It is said that bad things have to happen before good things can. I’d say that　無秩序の胃 coming into existence on that day in May a decade ago was a indeed good thing that came out of, well, you know. Heh. I’ve always wanted a website and I finally got one for free, thanks to a platform called Blogger, and I have to thank Firr for this. Blogging was relatively new-ish and I was somewhat excited to embark on a site that wasn’t hosted by Geocities and didn’t have this amateur-looking .gif image that we all know so well:

My written English got a little better. That’s a good thing. This was the first paragraph from my first ever entry dated 18.5.2004:

It’s been a while since I thought to myself, “must give this a try”. Venturing into the blogging world. Moi? The Malay adage hot hot chicken shit comes to mind.

The first few blogs I read was Firr’s and a college mate of his who was reading law in London. I remembered using Project Petaling Street, which was a different beast to what it is now, to increase traffic on my site[1]. Nevertheless, this allowed me to discover more Malaysian blogs[2] written by what I naïvely felt were the who’s who of the Malaysian blogosphere based on the topics they wrote about. No offence to these bloggers – it was not until a bit later that I merely scratched the surface as the blogs I tend to read were a select group people who had linked each other on their blog rolls. Gongkapas Times. Organised Chaos. Perpetual Permutating Perceptions. Life Is Great. Adventures of a Grasshopper in Madrid. The Malaysiana Digest. I could go on. The next good thing? Some of these bloggers are now good friends of mine.

I never professed to making my blog a specialty one. Randomness was the best cop out as I can write whatever I like. I did care somewhat about whether or not people read my blog posts but that aspect of blogging waned really quickly after looking at the dismal traffic stats on my blog. Some of the bloggers I read would read my posts, usually after dropping comments (genuine ones lah) and trackbacks[3]. And of course, my own friends do drop by and read, often with an encouraging nods in the comments sections. Some of my friends then started their own blogs, increasing the traffic between us somewhat. The Lost Codger. Starlightdreamlight. Thoughts. And the next good thing happened. More friendship was fostered, and then much more, if I should say so myself[4]. But when that happens, the existence of their blogs fizzled out. Of course, not all blogs were borne of the same reason why mine came into being. Hah.

My first face-to-face meeting with two of the bloggers who are now in my main circle of friends was on a cold January’s afternoon in Manchester where we had makan, went to see a film which had a scene of Clive Owen staring into Natalie Portman’s naked crotch[5] and more makan.

I had my usual fare of nasi ayam, whilst our friend from España went for Thai fried chicken and… get this, chips. Aiyo, kawan, I thought you’d want to have some nasi since we’re in a Malaysian place.

These meets got a bit more frequent but it’d be the bloggers that live within my vicinity, or should I say continent. London was the most obvious port of call, with food being the main focus of these meet ups. Like this one in May of 2005:

Saya pun berjalan ke arah Kafe Nahar di mana kawan-kawan saya sudah lama menunggu. Mereka sangkakan yang ada lori kimia berlanggar yang menyebabkan saya lewat. Mereka hanya bergurau rupanya. Hahaha. Mereka sudah makan, tetapi oleh kerana saya masih lapar, mereka pun turut menjamu selera sekali lagi. Anuar, kawan saya yang datang dari Madrid itu rupa-rupanya sudah memakan berbungkus-bungkus nasi lemak. Katanya di negara Sepanyol tidak ada nasi lemak. Saya hanya mengangguk kerana kasihan mendengar. Kami memakan juadah melayu seperti cokodok, karipap dan nasi campur. Saya meminum air kegemaran saya, teh ais, yang lebih lazat dari frappucino yang dijual di kedai Starbucks.

And this one just a month later in Lancashire:

Surlepahs mahkan ice cream, kahmi bertolahk ke Lancaster for some dinner. Mahkanahn India di restaurant Sultan of Lancaster sungguh lahzart surkalee. Walaupoon surrdeekit… how do you say hot? Purr-dahs. Yes. Walaupoon purrdahs, sahya turtahp rahsur ahyam madras mereka sungguh succulent.

Don’t ask.

無秩序の胃’s content ran a whole gamut of subjects that were close to my heart. A large bulk of it went to my gig reviews. I used to write reviews for a magazine in Malaysia called ROTTW, and with the advent of digital photography (another good thing that came of blogging – my rekindled interest in taking photos), doing reviews was a bit of a doddle. My favourite posts were the two Metallica shows I went to within one week and my first ever Ten Club experience of practically being front row at a Pearl Jam show in Dublin.

It was great to be back in Dublin after 16 years. The Point was a lil’ over half an hour away from the hotel and by the time we got there at half three, there was already a queue. At about four, one of the Pearl Jam crew told the Ten Clubbers to make our way forward through the throng. The shite thing was some of the idiots who weren’t Ten Club members did the same. Memang gampang, ingat security nak kasi lepas ke?

