Amirul B Ruslan: words + texts + communication

My latest piece on The Internet Is Our Fridge (a little fun&experimental blog I’ve got with the lovely Jamie “I’LL JUST WAKE YOU UP WITH THE LION KING SOUNDTRACK” Stephens), “The Commutenist Manifesto”, sounds a little like this:

I had a pretty strenuous commute at my last job. When work ended at 6pm I’d have to walk along a jammed-up highway about a mile to this dingy little impromptu bus stop that happened to sit beside this nasty sewage treatment facility, then wait for a bus that’ll take me to the Kelana Jaya LRT station. It’s no more than a five minute drive normally, but with the workday over and everybody bustling to get home, it stretches to about half an hour. Whew. Once that’s done, I still have the long part: getting on a train.

Kuala Lumpur’s light rail might not be as bells-and-whistles as Singapore’s or as fancypants¹ as Hong Kong’s, but it does the job. By the time I’m at the platform I’m exhausted as all exhaustion, but thankfully Kelana Jaya happens to be the terminus, so I’m guaranteed a seat. At some point later I could, of course, surrender my seat to a deserving elderly person or an equally deserving pregnant person, but I’m too asleep to bother. Dark side points — gained.

If you like terrible MS Paint drawings as well as silly-and-or-pretentious writing, then The Internet Is Our Fridge is for you. If you don’t like terrible MS Paint drawings as well as silly-and-or-pretentious writing, you should probably give it a chance anyway.

1. Fun fact! My secret goal at this blog is to say “fancypants” at least once in every post I make. [↩]

I am blessed with an immensely Google-able name, in that if you were to look me up you’d probably find me, not a hundred and fifty million other John Smiths.

One goal of mine was to be the top-ranking Amirul on Google, essentially making me the most famous Amirul in the world, but in 2007 I was uprooted by some punk-ass twelve year old kid who bought http://www.amirul.com and ended up using it as an unupdated blog about Ben10. Much rage was had.

I was on Google, then, and saw this:

But I am still lower than this:

Oh well. At least that’s an improvement.

I’ve amassed a minor movie collection in my little Mac hard drive, and since I’m unemployed I’ve had the chance to watch a great many of them, but not all. (Many of them are movies I’ve already seen, too, so that sort of puts a dampener on things, as well. Rewatching something is rarely as educational as watching something for the first time, though there are exceptions: ie. Inception.)

My download policy is strictly 720p or higher, and seeing something in HD can really have a dramatically positive effect on the viewing experience. I often go, “Holy crap! I can see all Eva Green’s pores!”)

Movies I’ve seen:

Casino Royale [re-watch]

Quantum of Solace [re-watch]

Kill Bill Vol. 1 [re-watch]

Secretary [re-watch]

The Social Network

The King’s Speech [which was bloody, bloody brilliant]

Movies I haven’t gotten around to (re-)seeing, but really should, and must:

The Girlfriend Experience

Inception [re-watch]

Kill Bill Vol. 2 [re-watch]

Kingdom of Heaven [re-watch]

Rachel Getting Married

Rashomon

Yojimbo

Also, Jamie is determined that I see her favorite movie, which I’ve had for awhile but still haven’t seen:

The Princess Bride

Makes me feel strange.

Makes me feel like writing.

Do not in any way let the Home Ministry of Malaysia amend the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984, which will allow them to effectively censor the Internet in Malaysia.

Jamie drew this. It’s a drawing of her, me and Baby. In that order.

Well done, Jamie! I am so proud of your efforts. It’s clear that you have gained a mastery of MS Paint unlike any other. You really conveyed a lot of things! For instance:

• Jamie is a girl, I am a boy. This can be quite clearly extrapolated from the fact that she’s wearing a dress and I’m wearing shorts.
• Our notable physical features are also properly depicted. You can see my goatee, and you can also see Jamie’s big, curly hair.
• It would appear I’m topless in this drawing. That’s also very realistic! I am often topless.
• Baby is a… blob thing. If you’ve seen pictures of Baby, you’d know she is a blob thing! Good work, Jamie!

We have an artist in the house. I am accepting bookings from galleries. (She also drew another sketch which I can’t show here because it is lewd.)

