Personal Life

Living in Kota Kinabalu

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Well, I’m been offline and out of touch for a lot longer than I anticipated, but I’m back online now. I’m working in Kota Kinabalu and will likely be staying here for a while. KK turns out to be a surprisingly vibrant, yet picturesque little city. As my brother-in-law says, you can get nearly everything that you can find in Kuala Lumpur here, but there are plenty of stuff here that you won’t be able to find in the Klang Valley, such as great beaches, clean air and fantastic scenic views..

The place I’m staying at is near the University Malaysia Sabah campus towards the north. It’s some way off from the city centre, but that’s more than made up for by the mountain views available here and the fact that the newly opened 1 Borneo, the biggest shopping mall in East Malaysia, is within walking distance of where we are. Mount Kinabalu is theoretically within line of sight from here, but it’s always covered in clouds so it’s not actually visible. Even so, the sight of the mountain covering the whole horizon is mighty impressive, especially so when the sun shines directly on it.

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Films & Television, Religion

Prince Caspian and the Fickleness of Deities

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My wife’s first reaction as we walked out the cinema after watching Prince Caspian was “Aslan is such an asshole.” Indeed he is, and in the same way, so is the personage after whom Aslan was clearly modelled, Jesus Christ and the Christian God.

This second installment of the Narnia series based on the novels by C.S. Lewis has been marketed as a harmless, big budget, family-friendly, action adventure fantasy flick. So harmless and family-friendly that no blood whatsoever is shown on screen even as Gentle Queen Susan perforates countless enemies with her arrows and Magnificent King Peter hacks and bashes his way through the Conquistador-like opposition. But I can’t help but wonder how many of my fellow Malaysians who sat with me in the same cinema were aware of the Christian agenda behind the novels and the films it has inspired. In a country so paranoid about religious sensibilities that The Passion of the Christ was banned in cinemas and the word Allah was, initially anyway, forbidden to be used by a local Christian newspaper to describe the Christian God, it’s a wonder that Prince Caspian is being shown on Malaysian cinemas with an “Umum” rating.

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Games

A Game: Marvel Trading Card Game (PSP)

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My Magic: The Gathering playing days are long gone and even if I do sometimes cast a nostalgic eye on an exciting new release like the recent Shadowmoor, I know in my heart of hearts that I will never again have the patience and freedom to buy entire boxes of boosters for the thrill of opening them one by one, build up networks of friends to trade cards and play games with and spend countless hours fine-tuning decks and analyzing strategies. So when I bought my PSP, it was with the knowledge that there are a number of well-received collectible card games available on the platform, and the Marvel Trading Card Game was at the top of the list to try out.

The Marvel TCG is a direct adaptation of the card based equivalent that uses Upper Deck’s Versus system. I’ve heard of this system but I’ve never actually learned to play it before this, so I had to go through the included tutorials not just to learn the interface but to understand how the system works as well. The tutorials do a decent job of teaching the fundamentals, but it’s likely that the average player will still need to actually jump into a game proper and learn about the quirks and subtleties of the system by playing the game and observing the available options.

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Personal Life

Visiting Singapore

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I haven’t been able to update my blog or even do much of anything connected with the online world since I’ve been in Singapore for a job interview for the past few days. The job thing didn’t turn out so well, though I’m still holding out some hope that I might get some freelance from these folks Still, since my wife and I had planned on it being a short sightseeing trip as well, at least it didn’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. As always, whenever I visit Singapore, the most striking thing is how orderly everything is. For example, even pedestrian footpaths closed for construction have signs saying, “Footpath closed. Please do not walk on the road. Use the footpath on the opposite side of the road instead.” It’s as if every little thing in Singapore, no matter how small or insignificant, is filed in a huge database somewhere and assigned under the responsibility of a specific bureaucrat. It’s an amazingly efficient way to run things, but in a way, it’s also a bit scary as well.

