Public Static

Spectral Expansion

2012-01-16T14:26:00.001+08:00

People are having less and less things in common to talk about nowadays. It's not that because people are becoming asocial, no, it's really just because people are having more and more choices in their entertainment. Say, if you lived during the Spanish Occupation, there was no TV, the newspapers probably came out about like once a month, and the news are like fucking three weeks old, so when there's a show/play in town, everybody would see it, and while it's the only thing you can talk about, it's probably something everybody can talk about.

Fast forward to my childhood, late 80s to the early 90s. We did have television, but nobody really had cable, and there were like 4 and a half channels that didn't broadcast retarded shows (most of the time anyway), so even though people were glued to the TV, they were still watching the same thing. There were like a grand total of ten cartoons on TV, probably five or so TV series, and about four movies a week, most of them occurring in varying timeslots. You could watch almost everything (specially as a kid because you had the time), or even if not, you at least know what each show was about. At school, everybody was pretty much watching everything, and you always had something in common to relate to. Sure the shows sucked by today's standard, but back then, what would you have compared it to? Even now, whenever people go nostalgic on that sort of era, everybody can almost say "o yeah, I remember that", because of the sole reason that we didn't really have that much of a choice.

Fast forward again to today. There's probably at least 15 different weekly TV series' that are available on the net or through your (not-so)friendly bootlet trader. And that's just for american shows. Movies come out in clear DVD form as soon as the cinemas stop rolling them. I wont even begin to discuss how much Japanese, Korean and Chinese shows are added to the list thanks to the Asian revival.

Now what? Half of the time you'd get questions like "Hey do you watch blah blah blah" and most of the time, you'd just be able to say "I think I've heard of it". And it's perfectly normal, because if you are going to watch each and every "weekly" show mentioned above, 24 hours a day will not suffice.

The only real way to have more people follow what you're following is to shove the shows down other people's throats. A less palatable alternative is to just go online and find strangers there who have the same interests as you, leaving you even more isolated from your local peers. How will the kids of today start reminiscing tomorrow when their childhood's scattered across so much that just knowing each and every one of them is already a daunting task?

Well there's not much use in saying I know how that's gonna turn out. For now, we'll talk about the news. Everybody at least knows about the news right?

"Well, I think I've heard of it"

Screw it. I have an obscure TV show to watch.

Phases of a Field Trip

2012-01-11T21:26:00.002+08:00

Field trips are about as much of a part in a student's early life as the uneasy experience of having one of his classmates soil his pants (in the sense that it's a yearly thing). And though the nature of field trips tend to change every year (i.e. sometimes somebody gets left behind in a forest, other times somebody vomits, etc), the natural phase by which the school activity occurs is pretty straightforward. This post is about that natural cycle.

0. The night before. This is when packing happens. Excitement usually causes the student to not sleep properly, which grossly affects his chances of being left behind by the bus, or spending half of the field trip knocked out, when his classmates will take funny pictures of him as though some cosmic law dictates that they should, even at risk of being murdered by the victim upon waking up.

1. Morning. Finding a seatmate phase - Finding a seatmate is very important, granted that the teacher is not a control freak who insists that seating should be done by class number, in which case the enjoyment of the trip depends on whether or not the student is chummy with kids whose surnames are alphabetically close to his. In case otherwise where the students are free to choose their 'mates, here are some factors that are considered:

- Whether or not the seatmate has motion sickness. Because seriously, fuck vomiters.
- Whether or not the seatmate brings a lot of snacks, if possible, imported ones. Fuck Humpy Dumpy.
- Whether or not the seatmate has a funny smell, is the class weirdo, or oppositely, the captain of awesomeness

After those things are considered, a seat is sought. Windows generally are given to students who seem like they've never been anywhere outside school or ridden a bus before. The far back part of the bus are for the "awesome" rowdy crowd who'll probably end up dead/in prison/pregnant before they hit 20. The front of the bus is reserved for teacher's pets, those who enjoy seeing the boobs of their teacher bounce as the bus travels in rough roads, and people who do not know the pecking order of this sort of thing. The middle part is reserved for the more normal kids who just want to sleep/much on chips/enjoy not being inside a classroom on a weekday.

2. Morning. Start of trip. - Prayers are in order, unless you're inside some pagan, God-hating school. If you hit the jackpot in having a Saint for a teacher, you will be saying the rosary for the first thirty minutes, which as much as I respect people's beliefs, is really a buzzkill to a kid who'd rather crack jokes about passing vehicles. Baons are revealed to people, carefully, as though one is playing poker, so as to not reveal one's entire loot. Classmates can smell quality junk food from an entire bus's length so it's wise to reserve some for later. After a good few minutes of travel time, the bus already smells like cheese flavoured chips.

3. Prelunch. - If there were no stopovers, chances are the people who munched and drank a lot of snacks right after departure are now holding a "who can hold their pee for the longest while being jeered by pretty much everybody in the bus" contest. Super excited people who couldnt sleep the previous night are, unsurprisingly, asleep.

4. Lunch - Here's the pecking order of a typical field trip lunch:

A) Kids with fast food for lunch
B) Kids with neatly prepared food for lunch
C) Kids with canned goods and rice wrapped in plastic
D) Kids with Nilaga for lunch (with matching ice cold sebo)
E) Kids with money, but likely wont find any store because the teacher decided everybody should have lunch in the middle of a goddamn forest.
F) Poor kids who will go from table to table to ask for scraps

5. After Lunch - Everybody's asleep. The people who slept the entire morning will be left to themselves to find some form of entertainment, possibly by seeking revenge by taking pictures of people who abused them earlier.

6. Cocacola Bottling Plant - For some reason, every trip involves a vist to a cocacola bottling plant, as though there's more to making coke than providing a bottle, cleaning the bottle, filling bottle with coke from a magical tube that never gets explained, and then the sealing of the bottle. The only good part here is that coke is drink all you can. (for alternatives, see UP Botanical Garden, Bahay ni Rizal, Science Centrum)

7. Completely unplanned urine stop - Because nobody ever considers that exposing kids to bottomless coke and peer pressure will cause their bladders to increase to twice the allowable size from overconsumption. The bus driver has no choice, unless he feels that the bus needs to smell a lot funkier.

8. Return trip - Kids who have previously hoarded up snacks are now panicking to get rid of their stocks. Bags of junkfood are opened and passed around the bus, further increasing the smell of cheese to slightly intolerable levels. The sugar rush of drinking coke and eating candies will be taking toll, leaving kids in a hazy state of morbid stupor. Singalongs are known to break out during this phase, in the same way inmates try to sing about not being inmates when being transfered from one prison to another.

9. Pasalubong - Almost always the final part of the trip that doesn't involve going home just yet. The bus parks at a pasalubong store where they have arrangements with the owner so they can get freebies, cash. Kids buy pasalubongs ever so thoughtfully, after which they forget why they bought pasalubongs in the first place and consume half of what they bought, with the other half left to be mishandled, mangled, and misplaced so that it looks like a well-intended roadkill by the time it reaches the recepients (usually the sundo)

10. Trip home - The part where the bus gets stuck in traffic, some of the kids beg to be dropped off somewhere nearer to their place, during which they'd have to plow through the filthy, crowded bus just to get to the exit while toting their oversized bags and plastic filled with pasalubong. Eventually the bus reaches school, the kids disperse into the night and leave behind enough spilled junk food to make the bus look like somebody detonated a cheese-curls filled IED inside the bus.

This is also probably the last time a class headcount is done, and the teacher realizes that the count's off by one, and that some fat kid got left behind in the pasalubong store because he's too slow in deciding whether to get turones de mani or turones de casuy, neither of which matters because all pasalubongs in the entire Philippines are actually made in Bulacan.

The END.

Wala Lang

2012-01-03T19:13:00.001+08:00

Tambucho - babae na malalaman mong lalaki pala dahil may nakausli sa pagitan ng bumper.

50% off - babaeng kalahati lang ang beauty pag imemeet mo sa lugar na hindi patay sindi ang ilaw

Sheraton - Sherang Maton

McDo - Sex

8-McDo - 50 pesos lang ang charge, may McDo ka na.

Hipon - Walang ulo, katawan lang

Lollipop - Okey ulo, walang katawan

Dikya - Walang ulo, walang katawan

Winston - Maraming wins sa party na ito

Lucky Strike - party kung saan swertihan lang kung may chicks

Hope - party na puro paasa lang

Marlboro Country - party kung saan dalwa lang ang umaattend - lalaki at kabayo

Philip Morris - Sigarilyo po ito

AVG - libreng proteksyon/condom

Resolutions

2011-12-22T13:09:00.000+08:00

This year I'm aiming for more realistic targets. Last year's projected invasion of Sabah using sea turtles did not work as well as I hoped it would. So here's my list:

Things to do for next year:

- Publish "the" book

- Give car a serious maintenance run , Brakes, wheels, suspension

- Give standup comedy another go

- Read at least one Elliot Wave theory book

- Cook the perfect steak

- Find another

Others (aka shit that may or may not happen, kinda like sex on the first date):

- Android programming

- 10 lap regular swim

- At least one marathon

Facebook One Liner Roundup

2011-12-15T15:10:00.000+08:00

A banana cue is just a more liberal turon.

"Niche companies that would die without Christmas: Mug makers, Song remixers (Christmas version), Queso De Bola manufacturers, and companies that make "Something green", "Something red", and "something cute"."

"Give a man another hundred years to live and a hundred year hence, he'd be laughing at every problem he has now. Most things in life's a joke, medyo slow lang ata talaga tayo."

"So if some pageant contestant privately disses the same stupid show that everybody else was publicly dissing a few months back, it's now a big deal? Filipinos just love to rage about all the unimportant things."

"Sana ako na lang si Mabini at ikaw si Bonifacio. Para 10 piso lang, magkasama na tayo palagi."

"Listen, I don't care how new you are to driving or what kind of backwater driving school you went to. You really should learn to use the signal lights whenever you're negotiating a corner or changing lanes. (hint: It's the stick behind your steering wheel that doesn't control the wipers)"

"Luckily a vampire never needs coins, because he doesn't need to follow barya lang po sa umaga. "

"Ever notice how trends are getting stupider and stupider? They're not. That's old age settling in without you noticing it."

"So the SUV in front of me had a faux-european carplate beneath an NBI comemorative plate, yellow lights for braking, an anti-RH bill sticker, and a bad case of smoke belching. I never thought a vehicle's rear could drum up so much hate in such a short time. Mind. F'ing. Blown."

"I refuse to acknowledge that a hero like Andres Bonifacio always went to war with a half unbuttoned shirt like the monuments and paintings would have us believe. I'm sure somewhere in the KKK Kode of Konduct, there's a clause there against man cleavages."

"If a Bohol rep can change EDSA to Cory Aquino Avenue, I propose we change Tagbilaran's name to Peanut Kisses. Everybody loves those things."

"The real worst airport is the one where you land in the middle of the ocean. Good luck clearing through immigration when your ass is five miles away from the rest of you. "

"What the Arroyos don't want you to know: That neckbrace can connect to an exoskeleton that has chainsaws for arms, rocket boosters, and ten-wheeler truck feet. You let her out of the country, she'll return as mechagodzilla or something."

"Last Sunday the priest had the gall to say that Santa Claus does not exist in front of so many children. He's lying because there was one time I saw him running on our neighbor's roof carrying their colored TV."

"Oft a grave error to mistake being swept by the current as personal progress."

"Thank you Vice. 95 million people, 3 joke variations."

"People will believe anything as long as you include a badass soundtrack to go along with it. #gullibletoads"

"‎(3:36:34 PM) nefasturis: I was going to ask for your comment about people who invert their names for nicknames and then realized it doesn't apply to names like Anna
(3:36:49 PM) nefasturis: Because, how would I know if you're already doing it? :|"

"Every 4-person thesis group ever: Leonard (leads), Donatello (does machines), Raphael (Cool, but rude), Michelangelo (#@$*& party dude)"

"‎"Sinong sumanib sayo? Sino? May pangalan ba sya? Kung sino ka man na nanloob sa aming kaibigan, magpakilala ka!"

"Ako si Red Horse. Red Horse Extra Strong.""

"Taena. Saludo ako kay Noli. Nobody can report about elves, ghosts, and other folklore with a serious tone for many years and still retain enough credibility to run and win vice presidency AND go back to reporting evening news."


"just keep chipping away at it. like the sea pounding a rock solid cliff it will erode over time, not because of strength, but because of consistency"

"Until facebook, I didn't know God talked through apps."

"I wish I had a dog named 20k so when people ask me what I do to exercise, I say "I walk 20k in the morning and in the evening.""


"The scariest part of growing up is watching everybody around you grow younger. There's something disconcerting about seeing your grand old barber replaced by a kid who would not look so out of place in "Ang TV"."

"People say fortune favors those who know how to wait. What they should be saying is that fortune favors those who know what to wait for."

"If you can give advice that's generic enough to say even without understanding the problem, you have a future as a horoscope writer. : )"

"Bago pa nauso ang planking, hindi ba mahilig na tayo manabla?"

"You're 30,000 feet up in the air where there's not enough oxygen for any scream, moving 3x faster than anything alive in nature, strapped to an heavy metal object that only flies through the explosive power of combustible fuel. So who was the smart ass that thought "Hmm, maybe this is the best time to sell duty-free gucci watches and fine wine"?"

"Globe's finally connecting people by forcing to meet them up in person."


"There are two kinds of dreams. One that you spend sleep on, and the other, with everything else."

"In hk, night buses go half as fast with twice as many stops. The same cannot be said of edsa buses that turn on warp speed at the strike of midnight."

"You mean the world to me, if I cared for the world, I mean."

"Why is San Marino Corned Tuna trying to market their product as a symbol of romance? ITS CANNED FISH. Barring mass hunger and the extinction of every marine life on the planet, giving somebody canned tuna floating in salt and vegetable oil in the interest of romance is NOT going to end well."

"Whenever somebody asks me for payment, I ask them if they accept time deposits. I don't have money but I certainly have time to spare."

"If you're obsessive compulsive, does it also mean you support arranged marriages?"

"In between moments you're telling the world how much youre having fun, you really should."

"You'll know democracy is dead when somebody loses a national election horribly and still manages to get power higher than the office he ran for. Binay's evil and all, but seriously, **** Mar Roxas for being the biggest line cutter in the land."

"Why are eggs sold by the dozen? Who decided that if I wanted to consume one, I might as well eat eleven more?"

"So do you click because you like something or to do you like something kasi click?

"As a kid I also had dangerous toys, but not because they might poison me. We were playing with tops with cold hard metal nail tips spinning at a hundred rpm thrown with a lashing cord that made the trajectory even more unpredictable.We caught them with our bare, prepubescent hands. There was not so much danger of getting cancer as there was the danger of accidentally reenacting the climax of The Passion."

"And the funniest thing of all, is that the things they scold you for in school are the ones that actually count! TALKING. PLAYING. STANDING. Reporting for f'ing duty, life!"

"So if we celebrate Christmas as soon as the BER months start and end it by Three Kings, that means we're spending more than one third of the year celebrating it. By comparison, there are only two weekends per week, which means we get more Christmas days than all the Saturdays and Sundays combined."

"Wala palang silbe sabihin ang "Pag di na ako busy, gagawain ko na ito." kasi mahirap talaga maging hindi busy para sa isang bagay na hindi mo pa ginagawa. Kung gusto mo talaga ang isang bagay, simulan mo agad. Dahil hindi lumalaki ang oras sa isang araw, kusang magaadjust na ang buhay mo para pagkasyahin lahat ng ginagawa mo. Di mo lang mamamalayan, may puwang na para sa pangarap na dapat matupad."

Metro Manila Film Festival is a Joke

2011-12-11T02:51:00.001+08:00

I won't pander on the issue. The so called Metro Manila Film Festival is a joke. I have long since considered the yearly activity as an exercise of abuse of the entertainment industry to cash in on people's aguinaldos and government-officiated holidays. Even Wikipedia doesn't give a rat's ass about who started it or why it even exists. Whereas most Film Festivals encourage high quality and original content even when the films are bound to be unpopular, the MMFF is a cash-cow milking exercise where movies with recycled content and slipshod, hastily-assembled narratives are the main event. Instead of making people aware that there are movie types that go beyond the usual stereotypes, what we get are rehashes that reappear in the festival every year. Mano Po 6? REALLY?! At this point just about everybody in show business has played the role of a Chinoy at one point or another.

Don't get me wrong though. Indies do have a place in the festival, just not the main place where they belong. No, in the school bus called the MMFFs, the indies get the plastic seat attached at the end of the bus where the spare tire is chained.

Here are the winners for the last 16 years:

1996 - Magic Temple (Peque Gallaga tries to prove he can make quality movies that aren't glorified porn. Decent, until he took a shit at on a year later when he released Magic Kingdom)
1997 - Nasaan ang Puso (Decent, if only due to Maricel's powerful acting)
1998 - Jose Rizal (School teachers love this shit to bits as it saves them time from doing actual teaching)
1999 - Muro Ami (Like Rizal, but under water)
2000 - Tanging Yaman (Standard formula of old, powerful actors mixed with shitty upstarts to bloat the roll call)
2001 - Yamashita: The Tiger's Treasure (WORST MOVIE IN EXISTENCE)
2002 - Mano Po (Golly, pinoys sure love their racist jibs!)
2003 - Crying Ladies (Let's have more jabs at Chinese customs because last year, it worked!)
2004 - Mano Po 3: My Love (How about we add more Filipinos faking Chinese accents? Yay!)
2005 - Blue Moon (See Tanging Yaman's formula.)
2006 - Enteng Kabisote 3: Okay ka, Fairy Ko: The Legend Goes on and on and on (The movie as stupid as the title, proving once and for all that writers have long since stopped trying to sound legit)
2007 - Resiklo (Zero plot, zero acting, horribly out of place special effects, Ramon Revilla)
2008 - Baler (Jericho Rosales pretends hes mestizo, while Ann Curtis pretends she's a local)
2009 - Ang Panday (See resiklo, minus robots, plus several inches in Ramon Revilla's waistline)
2010 - Ang Tanging Ina Mo (Last na 'To!) (Title explains it all, minus the "ing")

And here are this year's contestants:

Enteng ng Ina Mo! - Too many sequels already? Mix and fucking match with other long running movie lines.
My Househusband (Ikaw Na!) - Too many sequels? Change character names and setting, rehash the rest.
Ang Panday 2 - Too many sequels? LIE ABOUT THE COUNT. This has got to be the twentieth already.
Shake, Rattle & Roll 13 - Too many sequels? WE WONT EVEN TRY TO HIDE IT.
Segunda Mano - Spoiler: KRIS AQUINO DIES. Like every movie she's been in.
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow - See Tanging Yaman's formula, insert Gabby Concepcion.
Manila Kingpin: The Asiong Salonga Story - We haven't had an action movie in years so this is the only real movie to look forward to OUT OF SEVEN ENTRIES.

Fuck. This. Shit.

Baryang Magiliw - A Review of Philippine Coins

2011-12-05T17:01:00.001+08:00

When I was younger, money was very different - the money that I could get my hands on, anyway. The five and ten peso coins did not exist, which was a problem, because bills were much much more fragile than coins. In the hands of a child, the bills were practically wooden ships in a perfect storm of destruction. Banko central probably takes note of the number of five and ten peso bills that get destroyed every year, and 3 quarters of those would be attributed to "left in the pockets of a gradeschool student's shorts and then machine washed" and "crumpled beyond recognition by grubby little oilstained hands"

On the other (grubby) hand, we had the two peso coin. It was awesome. Like, the pinnacle of modern currencies. Hot-blooded and bare chested Bonifacio solo'ed that coin, until he moved up a notched and started bunking with Apolinario Mabini in the 10 peso bill, and then later in the 10 peso coin. I'd say it's tantamount to a barkada dick move, hanging out with a friend with a higher face value just because. Well, I don't blame Andres Bonifacio hanging out with Mabini. Who'd he bunk up with? Aguinaldo? History says that guy had him shot, twice probably. Putting them in the same coin would be like a spanish-era Tom and Jerry commemorative. Funny, but morbid.

haters gonna hate

The two peso coin was decagonal in shape. What was that? You thought it was octagonal? Well, welcome to the club. It was heavy, and its shaped gave it sharp angles. If you didn't consider how much candy it could give you, you could think it was designed to be a child's perfect throwing weapon, like a minor denomination ninja star or something.

Actually the same can be said about most of our coins before. They were heavy, and pitched at the right force,

they can do some mighty damage. They're twice as light now, probably adjusted so on humanitarian grounds and on

the pleas of the thousands of coin-flinging victims all over the country. I remember before when the newer, lighter coins came out, people went batshit insane about how the coins are so small we'd start losing them. We probably did, but the Department of Jeans, Shorts, and Paldas is happy to report that the number of busted pockets per capita has drastically gone down after a bag of coins stopped being as heavy as .50 rifle rounds.

Thinking about it, the weight probably has something to do with our perceived value of two pesos. Back then, like when you went christmas carolling and the house gave you a 2 peso coin instead of having the dog chase you for two blocks, you felt like you had a lot on hand, and that's because you DID. The coin is heavy, large, and you'd see Bonifacio's stern face staring at you from his decagonal frame, as though he's alive. "Where the fuck is the rest of my body," he'd probably say. And that made it feel even more important.

But no. Nowadays, you get two one peso coins with Rizal's face in it. Rizal in case you didn't know, is a richboy kid who barely spoke Tagalog, loved everything Spanish, went against independence and the revolution. If Rizal were alive today, he'd be that crazy hipster who makes Starbucks his second home and keeps on advocating we should have stayed an American colony. And you get two lousy coins with his face on instead of the 2 peso coin.

I say, let's remove the one peso coin instead and reinstate the 2 peso coin, remove Bonifacio from the Baryang Walang Hagdan and place him back where he belongs. What can 1 peso buy nowadays anyway? Then just so we don't look like heartless bastards, let's bunk Rizal with Aguinaldo, and maybe he'll have him shot again, which might not be such a bad thing because hey, free holiday.

Let's just hope he does it sometime after Easter Sunday, holiday economics and all.

Toilet Tourism

2011-11-21T14:08:00.001+08:00

Not too long ago, news came out that our flagship airport the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, ironically named after a victim of the facility's lax security, is the worst aiport in the world. Not surpisingly, Filipinos came out of the woodwork like malignos in the night to pitch in with their criticisms of the place, admittedly with me included, about the shitty restrooms, overexpensive food, and unprofessional staff. (200 pesos for a hotdog sandwich and water? really?)

Many efforts have been made since then to improve the place, but sadly the "maduming toilet" notion has stuck on and has become the rallying cry of people whenever the subject of tourism comes up. Matter of fact, during a discussion on the new facebook group Come Visit My Philippines on Inquirer.net, people refused to participate in the "invite a foreigner" campaign because they could not bear to bring them to a country where even the restrooms are dirty.

Not to stray too much off topic, but when I was a kid, I hated going to school because I felt that laziness was more of a human right than a social defect. I made up every excuse everyday in the span of 14 years just to justify not having to go to school. And that's what's just going on here.

It's like people just don't want the burden of action on them so they find something else to blame. And it just so happened that the toilet thing is the most convenient excuse off the shelf. Criticizing the goverment has become the official reason why people shouldn't do anything, on the argument that whatever they do won't really have much of an effect because of tax vampires in the goverment.

BULL. SHIT.

Sure, the goverment is incompetent and yes, passing through NAIA does feel like passing through a particularly diseased rectum. But is that really something that should stop us from inviting people over?

Of course there will always be dirty parts. It's just like your house. Who invites a guest over to show them the bodega or the dirty kitchen? For the case of the airport, that'd be like having a dirty door - a filthy entryway. But what's one dirty door if tits, great food, assloads of entertainment, and tits (twice for good measure) were on the other side? If I were to invite foreign friends, I'd be telling them about the best parts, and if you have been to those best parts in our country, you'd think all the imperfections this country has wouldn't matter all that much.

*deep inhale*

Problema kasi sa mga Pilipino andaming preconditions bago magsimulang tumulong. "Eh madumi yung ihian sa erport. Pano ako magiimbita? Nakakahiya naman! Government! Gising!" Susko. Common sense. Then tell the foreigners you're inviting that the airport CR is crap and that they should use the plane's CR or the lounges instead, if you do have to.

Di naman tanga din yung mga foreigners na di na sila pupunta sa napakagandang beaches dahil lang mapanghi yung cr ng airport na pagttransferan nila. If you can't workaround that simple marketing problem then you have no business criticizing what the DoT is trying to do.

And what about the foreigners? I have talked to a lot of foreigners about our country. They talk about a lot of things, from the beaches, to the malls, to the mountains, to the fucked up but interesting food (mostly about balut), to, yes, even the hospitality of prostitutes (which they love, in an awesome/depressing kind of way). They do mention the traffic, pollution, and occassional petty crimes - all in passing, but do you hear about them complaining about the toilets? Not really. These are people from the first world, who after they shit simply refuse to wash their own asses with their bare hands even when we are providing them with amplewater and a bar of soap. And yet they have no problems with the toilets. It's us Filipinos that are complaining more than the people who are supposed to shun what we are gladly pointing out. They're not.

Point of the matter is, we just can't seem to find it in us to love our own. I'm not saying love filthy toilets. That's borderline fetish level love. I'm saying overlook some things, and focus on what's good.

And that probably is the real reason why we can't promote our country efficiently. For every guy promoting the country, five others are badmouthing the place. Even our comments on the net contribute to the problem, seeing as google gladly hands all that info to anybody who bothers asks about our great nation.

To be fair, a lot of progress has been made to change our view of our country. Props to the Gokongwei's Cebu Pacific, and the other budget carriers for shattering the transport costs for joe ordinary like me to see the sights and sensations of places other than Manila and Luzon. More and more people realize that yes, most of Metro Manila might look like a turdhole, but like all turdholes, it's only one, and having to go inside it to have fun is completely optional.

NEWS FLASH: OUR COUNTRY IS AWESOME.

MORE AWESOME THAN JEJU ISLAND. FUCK JEJU ISLAND.

WHY DO YOU THINK SOUTH KOREANS ARE BEING EXPORTED HERE BY THE CRATE?

Tourism is all about perception. And until realize that to improve thigns, it's up to us to change how we perceive our own country, our culture, and our responsibility to go beyond what we currently have.

Toilet Tourism.

Battlefield 3 Hangs Up (A Rock And A Hard Place)

2011-11-13T15:52:00.001+08:00

Just raising this fix for those who have been encountering issues in the Battlefield 3 campaign, specifically the mission where

[spoiler]the soldiers mutiny after campo dies[/spoiler]

the only solution was to put it in window mode (alt+enter) right before i found the bodies and let it load the game (and it did!) and then when the next level started i resumed it at fullscreen by pressing alt+enter again. hope it helped.

Cred goes to this guy:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111101071254AApL8ye
Also, it helps if you reduce the detail level if you're not playing in a high end pc. You can set it back to normal afterwards.
That said, enjoy the game.

P.S. Will post on the tagaytay trip in a while.

Tagaytay Overview : )

2011-11-11T20:39:00.001+08:00

Tagaytay is a mountain town south of Manila famous for its cool climate, specialty restaurants, fresh fruits, and soup made of a cow's bone marrow (and I shit you not, good sirs). Located in the province of Cavite, its population consists of mostly Filipino Locals and rich uppity bastards that seek to invade the countryside with their posh sprawling manions large enough to accomodate up to 5 Sharon Cunetas* on any day.

*(An endemic species of large, song-belting creatures often featured in late night television)

The main languages of Tagaytay are Tagalog, English, and Coñospeak. In the recent years, the subdialects of Jejemon (backwards retarded tagalog) and Bekimon (homolust tagalog) have slowly crept in, brought in by visitors from the corrupted lowlands of Metro Manila.

The main currency of Tagaytay is corn and Collette's bukopie, both of which are readily available for exchange in shops located along the roadside, with one bukopie shop sometimes barely 5 meters apart from another shop of the same franchise. I don't know why, but apparently the locals love their bukopie. Don't ask. I know I didn't. Peso is also accepted by most major establishments, but as peso is not in pie form, edible, and filled with sweet buko inside, usage is frowned upon.

Don't even get me started with credit cards. Seriously. Last time somebody brought that up, it took three years for the body to surface. Don't court trouble, go with buko pie.

(Disclosure: Collette's paid 3 bukopies for this placement)

Another big feature of Tagaytay is the spectacular view of Lake Taal, which contains the Taal Volcano, dubbed as the smallest volcano in the world. It's well worth noting that it is not small at all, would not fit your pocket, or your luggage. And thankfully so, otherwise it would have long since been stolen by the neighboring province of Laguna. As a minor trivia, Taal Volcano is actually not part of Tagaytay. As any Batangueño will gladly tell you at knifepoint, it is part of Batangas. Recently there has been a proposal to put a signboard that says "Batangas" on the goddamn volcano. It did not push through, thankfully, otherwise we'd have to update our National trait from "Hospitable" to "Horribly Tacky". But I digress. Every now and then, it is worth noting that the view of the entire Taal Lake vanishes into a white screensaver, presumably during the extended maintenance period when the Taaleños clean the projectors that are used to create the world's largest hologram of the world's smallest volcano. [Citation Needed]

Tagaytay is also a famous place for weddings, presumably becuase it's far from Manila, so fewer guests tend to attend weddings there. Since it's traditional for Filipinos to feel entitled to attend the wedding of anybody they barely know (i.e. bumped into on the way to work etc), and no sane individual will finance a banquet that can satisfy an entire refugee camp, setting the event in a mountain is an effective way wither down the headcount pretty quickly, or failing that, a short controlled landslide does the trick with the low overhead of using explosives.

Tagaytay also features horseback riding tracks where both pros and novices from all walks of life can relive what it feels like being a rich haciendero riding an aging horse in a shit-infested track, which the locals fondly call "El Turista Trapp". But seriously though, who DOESNT want to ride horses? When I was a kid I thought I could ride one, give it a few kicks and hightail it out of the shitty track, going back to Manila with a horse that I can show my friends. Of course later on, I learned that if I kick the poor aging horse more than once, it'd die of rib fracture or something, and I'd get no further than about five meters away from the road before the horse goes belly up and I hit the pavement with my face.

Aaaanyway, Tagaytay is an awesome getaway that is about as close to Manila as you can get. With the cool climate, fresh fruits, sweet-tasting beef from mountain cows, and lots of restaurants to choose from, Tagaytay is a nobrainer when deciding where to take your rich foreigner buddies for a tour of the local scene (hint: if you're not local, ignore this statement)

Tagaytay, it's like Baguio, but helluva closer.

Taxi Drama

2011-10-26T11:04:00.000+08:00

Wednesdays are usually taxi days for me. My car's not allowed on the roads due to the coding scheme and while theoretically I am supposed to be commuting instead, I end up waking up too late for that. So I take the taxi, where I can continue my sleep at the minimal risk of ending up somewhere else when I wake up (like Alabang).

