Dear loyal readers,

I'm on a creative hiatus to work on Unscientific Malaysia.

Promise I'll be back soon, at least for the second anniversary of Coffee Conversations. You can also follow me on Twitter, @zurairi (I tweet A LOT there!)

Thank you for your neverending support. Much love to all!

Zurairi AR

Malaysia Fest 2009 Poster Revealed! Evolution of MFest Posters

Malaysia Fest 2009 (MFest), a cultural festival run by Malaysian students in Sydney, had just revealed their promotional poster last week:

MFest 2009: Our Culture, Our Essence

Which is the best damn MFest poster I’ve ever seen so far. Credits go to designer Azlan Ab. Malek and the Marketing Executive Producer (EP) Sabrina Hanim.

Things have not always been this awesome for MFest. However, the renaissance in the quality of marketing and promotion in MFest can be attributed to Sunny Tan, who was the Marketing EP in 2006.

This was the poster back then in 2006, when yours truly was just a lowly minion, a Marketing Director under Sunny’s department:

MFest 2006: One Festival, Many Faces, A World of Excitement

Laugh all you want, haha. I myself feel like crying with shame every time I see this poster resurface. It was cobbled together with whatever Photoshop skills that I had to hastily acquire.

I was immensely proud of the five hand-drawn caricatures, though. They were the mascots for that year’s MFest, and we dubbed them “the patungs” (dolls). They were supposed to represent the different races in Malaysia: Malays, Chinese, Indians, the indigenous and Azan Azlan. It was very hard for me to choose a favourite from the five! (it was the guy on extreme right).

The “words in the middle” was a genius idea by Sunny, they were supposed to be things that you could look forward to in MFest 2006. I adapted the concept of tag clouds, which was very new at that time.

Next year, I succeeded Sunny as the Marketing EP, and commissioned Joshua Soo for this poster:

MFest 2007: A Rainbow of Cultures

Marked improvement, don’t you think? I particularly love the colour scheme (“Rainbow of Cultures”! tee hee) and that hornbill humping the hibiscus. We dubbed that mascot Horny Bill. Suffice to say, the whole team that year was a bunch of horny buggers.

In 2008, my protégé Shaheera Djafar took over the department while I move up the ranks, and this must have been our tipping point. The terrific duo of Sabrina Hanim and Azlan Malek joined the department and produced this beaut:

MFest 2008: A Cultural Connection

The background painting was procured at Central Market KL: the Malay-ish hibiscus, Indian earring and Chinese cheongsam. There was this running joke among us that the lady in the painting is actually a cross-dressing dude since we couldn’t see her hair bunched up in a bun.

My favourite part of this: the red “FREE ADMISSION” stamp. Nothing like saying “FREE!” to get the Malaysians’ attentions.

There you go, see how far we’ve come. This year we’ll continue keeping it real.

Malaysia Fest: still the original, still the best.

More info on Malaysia Fest on their website and Facebook group. RSVP to MFest 2009: Our Culture, Our Essence here.

Zurairi AR was on board the Malaysia Fest committee from 2006 to 2008. However, he had sold his soul to MFest somewhere around the end of 2006 and continues to serve the wonderful event.

WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS FUGLY F1 CAR?!

In true meme-of-the-week style:

Full story about this fucking ugly sonofabitch of an F1 car here. Original photo from here.

The whole story about “WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS” meme, here from Topless Robot.

Seriously though, who the fuck is responsible for this abomination?

How to Hide Annoying Fan Check Tagged Photos on Facebook

Does your Facebook homepage look like this? Highlights bar cluttered with annoying tagged photos from evil distracting Fan Check or Pickup Friends applications?

Before: AAARGHHHH

With this (temporary) fix, you can hide them, and your bar will look a bit cleaner:

After: TADAAA!

This annoyance brings back memories of dozen stupid quiz updates appearing on your Facebook homepage. Luckily now we can hide those quiz results using filters on the homepage. The tagged photos however, are a bit harder since they automatically appear on the highlight bar, and you can’t filter them out by filtering a specific application.

