Category Archives: Pictures

Dye Dye Dye

So, 1 year and 3 months after a pair of scissors last touched my hair, my pure virginal black-but-shines-brown-in-the-sun hair of 22 years and 3 weeks was dyed.

My sister asked, “hey do you wanna share hair dye?”

I had the money and the intent, but never got round to dyeing my hair at a salon, but since she wanted to Do-It-Yourself, I decided that this would be the turning point. We bought bleach, hydrogen peroxide and semi-permanent hair dye.

My first attempt didn’t show much.

I think God didn’t want me to dye! Why won’t you let me dye?

It was cursed enough that walking about in the sun would never give me a tan; I could not change the color of my hair. Dammit.

I got more bleach and peroxide, and decided to go all out, walloping dollops to bleach the hair thoroughly. I never knew how tricky it was to aim at your hair in the mirror.

Various responses include “DUDE! WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR HAIR?”

It wasn’t till I was at a party that I met this hot chick with nice long hair and nice engaging eyes that I received my first compliment.

“I like your hair. It’s funky!”
“Wow thanks! That’s the first compliment I’ve had for this. What color is it?”
“It’s blue.”

Before this, I’ve had colleagues say, “eee why did you color it green? You should’ve colored it blue.”

Anyway, back to the hot chick. Turns out she was a friend of a famous lesbian.

“So, uh… by association, are you, y’know…”

She was the second femme I’d ever met in Malaysia. (First one here.) Well thank goodness there aren’t that many femmes in Malaysia. Potong stim, as we say. Makes me wish I was lesbian, though.

(On a side note, I wished that homosexual males will get the liberation to be dressed as they like, pink if they may, while straight guys would not, so that there is a distinction, and heterosexual girls would not harp on hot homosexual guys who they just assume are metrosexual heterosexuals. Makes it easier for people with lousy gaydar. Of course, this can only happen when we’re a lot less homophobic, to avoid discrimination.)

I once wrote an article saying how gawdy dyed hair was. This time, I took poetic license, as blue wasn’t a natural hair color, and I wasn’t trying to look blonde.

Now, enough of the pretense and drama. Show me pictures!

Unfortunately, the color turns out very differently in different lighting conditions, and sometimes doesn’t show, so it’s still best seen in real life. And so, with great deliberation, here’s a mugshot, which shows the color almost accurately, or as I’d like it:

Thanks to smashpOp for the 12x optical zoom macro shot using his Panasonic FZ5.

Thanks also to Leech (for technical support, and you are my purple-haired heroine), Davina (who has gotten a failed-blue-green and a bright metallic blue) as well as Jenifur (for the under-color, hidden style that I tried to copy).

So is it green or blue? Those who’ve tried to dye their hair blue but only bleached it till yellow or brown will find that it turns green. Still, the green, I found, was quite cool.

In various places, it goes from yellow-green, to blue-green, to blue-violet. I call it the Nokia 7110 chameleon color. (Remember that phone? It went from purple to green with dark copper in between.) It could also be called a fighting fish color. Yeah.

How do I get this, oh wise funky-color-haired Albert?

Bleach your hair by yourself, with a mirror. Do not seek help from anybody. Apply as sloppily as possible until hair has 1cm thick coating of bleach. Wash off after an hour, in case you’re as un-dye-able as me. Put loads of blue-violet dye until it slightly stings your scalp. (I did that the second round to avoid getting green again.)

Good luck, and show me how it goes.

Every Man’s Dream

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I dreamt that I was at TGI Friday’s at The Curve on Valentine’s Day 2006, and I had a few drinks and a big sundae with THE hothothot Hannah Sarah Tan. Then nosy cameramen from NTV7 poked their noses at us.

I never had such a vivid dream, complete with blinding sunlamps and three people seated (I assume they were producers who set us up.) It felt SO real, so intense.

If my dreams were any indicator of my future, I reckon that I’d appear on TV at NTV7, 12:15am (technically) February 14th 2006. Which means you set a phone reminder on 11:45pm February 13th 2006 so you have half an hour to get home and find a TV set. So if I already met Hannah Sarah Tan at the start of V-Day, I cannot imagine how much better the day can go. (I was rudely awakened.)

Treadshot-motion

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And now, for part two:

I got myself some nice cardboard, and drew a rough sketch of the motion. However, I forgot to get a semi-transparent plastic sheet so I could make a shadowless ‘sky‘ for the Transformer to rest on.

Transformers Energon Treadshot test animation
(requires Macromedia Flash plugin)
This time, I was in Manual exposure mode, 1/50 seconds, F2.6, macro focus, ISO 50 and auto white balance. It took me 10 minutes to take all 45 frames. I did not do the multiple camera angles because this Transformer was so simple, it would be cooler done in one motion.