Anyway, today's one of those days and I plan to check the stock market for a few minutes, and then sleep the rest of the way. But when I rode the taxi and told the driver my destination and preferred route, he answered in a weird voice "wag mo tatanggalin" (don't remove it)

I was like, "Remove what?" I almost chalked up the driver as one of those shabu-addled once who I've encountered more than once before, but suddenly somebody actually replied in a very minute voice "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh". I looked at the shotgun seat from the back. There was nobody there. And then it spoke again "Masikip papa!" I leaned forward and lo and behold I saw a 3 year old kid (or so I think) sitting up front. It was also kind of cute, until you realize that an adult's seatbelt protects a 3 year old kid from accidents in the same way a condom protects you from gunshot wounds.

But yeah, not my kid, and I just wanted to sleep. If ever, it's just going to give the taxi driver an incentive to not drive around like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse spreading death, destruction, and traffic everywhere he goes.

The kid kept on complaining about everything. At first it was cute, because her voice was cartoonish, and then it was annoying, because I planned on sleeping. She wanted more food, and the driver, who apparently was her dad, promised her ice cream after dropping me off. She said she was thirsty, so he gave her his water bottle. (I could not see, but how the heck does a three year old drink from a litre plastic bottle anyway?) and then finally she complained that she just wanted to go home.

At this point the dad's voice changed from the usual half-annoyed-half-concerned voice to a stern one. And that's also the point when I started paying attention (while pretending to not care of course). "Walang tao sa bahay," he said, "wala ang mami mo dun. Anong gagawin mo dun kung magisa ka lang?"

So the guy's babysitting, I get it. I suppose it could be done, provided most of his passengers are like me, no more than 3 people and not really giving a shit if there's another person inside besides the driver.

And that was when i was caught completely off guard.

"Anak, dapat lagi na tayong magkasama ngayon," the driver continued with a raspy voice and a sad undertone, "kasi wala na ang mami mo. Iniwan na nya tayo." The kid could only say "iniwan? mami?" And this was while we were cruising down the highway.

I looked at the driver for the first time since the trip started. He looked tired, and somewhat sad. And that was what distraught me. What if this guy is sad to the point of being suicidal? No more sleep for the rest of the trip, that's for sure.

After a while the kid finally fell asleep. The driver would occasionally glance at the kid, still straddled with the oversized seatbelts and he'd give a warm smile, and pardon me if I might embelish the story a bit, that sort of told everybody who saw it "Don't worry now, everything's going to be alright."

It felt like I was inside a drama story waiting to unfold. As though one day that kid is going to grow up, and have a chat with his dad, and bring up the day that her mother left them. And I saw what would've been talked about ahead of her.

Sad and wonderful at the same time.

What The Hell Happened

2011-10-23T16:13:00.000+08:00

1800s - Amigo

1920s - Pal

1940s - 友達

1950s - Pare

1960s - Pards

1970s - Repapips

1980s - Tol, Tsong

1990s - Dude, men

2000 - Bro, dude

2012 - Ate, Teh, Titah

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED, PHILIPPINES? Y U GO GAY?

Signs you're getting older

2011-10-19T20:58:00.000+08:00

It's normal. It's expected. Yet for some reason aging occurs in such a subtle way that makes denial such a tempting option for most of us. Time is such a good thief of youth that it manages to spirit off chunks of your life with the subtlety of a customs official - without tripping any Senate enquiry and/or burglar alarms.

The whole process, however, is far from fool proof. Occasionally you get these reminders that you are, in fact, slowly inching your way towards old age, demise, and horribly sagging testicles.

Here are some signs that you are aging:

1. The jeepney driver looks like he just got his license five days ago. He's listening to things you thought only hyperactive preteens listen to. (Justin Bieber? Really?) Also, he's driving like Takumi from Initial D, and not because it's all happy coincidence - it's because he grew up watching THE Takumi on TV.

2. And your barber? Long gone is the grand old barber who seemed ancient enough to have cut Manuel Quezon's teenage hair. While he may not know jack about stylishness, he probably mastered his trade long before you even knew how to masturbate. He could do a heart bypass with his trusty scissors and comb and that's why you're confident your hair will be cut properly. No, now, he's replaced by a guy who's probably about your age, or worse, younger, and there's that lingering feeling that you shouldn't be trusting him with scissors any more than you trust a five year old with a kitchen knife.

3. Music sucks, and you have your own channel or radio program playing music that you like - and they're either called "rewind", or "retro" or simply "classics".

4. And it's pretty okay for you to accept that.

5. People you grew up admiring are dying off. Michael Jackson, Cory Aquino, Steve Jobs, ~~Jimmy Santos~~ (EDITOR'S NOTE: For the last fucking time Jet, he's not yet dead. Stop killing him in your articles)

6. All your friends in FB have turned into babies, if you're to believe their profile pictures.

7. Remember that time back in college when you attended like, 5 debuts a month and had to be eighteen roses/candles/condoms in at least three of them? You didn't even remember the name of the debutante half the time. Weddings are like that now.

8. You're appalled at the fashion sported by kids nowadays.

9. You're using the term "kids nowadays", clearly accepting you've long since graduated from the demographic.

10. Half the time you're online, you're reminiscing about childhood stuff that your younger friends have no idea of. And I'm not even talking about your inaanak. I'm talking about the new intern at work not knowing who Computer Man is and why he's badass. (hint: he can travel through electrical wiring. Why? because he's a badass computer man, that's why. Fuck you.)

Twitter One-Liner Lowdown

2011-10-06T13:46:00.001+08:00

To be human is to think alone and feel collectively.

That which does not kills us makes us reconsider insurance.

Wag mong gawing trabaho ang bagay na gusto mo kasi hindi pwedeng bigyan ng parehong paggalang ang bagay na iniibig sa bagay na pinagkikitaan

Mark my words, we will be spending 10 years trying to record everything in our lives and the next 10 years trying to erase them

It's easier to pretend that Marcos is the long and short of the evils of that era, rather than consider him as a mere symptom of the times.

In light of SM Pampanga shooting SM pulls back selling SM Bonus bullets and personal firearms.

Sorry men, dahil may anti-planking law na, bawal na manabla.

Walang basagan ng trip!

When was the last time protesting actually fixed the problem?Bullets change opinions faster than placards, though not always for the better

When I have a kid I'll name him Winter so whenever he gets invited to a party, he can answer in the coolest voice "Winter is Coming".

I'll never get why people say being rich doesnt make you happy. Give me 500 thousand peso bills and I'll slap 500 people with them happily.

Madaling sabihin na "window shopping" lang. Pero pano kung lumundag yung mannequin papunta sayo at sinabing di mo na sya kailangan bayaran?

Never a love in the world for naught, if never a late realization left unsaid.

If you want to get into somebody's good side, never bring up any topic on politics, religion, sex, or UAAP.

God bless social technology for serving as the best jerkwad detector of all time.

Sometimes its not about solving something. Sometimes its just the acknowledgement that the problem exists.

You know its for real when the whole world seems to conspire for and against it at the same time, and you cant be bothered to care.

You mean the world to me, if I actually cared about the world I mean.

Balang araw,lahat ng non-negotiables mo sa paghanap ng pagibig lulunukin mo rin. Kaya kung ayaw mo mabulunan, liitan lang ang requirements.

Behind every great man is a woman. If there's none behind you, well, we can't all be winners now, can we?

Ang hindi lumilingon sa pinanggalingan, mabilis matututo mamisikleta.

People keep saying "never settle for less". What they ought to be saying is "never settle for less if never is fine with you."

Stop quoting Rizal as a Tagalog-user. He wrote his novels, poems, letters in Spanish, and watched Marimar undubbed (citation needed)

The fastest way to find out you can't change the world is to actually go there.

Lesson 4 today: Dont trade and drive. U myt get hit b4 ur sell orders does.

Sana magkaseat sale dyan senyo para makaupo naman ako sa tabi mo...

Right before the market takes a huge dive, the forum I go to turns into chaos. After only few posters remain - then it's buying time.

I once was sad because I had no shoes. Then I saw somebody with no feet. Who was white. And a lady. I was scared into not wanting shoes.

Ang pagibig parang taho. Hindi dapat puro tamis. Masarap sa umaga. Habang nakakalog, lumalabnaw. At higit sa lahat, mas enjoy pag sinisigaw.

Love is a lot like a pizza delivery. Getting there at record speeds means nothing unless the other side opens up.

When was the last time you experienced glory?The only real faith that matters is that of tolerance and respect.

You can't always get what you want unless what you want is not always getting what you want. Problem solved.

The fastest way to drive out a nail is with another nail, unless not having any nails is your objective.

People sometimes tend to say that they want a lot of things. I'm willing to bet more than half of the time, a simple hug will suffice.

Everybody needs a certain degree of liquidity. Money that you cannot spend when you need it is of no use to you.

It's easy to blame others for your future, but from the future looking back, you'll realize there's only you.

If you always go for win-win in a zero sum game, consider that somebody might be getting the lose-lose end.

Filmmaking, stories, games and jokes got replaced with work, business and everything in between. Growing up is as boring as everybody says.

The last product anybody ever really needs is contentment.

Teach a kid to ask "where to" and then watch him go farther than the kids who ask "how far".

The management ability most needed for survival is the ability to handle disappointment.

Wanted to use this wit-phrase "Am I in Vienna? Because I'm surrounded by sausages." but cant because it sounds gay in 19/20 instances.

A good teacher is worth a thousand books, and a good student, a thousand dissertations

Some people take a punch in the face better than they take a joke. The rest tend to fare worse in the fist-to-face division.

As children we were encouraged to write long essays and as adults we're encouraged to write short tweets. Ano ba talaga? O-o.

Samsung Galaxy S2 Kies "cannot start service"

2011-10-04T14:32:00.001+08:00

Just a friendly note to the people who are having issues with connecting Samsung GS2 to the latest version of Kies. I have a Galaxy S2 running on 2.3.3, rooted. Unfortunately I am unable to connect my phone to Samsung's inhouse PC interface program called Kies. After what seemd to be years of searching for a way to connect the damn phone, I was able to make it work, finally. Here are the methods that I used. 1. Stop using Windows 7 64bit. This OS is currently unsupported. 2. Update to the latest version of KIES and use the driver installation method.3. Restart the computer many times. None of those worked, but after reading something on the net about SD cards, here's what I did:1. Remove the battery. 2. Remove the SD card. 3. Startup GS2. 4. Startup Kies5. Plug the device to the USB port. And it worked! What the fuck. Anyway, In case anybody stumbles upon this, I hope it also works for you. Now I'm having issues with trying to make the Kies backup work. Oh Samsung, what would we do without you?

Dead Island Review/Tips/Cheats

2011-10-03T00:25:00.002+08:00

(It's been a while since I did a full article on any game, but then again, it's been a while since I played a game that can't be finished in one day. Anyway, yeah. Also, I'm reviewing this game on the PC with the game version only up to patch 1.1.)

Let's just say I'm not a fan of games that stress me out. I actually like games where I'm not challenged, where I can get power, abuse power, and ultimately get away with abuse. Dead Island gives me nothing of those, and yet, here I am, taking the time to write an article about a game that basically took away hours of potentially good rest to be replaced with unwanted muscular jerking, heart pumping, and soiled underpants. We'll get to that in a moment.

Dead Island is a zombie-themed person shooter that shares the questing-and-collecting elements of Fallout 3 with the theme of .. well.. zombie apocalypse. Most people would like to compare the game to another previously successful zombie-themed FPS game, Left For Dead. The comparisons are somewhat justifiable. There's only so much innovating you can do to a niche theme that's been done and overdone through the years. Some mechanics are similar, the usual "escape or die" theme, and even the enemy roster (hint: zombies) are near identical. It's not all apples and apples though, as there's something about Dead Island that makes it different, and that something is enough for me to say that at the end of the day, it's an entire game of its own.

The story is a mixed bag, but it's not like anybody watches zombie movies for the unique storyline either. You're in a resort as any one of the four starting characters that happen to be immune to the virus, and then you work your way though (as a team or alone) the whole island trying to escape and help others survive at the same time. A mysterious voice on the radio and a particularly obnoxious asshole lifeguard lead the plot on, while characters you encounter along the way provide more meat to the whole experience through their own smaller storylines. The twists in the game are somewhat predictable, but the effort that you will be putting in towards progressing the plot will make you feel all the much immersed in the plight of survival. Seeing a person die from some trivial bullshit right after you pulled an all nighter trying to save his ass, for example, is heartbreaking. The game is not without the emotional moments that the trailer promised us, but lets just say the acting could have been done better.

Graphics wise, the emphasis to detail in the landscape is astounding. It's an island, and beyond the shadow of a doubt, you will believe that the places you visit could have been real places if you take away the whole zombie invasion thing. The lighting and weather effects have been masterfully utilized to set the mood and paint any stage with a certain emotion. The effect works so well that sometimes you will find yourself afraid without even seeing any enemies. The zombies on the other hand are well within the current roster of FPS titles. The splashes of blood on high settings will make you appreciate killing the undead. The facial expressions are fairly limited, which is quite a disappointment since the game is supposed to explore the human side of a zombie apocalypse. That said, the game looks the part.

Dead Island's strongest appeal is that unlike almost pretty much every zombie game out there, it's sandbox styled, meaning, the order of the quests, what you want to play and what you want to skip is up to you. Sidequests give you experience, money, and better weapons, as well as additional flavoring to the main quests, which need to be completed to progress the storyline. Vehicles help you get around doing quests and a fast-travel system between safe haven help you get rid of having to trudge Two kilometers just to fetch some guy something to drink. The sandboxing is almost like Fallout 3 actually. The only difference in Fallout 3 is that travelling 2km will likely end you up fighting once or twice along the way while Dead Island will make sure you will be earning meter by meter in blood. The zombies spawn everywhere and clearing an area will only be temporary at best. It's because of this nature of gameplay that will make you hesitant to keep on venturing out on your own. The island is dangerous and the game makes sure you don't forget that.

Items can be scavenged around the island for use in quests, barter, or creating unique weapons. More than half of the time this is pretty much what you will be doing actually, but the implementation is okay and the game ensures your frustration will not make you pull out (all of) your hair. Items needed for weapons, for example, are randomly available from merchants every now and then so if you cant find it outside, you can buy it for a slightly ridiculous price.

Combat is stricly melee. The guns exist, but ammo is scarce and the effect they have on the undead is limited. A shot in the head is no better than a shot in the leg. I personally believe that FPS and melee just dont mix. Not when you cant see either your leg or fists. For some reason though, the style works for the game. At times the swings are inexact, but rest assured that it's a lot better than what you used to see in.. say... counterstrike. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be comlaining anymore (much). Weapons range from oar paddles to katanas to cooking pans. Each weapon has stats and attributes that make it more or less powerful. YOu're free to upgrade these weapons and modify them with the junk you collect around the island, imbuing them with poison, electricity, or fire or just additional moving sharp blades. Weapons get damaged as you use them, however, and the more unique and powerful the weapon, the more expensive it gets to maintain. This blancing feature will leave you budgeting weapon use for only the most important of situations, as going on bloodlusts all the time will leave you weaponless at a crucial period.

Healthpacks are available although not nearly enough are around most of the time. You can drink canned drinks and eat candy bars for additional health but these cant be carried around with you and must be consumed on the spot. So to set the mood for you, you're basically budgeting health and weapon health. Run out of either and you end up dead anyway. I can't remember how many times I ended up almost finishing a mission and then getting clobbered to death on the way back because I did not think of a good exit strategy or the logistics to back it up.

The enemies of this game are not particularly intelligent or diverse. Each type of enemy has certain movement patterns and once you figure them out, you can dispatch them easily, that is, if the game wasn't so goddamn clever in placing enemies around the ingame areas so strategically. The worst enemy of this game, when you think about it, is the island itself. It's the darkened corner of a seemingly clear hallway, it's the shrubbery placed alongside the main route, it's the detour through the showers that you have to go through. It's the fear htat any moment, you might make a mistake in clearing an area and have half of your life drained by a random zombie while you're in a hot zone. I cannot remember the last time I had a game that I played with a constant level of tension.

And that's what Dead Island is all about. You will never have the upper hand. The game ensures that you will be always at a disadvantage, limited in resources, and fighting for survival. When you get stronger, the enemies do too. When you start getting the hang of your skills, the game presents you with more targets. Until the credits roll, you will feel the need to survive more than to complete the mission. And as far as zombie games go, it doesn't get more immersive than that.

For all its limitations, bugs, and gameplay imbalances, Zombie Island is the zombie game of the year.

Some hints for the guys who are already playing:

1. Always consider running away as the best option. Level ups from fighting can only give you so much compared to quests, and every fight leaves you with less durable weapons and possible death. If you need to fight, fight near safe zones, workbenches, and sources of health.

2. Electricity > Poison. Stunning your enemies is a lot better than having them die slowly. Poison hardly has any effect even when in higher levels.

3. Dispatch Rams by running to the side when he's charging 5 meters away from you, then when he stops, hit him in the back. Grunts can be brought down by cutting of their arms when they're roaring. Drowners need to be flanked by running towards its back and then hit in the back. Infected need to be slashed right before they come at you, or if you suck at timing, a good kick will do the trick. If you're fighting 3 infected with helmets on, well, see rule number 1.

4. Always use the kick. They interrupt a lot of attacks (except from the larger enemies). At later levels you can dispatch downed enemies with just your foot. Save on weapon strength, use your legs.

5. Bundle quests objectives together to save time. Plan your routes to avoid dying in the middle of nowhere.

And lastly, if you are having a hard time with the game or are running on limited resources (i.e. time) because you're an adult who has to slave away countless hours at work, look for Razor 1911's Plus 10 Trainer. Works like a charm.

My Resolve

2011-09-19T01:28:00.002+08:00

I've always prided myself in being able to find amusement in creating things instead of just watching others people's work. It's something I picked up as a kid, whence I found myself rarely able to get the day's rage in toys I was left to find substitutes using what toys I had (lego, being a flexible toy helped out a lot) and a good dose of imagination.

It is that same drive that convinced me to try out writing novels, doing comic books, writing countless articles in this blog, trying to write for print, creating my own website, creating my own programs, games, apps or what not, trying my luck in doing standup comedy, creating music, poetry (albeit sucking at it), working on videos with friends, doing business, and finding out ways to earn a living beyond what I'm expected to be doing. I succeeded and failed in varying degrees in each field, but the bottomline is I just had to try. I was able to push through because I was with people who had the same ideals, though unspoken, could be seen in the way they worked the world.

A lot of that has stopped in the last few years, and I also lost contact with a lot of the people I worked with and shared my dreams with. I have the best excuses. I dont have time anymore. I need to focus on more important things that will matter to my future more. I have a different set of goals now. I figured, it's alright. I'm trying to become an adult, and maybe the lot of those things is just part of being young and wanting to do everything.

Tonight I got to thinking again. Am I really losing time because of what I think I am doing? Half of the time I say I'm pushing through with work, second work, and other boring adult stuff, I'm just leafing through my usual site feeds. I'm watching videos on youtube. I'm thinking of one liners for Facebook or Twitter. If I'm not in front of a browser, I'm playing video games. Or I'm watching TV or a movie, or just reading some random book. If I'm outside, I'm hanging out with friends. Or going out on dates with my girlfriend. Or being out of town, chilling out in some far remote location, probably inebriated half of the time. Those aren't really productive things, but I keep on claiming, I'm being choked with work. I'm not.

I took a look at the monstrous stream of people's activities in Twitter and Facebook. They're basically doing the very same things. There's something inherently wrong with the idea that so much devotion is spent in entertainment in our generation. I seriously doubt our parents spent this much time on amusement. Even less so for the previous generations.

And for my part, I'm beginning to feel the toll that such a lifestyle exacts on my ability to create. The short bursts for twitter and facebook are hampering my ability to write full articles on this site. One liner quotes have taken over the ability to create full dialog, characterization, and even plot. It's the distraction that's starting to chip away at what's supposed to be the main attraction, and it's scaring me.

Without me realizing it, I've become the ideals that i used to hate. I have become the audience. Those who just sample life without ever wondering what it's like to be on the stage. I dropped my pen to write and picked up the papers to read.

But it's not too late. I have my resolve left and I vow to overcome this rut. Here are the things I have decided to start with:

1. I'll reduce posting bullshit oneliners in Twitter and Facebook fishing for random online countenance (or whatever is the equivalent of it). It's won't matter to anybody in the long run, and I can make use of those ideas better in bigger projects.

2. I have to uninstall distractions on my PC. Call off the feeds. Remove my bookmarks. My life is understandably short and I do not want to be doing accounting at the very end of it to find out I had pissed the lot of my time on entertainment alone.

3. Stop forcing myself to do things out of social contract. There's gotta be a golden mean somewhere, and I will have to strike that balance soon. I don't want to live like a hermit either.

4. Reassess again what I want to do. This will probably take the longest of the steps but I know it's the most necessary as well. I resolve that being an adult doesn't mean I have to let go of the things that I love to do. I just have to find out a way to squeeze the most of them in without compromising my ultimate goals.

It starts now.

5 More Uses of Phone Cameras

2011-09-17T22:48:00.002+08:00

Thanks to the advent of technology, and mankind's apparent desire to record the shit out of everything for the next generation to ignore, we now have cameras in about every phone and the ability to store more stills than an average cinema reel. You'd think something that powerful would have really useful purposes, but right now, it's pretty much a social tool, mainly for sharing moments both public and intimate (read: scandalous)

I'd beg to differ, however. Apart from taking pictures of half-drunk friends, my chiseled, glistening half-naked body in the bathroom, and pretty much every sunset-bathed skyline in existence, here are five more uses of the phone camera that I've experienced thus far:

1. Ordering food where there is a language barrier - So you're craving to eat something you saw either on display or on somebody else' table, but you're in a country where English seems to have been outlawed five decades ago. The menu is posted where you can't pinpoint what you want without looking like a 3yo wanting his 'mamam'. That's a problem. You could drag the order taker to where you saw the food you want, or you can just snap a picture discretely and just show them what you want.

2. Recording details of a traffic mishap for insurance purposes - Let's be practical here. Accidents happen. Unfortunately for the lot of us, Insurance Companies have this policy of pretending like the term "accident" has not yet been invented until the very moment you claim it happened. They want proof. Usually in the form of a police report, which usually comes from police, which if you live where I do, are as rare as honest government workers. To make it worse, if you move your car from the scene of the incident, the police refuse to do the report, causing you to block the road until they confirm the incident. All the while, you earn the wrath of pretty much every car within the next two kilometers on both directions. So snap a picture instead. Or even better, take a video of it, like you're documenting some rare breaking news. Then move the goddamn car because the only thing worse than a bent fender is getting shot by a road-raging driver because if your bent fender.

3. Taking down blackboard/whiteboard notes - Gone are the days where you have to jot down everything like a chippy idiot in your notebook when you know you'll only be using that information for about 20 minutes many days later. Snap a picture instead. You'll save on paper, ink, and precious time you could spend doing other, more important things - like writing down articles about using camera phones to take notes down.

4. Recording taxi details in an instant - Capture the taxi name, plate number, phone number, and model in an instant, ensuring you can track your women friend's last ride in case shit without having to have them wait until you are able to jot the information down. Like a goddamn BOSS.

5. Remembering obscure places - Let's face it. While Google Maps is awesome, it ain't the one solution to all your locational problems. A small nameless tiangge where you bought your shady bootleg copy of Bang Brothers is probably in a sea of other tiangges inside a mall is not suppored by Google Maps. Solution? Take a picture of the place with the surroundings as reference. That way, when episode 5: Curvaceous Carla turns out to be a dud, you can always go back and swap it with some other sad variation of american pornography without problems.

Pambansang Laro Ng Pilipinas

2011-09-07T10:18:00.002+08:00

Bakit nga ba SIPA ang pambansang laro ng Pilipinas? Wala akong kakilala na naglalaro ng SIPA. Di ko napapanood sa TV ang sipa. Sa totoo lang di pa ako nakakakita ng totoong laro ng sipa bukod sa PE namin nung highschool.

Talaga bang may sport na sipa? O kathang isip lang natin yun? Bakit walang binebentang bolang ratan sa mga sports shop?

Ang sipa lang na alam ko, yung larong pambata na ang gamit e tingga at balat ng kendi. Kung medyo sosyal, yung may parang straw pa na wig, ewan ko kung ano tawag dun. Tassle? Dapat ata yun na lang nag pambansang laro natin. Isipin mo, pag televised sya, pati yung sipa, may sponsor na - nakadisplay dun sa balat ng kendi.

Kung sa dami nang mga sport natin na TOTOONG nilalaro, bakit di na lang antin palitan ang sipa? Eto ang ibang possible suggestions sa national game/sport natin:

1. Patintero Professional League

2. Ultimate Trumpo Championship

3. Putangina Mo Piko Tayo Federation

4. Henry Sy's Chinese Garter Open 2011

5. Pambansang Palakasan ng Inuman

6. Ewan. Matulog na lang tayong lahat.

Jai Alai is a Crazy Sport

2011-09-06T16:09:00.001+08:00

Jai Alai

I was channel surfing the other day when I saw a telecast of a Jai Alai game. Am I the only one who thinks the sport was specifically created so nobody will ever know what the hell is happening at any point throughout the game?

The layout is already confusing. Opposing players are playing side by side, even though they're fighting each other, and they're enclosed by three walls, one of which serves as their target. The ceiling is ridiculously high and the audience are to watch in the missing fourth wall. If the athletes weren't playing with really fast moving balls while wearing grandpa trousers, you'd think you're watching a stage play based on Bucket List .

The crazy doesn't stop there.

The game is played with eight players or two paired players in eight teams. That's EIGHT competing entities in just one game. Imagine if boxing played out the same way, where the referee invites the top 8 seeds of the heavyweight title, gathers them in the ring and says "fuck it, last man standing gets the belt". Every game is a royal rumble. No, make that a battle royale. Each team/player faces off against each other per round, and whoever loses gets replaced by the next pair of queued opponents. So it's no more a tournament than it is a survival of the fittest, with a race to 7 rule implemented. I seriously think that rule is just to make sure anybody who gets too good walks away with the probability of dying from a hit from the fastest moving projectiles in any sport save for archery and trap shooting.

Oh did I mention that? The balls called pelotas are made of woven metal strands wrapped in goat skin (presumably so any injuries will look like a goat teabagged you at 300mph). These balls are hurled by one player at very very fast speeds to the opposing wall, which by laws of physics, bounce in the most unpredicable patterns towards the OTHER player, who is EXPECTED to catch the damn thing with a wooden hurler called a xistera and bounce it back without suffering from various penalties like clinical death. Oh and you're supposed to do this while avoiding hitting or interfering with your opponent who is STANDING right next to you. As far as sportsmanship goes, Nancy Kerrigan wouldn't be able to play this game without getting sanctioned two minutes in.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Unable To Login

2011-08-22T22:05:00.003+08:00

Am I the only one having problems? I also tried logging in via

https://profile.ea.com/login.do

and am unable to do so. Post here if you are having similar issues.

Anything but Classes

2011-08-22T15:40:00.006+08:00

There's this interesting theory relating age and perception of time, in that the younger you are, the longer a unit of time appears to you. Like an adult's perception of a jailtime in years, would be relatively equivalent to a child's afternoon inside a classroom. (I am not shitting you, you can google "age and perception of time" and find medical papers on this issue). But whether or not this is the reason as to why, the 8 hours of classroom-based instruction felt like Reclusion Perpetua doesn't really matter. What mattered was that it did felt like Reclusion Perpetua, and that as kids we'd grovel for any hint of excuse so we don't have to stay glued to our seats, which at the time might as well been filled with spikes.

Luckily, during certain points of the year, we had these school events, which were still boring as fuck, but was a vast improvement from what we felt was destroying our souls - the four walls of the classroom. Here are some of those events:

First Friday Mass - The most common reason why we shouldn't be inside the classroom learning stuff, is that we're hearing mass as a school. The mass lasts for only an hour and it's pretty standard affairs, unless the ever colorful theater club decides to do a production number after the gospel which showcases their "diversity" by portraying a play with an all-girl characterization. (hint: I'm from an all boys school) I remember only two instances when this event broke my expectations - when our teacher thought every song in the mass should be given the DEATHMETAL treatment which turned out so epic, I bet Jesus reconsidered for a moment the ROCK by which he built the Church upon. The other time was when our class had to be placed next to a class of students from an all girls school across the street (that was awesome too).

Living Rosarhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gify - The Living Rosary, and I apologize for what insult I may cause by being honest, is the most boring event in the list, and I sometimes contemplate that somewhat, being stuck inside the classroom is better than this. It's like saying the rosary, but for an entire half day. Each hail mary is represented by some poor student rep who has to stand in the middle of the campus, under the heat of the scorching sun. Lots of intermissions happen in between prayers and at some point, people forget what the hell it is that they're doing. It's like the woodstock of Roman Catholicism. Best part of it is when they launch a set of balloons shaped like a rosary, for reasons which escape me to this day.

Mini fair/Mission Sunday - The only bad thing about these fairs is that they rarely ever happen on a school day. So instead of being saved from classes, you're forced to slice off a chunk of your weekend for these activities. I've covered in lengthy detail how much these fairs suck in another article, which can be read here: http://redkinoko.blogspot.com/2011/01/school-fairs-suck.html

Intramurals - I still don't know why they're called intramurals. Intramurals literally means "inside the walls", which is pretty much everything that we do in school. Why can't we just call it "sports fest" like normal people? Anyway, there are only three sports in my school - basketball, volleyball, and tug of war. The last of the three is taken so seriously, I remember one teacher feeding her players ever so generously right before a match so they can gain more "traction". It's crazy. Also, does chess count as a sport? No? Good. I hate chess.

Recognition Day - The time of the year where people recognize each other, because other days, they don't even know people's names. I don't really have a lot of stories for this event, other than during our batch, the clubs had this internal arrangement of giving awards to other clubs in exchange for receiving awards in return. There was like a black market of awards that flourished weeks before the event, so much so that by the end of the recognition day, the presidents of the Science club and Theater club were so loaded with awards and trophies they had to take the taxi home because they wouldn't have been able to haul their "awards" otherwise. Me? I got me a gold, a silver, and a bronze. Just for the heck of it.

Fire drills - For a school where the windows are made of wood, the flooring is wood, and two out of five buildings are made of ACTUAL wood, we rarely had this sort of thing. Matter of fact, I stayed there for ten years and can only recall two drills, one of which we were required to arrange ourselves alphabetically, which arguably took longer than just walking out of the fucking door, since we are arranged randomly inside the class room. (imagine in an actual fire you're yelling "WHO GOES NEXT AFTER TRINIDAD? HURRY MY LEG HAS CAUGHT FIRE")

Actual fires - The funny part is that this happens more often than the fire drill. If it's not our canteen catching fire, it's the incinerator placed conspicuously beside our oldest wooden building which also used to house the gradeschool library. And it happens again and again. You'd think we're a fireman training university or something. Still, whatever lets us keep away from regular boring classes is most welcome.

Life Updates

2011-08-17T14:24:00.002+08:00

Just a quick roundup of the happenings of my life.

1. As I've mentioned before, it's been a year since my transfer to a new company, which subsequently got absorbed by another company. The honeymoon is definitely over and I feel that my adjustment phase is done. At the end of it, I feel that I have shed a lot of things I used to enjoy to be able to focus on this new work. Living my dreams of giving standup comedy another shot, writing for print, and writing prose have all but ground to a halt. I do feel that I am slowly able to regain back some of those things slowly, but I doubt if I can still manage to get back to how things used to be. Not that I want that.