On the other hand, because we stayed in a dingy hotel in Geyland to save money, we got to see the seamier side of Singapore as well. I’ve known about Geylang’s less than savoury reputation of course, who doesn’t, and I even warned my wife about it and told her that we could pick a more expensive hotel if it bothers her to stay in a red light district. All the same, I was surprised, after having checked in to the hotel and going out in the evening for dinner, to see dozens of scantily clad prostitutes lining the road right in front of our hotel. I expected something, but not that many of them wearing so little clothes standing so brazenly out in the open.

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Films & Television, Science

A Film: The 11th Hour

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Courtesy of my friend Kien Boon of Boonuhkau, I had the opportunity of watching The 11th Hour at the KL Pac in Sentul on Sunday. It was my first visit to the KL Pac or even anywhere inside the new Sentul development zone and I have to admit that they did a great job in making the area look like an oasis of serenity in the middle of busy and dirty Kuala Lumpur. The price to pay of course is the prominent advertising everywhere on behalf of YTL Corporation, including brightly illuminated banners on both sides of the stage that remained lighted throughout the film and that we felt detracted from the experience of watching it. Nevertheless, it’s heartening to see a new addition to the cultural scene in Malaysia and my wife and I will be paying attention to what performances are going on there from time to time.

The film itself is a slickly produced documentary on environmentalism, focusing on global warming, that was apparently a personal project of Leonardo DiCaprio. As a long time skeptic on environmentalism, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I strongly disliked the film. Not only is it an example of hysterical scare-mongering of the worst sort, it ends up being inconsistent in its message and ultimately contributes nothing new to the subject. Worst of all, it preaches straight to the choir of the green movement, shying away from perspectives and solutions that could be beneficial but are controversial and unpopular among green groups.

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Personal Life

What I’ve Been Up To (Part 2)…

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One of coolest things my wife and I did over the past month was attending the Mayday concert at Genting on 19th April. This was the second time that we’ve been to the Arena of Stars for a concert, the first time being a Jonathan Lee concert during my holidays last year. As with last year, our main consideration was finding any concert that was being held during the one month that we’d planned we would be in Malaysia. If we’d known that we would be in Malaysia longer, we would probably have opted for the Emil Chau concert later in May. As thirtysomethings, Emil Chau’s songs are a lot more familiar from our school days than us than those of Mayday, about whom we barely know anything.

As it turned out, we’re both glad we went to the Mayday concert instead. Both of us had never been to a real rock concert before this, and the electrifying energy of the performance, combined with the wildly enthusiastic response of the audience, turned it into a truly eye-opening experience. It’s a testament to how out of touch I am with the music scene that I didn’t realize that Mayday is probably the biggest rock act in the Chinese-speaking world today, though the many Mayday songs chosen by my nieces when my wife and I took them to a karaoke earlier that month gave me a clue as to how popular they. And yeah, you know that these guys are popular alright when every little gesture made by a band member is greeted by a earsplitting uproar.

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Games, Personal Life

What I’ve Been Up To (Part 1)…

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I’ve gotten my Streamyx service up and running, so hopefully I can be online more now. To start with, this is what I’ve been gaming with for the past month. Since I expected to be in Malaysia on holiday for only a month, I knew it wasn’t feasible to bring back my main gaming PC all the way from the Solomon Islands. So in order not to become bored silly while on holiday, I bought a PSP. As my wife will readily attest, I’ve been making noises about buying one ever since it launched, but the higher price and the limited games library available then didn’t make it seem like a good buy until now.

The really funny thing is that while I originally intended to buy the PSP to play “deep” games that I’ve heard so much about, such as Monster Hunter and Armored Core: Formula Front, I actually ended up spending most of my time on it on more arcade-style action games like God of War, Wipeout Pulse and Tekken: Dark Ressurection. I have to admit that between the handheld format and the clunky English translations (and the severe lack of them in many places) I just couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm to really understand how the deeper games work.

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The unexamined life is a life not worth living