Pimp Post #1

While I am being paid Php120 by my online job to do nothing (my student is absent), I have decided to write a pimp post of certain things which I feel need to be, err, pimped.

1. Eisley

American indie band composed of four siblings and their cousin. It pains me that I don’t know anyone else who listens to Eisley, except my friend Wila (I introduced them to her), since they make some really sweet music. And please take note that these kids were raised (and still are) Christian, so don’t expect any sex, drugs or groupies.

Their music is pretty and melodic, with lyrics that remind you of carnivals, fairytales and those cryptic storybooks you used to read when you were little.

Also try Escaping Song, based on an old French book about love that transcends suspended animation ala Vanilla Sky (lol that sounded funny) and Marsh King’s Daughter, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the same name. Spread the lurve.

2. Neopets

Although it is dubbed by most people as “the greatest mindfuck ever invented” (and I agree with them) whose primary audiences are teenage bums with nonexistent social lives (like me), it’s a great way to kill time. I’ve been wasting my time on Neopets since I was eight years old. And I’m nineteen now.

You get to take care of your own virtual pet, which in turn can have its own pet, called a petpet, which can also have its own parasite, called a petpetpet. Extremely ridiculous, but also extremely addicting. I have tons of fun playing brainless and not-so-brainless games and saving up money in my own virtual bank account to buy a Baby Paint Brush for my pet (yes, you can paint them all sorts of stuff, like Mutant, Faerie or even Snot).

My starving baby Gnorbu Bananacue

Of course, it’s all for free, but the site bombards you with all sorts of advertising (both covert and overt), overpriced merchandise and wily money-making strategies, such as the incredibly capitalist Neocash scheme, in which you have to purchase a coupon via participating stores (i.e. Wal-Mart) and convert it into Neocash online, which you can use to buy nifty stuff at the NeoMall.

However, even if I am stupid enough to waste my time playing Neopets, I have not yet reached the level of Neocash stupidity, which basically means being stupid enough to waste real-life money on horseshit digital money.

Add me up as a goddamn NeoFriend.

3. Fuan no Tane

This manga beats the flying fuck out of those tacky True Philippine Ghost Stories they sell in bookstores, which are sadly not even edited for grammatical errors properly.

I have never been genuinely scared by a comic book until I read Fuan no Tane. And that’s pretty impressive, considering most of the stories in it are barely two pages long. These stories are urban legends from all over Japan, and boy do they make the hairs on the back of my neck stand. Until now I still think this chapter cover for Volume 1 is one of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen, for some inexplicable reason. (Looks like a bad case of colitis, now that I think about it.)

Of course, like any other compilation, it has its good and bad stories. A few of them are on the ludicrous side (but it’s Japan ffs, whut do you expect anyway), and some are quite amusing, but there are stories like Mr. Newt (#8, Volume 1) which still scare the living shit out of me whenever I remember it and I’m right next to a window.

Download all three volumes here for free at MangaTraders.

—

Okay, so this is all I’ve got for the meantime.
And don’t forget the golden rule: pimp unto others what has been pimped unto you.

Sorry, I only speak Taglish

Among the languages and dialects spoken in the Philippines, there is an unspoken pecking order. First in line is (duh) English, which is currently the universal language because the United States of America is currently the most powerful country in the, uh, universe. (This, of course, is relative, especially to some extremely passionate Russian and Chinese nationalists.)

Second, we have Filipino. Or more likely the bastardiffic Taglish, since it is the language of choice of socialites and social climbers alike. (Manong driver, don’t forget to make sundo me outside Starbucks maya ha?) And also since it is the language spoken in the country’s capital, Manila. Next is any major widely-spoken local language such as Bisaya or Hiligaynon.

Next we have dialects spoken by a smaller number of people, such as the crispy Kinaray-a (my personal favorite). However, most people, especially snooty kolehiyalas, seem to think of it as a major turn-off.

Sample Conversation
Kolehiyala 1: Ohmygod, that guy is so gwapo. Try to ask him where the foodcourt is.
Kolehiyala 2: Hi there. I was wondering if alam mo where the foodcourt is?
Cute Karay-a Guy: Aw sorry, wara takun kamaan.
Kolehiyala 1&2: Eww!

