Game Project: Unlocking Pandora

I’m in one of the most non-productive stages in my life right now, aka Empty Days. Non-productive, yeah but it sure beats the bad days and I’ll be having more of those in the coming weeks. Still, I am thankful for how things had turned out.

For starters, I nearly struck a silver Wira while driving around Kelana Jaya this morning but managed to stop in time. Never saw a partially bald man gone so white before. I left the T-junction quickly, with 5+ witness drivers meters away behind me even though we're all driving at 5km an hour.

It wasn't my fault but I'm not going to waste this blog entry describing in ridiculously detailed scene on how he should have noticed my blinky turn signal, especially since he was on the road the public used to turn left instead of going straight forward. I'm saving it to bored to death the traffic cops.

So instead of committing 3rd-degree murder, I decided to fill a little more of the day's void by building up a bit more of the game project I’m working on, ignoring the fact that I might have better things to do, like kill a cockroach or something.

To get a clearer definition just so you guys can see my pride on how cheap my project it, I’ve rounded up the usual background system and resource checks:

-RPG Maker 2003 (game engine)
-First Seed Material and etc (sprite graphics)
-Monta’s Monsters (monster graphics)
-Moutamsi Music and etc (music midi)
-A1 Free Sound Effects and etc (sound effects... duh...)
-And more etc, etc, etc since I haven’t bother to properly catalogue where I got these from.

Take note I'm writing a copy-and-paste from my old topic in GW gaming community but I'm going to make it as simple as a tourist brochure written in badly-printed Jawi. So if you don't understand, do ask me or, as the Travel and Adventure channel taught us, improvise your brain.

So without further ado... Quickening presents...

Game Systems:
-Menu System and Character Battle System (Action Time Battle).

-Map-based characters' actions such as field shooting and etc...


-Member switching in Character Battle System.


-Class Choosing (There are 3 variations; Offensive, Defensive and Support. As the story procresses, your members will have to choose one out of 2).

Story:
The main heroine is Keea Winston, a student of The Academy who's about to graduate as soon as she gets her thesis done. The magic class she had chosen, Soul Energy, is rare, difficult and mostly useless so she had to travel to a place called Stony Village and study its history and runes with permission from the local experts.

But Keea's presence disturbed a locked secret and her unique aura trapped the guardian spirit into her body. Without the guardian spirit, the imprisoned evil entities started to leak into the forests of the island, awaking all manner of savage and vicious beasts, threatening the population from unknown and long-forgotten nightmares.

Now possessing what is called Fighter Spirit, Keea infused the magical energy with her own and sought to rectify her mistake (and save her own life) by searching for two other guardian spirits in two other sealed chambers before the evil entities reached them.

Her actions though, went not without notice by numerous high profile personalities, such as the Society of Aqera, the Nobility of the neighbouring country Sun Valley, the Circle of Casters in The Academy and also the reclusive agents of the Dark Enchanters.

And even if Keea managed to survive through all that, there's the secret of the spirits themselves...

Characters:

Name: Keea Winston
Role: Female protagonist
Background: She's a final year student of a magic university and she only needs to do one last task to graduate so she could later return to the Academy as a junior lecturer. Yet often of late, she dreams of an unknown golden-haired woman playing a sad tune on a harp. She thinks that one backwater island, home to the ruins of Pearl Temple, holds the answer to this mystery.
Skills: Soul Energy


Name: Jake Langley
Role: Wise old nag
Background: Langley was Keea's first tutor in the craft arts and he remained one of her oldest and dearest friends. His true background, however, is shrouded in mystery, other than he has been travelling around the region for centuries as a freelance consultant and tough bargainer. So far, it is believed that Keea was his only apprentice, a favour to her long-dead father.
Skills: Elemental-infused Soul Energy


Name: Niq Hillshire
Role: Obligatory anti-hero
Background: Niq is the headsman of Stony Village, a growing community that was once filled with outcasts and refugees. He takes his role very seriously and was most protective of anything of value that came out of the Pearl Temple ruins. He is quiet, rebellious and unconventional but without him, Stony Village would have turned into a lawless thieves den instead of the peaceful yet sorely overlooked society it was.
Skills: Ice Flows and Ice Blade


