Category Archives: Rants

I Heart Rock

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For once, I sat close enough to the stage in Jamasia, Hartamas, to get nice, bright shots at minimal optical zoom, allowing for big apertures, thus better exposure. The occasion? Heart Rock, a charity gig.


Broken Scar started the set with his Emily The Strange Epiphone SG.


Zack of Cosmic Funk Express rips out three thousand notes in a spacey, mind-bending frenzy. You can see the effect on Alex, the drummer.


As for Alda who was standing on the bass drum, well, he just loves beer. His bass had to be retuned halfway, and so Zack unveiled his touch-tapped version of the Doraemon theme song!

We were also treated to Alda’s vocal debut, singing Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ version of Jimi Hendrix – Fire.

Needless to say, we’ll request for Eric Johnson – Cliffs Of Dover next time.


Stonebay‘s grungy vocalist has a pretty guitar.


Naked Breed, featuring Melina of Tempered Mental. Interestingly, Tempered Mental would feature Jack The Shredder of Naked Breed.


Guitarists might recognize this neo-classical and blues shredder from Bentley Music, filling in, in Edge Of Fire. Shaun Ng was also the first ever webdesigner for Xfresh, but that was ages ago.


Daniel of Edge Of Fire, in my opinion, is the only handsome Korean-looking Chinese guy there is.

What’s with you not-exactly-prepubescent girls and your obsession with slanty eyes and long dragged faces? I knew a girl who had good taste (in looks anyway.) Then comes Korean-looking Chinese boy and she’s nuts about him and how he’s so cute. I do not consider a guy who has such a long stoned face and doesn’t smile or even smirk when camwhoring with girlfriend… cute. Do I have to slap some expression into you? Dammit, you got yourself a hot chick, don’t look so sad okayyy.

Note that I say Korean-looking Chinese guy, not Korean guy, because Zack is da shiznit, and is the sensation on YouTube.


Anyway, back to the story. Shaun broke a string. Oh no what do we do? Fear not! The band plays an acoustic cover of Mr. Big – To Be With You.


Polar Attraction, with Jaya Satriani. Even spacier than Cosmic Funk Express.


One Buck Short ends the set. How the heck do you play after a shredder band?

In unrelated news, I got the chance to play with a Canon EOS 350D at a later gig. Yes that’s right, a digital SLR camera! My friend had a Canon 17-85mm, F4-5.6 lens on. That combination was sweet, but the lens had a prohibitive price (and anything with a bigger aperture would cost at least 4 times more), and it wasn’t that bright either, so I kept to ISO1600 at all times. Manual focus was only fun when it was bright enough, plus the viewfinder could be so much bigger. It was only much later that he revealed the Speedlite 430EX he was carrying, but I was lazy to test it out. Besides, flashing isn’t my preferred style.

This is why I would not get a digital SLR – I would not be pleased with it. I already know the limits of what I can afford!

Third Stone From Jalan Ipoh

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I live in a housing area in Segambut, near Kepong.

I use public transportation.

I am a guinea pig to the new RapidKL buses, that rolled out in North KL (Kepong, Sentul, Gombak etc.) I could say I was thrilled to be the first.

How does the new system work?

Take a bus from any one of the central stops (Maluri, Titiwangsa, KLCC, Medan Pasar (behind Central Market) or KL Sentral) to another central stop. In my case, Titiwangsa. I then hop on an intermediate shuttle bus that brings me to Metro Prima. Metro Prima is thus the bus hub for Kepong and Manjalara. From there, I take a bus to my housing area.

The buses that route the central stops are 5-10 minutes each. The intermediate shuttles come every 10-15 minutes, and the home-coming bus comes every 15-30 minutes. These are my observations, not something read from their leaflets.

On the downside, it is initially confusing, and you can’t sleep on the bus. I used to take one bus from Medan Pasar all the way to my housing area. I knew its exact times; it always left Medan Pasar at the 15th and 45th minute of every hour, except during peak times. I also knew that the last bus left at 11:15pm.

On the upside, it makes a whole lot of sense. Segmenting the bus routes will segment jams, too; a bus that used to go from A to B to C might get a jam at B. Now, jams delay only the B buses. People actually travel short distance, within a point in A to another point in A, so the jam in B doesn’t affect them. Shorter routes also let the buses be more frequent.

