| Worrywart |
[Apr. 23rd, 2009|05:05 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  worried | ] |
Worry is pretty bad when it hits at 4:30 AM, winging in on a headache - worse when you have something big coming up in five hours. |
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| Blogging through Pidgin |
[Mar. 3rd, 2008|04:08 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  geeky | ] |
Hello, it's been a while. I guess I should be saying something substantial, like, say, where the hell I've been in the last year or so. Or not. I'm just blogging to test how Frank can upload posts for me through LiveJournal chat on Jabber, which I've yoked through pidgin. It's interesting, since I've been looking at standalone blog-progs (like Semagic and Firefox plugins), but this one appeals to me the most.
You may actually see me posting more often. Probably not, but hey, here's hoping. |
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| Freedom Writers |
[Apr. 9th, 2007|01:14 pm] |
So ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) deathberry and I watched Freedom Writers toward the end of Black Saturday. I hadn't been to moviehouses recently, so I didn't know about this movie before bought us tickets for it.
( Read more... )
Overall, it's a good watch. If you liked Dangerous Minds, and are willing to watch it without the Coolio soundtrack, this is a must-watch. |
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| Escalation |
[Apr. 8th, 2007|12:29 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | travel | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
Have been in Singapore visiting deathberry for holy week. It's been such a nice uplifting experience, so I'd like to write down my impressions of things.
First off, escalators. Anyone who knows me knows I enjoy travelling along public transportation routes. deathberry had earlier reported the e-z card, which is basically used for train and bus fare, and doesn't even require you to remove the card from your wallet. (Of course, on the first bus ride, I forget to "tap out". Sigh.) One of the first things I notice, having been an expert on public transportation locally, is that the escalator nearly took my legs out from under me.
Within a few rides, of course, this leads me to an analogy between escalator speed at train stations and the economic growth between Singapore and the home country (which is how I'm referring to it at the moment).
Of course, all this becomes moot once we get into a mall (namely, the atria at Orchard): they're more of the normal pace. Quoth deathberry: "Of course, in malls, they want you to slow down to read the ads." |
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| Tragedy |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|10:55 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | sad | ] |
Just when I was about to gloat that I just got back online, I find that the person responsible for keeping the Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List, Philip Mak, has just passed away due to a cerebral hemorrhage. |
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| Somehow, a Story is Actually Almost Done |
[Feb. 7th, 2007|07:13 pm] |
But it should have been done more than a year ago. :(
Anyway, it was mostly written on dead tree, and still awaits a conclusion, but it'll be the first in years, so I look forward to being lambasted for writing it. |
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| Night Life |
[Feb. 2nd, 2007|09:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  hopeful | ] |
Wow. It's breezy living for the moment here, and I think that the night life high up in Ortigas is a lot more fun than staying at home. Especially since I'm not communicating very well, actually. But this month is promising much much more.
Crossing fingers. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 31st, 2007|08:05 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | contemplative | ] |
It is now a month into the year, a month in my new environs, and days into the new life-setting I'm in. I'm strangely fine, and that is strange.
Something in me is still in shock, unwilling to let go of old habits. But today is a Wednesday, and I'm here in an internet cafe typing away.
Sometimes, I wonder what I've lost, having my cyber-umbilicus severed. I'm truly a starving infant, struggling to escape from my fetal position, and take my first loud cry, clearing my lungs and declaring that I am indeed alive and well.
I am alive. I am well. |
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| The Road Home |
[Jan. 27th, 2007|09:06 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Handycafe | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  listless | ] |
I am once again writing under duress. Hopefully, in a short while, I will be writing posts from my own unit, and not having to go out of the house to be uploading pitiful remarks on the state of my being, and be able to wax moldy under my own roof.
I'm not sure whether or not I can spread the news yet, since I'm not sure who actually reads this. I'll just leave it to say that I have a slightly modified work goal for July of this year. |
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| To Live and Die in the Span of a Kiss |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|12:40 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  working | ] |
Nice dramatic title, but with much of a constipation of content to follow. Maybe later I will edit this and fill it with rants and raves and anything that my mind seems unwilling to part with right now.
