Novel | Curious

Smaller Is Only Slightly Better

2012-02-04T21:54:00.002+08:00

This is going to be an extremely short update. To mitigate the disaster that was my last dollbox, I made a second box that's smaller and hopefully simpler to maintain. It is roughly half as wide as the original, but a wee bit deeper. Dimensions are 10" by 10" by 6.5".

And as you can see, I've already started decorating. That's pink giftwrap serving as wallpaper for the second floor. It's probably just me and the limitations of my crafting skills, but the "wallpaper" was a pain in the butt to install. Or maybe there's a very important-but-obscure wallpapering technique somewhere that I missed.

I'm also trying to make better use of the "Less is More" furnishing philosophy, using pieces in moderation and resisting the urge to go for the Cramped And Crowded Furniture Store look. I'm not a formally-trained interior decorator, so I can't speak for how well my approach is working.

The good news is that by doubling up on the illustration board, I've managed to stabilize the second floor to minimize warping. So far the floor is still holding up well. I've since tested the double-layer theory by re-doing the second floor of my first dollbox accordingly, though I think it's safe to say that one should have fairly fewer problems when working with a smaller floor area.

In the meantime, it looks like the coming weeks are going to be full of me dividing my time between writing, knitting and working on doll home improvements.

One more week to Inkblot season!

2012-02-04T20:33:00.000+08:00

I suspect this is going to become an annual thing for me from now on. All the writing workshops, books and software in the world probably aren't going to make the next J.D. Salinger (maybe not even the next J.K. Rowling), but it can't hurt to try, can it?

For someone who has dreamed of being a writer for years, I have been (un)surprisingly abysmal at keeping it up. I consider it a good day whenever I "successfully" finish writing something I started, even if it's something silly like a poem or a blog entry. At the last writing workshop I attended, I managed to compose exactly one original piece, which is already an ill sign. I guess my mind tends to get distracted very easily, too easily even. This is nothing new, this even happens whenever I read books.

For all my failings at actual prose, however, I have developed something of a talent for making worlds up. Since settling on my life's calling back in fifth grade, I've fully devoted my energies to creating at least three full-scale fictional universes. That's not counting the times when I pick up on a single story idea and decide to play around with that thread in my head for days at a time.

My current long-term writing project has been on the backburner since my sophomore year in college, and I still suck at writing at least one proper (and by "proper" I mean "readable enough for submission to respected literary publications") vignette from that particular universe. My copious worldbuilding notes alone are probably two to three times more massive than any actual prose I've written for it. And then there's the issue of the volume of made-up words exclusive to the universe...

The Classic Writer's Dilemma in all its permutations has been one I and my other writerly friends have discussed at length numerous times, and it still seems like none of us are getting any closer to becoming the next literary darling. But to very loosely quote one of my best buddies, the only way to go is Write. Up. Something. ~~Ponies!~~

One of my less-ridiculous-looking character concepts from this universe. Thank you, Hero Machine.

A Purse of Stories

2012-02-02T23:51:00.000+08:00

Well, it's more like a brown paper bag of stories, really.

I'm still somewhat baffled as to how it happened, but it seems fairy tales are becoming in vogue again. One minute the director of Twilight was shooting her own Hotter and Sexier take on Little Red Riding Hood. The next thing I know, one of my oldest friends is ranting about how Once Upon A Time (not to be confused with Wansapanataym) is holding his interest less and less. Classic children's characters left and right are getting edgy makeovers worthy of comic book superheroines, while longtime Fables fans are finding more and more reasons to feel smug.

So where does the mystery paper bag come in?
(and it just goes on and on...)

Kids will ALWAYS fight over the top bunk.

2012-02-01T22:25:00.000+08:00

It was inevitable, really. After expending so much time, energy and packing tape on building a more-or-less ideal cardboard dollhouse, the next logical step was for me to dabble in cardboard doll furniture.

The decision to "branch out" was borne from a very unique dilemma, one shaped like a whole mass of irregular Tetris rejects.

Leftover pieces of illustration board from my dollbox attempts

Because ~~packrats~~ industrious crafters are usually loathe to ever throw anything away, I figured I needed to try my hand at furniture. It would certainly save me some more money compared to if I were to commit to investing in Sylvanian Families furniture pieces all the way. Plain old tables, chairs and beds were too boring, however, which I why I decided to attempt building my first mini cardboard bunk beds.

Of course, mini-scaled cardboard bunk beds were hard to come by. So, I had to improvise my own bunk bed design. I took a cue from the dimensions of the Sylvanian Families bunk bed as my starting point, and from there I pretty much jumped right in and hoped for the best.
(and it just goes on and on...)

Today in Flickr groups: Little Boxes

2012-02-01T15:57:00.000+08:00

Remember the last post I made about esoterically-themed Flickr groups? Turns out the eraser-collecting scene had gotten more insane than I ever imagined. The biggest tip-off for me came mostly when I started seeing them in real toy shops. For this we have the good people at Iwako to thank, because why rub out your pencil mistakes with nondescript gray slabs when you can do it with pieces of rubber shaped like hamsters?

Going back to the subject of Flickr groups, one of my favorite online pick-me-ups is the Little Treasures Flickr pool. I freely admitted that I am a bit of a Flickr lurker ages ago, but this is getting out of hand.

While I have an unabashed appreciation for small toys in general, I have more of a love-hate relationship with the art of displaying/storing them. Much of my frustration may stem from printer's trays being awfully hard to find, but then I have yet to take up antiquing as a phase.

An even bigger issue for me is my perennial lack of storage space, which is not bound to get better anytime soon thanks to my fleeting passionate hobby complex and the law of conservation of mass. I might stand a slightly better chance of justifying this if I had actual photography skills, though it seems colorful objects and camera only occasionally get along whenever I'm working with them.

If you think this looks bad, wait until you see it now.

On the other hand, I guess my fiction-writing skills could use some exercise...

Sockbert

2012-02-01T01:35:00.000+08:00

Say hello to Sockbert.

Made when I was perhaps little more than a wee weirdo-in-the-making, Sockbert was perhaps one of my very earliest (and creepiest) attempts at doll-making. Looking back, I feel like I should probably walk into a Doll Collectors Anonymous meeting and just admit that I have a doll problem.

Once, this problem reached the point that I was desperately looking for ways to get my doll fix. That meant figuring out how to make my own dolls, never mind that I was then too young and uncoordinated (read: stupid) for the task.

(and it just goes on and on...)

Fool's Dragon: A Free Knitting Pattern

2012-01-31T17:08:00.003+08:00

Here we have Zeb the Dalmatian Dragon, one of my more surprising attempts at improvising my own stuffed animal. For some reason I just felt like knitting my own winged hexaped lizard in honor of the Chinese Year of the Dragon (It only comes once every 12 years! It's extra-special!), not to mention the promise of a new season of Game of Thrones this coming April.

This is my first actual attempt at posting a knitting pattern, so please be gentle.

(and it just goes on and on...)

The Secret Lives of Clothespins

2012-01-28T17:58:00.001+08:00

So yesterday was a bit of an uncharacteristically busy day, and hopefully I'll have more to blog about in the coming weeks. For now, here's an interesting discovery I made while researching one of my, erm, projects:

Worry Dolls. A bit of a peculiar name for what could tentatively be the next big grassroots fad to displace friendship bracelets. It turns out there's a Guatemalan custom wherein kids stick small dolls under their pillows at night, serving as a sort of lightning rod for all their worries. Is it weird of me to say they remind me of a cross between voodoo dolls and Hakuna Matata?

Of course, the real reason these things caught my eye was because their construction bears an uncanny resemblance to an arts & crafts kit I got at a store way back when I was in high school. They weren't marketed as Worry Dolls, but rather as some generic girl-friendly crafty project intended to engender creativity and sharing and all that crap. I believe they might have had some cutesy name like "Friendship Pocket Pals" or somesuch.

The good news is that thanks to the miraculous preservative properties of my notoriously cluttered desk, three of these managed to survive years of schoolwork, paper pileups, hoarding and seasonal insanity.

Yes, these are more or less the very same "dolls" I made out of that old kit. Similar use of embroidery floss, drawn-on faces, and even the exact same variety of wooden clothespins that for very specific reasons are not common here in the Philippines. I guess the biggest difference is that the Worry Dolls pattern used popsicle sticks for the arms, while the kit I got came with pipe cleaners. Incidentally, Doll 1 is nursing a long-broken arm from my preadolescent horseplay.

A neat but possibly irrelevant sidenote: The first two dolls were made straight out of the package, while the third was made possibly many months later during one of the off-days at home. I am still absolutely baffled as to how I managed to give Doll 3 picture-perfect Jessica Simpson hair.

I would have liked being able to make more crafty dolls like these. Now if only these kinds of wooden clothespins were easier to find here...

Stuff I Wasn't Expecting #63

2012-01-19T18:14:00.000+08:00

The imaginary blog gremlins who have been following my cardboard mock-dollhouse project may be wondering whatever the heck happened with it. Well, wonder no more!

Producing this simple result was much trickier than I thought. Then again, the dimensions and building of the whole thing were pretty much done on the fly, with little more than a vast expanse of stiff board and whatever drafting supplies I could find in the house.

In the end, I'm still convinced I could've done better.

For one thing, I definitely did not anticipate this:
(and it just goes on and on...)

Your Music Break for the Day

2012-01-13T04:05:00.000+08:00

BREAK UP!

Break up wit' yo' boyfriend!

You know how every now and then you get the spontaneous urge to play something funky?

I don't know what it is about this song, but it's become one of my go-to numbers. (Go behind the scenes here.)

Unboxing the Lalaloopsy Treehouse, Part 2 (Treehouse features)

2012-01-13T03:52:00.002+08:00

We interrupt this review to bring you a special news bulletin: Mittens can control the weather! (Okay, not really.)

Now that that's out of the way, let me just state for the record that I am probably not the best at taking actual pictures of toys. Moving on to the Treehouse tour!

The Treehouse proper can be divided into two major parts: the "Bigger Tree" and the "Smaller Tree." The Bigger Tree carries the bulk of the playset's special features. Both trees can be connected by a bridge made of popsicle sticks and a yellow zip-line rope (more on those later).

As has been mentioned a bunch of times throughout this product's marketing, the playset is "double-sided" so to speak. All that really means, though, is that the "leafy" section of both trees is hollow enough to carry a couple of vaguely-defined platforms for the dolls to sit semi-comfortably on, not to mention hang a twee "walnut hammock" from. (The Smaller Tree has its own slightly smaller walnut hammock.)

The Bigger Tree's walnut hammock.

As you have probably already noticed, the walnuts aren't exactly well-designed for the dolls themselves to snuggle up in. We can therefore conclude that the hammocks fulfill one of two purposes:

They're for the dolls' pets to sleep in.
They're for hanging food in the trees to keep out of reach from bears.

One thing I like about this playset is that the door and window shutters really work. A minor detail, I know, but I take what I can get.

(and it just goes on and on...)

Unboxing the Lalaloopsy Treehouse, Part 1 (Box, Dolls, Accessories)

2012-01-10T07:55:00.001+08:00

Last year, I "treated" myself by getting the fabled Mini Lalaloopsy Treehouse playset. Like any other self-respecting toy nerd (is there such a thing?), I do occasionally occupy myself with meticulous toy-unboxing photo shoots. And seeing as this was an extra-special purchase and this blog is no stranger to meandering anecdotes about treehouses, I felt this deserved at least some sort of proper documentation.

Because this post turned out a bit longer than I thought, Part 1 shall cover my initial impressions of the packaging, the dolls and the itty-bitty extras. The Treehouse itself (features and all) will be covered in Part 2.

Here we have the as-of-yet unopened Treehouse in all its shiny, plastic glory. I can't be alone in hating toys that look overly intimidating and expensive while still in-package. Then again, I guess this must partly explain the cult of mint-condition toy collectors.
(and it just goes on and on...)

Aaaaaaaand my estrogen levels just skyrocketed.

2012-01-07T20:46:00.001+08:00

I'd rather not go into detail about the random turn of events that led me to this site, but it appears I have my own fairy name now!

Great. Now all I need to do is file this along with my porn star name, my pick-up artist name, my Time Lord name, my Zombieland name, my Game Grid name...

My fairy name is Oak Rainbowglitter
She brings good fortune.
She lives in forests of oak and lime trees.
She is only seen in the light of a shooting star.
She wears pretty autumnal leaf colours and has multicoloured wings like a butterfly.
Find out your fairy names with The Fairy Name Generator!

Today in Cardboard Dollhouses

2012-01-05T03:26:00.000+08:00

Research! Yeah, that's it. I'm doing research.

If there's anything I've learned from the five ill-fated months I spent as an employee of the SEO persuasion, it's that looking for anything on Google these days has become yet another fresh hell brought to you by CAPITALISM! It's gotten to the point that just seeing the word "eHow" is enough to send me into a mild spasm. (In case you don't get my meaning, just Google "content farm." Wait, scratch that. Don't.)

The good news is that my search for half-decent cardboard building ideas has not been a fruitless one. While I did stumble on a bunch of fun homemade houses (plus this doozy of a project), I believe I may have finally found a solution to my "adding a second floor to a nondescript cardboard box built from scratch" dilemma.

Of course, looking back on these ideas now begs the question, "What the heck where you doing building a box from scratch when you could just alter a prefab one? Isn't your country, like, swimming in giant boxes? There was even a passing joke about it on a certain movie which shall not be named!"

To put it as calmly and as non-meanderingly (is that even a real word?) as I can, I guess I preferred the challenge of figuring out how to build a box that works to my specifications first. That and if I wanted to just decorate a box willy-nilly, I could've just used a flipping wooden shelf as my starting point (as this page has already reminded me).

Getting back on track with an actual build update, the dollbox remains unchanged. However, I did get hold of some new raw material so I can resume construction. And I mean about 1,200 square inches of raw material.

Unwieldy as heck, and baffling to cut and shape into a more manageable size. Because I'm nuts about my toys. Because I like a little creative freedom. And because I always have to do it the hard and stupid way first.

As a parting word, I shall give you a fairy house. Yet another reason I wish I knew how to build stuff with wood.

Things I Do Whenever I'm Online

2012-01-04T00:49:00.000+08:00

In no particular order:

Check my email on Google and Yahoo!
Browse io9
Browse Jezebel
Browse Spot.ph
Browse the Tor blog
Lurk the New Media section in the TV Tropes forums (fora?)
Lurk io9's observation deck
Lurk the Minimate Multiverse

(and it just goes on and on...)

This packrat is also a cheapskate.

2012-01-03T23:14:00.007+08:00

My unhealthy fixation with tiny objects continues. I was sick of having my Mini Lalaloopsy figures (I hesitate to call them dolls out loud) loiter like mooks out in the open, pets and furniture in tow. It was about time I got them a dollhouse.

Unfortunately, since I have absolutely zero chops for finding ideal miniature setpieces, I had to improvise. My choices were pretty much limited to affordable wooden toy shelves or... this.

