151 posts tagged “me”
So today in a lucky draw I won a two nights' stay in a beachview room at the beautiful Shangri-La Tanjung Aru resort in, um, Kota Kinabalu. Two nights free. With breakfast. And you're spending it with Amirul B Ruslan. What could go wrong?
Oh, one minor glitch might be that I have the hotel stay, but not the air tickets! Those sneaky Shangri-La folks, secretly adding complications for me in what would have been a troublefree romantic trip for two!
On another note, I have absolutely nobody on the top of my head to take. Candidates may now officially nominate themselves beginning... now.
I feel tough! I've just completed three articles in the span of an hour. I think I shall do the same tomorrow. It is Thursday, August 13th 2009, and it is 2:34AM. I feel overworked, overstretched, and overstressed.
I think what I need is a vacation.
So I think I'll have one. Young Gordo(n) Smith:
is spending a week in KL where he's working at TELL! He's also staying at this most gorgeous place, a place a couple of minutes from Masjid Jamek called BackHome KL, and I went there to check it out (under the pretense of a story - which there is, really, brah!) and I fell in love instantly.
It's a two floor place that has like an open-air courtyard thingy. I realize I'm being a little too concise here with my descriptions, but the ground floor has some rooms, and the first floor also has some rooms. Actually, the first floor is just made of rooms (there is a bathroom annexe building that is connected by a gorgeous bridge), too. I took some photos in between bouts of me going, "BAM, I THINK I'VE FALLEN IN LOVE!" This time, it was a lodge. It's easily as nice - if not nicer - as Singgahsana in Kuching, my favorite place in the universe.
The beds are for only RM35 a night! Against quite possibly my better judgment I made the call to reserve two nights there, starting from tomorrow. God knows I need the rest.
COLLEGE LIFE IS OVER
GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE
====
Last Day Of Classes
Lovely course rep Visha, whom I've had my entanglements with over the second and third semesters, but have since patched up. She's an awesome person, and I would like to steal her grades to use as mine. You, good madam, win three patented Amirul B Ruslan <3 Awards. (They're pronounced "Lessthanthrees")
I have to use this photo, because the other one (accessible on Facebook, I fear) has me in a ridiculously effeminate pose, and I don't have any idea why it looks that way. Cruel photoshoping, obviously. OBVIOUSLY. These are most of the male coursemates in DJR2. To the left most is Josiah, who you might recall from minor recurring roles in this show (BLOG). The rest of these strapping young gentlemen did not pass their auditions, alas. Or they did roles on filler episodes.
I enjoy engraining myself. And I think my hair looks just dandy in this one. Sarah obviously thinks so, because her smile is so big, it's covering Tabby's face. Then again, that's not very hard to do...
The entire group once more, except with Julia making her silly face. This is why we're hot.
AFK one sec, making this Facebook display pic.
Jula Hoo using a Nikon tilted towards the ceiling, looking at a MacBook raised above the owner's head in an attempt to catch her from an angle. I actually love this shot, even if you can't see her face. And even if the word Nikon is backwards, as Photo Booth images are wont to do.
Get your 3D glasses ready.
Okay, there we go. Amirul in a suit. He likes that suit very much.
Words of wisdom, as shared by gentlemen.
One of my little passions, thanks to the Internet, is webcomics. I've liked a whole lot of them, from Geeks In Love to XKCD and more, but the single best one I've discovered lately (okay, well, today) is SUBNORMALITY by Winston Rowntree. The lavish attention to detail, and the awesome-fantastic subject matter (which range from streetwalking horror fiction storytellers, to angry voracious sphinxes (sorry, "Sphynx"), and the occasional brilliantly-lit political content.
Here's one I love a lot, I even saved it into my hard drive. And showed to every person I could find. I liked it that much.
And this one, because it reminds me of conversations me and Shafiq have all the time:
I've bookmarked SUBNORMALITY, and if you enjoy your comics to be subnormal, so should you. I can't praise the comics enough. They're made of raw win, you know that? RAW. Raw, sheer awesomeness.