Then again, maybe it will just be in a new post, and this post will remain as a placeholder that has lost its place. There's an allegory there somewhere. |
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| Shaking and Quaking |
[Jan. 20th, 2007|08:02 am] |
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Quite a bit of action going on, quite a bit of action to come. I will post when time comes, and I can do comfortably from between walls I call my own. But it is likely you know what I'm talking about. |
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| Turning Korean |
[Jan. 14th, 2007|05:17 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | lethargic | ] |
In what may be the Korean section of an internet cafe, temporizing between one Korean household and another, I wonder...
Is there a story here somewhere? One that doesn't need a translator? |
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| Oasis |
[Jan. 9th, 2007|04:32 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
Last weekend, my love and I found ourselves at Gateway way with time to kill and that the Cineplex had decided that they were better serving the public with Denzel Washington's new thriller instead of Eragon (or nine other cinemas worth of Metro Manila Film Festival entries). After much decision, we settled on a snack at Oasis.
Oasis is the "contained" garden within Gateway Mall, which is actually a floor above the actual street. What I'd originally thought as cooled by the small brook flowing along the middle of the "enclosure" was later pointed out to be several strong cold-air ducts.
We had a great time there, fleshing out a story from what I can recall of the story of the Spirit War from the Kamigawa storyline, to the exquisite high English tea with sweet scones and fresh fruit.
It was a great weekend, but I think the activity has been taking its toll on me... |
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| Coming Up Roses? |
[Jan. 4th, 2007|04:23 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | amused | ] |
Well, it's the new year, and things are turning, mostly for the better. I'm also back to my other blog, which the industrious can note by the same picture for my profile. I wonder if you can google that now.
Hopefully, net access at home will be back in a handful of days. More hope, and even more wonderful things will spring forth.
Stay tuned! Or not. :p |
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| Things Get Better |
[Dec. 24th, 2006|03:53 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | good | ] |
Well, at least in potentia. The party at Dino's was very nice, but fairly sedate. Got to see Amiel after a long time, and the usual cast of characters. :)
Have to remember to look into the notifying-everyone-so-no-one-gets-uninvited issue.
Edit: Hmmm... seems like the time... to do some... spring cleaning. I guess. |
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| Testing the Waters |
[Dec. 8th, 2006|02:01 pm] |
For the moment, I am doing a 120-minute experiment into whether or not chaos in the environment factors into research.
So far, I've actually had progress. But I expected that. |
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| Life and Change |
[Dec. 3rd, 2006|08:38 pm] |
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Merely eight months from my last post, I feel safe in saying that life will be changing very soon for the better. |
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| How to Go About Writing Someone Else's Story |
[Apr. 5th, 2006|12:40 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | story | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | home | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | loved | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | broken sound card | ] |
I wanted to write a story that was completely from the perspective of the secondary character. I'm the type that makes titles as early as I can, hoping to leave myself hints about the story through all sorts of details, which could include the title. The working title for this concept was Second String.
Now, as I was fleshing out the details of the story, I realized with some surprise that I had somehow found an rather elusive beast: a story which allows for the necessity of detailed and explicit sex. (I have formed the opinion that most sex in fiction is gratuitous - except mostly for when sex is used as a political tool in the story, and this rarely requires the level of detail that can make a story explicit. Of course, this excludes fiction that revolves around the sexual habits of its characters, and even then the level of detail rarely needs to be explicit, unless the purpose is to set tone, or perhaps to shock.) This helped me gear the earlier parts into something that culminates in the aforementioned scene of passion, and then builds from there.
Unfortunately, it was shortly after this sequence of fleshing out the concept where I stepped back to realize: I'm basically rewriting "Fight Club" with characters in their teens.
***
Don't ask me about what I thought about "The One". |
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| I Don't Know Whether to Pat Myself in the Back or to See a Shrink |
[Mar. 15th, 2006|05:52 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | dreams, weirdness | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | too many to mention | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | the cogs in my head turning? | ] |
I have just woke up (PC boot-up and morning toilette removed) from something which I could call anything from a light nightmare to what I now realize could be a very sharp mind trap.
