I’ve been taking time during this travelling to write, explore, and perhaps catch up on Fate/Grand Order. I’m stoked to have Tohsaka Rin’s nostalgic uniform as a Mystic Code for many reasons, not least because I think I look rather fetching:
Yes I play as the female master, as previously mentioned. It still throws me sometimes when I read the story dialogue and I’m referred to as she and her. But I’ll take any compliments in my clearly brilliant abilities in any form they so wish to express.
Perhaps the biggest surprise from the most recent event was seeing Medusa wearing the uniform as a plot device. I appreciate they pay homage to the earlier Fate installments for their old school fans.
You’ve all been very patient with my laptop coffee shop travels over the last few weeks, so as a reward consider this the last for this trip. I’m at one of my favourite places to work in the whole world: Case Verde in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The sounds of the fountains and birds are rather lovely.
Clara and I will be heading back to Sydney in the next few days. It’s weird, I don’t feel like I’ve been on holiday; more like I just picked up life where I left off. Australia is nice, but at the risk of contradicting that Peter Allen song made famous by Qantas, it’s not home.
Just before Clara and I went up to Kuala Lumpur to explore Plaza Imbi—among other places!—we made one final trip to Sim Lim Square. I heard the rumors that the complex is being on block sold, so we took the chance to have a goodbye wander and take pictures. I’m sensing a trend here.
As I said on The Instagrams, I couldn’t tell you how much of my childhood was spent in this building when I was growing up here. But it would have easily been a few hours a week, if not more. As late as 2007 here I was blogging about going there.
Along with the late former Funan Centre, SLS was the place everyone in Singapore went to get computers and electronics. Before building PCs became the exclusive purview of gamers and enthusiasts; when it made financial sense to build your own machine rather than buy complete systems or expensive laptops; SLS was full of parts stores. In its heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, I felt as though I was on the floor of the New York Stock exchange with the shouting, crowds, and laser-printed price lists.
In its less-reputable days, one could also find pirate software and movie stalls among the legitimate stores. I vividly remember on more than one occasion as a child wandering the centre with my dad, and hearing loud shouts about police coming. I’m not sure if they were tipped off, or they just had lookouts, but no sooner as they could shuffle all their customers out, the whole complex was ringing with the clattering of metal shutters being rolled down and locked. I was a relatively sheltered child, so at the time it startled me no end!
I owe a lot to Sim Lim Square for my personal development and career. I got my first and only IT related retail job within its walls. I built my second, third, and fourth computer there. The machine I first installed a BSD operating system on came from there. At one point I was building computers for friends, then it expanded into me doing it for money for other expat parents. And whereas I hung out at Funan Center and bought most of the peripherals and monitors there, SLS was where everything else came from; to the point where several of the stall owners knew my name and could often predict what I was coming for.
But the writing was on the wall even by the time I came to Singapore in 2014. Cybermind and Skylet were long gone, along with the second hand computer store in one of the back corridors on level three where I used to talk to the auntie for hours. Some of the camera stores were still there, but had shrunk their footprints. At least Video-Pro was still around!
What was heartening was seeing a larger crowd and more open stores than there were last time; fewer people than the early 2000s, but a respectable crowd. I managed to find a replacement retractable Ethernet cable for my daily carry kit, and a few other bits and pieces. This is what SLS was great for; back in Australia I can buy the same parts online and wait two weeks for shipping, but it’s all right there. And I’ll miss that.
Maybe the block won’t be sold, and SLS will keep being the place people go to for parts in the future. Maybe it’ll have its soul gutted and replaced with superficial, authentically-agile space as what happened with Funan. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new building in its place next time we come up, complete with all the generic, cookie cutter stores that are everywhere else. But it’ll be hip, trendy, and modern!
I suppose we’ll always have Den Den Town and Akihabara.
I’m more of a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf guy, but I always loved coming to the Starbucks in Berjaya Times Square, this massive shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur that among other attractions sports an indoor roller coaster. The shopping centre, not the Starbucks.
But the lack of a roller coaster doesn’t detract from the majesty of this place. It’s one of the only split-level Starbucks outlets I’ve ever been to, with a second floor seating area that puts some airport lounges I’ve been in to shame. The lighting is subtle, the seats are comfortable, and you feel like you’re walking up Titanic’s grand staircase to get to it.
Coming back here now after a decade, it’s now a Starbucks Reserve outlet, so it’s even more plush. The nitro coldbrew coffee is decently satisfying in a Guinness way, but the mistake coffee hipsters make is thinking Starbucks is a coffee shop; it’s a lounge and relaxing respite from the bustle and heat that you rent by buying coffee. And this is one of the better ones in Kuala Lumpur.
I wish I made notes of where earlier Rubenerd blog posts were written from; I’m sure many of the posts from 2007 were from this one spot. As were many of my earliest FreeBSD VMs, but that’s for another post.
I’ve had some time to catch up on Fate/Grand Order on coaches and trains over the last couple of days; not much blogging, but we’ll get back to that. Her innocently scary respose to Mashu’s question made me chuckle.
Kuala Lumpur has surprised me; in the intervening decade since we lived here it’s developed a lot. It has a couple new MRT lines, there are many more buildings dotting the landscape I didn’t recognise, and mobile internet blackspots are gone.
And then Clara and I went to Plaza Imbi, and reality set in a bit. It used to be KL’s answer to Funan Centre and Sim Lim Square in Singapore, where you’d buy and discuss computer parts, and could lose a day just wandering all the interesting electronics stores. I remember coming up here from Singapore with my dad during the Malaysian Grand Prix, and exploring the stores. It was a father-son bonding thing I appreciated back then, and remember fondly now.
