysians, if the falling NST readership is of any indication.

The Two Faces of The Same Head

I found it bemusing that so much interest was being held over this event, such that I began covering it in a lazy, slapdash manner so typical of me. The amount of emotional dudgeon over one man's threatened freedom was amazing, but what made him so different from other men? What made his near-plight such a rallying call for Bloggers Everywhere?

I couldn't see it. I still don't see it.

I am glad, however, that Jeff's gotten out of it somewhat intact: hell, he got out it even better than you'd expect, considering the fact that they wanted him in Kamunting. But I don't know if people will remember this all in ten years' time — not the way people might remember, say, Anwar Ibrahim.

And I still think blogging as a far more egalitarian and more inclusive activity than what many others wish it would be.

I Don't Hate You 'Cause I Hate Freedom.

2004-10-08T05:19:00.000+08:00

Check this out. I mean, I like Aiz and all out of principle, but damnit, he is such a big target.

I decided to try and see if I could make it all reverse-countdowny the way Aiz did it, but then sanity reared its ugly head and reasserted itself.

Bloggers can spell “Jalan Riong”.

How many of them can spell properly again, much less spell “Jalan Riong”?
Bloggers have opinions…

Dude, opinions are like rectums and nasty little secrets. Everyone has them.
…and bloggers don't really care who they upset.

Raise your hands, how many of you would have parental units, employers, friends and family killing you if they ever saw what you did on your spare Internet time.
Bloggers are under no editorial control.

Wow. Great. Just like Rupert Murdoch, without the impending senility or money. Mmmyeah no editorial control.
Its a wee bit difficult to “switch off” the Internet.

Yes. It's hard to turn off the Internet, but it's easy to choke it with weeds. Tried looking for a good MP3 song lately?
Bloggers are not paid a salary.

Which makes us hobbyists, not paid professionals. I'm supposed to be risking my life and liberty for a fucking hobby?
Bloggers move in packs — mess with one and you end up messing with them all.

Dude, like the wolf. Except that wolves don't argue, backbite, bitch or snipe at one another as often as we do. Dude, are even talking about the same kind of bloggers?
Bloggers can (and often do) use “hyperlinks”.

Wow. Look, the Enemy has money, power, influence and experience, but with our secret weapon, developed by Vannevar Bush, We Shall Overcome!
Bloggers don't have to wait for tomorrow to report today's news.

Yes. Like I need to hear another “Berita Harian SUCKS!!” or nauseatingly naïve blog post.
There are nearly 10,000,000 Internet users in Malaysia and nearly 1,000,000,000 users worldwide. Now, that's an audience.

A significant number of those buggers love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or any other TV show you could care to mention. Don't monopolize the Internet, man — the fen wanna have a go.

Don't hate me 'cause I'm beautiful, baby. Hate me 'cause I'm so mean-spirited and flippant.

Cryptic Time!

2004-10-07T08:44:00.000+08:00

Do you have armor?

Not literally some kind of physical armor, but the kind of metaphorical, mental armor that you wear all the time, because the world isn't something a person should deal with without some kind of protection.

I have armor. It's not terribly strong armor, but it was made in the Cempaka Forge, which basically means that it's good for some things but horrible in others, and it scrapes my psyche in the wrong places and occasionally leads me astray.

I'm inclined to believe that any child leaving that school leaves with cursed armor, myself. Hani said it rather succintly herself: “I don't think kids from that school are capable with dealing with the real world”.

That did mean I had to learn and reforge the armor I wore into something that wouldn't get me cut into ribbons in Battlefield Life. And it still means that I occasionally overestimate the strength of my new, refurbished armor, and I take unnecessary risks.

Take this and last week, for example. It started off with Jennifer Tai's treatise, Scarfer's reaction and Jennifer's counter-reaction, and it's ended up like this. Amazing how it went. Another mild disagreement turned major turned catastrophic, at least for poor Jeff Ooi.