Name: Anita of the Aqiaka Clan
Role: Annoying curious faerie
Background:

Enough said.
Skills: Planthood and Floral Wrath


Name: Montgomery Suayunu
Role: Wiseass
Background: Before he became a mercenary for hire, Monty was a soldier of the Aqeran Sniper Unit and before that, he was a boy raised in a military community on the notorious Aqeran-Sun Valley borders. Constant fighting and battle conflicts gave him a devil-may-care approach to all things that wants to kill him, including his friends. He and Niq are old buddies, despite the wide difference in their personalities.
Skills: Long Range and Metallic Bombs

And also 4 other members yet to be discovered. Oh my!

Some of the main NPCs (Non-Playable Characters):
Mr. Usana: "Knowledge is the most dangerous kind of weapon to give to your foes."
Baba Yaga the Witch: "History never ends. It always comes back either to haunt us or repeat itself."
Princess Regent: "Bribery is the lowest form of begging."
Lord Protector of Aqera: "My duty before my life unless my heart tells me otherwise."
Lord Sagecrest: "My kid is too pretty to date your hero."
Lady Emerson: "Let's face it. The best kinds of trouble are always inherited."
Rilselq: "Dreaming is natural. Not everybody does it but everybody should."
Bernadette: "Sometimes, you gotta come back full circle to start all over again."

Screenshots:







Larger 640*480 pixel Pictures:
http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/9200/unlockingpandora011kd0.png
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/9476/icedragons01ea3.png
http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8431/temple01road20fixdf4.png

Progress at the Moment: 5% Done
Mood to Work:

So yes, this is a summarised version of the game project I'm working on. I intend for it to be a free-to-download because it's obviously made from an overused game engine (I just need to weak some custom coding) and from a free graphics site. It'll be vulgar of me to sell this since I got so much of it for free. And I'm only vulgar to people I want to cheat money from.

If there's anything I like to waste time other than playing expensive games, it's building cheap ones. Expect this to come sometime exactly one year from now (hey, quality control-lah!).

In the meantime, I got to see to a car that had a surprise attack from a silver Wira and check if the breaks and tyres are still passably safe to, I don't know, maybe to run into another near-crash again.

Malaysian Teenagers Going Down in the Street

They’re gonna clean up your looks,
With all the lies and the books
To make a citizen out of you.
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on your son
So they can watch all the things you do.

Although this is one of my favorite songs (or maybe because of it), I rather not speculate what the things that was going through the head of that song’s writer. I have trouble going through the things in my own head already. But it is a nice song and it helps for someone like me to zone out without getting to the drugs. Cheers to My Chemical Romance.

But hey, the subject of the song fits. Teenagers are scary, whether the adults want to admit it or not. But they won’t admit it because obviously as mature adults, each holds a sense of vanity that they might be somebody’s role model someday, whether the teens want to or not, and it’s low-class-lah to walk around blurting, “Oh yeah, teenagers. Nasty, filthy animals.”

Nasty and filthy. Like the streets of KL where they’ve taken to loitering. And according to the Star newspaper reports, they might even be filthy rich. But don’t too easily brand these as spawns of the ignorant, fat-wallet’d parents. Money comes from a grapevine of multi-layers exchanges, considering the reports of theft and the occasional tai kor or ‘big brother’ as whacamacallit.

Starting with the theft and the intimidation, of course the local restaurant owners along those streets would say it, either exaggeration or plain truth. Remember the rule of real estate? Location, location, location and it is devaluing power of location to have punk-haired teenagers smoking right outside their non-smoking sections.

Sure you can have the local Rakan Tetangga patrols (it’s something like a group of caffeine-empowered neighbourhood watchmen) making rounds. But for the sake of smart-ass mentality, nightwatch patrolling is like running through a flock of pigeons outside a Sri Paandi restaurant. The watchmen can walk through those streets many times over but the teenagers just flutter back to the streets the minute those backs are turned.