(and it just goes on and on...)

Flying Pigs, Too Many Mitts and Other Adventures in Obsessive Knitting

2011-12-31T00:13:00.008+08:00

46 pairs of fingerless gloves in two years. Well, that was a stupid idea.

It all started with this nifty pattern. Actually, it goes back a little farther, when my knitting-fingerless-gloves obsession was in full swing and I joined this little website called Ravelry. First launched in 2007, the site has become a major online hub for knitters, crocheters, and other fiber artists of all skill levels.

So what does this have to do with me swimming in a surplus of half-mitts? Blame it on a weird hybrid of ambitiousness, peer pressure, and maybe even a streak of hypomania or two.

See, like any other sizable online community, Ravelry has a metric ton of user groups. As luck would have it, I found a group that was devoted entirely to fingerless gloves. (Good people, all of 'em.) It was December 2010, and for the coming New Year people were aiming to knit 11 pairs for 2011. I threw my name into the hat, and just two months later-- well, you get the picture.

Okay, basically I had completed my 11 pairs by February. By New Year's Eve I had 35. Thirty-five. A good number of them still have yet to have any takers. In hindsight, I may have massively underestimated the whole "tropical climate" thing.

So I had to hit the brakes on glove-knitting for the time being. But no way am I taking a break from knitting period. So I asked myself, "What can I knit all year round, regardless of climate, that I can still derive twee amusement from?"

Enter two square meters of fiberfill.

Here we have but a snapshot of some of the Ravelry toy patterns I'd been meaning to try, not necessarily right away. To make things more interesting, I decided to give myself the self-imposed goal of knitting 12 toys in 2012. Because I'm a stickler for continuity that way.

Of course, since I rarely ever knit anything bigger than a hat, it's not like I'm aiming for the moon or anything. (Plus I generally work better with double-points than with circular needles, which hate me for some reason.)

Since December is also "Spend The Holidays With The Relatives" Season, I have inadvertently discovered that handknit dolls are a fast and dirty way to distract young nieces and nephews while also eliciting the oohs and ahhs of older aunts and uncles. Already I have given two away and volunteered to knit two particularly outlandish family requests, namely something in bright colors and a flying pig.

Hopefully toys will be a bit easier to give away to random people. Which reminds me: Anybody know an upcoming anime/steampunk convention where I can give away 46 pairs of fingerless gloves?

Good Morning [insert place name here]!

2011-12-04T00:11:00.003+08:00

First of all, the full-length version of this jingle actually isn't that bad. Though the TV commercial is a bit too syrupy for my tastes.

But more importantly, I finally know what this ad subconsciously reminds me of!

I'm a bad person for always giggling at that flasher bit.

Also, there might be the teeniest hint of an Enchanted-esque crowd song influence here. (Small confession: not all that crazy about Enchanted.)

In any case, I am now fully expecting a "Good Morning, Convergys!" follow-up number.

When All You're Missing Is A Dollhouse...

2011-11-06T13:17:00.013+08:00

Lately I've stumbled onto a couple of discoveries that were as unsurprising as they were bad for my long-term financial health: that there were local Facebook fan pages for both Re-Ment and Sylvanian Families. As if my small world (of plastic, not the one in my head) needed any more over-populating.

To the uninitiated, Re-Ment products are a quick way to add some personality (if not kitschy flair) to the average diorama. Of course, this doesn't disqualify them from having their own applications for playtime either. *cough*

I tend to hold a high appreciation for the craftsmanship that goes into products like the collectibles Re-Ment puts out. My minor obsessiveness over tiny objects aside, one of Re-Ment's real selling points is the unnerving realism that goes into their products. Most people have trouble keeping track of anything smaller than their car keys, but Re-Ment proffers a world that tries to sell as complete a scene as possible in miniature.

Sylvanian Families, meanwhile, treads a fine line between being just another old-school dollhouse company and a furry fandom enabler. (Not that I have anything against furries. Fine people, I'm sure they all are.)

While realism doesn't rank as highly on this brand's priorities list as it does for Re-Ment, Sylvanian Families still aims to create its own idealized microcosm of cute forest creatures living in their own quaint country-style throwback of a society.

For their 25th anniversary, Sylvanian Families decided to put out a few very special items. These include sets with a maypole, a nautical rabbit family, and--

Huh.

Think they're gunning for a new target demographic, perhaps? Perhaps baiting in consumers along the lines of...

Nah.

Transformers are so five years ago.

2011-09-24T19:10:00.005+08:00

Archie McPhee is perhaps better known in geek circles for being a purveyor of unique 21st century novelty items, a disproportionate number of which are themed after bacon and mustaches. But the website really won me over with its quirky selection of toys.

Among other things, the site offers an honest-to-goodness line of action figures based on men and women from history. Move over, G.I. Joe! Now you too can play with your very own Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette (complete with detachable head!), Charles Dickens, Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, and of course, Jesus Christ.

They even have their own "All Of The Above" package.

Archie McPhee doesn't just stop at famous historical figures, however. They also offer other toys ranging from the neat to the bizarre to the downright sad.
(and it just goes on and on...)

So much for maturity.

2011-09-23T02:31:00.002+08:00

(Originally posted at the Lalaloopsy Fan Club forums last July 19, 2011, 11:34 PM forum time.

I am still ambivalent about the issue of indoctrinating little girls with the color pink.)

I'm getting one inch closer to completing the new minis! Managed to snag Jewel's Primpin' Party yesterday.

(and it just goes on and on...)

A peek into the House of Lala

2011-09-23T00:21:00.004+08:00

(Originally posted at the Lalaloopsy Fan Club forums last July 16, 2011, 1:55 PM forum time.

Yes, a Lalaloopsy fan club. These minis have really done a number on my thought processes.)

Just got my hands on Berry's Kitchen this week. It is adorable! The oven and sink are also pretty sturdy, which makes them an improvement over past playsets so far. Am going to get Jewel's Primpin' Party next, now all I need to do is save up for the Treehouse!

(and it just goes on and on...)

The Times, They Are...

2011-09-04T22:30:00.002+08:00

I should have seen this coming. I walked into Astroplus today and there was a whole table of music CDs on sale. Two things immediately struck me: that these were actual proper albums by actual recording artists I recognized (some of which had even been on my CD Shopping List for a while now), and that they were now being proffered at ridiculously low prices. The sign even said "80% Off!"

I had already known about the radical decline of CD sales for some time now. I already know about the great sea change that lead people to get their music primarily from downloads and torrents and stuff. I even made the hard decision of making that shift myself recently, shutting away my older baggage about the medium for good. But I have to admit, seeing the great sea change with my own eyes was still a real punch to the gut for me.

Of course, even music fans know when not to be denied. As I had only a little cash left at the moment, I had to choose between this...

... and this.

In the end I had to go with Kings Of Leon. Admittedly the lure of having the original Superman film score, the Batman Beyond theme, Danny Elfman's Batman music AND the Justice League Unlimited theme blaring from my laptop on demand was great. However, even I had to admit that there were a couple niggles about this album that made it difficult for me to commit to it. Besides, how can you put Smallville in there without a token mention oSOMEBODY SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE MEEEEEEEEEEE...

I kid, I kid. I guess I can always come back for the DC album some other time. It's not like only one Astroplus is feeling the music industry pinch, right?

Spin The Gray Circle: Confessions of a CD Snob

2011-09-04T22:10:00.001+08:00

(Originally published in my very first blog last March 26, 2007, 22:48 Philippine time.

It probably goes without saying that my CD-buying habits have not fully recovered since then.)

To put it safely, by most accounts I am very money-wise and frugal: traits I often take pride in. But if I had to have only ONE very costly, irrational and disappointingly deplorable vice, it would have to be buying CDs. (All ORIGINAL ALBUMS, mind you.)

It has come to the point that my family has grown seriously concerned, worried that an otherwise clearheaded person would willingly splurge (I prefer to think of it as “invest”) thousands of pesos on an otherwise pointless hobby. To make things even MORE drastic, practically ALL the music I personally listen to these days comes exclusively from CDs. I’m not kidding.

My “sole vice” exists in very ironic circumstances: that these days (especially right here at home) one could always opt for easier and CHEAPER ways to obtain music… Downloading songs online and tracking down in Plaza Fair home-burned CD-R copies you could literally buy by the dozen, to name a few. This isn’t the Nineties anymore, when CDs and tapes and cursory playlists on FM radio and MTV really were the be-all and end-all of music for the masses. Now, it seems you can really find EVERYTING for free online (that is, if you’re tech-savvy enough).

I personally hate being figuratively backed into a corner whenever I’m questioned about my “musical habits.” Yes, such a pastime would indicate not only material elitism, but sheer musical snobbishness. And yes, not only is it technologically backward (seeing as CDs are possibly already on the fast track to obsolescence, thanks to the Great Wide Web), but it is also the sort of counter-productive consumer behavior that keeps the big record companies ludicrously rich and the current music industry perpetually on the rocks.

So WHY do I refuse to wean myself from this aesthetically “nasty” habit, especially since I have a whole shipload of good reasons to? Well, to speak very honestly, I’m feeling kinda stumped about it myself. For me CD-buying is not just some pathologically maniacal obsession I am enslaved to. It is simply MY way of maintaining a very personal, intimate, somewhat holistic affair with an art form that has otherwise been permanently changed and spread wide open by digital globalization and quantity-over-quality megalomania.

Precisely because it has now gotten SO EASY to get gigabytes of aural pleasure online, some people now seem to get music online not because they want to, but simply because they can. This is just my opinion, but just clicking on an allegedly awesome song online just seems so antiseptic and impersonal compared to the concrete act of literally craning your neck, getting on your knees or breaking your back in search of some full musical document only Fate could bring your way, then later taking a chance and cradling it in your fingertips in some moment of surreal triumph.

In short, I hold on to my very costly, irrational and disappointingly deplorable vice… simply because I’m a damn romantic.

MY MOST RECENT ACQUISITION: Sonic Youth's 2006 album "Rather Ripped"

Google Images Versus Tiny Plastic Babies

2011-09-04T20:39:00.008+08:00

I love Google Images. I don't know why, but today I randomly decided to play around with one of its newer features. They recently updated things so that you can find images not just with search queries, but also by uploading an image from your file.

That being said, the new image-based engine seems to run on predominantly-used colors, not unlike the search functions on sites like Etsy or Hostess With The Mostess. This is not without its foreseeable quirks.

This was a results page I just pulled up this evening:

And this was the actual image I tried to ~~bamboozle~~ test Google with:

For some context, the Naked Mohawk Babies Riding On Carrots saga.
(It helps to know that I am also a Cake Wrecks junkie.)

I first came across the Carrot Jockey image about a year ago, happily giving it a new home in my Bizarre Stuff From The Internet hard drive repository. (What, you don't have one?) I would've easily put the whole Tiny Plastic Babies saga to rest right then and there. A chance work-related discovery, however, recently forced me to see these kitschy craft store tchotchkes in a whole new light.

I already figured there must have been a myriad of baby shower decor and party favor applications for these things. But I never imagined anything quite as specific as... well...

The [My Water Broke] baby shower game will sure break the ice at your upcoming baby shower celebration! Guests will be taken by surprise when you let them know about the little one in their favorite beverage! Prior to the shower, place a baby in each cube slot and make ice. During the shower, serve refreshments with the special ice. The guest that has their baby break free first is the winner!

Wow. Wow.

Yeah, this certainly takes the whole "icebreaker" concept a little too literally.

In short: Google Images, still an inexact science. Tiny plastic babies, now menacing ice cubes and carrots near you!

David Tennant fans scare me now.

2011-06-07T18:34:00.000+08:00

On The Zafra Years (also: journals)

2011-05-31T18:05:00.011+08:00

Any young, aspiring Filipino pop writer worth their salt these days has had the Jessica Zafra phase. At least a couple of my friends have all dreamed of becoming her, some even long before they knew she existed. *cough* I'll never forget my Tita's immortal hallmark of a good writer: that she can make even the act of watching ice melt interesting to read about. ("Defrosting", Twisted 7)

More importantly, before the dawn of Rifftrax and the Nostalgia Critic her Twisted book series was my bible on the fine art of injecting film analysis with funny. Personal highlights include:

Twisted 5 with the Voltes V-inspired cover and the pieces on The Ninth Gate and Mystery Men, which for some reason I remember most vividly.
Twisted 7, which in its time shockingly put forth the theory that Terminator 3 was a good movie. I also fondly remember giggling way too long at the title of the book's Cold Mountain review.
Twisted 8, the most recent book I'd gotten to date. (Yes, I know 9 is already out.) Mostly I remember it for giving me yet another reason to just go out and effing buy Atonement already, and for now making me permanently associate Blood Diamond with both Congo and Lord Of The Rings.

In case it had not already become apparent, I had developed then a mild case of Zafra hero worship I decided to wean myself off of (mostly for my own sanity, but also because I still wasn't much of a movie/tennis/tech person).

Of course I still follow her official blog, from time to time remaining indebted to its presence for such things as celebrity correspondence and everything I ever needed to know about Joey Gosiengfiao's Temptation Island.

An extremely bad idea: watching this video right after reading the Wikipedia article on Cannibal Holocaust.

Lately I'd been scouring the blog for its previous entries on the subject of notebooks and other things we use for writing.

This year I have known the thrilling experience of shopping around for my sister's daily planner, and in a way it had caused me to become more contemplative about all the blank notebooks I'd lovingly amassed and scribbled in over the years. (Unlike Sis I am not much of a "planner" person.)

Ever since the minor Moleskine explosion that seems to have erupted domestically overnight, I never really understood the elitist preference for such absurdly pricey journals and other related instruments. (Inkwells? People really still use those?) However at the risk of sounding like a blatant shill, I developed a better understanding of such lofty preferences after finding Gwen Diehn's The Decorated Page on sale at National Bookstore.

I won't go too in-depth about how much I love this book (perhaps I'll save that for another blog entry), but I do highly appreciate its introductory chapters which discussed technical things like archival quality (a.k.a. why "acid-free paper" is a big deal) and the merits of neutral versus determined materials when journalling.

I still can't quite make that transition to high-quality leatherette carnets though, not while I still have a small stockpile of blank books I need to burn through right here at home. Nevertheless, I've now become a more aware, more conscientious diarist (with a disturbingly more pronounced selectiveness when it comes to ballpoint pens).

My current notebook (WHICH IS NOT YOURS). Costed me just P16.50 at American Boulevard a.k.a. Trying To Be Hot Topic.

The funniest part? I could just as easily make these myself.

The Rock Radio Paradox

2011-04-26T16:33:00.003+08:00

I can't go through this again.

I'm live-streaming UR Faceradio right now (yeah, I know, another audience share in Zuckerberg's pocket) just because I'm getting tired of rock 'n' roll suffering yet another slow and agonizing death at the hands of the short-sightedness of Pinoy radio executives. Yeah, my conscience is still nursing soul pains from not having tuned in to NU 107 enough.