Minecraft has pretty much become an obsession for me. I log in a few hours each night, every night, and I play it more than any other game. The premise of this unlikely indie megahit is simple: you’re in a practically infinite world with the ability to mine, craft and position blocks of natural resources to form… well, anything you want.

Think of it as LEGO, but on the computer.

Already racking up a million plus sales despite officially still undergoing “beta” development, this game lets you go wild with your creativity. And best of all? You can do it cooperatively, in multiplayer with your friends.

Shafiq and I played around with hosting a server off of his laptop, and it worked surprisingly well. The lag was minimal, and the difference of playing Minecraft alone and with friends is huge. Minecraft gives a new meaning to the term team-building.

The above is a world hosted by my Dutch friend Lawine, with a total of four players so far — me, Shafiq, Lawine, and a friend of Lawine’s. There’s some noticeable lag, but not enough to deter us from building. The world itself so far is a paltry 4.15MB in size — and notice, when zoomed in, that only a tiny fraction of that is occupied. I’ve seen servers where a map of the world, not the world itself, comes up to 133GB. I’ve seen whole worlds large enough it needs mapping from Google Maps.

While we haven’t named the land yet, we have several brilliant things in our first city! The northern side is generally reckoned as Lawine territory, whereas the southern side of the city is christened New Amirulia. I have hill forts, he has obscenely well-designed houses! His first was a Dutch storehouse, followed by a public swimming pool, and a cathedral he’s dubbed the Unholy Church of Lawine. It’s huge. It’s unholy. I wish I had taken caps.

Ugh, now I’ve got that urge to build. It’s 3 in the morning…

I saw a dead leaf that reminded me of Napoleon’s command hat.

So I made Baby wear that hat today.

She did not like it.

And she turned her back to me afterwards.¹

1. Photos taken with the shiny fancy new family Canon PowerShot G12. If I were a copywriter at Canon I’d suggest the G12′s tagline be “Empowering the talentless”. [↩]

Stream of consciousness writing from today made in those all-important ten minutes after waking up.

#67: Drowning

I woke up today from sleep I don’t remember stealing, and all around me was pitch black. I panicked at first, a wordless, wild waving of my head — but I got my bearings and realized where I was. Of course I was. The lights went on after a perfunctory step-step-flick to the wall.

I collapsed back in the sofa. My thoughts were in disarray. I latched onto the first one, the one that came up quickest to my head, and it said: drowning drowning drowning.

It made me think of fingernails, of a biting ache that consumed them, deoxygenated in every way except the literal, and I breathed in slowly, in and out, before all my thoughts fell into place — and when they fall into place, as it always does, I lose my transitory, ephemeral grasp on them.

—
Detour to the bathroom. Fingers raw, body calm, passive, smooth. I contemplate a shower, but chose not to. I wash my hands. Compulsively. My childhood birthed extensive mythology about my compulsion with washing my hands. My mother talked about how every time I’d pass a bathroom I’d take a detour to the sink, regardless of how my hands were. My fingers now are raw and they ache, so I need to cleanse.

Water runs over my fingers and I realize the obvious. I mentally associated drowning with my fingers because of something I had written here¹ some time back. A month or two must have passed since my last real post, and slowly my desire to post here faded away, and my desire to chalk this blog up as a great experiment gone wrong rose. But with that simple thought of drowning I realized the ache in my fingers wasn’t pain: it was longing.

It was longing to be back here, to be writing, to be crafting something from any of the exotic, erotic encounters that occur during my life. I am typing now. I take a quick break. I ball both fists. I resume typing.

That ache is gone. And I should do well to keep it that way.

Homecoming. How I’ve missed all you darlings.

1. ie., not here, but secretblog [↩]

I was driving to Bukit Antarabangsa with Roslyn to grab some groceries at Giant; while going up the menacing road up the hill, we pass an Omega Eggs truck. This conversation begins.

Amirul: I wouldn’t mind some Omega eggs right now from OldTown.
Roslyn: Ever noticed that telur orang putih is really putih and telur Malaysia semua brown?

“Have you ever noticed that the white people eggs¹ are really white and Malaysian eggs are all brown?”

1. Telur in Malay can also colloquially mean “testicles”, the way “balls” is slang for that in English… [↩]