Anyhow, I achieved the above by installing the Greasemonkey extension on Firefox, and using this handy script which will enable you to set what to show or hide on the highlights sidebar. After installing Greasemonkey on your Firefox, simply click the “install” button on the script page to install the script.

(I’m aware that Opera supports the script, and you can install scripts in IE7/IE8 using IE7Pro or iMacros, and in Chrome there are some tinkering you can do, but I’m afraid I don’t know the exact details since I use neither of these other browsers exclusively, sorry.)

After installing the script, there will be a tiny “Edit settings” link on top of your highlights bar, and clicking it will open the settings menu:

Just click on “Hide tagged” and those tagged photos are gone! You can click “Show tagged” to bring them back on.

Of course, the downside is all other innocent tagged photos will be hidden too if you click “Hide tagged”.

You can also just collapse the whole highlights bar by clicking the tiny arrow beside “Highlights”.

That’s why this is great as just a temporary fix if you can’t stand all those tagged photos (I know I can’t) until Facebook bans the applications, regulate the apps’ sidebar manipulation or until the hype dies down and people stop using the apps. Considering people still do quizzes up until now, that might be a long time coming.

You can also use this script to hide any other annoyances on your highlights bar! As you can see from the snapshot above, you can also hide certain friends from it.

Good luck! =)

Note: Greasemonkey is an awesome Firefox extension that lets you manipulate a lot of things on the internet with different scripts. Lifehacker has a feature on how to use it with  Top 10 Greasemonkey User Scripts.

Coffee Over Comics: 26/08/2009

Batman and Robin: always AWESOME

Here’s what I got last week:

• 28 Days Later #1
• The Last Days of Animal Man #4
• Avengers: The Initiative #27
• Batman and Robin #3
• Blackest Night: Titans #1
• Buck Rogers #3
• Dark Avengers #8
• Dark Reign: Elektra #5
• Dark Reign: The Sinister Spider-Man #3
• Dark X-Men: The Beginning #3
• Detective Comics #856
• Fantastic Four #570
• Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink #4
• Green Lantern #45
• Justice Society of America #30
• Madame Xanadu #14
• The Flash: Rebirth #4
• The New Avengers #56
• The Red Circle: The Shield
• Runaways #13

The story of The Red Circle intro issues comes full circle (heh) with The Shield. It’s pretty much the same super-soldier story: a bit of Cap, a bit of Magog and bit of Gauntlet (from Avengers: Initiative). The Red Circle titles are starting next month with The Web and The Shield. Inferno or The Hangman will be the backup stories for each of them.

You can go no wrong with zombies, and Boom! Studios did well by picking up the 28 Days Later franchise. The original film was one of the best “nu-zombies” (haha that’s what I’ll be calling these new breed of zombies/infected that can run fast as hell) film ever. This new title will tell the story of a group of hardened journalists covering the infected UK with the help of a lone survivor. It has a strong female lead character, and a good setup—hopefully this will excel, just like all other Boom! titles. Having me reading Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and re-playing Left 4 Dead, it’s gonna be a zombie fest all over again!

Let me just say here, that as always these titles are awesome: Batman and Robin, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Madame Xanadu and Runaways. So I’ll be reviewing these other outstanding titles below.

RECOMMENDED READS:

Fantastic Four #570: Marvel was promoting the hell out of this new run by Jonathan Hickman, and I decided to pick it up after such strong praises from other comic writers and artists. I thought that Dark Reign: Fantastic Four, written by Hickman as a lead-in to his arc was fairly decent, not exactly mindblowing. There were some cool moments with Franklin and Val, but the bit about the alternate universe versions of Sue, Johnny and Ben was a bit gimmicky.

However, after reading this one, I’m pleased overall with the story. Hickman is definitely borrowing from DC on alternate earths, especially the gathering of Supermen part in Final Crisis. It’s nice to see Marvel exploring these concepts too, and I’m curious to find out who the three founders of The Council are, and what our Reed will think when he found out that he isn’t the first Reed to make an initiative to save the world.