Oh, and the last bus is now 12:30am! Eat that, taxi drivers who charge midnight charge between 11pm and 12 midnight, instead of after midnight! (Oh, and midnight charge is 50% extra, not twice the amount on the meter, kids!)

Anyway, I got on the 2T3 bus from Titiwangsa to Batu Tiga, Jalan Ipoh, where I was waiting for the bus to my place. It was 9:55pm and I was not in any rush, and asked the conductor when the bus would leave. 10:20pm, he said. I took that chance to eat dinner at some roadside stalls nearby.


A chicken burger for RM1.80! Where else can you get that price? Decent sloppy burger.


Super old-school parking meters.

A busker stood in the mainly Chinese crowd and started playing. I went over, dropped a note and asked if he knew Bob Dylan. How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?

As I ate slowly, I saw THREE buses that were headed to my place, pass by. Not bad, not bad.


Inspired, I slung out my guitar. Notice that thing on my hair?


Yes that’s right – a guitar capo! I was shopping around for the spring-loaded one, but couldn’t find one cheap enough that I could afford to lose. Yeah, I tend to lose anything tying my hair, except plain rubberbands.


And this is for those who wonder what my sideburns look like after the 500th-day-haircut.

Anyway, if you don’t like using public transport, then go save up for your own car. Or convince your parents that you’re not traumatized by that road accident anymore. Or get a license. Or walk.

If you don’t have the money, come take the bus with me and I shall impart upon you my virtues of patience.

Green Eyed Monsters

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What’s up with female bloggers and their obsession with other pretty female bloggers? About every urbanite Malaysian female well versed with the Internet, blogger or not, reads Xiaxue (whether they hate her or not) and JoyceTheFairy (whether they drink alcohol or not). Some bloggers even post pictures of their aforementioned idols on their blog. Some hate them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

I just don’t see guys doing it.

Yes, society sets such strong pressure on girls and their physical appearance. But then, you don’t ever see the most insecure of guys talking about how they wish they were as good-looking as… uh…

Name me one Malaysian blogger you read because the author is sex on a stick jaw-droppingly handsome.

Okay, maybe everyone reads Kenny Sia. But is it because he’s good-looking, or because he’s funny? (And he meets chicks, which falls back to previous statement.) If he was that good-looking, I’d turn gay. But no. Girls have admitted that Joyce is so hot they wish they were lesbian.

I guess the only male bloggers who bother to camwhore consistently are gay. And straight guys don’t admit to reading gay blogs.

For the record, lest he’d never send me games for my future handphone, smashpOp doesn’t take enough pictures of himself to show off how cute he is, and he’s not gay. I don’t post pictures of myself which don’t prove a point, be it modelling a hair clip for rockers, infrared eyes or showing off which hot female bloggers I met.

Of Pictures And Text

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Why don’t I add text to pictures?

Quite simple.

I don’t have a lot of fonts, so Photoshop loads faster, and if I typed “Pink Honda Jazz” in the picture, instead of typing it out in text, I would not be able to do a text search on it.

I don’t like watermarking my pictures either, not that I’m encouraging that people steal, but often I see great pictures plastered with alpha-transparency text, obstructing the beauty of the picture. If your girlfriend was a model, you wouldn’t tattoo your name on her cheeks would you?

That said, I don’t hate watermarking people, just the bad watermarking. A logo in a corner is better.

There are also different levels of Photoshopping.
1) Resize
2) Resize and auto-levels
3) Resize, color balance adjustment, contrast (at this stage all adjustments are done on the entire image, not specific parts of the image)
4) Resize, color balance adjustment, contrast, sharpening
5) Resize, color balance adjustment, contrast, sharpening and retouching (actual color adjustment, surgical enhancements)

I usually do 1) when the picture is perfect, 2) for normal shots, 3) for darker shots and shots where I want to put emphasis on a certain object, or isolate by mildly desaturating the background, and 4) for when it’s blur. I take pride in the fact that my pictures look plausible, given the right settings. At most, I am merely covering for exposure/color mistakes done when taking the picture.

I’m relatively good at retouching, but I abhor it. I respect the purity of the image as it was captured, and step 4) is just to adjust the picture to what your eyes would see, or your brain would see, like a white paper in a yellow-lighted room. Also notice that the human eye has very big aperture (I did an experiment) and it is hard to focus on two objects far from each other at the same time. When you want to look at the other object, you have to refocus on the other object.