Enough of that. My armor actually dealt very well with a lot of blows I had suffered during this period: some negative emails, one negative blog post, and two IMs, one fairly eh, and the other managing to score the biggest wound I had this week. Not because it was remarkably witty, mind you, and to be honest, one that was partially self-inflicted.

The reason why it hurt was because in a sense, I had forgotten who the sender was. I had thought that she was probably ‘just an acquaintance’, but it turns out that I had shown her where my weak-spots were. So when she lashed out, more out of her own sense of betrayal and hurt rather than what I said, well…

Critical hit. Blood everywhere.

I'm sorry, my friend. I'm so terribly sorry.

Holy Toledo!

2004-10-06T13:28:00.000+08:00

Now /. has gotten into the action.

I'm so sorry, Jeff.

But wait. Common Hall of Online Utopia?

Yeah, right.

Oh, You Silly Guv'mint People!

2004-10-06T09:49:00.000+08:00

Inspired by a friend of mine. I don't agree with her a lot, but she has a point. Yes, she's a LiveJournal user. So?

Typical life. I spend the weekend ~~under a bed, living on my own refuse and crying like a man with his soul broken up by cruel, cruel fate~~ spending time with my family and friends, and someone Way Up There stirs up a hornet's nest we call the Malaysian ~~“blogosphere”~~ Blogging Community.

Just a question to Jalan Riong: Why lah so stupid? Oh, I'm sure that what you want will eventually happen, and you know, things will eventually settle down to the horribly unpleasant status quo that everyone seems to desire, so why bother doing this? All you've done is made Jeff famous. And if it's anything, he doesn't need to get any more famous.

I like Jeff. Not because he's funny, or amusing, or even personable (I don't even know the man, so how would I know?), but because he has that obssessive-compulsive streak about him; the kind of obssessive-compulsive streak that's very useful if you were, say, a MAS or ASTRO customer. Very useful.

Except now that you've made him all saintly and shit, because you've just decided to take on the role of the Bad Guy. The Bad Guy with the UMNO-Youth-style manner of intimidation, all force and no class. You might know what I'm talking about — the self-righteous, easily-offended martyr for his race who wants the people who said those hurtful hurtful things to stop, and he'll beat up and intimidate everybody, like some kind of Johorian Loan Shark ~~or my girlfriend on PMS~~ to get his way.

I mean, really. You even got TV Smith to write poetry. Poetry. It looks like Bad Goth Poetry. My GOD. It's an ode. I never thought he'd stoop so low.

You know what the fan-bloggers, the bloggers who write about unimportant shit like who dies in Buffy and why Captain Archer's so fucking hot (can't say I disagree with that, hoo boy!) or why they want to marry Legolas and have his squealing babies think when they see the righteous furor that the Jalan Riong nastiness has engendered?

“My God,” they'd say. “They're blog-wanking.”

And it's all your fault. Thanks a lot, Jalan Riong. Now they're just going to be insufferable. All that heat from the Higher Ups, see. Dries out their sense of humor. Very the not nice to see, you.

And I know I'm gonna catch some flak now. If only in the form of well-intentioned advice.

Oh My God Dude!

2004-10-02T13:34:00.000+08:00

I'm a celebrity now! I got quoted in MENJ's blog. Woo hoo!

And he called me a dickhead! All right!

Do I read his blog? No, not really.

Oh. What's my problem with him?

I dunno. Don't read his shit. I just needed an example of a ‘bad blogger’, so I chose him, based on the amount of bitching I've heard about him (yeah, bloggers are the quintessential Internet dwellers). I can't believe he read my blog! Whoa! Next thing you know Jeff Ooi's gonna come by, read what I say, and call me a cocksucking motherfucker.

That would so awesome. Please, Jeff, if you read this, I'm like your worst enemy and shit, and I think you should be buggered by angry hornets. I'd be ever so grateful if you, like, describe what I do with my mother every night in embarrasing detail. Ok, thanks, bye!

TARIQ SMASH: No More Blog-Talk.