The intervening decade hasn’t been kind to it. The façade is falling off, the centre is grimy and dark, half the shops are boarded up and gone, and the escalators don’t even run. Of the few remaining shops, most are second-hand stores selling badly worn laptops. I feel for the shopkeepers desperate to reel me in to get any sale at all, but it’s not an environment I enjoyed.
As an Iomega nostalgia aficionado though, I was delighted to still see those Jaz and Zip drop-tile ceiling adverts still there after all these years. They used to light up; no longer. Which is Plaza Imbi in a nutshell now.
I lamented the fact Funan Centre was gutted and refurbished into something unrecognisable, and Sim Lim Square was being sold and demolished soon. But now I’m realising perhaps those outcomes are better than seeing them decay. If I had tons of money, I’d clean up places like this and run them like cooperatives, where all the shop owners inherit a piece of the place, or only pay rent to cover costs. That way we keep some of these pockets of independent retail in a sea of generic, homogeneous buildings selling the same stuff.
But maybe that’s why I’m not a property developer!
Before the Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest building in KL was the 421 metre Menara KL (KL Tower). I went there as a kid back in 1997, but a lot had changed since, and Clara and I have since developed a touristy obsession with observation decks.
The remaining yearly haze from the Indonesian forest fires was still lingering in the sky a bit, which you can tell from the photos. But otherwise the view was amazing. This was the view of KLCC from the open-air Sky Deck:
There’s a tiny cafe on the top floor, with what’s probably the most expensive coffee we’ve ever bought! But the view was worth it, just as it was back in Hong Kong.
You can get a few different shuttle buses up there, but Clara and I walked down Jalan P Ramlee from KLCC, then up Jalan Puncak. It was maybe half an hour or so, then maybe fifteen minutes to get back to the monorail line to head to Lot 10 and Berjaya Times Square where I’m typing this now!
Clara and I are in Kuala Lumpur for the week, after spending some time in Singapore. I only lived here for a couple of years a decade ago, but Clara’s been beyond patient while I excitedly hit all the old haunts and point them out to her. Hey Clara, check out this kopitiam! This is where I…
(Much of this blog from 2006–07 was written from here, and many of the earlier Rubenerd Shows. One day I’ll get around to tagging them all with locations).
KL is an interesting place. Like Sydney, it sprawls in all directions and has many distinct neighbourhoods with their own unique character and makeup. Singapore is meticulously planned and largely homogeneous; local Malaysian cartoonist Lat once commented that KL’s layout looks like spaghetti thrown on a wall. And while Singapore and KL are vastly different cities, they have a common colonial heritage and were once part of the same country, so similarities do peek through.
We’re staying down the road from KLCC, most famous for being the home of the Petronas Twin Towers. But other than a few opportune photo ops, we’ve been doing exploring elsewhere. Today was to Mutiara Damansara on the western periphery where my family and I used to spent a lot of time.
I haven’t found it yet, but my dad sneakily took a terrible photo of my thinking with my laptop at the Starbucks when I was studying remote, so I asked Clara to take one of me back at the same place a decade later, pulling the same stupid pose! I can’t stand seeing pictures of myself, but am willing to make an exception for nostalgia.
This is one of my favourite areas of KL; technically Selangor once you’re out this far, but who’s counting. We used to come here all the time for the food at the Curve, and spent an inordinate amount of time at the Ikano Power Centre, Ace Hardware, and IKEA buying groceries, hardware, and furniture for our new house we thought we’d be in for a long time. Not necessarily in that order.
The biggest difference now since we lived here is it’s accessible by the awesome new MRT. It’s a fun, scenic route above-ground for most of the way from the centre of Kuala Lumpur, and is super easy to use with the formerly toll-road only Touch n’ Go cards. This is game changing.
I suppose this blog will be a de facto travel site for the next week or so. I won’t lie, it’s fun to blog about stuff I’m doing, rather than commenting on. I wrote that sentence before realising it’s a tacit admission that I must have been lying the rest of the time? What a silly phrase.
The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.
01:45:06 – A three-phased look at Marvel Comics with Frank Edward Nora, Chad Bowers, and Rubenerd!! PQ Ribber is our guide and commentator!!
Clara and I are in Kuala Lumpur for the next few days, but that doesn’t stop me from remembering our impromptu visit to Jurong East on Saturday. What an odd remark.
Growing up in Singapore, is a phrase with four words. I only had reason to go to Jurong East for two reasons: if there was a sale at the IMM shopping centre, and for transiting to the North South MRT Line after visiting friends in Clementi. Nowhere is far from anywhere else by definition in a city state the size of Singapore, but you get used to thinking Jurong East, Punggol, Woodlands, and Changi are on other sides of the world when you’re an expat kid living in Newton.
Clara and I decided to head over to Jurong East on a whim, after she realised volume one of our favourite Hyouka manga was available at the Kinokuniya branch there, along with an art book by one of my favourite current artists Saitom. And somehow we ended up staying there the entire day wandering.
We had some beautiful food at a Penang-inspired restaurant in Jem, built our own minifigs in the Lego store, explored some indie arts and craft stores downstairs in Westgate surrounded by all the carefully planted gardens, got to relive some Challenger IT store nostalgia from the late Funan Centre, an Instagrammable brew from HeyTea, and topped it off with some local fare from Mr Bean. They had an anime weeb store, a Coffee Bean branch, and that amazing Isetan supermarket.
Wandering nostalgically is fun, but finding somewhere new is just as great.