Photo by Mykl Mabalay from EarthShots.org

Last in line of the linguistic food chain is the even lesser-known Ati dialect/language. I am no linguistic expert, so I’m not entirely sure what it is, but yes, the Ati have their own, and from what I’ve heard, the number of people who can actually speak it are greatly decreasing. And since the Ati are basically considered by most Filipinos as the homeless nuisances who like to sleep under our public transportation infrastructures (read: taytay), I am guessing only a handful of people are currently making an effort to preserve it.

Some people I know are actually proud that they’re bad at Filipino, or any local language/dialect. Whenever someone mentions some uncommon (but definitely NOT archaic) local word, they go all ohmygodwhatdoesthatmean? Sorry to break it to you, but it is neither cute nor amusing; it is actually quite pathetic.

I remember these two siblings who were in my group during a summer workshop. They didn’t know how to speak Hiligaynon, only English. One time, a boy from another group came up to them and, in an effort to make friends, started to talking to them (in Hiligaynon). Of course, my little brown Americans didn’t understand a word and just stood there. I told the other kid that they didn’t understand Hiligaynon, and that he should talk to them in English instead.

He looked bemused and answered, “Ano na sila haw? Porener?”

P.S.
I was strongly tempted to include Jejemon in the list, but I decided not to, for fear of comments along the line of “That is sooo last year na kaya?! Eww!”

Rurouni Kenshin gets animated reboot/Jinchuu arc

I was a measly eleven-year-old girl when I first watched Rurouni Kenshin – my first major fandom. Eight years later I still think it’s one of the best anime/manga series ever, so I was extremely hyped when I came across this news in ANN. I’m not getting my hopes up about the live-action adaptation (not a fan of LA), but I’m okay with Sato Takeru playing Kenshin. He’s definitely got the scrawny, vertically-challenged look going for him, and I can see the Oros coming out of his mouth already. (Would it hurt to ask for Miura Haruma as Sanosuke? Teehee.)

But it’s the plan for the new anime that is currently causing my old fangirl heart to go on overdrive. The studios deprived us of the Jinchuu arc, and then tried to make up for it by giving us the godawful trainwreck known as the Seisou Hen OVA, which completely mindfucked every RuroKen fan who watched it. Even Watsuki-sensei. Seriously.

Okay, so yes, I did spend several hours of my life crying and moping around because of that stupid OVA, but not because it was so touching, but because it was so damn pathetic. It ruined every single thing the canon work tried so hard to build. It was one big bitchslap from the studios saying “Kay fantards, the two of them died from a SEXUALLY-TRANSMITTED DISEASE already, now go DIAF and stop bugging us for Jinchuu.” Ouch.

However, it turns out there really must be an anime-resurrection god watching over us (FMA Brotherhood fans will agree), because he/she/it gave us – tada! – Aniplex. The studio in charge of the new series.

That said, I still feel a bit fidgety about this new production. Nobody’s sure what it really is. Will they do a total reboot, or just animate the Jinchuu arc? Or, God forbid, just a one-episode special based on Haru ni Sakura?

A reboot will definitely earn RuroKen new (younger!) audiences, but I don’t really care what they do, as long as I can have my animated Jinchuu arc. That, and destroy all traces of the Seisou Hen OVA from the face of this planet, so I can finally die a happy fangirl death.

Coffee

Just the mere thought of getting to have my coffee makes me really happy. It’s weird. I only got into coffee over the sembreak, but it has instantly made its way into the list of little things that make me happy for no particular reason (i.e. taking loooong walks, taking loooong bus rides, and filling in blank spaces with black ink). Right now my favorite just has to be Nescafe’s Brown and Creamy (the one with brown sugar).

At times like these when I feel like there isn’t much meaning in living, it’s the little things that seem to matter most.

Drabbles

I write drabbles.

And sometimes I think drabbles are the only things I want to write. Not exactly drabbles in the sense that they’re exactly one hundred words, but more along the lines of less than a hundred words. I’m not particularly good at them yet (I still suck, honestly), but it’s something I definitely want to get better at. I write ficlets (and I still cringe at the sight of some of my older ones), somewhere around a thousand words, but sometimes I feel like they drag on forever.