2004-10-02T01:18:00.000+08:00

I'm pissed off. I don't want to talk about blogs any more. I just don't. It's stupid pedantic arguing. “Oh, bloggers should be responsible for their opinions, they'll get hurt, blah de fucking blah”. That's consequence. You be careful when you don't want to get hurt, not because you're a fucking professional. You're professional when you get paid anyway, and blogging pays shit. Stupid people.

Blogging, like McCloud said, is a medium. A container for messages, you know, like a jug is a container for Merlot or some shit medium-class wankers or conneiseurs drink. I dunno. Some times the drink sucks, so do you blame the jar for it? Of course fucking not. And besides, like jugs, you can fill blogs with whatever messages you want. Look at the Datin Diaries for fuck's sake. She's already admitted that part of her blog is fictional anyway. Sheesh.

And you bloggers want to be taken seriously. So work at it lah. It's not as if Jeff Ooi isn't doing anything right — at least people listen to him and trust him. That's worth something, even if you bitch like an old lady about how he's not accountable to anyone. Of course he's not accountable to anyone, he doesn't get paid for advertising, no one will fire him from his damn job, he's doing it because he loves it. Not for Truth of Journalistic Integrity. Because he likes it, and he can't stand people not knowing what a fucked up country we live in.

So you get hurt when some troll comes in and calls you and your mother names. So fucking what? It's the fucking Internet, baby. Scum come in all the time. Hani's a wonderful woman, she writes good, and who did she fucking get? Some self-righteous prick who dissed her because she's not the typical Melayu girl: ie scared shitless about saying anything, and cowed down into not thinking.

Fuckers. Blogging is a medium. Bloggers have no duties and responsibilities save within their own domains. That's it. People want to listen to them, that's fine. The thing is, there are hundreds and thousands of other bloggers out there. Some are nice people, like Hani, Najah, Pick Yin and the like. Some aren't, like that fucker MENJ and his Mullah-talk. So what? That's the Internet. It's not as if people are getting paid for this kind of shit.

On Blogging.

2004-10-01T13:08:00.000+08:00

The Scarfer's just announced her intention to take a hiatus. Almost a month ago, the Datin decided to do the same.

They're two completely different people, with relatively little in common, apart from the fact that they're involved with someone ‘exotic’ (one is married to a Datuk, the other is dating a gwailo), and that they're both female, and obvious shit like that…

Basically they've got nothing in common. Save for one thing. They spoke their minds, realized that to some point, they were wrong, found out that people didn't like them for being wrong, and realized that blogging, formerly the panacea for troubled minds, has become too much. The things people said have become too painful, blood has been drawn, and it's time to pull back and lick your wounds. The game isn't fun anymore.

You know, I'm terrified this would happen to me. Hence, I limited attempts for people to post their feedback on my blog, reasoning that the kind of people who would do stupid, hurtful things to me would be those who don't think about what they say, and find that it's easier to talk trash than to STFU.

At least, when they're struggling to either 1) register to Blogger or 2) write me an email, if what they're saying is important, they'll find a way to say it, and if it turns out that what they're saying is wrong-headed and obviously contrary to Natural Law, hey, they're sad fuckers.

Or that could just be a rationalization and all I want to do is talk without being bothered. And when I don't want to talk, I'll just let go of blogging, without having to tell you folks that I'll be in a hiatus.

I just realized something. In almost any literary or textual medium, the author owes the audience something. It could be money, in the case of novelists and authors, or it could be trust, in the case of a journalist or a newspaper columnist. But a blogger owes his audience nothing.

The audience comes to a blog in their own free will, and can leave without accruing penalty, other than wasted bandwidth, which the blogger has to pay as well. Nothing is owed between the blogger and his audience, other than what the either side believes. And belief is the flimsiest coin there is, even on such a nebulous realm like the Internet.

I can leave, I can call you all names, I can profess the foulest doctrines that could turn the stomachs of any right-thinking reader around the planet. And I still wouldn't be responsible for you. Any responsibility I have is what I take up, and I am in no condition to be punctual, inoffensive or even Right. I just need to Be.