2. I am starting to grow back my habit of swimming again. I have gained enough pounds to start exporting it to East Africa in bulk. I am trying to curtail my intake in the mean time, which is sort of working. Sort of. I really need to buy a weighing scale so my body mass measurement doesn't have to be as inexact as astrology.

3. I have gotten back to trading stocks. Pretty impressed at my streak this time, as lord knows I start losing my head the moment my pockets begin to fill. I tried to limit my own greed this time and it's paid off. The last few weeks' rollercoaster ride has proven very profitable. As of writing, I'm barely 10% in the market. And I think it's cool that way. God's been really generous, so I have plans on resurrecting my old charities as well. (treating friends doesn't count, so do don't get your hopes up)

4. My super duper secret project is doing good so far. Not great, and there's been a lot of hiccups along the way, but I suppose it's better than having it die in the Ningas Cogon brimstone hellfire. First windfall should be around this month or the next.

5. I'm going back to recreational programming to make the leap into the current generation of software dev. I've gotten myself an Android phone and I've laid out my first project, which will also serve as the "teach yourself how to" sandbox for the mean time. Can't disclose what the app's supposed to do, but here's a hint: it's got somethign to do with networking, black sun, and ARPs.

6. My recent plans into going into importation has failed during the first step. Shit sucks, but given my current loading, I suppose it wouldn't have worked out well anyway. I've no plans on giving up though. Next time I see an opportunity arise, I'll be ready.

7. I have a 1080p camera, a computer fast enough to do the editing, and some ideas in my head. You know where this is headed. :)

8. Im at a point in my life where I know I'm getting where I'm headed but I'm asking if I should be going there in the first place. It's crazy, and there's not even a term for it. Mid-mid-life crisis? Mid-quarter? Quarter-back crisis?

That's about it.

Rainy Day Blues

2011-08-16T13:07:00.003+08:00

As a kid there were only two things that could make my weekday morning exciting: aliens invading the earth and the possibility of cancelled classes. Between the two, the former is less likely, but the latter is less likely to happen as it should be.

I don't care what people say. Kids nowadays have it easy when it comes to announcement of classes. Sure, the decision still gets delayed, depending whether or not the magical tarot cards of the Dep Ed secretary align with the planets, but things like that are just meant to stay the same.

What's important now is that people are actually paying attention, or at least seem like they're exerting effort to pay attention to whether or not kids should be commuting when half of the roads on the way to school has turned into a cholera-powered version of Splash Island.

Back then it was much crazier. The Dep Ed secretary seemed like the grand old man of Mt. Banahaw, who, if could not be found, is actually soundly sleeping to the tune of the falling rain. (and we all know how tempting this becomes during rainy season)

There was no internet yet, so we all had to rely on amazingly distracted AM newscasters who kept on changing topics every 0.5 seconds. One minute you're listening to them look for the DepEd secretary, and then the next, they're telling everybody tuning in, including the hapless kids of course, of a grissly murder that involves intestines being used as ornamental accessories.

To make it worse, at times, you'd get two different radio stations saying different things. Dude A will tell you NCR has no classes (YAY), but in another station, Parañaque, where I went to school, is leaving the decision up to the school principal. Which is which? It's like googling for "will masturbation kill me", whichever answer you prefer, you can find it if you look for it hard enough.

Speaking of "leaving the decision up to the school", it has got to be the worst possible call of Dep Ed next to "make the kids scoop out the floodwater", because quite frankly, I wouldn't trust the same school that makes kids eat canteen food containing weaponized-grades of household bacteria to decide what's safe for students.

To make matters worse, the only way for you to reach the school is by calling the office number, which is, of course in an office, which is, of course, open during.. and I bet you wouldn't really expect this. OFFICE HOURS. You could call the guard, sure, but the best he can give you is whether or not the school gates look like the entry to the Atoll in Waterworld, and whether or not a no flippers no entry policy will be enforced.

So worst case scenario is, half of the known world has already cancelled classes, your neighbors are busy inflating their emergency rafts and bringing up their gargantuan television sets up stilts, and you're hoping for a miracle that wading into the floods to go to school will not give you gangrene, because everybody knows kids who have rotting flesh on them will never hear the end of jokes - the worst thing a kid can contemplate.

SO yeah, you go to school anyway, walk, ride, wade or even swim like you're breaking out of alcatraz and school is your only way out, and then halfway through- or worse, the moment you arrive, you, together with other students who look like they just went through a Pista de San Juan Bautista will find a nice piece of paper the size of a mobilephone sim card saying "Classes cancelled", signed by the principal, and tacked on the most convenient location - i.e. the top of your school tower.

So you brave the weather, accept your fate and try to go home. Half of your day is spent on begging strangers to take you anywhere the water is not waist deep and the wind doesnt rape your wet body. Against all odds and common reasoning, instead of finding yourself a dead corpse in some creek, you get home soaked to the pancreas.

Finally.

Thirty minutes later, it's sunny as fuck and nothing has happened, amd you're left to enjoy the rest of your surprise holiday with a burning fever and foot infection.

Some days.

Deadlines Shouldn't Mean Dead On The Line

2011-08-07T02:24:00.004+08:00

Were it not for the last minute, nothing will ever get done. That's a very popular saying for both the academe and the corporate world. It's practically the most important invention of mankind next to creating fire. Matter of fact, you think fire would ever have been discovered were it not for some caveman manager pressuring the release of the beta? I bet some wise guy in marketing thought the then-new product "fire" can be marketed as that will forever revolutionize how people protest during SONAs. The project got finished at the last minute, but the true purpose won't be achieved until Erap's presidency thousands of years later. The caveman manager invented the last minute. Because last minutes exist, deadlines have to exist too.

It's understandable. If something has a start, it has to have a solid finish. Ask any porn director. Without the proper ending, things will just falter. I mean, look at the movie Clash of The Titans. That was just wrong. A two minute boss fight in a two hour action movie? REALLY?! But I digress.

The long and short of this tirade is that deadlines are important. There's a sense of drama in beating the deadline. Look at how the US congress passed the debt plan at the last minute a few weeks ago. Okay, maybe that was a bad example. Deadlines ensure that people know when things should be done. Otherwise, God help the cooks.

Be it as it may, deadlines should never be the endall of things. Every deadline should have a reason, and in my industry, projects falter the moment those reasons become unreasonable, or worse, forgotten.

In the world of IT, a product release, a project completion is very important. However, there are many things much more important than that. Product stability for one, and sustained effort of the producing team for another. Any reason behind a deadline should have considered both, and in the event that it acts to the detriment of either, that it should have a more important reason for going against any of the two.

Think about it. What's the point of releasing on time if the product is broken? What was that? Sorry, my hearing was blunted by Windows ME screaming at the back of my room of painful memories. What's also the point of releasing on time if the team that produces it, and will have to subsequently work on it in the future again simply burns out? I've seen teams lose swaths of their people because of crunch time burnout. It's never a pretty sight. Is a deadline worth that?

It's a sad fact that even though much of what I'm saying is common sense but things are all to easily lost in the chaos of day-to-day activities. An organization that has multiple levels of management and interworking architecture amplifies this problem. Sometimes, the reason for the deadline somewhat gets lost in between the layers of communication, and things boil down to the reason "because boss said so. are you going to go against boss?" Sure, fear of upper management is understandable. They're the ones handing out the moolah every pay day, afterall. But what's more important is the love of one's work, and consideration of everybody who has a stake in the project. This includes the clients, and those that labor to complete it.

A deadline should always be in everybody's minds when working on a project, but it should never be considered an unmoving notch that will either be reached or breached. It should be a guiding measure that can be moved if the situation calls for it.

And it should never come at an expense greater than what it can gain.

I'm cowriting in another blog

2011-07-21T13:22:00.000+08:00

http://mgakacheapan.blogspot.com/

Chekidout.

DTI Application Form Requirement

2011-07-19T11:04:00.002+08:00

Just a short tip for those people who used or are planning to use the BNRS/WebRNS (the electronic business name registration system) on DTI.GOV.PH's website. When you go through this application process instead of manually filling up forms, you will only be given the printed certificate when you claim the registration at the DTI office. Which is as expected, because hey, it's all electronic.

Unfortunately, some establishments, more notably the guys at the city hall and at the bank (BPI in my experience) tend to look for the signed application form that goes with the certificate, which can only exist if you're doing things manually. All explanations that the BNRS makes this unavailable has so far been troublesome at best and useless at worst.

To workaround this, after registering and obtaining a certificate number just go to http://bnrs.dti.gov.ph and then click on the "Request for Certification" link. Input your certificate number and the year that you registered and then wait for the application information to appear.

Click on "Download in PDF" and then open and print using any PDF reader.

For the case of the bank, they agreed to using this copy provided I sign in their presence. For what purpose, I have no idea, but whatever works works.

So there.

Meralco Time of Use (TOU) Meter Worth It? Theoretical Computations

2011-07-11T02:01:00.006+08:00

Late last year, Meralco quietly rolled out a program where industrial and residential accounts that qualify for the requirements can equip a new meter that is similar to what they use in other countries, wherein the rate at certain times (off peak) is different from the regular (peak) rates for the rest of the day. How's the system faring? Let's have a look see.

This is the timetable set out on Meralco's Website:

Peak Periods

Monday to Saturday 8:00:01 a.m. to 9 p.m. (13 hours)
Sunday 6:00:01 p.m. to 8 p.m. (2 hours)

Off-Peak Periods (where electric rates are lowest)

Monday to Saturday 12:00:01 a.m. to 8 a.m. & 9:00:01 p.m. to 12 midnight (11 hours)
Sunday 12:00:01 a.m. to 6 p.m. & 8:00:01 p.m. to 12 midnight (22 hours)

If you're a working person like me who's only around usually at night, or are with people who are, this sounds like a blessing in disguise. 70% of my monthly consumption comes from air conditioning and water heating, which are both active mostly during the Offpeak hours.

Fucking brilliant? Not so fast.

Now that thing about this whole scheme is that you are going to be using a different pricing scheme that is only seasonally varying compared to the usual meter rates. This is a bit strange, but we'll get into that more in a while. For now, the facts.

This is the time table provided in the Meralco Website.

Now to translate that into pesosesoses, this is what I have in my bill last month using a normal meter:

GENERATION

 Generation Charge (PhP/kWh)            216     5.5265           1,193.72

On the assumption that I will be using a new meter and my Peak/Offpeak ratio is 3:7, here is the new computation:

Offpeak: 151.2 x 3.0925 = 467.57 pesos
Peak: 64.8 x 6.4852 = 420.24pesos

New total: 887.81 pesos

Total savings: 305.91 pesos

That's more than 30% savings right there. And this is talking about a load of 216 KWH, which is very low for a household. There's a catch of course.

To avail of the new system, there are fees to be paid, as indicated here:

On my account, I am using a 1-phase meter as this is what's commonly used in small-medium households. I need not make any additional computations, but let's do it anyway.

The supply charge amounts to about 2.35 pesos but the metering charge practically wipes out a good chunk of savings you may get. In my example,

305.1 - 2.35 - 117.20 = 185.5 pesos net savings per month.

Given the one time application fee of 2,720 pesos and dividing that with the savings per month (ceteris paribus), you will only be able to pay off the installation fee and really start benefiting after 15 months.

To keep this simple, in order to beat the system and save decent money off the new meters, you will have to consume a whole block of kilowatts only at night, because it's 2 pesos cheaper during that time (since the average actual generation cost is 5.5 pesos) as compared to the regular rate of the new meter which is 0.6 more expensive.

Now, in the other countries, this system is also in place, and unlike ours, theirs is mandatory. I will not go on to question the price of the generation charges in our country because we are largely dependent on two very volatile energy sources - coal and hydro, but I will question why in the world did ERC approve flat rating the regular and offpeak rates, where the regular rate is a lot higher than the fix-meter prescribed rate, and have a provision that Meralco can raise the bar if they so wish.

Sure, the 117 peso surcharge is okay. Maybe the extra CPU power to crunch the already computerized billing is that expensive. I'll accept that. But what does the new meter have to do with generation costs? These costs are sent to meralco from the power suppliers. And the ERC has already given them the go signal.

What does that mean? The ERC has forced the producers to sell electricity at varying costs during varying times of the day. That means Meralco is already operating on the variable cost system for everybody, except the customer (us). That means if your meter is old, but you're using a lot of offpeak KWH compared to the regular KWH, all the savings that you should be getting is being accepted by Meralco instead. If this is the case, it's no longer surprising that the cost of generating power in the country could be so high while Meralco is still racking up record incomes in the recent years.

In other words, the less people who buy into this program, the better. They need some people to benefit, because it will give the ERC Meralco's justification for the program, but they also need to minimize the people buying in, and it seems to me they are doing it by keeping the savings marginal and the process convoluted. Less savings for us = more profit for them.

As a conclusion, the new meter can be good for you - eventually, and depending on your lifestyle. I won't claim I am sure that I did not make false assumptions here. I have not tried the system for myself but I am considering it. And it's also possible that the fixed-rates in their website is incorrect, which I'll try to clarify soon.

If you have any corrections or previous experience on this matter, feel free to comment.

Dish Is Wash Cooking

2011-07-06T23:27:00.003+08:00

Ask me the one house chore that I do best aside from sitting down in front of the TV and I'd happily say it's washing the dishes. I understand why a lot of people hate washing the dishes. It's like half of the things you'll be washing has gone through, at some point, both directly and indirectly, into some other person's filthy slobbering mouth - while the other half may or may not contain rotten stuff. It's messy, definitely but I like it for the following reason:

1. I'm in contact to water so it's cool.

2. I have a perfectly good excuse to play with soap bubbles.

I started washing dishes when I was about eight, and at that age I still had to use some sort of stepladder or chair just to reach the sink. My dad always had this "earn-your-keep" way of running things and so when we came to live with him in Saudi, he figured if he's going to give us allowance, we might as well earn it through chores. Of course, Saudi is Saudi and the house we lived in wasn't exactly large so the two main chores that could be delegated was washing the dishes and ironing clothes.
Since nobody would let a 7 year old touch heated appliance any more than a gun shop would issue a license to an insane criminal, I got the dish washing gig.

At first I thought it was a bitch to do. You iron clothes a few times a week, but dirty dishes always have to done everyday, lest you turn your kitchen sink into a miniature primordial soup of bacterial life. Like for example, I remember forgetting to wash the rice cooker the other day for a grand total of four days and when I lifted the lid, it seemed like the fungus had evolved into the Renaissance period. Washing dishes everyday was bad, but on vacations, it turned into a three-times-a-day ordeal. Okay, maybe my sister and mom helped out, but still, it was a pretty shitty deal to me back then. I felt like it was eating into my vacation.

Later on in my life, I finally got to appreciate it more, for during school season, I always have an excuse to put off having to do homework in, so I got enough time to watch TV (Daimos, Voltes V, and La Traydora - the first mexicanovela in the Philippines) while washing the dishes, granted that I do the dishes really slowly.

I'd like to also think that my constant exposure to running water and cool temperatures is what enabled me to have the longest coughless streak - from 3rd grade of gradeschool to college, which is when I stopped washing the dishes because I was already driving and using the computer - and I might get the so called "pasma".

And to those bitching about how hard it is to wash the sebo/grease off the dishes now, as somebody who's been washing dishes for 20 years, we've already come a long way as far as dishwashing technology goes. Those commercials by Joy about they cut grease like a boss? It's all true. Because back then you had two options - a bar of soap, or dishwashing paste. A bar of soap is a bitch to get into the sponge. After a few uses, the powder washes off and you have to reload again. The other option is to drown it in water first so you can use the concentrate - same banana. It's just as bad in washing, and it's hard to get the soapy smell off.

Now the DISHWASHING PASTE. Now that's an improvement. You got it to stick to your sponge - and that's about it. It's terribly shitty at removing stains, grease, and odor - and for some reason it has a nasty habit of leaving behind, well, paste. Everytime my mom sees that a piece of rice or paste was left in a single fork, plate, or glass -she'd be more than glad to empty out the entire dish rack into the sink to repeat the arguably shitty process of washing all over again. This is probably why, even as an adult, I have the same sort of disdain at dishwashing paste as I would, for example, rapists.

At some point over the years, AXION, specifically, thought it would be cool to change the paste into GEL, which made the paste look like gelatin. I loved it. It smelled nice, and looked fun to play with. I loved it, at least until I got to use it for the first time and realized that because it IS gelatin, it will not stick to pretty much any sponge, and just end up fragmenting into smaller pieces and get stuck into the utensils and get me, of course, a healthy dose of "WASH ALL OF THEM AGAIN UNTIL YOU GET IT RIGHT" treatment. Thankfully, after a few tubs, a few months, and probably a stroke of sobering for the people in AXION, they decided that the gel thing is bullshitting nobody anymore.

Joy, on the other hand, now joy just made life a whole lot easier. It's syrupy so the sponge will easily lap it up. When diluted, it acts as a natural grease-remover, and when concentrated, it becomes the Jovito Palparan of sebo, the type of substance grease tells their kids to always pray they'll never encounter. The moment Joy became a staple washing substance, dishwashing was a breeze.

Even nowadays, I still find dishwashing a good way to relax. There's something about the way water interacts with the dishes and utensils that calms my head. I know it sounds quirky but I'll admit it does. When life is bad, and there's no good news in sight, I switch on the faucet and tell myself "ah at least there's running water, a good sponge, and dishwashing liquid thats neither GEL OR PASTE."

All That And A Bag Of Chips

2011-07-05T14:36:00.002+08:00

Ever wondered why junk food containers seem so easy to open and yet can be a bitch to open without having to use your teeth, thereby making you look like you're an ugandan refugee desperate for food? How hard is it to make packaging that doesn't require cold hard steel to open up? I have no idea but that's just the case for every other junk food I eat. We should start considering putting our valuables inside potato chip packs. We'd catch robbers cold, with them still at the scene of the crime trying to bite the shit out of the container.

Still on the topic of chips, VCut and Potato Chips are fucking con jobs. Thirty seconds after opening the bag and you're already down to those shitty potato crumbs. How does that happen? How do you eat so fast? After exhaustive research and cloak-and-dagger journalism, I have found the answer. The trick of the magic is that [SPOILER ALERT] the bag was never full. The guys who pack the potato chips actually places just three chips, seals the damn bag with enough air for a lunar landing mission so you'd think there's a lot inside, and then punches the fuck out of bag so that only crumbs are left. That way, the makers of VCut can sustain their factory operations with just three pieces of potato per month.

How about Piattos? What's the driving force that made people think "You know what would be a fun snack? A hexagon." Why not a triangle? Why not an octagon? We can call it UFC snacks - the snack fighters crunch on when their bones get crunched up. Available in dried blood barbecue and what-the-fuck-is-coming-out-of-his-mouth yellow cheese. Fortified with steroids and adolescent stereotyping!

Humpy Dumpy is a really fast way to lose friends. Open a bag up and you'll never have to wonder what abandonment issues mean ever again. I don't know a lot about gastronomy but I do believe that you can increase product sales by something as simple as NOT MAKING YOUR CHIPS SMELL LIKE A HUNDRED DRUNK RATS SNUCK INTO YOUR FACTOR AND TOOK A PISS ON YOUR FLAVORING VAT. I had a bag in gradeschool where a bag of Humpy Dumpy unfortunately spilled. 20 years later, IT STILL SMELLS LIKE RAT PISS.

Lastly, stay away from Chocolate flavored Cheese Curls. ITS CHEESE. CHEESE CURLS. WHY WOULD YOU PUT CHOCOLATE INTO THE EQUATION? CHEESE AND CHOCOLATE DONT MIX. Here's an open letter to the manufacturers:

Dear Jack and Jill,

Please stay the fuck away from the guys who made Humpy Dumpy. They are a bad influence for you and the substances they make you inhale deteriorate your sense of taste.

p.s. Chippy is salty enough. STOP INCREASING SALT CONTENT EVERY MONTH.

Thank you,
Chips lover.

10 Year Fucking Saga

2011-07-03T02:30:00.001+08:00

Harry Potter first came out 10 years ago, at a time when the hottest thing online was mailing groups, mobile phones could be operated with one hand, the fastest way to watch a movie is through VCDs, the PS2 cost 35k pesos, the iPod did not have a USB interface, and a burger-and-fries meal cost 30 bucks. The tweens you saw at the cinema back then have graduated from highschool, college, and are probably working with you at the office. That is what 10 years means. Now are you going to tell me the story's ending only just now?

Bataan Nuclear Power Plant Resort/Tour Info

2011-06-28T10:43:00.005+08:00

In a bid to prove to people that the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant is safe, tourism officials are now opening up the single highest concentration of national debt for curious lookers, vacationers, and tourists.

While I get the idea of having a nuclear plant for a tourist attraction, I can't wrap my head around the idea that doing so will prove the plant safe, given that the plant a) has never been activated and b) is more than 30 years old. That's practically tantamount to having people sit inside those ancient propeller planes in Sangley Point to prove that they're still good to fly if there's enough political will.

From the pictures, the BNPP is still in good condition. Good enough to tour, but I'm not really sure whether its good enough to house materials that can melt the face of a man and pollute our national waters for the next thousand years. Two different things really. Entry ticket is 20 pesos and tourists get a tour of the enormous concrete structure that sits 18 metres (60 feet) above the ocean on a mountainside.

Anyway, apart from the nuclear power plant daytour, they are also opening up the beach beside the plant. They also converted the nearby Environment monitoring station into a barracks-style villa that can house up to 45 guests (although I have my doubts on the capacity) including a room that can house 7 guests for 2700 pesos (Cheaper than Sogo Hotel's budget rooms). These prices are probably going to be adjusted for the demand, which I'm sure there will be a lot of. Because hey, we paid for it, we will be paying for it for a very long time, we might as well see what we got in exchange, right?

I'll be updating this page with more details as they come out, including the opening times, contact numbers, booking info, and how to get there.

Greek Debt Woes

2011-06-27T23:43:00.001+08:00

2800 years later and Greece is once again the center of the world. It's amazing how globalization has ensured that I have to pay attention to what some Greek solon decides to do with another country's money that can't be any more related to me than I am related to, say for example, Lady Gaga. And yet, here I am. Here we are. Where is Kevin Sorbo when you need him?

Curtain Calls

2011-06-26T18:31:00.001+08:00

Originally slated for publishing in an issue of Statement that never came.

Statement takes a look at the legacy of the comedians who up to their last moments refused to go quietly into the night.

On and off screen

Cipriano Cermeño II, more popularly known as the albino bisayan comedian Redford White, has been one of the enduring icons of Philippine comedy for almost three decades. Since his debut as a skinny Filipino version of a famous Saturday morning cartoon character in the movie Hee-Man: Master of None, Redford White has starred in dozens of movies and almost as many TV shows. His trademark of croaky, high-pitched whines and facial expressions that could be recognized for miles a way were guaranteed sources of laughter, even in this age of sophisticated humor.

Little known to many, Cipriano was in fact a quiet, timid man off the camera who used his onscreen character very professionally. Outside the set, his friends see him as a serious mild-mannered man who, as coworker Eric Quizon describes him, "a man who believed in his craft and valued his work." During his final days, many friends from the industry who visited Redford were surprised to see him laughing as heartily as he did on camera. True to his calling, Cipriano left with a good laugh from him and those around him.

Through thick and Thin

For many years, Palito has appeared in a lot of comedy films and is one of the most recognizable actors when it comes to comedy. Known as Reynaldo Alfredo R. Hipolito, Sr. in real life, Palito started doing comedy as early as the 60's up to the mid 70's when there was a general decline in comedy. Palito hit the peak of his career during the boom of comedy films in the mid 80s. It was during this time that he starred in a number of major roles in movies, most of them cheekily named, like Rambuto and James Bone. Palito is the textbook example of slapstick self-deprecating style of humor that is pervasive in the humor industry even today. Later in his life,

Palito laid low from the movie industry and starred in independent movies such as M.O.N.A.Y. (Mistaeyks obda neyson adres Yata) as lately as 2007. He also continued to routinely play with his band Palito n d Gang every Tuesday on one of Pagcor's smaller casinos in Manila. He also occassionaly appeared in the local music scenes such as this year's Muziklaban. After coming home late one night last April, Palito was rushed to the hospital due to stomach pains and died five days later due to lung complications from his long history of smoking.

From a long vanishing list

Cipriano and Reynaldo are not alone. They join an ever growing list of comedians who have passed on and left a legacy of films and shows that helped define the preferred humor of an entire generation. Rene Requiestas, Cachupoy, Pugo, Panchito, Pablito Sarmiento, Jr. (Babalu), Ricardo Castro (of the Reycard Duet fame), Tommy Angeles (Mang TOmas of Home Along d' Riles) are just a few of the more recognizable names of the comedians that have departed since the glory days of the 80s and early 90s. Looking back, very few people from the heydey of self-styled pinoy comedy movies are still in the limelight today, including Joey De Leon, Andrew E, Vic Sotto, and the iconic Dolphy Quizon. It's a sad affair to see the lot of these people go, who despite all the criticisms of the straightforwardness of their schtick, have left and undeniable mark that lingers on even with the movies today.

Legacy of Laughs

Together with the comedians of their time, these actors worked with prevailing themes of underdogs going against the norms of society. The protagonists serve as the butt of most of the jokes and almost always live a laughably dismal life. Through the course of the movies, the heroes are given a chance to redeem themselves, beat the bad guys, and learn a lesson or two at the end. Albeit formulaic, these movies proved to be simple, easy to relate to, easy to digest, and at the end of the day, entertaining for the majority of the audience. Brevity is the soul of wit, and the simplicity of the plots prove to be it's most brilliant factor.

The typical comedy movie serves as a container of the Filipino way of thinking when it comes to humor. The sometimes somewhat brutal side of showing ugly people getting beat up over and over again, the blunt insults, the slapstick, probably painful situations the characters are consistently exposed to, and the self-depricative attitude show a culture of making fun of what's otherwise unbearable. The cruel but honest sense of humor is invoked and elaborate in these films. It might sound too much to the uninitiated - but it does work.

There is depth, however, for those who meant to look. An article made by Benito Vergara on comedy movies of the 80s raised various points generally tackled by the movies. One common recurring theme in these movies, according to Mr. Vergara, is the apparent lampooning of western icons from Rocky Balboa in Rocky Tu-log, to Rambo in Palito's Rambuto. The iconic movie Istarsan starring Joey de Leon and the late Rene Requestas proved to be one of the most successful movies that worked with this trope - and in this way, the common crowd can find a more relatable version of the more famous originals, and brings them closer to what might be seen as a higher status for them.

For all the rhymes and reasons of the workings of comedy movies, bottomline is for the most of us, they were funny and they still are funny, even after some jokes have lost their relevance. As part of the generation that grew up looking at these movies for entertainment, nostalgia or not, they were completely entertaining.

The Next Generation

The fading of stars from the last generation, however does not mean the fall of the industry as a whole, much like the folding of the comic industry in the 70s, the slack of comedy movies (or all Filipino movies in general) from the previous decade created a craving for Filipinos to see one of their favorite genres back in the big screen. The past few years have shown an increase of comedy films produced, and possibly even more in the coming years. This new wave of Pinoy comedy films are spearheaded by both the remaining golden actors from the past and the new artists, most of whome who have been shaped by those talented few, those unforgetabble silverscreen clowns, whose lifelong arts have left their mark in film history - how to make the Filipino forget their problems even for a short while and laugh the good laugh.

Random Thoughts

2011-06-25T17:36:00.002+08:00

Why do some people (mostly old people) take forever when withdrawing money from an ATM? Now I'm not too sure about how they do it but from the amount of button presses they're making, they could probably have activated the entire nuclear arsenal of America already.

Smallville is in it's 10th season. 10 SEASONS. That's 10 years. If Clark Kent was 17 when Smallville started, he'd be 27 and still living with his parents, cozy with not being superman, not having his uniform, and not having a career. What the fuck.

We should probably start building roofs made from vulcaseal already. That product should sell well. You can pay my consulting fees after I've turned you into overnight billionaires already.

Why are people surprised with the abundance of water lilies (or hyacinths if you feel like being a dirty hipster) in our rivers? It's not like they just landed one night to astound us with their presence the following morning. If that were the case, even I'd be picking my jaw up from the floor.

When Noynoy congratulated La Salle in its 100th year earlier this month, he mentioned two achievements the institution has done for this country: Let Lozada stay in La Salle Greenhills, and let the Namfrel use the CSB gym - two achievements which were basically done by letting people use campus space. As far as sociopolitical contributions are concerned, those have got to be the laziest achievements ever. Animo!

Governments Should Be Run Like Corporations

2011-06-15T18:52:00.002+08:00

MANILA, Philippines—The Supreme Court affirmed with finality the dismissal of three officials of the Public Estates Authority (now the Philippine Reclamation Authority) implicated in the cost padding of the P1.1-billion, five-kilometer President Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard in Pasay City.

So let me get this straight. Our bureaucratic red tape has gotten so bad that to fire three fuckers for screwing up on the job, it involved the highest judicial body in the country, 9 years (the filing of the complaint was in 2002) and 15 pages of reasoning? The only way that sort of effort for firing somebody can be justified is if we're firing somebody like Dolphy from the position of King of Comedy. Or maybe the Pope. Maybe. But these guys - these guys are MANAGERS. You know, a position a few steps above that guy who serves your hamburger in McDonalds.

Whatever happened to the good old "GET THE FUCK OUT YOU USELESS CUNT," way of thinking? If you have somebody under you who is acting inutile, shouldn't it be your god given right to replace that person? Take for example Virgilia Torres of LTO. Innocent or not, she's in hot water - and let's face it, the LTO hasn't been run this bad since the time horses were the only things plying our roads. People are clamoring for her resignation. Her resignation. I can't seem to wrap my mind around that idea. We're paying for this person to work, and she doesn't do as we please, and then the best we can do to replace her is to ask her to step down? Is there any other job in the world were that happens?

To be fair, the Japanese companies never really fire people. They shift useless people around like I shift dirt in my apartment when I have no dust pan. That's to humiliate people and then they finally man up and resign. Not here. If there's anything we can learn from the case of Merceditas Guttierez, dignity is not a prerequisite of life, however low. It sometimes makes me wonder how she manages to sleep at night without having to hire somebody to knock her out cold with a baseball bat every time.

Fire people. Our government and our leaders (those who matter, anyway) should start growing balls and kicking other peoples'. Hell, if we can't trust them, make the public do it. Let's have a show like Showtime where we get to vote out one official per week. We'll show nominations on Sunday, give them a week to state their case and a week for us to text in our votes, and then on Friday, Toni Gonzaga and Lucky Manzano will announce who will get escorted by the ever manly KC Concepcion who will punch the guy in the gut and drag the carcass away to be fed to Vina Morales for dinner. The proceeds of the text messages can be spent to support the rehabilitation of our nation's most endemic life form - Noynoy Aquino's hair.

It'd be the perfect show, and then we can use it to replace other shows so we won't have to put up with that show filled with hispanic-looking actors playing the role of protomalays. What's the name of that shit again? Amaya? Maaan I hate that show.

