I’ve been mentally listing a lot of “holy crap, that person’s my age and has already done that?” moments these past few years. Now with the help of Wikipedia, I can rest assured that there is an official, interweb-sanctioned version of this sorry (for me) list.
This is just a partial preview. Click here to view the full list.
- Jessica Biel, American actress
- Dmitry Chaplin, Russian So You Think You Can Dance finalist
- Lee Chong Wei, Malaysian badminton player
- Kelly Clarkson, American singer
- Elisha Cuthbert, Canadian actress
- Kirsten Dunst, American actress
- Fairuz Fauzy, Malaysian A1GP driver
- Anne Hathaway, American actress
- Ricky Kaká, Brazilian footballer
- Keiichiro Nagashima, Japanese speed skater
- Maria, WWE superstar
- Dennis Moran, American computer hacker
- Nana Ozaki, Japanese gravure idol
- Elena Paparizou, Greek-Swedish singer
- Anna Paquin, Canadian actress
- Missy Peregrym, Canadian actress
- Tiffany Pollard, reality television star
- Andy Roddick, American tennis player
- Seth Rogen, actor/writer
- Vadims Vasiļevskis, Latvian javelin thrower
- Kat Von D, Mexican-American tattoo artist
- Lil Wayne, American rapper
- Kimberly Wyatt, singer (The Pussycat Dolls)
- and many more…
Wow, Seth Rogen’s my age? I can’t believe it, I love his movies! That’s funny, because I really feel that we would get along well. Like, we’d hang together well or something. I think he’d like me, you know? I’m sure alot of guys are like, “I’d like to hang out with that guy,” but I think he’d like to hang out with me, that’s the cool thing. You know what I mean?
This post was brought to you by a still-up-at-3am-coz-overslept-on-sunday instant noodle moment.
Michael Crichton has died of cancer at age 66.
He was the first author I read. I was probably ten or eleven, I was at my grandparents’ house in JB, of all places. Somebody left a copy Congo. It was an old, wrinkled copy. I read the first few pages and hardly understood a word, I was unaware of it at that time, but I was hooked – I went on and read almost all of his other books.
Until today I do not really know who’s copy of Congo that was, I suspect my mother probably borrowed from an uncle, or someone.
A year or two later Jurassic Park came out. The whole family went and saw it. I recognized the name Michael Crichton in the credits, but I also saw another name – Steven Spielberg, who was credited as the “director”. At that time I didn’t really know who Steven Spielberg was but I asked my father what does a director do. He said he was the person who’s in charge of the movie – the person who made the movie. So that was the first moment I learnt that movies were made, and were made by a person. There and then I told my father I wanted to be a director. But well, I didn’t. The point is I wouldn’t have known about making movies if it weren’t for Michael Crichton and his stories.
So thanks Michael for all the stories. Alas, you’ve really left us.
(And to cheer things up, here’s the obligatory xkcd comic)
No, it's been over 15 years, buddy.
I have a confession: I did not vote. So, although I am immensely proud of Malaysia for the first time ever (yes, this beats climbing Everest or hosting the best Commonwealth Games ever), every time I express my excitement or think about how EPIC this is, I will always get a pang of guilt and regret that somehow I’m not really part of it.
So now, I promise, I swear I will register and vote at the next election (or by-election if it happens). Not only that, I promise I will not be afraid to talk politics. I will be as active as I can in understanding and engaging in the (rightfully open) discourse of the governance of my country. Because, for the first time I can see that yes, I, a lonely guy who stays in his room all day writing a blog that nobody reads — can actually make a difference.
A friend once asked me, what did I want out of life. I asked him what did he mean, he said, “You know, like a big house ke, a sports car ke, whatever lah.”
I thought for a while, and answered — I want to change the world.
So this is my chance. This is our chance.
Presenting my latest set of movie-film ideas, numbers 73 – 77*
Untitled Horror/Thriller
A blogger commits suicide on a live webcam chatroom, shocking the entire web community. But mysteriously, her blog, Facebook profile and statuses are kept updated with cryptic messages. An elaborate prank? Or digital messages from the afterlife?
Untitled Romantic Comedy
A man with a rare speech disorder falls in love with a lip-reading deaf girl.
“KL Berhenti” Action/Drama (tentative title)
Due to a freak calendrical coincidence, the Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and Deepavali holidays are scheduled back to back. Last minute shopping spree craziness causes the problematic KL traffic system to buckle, engulfing the entire city in a rare mass bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. Watch as the normally disparate lives of Malaysians collide in the sizzling heat of KL streets.