And these teenagers are a klik. They have cellphones, with service lines rates cheaper than rap stars’ name, so it’s no difficulty to coo-coo a warning when the fellows-in-uniform turn the corner. And those same said cellphones is used to herd in the money-hungry teenagers when the ‘big brother’ comes to their streets (as if the street belonged to them already).

One can only speculate what the tai kor wants in a street full of teenagers, more so since some of these teenagers hang out near parking lots. If you need another reason to bring a big, heavy umbrella after parking your car, open-air, on a Malaysian sunny day, this takes the cake as they might take your everything-else. Like I mentioned, there are other ways to finance those punk hairdos and designer bags than negligent parents. Rich or poor parents doesn’t matter; it’s the negligence.

This situation is worrying. Screw aside the ‘children are our future’, and ‘keep the city image clean’ slogans (since our Parliament is spouting those words almost every week) because when the tai kor comes, things get criminal. Think gang recruitment and I’m not joking s**t here. I don’t have to be a police officer or a news reporter to put two and two makes four. And I used to walk on some of those streets and know folks who still walk on those streets.

These aren’t bored teenager. They’re perverted teenagers. Next to being perverted means already being bored (which makes bored and perverted teenagers an over-use of adjectives), the possibilities of the kids' greater entry to criminal exposure and manipulations are so numerous, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a shark-grinning tai kor in the face.

If you want to get them teen creeps out of trouble, you got to play the same game as them ‘big brothers’ do. Because sure as the teenagers got soup for brains, these tai kor don’t wear law enforcement uniforms and they swing money bags instead of batons. Once the right kind of good guys put on these costumes, be nice with the teenagers. Hang money on a fish pole and herd them to a different direction as they follow hungrily. When you netted their respect, make them do community work for money.

Like pick up the street trash, maybe even sort by recyclables. Give money. Get them to paint the city’s iron fences. Give money. Encourage them to join the Rakan Tetangga and help make streets safer. Give money. Make them vomit the information about these dirty tai kor. Give money. Money, money, money; the root of all persuasion.

It’s not cheap (duh, they are rich kids!) but let’s scream out the music here. The reality remains that you can’t get kids off the streets, not as long as there are inattentive parents, nice streets and perverted teenagers. Hell, you might as well not have bothered. Let these kids do their syok-time, get on floating high and slur profanities at everybody in a skirt. Yeah, that how we want the tourists to remember Visit Malaysia Year 2007.

If the country ever got to something like that, doing nothing about the teenagers, then we know we’re truly running out of smart people. So at the very least to get something done for the sake of getting something done about it, very least for the overworked G-Men can do is to try to divert their attention away from the even more bad guys.

Because as school holidays are still going on, this country doesn’t need to keep digging its own 50 year old grave without its teenagers playing a High School Musicale version of My Chemical Romance.

Teenagers scare the living s***t out of me,
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes
Or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me!

Introducing Me

In the light of my most recent attempt to achieve numbness of emotions then posting about it in here, I've realize that I have yet to actually introduce myself. Well, since I don't really want to introduce myself, I suppose it's all polite courtesy for my future self when she re-reads all this (I'll be 30 and gray before my time and she'll go "Giirl, you're a pathetic imbecile." Not that I except she could be better than me seeing that I created her.

And in so creating said future woman, let's define current woman. I'm in my early twenties, at the age where I should be maturely able to leave home and go build the nation or something. But I can't . I'm stuck here because I haven't graduated yet and I took the full bachelor degree course instead of doing diploma first and earn a bit of pay.

Along the way, I gained a few 'F's'. My folks think that the stupidity lies in the school. Maybe they won't admit to themselves that their slug-a-woman (wow, sounds like a bad comic book heroine) had actually blown thousands of ringgit in depression.

Woah, did I just said depression? I mean stupidity. Yes, I'm not depressed, I'm just stupid. No I'm not anorexic, I'm just stupid. No I'm not suicidal, I'm jus-... well, you get the idea. Around here, emotional problem means that it's an embarrassment to the family.