Classic Filipino Games Revisited

2011-06-09T19:03:00.000+08:00

A few years back, I did a piece on why the older, more traditional games are better than the cheap, made-in-fucking-china alternatives that are being shoved down our throats by cartoons. Granted that you did not grow up in a sheltered environment like the Manila Juvenile Correction Center, you probably know that we're just scratching the surface as far as games go. Here are some more traditional Filipino games that are worth mentioning, focusing on games that don't need anything to play other than friends.

1. Cops and Robbers/Agawan Base
The two games are somewhat similar, in the way Robin Hood and Expresident Arroyo are similar in that they have the same mechanics (rob the rich blind) but have different end goals (the former gives back to the poor, the latter robs the poor blind afterwards). Each team has two bases. In Cops and Robbers, the cop team get to catch robbers who leave their base, while the robbers try to free their caught bretheren by reaching the cop base without getting tagged. Why the robbers would want to venture out of their base at the start of the game in the first place is beyond me. It must be a kid thing. In agawan base, both teams are cops AND robbers, with the person who left his base later having the power of a "cop". This usually leads in disputes as to who left the base last, but is quickly settled with a nice, clandestine punch in the gut. A game that has more than 15 people in each team is the best kind, specially when 12 people are already caught and then somebody tags the enemy base and causes a jailbreak. Absolute. F'ing. Chaos. Just the way we liked it.

2. Luksong Tinik
This game tests the ability of kids to jump as high as they can, by leaping over the hands and feet of a player placed vertically on the ground, on top of the other. First person who trips replaces the guy who is risking breaking his fingers and toes so the others have something to jump over. Last person who trips is usually the guy who jumps shittily enough to crash on top of the unfortunate limbs. As the person who needs to provide the "obstacles" need to use both is feet as well, that person will have to do it sitting on the ground, and everybody agrees this is a very shitty game to play outdoors during the rainy season.

3. Luksong Baka
This version of the leaping game solves the risk having your fingers trampled by your overgrown classmate who probably shaves twice a week, and replaces it with the issue of having your spine broken when somebody the equivalent of the national animal of burden leaps over you and plants his hands on your arched back. Arguably harder than Luksong Tinik due to the higher obstacles set, luksong baka also features different types of "asshole" tricks such as deliberately burying your fingernails on the back of the obstacle or just fucking ramming the shit out of the poor guy. As with luksong tinik, first guy who fails to vault replaces the obstacle.

4. Patintero
Admittedly, Patintero does require drawing/vandalism implements to draw the lines where the defending team can stay at, but then again, that'd be underestimating the creativity of really bored children. Here are some of the line-drawing substitutes I've seen through out the years:

- Broken plant pot shard
- Yarn
- Water drawn using a coke liter bottle
- Fat crayons
- Virgin blood [disputed]

Depending on how the lines are drawn, they can either start disappearing before even the first round ends (see water-based lines), or they can be so hard to remove. Some of the lines drawn by Rajah Sulayman as a kid are so well drawn, they're probably still visible today, to baffle our archeologists. (Headline: Ancient Filipinos had minature parking lots) Patintero is a lot like boxing, understandably always in favor of the faster player a with longer reach. Also, this has got to be one of the best Filipino sports to bring in the trashtalking. Since you're going to be facing your opponent face to face within barely an arms reach, anything you'll say will be on a personal level - and unlike the game of Trumpo, the opponent will not be holding a sharp rusting nail in his hand.

Red on Twitter

2011-06-08T14:32:00.003+08:00

If you promise to follow me on twitter, I promise to stop secretly following you home every Thursday night.

http://twitter.com/redkinoko

How To Solve EDSA Traffic

2011-06-06T17:41:00.001+08:00

I am writing this article to address one of the largest problems plaguing the main thoroughfare of Metro Manila - Sharon Cuneta's EDSA posters. No! Wait! I meant traffic! My mind slipped! Sharon's posters are large, but they're hardly a problem. Unless they start falling on people, of course. Then we'd have real issues, such as should we still consider Sharon crushing people with her ass a joke? (probably not, but it's worth debating)

Anyway, the past few months, various measures have been introduced in an attempt to declog the overloaded road, from the reintroduction of the color coding scheme, to the catching of colorum buses, to the removal of any bus that has the name or face of Claire De La Fuente in it. So far, it hasn't really been working.

Of course so far, the issue has been that there are far too many buses that ply the route everday and that there are never enough passengers to fill all the buses up, which causes them to wait longer, which causes lanes to get blocked, and causes the private vehicles to get snarled in traffic. Makes sense, but then again, we can also reverse the idea.

I remember before when I was still working in my last company, I'd go to the MRT Guadalupe station every night and see the problem in a different light. "Holy shit," I thought, "we sure have a lot of signboards with half-naked men. The foreigners must think the entire nation's ga... " WAIT! That' s not it! I meant "we sure have a lot of private vehicles!" Yeah, that was what I was thinking. For real. So yeah. Anywaaaaay...

What if the issue is that there are too many private vehicles filled with people who could in turn fill the buses that are parked on the side of the road? If the buses were utilized more and the private vehicles would occupy less space, there'd be less waiting time for the buses and there'd be less ball-punching traffic every night.

There's the argument that buses are asshole drivers, but as a driver I often think that for every "FUCK YOU AND YOUR CLAN" that I utter at a public vehicle, I do so at three private ~~assholes~~ vehicles. Because it's true. The number coding? How many vehicles are using NBI carplates? JOURNALIST carplates? LAWYER carplates? You never see these infernal cheating devices in buses. You dont see a "BUSSDRIVER" carplate in front of a bus. You just dont. It's the private vehicles that tend to cheat more. More specifically, it's those oversized SUVs. I hate those with a passion.

It makes sense. Private vehicles are the bane of EDSA. But why is it that we hardly pinpoint private cars as the culprit? Well most of the lawmakers aren't fans of buses other than the ones that they privately own. I bet Toyota and Honda are in it too. We're probably the only country in the world where there's no mechanism to remove old and poorly maintained cars on the road. It's not uncommon to see cars that are third, fourth, and fifth hand, some of them initially purchased from the first batch of Spaniards that landed in our country some 400 years ago (you'll know them by their carplates that start with the letter Ñ )

Most countries put penalties in trying to make a car stay on the road past its effective life. I know coming up with rules that will exclude some cars from being used in the country's roads paid for everybody (except for Lawyers and Doctors who refuse to file proper taxes and homeless people) seems unfair. But that's just life. The public transportation system is there for a reason and it's not that it's being overutilized - it's underutilized and mismanaged.

And the next time somebody who drives a car to and from school/work starts bitching about EDSA traffic, tell him to commute. He'd be contributing to the solution in so many ways, not to mention that by increasing the pool of commuters he's minimizing the odds of some other commuter getting hit with a falling Sharon Cuneta billboard.

Statistics worth both ways.

No Comment

2011-06-02T13:44:00.004+08:00

Ever noticed how, guys can complement each other's articles of clothing with only the minimal level of care whether or not their praise will be interpreted as homosexual advance? Nice shirt, buddy. That is an awesome cap. or "Whoah, those are killer kicks man." It's all good. That's some brotherly love right there.

One thing you never ever hear anything about though is what is essentially the largest article of clothing you usually wear: your PANTS.

There's no easy way to do praise pants. I mean, there's no easy way to do it without sounding like you dig other guys.

Nada.

You wanna know why? Because there's no part of the pants that doesn't hint that you were looking at parts of another guy no straight guy would dare even lay a second's glance at.

Leg, buttocks, or crotch. Take your pick.

Like if you notice the guy's belt buckle, that means there's evidence that your eyes were wandering into the groinal homolust territory. Even the pants label is just a few inches of the "oh wow you were totally checking my ass out" region.

That's probably why nobody ever knows about what kind of pants are fashionable. They're the taboo of men's clothing, next to underwear of course, but you get the point.

No pants? No comment.

How To Fix Skype Crashes

2011-05-27T11:19:00.002+08:00

If you've been using skype like me, then yesterday you also probably encountered a problem where the Skype client app crashes upon start up. Apparently this does not affect all versions of skype, but for those that are affected, this is the workaround suggested:

1. Go to C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Skype

2. Rename shared.xml to shared2.xml

3. Go to your skype username folder.

4. Rename config.xml to config2.xml

5. Restart Skype.

This should fix the issue.

Proof of Ownership

2011-05-26T22:30:00.001+08:00

This post is to prove that my proof of ownership sent May 26, 2011 9:25PM Manila Time is valid.

Hash is as follows:
81C844D3AE4B79AD2D9B077C642B1C19BC51256609FAC37B2D573BA923E14505

Signs ng HR kung tanggap ka ba or hindi

2011-05-25T21:36:00.001+08:00

1. Pag naamoy mo na parang may sinusunog sila na papel ilang segundo matapos mong ibigay yung resume/forms mo, malabo na yun.

2. Pag sinabi ng HR "Please stay here while I call the security..."

3. Pag ang parting words nila eh "Don't call us. We won't call you."

4. Kapag hindi na makahinga yung HR sa katatawa at kinakailangan syang ilabas ng interview room in a stretcher.

5. Kapag may naamoy ka na teargas.

6. Kapag nakita mo ang picture mo sa labas ng opisina nila na may nakalagay "Wag tularan"

7. Kung ang pangalan mo ay Osama Bin Laden

8. Kung ang response ng HR sa mga questions mo ay malakas na paghilik.

9. Kung isa sa mga interview questions ay "Saan preso ka dati nagwork?"

10. Yung final interview mo eh yung hepe sa presinto.

Fast Five : A Fast Review

2011-05-23T17:02:00.001+08:00

Fast Five is, quite possibly, the most fun Fast and The Furious movie that I have seen in quite a while. Quite relatedly, it is also the least Fast and The Furious looking movie in the series. To be fair, there aren't a lot of places where you can drive in the Favella. The movie is like a pot session with friends. As long as you don't try to check the facts and maintain a healthy dose of not-give-a-fucks, you're sure to have fun.

Let it be known however that Fast Five is the last movie you'd like to watch if you want to learn about Rio De Janiero, because if you'd do that, you'd think all Brazilians are either armed with a firearm, or dirt poor, or corrupt cops, or all of the above. It's so stupid, you'd think if people were paying attention they'd be crying racist by now. (Hint: nobody cares)

Did I mention most of the stuff in the movie don't make sense? Here are a few of them:

1. A good portion of the preparation movie is about trying to negotiate a hairpin curve to avoid camera detection. Which they don't use anyway.

2. Considering these are people who are on the run, it's surprising that they were able to get cars AT ALL. Where do these people get the money? ANd if they do have that amount of money, why do they still have to live like they're gonna starve if they stop boosting cars? Nevermind the fact that Vin Diesel was able to somehow smuggle his old car into his luggage halfway across the Americas. I can't even smuggle a toe clipper onboard.

3. At one point, Vin Diesel's character comes out in the open to taunt Dwayne Johnson's character. They hang out in a party which turns out to be the most heavily armed rave crowd I have seen in my life. And for some reason, despite Vin going to Rio for the first time in his life, these people somehow feel indebted to him, to the point that they'd willingly put a gun in the face of an AMERICAN PARAMILITARY OUTFIT WITH MUSCLES THAT ARE BIG ENOUGH TO REQUIRE LICENSES TO CARRY AROUND. What's Vin's explanation? "THIS. IS. BRAZIL!" What the fuck.

4. At the start, when Vin turned against their co-criminals and was escaping with Paul Walker, he sped alongside the train so Paul could hop off on the car, only to have it fly off a goddamn cliff. Note that there was no real need for Paul to hop off. Or for Vin to crash the car. Vin could have stopped the goddamn car, and Paul could ahve gotten off at the next station.

4b. While we're at it, after dunking the car into a body of shallow water and SURVIVING, Paul and Vin walk up to the shore to find enemies who *GASP* were waiting there ALL ALONG, as though they expected the two to do something THAT STUPID AND SURVIVE. Either they're psychic or they're the world's most optimistic latinos, I don't know. AND even then, seeing as falling off a cliff takes seconds, that meant these bad guys travelled faster than freefalling bodies to reach the bottom of the cliff in time to pose like machos looking for gringos to kill.

5. Nevermind the magical vault chase scene and the spectacular absence of any rational laws of physics. That shit was just too ridiculous. Added to that, the totally unnecessary police car race scene. It took a while for me to realize I wasn't watching an arcade racing game replay.

4. Towards the end, they finally get the dough. It's all in Brazilian tender. How the fuck do you smuggle that out of the country?

The whole movie feels like it's Ocean's 11 if Danny Ocean was an overbuffed simpleton. In addition to his ragtag gang of specialists, he has also enlisted the help of "FUCK YOU AUDIENCE". It's a heist that pays less attention to the meticulousness that goes into an elaborate heist and replaces it with "FUCK YEAH" moments that defies logic and kills braincells at the same time. You'd be an idiot to try and take this thing seriously. Serioulsy.

That said Fast5 is solid, fucking stupid, and fun.

Mar Roxas : Linecutting Asshole

2011-05-17T13:00:00.005+08:00

It's been two years after the country collectively said "Binay's ugly, scheming, and probably in league with the devil, but we'd rather vote for him than Mar Roxas." Now, Mar is getting a position higher than the one that he ran for. You gotta at least admire the guts of this guy. I personally cannot think of a worse insult than having people pick somebody who quite possibly eats babies for a hobby over him in a popularity contest. Apparently, Roxas is too dense to realize that quite possibly, the people do not want him anywhere near a position of power.

What kind of sick twisted system allows somebody who lost an election get what he doesn't fucking deserve? We're giving him the Chief of Staff position - which is already an extension of the presidency. Given the mental acumen of our current president which is not above that of a week-old carrot, this position might as well be the most powerful in the land. AND WE'RE HANDING IT TO A GODDAMN LOSER.

What does that teach our kids? If you can't win fair and square, find friends who will let you cut the line? To make things worse, the position he's lined up for doesn't even exist yet. The PALACE is basically creating one out of thin air just to accommodate his undemocratic ass.

What's so special about Mar Roxas anyway? The only way I can understand the fervor by which Malacañang is actively trying to find a place for him in the palace is if he eats coal and shits gold-encrusted diamonds. That'll definitely solve a lot of problems. News flash though - HE DOESN'T. The only distinguishing feature he has at the moment is he's married to Korina Sanchez, who is 50% journalist and 50% prefabricated plastic.

Seriously, fuck that asshole. I'd sooner have voted Jay Sonza as vice than him.

At least Jay is honest about what he wants:

Another shot at Mel Changco.

No Cow

2011-05-16T13:47:00.002+08:00

Aerodynamically, a cow should not be able to fly, but it doesn't know that fact so that never prevents it from being at heights as high as 30,000 feet in the air.

Served in airline meals after the passenger decides between chicken or beef.

Philippine National ID - Why It Makes Sense

2011-05-15T16:02:00.001+08:00

This issue maybe a bit late, but let me take a shot anyway. It's still as relevant today as it was 7 years ago.

I remember when I was in college, people were pushing for a National ID system and as expected, it was the subject of much debate. People who were against the thing had come up with a lot of reasons:

1. It can be used by the government to track down each and every one of us.
2. It will cost a lot to implement
3. (this coming from a DLSU student council) If we lose our card, we lose our identity
4. It will promote extrajudicial killings

Long and short of it is, barring point #2, most reasons given are buck retarded.

Here's why:

1. It can be used by the government to track down each and every one of us.
It's the job of the government to track us down. Whether it's for paying taxes, knowing whether or not we're breaking laws, or just dead already. That's why they're called the government. The same data that the government already has will just get more organized, hence easier to reference. While at first it may sound shitty on your part, if it's going to work for other people too, it can be beneficial in so many ways. More on that later.

2. It will cost a lot to implement
This is true, but the cost of implementation will be easily overtaken in the long run by reduced overhead in maintaining a lot of other incompatibly information systems. Do you remember your SSS no, TIN no, License no, Passport no, and Birth Serial no? If you can't, the government has to remember millions of those datasets and be expected to connect them all together if need be. That sort of responsibility costs money to enforce. In HK, do you know how long it takes to clear immigration? One minute. Your ID, then your finger print, then you're good to go.

3. (this coming from a DLSU student council member) If we lose our card, we lose our identity.
Seriously, fuck the guy who uttered this. I hope he's already dead at this point in time so as to minimize the chance that his asinine genes will be passed on to the next generation. This is not a valid argument when discussing the matter with people with IQs not pegged with the current Peso to dollar rate.

4. It will promote extrajudicial killings
Since the first three arent really very compelling, I suspect the opposition tossed this one in just to make things festive and relevant to GMA's favorite pasttime. I honestly doubt giving a unique number to every citizen will cause them to be the target of deathsquads. It's just fucking impossible. But hey, might as well right?

See, every person needs an a unique IDENTIFIER. That's what a National ID is. More than a plastic piece of card, a national ID is a number, a set of characters, a sequence that is unique for every citizen. It's more unique than names, because as any of the six bajilion Filipino Chinese living in Binondo named Alex Tan will tell you, names can be very common and confusing. The national id can be used in place of all the government IDs that we have right now, the SSS, NBI, TIN, Passport, Birth Cert, etc.

How can that be evil?

If ever there's any evil there, it's seen by subservient types - people who like the system as it is - fragmented. Faking a personality is all the harder when everybody is referencing everybody, in the same way it's easier in Friendster to create fake accounts because pictures back then weren't being tagged by other people. In facebook, if your account has no references on other accounts, it's easily pegged as fake.

The benefits are very easy to figure out. And although theyre trivial, anybody who's transacted with the government will agree that these will do a lot to improve the average lifespan of Filipinos and reduce overall deaths by red tape frustration:

1. NBI Clearances will no longer have false hits. Meaning, even if another guy with the same name as you is out there killing babies and raping cows, you won't be held against it.

2. Non-taxpayers can be easily deprived of government services until they are forced to pay. This will improve collections and LEVEL OUT THE FIELD FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO GET AUTO-DEDUCTIONS EVEN BEFORE WE TOUCH THE MONEY.

3. Voting will be a lot easier. When a death certificate is filed, mark the status of the ID profile as deceased. It's easier to track who's dead and who's alive when the status of voters is updated in a same list as birth/death certificates. As an added bonus, tax payers skipping payment can be prevented from voting. Imagine that.

4. No need to apply for 5 different cards. You just need one. Bank applications can be easier, as with pretty much everything that needs to verify your existence.

5. It's be so much easier to associate people to anything from phone numbers to internet addresses, making it all the more easier to track down kidnappers, and other criminal, subversive elements. It may sound draconian, but come on, if you're not planning anything radical, why should you be alarmed?

FHM's TOP 100 ?

2011-05-12T15:23:00.000+08:00

Okay, this reaction is a bit on the slow side. This is mainly because I am a cheapskate and only buy back-issues when it comes to stuck-in-puberty magazines like FHM. It's cheaper that way, and provided that the magazine is not second hand, a hot picture six months ago is still just as hot now. It's not like FHM is current events or anything. Breaking news is for today, but cheap shitty penis jokes are forever.

So I picked up FHM's Top 100 Sexiest Women Issue the other day and found that Regine Velasquez is in TOP 7. Holy crap huh? Sure, at some point Sharon Cuneta was in the list too, but never that in such a high rank. And to be fair, this was 10 years ago, and guys who read FHM like construction equipment too, so tonnage wise at least, Sharon's got dibs for a slot.

No. It's fucking 2011. Regine Velasquez may have been hot at some point in her career. And yes, at some point in may life, I considered her hittable. But then again, at some point in my life, I also thought the Pentium 2 was the most powerful thing in the planet. Interestingly, those two facts occurred at about the same timespan - about a decade and a half ago!

What happened Philippines? Has our love for retro reached a point where even our libido has gotten affected? Regine Velasquez, in case you aren't paying attention is OLD. I'd accept if she's in FHM's Top 100 Historical landmarks instead. She's ancient and renovated enough to pass as a UN heritage site.

To top it off she's married AND pregnant. If we're going by the levels of handicap as measurement of scores, the moment she gets a minor sprain, she'd be dancing in the top seed as the hottest woman in the land.

At least until Sharon grows a V12 engine becomes heavy enough to be affected by the truck ban.

Facebook One-Liner Roundup

2011-05-11T00:27:00.003+08:00

It's been a while - and I have nothing interesting to post, so, yeah.

Wala palang silbe sabihin ang "Pag di na ako busy, gagawain ko na ito." kasi mahirap talaga maging hindi busy para sa isang bagay na hindi mo pa ginagawa. Kung gusto mo talaga ang isang bagay, simulan mo agad. Dahil hindi lumalaki ang oras sa isang araw, kusang magaadjust na ang buhay mo para pagkasyahin lahat ng ginagawa mo. Di mo lang mamamalayan, may puwang na para sa pangarap na dapat matupad.

If some people can't believe Bin Laden is dead, I'd say that's to be expected. Half of the world believed Hitler was still alive five years after WW2 ended. Sixty years after, there are a handful dedicated some who insist that he still is, long after the Soviets owned up to hiding his body from the rest of the world.

You never forget good people even when they've passed on. The really good ones though, they haunt you with their words. It's as if the day they were whispered in your ear is no more recent than yesterday, as though they are far from being memories. It's like without you knowing, they've become a part of you.

Now that the filling's been removed, there's a hole in my lower gum that's big enough to host the next ASEAN games, which, coming from the last time we hosted it in Manila, should be an upgrade for the athletes.

Take a look at the friends of your FB friends. There's at least five of them you've never met your entire life. Take a look at their friends. There's even more people who have completely unique lives you will probably never know about. Suddenly the world seems like such a big place. Now take a look at yourself. Stalker! :)

It's not the pain from a wound that oft drives you mad. It's the maddening itching that comes afterwards.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and the king's horses and men couldn't put him back together again. The cops were onto them fast, so they had to call the right person for the job. The Easter bunny.

Bakit ganun. Parang lahat ng tao kaya nang ipaliwanag bakit nagkakaroon ng global warming pero wala pa rin makapagsabi sakin bakit may ut*ng ang mga lalaki. :| Priorities naman jan.

The day's not complete without coming across a bus trying to break the sound barrier with a 40yo Diesel engine on the freeway.

It's easier to believe in miracles when you're the one making it come true for others.

Tonight reminded me of one thing I learned recently. Every now and then you're going to have to take a sharp turn. You're going to hate the reason no matter what it is and you're not going to like the feeling of being thrown off balance. Chances are, you'll end up face first into the ground, dirty, far lower whence you were, and dignity be damned. It's going to suck, and it's going to hurt long after, but let's be honest with each other. Who would want to live life in a predictable straight line?

Daig ng maagap ang masipag. Kasi kinabukasan, pwede mo nakawin yung ginawa ng masipag.

And then, just like that, the flash of last firework faded with the evening air. "Where does the light go, mama?" Andy asked his mum. His mum lifted him up and began carrying him back home. "Oh but to sleep dear, that they may brighten up somebody else's life another day."

Wouldn't it be infinitely more meaningful if people gave flowers that weren't cut off from the rest of the plant so they don't have to die out after a few days? I know right? Well apparently, the theory doesn't doesn't add anything to the romance if you gave seeds instead. No instant gratification there. But if you ever get the balls to try, go for watermelon seeds, because hell yeah, watermelons.

Man appeared on earth about 2-3 million years ago. Man's ancestors existed even before that, which spent hundreds of millions of years branching out from the tree which towards the bottom, implies that at some point in time, we shared a common ancestor with fruit-bearing trees. While this is very hard to prove, its plausibility can be exercised by simply asking yourself "Bakit ganun yung ulo nya? Parang mangga!"

We have executive officials trying to enforce road traffic, traffic enforcers making up their own laws, law makers trying to become full time investigators, investigators who want to become businessmen, and business men who want to become executive officials. And my last company's management tells me job descriptions don't matter much. Sure.

Cars in Philippine roads are like gremlins. Sprinkle them with a bit of water and they start multiplying like crazy.

Payo sa buhay #1: Kapag binato ka ng bato, batuhin mo ng tinapay. Tapos habang kumakain sya, suntukin mo sa kwan ng sobrang lakas. Bawi ka na.

Elevator Obvious

2011-05-09T11:50:00.003+08:00

I don't get people who try to stop me from closing the elevator door by saying "UP!", specially when I'm in the ground floor, the indicator arrow is pointing up, and there's no basement to go down to. So I answer back "YES!" and then proceed to close the door anyway. Thanks for the tip, but I think I missed the part where you're suggesting that you want to go up TOO.

I can't imagine a scenario where I'd be saying "Oh thank god that crazy man running towards me dutifully informed me that the elevator is, in fact, going up. Otherwise, who knows how badly I'd have gotten lost?"

Splash Island Review

2011-05-06T14:20:00.001+08:00

Splash Island is a water park. Like other waterparks, it offers activities such as floating on a lazy river, riding water slides, swimming in a wave pool, and partaking in collective urination into barely chlorinated water.

The park first opened in 1997 and a lot of changes have been introduced since then. The water, for one, has been changed as many as three times already over the course of the park's history. The park's been around for more than 10 years, and in some slides, you can see aging setting in. There are parts of the slides where water constantly leaks, occasionally plugged by the unwary customer who "went over too far". But isn't that what we all need? A bit of rush from narrow brushes with highly embarrassing deaths, which will make us Pariah inside any bar in heaven.

The park is located alongside South Super Highway, through the Southwoods exit. If somebody insists along the way that it's the Biñan exit, put your foot down or risk having to turn around at additional tollway fee costs. Its strategic location ensures that you're getting wet by the attractions and being dried by the hot exhaust of passing vehicles at the same time.
Splash Island
Lockers are available near the shower area where you can deposit valuables that you don't want lost or wet, such as cellphones, wallets, and dignity. There are actually two shower areas, but the second shower area is nestled so close to the exit, people hardly go there. So come closing time, if you don't want rinsing off with some guy soaping his ass approximately 1.5 inches away from you, try to go to the second shower area instead.

The park opens at 8am, which is arguably the best time to enjoy the park, while the water is still generally colorless. Come afternoon, the water tends to become turbid and generally unsafe for accidental human consumption. The park closes at 5pm, but it is advised to leave a bit earlier to beat the swath of people lining up to shower.

In an interesting development, Splash Island has implemented a run schedule for the attractions during regular operating days, with the exception of public holidays where heavy volumes of park goers are expected. Slides, for example are scheduled to be only open after 12pm, right about the time you are already hungry. Expect lines to be long. If the lines were long before, expect it to be worse, as in by the time you've gotten to the front of the line, you'd be dry and you'd forget what you've lined up for already, or why you are wearing nothing but board shorts in the first place. There are times that you'll feel like you're in a refugee camp, lining up for everything that you need.

Here are some of the rides that you can partake in:

Rio Montanosa - The only slide where up to four people can ride a single raft. The best part of this ride is you don't have to haul the gigantic raft up the stairs as with other rides. The worst part is that you have to line up long enough to call whoever you're riding with "life partners". The queue is so long, it's not surprising to see Japanese occupation soldiers sliding down every now and then.

Balsa River - A long canal filled with water with a balsa to user ratio of 1:100. Chances are, you'd end up wading there, simulating commuting during storm season, with the only difference being a lower risk of incurring Leptospirosis. (note: lower not zero). It is highly recommended by 9 out of 10 doctors that you thoroughly rinse you're nether regions after using this attraction for prolonged periods of time. The lone dissenting doctor died of leptospirosis, just so you know. (Pro tip: the water amazingly changes in color throughout the day from immaculately transparent, to nestea brown. It's a wonder of nature)

Isla Pawikan - a playground partially filled with water and designed for younger children. There are fountains all over the area that respray the water coming from the small pools, ensuring that the kids are filled with joy, excitement, and unhealthy doses of second hand urine.

Agos Grande - The wave pool is likewise scheduled. Speaking of scheduled, it's also known as Tagos Grande. Because apparently, not all women are all about hygiene. I'm just saying. Anyhoo, when waves aren't present, the lifeguards bring out a large inflatable glacier for wallclimbing that rises up 18 ft in the air. You climb it with zero harness, and if you fall, you fall on either other swimmers or about 2 ft of water - just enough to dilute blood coming out of the crack in your skull. Lovely.

Magellan's Drop - A high-speed slide where you go down a straight path with only a slice of flimsy foam seperating your ass from a very uncomfortable visit to the proctologist. Why they called this attraction Magellan's Drop is beyond me. But if in any case this was the way Magellan tried to conquer Mactan, Lapulapu's win would've been cakewalk.

Speaking of which.

Dos Supremos - This is not really about the ride. It's more of why in the world would Splash Island have to name its attractions after the national heroes. I don't really know a lot about respect, but it's one thing to erect a monument for a fallen here, it's another to name a water fun slide after the leader of the Katipunan. Here's the description from the site:

The Katipuneros who shed blood for our freedom from Spain, looked to one Supremo or supreme leader. At Splash Island, we have two! The Dos Supremos are giant twisters that revolutionize the definition of blood-pumping.

What better way to celebrate martyrs than by sliding down half naked in what is essentially giant plumbing. Hurrah for nationalism

Other slides such as the King Pilipit have been permanently closed down to the general public but remain open to thrillseekers who laugh at the face of danger. These waterless slides require users to bring up their own bucket of water, which will be used to lubricate the descent into the plastic tubing. Inherent danger mostly centers on having your skin roasted when gravity persuades water to go on ahead and leave your ass at the mercy of momentum and friction.

Splash Island is a place where I left a lot of childhood memories in, among other things. For all its flaws, and I did not stress the other part enough, it's still actually fun to go to, specially with friends. Specially with friends who have no allergies to putrid water. One of these days when you drop by, leave me a message.

Chances are, I'd probably be still in line on one of the rides with some Japanese occupation soldiers.

Torches and Pitchforks

2011-05-01T22:57:00.002+08:00

For the sake of not catching my readers off-guard by intentionally unfunny posts, I will now try to limit these kinds of articles during Serious Sundays and government holidays. Special announcements are, of course, exempted, as with anything related to Vina Morales. That shit's gotta stay real-time, you know what I'm saying? I don't. Anyway, on with the post.

I love reading about history. More specifically, I love reading about wars. War an interesting phenomenon that teaches very strong lessons at a very high cost to those involved. Ask any war veteran still alive today. For some reason though, that lesson is almost always too quickly forgotten. It's like one moment, people are saying "This should never happen to future generations." and the next moment, Germany is trying to strangle France again.

You'd think the reason why this happens is because the veterans of the war die off. Try World war 2. It started a mere 20 years after the "Great War" that many saw as the war to end all wars. I know, I know, it's the national grudge. But try getting an arm blown off. Or the arm of your best friend. Or all of your friends. That ought to change your perspective on a lot of things, and asked in hindsight if you'd think that's a price worth paying for "getting back at them frogs", everybody would say "hell no".

You'd think if that's the reason, wars wouldn't last long. Not years. Not even weeks. It'd be like a brawl in a party. Somebody starts bleeding, everybody stops the fight. Whatever the reason was is suddenly no longer worth it. That's not how wars happen.

Do you know how wars are sustained for very long periods of time? It's because people have poor memories. At the start, people have their reasons. Then because of the fighting the reasons are overtaken by something more personal. A friend gets killed. A family becomes collateral damage. Suddenly it's no longer about the reason. It's about getting back at the enemy.