Random story: I was actually old (young?) enough to remember back when 97.1 FM was still a semi-respectable student-oriented pop station that gave the odd bits of music trivia every now and then. There should be some sort of law dictating the increasing probability of a local FM station turning into the same sort of homogeneous masses-pandering behemoth that would play Celine Dion and lifeless reskinnings of the Papaya Song at the most inopportune times of day.

An Odd Musical Tradition

2011-04-22T14:01:00.002+08:00

Despite the origin of my longtime Internet handle, I was never much of a religious person. That being said, in "observance" of every Good Friday I now have this odd tradition where I always play the same album.

First acquired in the summer of 2003, believe it or not I fondly regard this CD as one of my very first "real" rock albums. I was a pretty stupid teenager back then.

Besides the fact that a disturbing number of Rob Thomas's lyrics all seem to address how desperately he needs some sort of savior figure in his life, probably the most remotely Christian element in this whole album is the kickass gospel choir in "Downfall" (not to be confused with the meme-tastic German WWII film Der Untergang).

Matchbox Twenty is as faux-retro as you can get, a big-name artifact of a mildly regrettable era that emerged to try and fill the vast vacuum Kurt Cobain's Grunge left behind (without having to resort to bubblegum boy/girl pop groups, anyway). That whole era of just-passable rock bands was defined by this embarrassing mix of lyrical earnestness and overly self-conscious bids for musical credibility. One need only look back to the likes of Creed or Live to get a feel for how cheesy yet angst-ridden those post-grunge years were.

Incidentally Matchbox Twenty was also one of the biggest presences in my adolescent life for a while, the requisite totem I assumed in a volatile period in which almost every teenager needed some (often music-related) hero-slash-idol to project all their hormone-addled frustrations into.

By some accident of geography, I now often associate Good Friday with More Than You Think You Are. Catch me on a certain day and I may relive whole chunks of that decade to this band's music -- nay, even persist in my unironic adoration of them.

Hey, everyone's allowed to have at least one musical guilty pleasure, right?

Music For A Movie

2011-04-19T04:59:00.003+08:00

Educational factoid of the day: The song "Never Let Me Go" (for the novel Never Let Me Go, later the movie Never Let Me Go) is not a real song.

Or at least it wasn't. Until now.

To crib shamelessly from ~~the YouTube video description~~ film critic Peter Howell's article in The Star about the song's conception:

... Judy Bridgewater isn’t real. The album is also fake, although it looks genuine, right down to the track listings: “Wanted,” “Dance With Me,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Light Over The Hill” and “Crying Over You.”

The album cover shows an elegant woman lounging on a settee, a cigarette with holder in her hand, as she stares a come hither (or get lost) look.

Bridgewater and Songs After Dark are part of the elaborate fiction of Never Let Me Go, a 2005 sci-fi novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro that is the basis of Mark Romanek’s affecting new film by the same name.

The singer and the album become the fascination of Kathy H., the story’s central character, played by Carey Mulligan.

Holy carp! World-building in action!

Then again (SPOILER ALERT), I did already hear somewhere that the plot of Never Let Me Go sounds like an artsier, less crappy take on The Island anyway. Factor in the novel's mild alternate history angle, and I guess some fictionalized filigree was inevitable.

Going back to the song, it really does sound like something my grandparents might have played on their old record player, possibly even danced to on their first date back in the Fifties. (Or do I mean their Fifties? Fifties the decade, I mean, not Fifties the age. And their Fifties, erm, the actual Fifties, not the Fifties as depicted in the book. Ow, my head.)

My point is that the song is genuinely lovely. I was never really much of an Old Standards kind of girl (though that might be bound to change once I reach my Spinster phase of existence), but this really does feel like a song I could enjoy playing constantly alongside my Asin or Johnny Cash albums. To confuse things even further, it appears the song mentioned in the book is a separate entity from the song that actually gets played in the movie-- You know what? The song is lovely. Can we just leave it at that and move on?!

Today in Flickr groups: Eraser Heads

2011-04-19T00:07:00.009+08:00

First off, did you know that collecting Japanese stuff-shaped erasers is a thing now?

I didn't.

The way I see it, a telltale sign that your twee, eccentric recreational sideline has blossomed into a full-blown hobby is when you have whole Flickr groups devoted to taking artistic photographs of it. Yes, the same holds true for erasers.

Don't get me wrong, colorful erasers cut out in random weird shapes had been around even back when I was a kid. But even I don't recall this much loving detail devoted to them, back then the things were still designed with rubbing out penciled errors in mind. I might have even *gasp!* taken a fancy fruit-shaped eraser or two to some of my more disastrous art attempts.

But these? These feel less like erasers and more like a distinct new miniature art wave rooted in the depiction of Chibi-fied objects in the Rubber medium.

This also adds fuel to my budding theory that deep down, humans have a bizarre fixation with things smaller than they should be. From fake dimsum platters to real bottles of hard liquor just like you'd get when you're flying First Class, if it exists then it may have also been adapted to a more diminutive form at some point. Even movies.

Erasers also happen to be a tad more affordable than real high-end miniatures (for now), which means that maybe it won't be as difficult for me to find props for my tabletop ~~disco parties~~ sceneries now.

The Evita stuff made me tingle.*

2011-04-18T00:16:00.010+08:00

*Come on, I can't be the only living human being who's seen Connie and Carla.

The musical may have had its cringe-inducing lyrical moments, and it may have taken me 15 years to admit it, but my God, Evita sure had one fantastic soundtrack. I will say that even way back then I loved "Another Suitcase in Another Hall." (Which on the album is exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds long. Huh.)

"Requiem For Evita" is sure to go down in history as one of the most epic opening numbers to a ~~musical~~ rock opera ever. Right next to "Overture" (Tommy), "In The Flesh?" (The Wall) and... yeah, I've just exhausted all of my rock opera opening song stock knowledge.

Surely a huge part of the Requiem's punch is the melodic foreshadowing to one of the show's biggest numbers, "Rainbow High." My God, how I love this song. Its sheer impact never quite clicked with me as a kid. You'd think the note-for-note Simpsons homage from eight years prior would have clued me in, but nooooooo. It took a much-belated proper playing of the movie soundtrack last November for me to finally "get it." Because I'm culturally dense and thick-headed that way.

The brash gravitas and mile-a-minute wordplays of "Rainbow High" almost made me wonder if the more accessible film adaptation of the musical would have succeeded at all without Madonna in the title role. And when she mouths that final "star quality" (flourish and all), you can just visualize her standing in front of a mirror, dressed to the nines and beaming with smug, triumphant satisfaction.

On the bright side, "Buenos Aires" immediately took me back to my childhood and my parents' frequent Broadway benders on the family CD player. (Some cheesy lip-synching, ponyback rides, Frank Sinatra and pillow fights may have been involved.)

Another song I didn't expect to like instantly was "I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You," which I gather depicts the hypothetical first meeting of Eva Duarte and Colonel Juan Peron. (I haven't seen the movie yet, I promise I will get around to it very soon, LET'S MOVE ON) Of course everybody by now knows that the song is dripping with the symbolic shrewd politicking that defined the Eva-Juan relationship and is thus not a seduction song in the conventional sense. That still doesn't diminish the song's hypnotic sexual tension though: If I had to choose between waltzing with ~~Antonio Banderas~~ Che and singing a plain hoighty-toighty duet to this song, I'd choose the duet.

"She Is A Diamond" is the shortest number on the CD, but it is also its rare fragile, earnest moment. ("You Must Love Me" is the other one.) The character of Juan Peron is an infrequent presence here anyway, so it seems apt that this short number was still enough to humanize him and paint him as a burgeoning dictator who might actually deeply care about his wife. Say it with me: awwwww.

Perhaps the eerier listening experiences for me had been "A New Argentina" and "And The Money Kept Rolling In", but only because listening to them suddenly gave me this inexplicable urge to go out and buy Here Lies Love. In a perfect universe, Imelda Marcos would have her own polarizing quasi-biographical musical, wildly popular yet tongue-in-cheek enough to make her the next, well, Evita.

"Lament" is, to put it succinctly, a terrifying ending. It puts a sinister spin on the whole musical, and it gets even worse when you stop and consider that the real Eva Perón's body really did disappear from the face of the earth for a little while. Thus, that danged last song really did turn into a brick-pooping moment for me.

And may I just say, not even a proper playthrough could save me from getting plain sick and tired of "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina." At least that Simpsons episode had the decency to ape other songs from the musical too.

How could you, Alex Proyas?!

2011-04-15T09:18:00.005+08:00

I thought you were cool!

I liked The Crow. I actually enjoyed I, Robot on the big screen. I haven't seen Dark City yet but I've always wanted to! And now you retroactively pull this frakkery on me?!

The end of the world? The wall of numbers? The creepy little girl who can see fifty years into the future? The grade school time capsule? The solar flare of doom? The little black rocks? "Everyone Else"? The man of science estranged from his religious father? The mom who goes crazy and dies? The Adam and Eve plot? The ~~angels~~ aliens? The flaming deer? THIS?

Granted, you didn't 'shop in the bird and you didn't slap on the caption.
This didn't even happen on the set of your movie.
YOU STILL COULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS, PROYAS!

But you know what really adds insult to injury? Roger Ebert liked this movie. Not only that, My Dad liked this movie.

My Dad. Liked. This movie.

My Dad, the same man who without irony* would tell us all about the Third Secret of Fatima, the truth behind the Illuminati conspiracy, and how the President of the United States was 17th in line of succession for global command behind a secret cadre of super-gazillionaires, LIKED Knowing.

Okay, granted, you weren't the screenwriter. That might give you a pass.

Still, what the hell Alex Proyas? I thought you were cool! And now I'm going to be stuck thinking every other movie you've done was a fluke*.

_____
* I hope not.

For your sake, I pray that Garage Days turns out to be awesome.

P.S. They're planning a reboot of The Crow. Please do something about that.

After all, 132 pages is not a lot.

2011-04-13T23:21:00.011+08:00

Scott Adams would like for you to know that he does indeed lead a life outside of Dilbert.

Any time a book claims that it can change your life, world view, fundamental belief system or whathaveyou, one naturally cannot help but feel dubious. If it also happens to be a short book you can legally download on the internet for free, well, it wouldn't hurt to put your principles to the test (for free!) every now and then.

God's Debris, Scott Adams' first published novella (and non-Dilbert book), openly markets itself as a "thought experiment," one that could possibly shake the walls of your own spiritual life if not bang on them incessantly with a big stick. If you're a young, impressionable high school ("People under the age of fourteen should not read it," says Scott in the Introduction) or college student possibly looking to expand your intellectual borders beyond angsty pop-rock and supernatural romance novels while trying to make yourself look smarter to your peers *coughmenineyearsagocough*, then sure, the moniker can work.

To be perfectly honest, the central concept Adams tries to highlight in the story would have made a shorter, less-muddled standalone nonfiction book on its own, and the framing device with the delivery man and the old man in the apartment feels unnecessary. Sure, it's a lovely jaunt through roughly fleshed-out narrative, rising action, falling action, organic dialogue, subtly-telegraphed ending and all that juicy quasi-literary stuff, but you can already tell the only thing anyone's going to remember of this whole book is the nifty, water-cooler-worthy "Levels of Consciousness" business.

I am the AVATAR! Watch as I assert my spiritual complexity over all of you sheeple!
What was my point again? Oh, yeah: admittedly the questions raised in the book are some very insightful ones. The "thought experiment" is a valid one if you have rarely ventured beyond the ethical dimensions of your own spirituality and dipped more into the metaphysical parts of it. It dwells less on the moral question of why we must do certain things and more on the "practical" question of why God -- assuming one exists -- does certain things.

The questions, however, lie fairly low (read: non-threatening) on the Sliding Scale of Earth-Shattering Revelations: innocent enough not to offend anybody -- or so Adams hoped in the book's Introduction -- but provocative enough to spark some spirited discussion. One wonders if maybe more of the book's metaphysical conflict would be explored in the novella's follow-up The Religion War because, come on, it's got the word "War" right there in the title.

God's Debris also consciously treads that very fine line that separates the devout and the logical-minded; a whole (brief) chapter, "Science," addresses the presumed dissonance between science and religion in a way that reads much like a watered-down Carl Sagan argument. An earnest attempt is made not to alienate any of the religious, though it's unlikely to cause any controversy anyway except maybe over the mention of string theory.

Plot-driving philosophical conundrums aside, as a proper novella I think I liked this book better the first time I read it.... when it was called Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING: Since it's old hat to name-check R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" at a time like this, I shall instead break tradition (not to mention betray my post-grunge bias) by playing "Why I Don't Believe In God" by Everclear. Mostly because it's a legitimately nice song and Everclear needs every hit they can get.

... it wasn't a prequel.

2011-04-10T02:45:00.003+08:00

OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS

IT WASN'T A PREQUEL

*ahem*

To explain, for several months now I had been made aware of a certain alternate reality game masterpiece known affectionately to its fans as the Beast. It ran for a magical three months in early 2001, but it had taken me just last month to actually sit through a walk-through explaining what the heck was going on in it.

I'm looking through my daily journals right now, trying to remember exactly which night I spent without sleep and devoted to that walk-through. It might have been the 28th, the 29th of March. It was an exhilarating night, and all over something that ended almost ten years ago. (Dang, I'm old. And I need to get out more.)

Of course, it is impossible for me to discuss the Beast without going into length about the film it was created solely to promote. A.I. Artificial Intelligence was originally a Stanley Kubrick project inspired by "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," a sci-fi short story by Brian Aldiss. And going by the Wikipedia page, it also famously got stuck in development hell for several decades until Kubrick died and Steven Spielberg took the helm.

Considering that Development Hell is usually a place reserved for either the unluckiest or most passion-driven of projects, exactly what is so special about A.I. that Kubrick had spent years making sure he got it right?

Well... I'm not exactly ready to answer that question yet. Maybe one day I'll attempt a proper movie review, I'm still not sure. All I remember is that when my sister and I first watched that movie onpiratedVCDpleasedonotjudgeus we were both overcome by that same dazed, rotten but sobering feeling you get when a movie leaves behind an impression somewhere between "This movie is incredible" and "Oh my God I want to DIE." (The last movie to make such an impression on me was A Very Long Engagement. Thanks a lot, HBO.)

There's one more thing: Despite it leaving a fairly visible impact, I did not recall particularly falling head over heels in love with A.I. the way you normally would when you discover you have just seen your new favorite movie. In short I did not recall particularly liking A.I. despite its emotional punch.

I still don't. I still can't get over how stereotypical or under-developed some of the characters were, or how baffling the lead-up to that ending was, or how Jude Law as a sexbot seemed both eerily appropriate and utterly ridiculous.

But most of all I was just struck with how the plot itself seemed to do much of the movie's heavy lifting. Taken out of context many of the performances in this movie (like the jerkass big brother or the "ringleader" of the flesh fair) play out like lazy archetypes, but at the same time you get the feeling that their presence makes sense... or at least has to. All because of this loony roller coaster of a plot.