“Strikeout” Action/Thriller (credit: original idea co-authored with Azim)
A psychotic fundamentalist threatens to blow up every single modern Malaysian landmark, from the Petronas Twin Towers, to the multi-million dollar Eye. An ex-bomb technician turn CID investigator, Johan Jufferi join forces with sultry TV reporter Sarimah Sarini to hunt down the KL Bomber. Will they be able to stop the madman before Malaysia is bombed back to the pre-Mahathir agricultural ages?
“Jalan-Jalan Cari Makan” Action/Crime (tentative title)
Four young Accounting BA graduates enter the job market, to find a highly competitive world. Jobless and desperate to make money, they unwittingly join the KL underworld – becoming Ah Longs. Follow the yuppie-wannabe middle-class suburban quartet as they journey into the underbelly of Kuala Lumpur, asking people for money – and making sure their taxes are properly accounted for.
This post was brought to you by large amounts of Nescafe Mocha Latte.
* The numbers 73-77 are not literal numberings representing any sort of real list, just a random set of numbers pulled out of my ass to signify the metaphorically long list of unfulfilled thoughts occupying my rarely explored, suppressed creative subconscious.
Via TechCrunch:
The new project, called OpenSocial, goes well beyond what we’ve previously reported. It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called ‘hosts’) that choose to participate.
Note, “on ANY social networks that choose to participate.” Currently the participating networks are: Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.
Nope, no Facebook. I guess the idea is to “out-open” Facebook. Great, just when I’m getting my feet wet thinking about developing Facebook apps. More details on the TechCrunch page.
Good news. MYNIC is planning to open registrations for .my 2nd Level domain names (e.g. www.something.my). Finally.
I can think of a whole slew of possible cool names that can go with .my. I’m not going to say what, I’m sure you can think of a few words (think domain naming “tricks” like del.icio.us :))
For those who already own .(com/net/org/edu).my domains, there will be a “priority period” of two months (Nov – Dec 2007) where you can automatically register your equivalent .my domain.
Public registration for Malaysians opens March 2008, with worldwide registration opening at least 6 months later.
Yes, imagine how much money you can make selling .my domains worldwide! My oh my.
There’s a FAQ with all the relevant details.
I use Meebo exclusively as my IM chat program.
My mother uses it too. She uses Flickr and some Google apps like Calendar. She sent me an SMS one day asking for help on Photoshop, I sent her a link to Picnik, she never asked me for Photoshop help again.
This is significant because my mother had never used a computer only after recently (since like a year ago actually). So this proves (to me at least) that those “web 2.0″ sites really do care about better user experience, and about making things easier for the user, and they do work.
But that’s not my point.
My point is, besides my mother, I do not know anyone else who uses these kind of web apps who are geographically near me (like in Malaysia). Only a handful. Except on Flickr, there are a lot of Malaysians there for some reason (Flickr being one of the first 2.0 sites, I guess). No, Friendster and MySpace users do not count. I’m talking about new, cutting edge sites that get featured in TechCrunch and has those beta logos.
So, consider this an unscientific survey. I picked three of my most used ones… (for those who are not familiar with any of them, I’ve written a short description)
 |
Do you Meebo? Web-based Instant Messaging client. Supports MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, ICQ and AOL networks (practically all of them). All you need is to open meebo.com in your browser, no need to download any IM applications. |
 |
Are you on Reddit? A social bookmarking site, similar to Digg but better (IMO), and a bit less popular (IMO). You submit interesting links and people can vote it up or down, links with more upvotes get to the front ‘hot’ page. |
 |
Are you a Twit? “Micro” blogging. You update small 140 character snippets of what you’re doing right then. So people can learn how boring your life is. Learn how boring my life is at twitter.com/zaim |
So if you are on any one of these websites, please tell me, drop a comment, e-mail or Meebo me. So that we can, um, well I’m sure what we can do then…
[ And, please don't be shy, drop a comment. From my WP.com blog stats, I know my posts usually get one or two hits from search results, PPS or Fakapster and whatnot. So if you are that one person, do comment, I'm really curious :) ]
So, Point Blank comes up with “Ipoh Mali”. What’s apparently so special, cutting edge, new and refreshing about this is its local (i.e. Malaysian) references. They say it like it’s never been done before. To this, I have to say, and pardon my abbreviated French, WTF?