And this is not just limited to wars.

Sometimes, we become angry at something for so long, we tend to forget why we were angry in the first place. Sometimes, people around us have been angry for so long that we become just as angry, without ever remembering what has gotten us so riled up in the first place.

That's called mob mentality - the worst kind of intellectual collective that sacrifices individual logic with group thinking. "Maybe" and "What ifs" are replaced with torches and pitchforks. Questions are replaced by demands. Thinking is replaced with threats.

I remember in one of the companies I've worked for before, people became so angry at the management, even issues that were bigger than the management were somehow transformed into points against "the enemy". While there were mostly valid points, the possibility of a more civil negotiation went out the window. And the situation simply spiraled out of control, where everybody wound up hurt, and worse, even more bitter.

See, collective anger doesn't just affect your thinking. It affects your very personality. You can't feel a certain emotion for so long and not have it leave a trace in your character. You become an anger-driven person and make you even more susceptible to similar kinds of herding.

The only answer is you. You have to stop. To stop, you have to know if you have an issue. You will know you're already sucked in by the mob when you just can't find a strong, first-hand reason why you feel strongly against something, even though, if you think hard, you know there are alternative ways to resolve the problem other than through force by numbers.

Take a step back. Think and reflect on what has happened thus far. The moment you realize there's more to the issue than just what "everybody" thinks, that's the moment you start becoming an individual again.

And as an individual, that's the only time you can really make a right difference.

No Exceptions

2011-05-01T15:02:00.004+08:00

Seen at the ticket counter of Midtown Mall, Rob Manila. Security policies apply to everybody, Norse Gods included.

Red Book - The Real Filipinos

2011-04-24T22:33:00.003+08:00

Sometimes in our lives, we are given the privilege to witness extraordinary things but we do not do not realize how significant they really are until much later in our lifetimes. Some things simply do not sparkle unless viewed from hindsight, where they show their true nature and become golden. This post is about one those events, written for posterity, that never will come the day that I forget when I saw what it meant to be real Filipinos.

When I was about five and living in Saudi Arabia, I distinctly recall having a couple stay with my family for a short while. They were tad older than my folks, but they were a pleasant lot. We lived in a small apartment of two bedrooms, only slightly larger than the first floor of our house in the Philippines so I remember being slightly pissed at the idea that they would occupy the room of me and my sister. On the other hand, the lady taught my mom how to cook pizza and cheesecake, and I got to sleep with mom and dad again. After a couple of weeks, we brought them someplace in Riyadh (we lived in Al-Khobar) and I got to eat at McDonald's, and that for me was the highlight of the trip.

That was my version of the story, from the point of view of a five year old, a good twenty-two years ago.

As I grew up and pieced together things from my sister, my parents, and later understanding of other much more subtle things that I remember, the picture that emerged was entirely different.

One night, my dad was in a public long distance call center. International direct calls used to be very limited back then so we had to visit these places just to place calls to the Philippines. It was then that another Filipino approached him. I do not know what exactly the man said but he told my dad that he was familied like he was, and hoped my dad would understand his situation and help out.

As it turned out the man my father was talking to had run away from their employing family who withheld their passports and put them on the police search list for runaways. They needed a place to stay. My dad, hearing the man's plight gave our address, and soon enough, the next day, they arrived at our place.

First, note that this man is a total stranger to my father, who has the whole family living in the address that he just gave away. And while I can say that living in Saudi brings out the best in Filipinos, I cannot say that there are also bad apples that tend to act desperately if not criminally in the face of hard life there. Second, we are not talking about the United States, or the Philippines. Saudi Arabia has unforgiving laws, be it towards criminals, or even those who seek to harbor them. Knowing these things, my dad agreed.

Throughout the stay, we did our best to help them become accommodated. My dad had to work so this left our mom, my sister and me to the company of our guests. Tita Cory and her husband, whose name eludes everybody in my family, also tried hard to make themselves useful. Part of the help they gave was the cooking lessons that Tita Cory gave my mom, which to this day I'm still grateful for (Mom's pizza and cheesecake are still the best).

All is not well though, and at the time, although I did not know it because she hid it from us kids, Tita Cory was already languishing at their plight, being stuck in a stranger's household and not being able to send money back to the Philippines to help her children and family. Being outlaws, they could not even go outside our house that had no windows (for insulation) and almost zero means of entertainment. (It was the late 80s, cable was not yet mainstream, betamax availability was few and far in between and the internet did not yet exist in Saudi). I could guess the boredom amplified the stress of hiding. My mother told me Tita Cory cried a lot, and if ever there's anything my dad has a soft spot for, it's crying women.

The problem with returning back to the Philippines is that you can't do it without a passport. And even if you do have it, you can't simply walk into an airport with your name on the hitlist of the police. The only ticket you're getting is one straight to jail. The only way out is through the Philippine Embassy, which we did not have in Al Khobar. It's in Riyadh, which is 389 kilometers away from Al Khobar. To put that distance in perspective, that's the distance between Manila and northern Ilocos Sur. The road between the two cities is a highway cutting across a swath of desert land, patrolled by police and laced with checkpoints where they check foreigners for documents. In short, just moving from one city to another was already very risky business.

My dad knew just letting them stay with us was already pushing our luck, and that the trip was no trivial matter considering he was also working full time on two jobs. He went around our building to bring the matter to his closest friends to see who could help. Understandably, nobody would agree to help. Who wouldn't say no to something that would jeopardize both their safety and livelihood for people they did not even know?

That said, my dad knew that if there was anybody who could do something about it it would have to be him. So one morning, we all woke up, got into dad's company car, and went for the long trip to Riyadh. Before we left, I noticed that there was money in my pocket. I gave it to my mother and as it turns out, it was tita Cory's small way of thanking us for our cooperativeness. We returned the money anyway, knowing she'd probably need it more than I do. (This part my mom told me, as I could no longer remember it ever happening)

I remembered sitting on somebody's lap. I don't remember who though. But at the time, I didn't know how dangerous what we were doing was. Hiding the folks was one danger, being on the road with them where one patrol or checkpoint could expose how we were helping undocumented aliens was completely another. My mom told me that one possible reason why my dad brought me and my sister along is that Saudis tend to have a weakness when it comes to children, and they become lax in their checks. Me? I was just happy to tag along. I was five and bored, so I was just enjoying the trip.

Thankfully we never got to test the child-weakness theory of my dad. As though the hand of God was at work, that day, there was not a single checkpoint on the road on the way to Riyadh. I don't remember ever dropping them off but I do remember Tita Cory was teary eyed when we were within the city already. Funny how her face at that specific time was the only one I ever remember of her. I remember eating at McDonald's afterwards, which at the time only existed in Riyadh. As a side note, if ever you think going a block or two for Mickey D's is a bitch, try three hundred kilometers.

On our way back, the significance of the act of God seemed more apparent as the places where there were no checkpoints before were now filled with police. Had we not been at the right place at the right time, Lord only knows what would have happened.

As an epilogue, I later learned that the couple, through the help of the embassy, was able to return the Philippines. Later on they both went back to work this time in a cruise ship, where Tita Cory became a chef. My parents and the couple exchanged few and brief correspondences and pasalubong packages a few years after the incident but sadly we've not heard of them ever since.

My parents risked livelihood and life to save a couple of strangers who for all practical reasons given our situation could have been ignored. People say that Filipinos are generally hospitable for their generous treatment of their guests. That's probably true, but I also think that the real hospitality, the nobler and less practiced, and less publicized one is the hospitality that moves us to help out and accommodate strangers, the value that turns us into Samaritans in face of great risks to ourselves and our loved ones to do something inherently altruistic and human.

That day I saw a glimpse of the real kind of hospitality.

The real Pinoy spirit.

That day I saw Real Filipinos.

Mongolian Matters

2011-04-23T22:19:00.002+08:00

I don't think I'll ever get Mongolian style meals. You're given a dozen ingredients to choose from, including assorted meats and sauces - implying you, the great empowered creator of your own meal can choose from tens of thousands of combinations to make your dish uniquely yours. But when you have it cooked, it still tastes like every Mongolian meal you've ever tasted. How is that possible? That's like giving me two pairs of wheels, an engine, four seats and a tank of gas and no matter how I arrange it, I'll end up driving away in a Honda Civic all the time.

There must be some conspiracy wherein the splitsecond you take your eyes off your food, the "chef" mixes in some secret "make-it-mongolian" ingredient, and it's not even crushed nuts.

Speaking of crushed peanuts, why is it that when a dish has crushed nuts, it's considered classy and oriental, but when you're just having a couple of beers with nuts, that mean's your too cheap to afford anything else? Why can't we decide once and for all if peanuts are cheap or saucy?

I digress.

I can just imagine what Mongolian chef school is like. They'd just have one subject: How to Mix Shit Without Burning The Kitchen 101. They don't have to think of the ingredients, the ratio and proportion, the blending of taste and all that. No, that's the customer's problem. Isn't it just the laziest thing? It's so lazy I'd say it's just fucking brilliant with a capital A. Does your food taste like shit? Blame your poor ability of picking out the right ingredients. The chef was just there to mix it all up in a heated metal plate.

I imagine that the whole "Mongolian" bowl meal started out as some lame excuse of a chef who got to work late one day. "Where's our food?" the angry customers yell. "I'm planning something special," the chef tells them, and then brings out every ingredient in the kitchen.

"It's called EMPOWERMENT. If you make your own dish, I'll cook it for you and add bottomless iced tea."

The crowd loved it, quite possibly because we're talking about a really shitty chef who can only cook better if the customers did half of his work.

Or maybe it's really just a Mongolian tradition? They probably have no Mongolese (and I am freely asuming this is just how they call their language) phrase for "What's for dinner?"

One person got so fed up of the bullshit, he had to leave the country and have other countries make food for him instead. This is Genghis Khan and his motivation of conquering half of the known world during his time.

And he probably hates lettuce too.

Red Book - Teacher Talk

2011-04-18T14:54:00.001+08:00

If there's anything to be scared about in school, it's the teachers. Sure some of your classmates might beat you up in one of the fights, but that's more of a temporary thing. If there's anything I learned about kids early in life, it's that kids have the attention span of a particularly forgetful goldfish. One day you're burying fists in each other's faces, the next day you're sharing coke from a single straw. No, that's not really what's to be scared about.

It's the teachers.

In the land called school, they're the judge, juror, executioner, and occasionally the object of your prepubic lust.

You read that last one right.

I know, I know. I went to an all-boys school. Try to understand.

A teacher is not legally allowed to beat up a kid in class. We're not barbaric. What are we, South Korea? No, the worst physical thing a teacher can do is to vent out at other inanimate things incapable of filing assault and battery charges in Bantay Bata 163 such as the blackboard, the cleaning closet, Mark the retard...

Here are other things they usually do without having to resort to manhandling:

1. Throw chalk at you with the precision of a Barret M107 sniper rifle. Years of practice have enabled the more seasoned teachers to reclassify these harmless writing implements into precision strike munitions.
2. Throw shoes at you. I have no idea on this one, but for some reason it's something that occurs often enough for me to remember.
3. Make obscene remarks about how they will fong your internal organs. (as immortalized by our Drafting teacher's "babarukahin ko ang bituka mo" the meaning of which eludes me to this day)
4. Throw your notebook on the floor and treat it as though it's the progenitor of the bubonic plague.
5. Pull your sideburns. I have strong belief that this is the equivalent of capital punishment in the education system. I cannot think of anything more painful, short of an in-classroom crucifiction followed by a 4-chapter nonstop reading of Noli Me Tangere. But that's too inhuman already. Nobody should endure Noli any longer than a chapter every two days.

So to recap, they can do anything EXCEPT lay hands on you, which is very rarely employed and only when secretively by some teachers who learned how to teach lessons by watching instructional videos from the Ultimate Fighting Championship. For the rest, they have to delegate things to the only people on earth who can, legally and backed by the 1986 National Constitution, beat your ass black and blue.

Your parents.

If a teacher deems you too unruly for her tastes, she'd issue a demand to see your parents. That's when shit just crumbles. First, you have to tell your parents. Parents, being busy people, absolutely hate having to leave whatever it is that they are doing, just to apologize to a bunch of strangers who they are already paying four times a year to keep you out of the house. They're busy, but never too busy to beat you up. Strike one.

Of course, when the teachers meet up with the parents, they will mention anything BUT you. I assume the teachers are probably sick of talking to and about adrenaline-junkie children all day and would kill to talk to normal adults. So they'll talk on and on about life, the works, and how they met their husbands 30 years ago, which of course your PARENT are not interested in, but cannot skip becuase they are in school specifically to ensure that you don't end up out-of-school, which means they'll have to put up with you longer than they already do. At the end of the session the teacher sells the PARENT everything from underwear to life insurance to house and lots. PARENTS HATE THIS. So the first thing they do after they see you again, at the privacy at your own home, they will beat you up for having to put up with all that. Again. Strike two.

So in a way, teachers still have the power to manhandle you. But like syndicate bosses, instead of laying hands on you in a personal way, they have bouncers to do the ass kicking for them. At the same time, they earn commission from whatever they manage to sell in the process. It's a win-win situation - for them at least.

As a seperate note to our non-Filipino/non-Asian readers, beating an offspring is still the norm in our country. While this maybe reported as unethical by a lot of western countries, we maintain a liberal position on the issue and only limited by the "no blood no foul" rule, end even so, it's more of a guideline than an actual law. Try it sometime. I doubt any kid will have the guts to bring a gun to school knowing that getting caught dead or alive will still mean having to answer to their parents and God-given rights to give a healthy dose of behaviour-corrective physical therapy.

Going back, one of the more noteworthy things about our teachers is that unlike most progressive schools in the country nowadays where the teachers are young and don't stay very long, our teachers have been around for a lot longer than most infrastractures in town. And I wish I was making this up, but my doctor, who is probably no less than 25 years older than me had the same FIRST GRADE teacher as me. The teacher who was pulling my sideburns had, 25 years ago, been pulling my doctor's sideburns as well. We made jokes about how Homer, author of Oddesey went blind because of doing homework for our History teacher, and we half believed that the only reason it can't be true is because they were probably living in different continents at that time. Some of these teachers are so timeless, they're probably still doing what they do best right at this minute. Like right now.

These are the few, the grand, the seasoned people who have for years honed their skills in teaching and disciplining the worst kinds of student to the extent that some feats they perform, when not taken in the context of school, can be mistaken for superpowers. Here are some of those things:

1. They can hurl things at amazingly accurate trajectories. Nevermind that half of our teachers are over sixty. If they can lift it, sure as hell they can chuck it at anybody's direction with an accuracy that would put our SWAT teams to shame. As mentioned above, the only way to avoid getting hit by anything is to avoid putting teachers in a situation where throwing something is the most convenient option they have at disciplining you.

2. Teachers have an amazing ability to recall names of students, even if they handle 5 classes a year with fifty students each. They'd still remember a student from 1991 who happened to have exceptionally horrible handwriting 20 years later. It's like talking with a living breathing google. Once you put it out there, they'll be able to pull it out years later, in the most embarassing manner possible. Wheras, by comparison, I can't even remember the name of the guy at work I talked to earlier. What I do believe is that he's my boss. (I think)

3. Teachers can read your mind. I'm not saying all teachers can read your mind. Some of them, most of them the younger ones who haven't suffered the continous onslaught of puberty-related evils, are just plain clueless. The rest, the veterans, can read your mind like it's morning paper headline on a bright sunny day. The only reason why you think they never seem to listen is that they don't care, and most of the time, what's on your mind isn't worthy of exiting it through any orifice of your body anwyay. If there's still doubt in your mind, try cheating. If there's some brilliant plan you're thinking of, chances are there's somebody who's tried to do it already 5, 10 years ago. It's still old hat, no matter what. Speaking of which,

4. Once there was a teacher who said to us that she could hear the voice of God speaking to her during exams to tell her who was cheating. While I'd love to say how much implausible that may be, and I shit you not, this teacher CAN catch cheaters better than Angela Lansbury catches murderers in Murder She Wrote. For the teacher's case, you didn't even need to commit the act. The moment your mind formulates a plan, the teacher's eyes are already glued on you, like a hungry hawk waiting for the poor mouse to make a move. If we had ombudsmans at par with my teacher, the instant politicians meet the eyes of madame teacher, they'd be pleading guilty to 10 years of prison already. Teachers can sniff dishonesty, fear, and body odor beyond normal human limits.

If Professor X were among our teachers in gradeschool/highschool, the only thing that would probably make him stand out is that he's got slightly less hair than his male colleagues. Other than that, he'd be joe ordinary.

One day I'm going to have kids. And they'd probably have to put up with teachers like that too. The odds of them meeting the very same teachers with me if they got to the same school are reasonable enough and they'd get their sideburns pulled by third generation punishment. I'd say it'll be all good, and maybe someday when their patilyas are no longer hurting so bad, we'd have a good laugh about it.

At least maybe until the teachers summon me.

Happy 50th, Space men!

2011-04-12T12:05:00.003+08:00

Today's the 50th anniv of how the first man who lived after going to space became the actual first man in space. If there's anything to be learned from how Russia does things, if at first you don't succeed, most of the evidence will burn up on reentry anyway. Seriously. How many cosmonauts were lost before Yuri?

Schadenfreude

2011-04-12T10:29:00.003+08:00

Whenever I think my work sucks, I think of other professions and breath a sigh.

I bet workers at the ribbon factory have to deal with a lot of red tape too.

For workers at the Chicharon plant, it's always crunchtime.

A customer breathing down your neck is normal for a GRO.

For septic tank cleaners in dry places, tough shit.

Is Marcos the Worst Philippine President?

2011-04-11T19:51:00.000+08:00

The only good presidency is the one that happened long ago enough for people to forget how horrible it was at the time. Aguinaldo sold out. Quezon enslaved the legislation to a degree that would make Arroyo blush. Magsaysay was a master of subtle publicities and had the entire nation swooning despite his economic ineptitude. Macapagal sold us off to the foreigners. Of course none of these are so evident now because nobody writes things like this in the history books. Point of the matter is, Marcos sucked as a president, but he also did good things, as can be said of every president in our history. It just so happens that he became president at a time that people are able to effectively preserve memories already, so the usual process of forgetting never happened. Ever notice how, no president in the last 40 years seems as good as the ones before? Thanks to technology, we've become really good grudge bearers. That's all.

Inquirer.net's Biggest News Of The Day

2011-04-11T15:12:00.004+08:00

Inquirer.net is like a hot but secretly batshit insane girlfriend of a close friend. At first you wonder why anybody in their right mind would dump her, but after a while you just say "good riddance" and then proceed with filling the grave with your shovel. The longer I read Inquirer.net, I get to realize why GMA News TV left the previously dominant news site INQ7.NET. Inquirer fields an amazing array of retarded articles on their site, ranging from five worded SEO traps, to unmarked paid advertisment, to amazingly bias politicking from only the most unprofessional people of the industry.I'm not saying GMA News TV is any better, but "good riddance".

Just look at the article above.

1. A kid learning how to fold paper is NOT news. Every kid eventually learns it. The only time it can be special is if the baby learns it while inside the womb and comes out clutching one of those folded things that predict the color of your crush's underwear. Now THAT is headliner news to me.

2. The "woman" who was written in the title is none other than the WRITER, Edna T. Belleza, who at the very least had the decency and lapse of ego to not write her full name in the title preceded by "Her Most Magnanimous" title. If the space allowed it, maybe. Really. Not even columnists have the balls to do that. The author then proceeds to write every so casually over what she did over the weekend as though the article is a blog post shared with a couple of friends. Part of my died every time she mentioned "Me", "Myself", and "I". Yes, you're doing what a parent is supposed to do. We get it.

3. Good parenting is teaching your kids that it's important to get involved in helping people when they are in need. Bad parenting is telling your kid that you can do this by sending somebody who just lost his home, his family, and his livelihood FOLDED PAPER, because some stupid legend says if you make enough you can get a wish granted. I can imagine a poor Japanese guy receiving a box from our country, happily opens it up, and finds a thousand poorly folded paper cranes that at best, can only provide heating for approximately 30 seconds of warmth, or alternatively, a supply of bodily fiber if he can bear to eat folded avians. "Kuso," he would tell himself and shake his fist at whoever ruined perfectly good paper just to say they care.

4. To top it all off, the project ISN'T EVEN FINISHED YET. And YET it's already headliner news. How's this for a more honest to goodness title: NOT DONE YET, BUT LOOKIE HERE! That's like having a property development group making a presscon about a building that's basically just a couple of struts sticking out of the ground "hopefully this will be finished soon, but just so you have an idea, you can live here someday". The press would probably get pissed and proceed to swing heavy construction tools at the marketing people.

How does an article like this get published?

6 More Stupid Things Drivers Do

2011-04-08T19:58:00.001+08:00

1. When entering a parking lot via an electronically-dispensed ticket, some cars overshoot. Instead of backing up, or just getting out of their cars to get the card, they have to ask an attendant to hand it to them, as though their ass is glued to their seats and there's no way to get out without triggering massive rectal bleeding.

2. Not bothering with signal lights since they're just turning 'round the corner' as though there's some other use for turning signal lights other than that, and I somehow missed it during driving lessons.

3. Using carplate holders that tilt the plates forward. Theoretically these carplate holders are designed to fold down when you reach the speed of about 100kph, which is too fast for anybody to care about what license plate is on your car anyway. If you do stupid shit at speed, they won't need your license plate. They will need a tow truck and a very large shovel for hauling your car and your remains away.

4. Using tinted carplate holders, which when exposed to bright lights, tend to hide the plate numbers. Next to those ugly European Union underplates, this should be marked as capital crime punishable by being tacked with license plates on the driver's forehead with nine inch nails.

5. non-LTO sanctionedVanity plates. The worst part of this is that we already have a law against using vanity plates in lieu of the actual plates that can IDENTIFY THE VEHICLE, WHICH IS AS GOD INTENDED FOR LICENSE PLATES. The police are too scared of who they're going to offend, and people are too crafty to be bothered to be identified when they're fleeing from a hit and run accident. I propose a simple solution for this case. Any car caught wearing those plates should be legally open for being hit in the windshield repeatedly by a tire iron, or anything equally as hard. Empower the people, make the windshield sellers rich, fuck people who think having relatives in NBI is a ticket to insolence. It's Win-Win. Vote for me in the next election.

6. People who drive with their arms or elbows dangling outside the car. I'm pretty sure Filipinos aren't huge people. Some are, but most aren't. It seems though that for some people, the space inside the cars is still too small for them that they'd have to stick their arms out where it can conveniently get in contact with anything from tree branches to ten wheeler trucks. I'm thinking it's so they can high-five people in the other lanes quickly, just in case they found a situation that makes that a life-saving necessity. Otherwise, it's just fucking retarded.

Corporate Chair Swaps

2011-04-07T10:30:00.002+08:00

Log taken from a convo with a friend a few weeks ago. A worthwhile read for officeworkers and misplaced chairs everywhere.

Mai: yeah. this used to be a good chair until the adjustment got borked
Mai: ;_;
Mai: must fight the urge to secretly swap chairs
Red: hahahah
Red: who knows, maybe sombody already swapped that in. you didnt break it, it was replaced!
Red: DUN DUN DUN DUN
Mai: fffffff
Mai: o_o
Mai: hmm
Mai: HMMM
Red: the plot thickens
Mai: >:E
Red: on February the 7th, 11:57AM, you went out for lunch, during which time there was a 15 minute gap in the surveillance tape of your security office.
Red: The texture of the gum stuck under your chair changed shortly afterwards, as well as the backrest
Mai: ahahaha
Mai: (there really has to be gum stuck underneath the chair. It's like a fingerprint)
Red: LOL
Red: Mai!! That's bad. Don't you have a wastebasket?
Mai: I don't chew gum in the office!
Mai: but yeah
Mai: it's how you can identify which chair is yours, right? (aside from carvings)
Mai: "PRE AKIN YANG UPUAN, DI NAMAN JUICY FRUIT ANG CHEWING GUM NA NAKADIKIT SA UPUAN MO"
Red: hahaha
Red: yeah. real pros have judge stuck under their chairs. amateurs have to settle with bazooka joe.
Red: you can't get replacements?
Mai: I can request for one, but if it'll take a PR I'm doomed to this chair for two weeks or so
Mai: unless I can get a kind soul to swap chairs with me! (I doubt)
Red: well the kind soul does not have to know of his generosity
Mai: ahahahaha
Red: forgiveness is easier to ask than favor
Red: >:]
Mai: evil evil jet
Red: "Please let us exchange chairs because my back hurts" is a lot longer than "whoops."

Working in McKinley Hill

2011-04-01T20:45:00.009+08:00

(subtitle: why it sucks)
McKinley Hill is a patch of land near Bonifacio Global City (BGC) developed by Megaworld for residential, commercial, and corporate purposes. Because of it's proximity, it's often confused as part of Bonifacio Global City when it's not. If McKinley Hill were a person, it'd be a out-of-school hipster who gets by through his links with his big brother BGC. Meanwhile, BGC does everything to distance himself from McKinley Hill, and does it to some degree of success, as we will discuss further into this article.

1. McKinley Hill has an identity crisis
Understandably, BGC is also a potpourri of all purposes from recreation to schools to work to residence. The city within a city concept works well. McKinley hill also tries to cater to all these things. The only difference is that McKinley Hill is about 1/6th the size of BGC, and ends up with offices built next to housing projects, schools next to chain smoking call centers, and expensive restaurants below common-man work areas. If you live here and wanted to relax by jogging, you'd end up mingling with a 24-7 workforce from outsourcing companies. Your kid will be going to schools beside malls. And dining will always feel like office cafeteria because there's always a lot of workers eating.

2. McKinley Hill hates commuters
Megaworld refuses to outsource transportation but exceptionally sucks at providing its own. The lone bus loading terminal is in the middle of it all, which is sensible, until you realize that if you live, study, or work somewhere around the further edges of the development, you will have to walk the long walk everyday, through uneven terrain through every weather imaginable. You'd think the fact that it's called a HILL would tip off planners that people might need better ways to get around. Since the buses are privately operated, they are few and far in between, limited in scheduled hours, and oftentimes jampacked with workers during rush hour. To add insult to injury, the fares are grossly overpriced at 20 pesos and can only be discounted if you pay for the tickets in advance. Oh yeah, the tickets are also expiring, as though for some reason paper has become a perishable good. The only public jeep station is just outside McKinley Hill, but you can reach it only through a short uphill climb worth two stories if you happen to be working in the lower McKinley parts. A few months back, admin thought that the jeeps were an eyesore so they had the jeeps move 300 meters away from the entrance, where it's dark and without cover from the elements of nature, and closed down the perfectly-working shed. Other options for commuting are taxis, and habal-habals, unofficial for-hire scooters who zigzag in and out of traffic as though they're in some videogame where getting bumped reduces health and does not cause your brain to be thrown into the pavement 50 meters from where you land in the event of an automobile collision. They fetch for 40 pesos, and a few days of your lifespan per ride.

3. McKinley Hill hates drivers as well
As mentioned earlier, BGC secretly hates McKinley, and goes out on a limb to ensure that there is no direct path between McKinley Hill and Global City. McKinley Hill figures this is all good and normal and sticks to the idea that somehow, a two-lane road on one end and a two-lane road on another end with NO TRAFFIC LIGHTS WHATSOEVER is somehow enough to cater to a population of several thousand cars, not including visitors who wish to avail of the various restaurants and events held in the Piazza. The only entrances and exists of this place is along Lawton Ave, and C5 which is subject to heavy traffic both in the morning and in the rush hours of the evening leading up to late at night. If God designed the human body the way designers organized this place, we'd have mouths and anuses the size of our nostrils and we'd be required to eat 20 pounds of meat every day. The only 5000-slot carpark available has the first three floors reserved for corporate accounts (mostly managers) the parking is laid out in a 700 meter narrow building with only one functioning elevator in the middle. The ramps are poorly maintained, with steel spikes poking out of the edges, waiting for its next rubbery victim. Oh and yeah, because of the topology, when it rains hard, the ground floor becomes a swimming pool. Free exterior and interior washing, see? I hope you like the scent of a wet dog.

4. The area sucks as a work place
The buildings themselves are poorly equipped to handle disasters. There's a power outage every week, and even though the building is less than five years old, the air conditioning oftentimes smells like it can swap war stories with my grandfather. While I'm not one to say ghosts do exist, there's something unsettling about working a stones throw away from a thousand graves from WW2. But then again, maybe that will ensure the ancient aircon system won't have to run out of war stories.

The food is just slightly more varied than a penal colony in North Korea. Along the whole 4 block stretch of Upper McKinley, there are only 10 food outlets including Starbucks and 7/11. Four of them do not offer solo meals below 100 pesos. There are no canteens, no food courts, and I heard that Jollibee, Chowking and other related outlets are not allowed to franchise within the district. The only other option is to walk to The Venice Piazza which likewise offers pricey meals that's obviously not designed for the quick and cheap luncher.

As for transport at night, the buses stop coming at 9pm, even though half of the companies in McKinley support 24-7 operations. The only other option is to take the taxi, or walk to the jeep terminal, which is, and gladly, not lighted AT ALL.

5. Establishments
The establishments in McKinley close early, and I suppose that's understandable because it's partially residential, but that also makes it a hassle since it's also supposed to be partially corporate, where people tend to stay very late. The food is designed to cater to the higher society crowd, which unfortunately doesn't cover 80% of the working populace. What happens is the food establishments are forced to come up with cheaper versions of their dishes, but to ensure that these cheaper foods don't kill the atmosphere or at least compete with their regular dishes, you can only order them TO GO. SO you walk to Piazza under the blazing sun only to order food, and then return to your office so you can eat. Because it's either that or you're stuck with KFC or McDonalds FOREVER.

6. Lack of infrastructure
Here are some things BGC has and McKinley hill has not bothered to give a damn about:

1. Church
2. Hospital/clinic
3. Drug store
4. Any shop other than 7/11
5. Working stoplights

What MH does have is easy access to any of two major cemeteries, for what its worth.

Conclusion:
The location of McKinley Hill is technically a good location. It's near Makati, BGC, the airport and access to the South Luzon Expressway. It's tucked away from busy traffic, and is peaceful because of it so, but with the lack of infrastructure, lack of a clear vision of what it wants to become, and a simple disregard for most of the people visiting it regularly makes it come far below its potential. With so many alternatives popping up in BGC, and even the Mall of Asia, I won't be too surprised to see that McKinley Hill will become the next Eastwood Libis - once the hottest place for living and tech startups, and touted as the best place for IT business, now slowly becoming a ghost town. And as far as ghost towns go, being surrounded by dead people is a clear advantage.

Single And Ready To Mingle

2011-03-31T23:46:00.003+08:00

I don't really want to be taking sides and all, but if God thought having a lot was a good thing, he wouldn't have stopped with His Only Son. I'm just saying.

Men And Wrestling

2011-03-31T09:58:00.000+08:00

The thing about growing old is that you don't really know how far into the age game you're in until you turn on the television. The other night, I was looking for some late programming when I saw a rerun of the Wrestlemania XXVII. I haven't watched "pro" wrestling in years but I was kind of happy to see that the contenders were the same people I followed back when I was still watching avidly 10 years ago. Ho boy, did it take me back to my younger years.

