All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Fun

Purging of the English Language

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Check out this list of English words that the editors of the Collins English Dictionary wants to purge to make room for new words and the accompanying article. As it notes, some words that are common in mainstream usage are nonetheless useful in particular communities. As a gamer, I’ve collected my fair share of Periapts of Wisdoms across many different Dungeons & Dragons-based computer games, so I should know!

Then again, while it’s understandable that a dead tree version dictionary wants to drop words because you can only fit in so many in a single volume and still have it at a manageable size, in the Internet age that we live in, these words will never truly be gone. Furthermore by singling out these particular words, the editors have simply given them a short-lived notoriety that will effectively grant them a new lease on life.

Fun

Game Grub

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Spotted this on the Quartertothree forums. Gamer Grub, performance snack food for gamers! Available in four flavours (“Action Pizza”, “Strategy Chocolate”, “Racing Wasabi” and “Sports PB&J”) and laced with special health supplements designed to make gamers better at playing games! All that, and be edible without forcing the player to stop playing too! Ok, all of that is bunch of crock but at least the manufacturer’s website lists all the talking points with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humour.

This is nothing more than a novelty gag item, but give the creator props for daring to try something so wacky!

Games

Racism and Nationalism in Medieval 2

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I’ve been playing Medieval 2 Total War for a while now. I’d passed on it when it was first released in late 2006 and only bought the Gold edition including the Kingdoms expansion earlier this year. Easily the most popular choice of nation when playing the Medieval games is England, partly due to a combination of cultural familiarity, its easily defensible starting location and the excellence of English longbowmen. I tried my first game with the Venetians who start out with a great navy but whose provinces are actually separated from one another but couldn’t make much progress. Venetians get hemmed in too much by their Italian cousins, the Milanese and the Sicilians, as well as the powerful Holy Roman Empire to the northwest and the Byzantine Empire to the east, so I ended up having to restart my game as the English in which I’m handily conquering the whole map.

One of my favourite things about this new version of Medieval are the pre-battle speeches that your generals make. The speeches made their debut in Creative Assembly’s previous game Rome Total War, but they’ve been greatly expanded here. Each major nation now has a different way of insulting each other and the personality traits of the general making the speech also influences what gets said. Check out the YouTube video I linked to for a great selection of these speeches. Playing as the English, my generals have called the French wine-sodden and arrogant, the Germans pox-ridden, the Sicilians sons of Satan and the Danish “scrofulous”, whatever that means. It’s awesome and doubly hilarious when a drunken or even outright insane general spouts off some utterly nonsensical stuff.

On a vaguely related note, here’s an Ebay listing for what must be the coolest auction ever. For the princely sum of least twenty five thousand British pounds, you can own a full size replica of a Roman siege catapult. It was built for a television show and now doesn’t fire, but it would be the perfect lawn ornament if you happen to live in a castle!

Personal Life

Spidey All Tied Up

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My wife and I have been experimenting with putting videos up on YouTube. Unfortunately since we’re only taking them using our old digital camera, the results aren’t really great, and they seem to be darkened after YouTube finishes with processing them. Here’s a video that we took when Spidey was smaller.

One of our worries about leaving for Kuala Lumpur was what to do with her. We wanted to put her in a dog boarding school here in Kota Kinabalu but didn’t have enough time to arrange for that. My wife’s parents happened to be here so we had to let them take care of Spidey instead. As expected, Spidey had to sleep outdoors for most of the week. She was naturally delighted to see us when we got back, but we discovered that she had developed some itchy sores on her belly.

The local vet here wasn’t open due to the Hari Raya holidays but we managed to call him and he said it might be a fungal infection. Since she’s back to sleeping in the room with us, the sores have dried up a bit, but we still need to be careful that her belly doesn’t stay wet for too long.

Personal Life

A death in the family

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I’ve been away for a while due to a death in the family, the exact details of which are too private to elaborate on here. Suffice to say that the treatment of groups of people like the disabled, the infirm and the mentally disturbed in our country serves as a stark reminder that for all of our gleaming skyscrapers and highways, Malaysia remains very much a third-world country.

2008 has been a very tumultous year for me so far. I started the year by basically getting fired, having to adapt to a new life here in Kota Kinabalu (though that was on balance a positive development), having my investments pummelled in the current market climate and now this. I daresay that this will be a year to remember in history as well. Between the Chinese Olympics and the devastation of the earthquakes in China before that, and the ongoing blood-letting in the U.S. markets with the U.S. presidential elections still to come, there will be plenty to remember this year for.

Politics

Nationalism is bad, okay?

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This post in an expansion on comments that I made in response to a post by Jed Yoong on her blog. I’ve so far refrained from commenting on the political situation here in Malaysia because I don’t have anything original or new to add to the already deafening cacophony out there and I don’t like to point out the obvious. In many cases, however, when a particular strand of public opinion becomes very shrill and one-sided, I feel a compulsion to throw some cold water on it. Chalk it up to my contrarian nature or maybe it’s just because I despise arguments that leave no room for doubt of any kind.

What’s gotten me riled up is the widely held sentiment that the racist politics of Barisan Nasional ought to be replaced with a multiracial Malaysian Malaysia. Yes, the BN are racists. Big deal, but we’ve known that forever. And again, yes, a multiracial Malaysian Malaysia is a great thing, sure, but playing it up too much edges things too uncomfortably close to nationalism for me and recent anti-immigrant sentiment in Malaysia is already too negative for my tastes. As I noted previously, if racism is bad because it shouldn’t matter what your genetics are, then nationalism ought to be bad as well because it shouldn’t matter where your mother happened to physically be when she went into labour. Am I the only person who finds it ironic that so many Malaysians blame current immigrants from places like Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines for their troubles when so many are descended from past immigrants themselves?

Similarly, I’ve read multiple commentators saying to the effect that sports are a great way to unite Malaysians across the racial divide. Does that mean that whichever country is currently playing against our national champion is the enemy? Does that make anyone who supports a non-Malaysian in any sports match against a Malaysian a traitor? Why does it always have to be one group against another group?

I’m also troubled by the assertions of Chinese and Indian Malaysians that they deserve equal rights as Malaysians because of the past contributions of their ancestors in developing the country (with the Chinese being especially fond of pointing out that they were the one who fought off the Japanese). The problem with this is that it assumes that such rights have to be earned as opposed to naturally accruing to anyone who wants to live permanently in the country and implies that new immigrants shouldn’t have those same rights because their ancestors didn’t make similar sacrifices. If it is not morally correct to blame the current generation of Germans, for example, for the actions or even antipathy of their grandfathers during the Holocaust, is it correct to credit a people for the beneficial actions of their ancestors?

The idealogy diametrically opposed to nationalism is of course cosmopolitanism, and the Wikipedia page on it is a worthwhile read.

Games

Awesome Lego Sentry

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I’ve reinstalled Team Fortress 2 and I’ve been playing it on and off, mostly on the Malaysian Bolehnet server and some Singaporean servers. It’s especially funny to play on the Malaysian servers and hear people trash talk while joking about Anwar being online playing.

The above picture appears to be a TF2 engineer sentry made entirely out of Lego. I shamelessly stole it from the Lowyat forums.