I Should Write More...

Truth is, I miss writing. Not blogging writing, but writing features, interviews, opinion pieces etc. "What's the problem, you run gua, don't you?" you might ask. Well, to be honest, gua's audience not the sort that would "get" my kind of stuff. You know, the tongue-in-cheek and you-gotta-know-pop-culture-to-the-max, kind of stuff.

I used to have a blog on gua called "The Buzz Station" (cool name, huh?) and I remember posting something called 'The Unsexiest List', listing the babes that don't do much for me. Obviously it was a take-the-piss sort of piece, but people actually asked if I was gay and if I didn't like women. Wankers.

But like I said, I miss sitting down and typing up pearls of wisdom to be shared with a more enlightened audience. This blogging thing has made me somewhat lazy. Everything is a 100 words with a couple of funny pictures. Lazy, lazy, lazy...

Then there's Twitter as well. Not only less is more, grammar also out the window. Lazy, lazy, lazy...

But oh, I'm into scriptwriting now. And the past few months has been spent learning the craft and actually writing a couple of things that will and have made some impact. My online drama 'Mingguan Lelaki' has chalked up more than 700,000 views todate on gua. And this movie script that I'm co-writing with Izham has gone into the final, final, final, aboslutely final draft and will go into production after Raya, hopefully. A sitcom is coming up as well.

So I've not been THAT lazy. But I should write more. And I will start now. The problem sometimes is that I tend to overthink things, but that will change and I will go with the flow more now. After all, I am my own editor and I could/should write whatever the hell I want.

And I will....

Tribute To Yasmin Ahmad

Gold Coast + Brisbane : The Best Of My Snaps

Fire! Fire!

So here’s what happened. After an eventful day in Brisbane, we arrived back at Surfers Paradise almost close to midnight. While my apartment mate Datuk Azman had already gone up, Nades, Raj and I were lepaking a bit at the parking lot at the back of the building, when these four guys came running towards us.

It became even more interesting when we heard sirens blaring in the background. “What’s going on, man?” Raj asked the dudes.
“The building’s on fire!” said dudes.
“Which building?”
“This building!”

Yes, our apartment was on fire! “The 9th floor is burning!” they added. My apartment was on the 10th floor. Then came the most dramatic part; Raj was running around and screaming: “Call Datuk Azman, the building’s on fire! Call Datuk Azman, the building’s on fire!”

Thing was my hp battery had died. Bummer. But Raj managed to call the Datuk as we made our way to the front. We could see black smoke coming out of one of the apartments on the 9th floor. By then too, five fire engines were already parked there while the police had already cordoned off the road. Yes, very efficient one, these Aussies…
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Anyway, more curious onlookers had gathered in front of the building while the other residents who had just returned were all going “holy shit, this can’t be happening!”

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Well, it did. And we were kept out of the building for quite a bit, freezing in the cold winter night. Although some managed to see the humour in it…
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The dudes who had called the bomba were shouting: “we saved the building, we saved the building!” to everyone who cared to listen and finally got they just reward when they were interviewed by a local TV crew.
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A short circuit had caused the incident, and the kitchen of that apartment on the 9th floor was completely destroyed. But thanks to the good work of the Gold Coast fire brigade, the “fire” was confined to just mere smoke. And oh yeah, thanks to those dudes as well – you guys rock lah…

One Day In Brisbane

What a day we had yesterday in Brisbane. We left very early in the morning and after going thru some traffic jam, we reached the venue of the event at Griffith University in downtown Brisbane almost an hour an a half after we had left Gold Coast.
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After checking out the hall for a bit, we then went for a big, hearty breakfast together with the organizers and our kind hosts of Paradigm Infinitium – Kiong, Shona and Raj. ...

Then it was time to rock n roll. Well, to present our stuff, really. The audience was rather small but all the presentations were recorded and will be made available online pretty soon. But I must say that all the speakers – Datuk Azman Ujang of Bernama, Citizen Nades of The Sun, Malaysiakini’s Steven Gan, and myself – did a good job (ahem) in presenting different points of view on the development of new media in Malaysia (especially in the political space). ...
After that, we had a couple of hours to kill before the Malaysia-Australia Annual Ball, and so decided to check out the sights as much as we could. And here’s the city seen from the South Bank of Brisbane River. ...
Breathtaking, ain’t it? We also got on the river taxi called CityCat. It was a cool ride along the Brisbane River, although I was freezing like hell everytime the Cat accelerated. ...
Oh yeah, Brisbane’s got its own Eye as well… ...
We also stopped by at a street market, always a favourite destination of mine.
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The Ball was next, but although we had a pretty darn good time, I don’t have any pics to show off here, which is pretty strange.

But I do have photos of an interesting incident that took place after he had returned to Gold Coast. So stay tuned…