Ironically this quirk is also the reason why I cannot find it in me to outright dismiss A.I. as a work of fiction. It is a widely-held belief in literary circles how "literary fiction" (the kind you'd expect to win Pulitzers or other equally magnanimous awards) is known primarily for its character-driven stories while "genre fiction" (which includes works of horror, fantasy and science fiction among other things) is more known for its plot-driven stories, often derisively so. But as an aspiring writer with a preference for certain flavors of genre fiction (do you people read this blog?), I feel I need to bring up one of the surprise perks of plot-driven stories, and possibly one of the best parts of writing itself:

Worldbuilding.

While I may not care much for A.I. the movie, the Beast completely helped redeem A.I. the fictional universe in my eyes. That's because of exactly what the Beast is made of: it's knee-deep in the mythology of A.I. in ways the movie isn't. It clues us in on the nuances of the world that both created and doomed David the robot child, and it does so in tantalizing increments of company profiles, hacked e-mail, vandalized websites, stone-age blog posts and leaked coroner reports. And code-breaking. Piles and piles and piles of code-breaking. But I'll get to that later.

The enormity of the scale and depth of the Beast itself caused me to remember that for all its flaws, A.I. was still a remarkably complex feat of worldbuilding. The building of this universe from the ground up is as sound as you can get considering that this was all just for one single Hollywood movie. This is a universe where people can be kept in suspended animation, where companies are in cutthroat competition over the next groundbreaking piece of A.I. technology, where people attend university on the Moon, where rednecks have built campaigns and militias dedicated to the cause célèbre that is the snuffing out of the Mecha menace. Heck, the fact alone that the words "orga" and "mecha" are loaded epithets in this universe is just mind-blowing to this poor nerdichlorian heart of mine.

But most importantly at all, the Beast wasn't a prequel.

I mean that literally; after hearing so much about the Beast pretty much serving as the backstory of A.I., all this time I thought it was literally a direct prequel to the movie. It's not.

But I'm too much of a lady to spoil all the best bits, so I must insist you judge the Beast for yourself. Your sleepless night starts now. Now go, go, go, go, GO!

(Stay tuned for an eventual continuation to this post. I have not even begun to geek out over the Beast.)

You are waiting for a train...

2011-04-06T02:49:00.004+08:00

Pardon me, I've got something in my eye.

Damn, it's eerie how Harry Potter had become the thing that had pretty much completely pervaded this generation. My generation.

Ye gads. The antsy anticipation of the next book. The twee all-star Britishness of the movies. The aptly fantastical incredibility of a children's author richer than the Queen. The surprise alternate reality game tie-ins. The knitting. Heck, my very first email address (which one of my now-oldest friends first started up for me) was a Harry Potter reference.

Most of all, I keep feeling that J.K. Rowling should win a bloomin' Nobel Peace Prize just for being a writer lucky enough to be in a position to spawn more writers, to make writers dream big again. Dream that they could save literacy, spawn a subculture, out-moolah the Queen and all that. All thanks to a young boy-wizard dreamed up on a train ride.

Dang. How can you look back on something like this and not believe we live in surreal, interesting times?

Evicted

2011-04-02T12:01:00.003+08:00

No, I'm not being kicked out of the house yet.

There's no crime in exhibiting Filipino hospitality, though a case has to be made for when said hospitality comes at the expense of completely obliterating one's sense of personal space. I had only just managed to move most of my stuff back in the room (though the Bottomless Yarn Cooler is still sitting in the hallway), but recent events had informed me that I might have a lot more heavy lifting to do.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a toilet to unclog.

Looks like I have some plans for next weekend.

2011-04-01T15:29:00.007+08:00

(via our favorite Filipino speculative fiction site, Rocket Kapre)

I just signed up. I've commuted by myself to Cubao before (thank you, WWE!) and a very good friend had already showed me around Cubao X...

How hard can it be?

Oh. Right.

*goes to rummage through her immense backlog for something she can bring to Cubao*

Let's Talk About Wallpaper!

2011-03-31T20:46:00.011+08:00

So... that Doctor Who Series 6 trailer.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of what terminal squee velocity I hit the moment I found out this trailer showed up on YouTube-- okay, maybe I can deviate for just a bit by talking about how surprisingly hot and kick-ass River Song looked about 24 seconds into trailer.

Um, also this.

Okay, now onto the matter at hand. Fast-forward 38 seconds... GO!

Yeah, this scene is probably just another one of those eye-popping red-herring-type Why Trailers Lie kinds of scenes. But mostly this scene caught my attention just because it suddenly reminded me of one of my most favorite Pinoy rock music videos ever.

I'm talking of course about Pupil's "Dulo ng Dila".

Come on! How can you not love a band that tries to go the artsy [OVERUSED "H" WORD REDACTED] route on purpose?

But of course how can we forget our favorite concept video wallflowers?

Oh, but let's talk about the Series 6 trailer some more!

Is it just me, or does this girl look suspiciously like the one from those infamous Playstation "Mental Wealth" ads from a while back?

It takes a real man to fall and look lanky in style.

Of course this will be the scene all the more continuity-headed Who fans will be buzzing about for days. (For those of you not on the know, the show is about a time-traveling alien that controls a spaceship called a TARDIS and changes his appearance every once in a while. We are currently at Doctor Eleven. This scene *reportedly* portrays what the inside of the TARDIS looked like about two regenerations ago. Yes, I think that's supposed to be a big deal.)

On a less related note, I find it somewhat unfortunate how that picture angle made Arthur Darvill look like David Tennant for a split second. Sorry, fangirls.

Oh crud. They've got some The Shining in my House of Leaves again.

SPOILER ALERT: SOMEBODY DIES.

Geek Quote of the Day

2011-03-31T20:32:00.001+08:00

Eight words:

"I'm more concerned that someone banged Red Skull."

Unceremonious Fridging

2011-03-26T03:34:00.003+08:00

"but one by one they're raped, tortured, killed, or all three."

Oh God, no.

In my endless optimism, I am still fairly confident a half-useful lesson can be construed from this train wreck somehow. But you can already tell any saving grace this thing can possibly have will just be buried under the very tall mountain of WTF DID I JUST WATCH ARGARBLAGH

I still need to see this movie, though.

Isn't this the part where...

2011-03-21T17:17:00.004+08:00

Guess what just showed up in my mail again.

Call me crazy, but isn't this the part where we, like, actually try and solve something?

(For those who don't know...)

We Are All Disney's Children.

2011-03-18T17:18:00.005+08:00

A mildly funny chat conversation I got into today with my other friend named J (not that one, or that one):

Me: this is probably going to be a massively embarrassing question, but ever seen Tangled?

J*: No, but I heard it was pretty good

Me: oh, you should see it
Mom and I did, and I actually thought it was really good
granted, I still haven't seen The Princess and the Frog yet

J: I heard Tangled was one of the best animated Disney movies in awhile

Me: it was the DAC**'s 50th movie, I guess they pulled all the stops for that one
I can actually say it rocketed to my Top 3 Favorite DAC movies

J: What are your other two?

Me: mostly it depends on what mood I'm in
If I'm being a princess apologist, I'd probably say Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin

J: Those are two of the best

Me: if in my Literature geek mode, Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Great Mouse Detective
if in my steampunk geek mode, Atlantis and Treasure Planet
if in some other mode, I'd probably also say The Sword and The Stone and Sleeping Beauty, and maybe Winnie the Pooh just for the childhood nostalgia factor

Yeah, you can sort of see the exact point in the conversation where an innocent question turned into my classic word vomit of increasingly indecisive nitpicky proportions. And that's not even getting into my embarrassingly eloquent thoughts on the Rescuers movies, The Emperor's New Groove, how I realized several years too late that Pocahontas retroactively ruined my childhood, and why I now consider The Little Mermaid and The Lion King overrated.

Did get some neat toys out of them though.

__________
* This J is a guy.
** DAC = Disney Animated Canon

Marble Hornets as a series of Dracula analogies

2011-03-17T06:39:00.005+08:00

Warning: This post will not make sense unless you follow Marble Hornets, which I highly recommend by the way. Think of it as a cross between The Ring, The Blair Witch Project and The Mothman Prophecies.

I don't know where I would be in the event that this series ever ended. Where would I be without the weeks of endless lurking and wild speculation on the narrative's eventual final outcome?

I have much respect for the minds behind Marble Hornets, and laud them especially for ushering in such a massively popular phenomenon while juggling college, which is more than I can say for, um, most people.

That being said, I had this bizarre brainstorm wherein I tried to compare the events of MH to that of another, much more iconic tale of classic horror. I'm talking, of course, about Bram Stoker's The Snake's Pass.

Just kidding.

So if we follow the "obvious" route of casting the Operator as the nigh-enigmatic Dracula, then what does that make the rest of the cast?

Besides the Operator himself, one of the most recognizable figures of MH is the Masked Man. The Masked Man's true identity and motive is perhaps one of the most hotly debated topics in MH fan circles, and to unlock the mystery behind him will perhaps bring one that much closer to unraveling the series as a whole.

But what if the Masked Man were but the tip of a proverbial iceberg, or little more than another unwitting pawn against the Operator? While browsing the discussions on the UnFiction forums, I stopped for a moment to consider the possibility that our Mask may in fact be a sort of Van Helsing figure (albeit a very cryptic and ineffective one).

This got the ball rolling. If we have a role for the Operator and the Masked Man then what does that make J? I personally like to think of him as little more than the hapless character-development-in-progress Jonathan Harker of our tale. Amusingly this lead me to imagine Alex as either the Mina, Lucy or Renfield (cringe-inducing mental pictures a la Coppola and Brooks be damned).

I need more ~~coffee~~ soda.

Rethinking the vinyl bubble

2011-03-16T23:08:00.004+08:00

I have a confession to make: I'd been out of the designer toy loop for a while now.

I should have already suspected something was amiss when I stopped checking Vinyl Pulse as frequently as I used to, though I still make it a point to keep up with the excellent TOYSREVIL blog whenever possible.

There is a package in our study, a dust-covered plastic bag full of blind boxes that I have yet to fully unbox, limited-edition miniseries from a toy trade just a couple years(!) ago. Every time I see it I get bittersweet reminders of my heyday activity in that scene. Today I had more or less commenced my thorough de-cluttering of our study, and I still haven't unwrapped that package.

I get a similar sensation nowadays whenever I click on my Toys folder in my hard drive (yes, I have a Toys folder, shaddup), or when I see some lifestyle piece in the news about an artist in that scene like Ron English or Tara McPherson, or when I walk into one of my old alternative culture haunts and almost all the art toys are either shelf-warming or on clearance.

I do not know what to feel about the movement anymore. Naturally a part of me still regards it fondly, never mind what parts of it have irrevocably become. However the fact that I drifted from it like I did says that I've pretty much become part of the problem, a bandwagon-hopper just recovering from that one never-ending party year.

I do not mean however to liken my involvement in the art toy scene to little more than a bad hangover; I still earnestly believe in many of the aesthetics the movement tries to espouse albeit at a purely conceptual principle level.

I may not know how to customize a Munny or to design my own platform vinyl from scratch, but I still do believe that art and playfulness can intersect in some hypnotically quirky form. I still believe that a toy rabbit with a fake mustache or a cross-section of some naked lady can be artistic statements in their own right. I still revel in the twee recursive absurdity of a fat Ronald McDonald expy in toy form. And of course I still really enjoy tiny things.

I may not be an active part of the scene anymore, but I still believe that art toys can have a place in our common world.

Sheep Fodder

2011-03-15T18:59:00.004+08:00

I'd been vacillating over an appropriate ARG platform for my current setting for ages, but it looks like a possible answer had been staring me in the face all along.

BBC FLASHNEWS: japan govt cnfrms radiation leak at fukushima nuclear plants. Asian countries should take necessary precautions. Remain indoors first24hrs. Close doors n windows. Swab neck skin with betadine where thyroid area is, radiation hits thyroid first. Take extra precaution, radiationmay hit phil at starting 4pm 2day. Pls.send to those whom you care.

It was awfully thoughtful of them to clearly spell out "radiation" whilst grossly messing up everything el-- focus, girl, focus.

It should have occurred to me long ago that perhaps the art of the chain SMS message hoax deserved closer scrutiny of some sort. Both the evening news and the paper today confirmed that this was all a pile of fear-mongering bull plop, but I already had my suspicions the moment the message advocated applying antiseptic to protect your thyroid despite the fact that (to my knowledge) a topical application really can't do much for a gland that's inside your body, but I digress.

Not since Pablo Banila had I expressed such a surprising modicum of admiration for a juvenile electronic prank that proved virulent enough to put the Philippine public's collective panties in a bunch. Of course there's nothing funny about sowing such immature chaos in the wake of a genuinely awful natural catastrophe, but you still can't help but wonder what sort of person would watch the aftermath of an earthquake/tsunami on the news and think "Hey! I've got a great idea for a message we can forward to people!"

Add the fact that messages like these are typically nigh-on untraceable, and... let's just say the power perversion potential in a cellphone-crazy country like ours can be frighteningly great.

You don't pay your people enough.

2011-03-12T22:34:00.006+08:00

Dear Sony Entertainment Television Asia,

Screw you for ruining Tonight: Franz Ferdinand for me by overusing their songs in all your old promos.

Love,
axilog14

P.S. You want a non-pointless context for a Franz Ferdinand song in a scene? See Tricia Helfer's guest appearance on Chuck. (No, not the scene with the police uniform.)

First Warning

2011-03-12T17:58:00.007+08:00

Well, it was bound to happen eventually.

Writer's block again. The whole lead-up to this weekend especially feels like I had spectacularly lost my mind. I'm starting to wonder whether there's some trick to half-decent blogging I'm missing out on somewhere.

Rule of thumb: If I start listening to The Verve a lot, that's probably not a good sign.

It's about time I dipped back into my beloved music collection. A long time ago I owned an iPod, and thus slavishly tended to my rock education much the same way an overprotective mother tends to her three-year-old. Now it feels like it's been long months since one of my record-hunting sprees. It's time I re-oriented myself.

In other news, I'm still vacillating over how best to finish J's fingerless gloves.

Weird things can happen when I try and experiment with my knitting. My original concept idea was to make a half-fingered version of the Tridactyl mittens. After finishing one glove and discovering that they might be too a bothersome a configuration, I decided to apply the trigger-finger style to the glove for J's dominant hand. (She's right-handed.)

I seem oddly determined to ensure that J gets three-fingered gloves.

Yipes, that picture looked more ominous than I thought. It's like this blog is intently trying to turn itself into Just Another Fool.

How do I keep getting these emails again?

2011-03-11T11:37:00.006+08:00

Today I got another one.

Even more bogglingly, an exact facsimile of this supposedly urgent message (Literally. The subject line is labeled "Mike Mason Has Sent You An Urgent Message") is hosted off-site by some third-party carrier I have never heard of.

