I’m a software developer based in Waterloo, Canada and Penang, Malaysia.

I mostly spend too much time breathing, eating and sleeping. But occasionally, I do tinkle with my camera(s), play my acoustic guitar(s) or fiddle around with my fountain pen(s) & ink collection while attempting to convince myself not to spend my next paycheck on yet another limited edition system techo (ring-based notebook).

I write about a variety of topics, mostly whatever interests me at the current moment. At this moment, it’ll most probably be about writing instruments and system techos. Due to my education and current location, you may find me to be a very confused English (which happens to be my second language) speaker & writer, constantly mixing both British and American English spellings. I can’t help it - I still prefer the British spellings (and expressions) but I do work with Americans and interact with them daily so it does influence how I write.

I’ve always been a proponent of the analog(ue) ways despite having a career that required me to type in front of a monitor from 9-5pm. I grew up surrounded by tons of stationery products and a trip to the stationery store has always been a treat to me during my childhood. To this day, I still prefer writing notes on paper and several items on my desk have accompanied me since my high school years.

Ever since the first time I picked up a fountain pen - initially out of curiousity - I couldn’t stop researching into fountain pens and acquiring more of them. From there, I moved on to inks (I own at least half a litre of blue ink in different shades), fountain pen-friendly paper and more recently, building myself a mountain of system techos that I can never fully utilize in this lifetime. You can expect long and lengthy stories of my trying to justify every expensive purchase made to my collection. Prior to using fountain pens, I’ve always favoured mechanical pencils as my preferred writing tool and I have a large collection of them as well.

In 2020, thanks to the Covid-19 situation, I found myself playing Ragnarok Origin on the Japanese “Fenrir” server and becoming totally consumed by it. It started as a mild curiousity to see how the game world had changed since the original version released back in the early 2000s before I found myself sucked into a really fun, friendly community who welcomed a non-Japanese speaking player into their folds and the rest became history. While I’ve step out of “frontlines” in June 2022 due to personal reasons, I do still casually play and love to meet other English speaking players on the server!

Since I have no problems moving on from things that no longer define my interest and/or events that have long passed, post entries that I no longer wish to be made public on this online journal have a four years expiration date. Next automatic archival process will occur on January 1, 2023 and will include selected posts written in 2018 and prior.

Reaching Me

A decade ago, I used to allow comments on my blog, like any normal website. Unfortunately, these days, my writings are more of an outlet for random thoughts or to capture a moment in time so that I can flip back the years to reminisence. Hence I no longer invite comments as these entries are written for me, rather than for an audience.

If you must reach me (which you don’t), try @melz on Twitter, @hiddenmelz on Instagram, or melz#7777 on Discord.

And no, there isn’t an email address available for you to reach me. Hopefully it’ll be such a pain to use those channels listed above that you’ll eventually drop the idea.

Colophon

This website is hosted on a private server, with no analytics tracking nor social network entanglements. Unlike most of the websphere, I do respect people’s privacy concerns and have no desire nor intention to peddle your information away for a few pennies. Now if only the rest of the websphere would share the same sentiments…

I use Noto Serif JP & Roboto from Bunny Fonts which does not track information and is fully GDPR compliant.

All photos published on this website were taken by me (unless indicated otherwise) and no form of reproduction is permitted without my express permission. Just because I do not mutilate my photos with watermarks does not imply that they are public domain.

This blog was generated using Hugo using a custom theme. Hats off to the amazing people who produced such an indispensable tool.