I sit here – like many others I’m sure – within “stay at home” measures, as we have been officially encouraged (no lockdown in Brunei), privileged to do so while having to adjust to the changes, amidst all the ways in which the COVID-19 has affected our lives. And I remember that I have a blog.

So, books. I had an interesting 2019 when it came to books. My reading record was still awful (I finished 6!). I was pleased to represent our Feminist Book Club, first booth-repping (that ol’ booth life) at YEP’s Thought Festival in September. Then two months later, I was invited by our book club founder Kat (Kathrina) to be a panel moderator (!!) during Heartwrite’s Tiny Lit Fest.

Our booth at the beginning of the day at Thought Festival. The books were later moved to a charming book trolley (from Kat!) and our “Feminism is…” board filled up with answers

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Some of you have asked me this question about Brunei associations and societies, and what follows is my answer:

Here’s a poll (optional, of course!) for me to better see how I can make this page more useful, especially for those of you doing research 🙂

For the sports societies, you can find the list here:

How about all societies? There used to be an official list, as I wrote in my old project update in 2011, but that website went down a few years ago. (We even had a draft application for B:Read, intended for association registration, but that draft went down with the website :/ )

Screenshot of the ROS website from 2010-2011

In recent years, due to the aforementioned project update post, I’ve gotten a few enquiries from people looking for such a list. Read more…

Sooo this quarter turned out a lot less active for me, as I got pretty busy with work, but also, I started playing this non-iPad and arguably non-casual game:

Pokemon Ultra Sun (Image: Nintendo)

Look, sometimes you gotta spend money on a good game that lets you walk through every metre of tall grass as you wish, or chase dozens of side story arcs and mini-games and feel rewarded by connecting these pieces of a virtual world.

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The S.O. says I play “a lot” of iPad games – not sure if it’s something to be proud of – and suggested I could do recommendations for casual players.

My short-lived Instagram hashtag #hazm8playsgames was actually similar in intention. It was meant to be a compilation of games that I felt were less mainstream for the casual player, one who might not really browse the App Store regularly or install new apps, etc.

I don’t like putting star-ratings on games, as I think it depends a lot on what kind of games each person likes. These are my preferences:

So it’s not exactly book reviews – I’m still struggling to read, thank goodness for fembookclub! But let’s give it a go…

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I finally did it. I archived an old post about feminism and a popular cartoon (and game) character who I shall not name.

Okay, the game was actually Kingdom Hearts II, but I won’t mention the cartoon name or the character.

That post got me a lot of traffic, y’know? Mostly from people searching the cartoon character by name, rather than the title of the cartoon show or Kingdom Hearts II (KHII). I’m comfortable mentioning KHII, by the way, because I still am interested in sexism and representation of women in games (“video games”, say the Western peoples) and in media – I have a tag for ‘women in media‘ on my Tumblr.

But blog traffic for the cartoon character specifically? I was tired of it. It was not traffic I particularly valued, eventually – no one tried to have a dialogue with me about it, and I became less interested in having a dialogue about it myself. This specific point is perhaps my main reason for archiving it. I usually am a believer in keeping your old work up, but it’s held less and less value for me throughout the years.

The attention seemed accidental, to be honest. WordPress is so good with SEO; my straightforward post title ‘[Character Name] & Feminism’ was enough to drive the post to Google searches. Ultimately, it got significantly more traffic than my other writings.

I don’t want it to represent my blog anymore. I’d rather people read my blog for my other thoughts and ideas; I don’t mind losing blog traffic if it means having a more relevant readership.

Which brings me to… this blog itself. I know. I never knew how to angle it. “I guess my blog is my book diary and my projects?” I asked myself, again and again. It was probably why Tumblr came as a relief – I could post content without sticking to a theme, which I had never quite clearly defined in my head for this blog. Tumblr’s structure allows you to be random, with only tags stringing your posts together. WordPress, and everything I’ve ever known about blogging, seemed to require consistency and regularity, which I struggled with. (I wrote about this on Tumblr too, here.)

But I love WordPress, and I’ll probably always find a home for myself in it. I love it as CMS, as a container for content; I like building and maintaining other websites with it. I update it from version to version with reluctance, but I delight in finding new plugins that extend its user experience. It’s still one of my favourite platforms for reading longform writing.

I’ve started restructuring the categories on this blog. I hope the new categories make sense. While moving posts and categories around, I archived other posts too, a small number of them. You won’t see them again unless they were caught by Wayback Machine and the like. They never fit in anyway, and seemed more Twitterish or Tumblrish in spirit. You won’t miss them.

And to all who look for feminist discourse around that certain cartoon character – thank you for finding me, but this blog was never a good place for it. I hope you found better articles and insights out there. Thanks for the website hits.

Written with StackEdit.