I have absolutely no idea how on earth I got this. This was probably the second time I've received an e-mail in this vein, the first email has similarly-themed content, and curiously enough was sent to me last March 1.

3/1? 3/11? Hmmm.

I'm starting to suspect either I'm being spammed, or I had somehow been dinged by some random ARG I'd completely forgotten I'd signed up for. The fact that the emails were sent by an entity called "Guardian Media Entertainment" sort of reassures me that this has to be just some sort of game or viral marketing campaign I have zero idea about. Not even Google helped, so far I just keeping getting the exact link to the hosted facsimile of Email 1.

Whatever this is, I'm getting the feeling that there's something I need to decode here. Either that or I should seriously report this to the proper authorities, assuming "they" haven't already bombed the National Mall.

________

Whoops, sorry. False alarm. I think I've figured it out.

Stan Lee's new tie-in project for the NHL. That's all you need to know.

That's what I get for clicking random stuff on Facebook.

Also: awww, how cute! They're attempting a viral marketing campaign!

PLEASE make that Inhumans movie happen, Marvel!

2011-03-10T12:32:00.006+08:00

For a time, one of the newest big things to hit Marvel Comics was the Illuminati. Created by comic writer Brian Bendis, this secret cadre of Earth 616 bigheads was intended to encompass most every major corner of their immediate shared universe. The Illuminati consisted of Iron Man, Professor X of the X-Men, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, Namor of the undersea kingdom of Atlantis, (then-)Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange, and Bla--

Wait a second, who the flying fig is Black Bolt?!

Thus went the fateful burning question, the one that kick-started my downward spiral into fervent obsession with a (reportedly) little-known team straight from the pages of classic Marvel better known as the Inhumans.

I love this team with the potent gene-altering passion of a million Terrigen mists (I know that's grammatically incorrect, shaddup). However like many other comic newcomers I knew fairly little of the team itself before I dug in deeper. I learned of how Medusa was a (brainwashed) founding member of iconic Fantastic Four foes the Frightful Four, and how Crystal became an Avenger (and mother) way back when. I learned that writers were often inconsistent in their treatment of Maximus the Mad, solely sticking their guns to his established characterization as a power-hungry usurping asshole with psychic abilities. Also, there was a giant teleporting dog.

But Blackagar Boltagon himself was the cornerstone of the group's lore, and to quote Bendis on the mute hero's niche in the Illuminati:

Black Bolt represents the Inhumans, who are an important part of Marvel history and play an important part in events that have not yet come to pass. He also represents a ruler/king archetype...

And what a king he was. As was the case with many newer pro-Attilan converts, it was the highly excellent Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee miniseries that first cemented this group's awe-inspiring potential in my precious little geek heart forever. Cinematic in scale yet elegantly emotional in scope and depth, this series proves just what an underrated property the Inhumans were in the Marvel universe.

After several hiccups and admittedly forgettable storylines, it took Warhammer 40,000 veteran Dan Abnett and his partner-in-crime Andy Lanning to bring the Inhumans back to the fore with the comic crossover event War of Kings. The epic space saga of two alien empires at opposing political odds, War of Kings was critically hailed as a huge step up from the other big Marvel event that directly preceded it, Secret Invasion. And as amusing as it was to speculate that our then-incumbent President was a Skrull agent in disguise, it was War of Kings that finally pulled me into the deep end of becoming a devoted comic book reader and an Inhumans fan for life.

Which brings us to the here and now, and this potentially heart-stopping announcement.

As far as comic-to-film adaptations are concerned, the Inhumans are as wacky and high-concept as you can get. I want to see how Thor and Captain America actually do in theaters first before I get my hopes up, as the very nature of the characters themselves could necessitate a lot of special effects heavy-lifting, and that's not even talking about whether they'll keep Attilan itself in the dark side of the moon or not.

If I had to hazard a guess at exactly what species of Inhumans story might be apt enough for the big screen, here are a few of my quick 'n' dirty thoughts:

The press release seems to place a lot of emphasis on the "sleeper cell" aspect of the Inhumans, which must mean they'll be reaching way back into their early history when they were still under the command of the Kree. This aspect of their lore doesn't get played up nearly as much as their great wide leap into extraterrestrial sovereignty these days, but in theory it might work depending on who's writing the script. Also, Ronan the Accuser has to make a mighty imposing appearance at some point.
As I mentioned earlier, the original Jenkins/Lee miniseries in itself would have made an excellent starting point for a straight Inhumans film adaptation. It helps that the miniseries, falling ostensibly under the Marvel Knights imprint, was intently designed to be self-contained and canonically ambiguous enough to mesh well with mainstream Marvel continuity without being slavishly bound to it. The subplot involving the younger Inhuman recruits might be ripe for some culling, though.
Back when there was still talk of Fox doing a third Fantastic Four movie, there was some fan speculation of the bigwigs bringing the aforementioned Namor the Submariner into that continuity at some point. Both the Jenkins/Lee miniseries and the Illuminati stories frequently bring up Namor himself being on good speaking terms with both Black Bolt and the Inhumans in general. At the time I had hoped that if the Fantastic Four movies were bringing in Namor then there was a good chance they could bring in the Inhumans as well. Ahhh, fanboys.
In the event that the hypothetical movie adaptation decides to lean more on the "space opera" side of the Inhumans, they might be able to manage with a loose adaptation of either the War of Kings story arc or the Realm of Kings aftermath. The only downside here is that both of these stories ended with Black Bolt "dead." However seeing as we've already seen a serviceable adaptation of the Dark Phoenix arc on the big screen and there looks to be plans of bringing Black Bolt back from the dead in a similarly messianic light in the comics anyway, this is probably going to be a foregone conclusion.
Son of M thereabouts can only work if we actually get House Of M represented onscreen in some form first. Silent War can stand alone only if there is an adequate story conflict to sub for Quicksilver's theft of the Terrigen crystals.
I really have no idea how well the Young Inhumans are going to work in a movie.

In the end, I should probably brace myself in case I get massively disappointed. At least I'll still have the comics.

Another way to introduce the Inhumans to new readers.

Settling the argument.

2011-03-10T11:59:00.003+08:00

(Posted by me after getting into a chat about ~~love~~ romance with A online. Taken from Ted Rall's Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.)

This Video is Dedicated to X

2011-03-09T13:09:00.002+08:00

Because even in a different life, we deserve the chance to be secret agents too.

The Fear*

2011-03-08T15:13:00.006+08:00

To conquer fear, you must become fear.
- Henri Ducard, Batman Begins

... I wear thick glasses. I have floofy bangs and have been known to wear vintage clothing. I think bicycles are one of the greatest inventions of mankind, second only perhaps to bicycles that have more than one gear. And while few of my more hipstery friends couldn't give a rat's ass about my geekier hobbies (let alone occupation), I continue to [be] amazed at how readily we've accepted the rise of a categorical brush-off that demeans and trivializes a person's choices.
- Joel Johnson, Geeks Versus Hipsters

I am the-- ooh, skinny jeans on sale!

__________
*No relation to the Lily Allen song. I think.

Inane mental associa-- I-I just don't know.

2011-03-08T12:21:00.008+08:00

Wow.

One Tuesday morning. Two Nicole Kidman movies.

I really do not understand our local cable provider sometimes. Reminds me of that other freaky morning when HBO was showing The Phantom and The Shadow back-to-back.

Though this particular case wasn't exactly unprecedented, as it was also around the time when Seth Rogen's Green Hornet was coming out in theaters.

Oh. Speaking of established pop cultural franchises warped into an unrecognizable big-screen mass by ostensibly Jewish man-child comedians...

These keep meshing together in my mind somehow, but I can't quite establish how or why.

By the way, did I ever mention how much I enjoy browsing the Imp Awards website?

A bigger box of string

2011-03-07T16:38:00.012+08:00

Saturday night. While I am sitting at the computer clacking away (same as every other day), Mom tells me that I can use the old giant cooler that had been sitting in our hallway for several weeks as a place to keep all my yarn.

Now I appreciated the storage relief, but at the same time I was apprehensive as it seemed like only a month or two before that the interior of the thing smelled strongly of dried fish. But Mom assures me that the thing had already been scrubbed and cleaned to within an inch of its life (several times, I hope), and thus suitable enough for my accumulated pile of acrylic and wool.

I could never resist a free plastic box. And as any SABLE-afflicted knitter/crocheter would surely tell you, you can never find enough boxes to hold your entire stash of string. Not unless it's a really small stash, in which case you clearly haven't been knitting/crocheting long enough.

So I got over my momentary Gift Horse Crisis, and gladly adopted my not-so-brand-new yarn storage cooler. (I could always buy moth balls for the stench, I guess.)

And surprise, surprise! The cooler wasn't big enough to hold all of my yarn and miscellaneous craft notions! Of course, it didn't help that I still insisted I stored some of my stuff in the original (and much smaller, and much newer) plastic box I had acquired specifically for said purpose. And not even the cooler could stand the full loony recursive madness of yarn in a box in a box.

And as big a fan I usually am of loony recursive madness, I couldn't risk my yarn storage attracting some sort of Bizarro world shenanigans. And I especially didn't have the luxury of making believe Mad-Eye Moody was somewhere beneath all my precious skeins of superwash merino while I was in the middle of knitting a thumb gusset.

In the end, I did manage to move my yarn into the cooler.
Most of it, anyway.

The cooler does me just fine, for now. The best advice for treating yarn storage (not to mention SABLE) problems, however, remains actually using up the yarn you already have before splurging on even more of it. After all, we don't want to end up drowning and suffocating in our own mounds of yarn.

Or becoming it.

E-Commerce: Why It's A Thankless Job

2011-03-06T16:03:00.006+08:00

(Alternative title for this post: "With Apologies to Everett Jensen")

I mean this in possibly the kindest, most earnest way possible... but write-ups like these are pretty much the reason why I have an "insane ad copy" category on this blog.

This wasn't my first encounter with Texture Clothing. An ecologically-minded online fashion boutique, Texture Clothing specializes in items that seem to aspire to a sort of hip yet rootsy aesthetic. And one of their best-selling products? Their patented Knit Mitts, which they also sell via the aptly-named Sock Dreams site, which is how they first came to my attention. (I won't go into extensive detail about how, let's just say TV Tropes was involved.)

Now I could go on about their unconventional hand silhouette or their pleasing selection of colors or why on Earth they cost 32 25 dollars a pop... but this isn't a knit mitts review, it's a post about insane ad copy. And when this not-so-anonymous copywriter says he loves his knit mitts, he loves his knit mitts.

I mean, holy cow! "Abscond from the palace of wisdom"? "Clutching your glass is an ecstatic experience"? "You reach for your guitar and launch into a fierce, political diatribe that you wrote to commemorate the death of some regime or other"?! What the what? You can't make this stuff up!

Purple prose aside, this essay can be summed up as thus: Poor Kid tries to write a School Paper, wears his Bleedin' Awesome Fingerless Gloves (which in fact were his roommate's) and decides to do some other Bleedin' Awesome Stuff instead. If this doesn't scream "unbelievably cool kid with a trust fund" then I don't know what does.

Don't get me wrong, I effin' love fingerless gloves something fierce. But you don't exactly see me spewing mellifluous accolades about them on the Internet for everyone to see.

*cough*

Today in Neatorama: Trinket boxes?

2011-03-05T17:10:00.005+08:00

Somehow it feels like I had stumbled into a whole new collectible niche I'd never even heard of until now.

I remembered feeling a similar thrill of discovery when I learned collecting rubber duckies or snow globes was a big thing in some places.

It really is a whole wide world of small objects out there.

Car... Eee... Van?

2011-03-05T12:08:00.012+08:00

The little button-eyed things may have taken me over for the moment, but I've not forgotten my other obsessions. I've been trying to work on this toy review for the longest time, and while it's not finished I figured I may amuse you all with one of the stranger tangents this post-in-the-making has taken me on.

Some call them trailers. (Not those trailers.) Others call them caravans.

Mostly when I hear "caravan" I think of the vaguely Arabian context, like as used in this old clip I remember from The Thief and the Cobbler (or one of its myriad workprint versions).

It's in here somewhere.

Top Gear, a.k.a. my sole point of orientation for anything car-related, had been very vocal on the subject of caravans.

And I mean very vocal.

Now as someone who has had zero personal experience with caravans--

Ahem. As I was saying...

As someone who has had zero personal experience with caravans, I of course had to wonder how accurate this viewpoint really was. Fortunately the boys of TG are nothing if not willing to put such views to the test.

Albeit cartoonishly extreme tests.

So... I guess this means the Brigands had the proper response to caravans all along:

CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGE!!!

Commercials That Rock: Crackers with SOUL!

2011-03-04T14:50:00.003+08:00

Once again, the Internet comes to the rescue!

I must have a really silly sense of humor, but this commercial used to crack me up the first couple of times I saw it. Granted, it didn't quite make me go out and buy a pack of Voice crackers, but it was pretty memorable.

As a quick bonus pick: This ad wasn't quite as memorable, but was still pretty darn silly.

Commercials That Rock: That Singing Caterpillar

2011-03-04T14:33:00.004+08:00

This was a very confused me last September 2009 on my Multiply site:

Why aren't more people buzzing about this?! MERALCO's new ad with the singing caterpillar :)

This was something I (finally!) found almost a year later on YouTube, convincing me that I did not in fact go nuts and imagine a singing caterpillar on TV:

Commercials That Rock: Umaaraw, Umuulan

2011-03-04T14:17:00.006+08:00

Now this is an awesome flashback from my childhood.

(Yes, I am that ~~old~~ young.)

This ad not only illustrates the sort of thrill you can only get when you buy something brand-new and shiny *cough* stupid commercialism, but it also harks back to the days when Rivermaya was still one of the most freakin' awesome bands ever in Pinoy Rock.

Sigh... memories.

Commercials That Rock: The Pianoman Cometh.

2011-03-04T14:12:00.004+08:00

Awww, isn't that cute? they're trying to be culturally relevant!

Wait a second, why does that guy look familiar?

I hope that's just me.

Critical Mass Hysteria

2011-03-04T13:36:00.003+08:00

Now I know survivalism is a big thing among certain types of geeks, but this might be getting a little out of hand.

Introducing the new LA Police Gear Zombie Hunter Tactical Bag.

This bag was designed to be a bail out or escape and evade style bag. It can carry all the basics if you have to make a run for it (ammo, nav, comms, food, water and more ammo). It differs from other bail out bags in that it has easier access to lots of ammo. Who wouldn't want more ammo carrying capacity and to be able to get at it faster?

To be fair, I do appreciate how they tried to sell a bag that could be genuinely useful in a dire situation, not to mention kept the write-up for it as dry, informative and non-sensationalist as possible.

Still, they actually marketed it as a zombie hunter bug-out bag. I don't know whether to laud their marketing team for expanding their customer range or shake my head in exasperation.

Falling in love with Astronomy again

2011-03-03T16:19:00.007+08:00

First things first.