My previous, more elaborate attempt was here, with Transformers Alternators Meister.

You want more? I’m getting a proper tripod and hopefully, semi-transparent plastic tomorrow. This is just a teaser. 😉

Transformotion

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I have always, always wanted to do stop-motion. I used to draw animated strips of people running, stickmen fighting and transforming into something else on the edges of textbooks.

Part of this desire to animate was satiated in 1999 to 2000, where I made quite a few Transformer plugin player models for Quake 2.

It wasn’t until I watched Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit that I dug out the old tripod Fazri donated to me, a flourescent table lamp, a poster, and a guitar to use as a hard surface.

Transformers Alternator Meister test animation
(requires Macromedia Flash plugin)
I set it to Manual exposure mode, 1/20 seconds, F3.5, auto focus, ISO 50, custom white balance set to the poster. When I zoomed in one step I compensated by slowing the shutter speed by 1/3 stops.

Pardon the camera shake; I put the tripod (which was broken and could only be extended once) on my bed. If I had a taller tripod I could place it on a stable floor and zoom in (thus cutting out the background as well!) Pardon the off-center part – when the first leg transforms, it is suspended in mid-air, with my finger holding it up (I had to Photoshop it out in one frame.) Pardon the bad angle, I should’ve used a storyboard. The storyboard would also help me plan the transformation properly. Also, trying to make him step backwards was a lot more challenging than I thought.

The gun also suddenly appears, out of my laziness and to retain the stop-motion ethic, which is to avoid Photoshop and computer graphics at all times. 😛

I took 45 minutes to shoot all the frames, which I figure was pretty fast. The hard part would be planning it; when I am free I will do a properly directed stop-motion transform, complete with angle changes to highlight different parts of the animation. I’d probably need to get a frosted glass panel and place another lamp underneath, so I get rid of the shadows and make it seem like he’s transforming in mid-air when he’s just lying on glass.

To convert all frames to Macromedia Flash format, I used Adobe ImageReady CS2. I don’t know if it’s just CS2 that makes editing anything very, very slow, e.g. crop and resize, that I didn’t bother with levels and other image enhancing.

Yeah yeah I am aware that this is quite badly done, but I’m doing it as a proof-of-concept and to perhaps inspire those of you with more time to do it.

Stereotypical Pictures

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Again, I am too braindead to blog about serious stuff, so:

First off, pimpage for Syefri who has a new web domain. Here he is pictured giving a speech about his evil plan of planting goats to cause arrest.

Frustration.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

The obligatory infrared shot; hot charcoal glows of infrared. This was taken without any filters.

An obligatory long-exposure shot, with the help of the circular-linear-wannabe-neutral-density filter.

An obligatory overexposed shot. Guess what this is!

Midvalley’s Dome provides very nice spot lighting.

The obligatory cloud shot; this one looking like a Chinese painting.

Free as a bird, just beware the shells of men.

Damn, it looks like a stamp template.

More stamps.

Six against one.

One Utama’s pool center near GSC provides extra balls. (We went to get the 8 and 14 ball and put the extra balls in.) In our next game, we had TWO 8s and 14s! This meant that someone accidentally put in two extra balls, screwing up the pool table’s mechanism (which I suppose will stop dispensing once it has rolled out 16 balls, even if there are more inside.)

Oh, and Rudy is the man. He survived this. I hopped over to his Christmas party, and he went, “ah finally someone with a camera!” I promptly forgot to take pictures of people. It was then that my secret resolution was to take more pictures of people. So if you see me, let me take your picture!

Who says cats are lazy? This one had a limp and walked all over the house.

It’s that time of the month again, when you can whip out your camera and take pictures of the moon. This was taken at 7:15pm!

And here’s a proper night moon. It has been in the sky since Friday the 13th until the time of writing!

Generally January One

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I am braindead and so I present to you pictures. Serious. I will blog about the Police Rights workshop I attended soon. I will blog about many things. But first, pictures, because that side of my brain was still working.

Assembly Point – where it’s legal to have an assembly, because there is a sign!

Man, those are some stoned monkeys.

I took a cab to Robson Heights, and ended up on the wrong side, but I stopped here to take pictures anyway. Thank goodness for that diversion, or else I would be feeding mosquitoes in LostGenSpace, where the workshop was held.

Waterfalls are captured with long exposures and small apertures, e.g. 15 seconds and F8. A tripod, or in this case, a rock, was used to stabilize the picture. I also used my circular-linear-wannabe-neutral-density filter to prevent it from being overexposed.

Photoshop was then used to counter the blue tint of my not-so-neutral density filter. (Neutral meaning it does not change the color of the picture.)