You’re a Malaysian from Malaysia, what else do you want to sing about? Shouldn’t it come naturally instead of exceptionally. It’s almost perverse, I tell you.
You want local references? Take Pete Teo. Don’t let his song titles fool you, you know with him singing names like Marianne, Laura Nelson, Tom, etc. His songs ooze Malaysian-ness. Consider Carnival Hall:
See the seasons they don’t change around here,
The rain wash down all through the long hot years,
And the lions,
Well, they’ve all gone and disappeared,
The righteous lies deep in the ground.
God knows who the lions and the righteous he’s referring to. Take another one of his songs, Last Good Man, which he couldn’t seem to put to record on any of his albums (which is a shame, it’s one of my favourites):
Tidal waves in a monsoon drain,
The waiting hour will never be the same again,
Since the rain came, it’s been real strange.Drinking Guinness in a Milo can,
Walking down Cyprus Avenue with pennies in my hand,
And from a backstreet, came Uji Rashid.
Long, hot, rainy seasons. Uji Rashid. Sounds familiar? Which takes me to another point I’d like to make (or observe and opine, if you will) – Pete’s genius in mixing the sacred and the profane, the use of contradicting images.
Like in Last Good Man, how he swerves from rainy drains, to Guinness, to Milo, to Cyprus Avenue, to Uji Rashid. And how he mixes a-world-away (Cyprus Avenue) experiences with balik-kampung locality (Uji Rashid). Now THAT’s what I call glocalism.
Also, his contradictory images has never been as perceptible as in Television, his latest album. Like in Hide your Gun:
Who for spring and daffodils?
Who for wedding bells?
Who for saints and infidels?
Numbly staring down,
Down the barrel of a gun.
And in Laura Nelson’s Bridge:
Gecko sings blues from heaven
Dead men play jazz from hell
[...]
Shimmering in the night
The congregation has gathered here for some devil’s delight.
Church bells the are ringing
And congregation screaming, hallelujah!
As the bishop leaves before the gospel
An angel swings below.
And Tom (now, I don’t know who Tom is supposed to be, this is just my personal take on it):
Jesus walked on water or so that’s what they say,
And Mary played a crooked hand,
Joe, well he walked around and around,
And that’s Tom, my friend.
Tom, my friend. Get it? As in Tom is NOT My Friend? No? Well, guess it’s really just me then.
One last point on Television – and I’d like to thank the album’s engineers for doing this – “mastering without compression”. A.K.A the missing ingredient in music nowadays. A.K.A subtlety.
Now, I don’t know much about audio engineering, but I can appreciate this, albeit only understanding it rather superficially. So I can’t really explain it sufficiently here (plus I’m getting bored writing) except to point to an example: Listen to track 9, Blow.
Notice the tabla in the background? (I assume it’s tablas, maybe it’s not) Now notice how even if it’s barely discernible, you can actually more than hear it, you can feel it? I bet you if you listen to the song without the tablas, it’ll sound really weird, like a totally different song. That’s something you can only achieve by not compressing the sound zealously, and removing all the “low” parts, and amplifying the “high” parts – i.e. removing it’s “dynamic range”. That’s how they did it in the 70’s, before digital music. And that’s how music is supposed to be made, IMHO. Read these articles for a better explanation: “Everything Louder Than Everything Else“, “What Happened To Dynamic Range“
More than just an audio engineering thing, subtlety here also applies to his songwriting. How he uses a plethora of musical instruments and musicians, but still pulling it off without sounding chaotic – everything jives in, sounding like one without you noticing them sounding like one.
And how his songs often break into different parts and beats in the middle without jolting you a bit. Or how he “introduces” new instruments. Like in Blow, around minute 3:00 you’ll hear eastern/middle eastern vocals (think Sting’s Desert Rose). Certainly a sudden surprise, but a pleasant, subtle one. It’s so uplifting, I almost cried. No, seriously :)
That’s it. It’s 4:05am, Monday morning. Good bye.
-aake mushrooms? Meet me at my Tumblr page. Or not.
P.S. I really wish I was a Sports Racer.
- moribund
-
(adj) : approaching death; about to die; expiring; almost obsolete
- soporific
-
(n) : something inducing sleep, esp. a drug
”the doctor prescribed a soporific to help him sleep.”(adj) : tending to induce sleep
”the professor delivered a soporific lecture.”
As in: “Zaim’s moribund life induces soporific effects towards his family and friends”
Definitions from Ninjawords → Wiktionary
More word lists at my wordie.org page. Wordie is like Flickr, but without the photos.