Sure we can all say "Oh, she's just having a slight fever. Let's get the Panadol," but the fact reminds that we're a society that abhors emotional problems. It's unstable. It's a weakness and God only knows if any other family member might be suffering from the same thing but had not yet manifested. Not good for the breeding stock of the rich and dato'ed (Dato' is kind of like a Malaysian knighthood, though its value had decreased somewhat for years).

Again, I've said that I don't care what people think about me, but mostly I was referring to people I won't see ever again. Goodbye-Aunties I call them, never around to say hello, just following *Mak to meet, greet and then say goodbye, it was a very nice wedding/function/party/whatever-social-event-please-don't-invite-my-mother-if-you-think-she-might-drag-me-along-again.

I do, however, care a little bit of what people might think of my family. Just a very small bit; Il have to do a CAT scan of my brain if I need to look if it's still there. I try not to expose them to trouble if I have to, especially since I caused it.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that the trouble would disappear. They do, however, have a bad habit of growing to massive proportions. Usually when that happens, I divert their attention to something else until the storm blows over. A cheap and dirty trick but if it works, I don't care.

Next to that, I'm also a slightly appreciative person. Especially about art. Not art as in museum gallery but art as in computer-affiliated cyber galleries. Check my December month's image. It's a nice pretty image which the original I got from CGSociety.
If the original artist knew I'm using this image to enhance my blog, whoopsie then. But it should be not as opposable as the image had been shrunk a lot to fit the blog page so the quality is kind of lest=s dramatic than the original.

I like pretty images. I would look all over the Internet for particularly nice images worthy of decorating my PC Desktop. Sometimes, I write a short story about what I've e found. Expect the one for December sometime around December (duh!). I'm not an artist myself (there's a school horror story in here but I won't bore about it to you. Yet) but you don't have to be a chef to know classy food from fast-food.

But most of all, I like to write. Fantasy fiction mostly, about my magical imaginary world. I have it slightly more structured as time goes along. It's a great way when you can't afford to own a Warcraft account and much faster to zone your head out too. In this cyber community I'm in, they're all cool on making plain vanilla old-school RPG games. Kind of like Final Fantasy before it took to worshiping the 3D religion.

When I'm not wasting my time on building a cheap game one coding line a day, I waste in writing about my imaginary world. I got some of the basics in the right places, mostly the technicality of magic and some minor histories. I've always wanted to write a book since Enid Blyton corrupted my childhood and I still do.

But I have no place for my fiction to get expressed. My mom calls my fictional writings as 'mengarut' or nonsensical. Sufficiently, family support is that very last thing I would ever ask of them when it comes to my most precious thoughts of all. I just don't think I could stand their oh-so-overwhelming concern.

That's what this blog is for, a place for my thoughts. It's true because I said it so and it shall be so (cue God-mode moment here, bear with me). And when it comes to keeping my private thoughts safe, I feel better believing that my future self would actually be thinking, "Girl, you're an okay imbecile."

The Ranting Continues...

Yesterday didn't turn out so well, huh? Yeah me... But as one must always induce positive thinking, one shall perceive that the rantings of yesterdays as manure to tomorrow's outlet. I think it was a politician who said that, maybe even a Chinese business man because I'm sure as hell that manure today is still manure tomorrow.

So pretty much, I got home in one piece yesterday. Drove all the way in one hand only and my left hand too. I had to use my right hand to hold my forehead up and those darn salty water out of my eyes, lest I'll have to stop by the side of the road and bawl like a baby. So I'm emotional. Sue me.

So yes, there's every possibility that I might get the failing grade on my thesis. Since we all charitable people, I'm not going to rant out on how I didn't bother meeting my supervisor (wrote about that already, go figure). Especially if my previous supervisors got a wind of me. I imagine them metaphorically crucifying me on the altar of the IT faculty but teachers being teachers, I would take a real crucifixion over an 'F'. At least I can die from crucifixion.

So I have one week to ferment at the pit of my stomach. No biggie. If I'm not too genius, maybe I'll work on that database my other course wants me to do. Me being me I can't guarantee I'll make it a working one, much lest hand it in time at all.

