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I am currently composing a blogpost about all the media appearances I've made to prove to myself that I have some meager significance in this world. /bawww
There are plenty of websites that host my image, really. I just want to organize it into one.
I love ampersands. I even have a shirt with a gold ampersand on it. (I will show it sometime when I'm not so self-conscious.)
With that in mind, I love hearing people talk about ampersands.
I love it even more when said people talking about ampersands are really cute.
Here's to you, mememolly, whom I have watched for the last seven minutes thanks to Rocketboom 'n' stuff.
I am an awful, awful person for putting this up at work, and nobody will ever understand my clearly visionary sense of humor.
A conversation on Facebook posted into my Tumblr account. In case you didn't want to type that link out, here is your sexy bith:
Obviously inspired by Monocle magazine, this typesetting I've done clearly differs from the magazine by my crisp and intuitive use of Minion Pro for my primary typeface, as opposed to their use of Plantin.
When it comes to Helvetica Neue, which they use - as I do - for setting the prefaces, it's impossible to argue with pretty much the single best font in the world. Let's toast to the Helvetica Neue.
This is all purely a random lark during work hours spurred on by the crippling workload of our resident graphic designer, out of curiosity and appreciation for Adobe InDesign. Typography has always been a passion of mine, just one that I've not invested enough love into.
Alas, the rest of the article made is in Latin nonsense text.
I was listening to A Camp's Charlie Charlie and then I clicked Last.fm to research the article I had just written prior to this on my blog (aren't I a pretentious prick, calling blog posts articles? Sorry. Reflex), and then I saw this. Isn't this a gorgeous picture? I don't know who the other two are, but I really like this picture. It's so very Scandinavian and A Camp.
Confession: except for Stronger Than Jesus and Love Has Left The Room, I found A Camp's second album Colonia to be a woeful disappointment. On the plus side, it has raised hopes that she'll follow up on that fail with a far superior The Cardigans album sometime in the future - no matter what you say, Super Extra Gravity was a fine, fine album.
Random thought (I have a lot of those. Some are brilliant, most are brilliant but fade away in seconds):
I wonder if there's a third-party statistics-y thingy that analyzes your Last.fm listen history to find out what music you liked in 2007 vs 2008 vs 2009?
Just so you can see yourself grow from obscure emo-goth to hip Canadian indie-pop over two and a half years.
I'll put in the minimum required effort here to post some fairly mid-legible thoughts into text here, thus fully utilizing the genius concept behind this blog ("Word! Text! Communications!" I thought some while back, the best concept any blog has ever produced, really).
It's a weekend, and I mostly do not enjoy weekends. I tend to sleep in on weekends and despite that never gain much in the way of refreshed energy. In fact, there was that one weekday before something important where I slept only three hours, yet felt more energetic and productive than any other day in months.
The magazine is fun as always, mainly because I get to dart around pretending to do work. I have a BlackBerry now (complementing my already-fancy iPhone!) so I tend to walk around looking straight into the little black brick, using my sensory powers of perception not to walk straight into people. BlackBerry Messenger especially is fun. I wish I could keep this damn thing: I'm being loaned it for a month by some very nice friends in a local telco.
This week started off frustrating and turned out fairly brilliantly. I finished all my articles due for the November issue rather quickly, leaving me to idly twiddle my thumbs at work. This does not go on very long because idly twiddling thumbs generally gets repetitive after a few minutes. It's given me time to get into the real meat of things! I've had multiple notebooks at my disposal, writing with gel pens of different colors and thicknesses ideas for new articles. Perhaps it's symbolic of my writing maturity, or perceived maturity, that I'm thinking of writing things outside of my usual scope, and possibly shopping it around to other publications should TELL not want it.
On Friday I subedited the entire magazine on a whim (and because someone let 'it's' instead of 'its' go through!) and I think if nothing else I've rigorously employed my quality-control measures on every headline and standfirst in our November issue. If you buy the magazine - buy it! Buy it! - and find any errors of a grammatical and spelling kind, reserve your hate not for the original writer or editor, but Amirul B Ruslan*, c/o The Amirul B Ruslan Foundation For A Better Future, 68000 Ampang, Selangor.
* I am actually credited as Amirul Ruslan in my bylines at TELL, though the masthead clearly calls me Amirul B Ruslan. This is all intentional.
A year ago this was around the time I started disappearing; for the next four or five months, almost nobody was able to get to me for anything. To be honest, not many people really wanted to. Low point? Rock-bottom? More like the absolute nadir.
There's absolutely nobody to blame - well, actually, there are - more than me, because every fuck-up, and there were many, lay in my hands. Heaven above knows that I'm still feeling repercussions from that, still, yeah.