Second, it has been over two decades and by now I have grown sick and tired of looking up at night and always seeing those three dots.

Fortunately, it turns out I could actually use this exhausting sight to better use!

GLOBE At Night is a nifty online initiative for measuring the I'm-guessing-very-appalling rate of light pollution worldwide, not to mention a fun way to re-orient yourself with some of your grade school astronomy.

All you need to do is go outside a little after sunset, look for the constellation Orion (or just those three iconic pinpricks if you're as pitiful a stargazer as I am) and report your findings.

Orion's location at a atitude of approximately 20 degrees North of the Equator, which Metro Manila (hopefully) falls in the vicinity of.

Specifically, you match up your local view of the night sky with one of the website's provided Magnitude Charts. These help measure the light pollution in your area by gauging just how big or deep a star field you can muster up with your naked eye.

If you can barely make out anything but the absolute brightest things in the sky (I'm looking at you, Sirius), then your neighborhood has way too many giant billboards, or anything else that produces excessive amounts of light.

Or tackiness.

You can learn more about this international campaign here. (Or here if you're a Facebook whore.)

I can probably already guess what the magnitude is in our area, but this still gives me an excuse to be all scientific about it!

Sigh... Is it sunset yet?

La La... Love You?

2011-03-03T14:01:00.004+08:00

This is the story of how I accidentally became a Mini Lalaloopsy first adopter.

I'll spare you the nitpicky rant on the woeful misapplication of a certain piece of music in this ad.

To quote a recent chat session:

1.) It's a whole race of dolls from a parallel universe where Coraline's Other Mother is not a soul-sucking b****! and
2.) I just HAD to give these people props for actually making an astronomer doll. (She has her own little moon globe! And a toy rocket! COME ON!)

I guess the moment I wouldn't stop doing double-takes the first time I saw them at a store, I should've known I was already doomed. And despite Neil Gaiman's very authoritative words on the subject, I still fell for these things hook, line and sinker.

Now, to clarify, I am chiefly a fan of the Minis and not the full-sized dolls themselves. Just so you know, the main Lalaloopsy brand is centered on these larger dolls with skinny legs and button-eyed bobble heads meant to emulate the floppiness of a traditional hand-sewn rag doll. And frankly if I wanted a doll that flopped around like a real rag doll, I could always make one myself.

Hopefully with less Humanoid Abomination characteristics.

Now, the Minis, on the other hand... I have to admit these teeny little things quite grew on me. And the Schmuck Bait backwards compatibility with doll houses and accessories intended for other girl-centered toy lines of similar scale like Polly Pocket, Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony doesn't hurt either.

I also can't help but appreciate the fact that the original boxes the Minis came in can also double as their houses, a nod to thoughtful product design at the very least. And it also lessens the sort of packaging grief I used to experience with, uh, other lines I collect.

The moral of the story? It pays to be a chick sometimes.

Bring me my tin foil parachute pants.

2011-03-03T09:03:00.006+08:00

For some demented reason, that sci-fi news website I frequent way too often took this opportunity to post about some epically ridiculous boy band music video that just happened to have some sci-fi in it.

It's cheesy as hell, as expected. Though it seems to be trying way too hard to be all serious and stuff. Or is that just the natural British stuffiness kicking in? And what musical troupe of ostensibly good-looking grown men would release a single titled "Kidz"? Who?!

Although I do quite like the style of that guy with the smoking jacket, Evil Goatee and gratuitous steampunk eyewear.

I must admit that Take That was never really my era, though I did love me some Robbie Williams. (Not that way.)

Definitely not that way.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Equally ludicrous sci-fi-inspired music video concepts by boy bands I actually remember.

Two words. Starts with "b". Rhymes with "Ackstreet Oys."

Somehow whenever I see that one scene I keep imagining Joey from Friends in the Lost In Space movie. If he had been assimilated by the Borg.

That hysterical moment two days ago when Mom and I were singing along to "Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely" in the car did not help matters.

Project Bughaw

2011-03-01T01:28:00.004+08:00

I'm having one of those moments again, where I am brimming with excitement, dizzy with awe over a thing I cannot even begin to explain.

Somehow a single page does not quite do it justice. A single name, maybe?

I am not a full proper part of the fold yet. I may drop a cryptic reference every now and then, but the fact is that it is a dangerously fast-paced, ephemeral, forever fleeting and maddeningly oblique culture as only the Electronic Universe can provide. But it is still not enough; somehow I feel this is yet one more frontier we may dare step out into, make our own.

Somehow I keep drifting back to this page. I keep drifting back to something that hints at the genesis of a new idea, a greater idea, a contagion of the mind that shall tap into some deeper, more dynamic collective impulse than race or creed. We can become our own cadre, a new esoteric circle of mysteries and abstract ideas and otherwise really weird stories. A frontier beyond that of mere Hollywood or television, a living breathing idea that shall inspire wonder as much as it does terror. (Oh, god I sound like a recruiter for a terrorist organization. Totally innocent post here, folks.)

All I can say is that this could be a clue to the future. The means to a completely different sort of end, a revolution of completely off-kilter ideas, a new outlet for the sorts of dreams and visions we let loose on our sleep only to lose hold of the moment we snap back to the waking state.

And I keep thinking that somehow, someday, we can make this ours as well.

Speaking of the Rumba...

2011-02-27T22:15:00.004+08:00

And now for something completely different!

Every now and then I'll post something from YouTube I *gasp!* actually found funny. Anybody can toss out a LOL or an ROFLMAO or even a PMSL on the Internet these days. But I'm doing this not to make other people laugh (you've probably seen a bunch of these before anyway), but to save myself from my own dismal short-term memory.

Today we have something that evokes its own memetic mutation in addition to being an embarrassingly huge part of my childhood. I also never knew the song used in this number actually had a name until recently.

More thoughts on Circus

2011-02-27T21:30:00.003+08:00

(More stream-of-consciousness amateur music criticism. This is more of an addendum to my earlier post than anything else.)

One of life's best surprises is when something turns out to become even better or at least cooler on the second go-round. More than applying to mind-bender cinema classics like The Matrix or anything by Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky ever, it seems this can also apply to certain rock albums.

I was genuinely surprised that on my second playthrough of Circus in a while, "Minsan" actually brought me close to tears. Which is really saying something, because it's a more upbeat ditty than my usual sad bastard fare. I'd even dare say that "Minsan" has brought me closer to tears than any Christina Aguilera ballad ever. (I admit it: I think "Beautiful" is nice on paper but sucks donkey balls stylistically. "The Voice Within" did come a smidge close though. Why am I talking about Christina Aguilera again?)

Perhaps what really struck me the most about "Minsan" was the refreshing fact that it's not a song about romantic love, which I know dang near nil about. Instead it's a song about friendship, which I do happen to relate to more on a personal, intimate level. If you're a Pinoy and you didn't shed even the smallest tear at the line "dahil minsan tayo ay naging tunay na magkaibigan...", then you have no heart. Well, that or you're rocking something fiercely weird in your brain chemistry right now. That's fine. I've been there.

What else?

I noted that "Sembreak" and "Wishing Wells" fall on divergent ends of the Cute Songs Spectrum, meaning these songs are both precious (in the "aww, how adorable" sense) but in their own completely different ways. Also, "Wishing Wells" made me flash back to Tangled just now. I wonder why.

"With A Smile" is still resplendent. "Alkohol" is still funny, and oddly apropos given my friend's recent dabbling in commode-centric poetry. ("Doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo DOO!" Oh crap, getting flashbacks to last week's Glee episode again.)

I'm also noting how both "Sembreak" and "Kailan" utilized the twist ending. The difference is that in "Kailan" the ending was a genuine surprise, while the "Sembreak" ending was more subtly foreshadowed. I already figured the persona was addressing some very dear friend (lover?) who was far away at the moment, I just didn't guess that by "far away" the song specifically meant "migrated to Canada."

It must be massively unfun being the subject of "Magasin."

Odd that "Butterscotch" reminds me melodically of "Wishing Wells" in a vague way. Except at the halfway point, where it sounds like something else which is at the top of my head but am having trouble recalling right now. (Not rap. Spoken word? The only spoken word anything I know of is Peter And The Wolf and Serj Tankian's "Jeffrey, Are You Listening?") And the arbitrary number of Our Fathers prescribed in the hypothetical confessional was a hoot.

"Sa Wakas" in theory should be pure filler throwaway material, the sort of thing you imagine the guys just slapped together for the sake of adding more wacky bonus stuff to the album. I find "Sa Wakas" a serviceable standalone song: catchy, fun, even a bit danceable. (Rumba danceable, not "Like A G6" danceable.)

Let's finish this. I love the hard rock intro of "Wating." This pretty much proves what I had always suspected, that I'm a sucker for grungy guitar riffs and s***. Oh, hey, is that slap bass I hear or just regular vanilla bass? (The sum total of my knowledge of applied bass guitar in rock music comes from endless hours of Flea and Brian Yale. And that one episode of The Simpsons that had Mick Jagger and Elvis Costello in it.)

How To Write An Eye-Catching Title

2011-02-27T11:42:00.003+08:00

Certainly worked on me!

Down and Out in the Plastic Kingdom

2011-02-27T09:39:00.008+08:00

At the height of my Minimate-collecting hysteria just a little while back, I first read this lengthy but informative article about how the toy industry worked in the Philippines.

Written by Transformers fan ThunderBreak in the days when Multiply was still the Pinoy's social networking platform of choice, "What You Need To Know About The Phil Toy Industry" (Parts One and Two) was an eye-opening piece that sought to reconcile our typical toy-geek myopia with cold hard economics. It was written specifically to address distribution issues surrounding iconic toy brands like Marvel and G.I. Joe, but the substance of the article itself resonates well with most anyone (most anyone who likes toys, anyhow) regardless of what they collected.

The discussion also continued on Cybertron Philippines, internet home of our local Transformers community. And as their wide-reaching global fanbase (not to mention their nigh-comprehensive wiki site) would surely remind you, Transformers fans are a highly outspoken bunch among toy collectors in general.

Anyway, I'm writing this entry today in the wake of what has to be a very peculiar soul-searching moment for me; a toy collector's crisis of faith, if you will.

You see, March is fast approaching and it will have been exactly one year since I graduated from college and made my official entry into the Real World. Except I haven't actually entered the Real World yet, so instead I sit here at home -- mostly in front of this very laptop screen -- stalling for as long as I can and positively dreading, nay, evading the cruel reality that is our current unemployment crisis. The fact remains, however, that I need to start working eventually if I wish to maintain upkeep of my miscellaneous obsessions, not to mention my lifestyle in general.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Money doesn't make the world go 'round. But as Bono once said (no, really!), it was never really about the money.

Fast forward to 0:13.
In any case, here I am. Baring my soul. About toys, of all things.

I had been fairly vocal about this before on my old blog, but I had always loved my toys growing up, and not just in the syrupy, feel-good Pixar-induced way either. Toys had always been something of my back-up creative outlet, and that one especially bad year it felt like toys were all I had left to make me feel better.

That day might come when I would eventually outgrow them for good, learn to find my bliss elsewhere, preferably via a more "grown-up" outlet like travel or a romantic relationship or whatnot. But honestly? I don't want that day to ever come. I don't want to turn into that humorless sourpuss who can't take a walk on the ~~Barbie aisle~~ bright side every now and then, that sterile adult who can't think and on occasion love like a child anymore, that miserable human being who had completely lost touch with their playful side and can't do so without needing the aid of a happy pill...

I miss being that crazy kid who used to pretend that my bunk bed was a house, that the Sailor Scouts eked out a nomadic existence in a bizarre pirate ship/tank hybrid, that a Hawaiian princess named Tropica lived in an anachronistic European castle on the Maui coast with a parrot and a monkey, that Hellboy moonlighted as a shoulder angel when he wasn't working for the BPRD, that dragons could be swayed with non-violent action, that Renee Montoya often fell into sordid lesbian love triangles with Kate Kane and Morrigan Aensland while Pete and Harry weren't looking, that Vulpix was my totem animal or whatever kind of nonsense I used to act out with my toys back then.

Also, that The Spirit was actually a good movie.

Maybe one of these days I would be able to express all of these things much more eloquently, maybe eloquently enough to be able to make a concrete statement on what really makes people like us tick. And just maybe in doing so, people would stop thinking we're all a gaggle of sociopaths.

Really, really, really, really BIG things.

2011-02-26T01:25:00.007+08:00

Here's another weird item on my bucket list: a Claes Oldenburg art tour.

Because if there's one thing that tickles my sense of the absurd just as much as really, really small things, it's really, really big things.

For instance, I really want to go visit Venice, California if only to see this crazy (and very real) building. Why am I not surprised Frank Gehry also had a hand in this somehow?

That must be a crazy legacy to live up to, huh? That guy who makes really, really big things. Then again I guess it can't be as weird as being immortalized as that guy who bends spoons or smashes watermelons for a living.

Desktops

2011-02-24T00:58:00.006+08:00

(Originally published in my Multiply blog last February 5, 2008, 10:16 AM Philippine time.

My original desk had been unusable since 2007. I keep meaning to de-clutter, last time I vowed to was sometime right after graduation. Ha. The piles and piles of postcards and Minimate boxes don't help.

Alternate post title: Annals in Pseudo-Intellectualism.)

Study tables pretty much went the way of Discmans and manual cameras, what with the advent of desktop/notebook computers and all. It seems these days only the dinosaur-at-heart or the hopelessly nerdy (or both) still have an actual tabletop where they store their stuff/books, harbor their mundane little obsessions, and only occasionally actually get any work done.

Here is "A Study Table", a trompe l'oeil painting by William Harnett (not to be confused with the First Doctor):

And here are shots of MY study table (the second photo being of my desk in a state of mid-spring cleaning), the second unholy chowder to befall this blog, this time one of newspaper, lost books, meticulously-accumulated CD receipts and the odd Russian nesting doll:

Other miscellaneous sights in these shots include my CD collection, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a Joseph Cornell biography and (in the red plastic bag) an actual 18-foot gum wrapper chain.

Inane Mental Association of the Day: La

2011-02-24T00:06:00.007+08:00

(Not to be confused with Na)

Weird things happen when you're into a wide variety of interests. God bless the multi-faceted human being.

The Ultimate in Dressing for Function

2011-02-23T17:09:00.010+08:00

I don't want to go into too much detail, but I am currently in the process of (re)organizing my hard drive. That's 21.5 gigabytes of accumulated documents, digital photos, music, downloaded files, ebooks and whatnot. Oy.

While clicking through my folders and folders of accumulated electronic detritus, I found some possibly mind-boggling JPEGs from way back in June of 2010.

This was from when I was addicted to HeroMachine 2.5, an unusually fun way to kill time and vicariously live out your inane superhero fantasies via drag-and-drop. I have much more faux-superpowered chopsuey get-ups saved on my hard drive, but these four in particular were made in the wake of a recurring pop-cultural dilemma I have noted for some time:

Superheroine costumes.