I'm still reeling from any number of implications that the dream entails. It's one of the fairly rare third person dreams I had, and it's a meta-meta-reality to boot: at the onset of what I can recall, I see myself in a moviehouse with my girlfriend watching, what appears to be, a movie that is about our relationship, aside from the fact that it happens in a strangely semi-transparent hotel. What shook me from the dream was the realization that a character in the dream-movie seemed to be played by me - and I (in the dream movie) seemed to be playing a jilted lover, berating my girlfriend (who, in the dream-movie, is actually played by my girlfriend in the dream, who is my girlfriend in real life - this sounds like an odd reiteration, aside from the fact that I have had dreams where I had had someone else as my girlfriend, although that in retrospect is an actually fairly rare occurrence). I had woken up, going through the uncomfortable experience of trying to have three concurrent and increasingly jarring thoughts: I could barely feel the in-movie me's anger, since I wasn't quite sure it was me; the dream-me watching the movie was wondering if it was me; and the me doing the dreaming was wondering how it could happen that I was in the movie and I didn't remember being there, since I had settled into the thought that the dream-me hadn't played the dream-movie-me in the dream-movie, ever since my dream-girlfriend had appeared in the dream-movie, apparently being in a relationship with someone who the dream-me (and me-me, I guess) thought was representing the dream-me in the movie.
I guess I woke up before I had some sort of recursion-based shut down, or before my mind tried to construct some sort of loophole of illogic that would have me chasing tailless sequences of infinite descent. And this is before I had even gotten emotionally invested further than I had - I have had a dream or two before where I had to convince myself that I really was awake and that the world was as I remembered it from before I slept.
No, blogging was not the first thing on my mind. I'd say it was third, after realizing that, no, I did not want to go back to sleep to try to continue the dream, and trying to get the basic sense of what that dream was about. Luckily, with the long reboot sequence, I had enough time to twirl the idea of the dream in my head - and, by gosh, it is a sharp looking thing, after all. |
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| No Fair |
[Feb. 19th, 2006|11:44 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  determined | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Bioman Theme (running in LSS) | ] |
On the last day of the UP Fair 2006, No Fairmit, No Rally, Calibrated Pinoy Rock, deathberry and I had arrived from visiting the J-Pop exhibit at Shangri-La Plaza (hi guia!), after having our fill of nachos from Chef Donatello because we were not able to watch Aeon Flux. (Those nachos, in addition to nostalgic Babba Shawarmas constituted dinner, aided by Cool & Clear Lemon-Flavored Green Tea and Donatello's bottomless iced tea, which my dear will have to talk about herself.)
Anyways, we noticed several things about the Fair that made it more worrisome than the last time we went in: 1) the seeming lack of regulation when it came to having people enter at around 9-ish onward, with many black-wearing, bandanna-masked hooligan types roaming the grounds amongst the usual freaks and 2) the proliferation of children.
It's not as though we really needed something like the ULTRA tragedy to tell us that children in a massive crowd are likeliest to get injured, even as we saw the corrugated steel walls being pushed by the maniacs outside (who were apparently being goaded by the maniacs inside).
Once things settled down (about 9-ish through to about 11:30), we were able to enjoy some underground bands. We saw bands like Delta Joy (which I found to be more of a giggish band, not really meant to go pro), Machinegun (whose guitarist and bassist are top-notch; my advice is to get the rapper/songwriter on a diet, an exercise regimen and on some vitamins, because his lack of energy was dragging them all down), Blazing Bulalakaws (which kicked off the better half of the concert), Hemp Republic (how could people stand up for ska? It's shoulder-and-upper-back music---rock is hips and feet music), Tsubibo (which half of Popgun is this? It surprised me to hear a girl sing Mahiwagang Kamay), Aizo (which sparked the two-line dialogue between me and deathberry which goes like:
DB: They're so... JPop!
ZK: And that's a bad thing?
They do sound like The Pillows. And The Pillows remind me of the E-heads. How can that be bad?) and, what capped off the night for us, and surely was only topped thereafter by the eventual appearance of Parokya ni Edgar, which we did not wait for, was the manic, inspired, and truly insane performance of Kiko Machine, with songs like Pulp Magazine and Val Sotto (whose mustache will be forever immortalized) truly got the crowd going. The pit-crew like jumpers and Spider-Man on guitars pushed it way over the top, and we were laughing all throughout their four-song set.
I was kinda jumpy all night, what with all the people, the moshing and the circumstances that were trying to brim-over into a situation. Some people saw me and recognized me, but I did try to blend in.
Moral 1: If going to a fair where the lines to the portalets rival the entrance lines, do not have iced tea before.
Moral 2: If bringing a towel to sit on, insist, especially if it's gotten aged and threadbare. |
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