The match was the Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels, with Undertaker's 17-0 win streak and Shawn Michael's career at stake. I didn't really know anything about the backstory but that was more than enough for me. The ridiculous ante wasn't really surprising, since there's ALWAYS something at stake when it comes to wrestling. It's never just about becoming the best, or at least improving your league seeds. Hell I'm not even sure if there's such a thing as ranking in WWE. It's about grudges, it's about rivalries, it's about beating the shit out of the other guy for any reason other than just to see who's better. But hey, we wouldn't really have it any other way. If professional chess leagues were anywhere near as competitive as wrestling, one grandmaster would beat the shit out of another because he slept with the other's wife and got a venereal disease for it. If that happens, they'd have more fans, specially if stalemate endings have steel chairs involved.

And perhaps that's really why men just love wrestling. It's a marriage of adrenaline-pumping sports and ridiculous story premises with intricacies that would rival any soap opera. It proves that men do love a good plot, we just don't want that fact to be obvious enough and taken against our sexuality. I remember excitedly going to school every monday morning to talk about the latest happening in Smackdown and Raw instead of learning something that would actually be of use later on in life. There'd be firey debates on the finer points of the chokeslam, and how the Blue Blazer is in fact Owen Hart. There was a point in time that everyday, during 3:16pm in the afternoon, people would start talking about Stone Cold Steve Austin. Why? Coz Stone Cold said so. Doesn't make sense? Why should it? It's wrestling for crissakes.

So yeah, so Undertaker entered the stage, the lights dimmed, and the trademark death knell music played in the background. I wondered how many thousand times it has already happened before. Undertaker would roll his eyes back so it only shows whites, and then the lights would come on slowly. He must be sick of it also. I know I would. I've been watching undertaker "take care" of shit for as long as I can remember. I wasn't even in preschool when I first watched him with my dad on Saturday afternoon TV in Saudi. He was so awesome back then, and his intro is no less awesome now.

And then there's the match itself. Strictly speaking, it can hardly be called a match. It's scripted. I know, I know, it's scripted. We've always known it's scripted. Nobody gives a shit. It's like saying "Santa doesn't exist" but it doesn't matter anyway for as long as you play along and get the gifts that you want. The choreographed match is beautifully executed and it has so many twists and turns that you'll never know who will emerge as victor. You never really have that in other real sports. Or if ever, not often enough. In wrestling, you have it EVERY WEEK with recaps every Sunday. If wrestling weren't scripted, it'd be an hour of boring matches where nobody ever gets knocked out. Instead of death-defying acrobatic moves, we'd have stupid leglocks and takedown maneuvers with an occasional injury that will cause a celebrity wrestler to disappear for months before coming back half the man he used to be. Who'd want that boring-as-oregon bullshit? So pull out a steel chair and hit the ref already.

The match last night was just that. It was exciting, riveting, and it brought out the child in me that never really got over the WWE fever. Not even the ever present reminder of fakeness could take me out of the "game". But then there's also the reality, served so obviously to me when Undertaker and Shawn Michaels did a staredown, and it just dawned to me. HOLY SHIT. THEY BOTH HAVE RECEDING HAIRLINES. Where hair used to be, now emaciate forehead extensions lay. It was at that point that I also noticed that their ripped, steriodal bodies look like they were partially sagging already. And I guess it's understandable. Basic math tells me that if I started watching these two guys wrestle before I hit kindergarten, that means they've been doing these moves for over 20 years already. Twenty years. (And they can probably still kick my ass six ways to Sunday) These guys were already old back then, and they were much much older now. Undertaker even looked like he was having a hard time bending the rope to enter the ring. But none of that mattered to them at the moment. They were doing the same moves that they did 20 years ago, with bodies that are probably begging for otherwise. At one point, Undertaker did the top-rope walk he was famous for, although when he did jump into Shawn, he INJURED himself, and FOR REAL. Showmanship dictated that Shawn kick the injury anyway. Shawn likewise did a top rop jump on the Undertaker and likewise got injured bad. After watching matches for a long time, you just know what's real and fake.

Thinking about it, the fact that people of their age are able to do those death defying jumps, crashing on to barely padded mats and propped tables is a feat in itself. Hell, I'm at the peak of my fitness and I wouldn't dare do half of what they do in the ring. There's nothing fake about the risks, and it's that idea of real life daredevil heroics that pique the interests of guys like me in what other people condescendingly call "a violent version of ballet". The injuries they got during the match weren't staged. Undertaker tombstone piledrived Shawn outside the ring and you could just see the pained experssion in his face when his knees hit the floor while holding a FULL GROWN 45 year old man upside down. It. WAS. AWESOME. Not because it's all real, but because it's fake, but with reality just seeping back in.

Shawn Michaels lost the match, and as dictated in the stakes he must retire. While retirement is a gimmick employed by the WWE for entertainment purposes, this one looked pretty real. Undertaker shook Shawn's hands and the audience, realizing what they were witnessing clapped the standing ovation clap. The one time I chanced upon a wrestling match is coincidentally the last time one of the legends of my childhood put a closure on his book. It was moving. More than Shawn Michael's career, I felt that it was also the end of a two decade old following for one of my biggest heroes (who just happen to love putting his foot up people's chins to knock them out).

But of course that's never the end of things. Undertaker is still wrestling up to this day, and though there will probably nobody more charismatic and respected than him, there are tons of others just waiting to fill his spot. When I get kids, I'll probably introduce them to wrestling too, if not to learn about life, just so they have something to talk about come Monday morning at school.

Why? Coz Stone Cold said so.

How To Stop The Drug Mule Problem

2011-03-27T01:14:00.002+08:00

Honestly, I still don't see how somebody could take a package from somebody for delivery in exchange for money without knowing its contents. The only time I see this happening without ending in grim tragedy is when the KFC delivery guy doesn't check if my ordered food contains gravy. But yeah, we can field about more reasons on why this keeps on happening, but at the end of the day, there's a good chance those people who got caught in the act of ferrying contraband across borders knew the risks they were facing. Anybody who's tried smuggling food into the library back in school knows this.

But now we have the government stepping in, attempting to solve the problem by going after the "syndicates", which they can't even name on public TV. They might as well have called the perpetrators "nazi aliens" and they'd still be as damn intangible. Bottom line is, our country sucks. You can probably smuggle a whole container ship made of glistening shabu here if you have enough money to drown customs officials in confiscated liquour. Trying to catch anybody making drugs in the country is like trying to catch every drug addict in congress. It's a futile attempt, and half-hearted at best.

So where do we stand? Surely we can't afford to have more people killed off by foreign governments. For every person who ends up in the hanger for walking dope, a hundred of us will be in more suspicion every time we try to bring along tawas with us for our trips. (Note: Some countries like China do not sell deodorant. This is a likelier scenario than you'd imagine) So here's some things I think would help solve the issue.

1. I remember before, in some highways, they left cars that got into accidents along the road and just put a sign there saying "THIS COULD BE YOU." That's as effective as whipping the insolent kid in front of the class as an example to be feared by all. It's tasteless but it actually works. That's what we need to do. Take the pictures and clippings of previous cases, put them on airports and then put up a HUGE PINK MMDA-LIKE SIGN that says "TANGINA, SIGE LANG, BAUNIN MO YAN."

2. Stop wasting the additional 250 (security terminal fee) that we're paying to print out the face of Noynoy on every immigration card. Having to print his shiny reflective forehead consumes a lot of ink, and is probably detrimental to our image of a people with no hair problems. We can use that money to actually train the guards to know drugs WHEN FIVE FUCKING POUNDS OF IT IS STRAPPED TO THE WAIST OF ONE OF THE PASSENGERS. How the hell do you feel that in a hand search and think it's perfectly normal to have a balikbayan beltbag masking taped to waists?

3. Plan agents in the airport who will play as dummy drug mule recruiter. If anybody accepts the offer, the agent should have full authority to backhand slap the passenger. There is only one right answer - NO. Any other answer will set you an appointment with the business end of the agent's hand. Ain't nothing more corrective than a correctly placed smacking to the face.

4. Stop sending political envoys to countries that are planning to kill drug mules. I understand that sending our country mascot/vice president can be entertaining at times because it's like E.T. all over again, but that's just sending the wrong signal, pun not intended. Send Willie Revillame instead. This won't help, but since we're pouring money into a tax blackhole anyway, we might as well make it festive and occasionally scandalous.

5. Put Pepe Smith as customs head. He'll sniff the shit out of your baggage and take care of any confiscated material on the spot. Since there's more than one airport and Old Pepe can only take in so much, have somebody from those Kapuso/Kapamilya noontime shows to sub him out. Given the nature of drug use in showbusiness, we won't be running out of manpower anytime soon.

6. If somebody does get caught locally, send them anyway and make sure they get caught on the other side by phoning them in advance. Since our country is too softhearted on these things, let other countries with the balls to take them out deal with the problem.

Problem solved.

Shogun 2 Crash When Loading Saved Game File

2011-03-25T23:19:00.003+08:00

I love the Total War series. I've been a huge fan ever since Rome Total War days. I honestly think it's the "historical RTS" that got the balance right between a fun gameplay that doesn't require you to tweak a thousand different variables to run an empire and a sort of entertaining degree of historical accuracy. As for Shogun II, I've been waiting for this game since forever. Being a history buff, and having a trip to Kansai late last year made me real pumped up to play a grand RTS campaign based on Japanese history.

But the problem is, and I don't know why this is just so damn persistent, like history, Total War seems to keep on repeating the same mistakes over and over again as far as product quality goes.

I installed Shogun 2 Total War this afternoon, and it's just damn unplayable. Even the most basic of basics, the main menu, only loads 6 out of 7 times. You'd think they'd be able to see that not being able to see your game is already A BIG GODDAMN DEAL. But okay, there's a workaround for that right? Just run the game again, hopefully with better luck roll.

And THEN there's the saving problem. Eight turns in, I've subjugated a nearby clan and am preparing a massive excursion into another clan and then I told myself "hey, I've done a lot already, I should shut off this thing and get back to getting a life" And so I did. I saved and left.

Then after I tried switching the thing on, BAM. Saved files are no longer loading. LIKE FUCK. I told myself, maybe it's just my copy. I check the net and saw that the problem is prevalent in a lot of other player experiences too.

Okay, so it's just a bug. Maybe it renders your effort useless every now and then randomly, but hey, we all make mistakes.

WRONG.

As early as Rome Total War, there's already been issues with save files getting corrupted. Medieval II Total War also had it (although it was addressed fairly quickly), Empire TOtal War also had it, and it took almost forever to get fixed. You'd think that since it's just the same company, the first thing they'd check when testing the game is to see if issues that popped up last version wont anymore in the new one. But it just does.
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And we're just all expected to lap it up and wait for a fix. Whatever happened to the days when you buy a cartridge, play with the game and not have to deal with half-baked products like this? We didnt download no steenkin patches back then. Thanks to the internet, games are coming out half done, like a badly rushed homework or something.

I honestly hate love this game so goddamn much.

History repeats itself.

To the guys who are also experiencing this problem, report your problems on this forum so CA and SEGA know that this is a major issue and not just a minor one:

http://forums.totalwar.com/forumdisplay.php/96-Total-War-Shogun-2-Support-Forum

Let's not waste 50$ on a game that wont even work in the most basic level.

The Other Derek Ramsey : Interview Transcript

2011-03-24T09:37:00.004+08:00

About a year ago, a friend of mine from highschool invited me to start writing for Statement magazine. One of my first few tasks was to prepare the main article for a certain Derek Ramsey, who up to that point is only familiar to me because he tends to appear on posters about canned tuna. A lot. Write a straight man's article about Derek, my editor told me. Uhh okay. So I thought I'd try to get past the parts where female/female-at-heart writers usually stop because they start orgasming at some point in the interview.

So I went with deeper questions, to prove to myself and the rest of the readers that there's nothing much beyond that. Let's call it man prejudice: "He's not me, therefore he's a turd." The interview proved me wrong and changed my opinion to "He's not me, so he's kind of okay." For a man's opinion of another man, that's about as good as it gets. So I set off writing the article, but alas, for some reason I just couldn't come up with the right piece that fleshed out the spirit of the interview. People who read the article kind of agreed, so to at least make up for my failed goals, I am publishing the transcript of our discussion.

You're technically the most sought-after guy in the country today. And I think you know this.

That's what they say, but I don't really...

Did you ever foresee this happening to you?

No. Even this whole showbiz thing I never thought... even commercials I'd end up doing. Any of this.My first commercial ever was closeup and I was still (nice?) enough to do that and then I was in and out of the country then because I was studying in England so every time I'd fly in and visit my parents, I'd shoot a commercial, fly back to college, shoot a commercial, fly back, then move to the states, then after the states after graduating, i moved here permanently and got a job with MTV and I got offers left and right from showbiz and I denied that for a couple of years then I said you know what sige na nga I'll just try it.

That was the point that you realized, I think I'm made for this?

I still don't think that that was the moment. I couldn't get in front of the camera to tell you the truth but I'm a guy that likes to get over my fears. Before graduating I decided to join a college play just to get that feeling of being in front of a crowd, anything to do with acting or even public speaking so I auditioned for this play called the postmaster and got the role. and I did it. My parents flew halfway around the world just to watch and that was when I started to get comfortable being in front of the camera. Then ayon, commercials left and right.Then my stint with MTV which was fun and gave me even more confidence. I'm really willing to try anything but I never expected that I'd be where Im at now

You're currently doing modeling hosting and acting.

I find modeling the hardest thing to do. I'm not a ramp model I'll leave that to the pros.

What do you think is the next step for you.

I know one day this rollercoaster ride is going to end. I hope im going to be someone better someone new. I'm willing to grasp that day will come and im just taking it one day at a time. Enjoying whats being given to me now. Doing what contracts that I have. I always finish my contact. What's next? I dont know, more challenging roles. Stop playing the rich kid. Stop dying in the movies. Yeah. My dream is to play on like a war movie do a war movie or something historical.

If youre not an actor, or not a model, or not a host what would you be doing?

I think I'd be a teacher. I started as a marketing major. I did physics math at A levels. I dont know why. All my friends say they think id be a good teacher and I enjoy teaching kids so I think Id be a teacher but not here.

Three things that you cant do without.

First my family I have to be with nearly family. My sports even though I have a busted knee Im still playing. I'm hardheaded. And travel I have to travel. REquirements sa akin yan every year.

SO you're well traveled?

Im very lucky my parents brought me up, sending me all over the world. Ive been to israel kibbutz afrika, jordanl, all over europe, all over asia. Name me a place and Ive probably beent here. This year ill be in South africa for the world cup. I'll be in Korea to compete. Shanghai to compete. PRague to compete. Yeah, I've been everywhere. Even Finland. I don't know.

Which do you think is the most beautiful place on earth?

Here. That's why I'm here. I'm never going back to Europe. I'll never be in Europe. If I were to pick a place to spend the rest of my life, it would be here or in australia. People are very laid back, very nice. Over in ENgland you have to make an effort just to make friends. People just come up to you and theyre already nice. Extreme because if you piss them off, they get mad. Some of the most beautiful places Ive been to are here in the Philippines. To retire, somewhere int he province here or in Gold Coast Australia, which is similar to what we have here, just more organized.

Can you tell us something that few people know:

Ive been olaying the piano and the trumpet. I took piano classes for six years. The trumpet was a forced instrument for me to play. I wanted to play the Saxophone, but there were no more sax available so I got stuck with the trumpet

Did you ever want to play for the public?

Hell no. It's a thing I'd rather play by myself. I can read notes, but I'm more of making kapa. But I haven't been playing any instruments lately.

Statement Questions.

What do you think makes a man successful?

Wow. I guess it's not about making millions and millions of dollars and pessos. If youre content with the things youve done. My dad always told me, Derek if you did it all, even if you fail, I'm proud of you. He wasnt the father that forced me to get good grades, even though bagsak grades ko, even though I did my best, he's proud of me. If I can reach half of what my dad's done with his life, I'd be very proud of myself and I'd consider msyelf successful. It's the work that you put in. You put in all your work, and one day you sti back and you can say "This is all mine because of hard work." You have a family that sticks by you and you have been committed to that family. I guess that's how you judge the success of somebody. It's not hte money you make. It's being content with what you've done.

You're aware that this whole showbusiness is not forever. How would you want to be remembered and what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind.

I'd like people who I've been working with to know that everytime Ido a role or have a job, I givemy best. I want to be known as the actor who doesnt compete with his fellow artist when doing a project. I'm all for createing a good project not getting involved with you know how some things are, guess it's true. I play the role that's given to me. Let's put it this way. Everyone always say "Why do you always die? Bakit ka pumapayag na pinapatay yung character mo? I say That's what'sint he script. Why would I change it? They say it's not good for my image. I don't play for my image. If I like the scirpt I like the character. I play my character. I don't like to change it midway when we're shooting a project. That's what I want them to remember. "Ah si Derek, hindi yan maarte. Sya lang yung, you know, he plays his role, he does his job. When I start a job, I finish it. Even though halfway through, you encounter some problems. Tatapusin ko. Let's say may prob ako with this actor, director, I don't talk to that person anymore pero no prob tatapusin ko."

Last question. What is the role of the showbiz industry in shaping the future generations (Deep question)

Shet.

People look up to you.

We gotta educate the people who are watching us. I dont want to sound mean, but what's kind of disappointing sometimes is we are kidn of scared to take the risk of trying new things for the things that we do. You know indy films. I'm all for indy films. Try different style, different stories, not just doing the same thing, changing the setting, changing the name of hte characters. Sinasanay naitn viewers natin na ganun. We should be able to take new risks to give our viewers something new. If we do that, we'll tap all the classes, we'll get more peopel to support our own work instead of people watching cable, watching foreign fimsl, I think that's our resposnibilt to educte the viewers byd oing stuff liek that instead of doing more of the chismis side. I think the shows that rate the most are teh ones with most chismis, sinasanay natin yung mga viewers na magfollow ng lives ng people, who are also arent perfect and they feed on that, the imperfect of other people. Educate the viewers, give them new things to watch, things that they can indulge into.

ANy movies anytime soon?

I havent thought about htat. I'm a sponge Im still learning a lot of new things as an actor. As a director, I wouldnt know what to do I need to learn. Onet hing with me, that';s why you dont see mi in ASAP, singing and dancing regularly, I leave that ot the pros. The ones who acutally have talent, I'm the first one to admit I cant sing and I can't dance. We accept that you put soembody there who cannot sing but we still love him because, sige kasi maganda na mukha, pwede ka na magartista. IN the states, you have all these people who may not be the best looking people but htey have talent. ANds I feel sorry for the people here who relaly have talent in acting but theyd ont get the chance to because of their physical apperaance which is not something I agree with. Yun.

Last statement

I'm very vocal. I gets me in trouble. But that's how I am. That's how I was brought up. I stand up by the values given to me by my parents.

Worse Than Crab Mentality

2011-03-23T18:08:00.002+08:00

You think you have it tough dating? Try being a crab. You can't hold hands without injuring your partner, walking side by side is a bitch because you're both walking sideways, and you can't tell the gender of the other crab without having to reach down the nether regions to see if it's lalaki babae or bakla. To make things worse, you won't know if you're dating a fatty until you've gotten far enough to the point that you remove each other's shells. You'd think you're dating the hottest crab on the beach and then BAM. SEE THOSE OOZING ALIGUE? OH SHIT, HAMBEAST!

Leila De Lima For President

2011-03-21T21:48:00.006+08:00

Leila De Lima : Your president, everybody's mom

Okay, so a few years back I made a vow - that so help me God I will help Kris Aquino become president if she makes so much as a sign that she wants to run. This was back in 2006, long before anybody even contemplated on the idea, because Public Static is all about firsts, FUCK YEAH. I still think she holds the right qualifications, even if popular trend says she's a joke.

You can read my previous case here.

But then NOYNOY happened, and the odds that after seven years the public will still want an Aquino in the palace is next to nil, not considering not considering the great Benigno rising up from the dead to save the lot of us. Because of this, the Kris Aquino project has been indefinitely shelved. I'm not saying our current president is a poor choice, I'm just saying I doubt well be seeing him in any monument or monetary unit anytime soon. We just screwed up our chance to have the best president ever, Filipinos. :|

So that said, I am endorsing another future possible: Leila De Lima, who is, as of this writing, the current head of the Department of Justice. Now she may not be the ultimate president, but think about it. Take one good look at her, how she acts, speaks, and carries herself from one scandal to another and try hard to not think of her as a mother.

It's going to be hard.

Because secretly, Future PRESIDENT Leila de Lima is channeling the "Nanay Mojo" of every Filipina Mother and is eating that for breakfast. She'd be like the proto-nanay of Pinoys.

Right now, she doesn't seem like she can do much. But then again, that's because she's being assigned to positions where she can't do much. I am willing to bet that if the president issues an executive order that Leila can act like she's the mother of every politico, she'd be spending days on end just dragging congressmen by the ear back to their houses and smacking the fear of the law back into them, as the Constitution intended.

"IF I HEAR YOU TALK ABOUT PORK ONE MORE TIME..."

Remember that time Leila De Lima was still in the Commission of Human Rights, which, next to the Philippine Association of Mga Komedyanteng Bungal is probably one of the most toothless organizations in the Philippines? She nearly turned it into a goddamn paramilitary outfit, marching towards military camps, barking at generals like they smacked her child once and now have the devil to pay for it.

Now imagine you give this scary lady power to actually do some damage. Give her some teeth. Give her the authority to knock teeth off. Do you still remember your mom at the moment she was about to give the younger you the throw down of your life? Wasn't that scary? THAT IS WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS.

Because in truth, even though for the last 30 years, we've had two war veterans, an action star, a mother capable of producing offsprings like Kris and Noynoy, we've never really had a president who can scare the rest of the government shitless. And like kids who didn't grow up with a good dose of fear in their system, our government has become insolent. And curing insolence is what mothers do best.

Leila De Lima is the mother that this country needs right now. She's the president who'll pull down your shorts, beat your ass, and wish you'd never squandered a single peso of tax payer money in your entire life.

follow thine hand or get smacked with it. your call.

LEILA DE LIMA FOR PRESIDENT. YOU HEARD IT FIRST, HERE IN PUBLIC STATIC.

SPREAD THE WORD.

Priests, Prayers, and Others (Part 2)

2011-03-20T21:42:00.002+08:00

(Since I've already tackled this topic before here: PART 1., let's just consider this as a part 2.

Today I went to Church service with my younger sister and mother. The priest that headed the mass is, for the lack of a better term, hardcore traditionalist. And yes, he's the very same priest that caused me to write a pretty lengthy article last time. Please don't get me wrong. I love going to Church. At the most pragmatic level, I have a belief that there's a functional need for religion in the human intellect. At the least pragmatic, well, I like the idea that somebody out there is looking for us. Sometimes though, I can't help but feel there are a lot of things in a Catholic Mass that we could do without, without having to lessen the effect it has on people, if not even improve on it.

1. I sat through 25 minutes of homily today. That's 5 minutes short of a highschool class, minus notes, visual aids, or a chance to validate what you're listening to. I've always believed the human mind is capable of 7 minutes of undivided attention. It's probably much less now given our propensity to multitask. So after 25 minutes of speech material, even though I tried hard, I am left with almost nothing that I can remember. It's not me, it's really just the nature of the human mind. You'd think people who are public speaking their whole adult lives would know a thing or two about effective communication. I mean, look at the Bible. If Jesus spoke of the beatitudes in a 25-minute speech, Bibles will be 3x thicker, and nobody would probably pass Religion 101. Brevity is the soul of wit. Jesus had the right idea.

2. Because of Lent, our roster of songs have changed again. Not change changed, but changed just enough so that it's still basically the same song, but with subtle changes made to the rhythm, tune, or lyrics. I take it that the choir wasn't expecting the change either because the priest and the choir at times were singing different "covers". Naturally, the community spirit was deader than a Christian in a Roman Coliseum. Where people should be encouraged to sing along, they just couldn't, because somebody in the Ministry of Who Sings What decided that Church songs should be seasonal, but should still sound remarkably similar and dissimilar to each other at the same time. If we really want to write more songs for the church why don't we make it 100% different? So we don't have to get confused which song is currently playing? To make matters worse, some versions of popular songs seems to only exist to showcase the range of the voices in the choir. Are they really singing to foster the community spirit, or is that just pride I'm hearing?

3. The second collections. Why do we still have second collections? Why can't we just have one and let the Church decide how much of the community-pooled resource goes to where? Can't they tell us what we need to give money for before the first collection so we can deem how much we are going to give? The whole idea of the collection is to show that we are one community. By adding as second collection for a "special purpose" it makes giving sound optional. If we are really "one" then there should be no optional when it comes to giving.

Lastly, and I really didn't want to discuss about the whole Republic Health bill brouhaha here because it's too controversial, and I've already done it before, but I want to mention the Oratio Imperata, an ordered prayer. I am not questioning the nature of Oratio Imperata. I am questioning its contents, which if you have heard before, sounds so imperative about what we want to happen, that it already sounds ARROGANT and INSOLENT. Whereas normally, we ask for God's guidance, this prayer makes it sound like we are guiding the good Lord himself, as though omniscience won't tell Him what's best for the people. In truth, if you analyze the prayer frther, it's so imperative because the Oratio Imperata is more of a device to condition the mindset of those who say the prayers, which is an unfortunate turn of events because a very powerful device is being turned into a method of advocacy propagation, which begs the question who we really are addressing. It's a lose lose situation, most saddening, and until things change, embarrassing.

I know I've nothing to say but bad things for the Church at the moment, but that don't mean I love it any less than the lot of church goers, I am speaking out because I believe that there's more to the Mass than advocacies, tradition, and grandiose worship. It's about sanctity of dialogue with the Maker. And that's something we might be forgetting in the long run.

Pangilang presidente si President Quezon : The Final Answer

2011-03-19T01:27:00.003+08:00

In case people are still asking. Here's my question to that long question about translation:

What is the English translation of :Pangilang presidente si Manuel Quezon?

Answer: What is the ordinality of Manuel Quezon as President? or What is the ordinal number of Manuel Quezon as president.

(O HA?! KALA NYO HA. HINDI IMPOSIBLE YAN. KAILANGAN LANG MAGBASA NG MAS MARAMI)

You can shuffle the words, but the key here is the world ORDINAL, which I learned at some point in working with IT terminologies. So who says being a programmer makes you absolutely useless?

I think the better question is, "Bakit sa Bente Pesos Nilagay si Quezon Eh Hindi Naman Sya Tumira Sa Malacañang?"

My Credit Card Story

2011-03-18T00:25:00.000+08:00

I've never been big on credit cards, mainly becuase I've always believed I don't have a need for it. I hardly ever make any big purchases, and whenever I do, the establishments I go to tend to give bigger discounts when you pay in cash (yeah, fuck you Gilmore). It was not until I started working abroad, where the prospect of not having any cash at hand, nary a card, and a tourist-grade inability to explain yourself in the vernacular could land you in prison where I assume you will be made to taste rather unsightly delicacies (e.g. rape). So I finally got one, and so far BPI hasn't given me any major pain in the ass.

Granted, there are a lot of points for improvement. Their cards, for one, look like they're allergic to being stored in anything more compact than a two ton shipping container. Storing them in my wallet breaks them in just a couple of months, and I don't even have a gargantuan ass. Meanwhile, my ATM cards, some of them already old enough to become registered voters are still working. My BPI credit card has conked out three times in the last three years, and twice I had to pay for replacements. FOUR HUNDRED BUCKS FOR A PLASTIC CARD, REALLY?! On the last instance, I lost my shit and demanded that I be given a free replacement, at gunpoint if need be. The folks were nice enough to give me a free replacement, and strange enough, an ass-size reduction program at Marie France. I didn't even have to load my revolver.

Then there's the program for making your own card image. I tried it last year to see if I can make gifts out of the promo. The registration program online ended up swallowing my applications for an entire month, with the staff in CS vehemently saying I never submitted anything. I started thinking there's a conspiracy going on, and that if I were to start looking for the Holocaust they'd say it never happened as well. Towards the end, somebody somewhere in BPI wised up and told me that my image broke their rules, which weren't written on the site, which weren't conveyed to me when I started complaining. If I didn't act, I'd have ended up waiting for signs or something. It's almost like talking to God, really.

Lastly, there's the membership fee. Now I'm not even sure why credit companies still insist on having those. For every transaction we make, the merchants are already giving them amounts that are likely coming from the price we are paying for the goods anyway. This doesn't even include any interests that we sometimes have to pay when we can't make the full amount (or got too lazy to pay that month). That's like paying twice for the same service. Fortunately, the banks allow the fees to be waived. For my case that's 2250 every year that doesn't have to be written under the ever-growing "stupid fees I don't really understand but pay anyway" list in my big book of expenses.

How I waive my membership everyyear is almost 100% the same, I'm not sure why I still have to do it again and again. It works this way. Sometime around March, I recieve my credit card bill and say "Oh dear. My bill is quite high this month" then I scan down my list of legitimate purchases, purchases that I would not be proud to show to my parents, and purchases that made under the influence of very strong psychoactive components. One of them will be marked "Membership fee". Membership fee?! I ask myself. "I thought I already told those guys at the Most Handsome People On Earth Organization that I do not need to be grouped to stay as handsome and ravishing as I currently am!"

So I inspect it again and see that it's actually for BPI's credit card program. I dial 89-100, navigate through the labyrinthine IVR interface that requires me to press more buttons than when I wrote this article and then patiently wait for an operator while listening to the hold music designed to passify any angry callers through subtle messages embedded in the music ("WORSHIP BPI"). After what seems like an entire presidential administration's wait, an operator will answer me and at this point the music has pacified me to a point that I already sound like Ghandi. It takes me about half a minute to compose myself into the normal steroid-angry customer that I'm supposed to be playing.

And here is where it gets strictly theatrical, in a sense that I'm sure I don't really mean half of what I say and the CS are acting and playing along just as much. I question why I have a membership fee tacked on my bill. They tell me it's because I didn't make the quota usage of 1,000,000,000,000 pesosesoses. I tell them that's ridiculous and that I've never heard of anything like that before. (I have) They tell me it's new regulation rules. (It's not) I pretend that I am terribly upset and ask my card to be cancelled. They pretend to check with their supervisor if it's okay to do so. I tell them okay. One last time they tell me it's too much of a favor to ask. I tell them if they don't, I'll cut the membership and pull out my four accounts, as well as my support for the current government administration. They ask me to wait. I wait. Then afterwards they tell me the amount will be waived, and that I should just try to use the card more. (I probably will)

And it's like that EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

In the spirit of optimization, wouldn't it be just faster if they just accepted the idea that I will not be paying such a ridiculous amount for the benefit of being able to pay some MORE? If cancelling the membership fee automatically is hard, then at least there must be some hidden phrase that I can just use to bypass the whole procedure, which is no longer than most mating rituals of animals in the wild, but is just as energy-consuming when I could be writing articles like this instead. Yeah, just one reserved word will do. Like:

Me: Hello, I'm here for the annual waiver.
CSupport: Okay, credit card number please.
Me: Asterisk x15 - 135. (that's how they like to write it anyway)
CSupport: Okay sir. Let me check.
Me: No, scratch that. "MERCEDITAS GUTTIERREZ HAS CROOKED EYBROWS"
CSupport: Codeword registered. Your membership fee has been waived. Have a nice day.