The main thing wrong with superheroine costumes seems to involve an overemphasis on, to quote A Chorus Line, "tits and ass" among other things. Much geek discourse had already been devoted to this topic everywhere from Cracked to TV Tropes. Hell, even Shortpacked! took a stab at addressing this embarrassing artifact of the formerly male-dominated world of comics. (Though video games aren't exactly blameless in this regard either. Consider Lara Croft or Bayonetta or the entire female lineup of Darkstalkers.)

But it's one thing to decry a phenomenon, and another thing to actually do something about it. So with the (probably ill-recommended) help of HeroMachine 2.5, I set out to see if I could do a better job of designing a practical, non-exploitative superheroine outfit myself.

I bet you can see where this is going.

Guillermo del Toro once said that if you're the type who gets bored easily, then you are not a writer. I ended up creating not so much a superheroine but a whole cheesy paramilitary squadron, much like an all-girl A-Team if they consisted of Rambo, Jet Li and Samuel L. mother-effin' Jackson.

Look, they even have their own psychotic arch-nemesis/reluctant quasi-vigilante antihero ally!

Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to perpetuate the whole "improbably fancy outfit" thing, but this character's wearing roller skates because for a time I was obsessed with Miho from Sin City. At least she's wearing knee pads!

I wield pointy sticks now.

2011-02-23T16:12:00.003+08:00

Some people have their own pet bibliophile hang-up. For a friend of a friend it was architecture-related coffee table books. For me... let me just say Thank God For Book Sale.

A word of advice: do not convert the price on that sticker to American dollars if you know what's for you.

Erm... it appears knitting had become a thing without me even knowing it. That's my big off-blog secret these days: I'm a knitter now. Knitters are cool.

I had been knitting since just last October, and it appears I excel at knitting exactly one thing. And I have this entry to ~~blame~~ thank. Specifically, this bit:

Yes, it appears I may have inadvertently foreshadowed my obscene fingerless glove obsession almost a year early. You know what they say about hindsight being 20/20? Well, there it is. (To be fair my eyesight hadn't been 20/20 since I was nine, maybe the rest of me just followed after that.)

Oh, right. I'm supposed to be talking about books.

A helpful hint: The Philippines is, quite literally, crochet country. Admittedly my crochet skills are a bit rusty, but I digress. My point is that if you're a Filipino who just happens to be an avid knitter (or a knitter who just happens to be based in Manila right now), your best bet for discounted print resources is Book Sale. (Granted, you can also find discounted print resources for most everything else there: crochet, scrapbooking, quilting, gardening, cooking, polymer clay crafting, woodworking, metalworking, stamping, doll-making, cross-stitching...)

To wit, the following stack of knitting books had mostly been found at Book Sale (though not all by me. That's what happens when you let *other* people know about your wacko hobbies).

On a related note, any other Manila-based yarnies (knitter, crocheter, cross-stitcher or otherwise) should also pay Dreams Yarnshoppe a visit. At this point touting them as the premier refuge/destination for our ilk would be flogging a deceased equine, though it does vaguely kill me that they're the only place in this city where I can buy those precious double-pointed needles I need for my glove obsession. But that's a story for another day.

This is another.

Small parts and meta-toys: the Basic Fun legacy

2011-02-22T13:10:00.001+08:00

Oh hey. Basic Fun is still around.

I used to fawn over this company's toys as a kid, I would probably even go as far as saying this company fueled my longtime fascination with miniature versions of things. I forget the exact year of the first time I had seen a peg of these things at our local ToyTown, but I would definitely date it before 2007.

I used to dream of owning my own Etch-A-Sketch keychain (Now comes in four new collectible colors!) and strain my poor little nine-year-old head over how the heck Pocket Foosball was supposed to work.

Between my sister and I, we had managed to own miniaturized versions of:

Perfection
Twister
Hungry Hungry Hippos
Magnetic Poetry
a Dymo labelling gun
Bulbasaur, with his very own Poké Ball

Okay, that list was actually much shorter than I thought.

One unintentionally amusing thing about Basic Fun is how it made no secret of their being very much a "zeitgeist"-minded company. I like to think it was the enduring appeal of their Classic Games keychains and other signature products that saved their asses many a time whenever the eventual datedness of the latest hot-ticket pop culture property backfired on them. Back then they used to release a lot of Simpsons or Nickelodeon product, then a lot of Pokémon product. These days it's Bakugan this and Family Guy that and...

The last time I clicked on their site it was sparsely updated and riddled with malware. I thought that this signaled the inevitable end of the company much like it did with Kenner or Bluebird or *sob* Stikfas.

But lo and behold, I walked into an SM toy department one Wednesday and found a whole peg of them. I eventually got this:

My trusty Nokia in pic for scale.

What this tells me is that novelty keychains are still a hot commodity these days, occasionally to the point of parody.

Fun fact: I have seen an actual Ouija board game for sale here a grand total of once. Oh, that ghost hunter stigma!

One last note: People, never use your flash drives as keychains. It always ends in tragedy.

Though the jury's still out on whether putting a keychain on a flash drive will mitigate this.

Anybody got 3.5 million dollars in loose change?

2011-02-22T10:50:00.004+08:00

io9.com has featured yet another smorgasbord of drool-worthy TV/movie props up for auction, offering even more proof that I need to get a job.

Most of the props seem to come from the recently concluded Battlestar Galactica series and a slew of Marvel films, plus the odd space suit, plasma rifle or alien leg here and there.

I found the actual "content" of the note cards from the ending of Iron Man particularly entertaining. I wonder if Robert Downey Jr. insisted on writing Tony's speech himself (because we all know how gung-ho he can get about staying in character) or if the prop people really were just that exhausted.

Also, who knew Tony's Dad was so important a parkway was named after him?
Wait a second. Art Asylum did.

Too many of the BSG props stand out for me, though I do find myself oddly drawn to the Book of Pythia (poor, poor Elosha), the coin of the realm (er, Twelve Colonies) and Boomer and the Chief's photos for a wedding I guess that never was. (Hope I didn't spoil too much. I still have to watch all the episodes that came after "Maelstrom.")

I know geek consensus by now goes that the Fantastic Four movies were a big heaping pile of head-scratching nonsense, but is it incredibly weird of me that I always found ~~Mr. Fantastic~~ Ioan Gruffudd... dreamy?

Today in ThinkGeek: Don't diss the sonic!

2011-02-20T12:10:00.004+08:00

What could be better than an official replica of the Eleventh Doctor's sonic screwdriver?

How about a functional (not-)sonic screwdriver?

I had seriously been considering investing in a good screwdriver set for my own personal use. (What, you've never had that impulse to fix or take something apart before?) This is probably not the most practical route to take, but I want to have fun during my utilitarian moments, gosh darn it!

For those of you who spend more time with you purse or car than cooped up in your room tinkering with stuff (*cough*), you can also get your sonic screwdriver fix in flashlight form. They also made a Tenth Doctor version, for those of you Whovians still hung up on Mister Shakespeare ~~getting replaced by~~ regenerating into the King of Hipsters.

Today in ThinkGeek: the Zombie Attack Hoodie

2011-02-20T11:48:00.004+08:00

Here's something I'd been craving lately, from the website I know I'll never, ever be able to order anything from.

This hoodie features the battle scars you earned in your fight with the zombie hordes. Clearly, you've had better days. There are bloody handprints near the pockets and slashes across the chest. There's a deep slash across the back that reveals your exposed spine. There's a bandage on your left wrist revealing bite marks. There's a chunk of missing skull on the back of the hood, which is lined in brains. We'd say you ought to get that looked at, except there's a pretty massive blood spatter on the front of the hood around the area where your mouth would be. Which implies that you ain't one of us any more. But you put up a valiant fight, and for that we salute you. But we're not taking the helmet off, no how, no way.

I may not be much of a hoodie person, but this might become my closet exception. Well, this and Marble Hornets. (Uh, look that up on YouTube. Or, if you value your sleep hours, don't.)

When luggage evokes a time and a place

2011-02-20T09:10:00.011+08:00

Before my wild adventure in zombie-themed thesis writing, there was my wild adventure in luggage-themed research paper writing.

Specifically, after a failed attempt in working as a team player in Filipino class in high school. As a result I wound up doing a (mildly half-assed) school survey on what kind of bag everybody used. Which means that, yes, once upon a time I was knee-deep in my Overthinking Backpacks Phase. (Not quite as consuming as my Professional Wrestling Phase or my Rock Journalism Phase, but there you go.)

From time to time you can still catch me with a more-eloquent-than-healthy learned opinion on what makes The Perfect Bag. Whether it be the perfect backpack, the perfect messenger bag, the perfect satchel... (What the heck is the difference between a messenger bag and a satchel anywa-- Never mind.)

Today I want to explore the... luxurious side of this mundane dilemma.

This was a page I saved from an old magazine many years ago, an Etienne Aigner print ad for their oh-so-fancy Travel Handbag! Call this perhaps the foreshadowing to a future career in Advertising I never followed up on except in some alternate universe timeline, but somehow something about the absurd specialty of this product appealed to my stupid eleven-year-old bourgeois mind then.

But in this case the Etienne Aigner monstrosity shall stand in as a shorthand for the aesthetic this specific breed of Luxury Bag harkens to. Think Louis Vuitton meets Indiana Jones. Think African safaris and long voyages at sea care of our favorite dinosaurs of Western literature like Rudyard Kipling or Joseph Conrad. Think those giant nigh-on indestructible trunks that I have only ever seen in Harry Potter movies.

On the one hand, bags like these aspire to a sort of rugged romanticism you don't seem to see in this day and age anymore, except maybe in stories like Into The Wild and 127 Hours barring the fact that neither of those stories ended particularly well.

~~Dying cold, hungry and alone in the wilderness!~~ Adventure!

On the other hand, the catch to actually finding an authentic one-in-a-million ~~experience~~ bag like this is that it's either over forty years old or over 300 dollars.

Case in point.

Much touted about in castles of snark like Seinfeld and Jezebel, J. Peterman has to take the cake in quasi-rugged romanticism that revels in no irony whatsoever and costs more than any actual self-respecting adventurer would spend on. (Though I probably wouldn't know, my idea of adventure is ~~LARPing~~ cosplaying and toy conventions.) J. Peterman is one of those real catalogs that sells an attitude just as much as it does $700 flapper dresses.

Oh, but to prove they're not irrational brand-obsessed behemoths of style, the house of good Mr. Peterman does pose other options!

You see? You can just raid some old farmhouse in the country (praying you don't become the punchline of a Harper Lee novel) and find your own antique leather suitcase that's survived three wars and been trod on by seven generations of livestock!

Or you can just check your grandparents' baul.

A Retrospective

2011-02-19T02:17:00.002+08:00

And yes, I know it looks like Spider-Man is checking out Ultimate Storm.

I now find it incredible to believe that once upon a time these were the only Minimates I had in my whole toy collection. Like most any other people who fall into our circles, I did not expect this whole thing to eat up my life so quickly.

Currently I have lost track of exactly how many of the things I own right now. If I had to hazard a guess, I wouldn't be surprised if they now numbered at-- You know what? I don't want to answer that question just yet. I think I might die from shock if I did.

That Dead Island trailer: some quick thoughts

2011-02-18T21:08:00.006+08:00

(via Tor.com, which you should really start reading on the count of how informative it can be for aspiring speculative fiction writers)

Blame it on some weird quirk that has taken a hold (or, rather, a bite) of popular culture these days, but video games about zombies are a dime a dozen. And Dead Island is no exception. But DAMN, that trailer. ~~Bathos~~Pathos-laden stuff like this is the reason why I became a Literature major.

Surely you can see the original trailer on YouTube (or on that Tor.com page I just linked to), but I already know what you're thinking, and fortunately so have the good people at IGN. (and it just goes on and on...)

A Fairly Dangerous Book.

2011-02-15T19:43:00.005+08:00

(Originally published at Bookhawk Pilipinas last Jun 3, 2008, 7:35 PM Philippine time. Also blogged about on my Multiply site.

Looking back now... yes, my taste in books had been insanely cynical.)

I can't remember exactly what year she bought it, but just a few years ago my mom plucked this book out of the bargain bins of Page One/Fully Booked (P100 from P580, Power Plant Mall) with hopes that it would give her sound advice on how to deal with single-parenthood and precocious children with increasingly disturbing behavior, a.k.a. me and my two siblings.

Not that it was much help: for one thing Ted Rall is more popularly known as a political cartoonist a.k.a. the bane of Republicans/conservatives the world over, and not quite as an authority on rearing teenagers. Heck, despite its title it wasn't even entirely about troubled families at all (although it DID pose the fascinating proposition of abolishing Father's Day due to the proliferation of all those absentee male parents today's emo songs keep bitching about). To top it all off, the book was published WAAAY back in 1998, and therefore contained quite a few now-outdated references on how slow and unreliable the Internet was. I'm guessing that at some point Mom just plain gave up on reading the thing... which is how this extremely revelatory tome has now come into my possession.

An anthology of some of Rall's most incisive early non-political essays (with more than a few of his horrifyingly apt cartoons thrown in), Revenge of the Latchkey Kids can probably be best described as the Generation-X equivalent of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book. It has been by far one of the most important books in my as-of-yet young life, and it pretty much wipes the floor with the whole of that Emo musical genre I was talking about.

A lot of the topics here fall under the subheading of "Things We Never Talk About, But Are Secretly Pondering", albeit from Rall's glum, angry & irreverent point-of-view. Barring the fact that some of the socio-political stuff still keeps an American audience in mind (and that some of the content, especially the technological sort, has since fallen out-of-touch), the more universally pertinent subject matter is dark and disturbing all the same. Such must-reads include Rall's pieces on broken families, the end of the world, religious dissatisfaction, fickleness in friendship, personal identity, futile employment and the egocentric, apathetic youth.

Just as dark and disturbing as the essays themselves of course are Rall's accompanying cartoons, which also shows how much his drawing style has evolved when compared to his current cartoons.

Looking back at this last image now, I can't help but notice something... prophetic about it (note that this came out way back in the nineties)...

Did I die and go to whatever-it-is-we-call-the-Afterlife-now?

2011-02-13T03:47:00.006+08:00

This just in from the Art Asylum blog!

AND we have a potential line-up!

Where was this toyetic resolve back when the first two Marvel vs. Capcoms came out?! Don't get me wrong, I am excited as heck for this new line, but-- wait a second, Minimates weren't even around back when the second game was released. Never mind.

Fingers crossed that we'll get more. Somehow.

(To clarify I never actually played the video game myself, but my brother did! I tend to be of the mind that video games are just as good a spectator sport as, well, actual sports.)

"Coat Fudge" needs to be a movie NOW.

2011-02-09T19:02:00.004+08:00

My new favorite webcomic at the moment is Slow Wave. As usual, it took me TV Tropes to discover it, and it took me this webcomic to actually sit and think about some of my actual dreams a bit more.