If taking a picture back then meant stealing your soul, then I can see why we like to steal souls. Guys with cameras, I know, want to take a hot chick’s picture with their own camera. Sure, they can probably stalk her on Friendster and download and save pictures, but it’s not the same. You take her picture, it’s like you snapped a bit of her soul. You feel proud. A conquest. A capture, even if the methods were sneaky. All the more to be proud if you are in that same picture, so you can show off to friends. “Look I’m in the same picture with her!“, you beam.

Okay, now that you’ve braved my text, I shall reward you (sic) with pictures.


Left: A man is hard at work pumping. Argh motion blur! Right: I flash him, and he flashes me back.


One morning I didn’t sleep through the night, so I took my tripod out to the porch at 6:20am and took this stitched shot. (Picture has been turned to monochrome for clarity.)


Deja Voodoo Spells album launch, 26th January 2006: This is where I tried to sneak a shot in The Actors’ Studio Bangsar. The band played, with hot dancers in between each song. Whoa. First of its kind.


Here’s a customary shot of the KLCC Twin Towers. But it is just so pretty.


Left to right, top to bottom: Davina is truly a space cowgirl; sticky melted honey sweets stick to your teeth; lobsters in the lower ground floor of Starhill sing, “I Want To Break Free“; Starhill toilets feature a complex, nifty old-school mechanism to activate the tap, more Starhill ornaments.


Left to right, top to bottom: I can play without even touching the grand piano at J.W. Mariott; more Starhill ornaments; interesting lights arranged in a pattern; interesting bricks arranged in a pattern; I couldn’t believe my eyes, she looked so real from afar; trees project a shadow on the fog.


Left to right, top to bottom: The rope and the hole that broke Kevin‘s arm; the secret passageway underneath; the by-invite-only special screening of Khai‘s full-length movie, Ciplak; Khai the man giving a speech.

Ciplak features about everybody close to him in the scene, including the otai putih Peter Hassan Brown in a juicy role. There were elements of British humor, and while the introduction does try to slowly educate you on piracy, it quickly picks up into a very fun, accessible chase movie, with Khai the hero trying to get pirated DVDs to save his life, while spewing his trademark wit.

The only complaints I had were technical issues, like the camera going in and out of focus in the darker scenes, greenish white balance and horrible digital noise from an expensive camera. I’d say, better with fake lighting then, than to have a okay-lit but noisy scene. As for the greenish tint, it wasn’t in the trailer, so I blame the projector, or Paul’s Place’s lighting. 😛 But hey Khai, if you could sort those niggles out, it would make a subconsciously better quality film to watch in GSC International Theatres. If the quality could be fixed, it would be a heck more fun to watch than Sepet. The story doesn’t indulge in indie-film style, so the only thing indie is the film quality.


Left to right, top to bottom: Waterfall, duh; the rich versus the poor (okay, okay, so Astro dishes need to face one direction, I know); freaky green-lighted bus stop; caused by a pedestrian traffic light.


And now, for some obscenely big infrared pictures of me and my pupils.


I hope nobody steals this for Friendster.

Subcultured

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Guess what this is.

Anyway, I got off the Kepong KTM Komuter station, and the walkover was in darkness. I heard some skinheads laughing rowdily in the background, with black jackets, studded belts, boots and blond mohawks. In the darkness, I heard some tapping; it was a blind man, to my left, with a walking stick (as in, a stick that aids his walking, not a stick that walks.)

“Abang mau pergi mana?” (Where do you want to go brother?)

One of the skinheads was guiding the blind man!

They joked about the darkness and how they could relate to him. All four of them sent him off past the ticketing machines.

A touching moment, not easily captured on film due to the lack of light all around the station.

People in subcultures are still helpful Malaysians, you know.

Diet Coax

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11 PM, Friday, February 3rd 2006, location: KL Sentral

For the first time ever, KL Sentral’s concourse area was clear.

Earlier, at 7pm, I was there at McDonalds ordering. They didn’t have chicken porridge or Diet Coke/Coke Light!