On the same topic of music, I even ran a little series of posts on my guitars which ended really quickly for obvious reasons. At one time, I even had my friends write about their guitars on this blog. You want the URL for them? Hehe.

I didn’t travel much in my early blogging days as I was dead skint, but my first online travelogue was in the summer of 2006:

The trip may have not changed my life, but it was definitely one of my best vacations I have ever had. I have learnt a few things (apart from saying la quenta, por favor) on this trip, though.

Since then, I’d been to a few more places, and whilst these blog posts aren’t really Lonely Planet-worthy, it makes great reading for me to reminisce. My crowning glory, if you wanna call it that, was my recent string of posts from the Japan trip I did just two months ago, but I’d be happy putting together a couple of paragraphs after a walk in the Peaks which is just 20 minutes away. I love copping out by adding photos, but for the blog I try to not fill the post with too many images by appending these blog entries with a link to my my flickr.com account.

Apart from gig reviews are the occasional film reviews, juvenile as they can be, like this one for 300 back in 2007:

Oh, the other naked chicks? Not that hot, yo (okay, the writhing nubile oracle is fine). All I can say, apart from the great computer-assisted cinematography and the fantastic battle choreography, is… Lena Headey is hot.

As well as, shock horror, book reviews – which come to think of it limited to the works of Haruki Murakami. Yup, I have loads of them books but struggling to finish them. Which is no wonder I have stopped receiving books as birthday presents[6]. Have a butcher’s at the following gag-inducing paragraph of tripe, I mean, synopsis.

Kafka Tamura, the 15-year old protagonist leaves home in order to free himself from the empty life he led with his sculptor father. He ends up in a library in a town in Shikoku where he fell in love with the enigmatic Miss Saeki, fulfilling an oedipal prophecy made by his father many years ago. Back in Tōkyō, an elderly illiterate man named Nakata with no memory and the ability to speak with cats commits a heinous crime and leaves Tōkyō to fulfil a task that he knows he must perform. With assistance from a young truck driver, little did he know that his quest would lead him to the very same town in Shikoku where Kafka was.

And of course, posts on makan may it be of eateries or pathetic attempts of cooking in the kitchen. My favourite foodie post was on rice:

Rice, or nasi, is pretty much the staple diet of south-east Asians. No matter how much scientific evidence has been put out with regards how bad too much nasi can be, we still would go for the extra mile that is nasi tambah. I have been told that I would be “buke anok jate” for not partaking in the additional bungkus of nasi tumpang. Nasi is also used in Malay idioms (simpulan bahasa) – to describe one’s source of income to make a living (periuk nasi), or to describe distance (setanak nasi).

My blogging experience nevertheless had to evolve with the introduction of social media. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook wall posts were the new face of what people described as microblogging. People began to stop writing bog standard blog posts as the same experience can be had on social media which is faster to boot. Everything is at hand, thanks to powerful smartphones. Before I begin to lament like a “masa pakcik muda-muda dulu” old codger, I really have no qualms with social media as I’d like to the think compared to many people, I embraced FB pretty early, only 3 years after Zuckerberg’s dealings with the Vinklevi and created thefacebook.com. Yes, I saw the film too. Initially, my blog posts were automatically fed in full to the notes section of FB which had the desired effect of attracting comments and discourse but that happened only on FB and not on my blog. Selfishly, I terminated the feed and began linking the URL of posts on FB and now Google+[7]. Not that it improved traffic but I felt that I might as well as terminate 無秩序の胃 which was totally out of the question.

Ten years on, I still write drivel on this blog. Of course, I’d like to think the drivel reads a little better. I’ve been going on about traffic of the two readers to this site and after ten years of posts, the comments section is mainly occupied by spam which is swiftly dealt with by Akismet, thankfully. I write to please myself, narcissistic as it sounds and the cynic in me would say that’s what having an online presence is about, duck faces notwithstanding. So, here’s a belated tenth birthday wish to 無秩序の胃. And here’s to more good things coming my way, whatever that may be.

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[1]Failed miserably in that aspect.
[2]To this day, I can’t tell you why I was keener on reading Malaysian blogs as opposed to British or American ones. I have a feeling it is the same reason why I tend to gravitate towards reading books on Malaysian interests which at that time comprised works by the likes of Karim Raslan and Rehman Rashid.
[3]HOW do you utilise trackbacks weh?!
[4]You know who you are. If you still read blogs lah.
[5]Imagination. Ran. Wild.
[6]Restaurant vouchers weh.
[7]Does anyone use this? Really?!