Ants On A Wire

     Many of us do indeed hectic lives. Whether it's adults or kids, or even babies (yes, babies live hectic lives too. Don't you know that they need to keep a schedule so they can cry and sleep on time? lol jk). But haven't you at least tried to stop for a moment a marvel at the world we live in? I did. At school (couple of weeks a go). During an exam. AND IT WAS AWESOME!

    Exams can be quite stressing especially when it decides your fate to be in which class the following year. Even so, some of the questions in the test messes with your thinking! Typical situation is: You read a question. Seems easy enough. You answer C. But when you read that question again. You realise that your answer might be wrong. You pick B. You reread the question. You change to A. There you go. You are now officially confused.

    Okay, back to the point. I was busy answering questions in the exam and was busy remembering the facts that the teacher had taught us. Lots of hard questions. It was during a particular question that I finally popped. Damn questions with their "looks easy" approach but with their "WTF, this is the answer?!" answer. I decided to have a look at the outside world. I was situated beside a window so I had  a good view, kinda, the view was blocked by another school building.

    It was then I noticed something crawling on a wire (maybe the P.A system wire, idk). There were alot of those "things".

     After taking a hard look, I realised what exactly they were. Ants. Fire ants craling on a wire! (heh, FireWire)

    Their movement was certainly psychedelic. It hypnotizes you. It's hard to explain. I need an animation. Here look:

    I could watch that all day. The ants stop when they collide with each other for a couple of seconds. I wondered what they could be doing. Travelling from their nest to a food source? The wire looked like a highway for ants, minus the horrific accidents. The ants have courtesy to stop when they bump into another friend. Better than most humans.

    So, watching the ants in their daily commute made my day. I continued to watch the ants during every other exam paper after that. If I ran into a hard question, I relaxed by watching the ants.

    Thank you ants.



 On an unrelated topic, the ants animation I uploaded here was supposed to be a flash animation at first. Yeah. With the loading screen and play button. But I can't seem to find a good .SWF host anywhere that has direct linking. I got sick of a goose chase and published the flash file as a .GIF. Doesn't look as cool but hey, atlest you can watch psychedelic ant action all day long! And I also updated the blog's logo. Spent almost an hour using Photoshop.

Comic Geek?!

 For your info, I'm a comic fan. Ever since I was small I liked drawing. Drawing for me seemed to take all my day's troubles away and locked it all up. I'm also quite a (maybe) huge fan of comics. I just loved the different artstyles each artist would use to weave a story together in a form of comics. As far as I can remember, my first comic was Doraemon. You know him. He came from the future with a task to help Nobita escape his cruel fate. I always wished that I had Doraemon with me. He had all these crazy gadgets that he keeps in his magic pocket. I'd imagine that I had the 'Anywhere To Go Door' (Pintu Suka Hati). If I had that, my family and I wouldn't even need a car anymore! Fujio F Fujiko was really a master in his own right. He brought us the readers, into many mystical worlds and fun adventures. I loved every bit of it.

 I remember that in one of the comics, Nobita was reading the ending of an anticipated comic (odd itsn't it? a comic in a comic!) in a weekly magazine. I read the Malay translation of the title : 'Pemain Pedang Angkasa Lepas' (But in a recent reprint of the same comic, it's changed to 'Pemain Pedang Angkasa Bairon'). An idea then leaped onto me: if I loved comic that much, why not draw one. Soon my first epic masterpiece was born.

  I based my comic on the protagonist in the 'Pemain Pedang Angkasa Lepas' comic. In the ending, it was shown that a city was completely destroyed. I guess that the hero saved the city. He climbed into his spaceship and set off into the unknown space. Two men waved him goodbye as their hero flew away.

I took many sheets of paper and folded them into half. I drew the cover first with the exact same title : 'Pemain Pedang Angkasa Lepas. The comic was a mute comic meaning that there was no dialog. There was only sound efects. To me at the time, the dialog took up alot of space in the comic panels and was a waste of time. But even without dialog the comic was easy to understand. I used a pencil (my first love when drawing. Soon replaced by mechanical pencils) and drew panel after panel. It wasn't boring. It was fun seeing the story progress. I didn't have much time for my comic as school was in the way. But after a couple of days it was finished. My brother is also into comics and he drew as I drew my comic. I have to admit, he is the better drawer in the family. He dubbed my character Slash for he slashes many enemies throughout the comic.

 In a nutshell here's the story. In the future Earth was in chaos. Aliens took over control and destroyed anything in sight. There was only 1 man to save the Earth: Slash! With his laser sword he killed many aliens that opposed him. But he was soon captured by the leader : Alien Pumpkin Man (I don't have a name for him!) The leader was an evil pumpkin with face and limbs. Slash was imprisoned but he finally escaped and fights the leader. He quickly slices the leader. However, the boss turns into a ricocheting ball and slams into Slash! Slash was forced to use his secret weapon: His ultimate bracelet of power! He activates it and explodes. The mothership was burning and slammed into earth. Miraculously, SLash survived! He saved the world. Two humans wave at him. He climbs into his ship and flies off. The Earth is no longer enslaved by aliens. The End.

My comic was awesome and I showed it to many of my friends. They too seemed impressed. I kept my comic as a trophy that I, Muhammad Hasif, drew a comic. Skip a couple of months later, disaster struck! My comic was thrown out with the trash! It was an honest mistake but the damage was done. My first ever comic is gone. I wished I still had the comic with me. It was pretty depressing, all my effort down the drain.