How could they not have Diet Coke? How could they run out? Does everybody order Diet Coke? I thought all you McDonalds junkies order Coke, the real thing, not the weak artificial imitation. I thought you all order burgers too, so how could they run out of porridge? (I normally don’t order porridge but I was feeling sick.)

This is why I drink Diet Coke.

Cabbie With Soul

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So I hopped in a cab. This post will be partially translated from Malay to English as and when I feel like; cabbie will speak in italics while I will not. Conversation may not be completely, accurately transcribed, and may be shortened by accident.

So… kau dari mana?
I dari Bangsar Shopping Complex.
Oh… kerja ke?
Nolah, I baru tengok show. Itu Harith Iskander kat Actors Studio.
Wahhh itu Harith Iskander ya? Dia boleh buat wang buat show. English market.
Er.. yeah.
Kau tau, dulu I sekolah I buat persembahan. Banyak pementasan. Cikgu pun supportive. Tapi… I keluar, I buat security guard.
Huh kenapa you tak masuk? Kalau you tau, you bagus, you boleh buat.
Oh adalah… I ada cuba jugak. Masa tu ada interview RTM. Buat newscaster. Saya ada pergi. Tapi diorang macam nak… tak nak… nak ke tak nak? So I masa tu baru tujuh belas, I tak tahu apa-apa lagi, tak tau nak pergi mana, tinggal mana, I baru datang KL 1985.

He then goes on to say how he learnt scriptwriting, and knew how to and did everything on the set.

He went on about how Kisah Benar stories lack quality, and how anyone could watch a drama and complain about how it could’ve been so much better. About how Rosyam Nor is just doing it for the money, without the soul. And that he was actually sponsored by an Indian company, using his name to approach big companies.

You tau sekarang punya drama? Bila dia ada scene kenduri. Dulu kan, dia buat atmosphere dia tau. Ada budak lari sini-sana. Ada budak mau kencing. Sekarang kan, dia terus pergi dialog.

I threw in my own tangent:

Look at the colors in Jefri Zain movies! I was watching ASTRO RIA and saw bright vivid nicely post-processed technicolor in Gerak Kilat. Nowadays you see baaad, bad color and horrid, dark brown skin tones. What happened to good post-processing on film? Is digital film making our local productions look horrible?

He was actually quite photogenic. He had the look, even at his age. How old?

Anak saya pun ada kata, “Abah buatlah filem…”

I told him to go and do it, the next time his friends in the scene ask him to. Because he needs to represent. Because he needs to fix what is wrong with local drama.

You’ve got soul, go do it.

You got a chance, go chase it. (A cabbie was once a double-pedalling drummer whose band was about to get its big break.)

He then ended by asking if I had stock options in ASTRO. Yeah, I said. Keep it, he said. He then went on about stocks and went all stock-geek on me.

Sadly, I fear that he was just being lazy about it, like a lot of us. Why aren’t we getting up and doing what is right? Is Afdlin Shauki the only champion in local movies? (Okay, and Yasmin Ahmad too.)

I may not be a pious person; I believe in soul as the passion to do what is right.

Prove Your Metal

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So you might have read the metalhead on the street claim that their music is positive in statements in the newspapers. What exactly do they mean?

Let me take a few examples:

Heavy Metal:
Black Sabbath – War Pigs
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Go do yourselves a favor and listen to it online, through online streaming sites or other methods. You will find it to sound very, very old and classic-rock like. Except that classic rock sings about love, and less worldly topics.

Power/speed metal:
Stratovarius – Eagleheart
Heart of an eagle
He flies through the rainbow
Into a new world and finds the sun
Spreading his wings
Above all the sorrows
The glory of Eagleheart

This is also the cheesiest sounding of all metal – high-pitched vocal singalongs, no screaming, no growling, and lots of very classical elvish-sounding guitar solos. Girls will dig Nightwish, which is like Evanescence but more operatic.

Thrash Metal:
Metallica – One
Fed through the tube that sticks in me
Just like a wartime novelty
Tied to machines that make me be
Cut this life off from me

This is also an easy-to-find song and video; it won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance.

Yes, it does touch on the sensitive subject of suicide, and *gasp* euthanasia, and war again. However, watch the video, and you will see why – the protagonist, as a young boy, is told “for democracy, any man would give his only begotten son”. He is sent off to war and is hit by a grenade and is left a shell of himself, paralyzed from the neck down. Stuck in the ward, he cannot sleep, traumatized by the events. He then uses Morse Code to signal to the doctors that he does not want to live anymore. Whether or not the doctors did anything we don’t know, but it cuts to a funeral hymn.

