Since last night, I’ve been busy uploading and tagging, tagging and uploading photos and videos of this year’s fine Sabah Bloggers Gathering. Seriously, I don’t know where to begin, so I’m just gonna do my story-telling in bullet-form. But before that, here’s how I looked like.

I am Soulja Grrrl. Get it? *ROFLs to self*… Dressed to kill, coz I’m a mean grrrl. And playing too much Half-Life: Counterstrike will do this to you. I also made it a point to have an “official” pose to make things more tacky, like so.

• Enemy spotted! The first costumed guest I saw as I went out the elevator was a Japanese-uniformed dude. And he had no weapon! Dead meat
• My action plan was to get to know as many people as I could, under the pretense that I wanna take pictures of each and everyone who came to the gathering. AND EVERYONE FELL FOR IT! MUAHAHAHAHAHAH! Seriously, though, everyone was so cool, and you can count only a handful out of more than 100 guests didn’t come with costumes. I really enjoyed taking pictures of and with everyone. You peeps really rocked the house!
• The Allies ruled! It was three Allied US Army soldiers versus one Japanese Axis soldier sans ammo. But I’ll exclude the masked terrorists (you people know who you are). And luckily our War Correspondent was neutral, though he did don a US Army colour. Yeah, lucky Axis guy   The cool thing was us army troops – Charlie, Vera and I — were lounging together in the same table. That’s the spirit — stick together, team.

More photos!

(more…)

*Yawn* As I predicted since the announcement of the AF teaching faculty, ALL the students’ vocals were mediocre, and Cikgu Syafi has YET to DO ANYTHING with expanding their vocal talents. Someone just give her a slap on the head and GET HER TO DO WHAT SHE’S SUPPOSE TO DO! OK, I’ll just hold that thought for a while and go through my comments starting with:

EBI: It breaks my heart to say this to a fellow Sabahan, but his facial mimic was all wrong for this song, and his voice and performance were pathetic. Ebi gave us a sample of his vocal prowess (or rather, lack thereof) in Diari AF week 1, but I still kept my fingers crossed hoping I was just hearing wrong. As soon as he started singing Sudirman’s “Milik Siapakah Gadis Ini” though, I right away wished that he would be the first person voted out of AF. And I was almost on the spot, if not for the fact that Diya screwed up her performance, and Zana pulled out at the last minute. (more…)

This has got to be the most Sabahans ever to be selected in Akademi Fantasia — if you’re considering Ekin of AF3 to be a Sabahan, get your geography right… even the people of Labuan don’t consider themselves as Sabahans, alright? I lived there during AF 3, I know. Our Sarawakian counterparts weeren’t so lucky — only one guy was selected. In any case, let’s hope their quality is any better than AF3 (no offense to Velvet and Lotter of AF4, but Marsha and Felix were waaaayyyy better).

But wait, did I count right? 16 total participants, instead of the usual 12? It’s interesting enough that Astro decided to premier AF three months early. I’m guessing that Akademi Fantasia will run a bit longer than its usual 2-month period, which means that our mobile and phone bills will be suffering for a while longer, hah!

Grabbed from Sultan Muzaffar’s site, here are the Sabahans selected for this season — Candy, Kadazan-Dusun from Tambunan; Ebi, Malay from KK; Farha, Bajau from KK; and Noni, Sino-Malay from KK. Is it just me, or doesn’t Noni in the picture look a bit like the AF guest judge and One In A Million judge Syafinaz? Candy, in the meantime, reminds me of Nikki from Malaysian Idol, but I could be wrong ’cause I don’t watch Malaysian Idol much. Coincidentally, these two hails from the same hometown.

and…

I’m gonna check with my little sister Laura later, and see if she knows any of them.

Trivia: My uncle’s niece is Marsha AF3, who is a cousin of Linda AF2. Rich AF3 is a former classmate of my sister Laura, and Velvet AF4 is my relative (his dad came by my mom’s batik shop in Tuaran during AF4 to buy some stuff… and to lobby for Velvet, indirectly of course, hahah!). You know, when you’re a Dusun living in Sabah, you have relatives everywhere.

My sister was the first to be tried out by Ajai and company when she went for auditions on the 25th of last month. She didn’t get the cut though.

Still, I wonder how AF’s going to be this 5th season. Since Akademi Fantasia (Wikipedia) opened its doors for Borneons to join during the 2nd season, our fellow Sabahans has been monopolizing as 1st runner ups — Linda in AF2, Felix in AF3 and Lotter in AF4. Will we ever manage to get numero uno? Will the 5th season bring a wind of change? Will Sabahans suddenly get richer this year, resulting in an overwhelming feeling of generosity towards Astro, that we’d be willing to spend thousands of ringgit each week (like Mawi fans have) to vote for a fellow Sabahan, thus ending the 2nd-place syndrome and finally having him/her become the first ever Sabahan champion?

Or would any of us Sabahans even care? Looking at the track record of our runner-ups, their shot to stardom post-AF has not been impressive. Even Felix, who was recently nominated for Berita Harian’s Popular Star Awards (Anugerah Bintang Popular), has not been exploited to his full potential, appearing and disappearing in the local entertainment news like the Chipsmore cookie. Adam has faired better under KRU Corp’s care despite being 3rd in AF2, although I remembered an article a few years back where CEO Norman mentioned how the corporation planned to focus more on its filming ventures due to the ease of piracy in the music arena.

In any case, I am quite frustrated with the level of achievements of our fellow Sabahans from the reality shows thus far, so I’ll see how AF 5 goes but I won’t be spending my SMS credits just yet.