Drabbles are different.

I think drabbles are beautiful, and I have a lot of respect for people who can write them really well. I mean, to be able to convey so many things without having to use too many words — that’s a skill. And then there are drabbles that actually span years, and an entire range of emotions. Now that’s an effing good writer.

Because drabbles are abnormally short, they also tend to be less sentimental. The more words you have, the more you tend to be… cheesy. Putting in words you probably don’t even need, and words that only make your story drip sap like an untapped gum tree. (Like what I’m doing right now.)

I’ve never taken creative writing classes here at the uni (stupid course doesn’t allow double-majors), so I don’t know if they teach drabble-writing in them, but if they don’t, then they definitely should.

Sleep and Windows 7

Last night I was right in the middle of mentally listing down programs I would have to reinstall if I switched to Windows 7 when I fell asleep. I woke up quarter to eight the following morning and went over to the New Admin building for the Intraschool Broadcasting Competition, and got back to the dorm at one in the afternoon.

I went back to where I left off in The God of Small Things, and not long after I finished the Abhilash Talkies chapter (somewhere after the Orangedrink Lemondrink man makes Estha hold his dick, lol), my eyes started going out of focus and I fell asleep. For six and a half hours straight. I had some weird dreams involving Kibum and some other things I can’t remember, and I woke up every two hours or so, but only to stare at the window, try to guess what time it was, and fall asleep again.

Woke up at 8:30 p.m. and went out to eat dinner with Jennie. Watched Shutter Island with the rest of the girls. And right now I’m here at the upstairs lobby, writing this at 3:45 in the morning, because I don’t feel the slightest bit sleepy, and I’m thinking about whether there’s enough space in my other local disk for all the stuff I have to back up if I switch to Windows 7.

Currently I’m getting by with a Vista Starter (which sucks like hell), and I can’t even open more than three programs at the same time. Manong Rupert does Windows 7 upgrades for P350, and I think there’s some reformatting involved (I always thought you didn’t have to reformat when upgrading to a new OS), but I really think I should switch.

It’s already four now, and I apologize for being kind of incoherent. Off to save copies of my bookmarked links now~

The attention span of a five-year-old

Right now I’m supposed to be in the middle of editing this radio news program for class, but I have somehow been sidetracked into writing a post for my blog. Boywitty has been bugging me these past few days about my lack of activity despite having announced a “comeback” (lolwhut), but I’ve actually been busy with my Livejournal, so that doesn’t make me completely unproductive.

Anyway, lately I’ve been bothered about the fact that my attention span is rapidly decreasing by the minute. I can barely pay attention in class, I can’t finish listening to my friend talk about her weird dream, and I can’t stand reading novels anymore. (Dammit, I can’t even work on the radio program I’m editing without having to check SJ-World or my GMail every two minutes.)

Yesterday I borrowed Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things from the library, and this is my first attempt to read a full-length novel in a reeeeally long time. The only stuff I can finish reading are short stories and books the length of Coraline (size 12 font only please), and it’s pathetic, really. I don’t really care how long it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list — I’d probably fall asleep right smack in the middle of a Sidney Sheldon. So far I’m only on page 57 of The God of Small Things, and I’m already kinda lost. Oh boy.

High-speed internet… or the lack of it

If there’s one major frustration I have in this otherwise peaceful 18-year-old life of mine, it’s the fact that I have never enjoyed the privilege of having super-fast internet. Sure, I’ve had internet since I was like eight, but back then it was the dial-up kind, and our subscription was strictly 40 hours per month. And we had to pay for every freaking second of overtime. (Not to mention that I had to go offline everytime my mum wanted to call up someone on the phone.) All internet connections that followed were equally shitty.