I know not the meaning, but I want the good luck it is supposed to bring. Now to buy 4D.

The polarizers also come in handy; you’d otherwise see huge white reflections in the pond.

They reach dry land where they bask and stone.

“Man, time goes by so fast these days, eh young snapper?”

Check out the rock-hard shell. It even looks like a rock! Oh wait, it’s a rock. Toadally.

Basking outdoors. He is, technically, outdoors anyway.

Thus began the walk up the hilly roads of Robson Heights.

To a spooky looking bungalow where I would be mosquito feed again.

I met Lainie there. For lunch break I walked alone as she was engrossed in deep, headache-inducing conversation.

I walked past the legendary Brickfields Police Station, where the hardcore-punk-mistaken-as-black-metal kids were taken to on New Year’s Eve. The workshop taught us how to deal with police and what our rights were. These people weren’t given their rights, yo.

I landed in Nagas, this fancy-looking mamak opposite the police station.

The tandoori chicken was like no other. Fluffy, fresh chicken and naan bread. Mmm. The next time I’m hungry in KL Sentral, I will walk here.

It is said that teh tarik should not be consumed from a glass.

Take it straight from the source, yo. (I’m not dissing teh tarik; I love it, but I can’t have too much of it.)

A drunk fan was spotted opposite the police station! (Note the Chivas Regal bottle in an open box.)

A Long December

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Alright, here comes the final barrage of rock-related pictures, from December. I also break the 1 megabyte limit on this one. (Okay, so Counting Crows annoys me.)

3rd December 2005, Homegrown Finale concert, Sunway Amphitheatre

Rahul of One Buck Short with his pretty new guitar.

Republic Of Brickfields do their thing, with a happy crowd. I was standing behind, and on a stairway. To get the rest of the shots, I used a digital zoom of 2.2x (2272/1024) at 1024×768, for a total zoom of 4x optical times 2.2x digital = 8.9x. (I could go 14x if I was at 640×480, but I didn’t need to.) I was in Manual exposure mode, no flash, ISO 50 (it was possible, because there were spotlights), on F5.6 (that was the brightest aperture I could get at full 4x optical zoom) and varied my shutter speed between 1/40 to 1/60 seconds. It was quite necessary, as in Auto or Program mode, it would want to expose at 1 second, which would be too slow, and you’d just get a nice smudgy multicolored blur of rock stars. Digital cameras, even digital SLRs, are not smart enough to figure that the rock stars are already being bombarded with lights, and the cameras want to expose long enough to show the background. So if you think you’re gonna buy a digital SLR and get fantastic shots immediately on Auto, you’d be wrong.

Anyway, for those of you without shutter speed settings, you can just set your EV to -2 to get a similiar effect. Even cheap digicams have this feature, go read the manual, yo. Still too blurry? Crank the ISO up to 400.

It majorly annoys me when people want to get an SLR because they think it will solve their problems. Yes it’s all that, but they don’t even know their own digital camera well enough. Go learn about shutter and aperture and ISO and EV. Google it. If you’re lazy, the least you could do is pick up tips from my blog. I can do this with a RM900 camera, and a little Photoshop.

Trippy.

Oops, I forgot to turn off trippy mode for the intense Syahrul of Love Me Butch.

RAWR that’s more like it. Proper emo from the man himself. Few bands can sing emo without being off tune, and Syahrul pulls it off effortlessly.

ANGER RAGE POWER.

He’s so damn photogenic he is eating up your bandwidth now.

Yeah. Screw you black-nailed, black-eyelined, underwear-showing emo kids. This is the real thing.

Ham of Seven Collar T-Shirt has a funny posture, but it’s cool.

Duan gets a sneeze…

…and passes it on to Adam of Dragon Red, who is instead singing Superpreacher for Deja Voodoo Spells.

Yep, Rithan is not breaking a sweat, shredding away.

DJ Uno of Pop Shuvit on the decks, yo.

In case you’re wondering, yes, they did vote to smash the guitar. It was, of course, a cheap Pyramid Stratocaster clone.

4th December 2005, Dragon Red album launch, Midvalley Convention Center

This time around, I was sitting nearer, so I used 1600×1200, with a digital zoom of 1.42x, making a 5.6x total zoom, F5.6, ISO 50, no flash, and shutter speeds from 1/15 to 1/60 seconds.

Melina of Tempered Mental. They had bright, colorful spotlights for this one, and I was thankful for that.

This was where the stage was set up.

I think she looks good in red.

Hanafi playing for Estranged. He is also the temporary guitarist for Tempered Mental.

KLG Squad, rappers, yo.

Ean, the host. Damn, I love the spotlights, it makes every picture look much more dramatic.