The three big differences in this is that the movie thingy was just a database file, the lecturer is nicer and I have two other people that going to fall down with me if I screw this up. I may not care if my world ends between tomorrow and twelve seconds after I end this blog but I make an acquaintance suffer the wrath of the 'F', I'll roll over and die first. At least my group has a reason of fatality to excuse my lack of progress.

Passing over the hazards of school, I guess I did feel something close to better after the snot drive (wiped the steering wheel before I left the car). Got home just after sunset prayers, hung around the kitchen table area until *Ayah and *Genius (my littler brother) got home.

Interactions with Ayah just got low but not grudgingly. Frankly, I try not to care. Then he asked if I was okay. Now really, a man who raised you from diapers and still paying for your petrol money is sufficiently capable of reading your mind. More so since I still got red eyes from the boo-hoos.

Just for being a jerk, I kept eye contact away and ignored the question until my father asked me a third time around. I supposed a teeny weenie part of me just wanted to throw hints at him that I was capable of lying to my own father (like I haven't done it with various types of well-practiced faces before).

So I just said I had a slight fever. Being that it rained that morning, it sounded justified so he just left. Ayah, like every other male in this Confucian-ingested province, brushed it off and went to his business. I can't show emotions to my father. Firstly, I'm not pretty when I cry and secondly, I scream when there's finally somebody to see me cry (not good for the neighborhood).

Thirdly, he's a guy. Guys can't handle emotions, as Oprah had taught us. And I don't talk emotions with a guy. Maybe I would but it'll be in a bitterly joking manner that's worth its weight of sarcasm in bricks. I drop a lot of hints to my family but maybe I'm just bad at hinting to them that I got emotional problems. If I were to hit Ayah with a big sign that says "I'm the Stupid One", he probably still wouldn't budge.

But hey, he's in the dark and I'm in dire jeopardy, which incidentally, I'm going to bury myself in bed clothes until D-Day comes. I am not going to talk to anybody about this, lest if it's an authority figure. But I do plan to rant something out a little bit more, not here, but definitely in a chat room.

I think I'll steal some 50 cent coins around the house and fork it over to the cyber cafe and meet the gangs at GW cyber community. They're e not really friends but they share a little interest with me so I'm going to screw this over to them anyway because I'm anonymous. Just blur out a line or two, hear them chat back "Oh you poor baby...," then blow this over.

I consider it healthy exercise to finally get something out. Otherwise I'll have to pull over on the side of the road in a car then bawl like a baby.

Rant about the Old Man.

Today was not a good day. I dread coming home, especially since my mom isn’t around to distract my dad. *Mak is in England (the b***h) trudging around in the cold with her brother and his wife. Yes, I would like to trudge in the cold too because it’s London. I know one cyber community I’m still in it that calls anime enthusiast as japfags (Japanese-faggots) so I guess I’m an engfag. Hell, half my blog’s name is from a flowering English weed.

But she’s just playing 3rd-world tourist since she’s got money and not metaphorically spitting in my eye so I won’t anonymous flame her in Blogspot. It’s more about my father, aka Ayah.

Let me give you a long winding story. Get a Coke, or suck on something while you read if you like because the best way I can get you to sympathize with me instead of with a mature adult is starting with my older brother.

*Arsenal played around a lot during his studies in USA. Coming home from overseas empty-handed is something *Ayah couldn’t stomach, more so because he had supported his younger brother overseas. *POot came home without a degree, something Ayah reminded his children over a hundred times a year for the last over 30 years.

I’ll be lying if I said I didn’t think my brother’s university education disaster had an effect on me. If anything, maybe it made me more a loner. Arsenal had tried to escape the family and live on his own because of this. I didn’t know if the plan formed while he still was in USA or when he got off the airport. This was to get you an idea about the wrath of Ayah.

Just to be strictly fair, Ayah is a good man. One of the best I’ve ever met. The only time he didn’t care what the general public thought about him was when he sang karaoke. Every other time, yes, reputation matters. Money and reputation.