Okay, so you might be thinking, God there are people starving in (insert continent here) and here you are complaining about NOT HAVING HIGH-SPEED INTERNET. I’m sorry, I am fully aware of that, but right now I’m just kinda really pissed off, because for the past couple of days, I have been spending hours (and yes, money) in internet cafes trying to download a 700Mb file (split into 4 still-huge .part files) and I have ended up failing miserably. (It’s okay, you can laugh. Ha. Ha. Ha.) It’s either the connection gets bombed and my downloading fails somewhere in between 12% and 70%, or people start coming in to steal away my precious bandwidth through weapons of mass bandwidth-consumption such as the stupid Pet Society or the equally fucktarded Farmville, or NBA reruns on YouTube (which I can never appreciate for the life of me), and I end up with something as atrocious as 437 BYTES PER FUCKING SECOND. Yes, that was not a typo. You read that right: BYTES, not KILOBYTES.

(And if you’re wondering what the hell it is that I’m trying to download, check it out here, just in case you happen to have an oh-so-kind heart and an internet connection fortunate enough to reach even just 90Kbps, wink, wink.)

It doesn’t help that I have this obsession with HD videos, which basically translates to not less than 100Mb for something as short as three minutes. Sorry, but I just can’t stand Super Junior getting pixelated.

Moving Around

I’ve lived in a total of six houses.

When I was born in 1991, my parents lived in Taculing, Bacolod City, in my mum’s family’s compound, where my grandma and two bachelor uncles also lived. At that time, there were only two houses: my grandma’s old house, and my family’s little wooden house. I remember our floor was made out of bamboo, and there would be slits in between, and I would drop all sorts of random stuff in them: coins, coloring books, crayons, small toys, food. Later, when we had the wooden house torn down to make a new one, they would find tons of junk underneath, all dropped by yours truly. As a kid, I also had this nasty habit of drawing on our wooden walls and coating them with Vicks Vapor Rub to make them shinier. My parents saw that there was no way they could curb this passion of mine for drawing on walls, so my father decided to draw more stuff on them, since we were going to have a new house built anyway.

During the time when the new concrete house which would replace our little hut was being built, my family, composed of my parents, my younger sister and me, moved into one of the rooms in my grandma’s old house. I don’t remember much from this time, except that I thought it was really cool that I could watch TV (our old TV) in our room, and not in the sala.

When the new house was finally done, we moved back into it, making it my third house to have lived in. It was a nice, clean-looking house with pretty white concrete walls, worlds apart from our old hut covered with my crayon masterpieces. The sad thing was, I couldn’t drop stuff in between cracks on the floor anymore. We also had a small porch, where I placed a flowering makahiya I’d put in a pot.

A couple of years after that, my aunt in the States decided to have a new house built for their mum, my grandma, in the same compound. I was in elementary school then, and me, my sister, and the maid’s daughter would hang out at the construction site after the workers left late in the afternoon. We would pick up small polygonal wood bits and take them home, or put wood shavings in our hair and pretend we were little blonde children.

But before the new house was finished, my grandma died of complications from diabetes. She never got to live in it. When the house finally got done, my aunt didn’t want it to stay empty, so we moved into it. My two uncles stayed behind in the old house. It was a really nice house, with tiled floors and a veranda with pretty railings. The first floor was sort of like an open sala – it didn’t have walls — and the real house was upstairs. It was my fourth house.

We didn’t get to stay there for long, though. My father decided that the whole family would move to Victorias, where we could stay at a company house, and he could walk to work everyday. At first my sister and I were extremely pissed; if you check out our old house, there’s this small “I hate Victorias” etched into our bedroom door, just right above the doorknob.

Just this summer, we moved out and transferred to EB Magalona, which is just beside Victorias, and for the first time in my life I have my own room. And that makes a grand total of six houses. Some people get to stay in only one place their entire lives, but my family and I move around a lot, I guess. Haha.

I’m back!

I have officially decided to continue blogging.

SURPRIIIIISE~

Actually, it’s all thanks to my lovely friend Boy Witty, who faithfully updates his/her/its blog regularly. His/her/it convinced me to keep writing, so that I may be able to, um, “hone my writing skills”, as some seminar brochure would probably put it.

This blog was previously used for our CMS 131 (Writing Views) class, so all the other posts before this one are pretty much socially-relevant and formal-sounding, since they were class activites. I don’t usually write like that — I write like any typical eighteen-year-old, with the STFUs and the OMGs and all that shit. And once in a while you can expect some hormonally-charged posts, since, well, I’m eighteen, after all.

Okay so expect some more randomness from me in the coming days. Adieux~