Death Metal:
Death – Mentally Blind
You see your vision and no one else’s
Your every word filled with sarcasm
Crucify people with invisible knowledge
Verbal destruction with each compulsion
We will see where you go
The future for you is nowhere
Every minute a cliche of your kind
Too much to say from a person with no respect
Your accusations you will regret
From the mentally blind come ideas that are poison
Take away the power, a shallow person you will find

Death metal is pounding, and heavier than thrash, but one of the identifying factors is heavily growled vocals. Those are not voices of Satan! It is merely the style. Go read around. Go educate yourself. I’m already helping out here. I don’t have the following songs, but these can be Googled nevertheless:

Death – Living Monstrosity:
Living monstrosity
A freak for life they’ll always be
Never knowing love or hate
Only pain the drug creates

(Oh look, an anti-drug song!)

Death – Without Judgement:
Guilty until proven innocent
We condemn your soul and fate
Never mind the possibilities
Too busy for logic or to calculate

Anddd Death – Spiritual Healing:
Blinded by the twisted ways you live
Kill for religion, will the Lord forgive?
Idiocy has stricken your mind
A real-life hell you will find

If anything, Death‘s lyrics are merely championing that you should not blindly accept the false teachings of others. In other words, don’t be stupid.

I will not deny that black metal is morbid, rhymes in occult, and talks about crushing skulls, or that Pantera has violent lyrics, or that Death has a song called Mutilation. However, read beyond the sound, and you will find some very intelligent lyrics.

I’d like to give as much detail as possible, but I don’t have any black metal songs. The hardest I have is just by the band Death, and I don’t listen to them a lot.

Now let’s look at rappers, who champion free sex, drugs and alcohol.

Nelly – Ride Wit Me:
If you wanna go and get high wit me
Smoke an L in the back with the Benz

Let me spell L out for you. LSD. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. A drug that creates illusions and vivid daydreams.

50 Cent – In Da Club:
You can find me in the club, bottle full of Bud
Mama, I got that X, if you into takin’ drugs
I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love
So come give me a hug if you into getting rubbed

X is also E which is also Esctasy. A Bud is a Budweiser, a brand of beer. These hip hop songs are being played on the radio and being sung along by girls and boys, underaged alike!

I have been to many underground gigs on the more urban rock side, and have never seen somebody smoking a joint publicly. I have never seen anybody having sex in a rock gig either. Look for these things in nightclubs, people.

The more heavy the music played, the less girls you’d find.

Why are there so few venues to have rock gigs as opposed to hiphop/R&B gigs? Venues complain that the rockers don’t drink; this is especially so with the Malay crowds. Hiphop and R&B is more profitable. Don’t assume that there’s debauchery there, either – there will be more in a dangdut club.

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!)

Beer Dance

8 Replies

What’s up with bragging about being able to drink more?

I consider it a curse.

I am proud of my low alcohol tolerance high alcohol efficiency. One beer is enough to get a buzz, and if I drink it fast enough, I’ll get a minimal high. I’ve only had three beers maximum, and I don’t intend to discover what my limit is by me being reminded what dinner looks like after it has taken a tour of my stomach.

I can get drunk faster and cheaper!

So boohoo if you can guzzle ten beers and not feel a thing. What is there to prove? Three beers or ten beers still register on the breathalyzer. If you want to drink to pretend to be drunk so you can molest people and get away with it, why waste money getting wasted?

Then there are the alcohol elitists who think beer tastes bad. Water doesn’t taste that great either. The point is not to savor it, but to drink it like water, to get the high. (On a different tangent, smoking to look cool is not cool; please justify yourselves with better reasons, like saying it relieves your stress or something.)

Also, what’s with clubbing and dancing, but only with alcohol? Are people unable to dance without alcohol? (I find this incredibly lame.) Are people only able to dance to songs they’ve seen before on MTV, and thus know the dance steps for? (I find this incredibly lame.) Do people even get the idea of dance?

I dance because I can feel the music and enjoy it, not because I want to show people that I know my dance steps.