Also, since we're on the topic of webcomics, I should probably make a reference to this also-recently-discovered series of (discontinued?) shorts done by my friend Bobby DeBoer - who calls me "my Malay brotha'!" - loosely composed under the name Digging The Dead. They're great. Bobby, I didn't know you had it in you. Here's a sample.
Lastly, I'll probably have to put a mention in about some attempts I made in early 2007 that quickly, quickly got discontinued. I can't draw for crap (and my design skills are merely very modest), so I used the wonderful Toonlet applet/site for it. You should try it, if you've got more persistence than me. Save half the time it takes to draw Abe Lincoln and a theatre, double the time thinking of funny words and punchlines.
I'm not going to link them to you! They're really, really mediocre. Like, meh. In the presence of these two excellent webcomics done by People Who Know What They're Doing above, mine is lamentable in its quality. But here's one anyway. Because I do enjoy torturing my readers.
I never got around to continuing these pieces. Perhaps I should. One day, fame, glory, webcomics.
Or I could just keep reading SUBNORMALITY, and pronounce its glory with all caps.
You know your day sucks, and probably is going to stay that way, when you wake up for the fifth time at 4:40AM, crawl to the nearest bathroom, and vomit. You're out after a shower, one that makes you feel refreshed for a short while, but the facts are simple. This sleeping thing, you know, it sucks.
The funny thing is I'd rather be asleep now more than any other moment in my day, instead of shivering like a broken motorcycle on a winter equinox, and I've just not got it in me to go downstairs and grab something to eat, for fear of regurgitating it all moments later anyway.
Now I am left with the unwanted dilemma of lying back on a bed that keeps psychosomatically ejecting me every few hours, or stay up and pace noisily around the house from 5:08AM until when everybody else wakes up, making me look tired, creepy, and akin to that of a convicted sex offender.
Terrible choices.
I wrote a total of 2,239 fictive words today in the course of the last two hours, something that I expected would have drained me to the core, yet instead had provided me with enough endorphins to go to sleep now! Wow.
This is the most I've ever written at once. I think I might even be able to sustain this... give it some time.
Please, oh please, don't let this fall into disrepair.
I'm finally ready to work on a book again.
No plot hints, though, readers. I don't want to excite and I don't want to disappoint. I will, however leave you with one tiny clue. The title references this Soviet film.
This is one I'd like to see, though, even though there are no similarities between my current work and Mikhalkov's film at all, except for a slightly similar title.
Goodnight.
And yet I don't.
Word-Text-Communications has claimed its rightful place as #1 on the Google Search for "Amirul", confirming my place as the most famous Amirul IN ALL THE UNIVERSE (or Cyberverse, at least).
If you've been following this blog for a long time, you'll know that I actually already was the Most Famous Amirul before, but I slipped down the charts sometime in 2007, and had to live with being #4, then #8, then OFF THE PAGE. My old blog had replaced me, in those dark days. But now, karma strikes, and all you pretenders can just bow down to me, alright? Thank you.
I have defeated:
Amirul, the contestant on popular Malaysian reality TV show Akademi Fantasia;
Amirul, some preteen kid who owns http://www.amirul.com - who has my eternal hatred, for purchasing the rights to that before I did;
Amirul Rajiv, a Bangladeshi photographer;
National weightlifter Amirul Hamzan;
and more.
Oh, and I also killed off the alternate self of Amirul B Ruslan: who had lived three years on Blogdrive before switching to Vox.
Victory photo ensues:
Alright, so the photo looks more psychopathic than happy, but THAT'S THE ORGASMIC LOOK I GET WHEN I KILL OFF MY COMPETITORS AND GAIN SWEET, SWEET MONOPOLY.
Camwhores using my MacBook rejoice!
I have new photo effects for Photo Booth, nearly triple the original number, though this comes at the risk of slowing the damn thing down by a large margin. Here are some two shots I took, with the new effects.
Photo effect: "Trippy".
Photo effect: "Black & White TV".
I have photos and blogposts to place here at Word-Text-Communications, but I'm too sleepy and lazy and distracted. Patience, my loves, you shall see my usual deposits worth thousands of words tomorrow morning.
No class, so I think I'm going to stay home all Friday.