Of course, you, the audience, don't have to listen to what I have to say, either, or even visit me. That's your right. It's also the right of the reader of fiction, nonfiction, journalism or whatever, but I think blogging is special. Blogging is, probably, the only media where it is all right to be not listened to.

I could be wrong. It's something that's coming out, stream-of-thought-ish, you see.

An Interesting Revelation

2004-10-01T11:22:00.000+08:00

WARNING!: Not for people who find talk about masturbation and the sight of one huge penis unsettling.

If you've seen my profile before, you might have noticed that I've added a few new interests.

One of them was ‘masturbation’. Out of curiosity, I clicked through it, just to see who else was brave enough to put it in.

Two things I noticed:

There seems to be a lot of teen girls who like masturbate on Blogger. Youngest I actually saw was 15, which sounds suspicious as hell.
Out of all the women in Blogger, only two have posted pictures. Mind, not of themselves, but just pictures. Basically an eye and a pair of panties. Both of the posters are older than 25.

I don't recommend looking through the profiles myself, unless the sight of a huge, erect wang doesn't upset you (and yes, the profile has pictures that may shock and amaze you, mostly shock).

Why am I telling you this? Well… it's just me thinking about the nature of the Internet. I suppose telling the world that you like killing kittens is a ‘guy thing’, while for girls it's taboo. Unless I'm completely wrong, of course, and there's a far more reasonable explanation, like hordes and hordes of guys emailing you and telling you how hot they think you are—

Oh, wait. Hani used to get that kind of shit. Okay. Makes sense.

Why Are You Here?

The fundamental difference between the Non-Sequitur and Jyllands-Posten controversies.

Long Time No See, Eh.

The Only People Who Make It An Issue

A matter of convenience

Small fish

Don’t play the game the way the big boys play it

The issue

Butbutbut we’ve done this before…!

Losing the cause for the fucking fight

Oh, and in case you think you can get away so easy…

Words of wisdom from a “munafiq”

Fucking perspective, bitch!

Fütnotes.

Those Reptile-Brained Maniacs.

Fear and Self-Loathing In Petaling Jaya

Those Damn Gamers.

The Essential Division

Pray That Isn’t As Simple As That

Nature Brown In Rust And Dried Blood

A Nasty, Vicious Theory

Don’t Stop Them Playing!

That Won’t Work This Time, Buddy

And Now, For Something Completely Different

I can feel my sense of humor draining away.

Get Angry, Moralize.

First Impressions

The Stain

Jolted Awake

Ugly rumors, uglier truth?

Once is too much.

A Quick Update

What the hell hit me?

Naked Woman Police Brouhaha

Malaysians And The Law.

What, Us?

Bad Boys Bad Boys…

What ‘choo Gonna Do When They Come For You?

Cops, Actually.

Bad Attitude

Who cares if it’s fake?

fütnotes

Hard Science, Fuzzy Belief

The Un-Nameable Cause

Reason and reason alone.

The Real Killer

Meat and Bread.

You’ve lost the throne, children. Move on.

The search of meaning

The Real Use of Religion

Meaning?

Fütnotes.

Angry Religio-Cultural Rant #646,242.

Too Much Time On The Net Is Bad For You.

The Great Muslim Shock.

Pathogenic meme?

What Do You Want, The Moon?

23/5

On Being Multi-Cultural

Fitting into Multicultural Societies is Hard Stuff

You Tak Suka?

In An Idealized World

Priorities, Man, Priorities.

A Fairly Serious Announcement

YARP 2005: Remember the Forgotten

Less Than the Best.

Times Change.

Justice.

Forgotten and Forsaken.

Forgotten, and Forgetting That We Have Forgotten.

Safe Fasting, ya’ll.

Fütnotes.

We Don't Need the Fucking Water.

Dance motherfucker, dance.

Remember what you’re there for.

Pay Attention to the People Around You.

Go With Friends You Trust.

Reward Trust

Take Care Of Yourself

Have Fun, Go Somewhere Else Or Go Home1

Have Fun, Go Somewhere Else Or Go Home¹