The Bantus Capoeira Malaysia group. I don’t know what the connection was with Dragon Red, but heck.

AAA! Do not flash me! (Capoeira is way cooler taken without flash, at slower shutter speeds.)

Like so.

Fear the Brazilian guy with dreads, for he flies!

Yep, he’s coming for you.

Beware the malodorous foot.

Oh wait, he was wearing shoes.

“Hey that ain’t fair! Are you tripping me?”

Girls can join the fun too!

YYYEEEAAAHHH. You can tell that he’s enjoying every bit of it.

“Uh, I think we’re One Buck Short…”

Maybe they could grab some spare change from this breakdancer.

Or this guy, who will flip over three friends for you.

I suspect the little dude has some change. Yeah it’s Adam’s stage buddy.

Tech, guest rapper on Kehendak Naluri, raps like he got the munchies.

Goodbye, ev’rybody, I’ve got to go.

17th December 2005, Rock The World 6, Merdeka Stadium

I took a picture of the crowd, and the only guy who looked at me was the one you were supposed to spot. Where’s Syefri? (He has a full account of all the bands, go read his blog and buy his T-shirt. There are also more pictures at Jenifur‘s blog.)

Now this, this was far from the stage (we didn’t get media passes this time), so I cranked digital zoom to 3.55x at 640×480 for a total of 14x zoom. ISO 50, F5.6, and shutter speeds from 1/250 to 1/400 seconds.

As Yi Jian, Syefri, stim-girl and I stepped into Merdeka Stadium, we were greeted with a familiar rock anthem. Well, familiar to me, anyway. Faith No More – Be Aggressive! They then played Evidence, Easy and Digging The Grave. I was overjoyed! Finally, someone out there acknowledged this band who somewhat pioneered nu-metal and rap-metal, by playing them to the biggest (and only) rock concert (with more than 4 acts) in Malaysia! I should’ve went up to that guy and told him he had a nice shirt. 😀

Mr. Harooon was the usual emcee.

Alda of Cosmic Funk Express funks out the bass.

However, Zack takes the cake with two guitars, played simultaneously! Sadly, their set started with technical difficulty at the worse possible point – the roaring guitar solo introduction. The guitar could only be heard in the second half of the song. 🙁

“Hey man, you gotta show me how you do that shiiit.”

Frequency Cannon‘s bassist is loving the big stage.

Like, yo, yo yo!

“Damn, it’s hot today.”

“Thank God for the mist.”

Rithan rips out solos again, for Deja Voodoo Spells.

This time however, I spot their secret weapon – two people on keyboards! (That explains why they sound more properly produced, even on stage.)

Radhi of OAG, oo-oo-oo-OO.

People were getting tired, so…

“Let’s smash this guitar!” And so, he did. Again, this guitar is a cheap Pyramid. Do not be fooled!

Who says rock concerts can’t be cool(ed)?

We eventually retired with the crowd, for the harder bands in the night, and to float in space with Furniture, and sing along to Seven Collar T-Shirt. (This was taken at 7:30pm with a 15 second exposure.)

I didn’t bother with taking pictures because it was too dark and we were sitting too far away. It was time to just do what you should do at a rock concert – rock out.

Was it worth it? Most definitely. RM20 for 17 bands of all genres (pop to ska to metalcore, even a visiting by thrash-metal-in-major-key The Pilgrims, The Killers-like The Times and Kaiser Chiefs-like (reborn) A.C.A.B.) with an actual moshpit! (Unlike those moshpits in regular gigs with only 4 people!)

Death Metal

Gunned. Damn!

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you, and instead of putting loads of pictures of happy people at parties over the last 3 days, I decided to be different and put pictures of one of my birthday presents.

Guess which plane isn’t so plain.

Space-age carrier versus unidentified aircraft.

But wait, it’s a robot in disguise!

Meet Saviour Gundam, ZGMF-X23S, 1/144 scale model High Grade Gundam Seed-24.

If you’re not convinced that he’s a handsome bastard, here’s a closeup.

Ah, my other birthday presents are getting jealous. Meet (the belated) Bionicle Toa Hordika Vakama! (Don’t ask me who comes up with these names.)

Size does matter, and the Japanese warrior is no match for the German giant.

Transformers Alternators Silverstreak takes revenge for the Japanese (yeah the Alternators are American, but he transforms into a Japanese car.)

Saviour Gundam takes his position in the hall of heroes with the tiny, Gundam-feel Transformers Robot Masters Star Saber.

Do I like it? Majorly so! He’s even red for the occasion, ho ho ho. He even transforms, yo! I never knew how much detail went into a Gundam, or how many pieces were needed to ensure articulation and prevent it from being hollow. My only gripes were the fists, that needed to be disassembled to remove the gun.