Ayah grew up during Malaysia’s emergency rule at one of those ‘black areas’. ‘Black area’ is one of those places where there’s a high communist concentration. Expect bombs and food rations. Shop owners open your can of beans right at the store so they’ll go bad if you try to hoard food for the jungle-sneaking communists.

After the emergency, Ayah worked hard. Country boy got his tops in one of the best car dealers in the nation. He was flying business class to Germany every 2 weeks before he retired. He told us about how the Chinese have a saying that wealth survives 3 generations; first to earn, second to spend and third with only the name.

If that wasn’t a paternal threat, the Petronas Towers is made of beans.

You can’t fault a father for nagging high maintenance. Especially when he’s retired, unemployed and over 50 years young. I still remember how he used to beat me for having low grades. They hurt. Not a month goes by without at least for one day, thinking what I might have to do to just keep him neutral. Just because he doesn’t beat his kids anymore doesn’t mean he couldn’t and every possibility that he would still do it.

I do to Ayah to what I always do to things I worry about. Sleep it off. Well, my father didn’t have a deadline (he does actually, but as he’s a healthy guy, let’s not go there) and I don’t have to send in assignment reports. I don’t even show him my grades anymore, just told them to him and he thinks I’m telling the truth.

Two months ago, I did tell the truth, that I failed one subject. He didn’t blow like Mt. St Helen. I think it was due to me playing the guilty person. I can cry out tears and drain out snot like a faucet when I’m sad. More disgusting than embarrassing really (I stopped thinking what I look to people years ago) bit I did it in hope that Ayah to minimize his angry man output.

He was definitely angry all right but I think the teary-snot thing did the trick. We just had a very long chat which I phased out most of the time and he walk out of my room. For the next few days I played it neutral, just in case he might use my failure against me in something. He might not, but just knowing somebody got that kind of power over me still merits a hi-bye-only level of communication. He does brought it up from time to time, especially now that the semester’s drawing to a close.

In fact, I may have to brush this act up next month. I have every chance I might fail my thesis paper because I didn’t bother meeting my supervisor. I said before that I’m immensely private but mostly I just didn’t bother too. I had bad experience with teachers during primary school so I usually avoid them whenever I can avoid them. Or any other person who has authority over my future, for that matter.

It’s not my supervisor’s fault. Nothing about my failing grade is her fault. I just don’t want to see her and I don’t know what to ask her (slept it off, in fact). To cap it, the head of faculty had been informed about my misdemeanor. Head hadn’t answered yet. Great. If I’m not approved for presentation, auto-F. It doesn’t matter that I’ve already did the project and submitted the final draft in time. My supervisor is not going to defend me. Who would, I mean come one, after all the non-trouble I’ve caused her.

Maybe when I get the F, my father will blow his top. I know he’s been saving it. More so since money for the school is running out. My brother, Arsenal, had already been through it. And I’ve tried the running away method before (came back on my own will after over 12 hours). But pretty now is the sit-and-wait time.

Maybe if I sleep it off, maybe a new, bigger problem would arise, so I can have an excuse to cavil. Like meningitis or something.

First Bloom...

Hello and welcome to my blog.

This isn’t my first blog. My old one fell into discontent ages ago, mainly I think due to immaturity. I was young and I pretty much joined the blog bandwagon along with hundreds of others in a cyber community for teenagers. During those days, I strayed a lot from my own way of thinking, writing so that people would read. Maybe add a comment.

The old one pretty much bumped out as time went by. The contents, the accessories, the groups it was in, the whole blog grew into something that just wasn’t me. Not the real me. It became a... well not so much a façade. More a farce. I had to stop before I don’t recognize me anymore.

So I’m making a new start on online journals. I never really had a need for blogs. Or journals, for that matter. I didn’t want to because I’m very much a private person. Immensely. If you ask my own parents 20 questions of what they think they know about me, they’ll get wrong two thirds of it.

My... uh, privacy, is a side effect of my childhood. Of course.

I had a super terrific childhood. I was spoiled, the third child with three siblings and hard-working parents. I like to cry and joke a lot. I took nothing serious and, as Ayah always tells me, I took much of my life for granted. I know I do, but I just can’t seem to change it.