Done and done. I'd have more time for my lesiurely surfing for illegally procurable files and they'd have more time dealing with people who can't manage debt if their lives depended on it.

DON'T PANIC. IT'S PLASTIC.

Why I Don't Own An iDevice (iPhone, iTouch, iPad, iDontCare)

2011-03-07T12:53:00.003+08:00

A lot of people keep on asking me why I'm still not interested in buying an iDevice despite the facts that:

1. iDevices are the new hot gaming platforms
2. The multitouch controls are the shit
3. More people use it than common sense
4. Non-users are not part of the coven and shall be purged in the Great Reckoning

My reasons are simple. iDevices are cool because they combine a lot of things we want in one convenient gadget, and because it's trendier with the young crowd than venereal disease is with clubgoers in Malate. I need neither. I like my gadgets separate, and I don't like things because they're trendy. But because this is suppose to be a full-length article and there's nothing to be gained in settling an argument in a couple of sentences, here are my point-by-point rebuttals to the usual reasons:

1. The iPhone sucks as a phone. Ergonomically speaking, a wide screen is good for touch control, but it's shit when you have to hold it for more than 5 minutes near your ear when you have to use it for what it really is, like, you know, make phone calls. 10 years ago Nokia figured out that making phones that have curves and aren't as wide as a soapdish are easier to hold. Why do we have to uninvent this? That'd be like having some guy change the shape of the wheel back to square 100 years after everybody agreed circle is best, for the reason that a square wheel can also be used as a window frame. You can argue that a bluetooth phonepiece will solve this issue, but I can argue that bluetooth phonepieces make you look like an retarded jackass who likes talking to inanimate objects when people see you making phonecalls.

2. The iPhone/iTouch sucks as an MP3 player. Now don't get me wrong on this. In this day and age, almost all Mp3 players are practically the same, having the same features, playing the same low-bitrate bullshit being sold online. When I say it sucks, I mean it in a "I used to have an Mp3 player the size of a wrist watch back in 2001 why is this shit still as large as a brick ten years later" kind of way. I like my music player small because it makes it more convenient to carry around. As far as convenience goes, a device a few inches larger than my palm just to play music might as well be a 70s era jukebox.

3. The iPhone's multitouch controls aren't as awesome as you'd think.
The idea of a screen capable of multitouch is nothing short of astounding. Even now, I still find it amazing that they were able to pull it off. However, if you try and think of how you control of your phone, most of the time you're not really using the "multitouch" function. You have a finger, and you're using it to manipulate the interface. Like a stylus. Except unlike the stylus, the finger on a capacitive screen isn't the most accurate thing in the world. We grow up working with pens and sharp pencils because we know those big fat crayons aren't of much use when you run out of big coloring books to work on. This is just like that, specially in gaming. The controls are almost often either inaccurate or shakey. "But Jet, you just get used to it LOL." No. There are better alternatives out there, why put up with something less?

To make matters worse, the controls are always on the screen, making games that require more complex button press sequences visually awkward, with your fingers blocking out portions of the screen. The only iPhone games that I really enjoy are those that rely on the six-axis sensors, but even then, it's too gimmicky for my taste, and my hands are too shaky.

4. The games.
The games are casual. And I admit a lot of them are entertaining, but most of these games are just rehashes of what I've been playing for years elsewhere online. Angry Birds, for example, is nothing but a rehash of Crush the Castle - a game that's been free online since 2007. There aren't many games out there that haven't been done and outdone before somewhere in the annals of Flash-dom. The only difference is that this time the platform is portable, which brings me to my next half point.

I love gaming, and the idea of being able to bring games wherever I go is awesome, specially when I know I'm going to be alone somewhere without anything to do or anybody to talk to for a very long time. Masturbation is an alternative, but good luck getting away with it in a public commuter train. But then again, that sort of instance just doesn't happen often enough for me to think of having something to play on all the time. Whipping your game console out when you are with other people is just likewise so antisocial, unless they also have the same gadget and you'll be playing co-op. DS and PSP had this feature and exploited it well. On the other hand, most iPhone games are just single player. That means when somebody's playing, there's always one less person interacting with the group. It kills the group dynamic, so unless that's your intention in the first place, portable gaming isn't the way to go. We can say that it's also possible that everybody can get their own iGadgets and go play a game of who gets the highest score... but that's just tantamount to playing Patintero with five people belonging to the same team. :|

Next.

Good Parenting

2011-03-02T00:53:00.000+08:00

Seen inside SM Hypermarket Harrison Plaza.

Should I Tint My Car? A Case For The Untinted Car

2011-02-26T22:34:00.002+08:00

Note:(Written with a friend. He's going to put it in a form quite different from this one so I'm free to write at least the ideas we discussed).

While it's common sense to say that a tinted car has many advantages, from energy efficiency, to privacy, to security, there aren't many reasons put out in the open as to why you shouldn't tint the windows of your car. This is my take on why the opposite might prove advantageous.

1. Cars where the driver is visible are treated better in general by other drivers because tint dehumanizes other cars. The moment a human sees another human face, social semantics kick in, which is the same principle that allows us to decapitate a chicken with little remorse and not another human being. The moment normal people know they might get a reaction from other people, they start behaving in a fashion that will avoid an unwanted reaction.

2. Cars without tint are less likely to be broken into as well. While the going principle is that a car with a tint hides valuables easier, one without tint does not give the false sense of security that a user of a tinted car would have, so the owner is more likely to be responsible for his belongings. A thief would be less likely to see valuables scattered in the car, because the owner expects people to try and see.

2b. And even if so, a car without tint is less likely a target because anybody who tries to do anything fishy has a higher visibility from more than just the side where the door/window is being forcibly broken into. And since thievery is all about not getting caught, an untinted car is less likely to get stolen from.

3. An untinted car is less a target for carjacking as well. Since the interior of an untinted car is visible from the outside even when moving, carjacking one will expose the thieves to a higher chance of getting picked out at checkpoints. If they take the driver with them, all the more likely that they will get caught, as it will be hard to hold somebody hostage inside a car and not look like you're holding a hostage.

4. Lastly, an untinted car is safer for the sole reason that there aren't many like it these days. A criminal will always pick a car that does not stand out, given the choice between one that does and one that does not. It's not a conjecture. It's a statistical fact.

Kayo po na nakahubo

2011-02-21T18:43:00.001+08:00

Subukan nyo namang tumayo.

Why Filipino Music is Dying

2011-02-18T09:43:00.002+08:00

The Organisasyon ng Pilipinong Mangaawit is a joke and does as more damage to the local industry in the name of helping out.

Earlier this year, President Ogie Alcasid announced that OPM will be pushing for higher taxes for Foreign acts, in order to protect the so called "welfare" of local acts. Because of this, a ticket for a foreign artist's performance here in Manila would often be at least 20% higher than in Singapore or Hongkong, not even considering the fact that these are first-world countries we are talking about.

While this "might" help out the government in terms of additional revenue, I'm pretty certain foreign acts and local acts usually cater to a separate social status bloc. Putting on more taxes will hardly convince people who would rather see foreign concerts to watch shitty local ones just because they're "cheaper". You know what else is cheaper? Watching TV. If you do it from outside your neighbor's house, it's even for free. People watch concerts not because they can afford it. It's because they actually WANT to see the artist perform.

Killing competition by tax chokes is both underhanded and unsportsmanlike. Instead of trying to improve their acts, OPM pulls this, something tad step short of artistic fascism. So pull out a gun and take us hostage already. To make things worse, OPM refuses to eat its own cooking by SUPPORTING THE FOREIGN ACTS AND WATCHING IN THE VIP AREA OF EVERY FOREIGN ACT CONCERT. If OPM really wanted to compete, they'd take the foreign acts as a challenge to up the ante. If ever, foreign performances might even develop the local industry by inspiring up and coming acts, who might otherwise be too poor to watch it because a certain organization wanted poor people to stop wasting their money on useless concerts of foreigners and waste it on their useless concerts instead.

There's probably some other reason behind this move. Raising taxes on the grounds of fostering the community is a lie. No startups would be threatened by foreign acts. Why would your bar gig be sidetracked because Bruno Mars wants to come here to sing and snort cocaine? Only the ones who've been in the industry for so long would see that as a problem. Think about it.

And why is it that people have stopped watching local concerts anyway? Let's just put it this way. The two highest ranking officials in OPM is Ogie Alcasid and Gary Valenciano. I have a lot of respect for the talent of these two guys. But! Both of which released albums last year that were just 80% covers, a good number of them from foreign artists. While covering is understandable and quite entertaining, let's not forget that the OPM is supposed to stand for ORIGINAL PILIPINO MUSIC. For people who advocate so strongly against piracy, originality seems to be so lowly regarded. Why bother watching covers when you can go for originals?

Ogie Alcasid was nice enough to say this during an interview:

What are his plans for the revival of OPM? “Siguro, we have to assess the problems affecting the music industry before we could offer any solution. Kung ako ang tatanungin mo, ang isang problema ay ang kawalan ng sigla sa bentahan ng music. Wala kang naririnig na bagong music. ‘Yung paggawa ng bagong kanta bihira na. Tapos ‘yung batas na dapat four Original Pinoy Music (OPM) songs ang pinapatugtog every hour hindi na rin nasusunod. Siyempre nariyan pa rin ang problema ng piracy. Then the taxes sa mga concerts,” said Ogie.

So to keep it short. He complained there's not enough originals out there and THEN went on to release covers anyway. Man's gotta earn a living, I guess. Fuck principles. Later in the interview, he went on to propose drafting policies to foster the community through mandated airings of songs and other politically charged bullshit that likely wont solve anything but the OPM's personal problems. You don't solve sociocultural issues with political solutions. It's never worked that way and it probably never will now.

To be fair, to show that OPM does care for artists who AREN'T groomed by the big publishers, they have launched an OPM-Pagcor search for talents. And I have no qualms about this. A lot of good talent are out there just waiting to be discovered. Of course, there's still the fact that even with this contest, you can see where OPM's emphasis lies. Instead of trying to address the issue of not having enough people composing new songs, they're just trying to bring in more people who can PERFORM. From the mouths of the organizers, the objective is to find the next world class performer like Charice and Arnel Pineda, BOTH of which became famous for singing other people's songs. Gone are the song-writing competitions. I can't remember the last time anything like that was even televised. Which is too bad. I thought a lot of the better songs from the 90s came from those competitions.

What we have now is an archaic organization ranting about the clear problems of the industry, while at the same time grossly contributing to the problem and taking steps that are backwards-drunk away from solving the issues at hand.

Since when has the OPM become a part of our government?

Chapter 1 : Vectors : Chemical Manila

2011-02-16T19:53:00.003+08:00

Engineer Alan Perez held the corked test tube on his hand and shook it in gentle circling motions. The water inside contained blue fluid that danced around, and then finally blended into colorlessness. The man breathed a sigh and placed the vial into the test tube rack, hands steady, but enervated. Just in front of his table was the standard company wall clock with the proud Manila Water Company logo. Six in the morning - not even break time yet. There was nothing much to do around the place, and for all the complexities of the processes in the water treatment plant, once you have gotten used to its peculiarities, life within the second Balara plant became filled with doldrums.

"Batch thirteen is clear from intermediate chlorination, recommending the release for post-disinfection, Sir," he said in a boilerplate manner while writing down on a blue ledger.

A man with a hardhat and an unshaven smug walked in. "Good, good. Let's keep up this pace so we'll be able to finish all of today's work this morning. Then we can take the afternoon off." The man was Supervisor Carlo Nuñez, a stubborn man who's said to have been around long before Manila had any potable water running on its pipes.

Alan's always hated his dry humor - even that day. Work never really ended in the water treatment plan, and the horribly inefficient redtape made work even twice as labor intensive. To top it off, nobody ever really paid attention to the work they're doing, despite the fact that it was them on the frontline of hygiene, making sure half of the city didn't die from some obscure water-borne disease just waiting to get into the lifeline of Manila. Oh no, not that, people would rather go over bonuses people were getting in sister companies than wonder whether or not that glass of water they were gulping down had its own share of life-sucking bonuses in it. Idiots. All of them.

To Alan and everybody there, they were practically unsung heroes.

"Oh yeah, Alan, the guys from the SIWI have the post-treatment package ready. I've asked the boys to start unloading from the vats for this batch," Carlo grumpily reported to Alan, "You can just send the pre-testing analysis to me later after lunch." Alan sneered secretly - Carlo never did have regard for his work and often did reckless things that drove Alan who was pathologically meticulous, insane.

Alan opened up the drawer and took out a small medicine bottle. The Swedish International Water Institute's logo had been emblazoned on it. Was it really okay to just dispense additional chemicals into the waterways without notifying the people in at the MWS head office? He was going to ask Carlo but it seemed that he had already taken off for an early and lengthy break. If the senate enquiries had to crucify somebody - he wouldn't really mind to volunteer Carlo. That b*stard.

The engineer shook his head and poured the chemical into a flask of water on his table. The water remained colorless, which Alan quickly found to be odd. Usually for test chemicals sent in by SIWI or any other water monitoring agency, it always had trace coloring to ensure that everybody working with the substance would know the water's experimental.

Lifting the flask, he walked towards his pet mice within the same office. He had always kept a pair of dagang costa as a quick measure for water safety, knowing that even for rats the particular species of white-haired rats were susceptible to strong chemical reactions in the water.

The mice drank hastily; it was a hot day after all.

Alan watched carefully. The mice seemed fine and he breathed a sigh. Maybe Carlo did have a point in cutting corners when it came to the procedural labyrinths of administering water treatment. The chemical's supposed to be just another supplementary compound - nothing outside routine.

And then the mice proved his thoughts wrong.

The mice convulsed started coughing. Not ordinary coughing, but coughing like it's in pain. Alan had never seen such a reaction before - at least nothing so quick and gut wrenching. Blood started spattering after every cough and within a few seconds, the mouse stopped moving. Alan moved closer to the cage. The rats still had their eyes open, and for some reason both of them looked like they were still breathing. "Is it poisoned?" Alan wondered.

Then one of the rats sprang to life, blood streaming from its eyes and started shrieking uncharacteristically. A rush of chills circulated in Alan's body as he watched with horror the rat systematically bashing the cage in an attempt to get to Alan. The rat's immaculately white fur soon turned red with its own blood.

Alan was thrown back in surprise.

"My God!"

He then remembered Carlo's words. The substance would be delivered to all the treatment plants that day, and theirs was already administered in the thirteenth batch of the day's supply. With a boost of adrenaline he darted out to halt the release.

"sh*t! sh*t! sh*t! sh*t!"

Alan saw Carlo ,still standing on top of the open-air treatment areas, and the fact that he's still there meant the water was still unreleased. Alan panted as he got closer, staring at the ground. "Jesus f*cking Christ. That chemical from SIWI is dangerous. Good thing you're still here Carlo, you motherfucker."

Carlo did not reply.

"Say something you son of a..." Alan stood up and stared at Carlo, face to face. Carlo was livid, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth slacked. Blood slowly came out of his eyes and nose and a steady, rising grunt came from his throat.

Alan felt the need to run, but Carlo's eyes were somewhat teasing him. This was just a joke, wasn't it? It just had to be. Alan laughed, manically. "Okay I get it, now let's just..."

Carlo lunged forward and took Alan down in one bodily thrust. His teeth sank into Alan's throat and the blood purged erupted violently into the rapidly decreasing water reservoir. With Carlo's big burly build, Alan could only vainly struggle and watch as his blood choked up his breathing, leaving him into a writhing man soon bereft of life.

Howls echoed all around the treatment plant, along with blood curdling screams,drowned by the gushing of water, and the empty drumming of the exhaust fans.

The vector has been delivered.

And so with this, the purge of Manila begins.

Prologue: The Smoking Gun: Chemical Manila

2011-02-16T19:49:00.002+08:00

Smoke blown from the thick cigar between the lips of the general wafted around, like the lingering feelings of resentment that emanated around the conversation. The general was far from being at a retirable age, but the weariness in his eyes and the wrinkles on his body told of a spiritual exhaustion beyond belief.

Across the table, a younger man with a press badge and bloodshot eyes resisted an urge to cough. On his hand is a small tickler notebook where his right hand scribbled madly, in a desperate fashion. "So," the reporter spoke, "you're saying that you know the real reason why on the twenty second of February, 1984, the regime was finally able to uncover Rebolusyon ng Alyansang Makabayan's plot to oust Marcos?"

The general nodded. He answered with a raspy voice. "The stakes were high for both sides, and between us and them was a secret that could turn the tide of the struggle. Neither the RAM or the dogs of Marcos would like the public to ever know about it, so in the event, the story revolving that aspect of the revolution was kept secret."

"The secret?" the reporter asked like a child on Christmas morning.

"The intelligence officers from within the RAM, they knew something was up at the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant right from the start. There was more to the project than it being overbudgeted, undersupervised, and unusually militarized. To those in the know, Marcos had meant for it to be that way - as to why, that was the question everybody was left to ask.

What we knew was that there was something else being developed there. The fact that the amount of resources being funneled into the place doubled, tripled, at the height of the rumors of the Sabah invasion's Jabidah incident led us to think it was a weapons research program. Funds were coming in from the president's own coffers, some of them even reportedly from the amassed gold from YamashitaÃ¢€™s plunders, and until we knew what was going on there, we could not hope to bring Marcos down."

The fists of the general clenched as he bit on his cigar. The reporter stopped writing. "The Sabah Invasion, you say? You mean Operation Merdeka? If I remember it correctly it was a move to destabilize Sabah using trained Muslim commandos as a prelude to going to war with Malaysia over the territory. In the late sixties, the commandos rebelled when they couldn't stand what was going to happen and the higher ups of the military had them liquidated in Corregidor Island. As far as I know, after that, the Marcos government junked Operation Merdeka."

"Mistakes happened, but it seems the government had other ideas than to just forget about the islands. Either way, we had to know for ourselves what was going on. On the night of the 21st, we sent our black ops to investigate the plant. I'm the last living member of the support group of the unit that went inside."
"And then what did you see inside the plant?"

"The plant itself was heavily guarded but with our skilled troops, we managed to get in effortlessly. Once inside, evidence of human experimentation started showing up. Far from being just a nuclear power plant, sections of the place looked like a genetic laboratory, with specimens in stasis with overgrown muscular structures and menacing looks. We discovered that BNPP was in fact a cover for a research program for creating enhanced soldiers - not too different from Stalin's genetic experiments during the Second World War. All I was able to catch was something about the Tabon Man gene, of which I have no idea about even to this day."

The reported could barely mask the shock on his face as he stood aghast. The general smiled a bit. The secret had stayed hidden for so long he'd almost forgotten how much of a surprise it must be to somebody in the dark about the true "peaceful revolution." He slipped back into his seat before continuing.

"We tried to gather as much information as we could, but a firefight broke out in the plant. Those outside heard loud explosions coming from inside afterward and communications with our lead unit was broken. I supervised the retreat of the remaining units - the ones that went in never came back out, and soon the central building of the plant was in flames."

"What happened to the laboratory you discovered? Was there any information that you could have kept on record?" the reported leaned forward, as though trying to elude an imaginary eavesdropper.

The general sighed. "A good number of our comrades died that night, the price we had to pay for the destruction of the laboratory. Unfortunately for us, nobody survived among those who witnessed the place first hand or gathered documents. However - "

"However?"

"As I was the point man for the retreat, I trained my rifle's scope at the exit points. I thought I saw a man carrying a briefcase and a baby amidst the smoke and confusion. No, I'm pretty sure even now that it was in fact a man. I could not get a clear identification if it was friend or foe, so I hesitated."

"So you're claiming somebody survived the explosion and that person possibly has information on the secret of the nuclear power plant?"

"Yes. Of course, I couldn't tell anybody about the plant, even more so about how I let a survivor leave. It would bother our comrades, and we'll be spending unnecessary resources looking for him, and possibly endangering our lives further in the process."

The reporter finally closed his notebook. "The following day, the government started the crackdown on the RAM, Enrile and Ramos turned coat, and the people started gathering in EDSA, making the revolution public, ushering the People Power Revolt and the rest, they say, is history.

Meanwhile, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was deemed too dangerous to use and remained inoperable by the new administration, as you claim, as it probably was mean to be like that.

As for the events that happened that night, none of it ever leaked outside the military, leaving unsung heroes and forever changing the face of the so-called bloodless revolution. If I'm not mistaken, this story could possibly be the story of the century."

The general guffawed. "It seems you have researched this topic pretty quickly beforehand. I almost forgot to thank you for coming on such a short notice. "

A resigned expression permeated from the reporter's face. "I'm only interested in making sure everything that happened is in my notes. I take pride in my thoroughness."

"I feel like a burden has been lifted now knowing the people will know of the bravery of my comrades.They may finally rest at ease."

The reporter stood up. "Perhaps we misunderstood each other, sir General."

He pulled out a silenced pistol and unerringly pulled the trigger on the General's forehead. The general did not even see it coming. A moment later, he was dead, blood and brain pouring out of a wide exit wound where the lower half of the man's head used to be. The crimson stain slowly pooled into the wooden floor of the room.

"Loose lips sinks ships, General."

The smoke steadily cleared as the reported opened the door of the apartment and walked out into broad daylight. He tugged the press badge out of his neck and threw it on the creek just beside the street along with the smoking gun.

End chapter.

Philippine International Pyromusical Competition - Songlist and Review for Spain and Italy

2011-02-13T00:38:00.006+08:00

The family of my girlfriend was nice enough to invite me to dinner during the first leg of this year's pyromusical competition, and since I don't get to have a nice (i.e. paid) view of the event very often, I might as well do a review on it.

One thing I really like about these Pyrolympic/Pyromusical events is that it's like that only time of the year when my real musical preference gets the center stage. I'm a soundtrack addict, and although there's pretty much a soundtrack for everything in the entertainment industry, from epic movies to Kris Aquino's laughter, you don't really hear these things out of their original contexts.

For some reason, the contestants have a weird but nice habit of picking their tracks from movies, games, and other things that require soundtracks, so I get to enjoy fireworks AND tracks that are more than familiar to me.

That said, this week's two contestants are Korea and Spain. To anybody who's asking which Korea (I was), it's the Korea whose idea of explosions doesn't involve all-out war. I'm not sure about the mechanics, but I think they're required to do a talent portion (fielding something unique from their country), and then go on with the fireworks.

Talent Portion

Korea's talent was really good. I didn't quite catch her name but the violinist lady did good modern interpretations of various classics. When she covered "Anak" people just lost their shit, specifically the guys at the Spanish side, whose idea of capturing the hearts of Filipinos is to field four Flamenco dancers who, unfortunately, couldn't dance to the same beat. (effects of a Two drink minimum perhaps?) My gf told me she was also a beauty. I wasn't able to see, as I was busy prying meat from the crab I was happily eating at the time. So yeah, winner on this part is South Korea, hands down.

Fireworks

Korea worked with a lot of classic soundtracks. Opening with the Terminator Suite, I expected them to come on strong and maintain a strong motif throughout the performance. One thing about the terminator suite though is that its beats are very distinguished, which, if they don't sync with the fireworks, they make the timing delays very visible. From rough and tough, Korea swung to easy street with a couple of stringed Korean tracks, which I could not understandably identify, but were really nice to the ears. The usage of the long burning waterfall configuration of fireworks accentuated the peaceful aura of the music, which was a big plus on my opinion. And then as though to deliver a kick in the balls after the lull, Korea spent the next half of the performance rocking the shit out of the audience with the powerful track of the movie The Rock. After that,back to Korean stuff (at this point, you just know they're just messing with you by fielding as many curveballs as possible) and then they finished off strong with Gladiator's main theme, which is, to say the least, perfect for a strong yet somber finish. Timing of the fireworks are apt during the latter half and made up from the somewhat confusing first half.

Spain had a shitty intro talent portion. It's like they know it and decided to apologize by hauling ASS during the fireworks competition. Spain opens up with Requiem For A Dream (AKA the default epic music of almost every fantrailer on youtube) just to show they're not going for shits and giggles. Choice of fireworks immediately shows why they have won a lot of previous competitions. Mixing rock music with The Matrix Revolution's Neodammerung, which is arguably the best track in the whole trilogy. The theme of imperative doom sung by a ghostly Sanskrit voice ensured that any arrangement would be epic, but Spain took no chances and matched the track with a lot of rapid rockets and quick-flash fireworks. At this point they could have stopped and still won, but the time was barely at the half mark. The next song played is the first part Armageddon suite soundtrack, with the clear plucking of the Spanish guitar complimenting the slowed delivery of the lights display. To pick up the pace, the second half of the suite was played as well along with 2001: A Space Oddessey, though to a lesser degree of gloriousness compared to Neodammerung.

For the last part of Spain's performance they left the already beaten path of soundtracks and used a remix of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, a piece famous for having REAL CANNONS as part of the instruments played. What better song to be used for a pyromusical competition? Spain does not disappoint. Their finale was done so well to such degree that I literally had my mouth hanging wide open by the time the performance ended. I have never seen the whole bay in front of MoA light up as bright as that night, and I probably never will.

Spain > Korea. No contest.

Birthday Talk Doesn't Amuse Me

2011-02-06T13:01:00.004+08:00

Here's one more thing I don't get. How do people get away with realizing it's your birthday and then acting surprised that you're already one year older than the last time they saw you have a birthday? "Wow, you're 27!" Good job demystifying the puzzle, Sherlock. One year after my last birthday, I AM one year older. We didn't see that coming. Whoah.

Some people take it further, going all three bases fully loaded for the homerun of retardation by telling you "You're older now!". Think about it. Every time you say that to a person, even if it is not his birthday, it will always be true. "You're older now!" Say it ten times, it will still be true, for very small increments, like "You're a second older now!" "And now!" "And now!" "And - " click! bang! It's stating the obvious.

It'd be more interesting if people started saying "Wow, you're younger now." Because then, holy shit. How did that happen? If I were told that, I'd start tracking back to everything I ate and drank and try to figure out which part of my diet constituted the elixir of youth. Was it the sisig? Was it the half-consumed pizza that's been on my freezer for approximately 2.5 weeks?

And then there's the usual talk from the elders that go like "Oooh you're now. Shouldn't you be getting already? I hear is also looking forward to it already too." Now just fill in the activity for marriage, going abroad, or running for mayor(as is the tradition in some families, it's their coming of age thing). It's kind of pointless. The next time somebody does that, get back with Ooohhh you're now. Shouldn't you be getting a nice plot of land somewhere in Loyola already? I hear is looking forward to having cocktail parties in the afterlife too. Then it'd be fair and square.

I'm just saying.

Facebook Oneliner Roundup

2011-02-02T11:14:00.000+08:00

"And perhaps, it's of even greater tragedy that the true value of some people can only be seen by the size of the hole they leave behind in our lives." - scribbled on my Azeus training notes from six years ago. I can't remember why I wrote it.

Somebody told me a long time ago, hearts are like stickers. The more places they've tried to belong to, the lesser the chance they'll ever attach for good. You only have one heart, so make sure you stick where it counts.

Weeaboo during Japanese occupation = makapili.

Bakit naman dati hindi tayo obsessed sa mga mali sa printing ng pera natin? Bakit andun si Jose Rizal sa proclamation ng independence? Bakit pwede mo lagyan ng sumbrero yung kalbong katipunero? Meron nga bang kalbong katipunero nun? Wala naman nagtatanong dati.

Changes are like storms, in the fashion that you can never point to the exact moment they begin.

Payo sa buhay #1: Kapag binato ka ng bato, batuhin mo ng tinapay. Tapos habang kumakain sya, suntukin mo sa kwan ng sobrang lakas. Bawi ka na.

What does a guy trying to learn cycling have in common with Piolo? If they don't want to fall, they have to look straight.

Is it just me or are the girls I meet at the bars exceptionally good at quantum mathemtatics? Everytime I approach one, I end up getting imaginary numbers.

That Facial Expression

2011-01-31T15:46:00.003+08:00

I saw this ad in Harrison Plaza yesterday. I don't know whether they were having a two-for-one sale on equipment or statutory rape.

School Fairs Suck

2011-01-28T19:16:00.004+08:00

Mission Fair, School Fair, Mini Fair. We have a lot of names for this particular school activity, but no matter what it's called, it mostly sucks. The only reason why I have so many fond memories of it is because when I got to experienced it, I was young, gullible, and easily amused. Even then, I wouldn't really have it any other way, because hey, if it took me away from having to put up with reading books, wearing uniforms and eating shitty cantee - oh wait - scratch that one. In any case, anything that breaks the monotony of school life, be it a fair, a program, or the occasional threat of one of our antediluvian wooden buildings burning down due to embers coming from the canteen chimney, it's always more than welcome.

Minifairs are held once a year in our school, almost always under the premise that any income generated from the fair will be donated to the funds of our adopted missionary institutions. Everybody is welcome to put up their own booths for generating money from both students and visitors alike. For students in an all-boys school this is also an opportunity to convince ourselves that there are women in this world who aren't as old as our parents and teachers. (Something I did not fully understand until college) It's almost like visiting hours for a prison - except unlike prison visitation hours, mini fairs don't happen every day. To ensure the fair has constant population, students are required to attend at the threat of teacher-related retribution, and are not allowed to leave for a set amount of hours. Again, like prison. I'm not saying our school IS prison, but I bet if we annexed paranaque city jail we wouldn't least feel different.

Here are some of the things that are worth noting about minifairs in our school:

Chits - Chits are like the equivalent of Disney Dollars - they're the official currency of the mini fair. I don't know who it was that thought of it, but he or she should be commended for thinking of "chits". Bloody GENIUS.There are moneychangers at the entrance of the fairgrounds that exchange your money into flimsy token representatives of the money you should be holding in your hand. They are usually constructed with special paper that cannot be counterfeited since they're so easy to ruin, merely looking at them the wrong way can disintegrate them. So yeah, they're basically Disney Dollars, except you are not in Disneyland, and the chits are only valid for the one or two days that the fair is occurring. Come end of the weekend, your chits magically turn into bullchit. It's a one-way investment that's rigged to make you lose money. The basic idea of chits is - trap the population of a congressional district into an enclosed space half the size of a football field, and then refuse to accept Philippine pesos in any booth so people either use your currency or have them starve/get bored to death. Money comes in and it never comes out. Kim Jong Il and that Jew from The Merchant of Venice would be so proud.

Raffles - no minifair would be complete without raffles where nobody ever wins. I was in the school for ten years and never have I seen anybody even remotely related to me win anything. Not even a goddamn toaster. I figured the winners are actually also from the fair committee who, after claiming the prize, secretly return it back to the prize stash for next years fair. That damn toaster is probably older than me too. The raffle tickets are very cheap, but they are given as a whole booklet to every student who are then forced to SELL THEM TO EVERYBODY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Think about it. Each class in school has 40 kids. There are five sections for every level, six in gradeschool, four in highschool. that's 40 x 5 x 10 = 2000 children with 50 tickets each. 100,000 tickets all in all. The population of the entire CITY OF PARANAQUE - and this includes the farflung areas who couldn't give a shit about our school - during the 90s is pegged at about 400000. That means if the children of our school wanted to avoid having to buy our own tickets, we will have to sell a ticket to 1 out of four citizens of Parañaque, including Septuagenarians, retards, homeless people, and babies. YES IM MAD GOD DAMN IT. GIVE ME A MINUTE.