The art looks superb, except for Eaglesham’s drawing of Reed as the bulky hunk. I’m quite used with him being the skinny old nerd (with glasses and all), so seeing him look like Tom Strong just felt funny. Other than that, hey, tip-top start to a new arc!

Avengers: The Initiative #27: Christos N. Gage took a different approach to Initiative this time, and refreshed the tired title. Since being taken over from S.H.I.E.L.D. and now led by Taskmaster and The Hood, a lot has changed in The Initiative. The Shadow Initiative is no longer what it used to be, and this new reality was told from the perspectives of really-minor characters Johnny Guitar and Dr. Sax.

Dark X-Men: The Beginning #3: The main story sees Emma Frost peering into the mysterious mind of Namor, and finding things she didn’t expect in there. The pair Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk are charming as ever, delivering great dialogues and nice art.

There was a particularly clever panel where Emma found the three doors symbolising Namor’s strategies to cope with the surface world. The three doors had “Attack”, “Negotiate” and “SUE” engraved on them. Then we had Emma saying, “Odd. I never imagined you’d be one for legal action.” I couldn’t stop smiling remembering the cleverness of the whole thing.

For backup stories, we get one story where Wolverine was supposedly rampaging through the middle of the desert. Of course, we found out that it wasn’t actually Wolverine. But who was it? Finally. the most interest story is at the end, about the now almost forgotten Aurora dealing with her schizophrenia and disassociative identity disorder.

To Write Love On Her Arms

Most of the time, I’m quite a bastard when it comes to charity. It’s hard to fork out some money for people on the other side of the world that I can barely relate to, or for a concept of Earth or nature too big to wrap around my head. It’s just worse that I hardly have anything to fork out anyway.

With great surprise, I have made up my mind to support To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA), a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.

I’m doing this through a widget by SocialVibe and WordPress which I now have in my sidebar to the right. With this widget, one can choose a sponsor who will donate an amount of money to the charity organisation of one’s choosing, based on the number of people clicking the widget.

My campaign is sponsored by truth, which is a non-profit youth smoking prevention campaign. To help this cause, you just have to click on the widget and sign a petition on smoking, nothing big. It will ask for your zip code, so just enter your Malaysian postcode, it’s pretty much the same digits.

I am not going to actively pursue anybody to contribute. If you happen to be browsing through my blog, or blog-hopping, just give the widget a click if it’s not too much of a bother, yeah?

Depression is not something that is strange to me—having been its grip for more than a year. It wrecked my life and my relationship with my loved ones.

I also know a lot of people who are suffering or have suffered from the same affliction. It is a very much common happening, you are definitely not alone. Everyone in depression thinks the same—that there is no hope, and that no one will ever understand what they go through.

But I do know that, to beat depression you have to love yourself. You must know your self-worth and that people do love you, no matter how bad the situation you are in. Surround yourself with friends and loved ones, never be alone. Talk, no matter to whom. Find solace in the embrace of family. Pray to whichever God or Gods you may worship.

If you find it too hard to talk to someone you know, start by seeking a counsellor. You can also anonymously call the helplines. Here is a list of helpful services in Australia. If you are in Malaysia, there is Befrienders, which was inspired by Samaritans, a similar group in the UK.

Just know that things will get better. Somebody once told me “Where else is there to go, if not up, when you hit rock bottom?“.

Lastly, if you are right now battling with depression, I leave you with this blog post from TWLOHA:

You are going to move through this.

More importantly, I love you. YOU ARE GOING TO MOVE THROUGH THIS.

Don’t be defeated. Submit yourself to the process. You are growing. You are changing. You are doing LIFE.

I am not trying to make you feel better. This fucking hurts, and there are no two ways around it.

But I am trying to encourage you to not retreat. I can’t remove the pain, but I am going to hold your hand while it hurts.

Continue to reach out. You need people right now.

I’m here for anything you need.

You are LOVED in ways you cannot imagine. In ways that don’t depend on you. In ways that don’t depend on your performance. In ways that cannot be lost. Remember Remember Remember.

Love you my friend.

- Anonymous

You, yes you, we do love you.