But I can't help but realize with a grim smile, hours later after the topic came up - I was talking to Julia and I mentioned "Remember when I disappeared?" off-handedly while waiting for a lift that went down instead of up at the entrance of Sunway Pyramid after the fairly excellent XPax BlackBerry Party earlier, realize with a grim smile that I've come full circle.
That party was one of the best fun I've had in ages, and the crowd and fun and experience in dealing with events is the culmination of some five months in journalism, five life-changing months with TELL Magazine. Far be it for me to be immodest about it and say that it's all due to some magical talent in me; I know that I've got to cherish the moments while they last (and photograph for good measure too).
And perhaps what comes to mind is a quote my boss once told me: "Amirul, it's not that I'd say you have room for improvement, so much as you've got lots of room for possible failure." But it's safe to say I'm nowhere near the lows of October 2008. And much happier for it.
Dearest among my friends, Shafiq Shahimi:
and I do not agree on many things. Something we do agree on is that we both have a great deal of respect and (completely platonic) love for the manliness that is Soviet Russia.
Not politically, mind; yes, yes, Stalin was evil, killed millions of people, didn't afraid of anything. Soviet Russia was a godless communist nation that brutally oppressed the proles, yes, yes.
History and the media has painted the Soviet Union as a juggernaut of men wearing fur caps running en masse and beating people up with bayonets, along with giant tanks and nuclear reactors that explode and leak and the worst possible moment. Oh, and bad accents. Let's not forget bad accents.
But damn! They had a sense of style. Look at those fur hat things. And the AK47s. You can't doubt the AK47s. The Kalashnikov has immortalized itself as a pretty snazzy piece of kit. It could kill people, sure, but it looked better being held menacingly... or held while the soldier smokes copiously, looking depressed. (It goes without saying that most Soviet soldiers wandered around depressed. Can you blame them? Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for a few hours. They're all depressed - except for that one guy in each camp who's playing the guitar - and despite it they exude nothing but MANLINESS)
The following is a random compilation of Russian men in four typical poses: drinking vodka looking depressed, holding a gun looking depressed, smoking and looking depressed, or just plain looking depressed.
The guy on the left looks Chinese... and suspicious. He's probably thinking: "Bloody training partnership programs. Give China a hundred years and we'll be the ones ruling the world! The rise of China is within our grasp! I mean, think about it, Fallout 3, dudes." Also worth noting about the photo: can't you see the sense of brotherhood here? The three Russian guys in the center are clearly looking at the same thing. I think the dude in the bottom right is reading a letter from his lover, the sweet farmer girl Olesia in the Eastern reaches of Vladivostok. Olesia pines for his return, posing semi-nude with a hammer and sickle. The rest of the men end up feeling more depressed than enthusiastic, as they all have an Olesia somewhere, thousands of miles away.
Here the valiant 426th Russian Infantry Molotov Cocktail Battalion, the "Iron Bears", is about to deploy to yet another hopeless containment mission. Hopeless not in that the Soviet Army was not mighty enough to fight their enemy, but hopeless in that the Soviet Army's men never look like they have an inkling of hope anyway. Also worth noting: the officers are keenly aware that a Hitler salute in this picture would make Comrade Stalin very, very unhappy. Here's to another three rounds of vodka!
Also also: did you know that vodka was a commonly prescribed treatment for radiation sickness during the Soviet era? Sounds to me like your nuclear fallout bunker is missing some key essentials, guys. Learn from our comrades.
Officers tended to be far more somber than the enlisted (or the conscripted). It wasn't without benefits, though. Here, Comrade Lieutenant Voronin and Comrade Sergeant Hadyalev discuss the possibility of making the privates triple their patrol duty. Also worth noting: I'm going to get angry emails from people clearly telling me that Voronin and Hadyalev are obviously majors, or captains, or not even with the Army, or even General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Contrary to public opinion, drinking is actually a bad thing. This poster clearly makes it so. See how well-dressed Comrade Vladimir is, there? He got his handsome looks and sharp style from years of teetotalism. He's probably going to be CEO of the Russian Oil Commission, once the Union falls. Either that or he's actually a KGB operative in Eastern Germany really not interested in being poisoned by his dinner partner. Comrade Vladimir distills his own vodka, where he knows no dirty capitalists can poison him.
Did you know? Lenin was famous for refusing Russian strong drinks, and flat out hated drunk people. He had been quoted multiple times stating that the glorious revolution would be drowned by drunkards. Lenin preferred German beers and Italian chiantis.
Hope you enjoyed this short pictorial! Coming up next: "Manly Sailors and Conscript Patriotskis: the Original Soundtrack" by Amirul Ruslan, which wouldn't quite be original, considering he'll just bombard you with mp3s and YouTube links.