...

Okay, let's get a move on before I pop a nerve.

Food - The food is probably the reason why people buy chits. You can always starve yourself of entertainment, but not of food. To ensure that you're bound to go hungry, jail booths and "jailers" are put in place so the majority of people will be in constant tension and occassionally have to run. Apart from that, all students are required to do field demonstrations. We'll get to both of those in a moment. Back to food. Now food in minifairs is food when there is no minifair. The same shady-looking canteener who wouldn't look out of place in Tales from the Crypt is the same person cooking minifair food. The only difference is that prices are jacked up a notch, on the premise that "it's all for the mission". I can't help but think that the "mission" is a mission to strip you of any material belonging so we can all live like John The Baptist or something. To make things worse, since everything is traded by chits, it's not unusual to find that some store booths start running out of chits for change. So what do they do? They shift the currency to CANDY, as though it holds some sort of magical monetary value. Yeah, that's what children need. Less money, more sugar. Because really, fuck capitalism.

There are other guest food providers like Pizza Hut and Jollibee, but of course, they also have jacked up their prices. When you are a kid given a paltry allowance everyday, as is most of the kids back then, being able to afford a Chickenjoy is a sign of affluence. Being able to buy Chickenjoy DURING a fair when the prices are exoribtantly higher shows you have enough money to not give a shit. It's the ultimate symbol of luxury, the equivalent of overpriced cocaine for kids.

Program - Since we're not in a war and it's technically illegal for schools to detain non-students, the organizers are forced to prepare a program beforehand to "entice" outsiders to come into the school and pay the entrance fee. (Yes, they actually forced you to pay to enter school during fairs, even though you're a student, even though most of the time you're also helping out with some booths.) Anyway, my experiences came at about the time cable tv was just starting to take hold of people's attentions, so this wasn't so hard. All they had to do was invite "stars". By stars I mean not the A-listers, by stars I mean, "people who might or might not have appeared on TV on more than one occasion, and is probably related to one of the organizers by sheer luck". Still, their performances and mere appearance are more than enough to attract people.

Apart from the stars, students of all levels in gradeschool are also encouraged to do "field demonstration" which is something sort of an organized dance - which is kind of a misnomer considering all dances are supposed to be organized in one way or another. For FD's, organized means you have students of an entire level doing the same action formed in lines like the military, under the heat of the sun, forced to show the fruits of the labor of practicing for several weeks in lieu of actual academic work (which is okay too, I guess) to the parents, who for some reason always act bewelidered at the idea that their son can actually dance like everyody else in their level, or for the case of my parents, at the idea that their son cannot dance, period.

Thinking about it, Minifairs are just like longer versions of recess for us children, in the sense that it keeps us away from the classrooms, and that the amount of what we get from the experience depends on how far our allowances will go.

Okay, I've written a fairly long entry already, but I still haven't gone over the types of "booths" you can actually enjoy. Let's leave that for part 2.

Tom Clancy's SSN - A Book Review

2011-01-27T23:07:00.002+08:00

The first thing you need to know about this Tom Clancy's SSN is the one thing I had to learn the hard way. Contrary to what the title says, this is NOT a Tom Clancy book. Some toolbag author supposedly cowrote it and then Tom Clancy passed by, took a shit on the manuscript, and called it "cowritten". I've seen Call Of Duty fanfiction that sounds more Clancy than this book. Suffice to say, it appears that the whole theme of the book is disparaging disappointment.

The second thing you need to know about SSN is that it's written based on a GAME. And while there are books that actually pull the transition off, good for them, bad for this book. I can't say much about the SSN game because I never played it, but I was expecting a lot more from this book - being that I've been wanting to read it since I was in third year highschool.

The story starts with a very interesting premise. What if China went to war with the US? Nevermind how ridiculous this sounds now (as it did before) but who wouldn't want to see that? Keep in mind that this was written back in the 90s, just before the cold war ended, long before China started catching up on the US military program through a systematic nationwider version of "may I copy your homework". The result is pretty obvious. America triumhps effortlessly and rapes practically every piece of military unit that China has with just ONE submarine. It's so ridiculous at points you'd think it's written as substitute porn for hardcore military enthusiasts. The whole China/US battle is just slightly a notch above the premise of America invading Somaliland pirate coves.

The story is centered on Captain Mack, who, unfortunately, is the only named person in the WHOLE FUCKING AMERICAN NAVY. By comparison, a single chapter of the Chinese story Three Kingdoms which is the oldest novel in existence, has 20 characters with different names. Everybody else is named after their function and their ranks, and possess personalities no further than that of their position in the submarine. SSN chronicles the captain and his ships missions done throughout the war on several ridiculous rambo-style missions (which is kind of understandable since it's a game) and does not really go far into detailing the US-China war itself.

Most of the narratives sounds like it was written as though whoever wrote it really really hated the game, submarines, and fiction in general. Parts of it, no, a good healthy portion of the book is practically a slightly embelished activity log of somebody who knows half shit about submarines. To make things worse, the enemies are about as poorly constructed as the main storyline, most of them acting mindlessly as though they've never received even the most basic of training or even a hint of common sense. The way the Chinese navy got portayed in this story is so poor, you might as well call it blatantly racist. There's not a drop of Chinese blood in my veins but hell, even I got offended.

I read this book only during the times I had to take a dump, so I read slowly - and it was like watching a very slowly unfolding trainwreck that made me cringe every other chapter. The writing quality is rudimentary, repetitive and absolutely horrible to the mental facilities. Dialogue sounds like it's being spat at by one of those Command and Conquer units, limited to only one or two unique lines. I tried skipping an entire chapter and found nothing of value was lost. As I've said earlier, I've seen far better work in the annals of the internet. Writing quality-wise, this has got to be the worst book that I have read in many many years.

As a final word, the only way I can recommend this is if you have brain cancer and the only way for you to survive is to kill enough of your gray matter cells as fast as possible. At a little over 350 pages, this piece of bajongo shit is a better alternative than the much more elaborated and painfully meandering Twilight series.

Verdict: Fuck you Tom Clancy you fucking sellout sunnovabitch. We loved Rainbow Six and Red October but this is just too much to put up with.

Buendia Bus Bombing - My Take

2011-01-25T16:05:00.006+08:00

A so called "big bomb" is said to have destroyed a bus along Buendia avenue earlier, but according to Senior Superintendent Froilan Bonifacio, chief of police of Makati, they're still determining what kind of bomb it is. It's a true tragedy indeed, and it starkly reminded me of what happened a few years back, which also happened early in the year, if anybody remembers. The Valentine's day bombing, attributed to the Islamic group happened along EDSA and killed and injured a lot of people as well. I can't begin to imagine how people really find motivation in doing these things. What could be so bad that injuring innocent commuters would be justifiable? We're not in the Middle East. We do have religious friction but thankfully not enough to cause this kind of atrocity!

I don't think the damage sustained by the bus looked like it's a very big bomb. But then again, we have to at least have an idea what the cops think of a "big bomb". I feel that releasing such a statement so early in the investigation is both haphazard and sensationalist, and the media will have another field day with this one. Just take a look at how close the media got to the bus (yet again)

I do hope that this has nothing to do with the military looking for an excuse to start moving against whichever objectified threat they have in mind. While I can't claim that this has been true for previous cases, theories that go around the net like this can't possibly have zero basis. So here's to hoping.

As for the unfortunate victims, right now, I just hope for the best for them and their families.

p.s. I wanted to get into more detail on the bomb specifics, but I'd rather wait this one out first for more information to be released. So far, everything's just sketchy. Will update as soon as we have more data to crunch. If I were to make a half-assed guess, judging from the partial vectorized explosion of the shatterproof glasses, it'd be a high-impact fragmentation grenade of sorts. 40mm? The energy is too focused and there's not much burn inside.

How to Spot Batingting/ Catch tampered taxi meters

2011-01-25T10:22:00.001+08:00

Working in a field that renders me lacking sleep a lot of times a week forces me to take the taxi very often. Even though I often say I want to die in my sleep, I have no intention of doing so behind the wheel, where insurance does not cover me. But it's not like taking a taxi gives me a license to relax and just sleep. On the contrary, I feel more stressed riding a taxi than riding a jeep. While the latter's lack of suspension makes you feel like you're being constantly ass-wrestled by a midget, the former is more likely to rip you off.

Batingting is a term for modified taxi meters, presumably based on the sound that plays in the drivers head everytime he gains a peso out of naive passengers (a tagalog equivalent of KA-CHING). I encounter batingtings a lot and by a lot I mean from 2004 up to now, I've already lost count of the times I spent finding how taxis cheat their meters in the Philippines. So much so, it's turned into almost a sport for me. Or maybe more like a gamble. Spot the cheat, save money.

Sometimes when I call their BS, the drivers are honest enough to come clean. Other times it don't end aspeacfully. For the cases of the former, I have in my possession a lot of recorded statements from taxi drivers about these things. For both, I have various information on how batingtings really work.

1. Rule numero uno is to not follow the LTRFB guidelines. An unbroken meter seal (that blue/yellow plastic rope that ties the meter down) does not prove shit. A lot of drivers testify, the modified meters are being installed from within LTRFB, BEFORE the seals are applied. That's like the cops being the ones responsible for stealing your shi --- oh wait.

2. Batingtings are not limited to old cars, old meters, and old drivers. One driver admitted he'd only been in the business for a few months. His car was a latest model Vios and his meter was one of the fancier ones I've seen. These heinous meters are so ubiquitous, I wouldn't be least surprised if pedicabs started carrying fake meters.

3. Pushbutton batingtings are waning already. The past few years, I've been seeing less and less drivers who rely on batintings that require them to trigger a button to increase the fare. I suppose it's already become too obvious to anybody who pays attention, when the meter starts jacking up two increments higher in a single breath. This is partially because the newer cars have much more sensitive electrical circuits, and adding a connection from the aircon or the radio to the meter will cause the whole thing to short. (The problem's already existed before, but it was usually not bad enough to fuck up the car computer. This is also the reason why the older batingtings are attached to radios with busted displays)

4. The new batingtings, specially for the newer meters rely on adjusted distance. The standard distance-based fare is 30 pesos for the first 300 meters, then 2.50 for every additional 200 meters. Fake meters alter this and make it 150 meters or even 100 meters. It's harder to detect because 1, passenger eyes are not accurate distance measurement devices and 2, the driver doesn't have to do anything. It's also preferred by drivers because they always have the "oh the meter's broken, thank god you noticed" excuse when caught. The "running horse" meter, or the one with the animation of a running horse is particularly notorious for this because the adjustment feature is already built into the frigging meter, like it's been built specifically to buttrape passengers.

Here are some tips in catching these batingtings/fake meters:

1. If you ply a route often, set various waypoints for a particular route and try to memorize how much the meter reads on the average. After a while you'll see the price stabilize, and a spike reading beyond two fluctuations or so might mean you're being gipped. Keep in mind that even though you're in traffic, the wait-based fare doesn't increment until after a couple of minutes so it should not affect the fare that much unless you're in really heavy shit. This has got to be the most effective tool in catching crooks, unless in some twisted future all taxis are cheating - in which case I do hope our GPS devices will get more accurate distance measurement features - and laser beams that can destroy souls.

2. Fake meters usually come into play at night, as told by at least three drivers. This is because some batingtings still require some alterations to the meter, which would come in the form of thin wires attached to the meter. Keep a sharp eye on weird protrusions on the meter.

3. Related to #2, some batingting drivers have the habit of holding the stickshift in such a way that they are blocking the meter. To work around this, sit in front or since that's not as advisable for when you confront the driver, sit in the middle of the back seats.

4. For the newer batingtings that alter the distance increments, notice that some drivers tend to keep a low maximum speed even when in high-speed areas. You will notice these by the fact that they never go over third gear even when its clear that they can have the economy advantage of shifting up. This is because the moment they get too fast, the increments will happen at an impossible rate, and the meters will look obviously tampered.

5. For the older batingtings, it's pretty standard fare, as mentioned in my previous article. A broken radio, a driver who keeps on pressing things that shouldn't be pressed, and increments that happen too close in succession. http://redkinoko.blogspot.com/2008/10/taxi-scams-suck.html

6. The last thing I can say about detecting batingtings is that the ones using them are just humans - not in a sense that they bleed but in a sense that they cannot keep up the BS without flinching. A lot of them tend to start getting distracted when you look like you're paying too close an attention to the meter. Some of them will try to keep you distracted by talking to you, but if you know your psychology, a man who has something to hide will always sound different from somebody who doesn't. Keep your guard up and your instincts sharp.

As a final word, I refuse to acknowledge that all taxi drivers are scamming dickheads. I have met a lot, more than I can count, of drivers who honestly go to work everyday expecting fair pay for fair service. Sometimes the meters are indeed defective, and they come out with it the moment you ride. Even if they don't, sometimes it's not really the drivers fault. A polite inquiry into an unusually fast meter oftentimes results in a peaceful resolution of the matter. It's all a matter of taste, really.

Executive Entertainment Malacañang Style

2011-01-24T01:22:00.003+08:00

And now for the most important news of the day, selectively censored in the spirit of Philippine Journalism.

Because when the most important man is on a break from pleasing everybody else, somebody's gotta please him back.

Math and Journalism

2011-01-21T05:09:00.001+08:00

They don't mix.

Associated Idiocy

2011-01-20T13:49:00.002+08:00

I don't really get how some people can be proud of really useless things. Like parents who are proud of having tall kids. Tall kids? That's lazy. It's not like you worked hard to make your kid grow taller. That's genetics at work. You basically just sat there and waited for your offspring to hit it big in the genetic powerball. And what does being tall do to your kid anyway? I mean apart from being a choice pick in barangay league basketball and getting to stand at the far back during class pictures? Pointless shit.

Another thing I don't get are the people who tend to associate too much pride in membership of a certain group. Schools seem to be a number one example here - specially when the UAAP season kicks in. I don't get it. I'm a graduate of DLSU, but never do I find it necessary to use it as an excuse to make it appear I'm so much better for it. DLSU is filled with just as many retards as there are good, outstanding citizens. And even if I do happen to be the one idiot standing amongst a company of geniuses, that's not going to make me any less of a jackass would it?

And it doesn't stop in schools. In the corporate world, you'd see people proudly waving around their company like its Fortune 500 status somehow reflects in the boring lackluster jobs they're holding. That's like bragging around that you and Angel Locsin are hitting it off because you happen to pass by her billboard every morning. (hint: You are not)

I dread the day I take pride in where I belong rather than in how I am regarded there. Because otherwise, I'd be practically a groupie. Groucho Marx once said "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". I suppose the same holds true for me.

The Secret Of Immortality

2011-01-20T01:03:00.002+08:00

I saw one of my oldest stories again on some website a while ago, posted by a person I have never talked to, met, or even crossed online paths with. He's not even Filipino, and I can't recall any friend from his race. But it's there, and he says it's his favorite. He even made a nice caricature for it - something I've always wanted to do but never could for the lack of talent.

The story is almost seven years old. I realized just now that these things we impart our momentary feelings on - these short, ephemeral, dreamful tales - they just might outlive us, being passed from one imagination to another, never stopping long after our ink has run dry, our flesh has returned to the earth, and our bones have turned into ash.

Perhaps therein lies immortality.

Sanduguan: How it really happened

2011-01-19T12:47:00.002+08:00

Red Book - What School Was Like

2011-01-18T10:19:00.004+08:00

(note: this is just an overview. There are a lot of seperate posts on the topics covered here, and I tried my best to include them all under the same tag, for your reference)

See, my school wasn't exactly one of those high end educational institutions that had their own swimming pools, airconditioned classrooms, or covered basketball courts. What we had on campus was our own quadrangle which I've always thought as oddly named because the vacant space in the middle of our campus had more than four sides. It served as our basketball court, playground, and marshalling field. How we made use of the vacant space was up to our imagination. Occasionally, it will rain so hard that the only drain in the middle of our campus gets clogged so our quadrangle turns into a makeshift swimming pool - or rather puddle, which we kids took advantage of by running around getting our shoes and clothes wet, for reasons I still cannot recall, but back then it felt like such a brilliant idea.

So yeah, there wasn't much recreation to go around, which is probably why I have assloads of memories of us playing the usual games of taguan, cops and robbers, agawan base, patintero, and "suntukan hanggang may umiyak". But then again, if you've been keeping tabs, I spent my preschool and first grade in a school fit into a single floor of a particularly rundown building built by people from an alternate dimension where windows don't exist. Any classroom setup that let me see the outside world every now and then, and did not contain refugees from the Gulf War was an upgrade.

One thing worth noting about our school is that while other schools like to claim they were built on top of cemeteries, WW2 concentration camps, and vampire lodgings, ours was the real fucking deal. Everytime somebody tried to dig around, bones would turn up. That kind of explains why we never have gardening class, and why there's always that weird guy from Funeraria Jose gleefully standing by whenever there's construction going on.

Our school looked like a fort, with three buildings and the nearby church forming concentric walls that protect the quadrangle from the prying eyes of the outside world. Each building was a about three floors, with the lower grade classes on the lower floors and the higher grades on the higher floors. This was designed on the basis that younger children have not yet learned to avoid hauling packs of books everyday by finding improvised lockers, since lockers seem to be tools of satan in the view of our teachers, and having to climb three stories everyday with such a load would turn them into vegetables by the time they hit fourth grade.

As for facilities, we had a library which housed materials that haven't been updated since 1982 (this was still the case up until 1999, seven years after the cold war ended). We had a canteen, crewed by the living dea - err - our dear canteeners. We also had a media room, which still had those fancy slide projectors that haven't been in production since the Vietnam war. It wasn't really until two years before I graduated that the school wised up and started upgrading their equipment. By the time I left, we had a library that had data on the last two administrations, working internet, and a science laboratory that no longer looked like it was bought second hand from a mad scientist (although the preserved fetuses were still around. Who the fuck uses those anyway? It's not like we need to see dead babies to study biology.) We also had a music room, which had no music instruments save for a vertical piano which I've always wanted to use but could never do so because we weren't allowed to touch it or even look at it directly.

Interestingly enough, there's only one music teacher for the entire school, teaching 6 gradeschool levels, 4 highschool levels, at 5 sections per level on the average, containing about 45 students per class. You do the math.

The tuition fee was lower than average, but it was still well above public school education. The place was founded and run by Belgian missionaries, which may sound good Chocolate-wise, but trust me, there is no chocolates involved other than what my mom used to bribe my teachers so they won't snap one day and just strangle me to death instead of sending me to the principals office. These bribery cases are more often than one might think, since it's more of something that's bound to happen at least once per school year (yes, I was quite the little tool back then). But I digress.

PS3 Jailbreak Philippines/Greenhills : A Guide

2011-01-17T10:25:00.005+08:00

This article post serves as a repository of what I know so far about PS3 Jailbreaking, specifically for people who aren't savvy enough to break their own system, and have to rely on them usual shops in Greenhills.

I finally bought a PS3 this weekend after three years of long contemplation. Contemplation involved reading up on the current events in the PS3 homebrew community. After late last year's revelation of the PS3 primary keys, I figger it's only a matter of time before the PS3 as a whole is fully cracked, and there'd be not much need for shady solutions to *ahem* direct drive loading of games. It's a very interesting time to be involved in the community.

I won't bother to explain the jailbreaking history so far. Right now, however, jailbreaking your PS3 simply means you can play games that have been copied directly to your hard drive, or games stored in an external hard disk connected to your PS3. This means you can get backups of games from certain shops, load them into your PS3 or HD, and you can play them already as though you had an original disk inserted in your PS3. To add icing to the cake, backup games are loaded faster than the originals, although they tend to eat up more space. I'll take the time now to say that the best unit for jailbreaking are the large hd models like the 320GB and the 500GB, because while you can store the games in a portable hard disk, storing it inside the PS3 is actually much faster.

So what PS3 models can be jailbroken? The answer is everything, except R2 (Europe). From what I learned from the peeps at Greenhills, some units tend to reject the Jailbreaking tool. I don't know a lot of details though. In any case, any variation of the Fat/Slim units in any disk size should be fine.

To jailbreak, you only need to buy a jailbreaking tool, which is a USB dongle. I haven't memorized the procedure yet, but I'm sure you can find the exact procedure online. The most popular version available in the Philippines right now is the Amazebreak, which isn't the original, but works just as fine. It costs about 1500 including "labor", if you call it that, in Greenhills. It's noninvasive, so you shouldn't have any problems with warranties as long as you uninstall the software before sending it to Sony if ever anything goes wrong.

Backup images can be downloaded in Greenhills at about 100 pesos a pop. Not bad, but do consider that some games may have certain compatibility issues. You can check online listings to see which these games are. Metal Gear Solid is already one of them. https://spreadsheets.google.com/lv?key=tqjzdwQGOhsHl_KH0KiEC3w&toomany=true

The downside of JB'ing your PS3 is that you will not be able to access the PSN. The PSN requires the latest version of the firmware. Amazebreak requires, at the moment, only 3.41. If you upgrade to 3.55 or higher, it will disable amazebreak and if you're SLIM, as mentioned above, you will have no choice but to avoid jailbreaking the unit again. In the future, the required firmware of newer games will be higher than 3.41 such as GT5. Currently, Amazebreak manages to spoof the version by telling the PS3 it's already in 3.55 even when it's not. This allows games like GT5 to be played, but it can't work for all situations. For more concrete solutions, we're relying on the community to provide something in the near future.

As of writing, downgrading from firmware version 3.55 to 3.41 is only available for the FAT models. Attempting to do so in SLIM models will BRICK the model. So if you updated via PSN or GT5, you gotta just sit tight and wait for better solutions to come up.

So that's about it. The future of bootlegged software in the PS3 is brighter than it ever was for the last four years. Even with the limitations today, there's a lot more in store for the community, and it's only a matter of time for even the exceptions to be removed.

As a last word, I'd still say I'm buying original whenever I can, partly because I want the best games to be played stable, but also partly because I want to support the games development community. How you go about things, however, is entirely up to you.

Basic Meeting Minutes

2011-01-14T10:53:00.001+08:00

Ano Ang English Ng Singaw?

2011-01-13T10:17:00.002+08:00

The official medical term for "Singaw" is mouth ulcer, which sounds worse than it really is. Americans also use the term Canker Sore or Cold Sores, probably just to spite the British for laying the claim of naming one of the most common oral annoyances next to uttering the word "actually".

Singaw is derived from the local idea that when heat builds up in the mouth, it has to release it somewhere, causing the lips to bloat and eventually develop a hole from where heat is expelled. I'm guessing somebody teaching a class of students accidentally switched his geology manual with the one for biology, so now we have to deal with volcanoes in our mouths.

All things considered, there is no real quick cure for singaw. I should know. I get these sores at least once every two months, more often if the weather keeps on switching from blistering hot to nipple-chillingly cold. It happens so often I wouldn't be surprised to see one day a singaw developing inside a singaw. I should go get surgery and attach a zipper to my lips. When a singaw is about to form, I'd just unzip that motherfucker. "There you go, minivolcano."

That said, having a singaw is not fun. You sound like an idiot when talking and trying to avoid hitting the sore at the same time, and you can only eat certain types of food without ending up twitching on the floor in agony. Of course people will always act like they've never had singaw before when they ask you what's in your mouth.

To which, it's always interesting to say, "Oral Herpes. Wanna kiss?"

Philippine Current Events, The Lighter Side Of

2011-01-12T11:04:00.005+08:00

A brief summary of news:

1. LRT and MRT hikes have been approved. On one hand, a lot of people will now be forced to use other means of transportation, on the other hand, reduced ridership equates to less chance of having to travel from Taft to North station with some dude's armpit stuck 2mm away from your nostrils.

2. Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo cannot be sold, says Senator Recto. The two places are historical. If by historical, he means that the place is filled with old people and antiquated equipment that wouldn't be out of place in a WW2 film, then yes, he's correct.

3. Still more brouhaha from that one representative who badmouthed a stewardess. Somebody should tell them the MMFF is already over and done with. No more awards will be given. The stewardess is acting like she hasn't been in the industry for 20 years and the congressman is acting as if we actually voted for him.

4. BOI has reported that immigrants from China and Korea have grown by almost 50% between 2007 and 2009. By 2015, Malate will be renamed Little Korea and the rest of Manila will be annexed by the new Metro Chinatown.

5. Charice makes a perfume endorsement. If she requires you recruit 2 members to be come a member of the sales team of the perfume, we may be looking at a real Pyramid scam in the works. Okay that was low. That's not the real news. The real news is the news is actually running out of interesting things to report on. Nobody cares about this.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

2011-01-10T22:47:00.003+08:00

So I was visiting the new Ragnaboards earlier, convinced that my day has been good so far, until I chanced upon a sidewall that said:

I died a little. P***ina, ano daw?!

Red Book - Childhood Chow

2011-01-09T21:20:00.006+08:00

Back then, if there's one thing I sucked at more than Math, Art, Science and pretty much all school subjects in general, it's the ability to not lose my lunch kit. From the first grade up until senior highschool, I probably lost enough Tupperwares and Colemans to send the children of a house-to-house salesman to a college somewhere in England. After a while my mom kind of wised up and thought it more cost effective if I just bought food in school for lunch. This post is my recollection of the places where I spent those lunches in (whenever I hadn't unwisely spent/saved my lunchmoney for other things stupid kids waste money on).

Chirlay - Chirlay sold affordable tapsilog, longsilog, and tocilog meals. From what I recall, at one point in time, the franchise was successful enough to have two branches. The branch where we ate, however, was a bit more special due to its location. While the place itself was decently clean, it was situated strategically beside the Parañaque river, which gladly gave us the entertainment of guessing what kind of dead animal was floating by (it seems we saw at least one everytime we tried) or what kind of garbage was nearby basing solely on the putrid smell emanating from the waterway. The damn place was beside something that was less of a body of water than an open canal so that was kind of expected. The tapa was good though, and when you're a kid looking for a decent budget eatin', that's about all that matters.

Ka Pabeng - On the grounds of bang for buck, Ka Pabeng has to be the cheapest. Even as late as 1999, Ka Pabeng offered a heaven of a lunch for a paltry 35 pesos. You get one viand, which is often touted as catering-quality, a cup of sopas (albeit the sopas tasted like water with macaroni bits - which my friend Chris fondly called "sagmaw" or water used for washing rice), and unlimited rice. Read that. Unlimited RICE. They'd serve a plateful of rice on your table and everybody around you could get their fill. When the plate goes empty, they replace it with more. If you were early enough, that rice could also be fried rice. I'm not sure you remember for your case, but if you're adolescent, it seems that your body requires you enough calories to run a steam locomotive. Giving a teenager unlimited rice is like throwing water into a nuclear meltdown. It will help, but you're going to need assloads. I'm not sure if this place is still around, or if teenagers like me have cleaned the place up. You never bet against the appetite of a teenager. Never.

Palengke TakeOut - Admittedly the shop does not have any name, and this is about as close as a name as I can give it. Located on one of the aisles of the old La Huerta fleamarket, the PTO offers meals packed into one styrofoam, which in my humble opinion, is a generous amount of serving already - and at the vice-friendly price of less than 25 pesos. PTO proved essential during those times that you needed to take your lunch somewhere away from school due to lunchbreak play practices, newspaper collection drives, and simulated prison breaks. Best item on their list is the everpresent spaghetti which includes half a tasty slice. The sauce doesnt taste like spaghetti sauce any more than the bread tastes like garlic bread, and the color seems to be caused by Achuete, but for some reason I really liked it.

Minute Burger/Burger Machine - You know something that's surprising about Burger machine and minute burger? Their bulilit burger back in 1998 costs about 10 pesos for two pieces. This is at about the same time as when a regular yum costs 15 pesos. Now the regular yum costs about 40 pesos, while the bulilit burger is 20 a pair. It's still damn cheap - as it was back then, which greatly enabled us to save money for other shit like playing computer games at rental shops until our eyes turned red from exhaustion.

Bahay ni Mrs. Andrade - One of the more seasonal places where we ate - our grade five adviser managed to convinced us to eat at her house, which was a stone's throw away from our school. Even then, we knew she was a widow and that it'd help boost her household income, and she knew what exactly we undernourished kids needed - academic leverage. It was the ultimate combomeal. You got food on your table, and plus points on your exams. If you're a kid struggling with grades like me, that's what a real happy meal is all about. Of course there's always that weird vibe of having to eat inside a stranger's house complete with the literal teacher's pet DOG whose only wish in life is to TEAR THE HUMANITY OUT OF YOU with its MONSTROUS CANINE TEETH. But then again, the embotido of Mrs. Andrade was barking awesome so it was a well-offset risk.

Sol-Anne's - Back in the early ninety's, two women Sol and Anne decided to stop working for hotel establishments and just start their bakery for god knows what reason. This became what was to be known as Sol-Anne's. The meals in Sol Anne's was anything but cheap. Even in 1996, a meal there would fetch you 40-60 pesos, and the servings was just enough. The cheapest meal we knew there was the Lumpiang Ubod with rice, which is probably the best vegetarian meal that my young finicky self accepted, not counting cheese curls and other junkfood. For its price though, you get treated to really awesome tasting food, and sightings of lots of Paulinians (students from the all-girls school across ours). Even to this day, if you ask me where to find the best tasting versions of certain viands, I'd point that place out. Even after they relocated to somewhere further, I gladly walked fifteen minutes just to get dem good eatin.

Airport City Mall - This has to be the ultimate dining experience for me back in highschool. Airport City Mall is not a restaurant. It's a freaking mall. It's also worth noting that it's situated 1.5 kilometers away from school, whereas every other entry in this list is no more than 200 meters away. In exchange of course, at my time ACM was the only place there was a Jollibee, a decent arcade, a cinema, and cheap shit merchandise. Its very existence was like a gauntlet thrown at the faces students. Adding to the difficulty of distance, jeeps only passed by the place when they're going towards it. Going back means walking about 300 meters before you can ride a jeep. It was always a dare to go there, at risk of being late, to reap eating regular Yum and playing arcade. The only safe way you could go there without cutting classes was to rely on the "shortened period" system which is so complex that I'd rather not explain here. Short version of it is you get to have a lunch longer than one hour so you get more time to go there. But not us of course. We beat the game, managed to go there, eat lunch at Jollibee, play an entire playthrough of Soul Edge, and run back to school with just enough time to catch our breaths before the school bell rang. It's a power lunch story I'd be so proud to share even to my grandkids one day - but they'd probably be able to play arcade from their brains with their neural implants, and tell me I'm just making shit up to sound like I had it hard. At which point, by the powers bestowed by the Republic to aging people, bitchslap them until they start believing in my story and in the Second Coming at the same time.

But I digress.

You're probably wondering why, for all the horrors and complaints that I have on these establishments, I still end up eating there anyway. The answer is quite simple - the better known alternative, which is staying in school and eating canteen food, is still far worse in my opinion. We've always thought that the only difference between our all-boys school and prison is that at the end of the day we got to go home, while they on the other hand got to eat better.