I got used to being what I do, being in the system of sleeping off worries instead of tackling the problems that caused then, then shouting quietly in private. In the end, nothing gets done and resources had been wasted. At my age, I’m institutionalized. If I were to fill out a confession after being injected with truth serum, I would put ‘Occupation: Extremely lazy addict.”

Don’t get too much emphasis on it. The imagination is a good thing (I’ll even pat God on the back for giving it to mankind) but I’m not stupid. If I ever get broke, I know how to get work. A work with no future maybe, no offense to anyone who ever had been broke, I do apologize. But my needs are simple.

Work, eat and sleep. If it’s available, take it. If it’s not, screw it. And if you have to do something illegal to get it, do it quietly and leave no trace. Okay, if I ever had to resort to that, maybe I am stupid. Smart or stupid, I never really know what category I’m in. Not even during primary school. I got switched back and forth between the ‘smart students’ and ‘stupid students’ class. Attention disorder maybe.

Those were the little schooldays. I’m still at school, though the tertiary level. I should have graduated ages ago. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ll ever graduate. There’s a six-year limit I think, to how long you can stay as a student. I’m not sure. Again, attention disorder.

Not good for me. Even worse bad for my family, parents particularly. My folks don’t have a lot of kids. Just one boy, then a girl then me and then a genius (yes, male).

It might sound a good lot of kids (if you’re, heh, a Japanese maybe) but it’s pretty average if you count all my family members on my maternal side. The first two have already begun producing money and babies. Well, my sister is. My brother (an Arsenal fanatic I might say) is sort of living with my sister’s family until he made more money or married a rich girl, whichever comes first.

That’s my family. I will refer them from father to mother to brother to sister to younger brother as Ayah, Mak, Arsenal, MySis and Genius because I’m that kind of person. I may not care what people think of me but I’m pretty sure my peeps don’t want to get my dirt near them by crying out their real names. Besides, this blog is all about my thoughts and I have to get to call them whatever I like.

What’s with the name? If I were a guy, this would probably count as gay. Just for that, I’m not. Neither guy nor gay that is. But sexual orientation aside, the name is partially my love for fantasy genre, partially because I’m fascinated with English society and mostly because ‘shadowflower’ had already been taken by some pink-crazed German girl who hadn’t updated her blog since she signed in 2005.

I used the word ‘shadow’ in many abstracts and contexts. Corrupted by the Fantasy and Sci-Fi sections in bookstores, I have this imaginary world in my head as big as any MMORPG (massive-multiplayer-online-role-playing-games, if there are some of you who have yet to learn big acronyms. And welcome to English) and in that imaginary world, ‘shadow’ is a type of magic the imaginary people use to hide their spells’ technically. That’s another story however. Remind me to tell it to you someday.

Pimpernel is a type of flower that grows in England. A weed actually. Other weeds in England are Asians and Arabs (Indians, however, are no longer a weed since they taste so good when boiled in soups). I don’t necessary like the plant since I’ve never seen it outside the Internet but I choose it because I liked a short novella that’s older than Jane Austen called The Scarlet Pimpernel.

So by changing the first word, Shadow Pimpernel has almost the same scheme as the book, save it’s for my thoughts instead of suppressed French people. Whenever my thoughts or ideas get close to getting cut off, I save them in here, away from the real world. I just need a safe place for them, to think freely and let unbiased people see them get expressed.

If you don’t like what you’re reading, then ahead to another browser. If you think I’m a loner who needs a butt-**ck badly, leave a comment and maybe I’ll mention you in my next post. If you think it’s pitiful for me to exist since I’m writing miserable things about the people in my life, do leave a comment too.

In fact, leave all kinds of comment and maybe you’ll destroy my account’s bandwidth because I’m keeping my anonymity to protect my thoughts, my freedom of the individual mind. I’ll add some details from time to time, but the day I close this is the day the day I might actually hurt someone I care about with this blog.

So if you think I’ve hurt your feelings, go take a butt-***ck. You don’t know the feeling that’s blooming in me to finally get the s**t out for being totally honest.