I haven't finished reading through the archives yet, but so far two of my personal favorite strips are "The Refresher" and "I Hated High School", the former sounding like something that could actually happen in one of my dreams (no, I haven't run over any governors with big rigs in mine) and the latter making me crack up the moment blueberry pancakes were mentioned.

Looking back at some of the few dreams I've managed to recall snatches of the past few months, I have come to the conclusion that I am an insufferable nerd. (I can't go into too many details, but I have officially watched too much Doctor Who.)

Also, I wish I remembered more of my dreams so I'd have more story ideas.

In the meantime, here's an actual coherent dream journal entry... thing I wrote last August 21, 2009:

My more interesting dreams are always the zombie-themed ones.

The other night I was dreaming of this bizarre alternate reality where Simon Pegg's movies "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" were all part of the same cohesive trilogy... the "prequel" of the former being my dream. The movie is called "Coat Fudge."

In it, Doctor Doom is planning to take over the world with zombies, and only Simon Pegg (who, oddly, is wearing Spock's uniform from Star Trek) and Crystal (from the Inhumans) can stop him. At one point Doom actually pulls his top-secret "how to conjure zombies" book from a nearby bookshelf; turns out it's Max Brooks' World War Z. (I really need to start reading other stuff.) In the end, Crystal gets mauled by zombies and Pegg is passed out cold on a door floating down a river in the middle of a burning, zombie-infested wasteland, at which point "Coat Fudge" ends and the plot of "Shaun of the Dead" starts kicking in.

... I also had this older dream where Torrie, Kari and Grant from Mythbusters are all huddled up in an abandoned cathedral with other survivors while this giant horde of zombies surrounds them. Kari becomes the object of affection of this one creepy sentient zombie that used to be her boyfriend when he was alive, Torrie (in a blatant rip-off of the X-Men "Messiah Complex" story arc) is tasked with protecting this one infant who is apparently the key to staving off the impending zombie apocalypse, and Grant becomes a total bad-ass when he fends off the undead with this fantastic medieval-style cannon he built out of scrap parts lying around. (When Kari asks why he did it, he casually answers, "Couldn't sleep.")

EDIT: Weird, why do all my zombie dreams sound like Marvel Zombies crossovers?! I don't even read comics!

P.S. It is probably also a bad idea to browse Cake Wrecks right after reading about weird dreams.

Preview: Acrylic Dreams

2011-02-08T22:14:00.003+08:00

Google (finally) wears its heart on its sleeve.

2011-02-08T18:56:00.005+08:00

This is the story of how I first came to love and discover (and re-love) Google Doodles.

Flash back to July of last year. The American summer and, by extension, convention season were in full swing.

Mainstream media proceeds to deify the grand-daddy of them all, the San Diego Comic-Con, to ludicrous geek-Mecca levels. Old-timers proceed to lament the fading appeal of the once-cult gathering in true curmudgeonly fashion. Twilight bashers proceed to, um, assert that Twilight ruined Comic-Con (among other things). And the hardcore convention-frequenting meta-geeks are already contemplating which major con to attend next.

Comic-Con: It's the new Disneyland.
(Except only once a year. With more grown men. And scalpers.)

And in the din of the usual overexcited-block-figure-collector message board chaos, a neat little sighting crops up. Turns out that Google had taken the opportunity to help commemorate Comic-Con '09 by getting famed comic book talent Jim Lee to "alter" their classic logo design accordingly.

For the succeeding months the sheer awesomeness of this little digital nugget had never left my thoughts (cheesy as it sounds). Now I had seen clever Google logo mods before, but few of them had captured my rapt attention quite the same way this one did. (Must be that inborn geek instinct working at full blast.)

... which is how this blog entry would have went if I had published it last May 8, 2010 like I was supposed to. Writer's block really can be a bitch sometimes.

Which brings us to today, when a Facebook chat session with one of my best friends makes a couple of sudden segues to

Jules Verne, and
steampunk.

Which of course causes me to remember that Google Doodles are animated now.

Go on. Look. I can wait.

... Missed the fireworks, have you? Sorry to hear that.

A vague idea of what you missed. "I'm on a submarine!"

I can see New Zealand from here!

2011-02-04T13:53:00.008+08:00

Thanks once again to both Mom and AXN Asia's peculiar choice of syndicated programming, I have developed a newfound respect for the classic series Hawaii Five-O. Mostly during really late nights, after convincing myself to go to bed like a normal person after another one of my broadband free-for-alls.

A couple of months ago I remembered Mom's taste in compilation albums of oldies standards, which now means I can experience this bizarre seventies LSS whenever I'm on one of my weirder iTunes binges.

The best part? Yakety Sax on demand!

Tangentially related: Having to explain Boomer to my Mom while she's geeking out over Scott Caan.

Brutally Boring Bookworm Blues

2011-02-02T13:49:00.000+08:00

(Originally published in my very first blog last March 22, 2007, 4:11 Philippine time)

It's easy to mistake me for a bookworm. Indeed, a lot of people already automatically associate said nickname with my name, along with "weirdo", "rocker", "nerd" and "psycho".

Honestly though, I don't really consider myself a bookworm. An immature, eternally curious nerd, maybe, but not a real bookworm. And I feel this way for three reasons:

I suck at patience, and am notoriously short-tempered. This doesn't mean I literally mash books into a pulp when they get on my nerves, though. My mind simply have a tendency to wander off into Erewhon a lot while I'm reading, particularly when a book is REALLY interesting. I used to compensate for this with my childhood ability of speed-reading. Unfortunately it seems this "talent" of mine has now gone into decline since I became a music geek.
My knowledge of books (I hate to admit it) is not as pure and esoteric as that of bonafide bookworms. While I only APPEAR eclectic, a lot of what I know is actually meager trivia, second-hand stuff delivered by the same channels of information that pretty much service every other fat, ignorant couch potato on the face of the planet. I've never appreciated or even HEARD of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" until I saw and loved its movie version, which I'm pretty sure a lot of diehard fans must've hated.
I'm a practicing pseudo-intellectual. Nah, just kidding. Partly.

True, these things aren't supposed to define what makes one a bookworm. For the sake of argument, if you really love reading for what it makes you learn and discover, and other people have actually seen you carrying absurd quantities of books to corrobate this, then by all means you are one.

I only regret not already being an avid bibliophile earlier in life: These days a lot of the books I learned to love, I learned from either second-hand knowledge or sub-par movie novelizations (which in a way screws with how you remember & appreciate a particular work from the very beginning).

Now, I'm embarking on a quest (eww... cheesiness alert) to discover REALLY awesome books, and read and remember and cherish them just as vividly and faithfully as any other ten-year-old nerd would. I want to discover Literature anew, and appreciate its power, how it changes the world.

I want to actually KNOW firsthand how Nabokov writes, how Dostoevsky thinks, how Orwell became a hero of the counterculture, how REAL music journalism works, how Civilization itself first grew and came to be thanks to a few tablets of chiselled text.

But first, I gotta read REAL science fiction. I gotta figure out what a REAL Douglas Adams book reads like, and one day (hopefully) spare myself the humiliation of ever first hearing about a possibly great book from its possibly awful movie.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING: Everclear's "Science Fiction"

Starbucks Is For Beautiful People

2011-01-31T15:11:00.004+08:00

(Originally published in my Multiply blog last November 10, 2009, 8:36 pm Philippine time)

Even in the heart of Malate, one is not spared from the tyranny of the Law of Starbucks Hyperproximity. (Of course, the recession may have diminished this somewhat.)

Today Nads, Xiom and I were at it yet again. After the indispensable bite to eat at Nads' favoritest place (Migui's), we decided to take to a Starbucks since Xiom was craving a peppermint mocha... coffee... beverage... thing. (I'm not a coffee person.)

Sometime during the longish walk from the eatery across from school to the Starbucks across from that other school (you know, that major university with the huge white buildings along Taft Avenue?), I noticed that we could have just spared ourselves a whole load of trouble if instead of rounding an entire block, we could've just crossed the street to an even closer Starbucks branch.

Eh, exercise is exercise.

The people who came before us left behind these discarded table napkins (and mind you, those Starbucks tissues could outdo even the Yellow Pages in overall classiness) plastered with oodles of doodles. These were either Fine Arts people or failed Fine Arts people now working in the Advertising field. (Low blow? Sorry.)

Funny coincidence: This was not the first time I've seen doodles on a Starbucks tissue. (Not-so-funny not-quite-a-coincidence: My sister and/or an unspecified number of her kabarkadas were implicated in my first sighting of such.)

Thus was born Dom's Theory Of Ostentation In Praxis In The Medium Of The Coffee Shop Table Napkin. The gist of it is that people in Starbucks are practically required to doodle on those things to actively demonstrate their presence in the coffee shop as being equivalent to the validation of their value as hip, paying customers in this branch of a world-renowned, comically overpriced edible-goods and services franchise paradoxically situated in the urban capital of some Third-World country on the edge of nowhere. However while the "haves" would gladly leave behind their bespoiled tissues to furthur flaunt their influence even while absent from the shop itself, the "have-nots" will take home their doodles as keepsakes of their brief albeit sossy sojourn in the Land of Milk and Imported Coffee.

I'm sure Nads and Xiom can come up with some on-the-fly hegemonic rationale for all of this in true Lit-student fashion.

Naturally of course, we had to get in on the doodling action as well. If there's one thing we scholars inevitably are, it's either victims of our own meandering, over-analytical hypotheses... or garden-variety damn dirty hypocrites.

Our silly posturing at that café was not a completely wasted affair though. In between bonding over jackets (both pretty and unwashed) and grotty glamour magazines and the usual female-type chatter, surprisingly I had a very productive moment for poetry in that couch. Maybe the classy atmosphere was more conducive for creative output. Or maybe it was the money and Barako fumes affecting my brain.

Anyway, here is the world debut of my hipster-induced, decaffeinated opus of post-modern proportions:

An Ode To Peppermint Mocha

I'm minty fresh
and wide awake.
"Christmas in a cup,"
as Andrew Paxton once said.

We all partook of
the peppermint brownie,
which turns to rock
candy in a matter of
~~days~~ ~~hours~~ nanoseconds.

She craves peppermint sprinkles.

Miles away, in the next isle,
he craves her.

Christmas ending in a blink.
Next year, I'm ordering a
raspberry cappuccino.

Laser-Dancing a.k.a. Disco Inferno

2011-01-31T14:54:00.001+08:00

(Originally published in my very first blog last April 14, 2007, 20:27 Philippine time)

One night found me puttering about the house, darting restively from room to room, randomly checking cabinets or the fridge, eventually answering the phone then accidentally eavesdropping on my brother’s phone conversations with one of his friends. As usual. But then I hear Bro discussing with his buddy something he was apparently really into these days, something I haven’t heard of for what seemed like years.

Dance Maniax.

About three-plus years ago, Dance Maniax was the latest arcade-dancing craze. It was what the younger bracket of our extended family — from my sister to our lanky, video-game-loving male cousin — was absolutely nuts for… and (astonishingly) experts of. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that it’s one of the few video arcade games I’m actually moderately good at, besides air hockey and those ticket-winning games even teething children and their linguistically-uncoordinated nannies could excel in.

Not to be confused with the completely-foot-driven dancing structure of Dance Dance Revolution (which was already in every urban center in the Philippines years before Americans have even heard of it), Dance Maniax’ dancing structure is driven by four laser beams (two for the upper body area, two for the leg area), allowing for a more dynamic range of movement and, er, more creative freedom.

You could literally pull off WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANTED just to hit those lasers: hand-clapping; foot-shaking; head-banging; breakdancing; lightning-quick waving of the arms (for the experts); doing a frenzied cross of The Salsa, The Macarena and The Can-Can (in my case); or shimmying your ass (in my brother’s case) like the flaming diva you are.

Of course if you were good (read: hyper) enough, you instantly get free license to “showboat” before timid amateurs… even though in real life you’re about as physically fit as a dead rat.

Then there’s the actual music available for you to dance to, as carefully chosen by the connoisseurs of J-Pop, disco-fusion and alien possession. There’s the Big Band/ska-influenced “Get It All”, the horrifyingly frenetic “Happy Hopper”, the tribal-inspired “Afronova Primeval” and an absurd remix of that deep-country ditty “Doodah!” (formerly “Camptown Races”).

You also have “Mind Parasite” (disco-reverb), “Baila Baila” (latin-inspired), “Heaven is a ’57 Metallic Gray” (bebop), “Butterfly” (100% unforgiving J-Pop), a nonsensical heavy-metal piece whose title I forgot, and (when you get an ultra-high score) a bonus song starting with the feel-good, choir-backed “Jet World”, later devolving into the notorious arcadian acid-trip ‘Paranoia” (at which point the tempo automatically picks up, and you have to shimmy your ass faster than usual).

*Note: As with any other video game, if your expertise in Dance Maniax achieves that criminal level where you’ve mastered the cheat codes, memorized those ridiculous songs and found yourself karate-chopping in your sleep, NOW IS THE TIME TO STOP.

I'm ALREADY unprepared!

2011-01-16T05:30:00.006+08:00

I really should not be excited to see Sucker Punch.

The man has already directed three of the most polarizing films in the past decade: Dawn of the Dead for zombie purists, Watchmen for comic book purists, and 300 for, um, comic book purists/Greek history buffs/hetero-normative apologists?

That and judging by its belief-buggering trailer, this movie seems designed to pander to audiences in every other calculated way possible: Snyder's signature gratuitous slow-mo and spectacular visuals, veiled anime and steampunk aesthetics, jailbait eye candy, riding on the coattails of Inception, promotional tie-ins with Hot Toys and Alex Pardee's art, et cetera...

We already have every sign imaginable pointing to Zack Snyder shaping himself to be the Michael Bay of the 21st century, barring the fact that Bay's still around and that Snyder's movies actually do look pretty. I've already conceded to calling his collective oeuvre one of my biggest personal guilty pleasures, and I'm not usually one to have a firm opinion on anything movie-related (more of this in a future post). I even watched Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole in 3-D, for crying out loud!

Geeks and critics from coast to coast are already calling Sucker Punch every teenage boy's wet dream translated to film. And yet I still want to see this clusterfrak of stylized escapism unfold on the big screen. Does that make me a teenage boy too?

Well, that certainly makes Zack Synder something. For one, he really knows how to add pizazz to his trailers with rockin' tunes. I'll betcha the downloads for Lords of Acid, Silversun Pickups and Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" (because the band itself really needs no introduction) skyrocketed after these videos came out.

It's times like these when you really wish you can just call a spectacle a spectacle and resist the urge to over-analyze everything to dea--SHUT UP.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this.

2011-01-08T07:14:00.007+08:00

(and it just goes on and on...)

My last abortion of a short story.

2011-01-08T06:54:00.003+08:00

“Hello, I’m here for a haircut that will help curb my nervous disorder.”

(and it just goes on and on...)

A surprise appraisal of Circus.

2011-01-06T10:11:00.004+08:00

(Note: This review was "composed" during a spur-of-the-moment listening spree on my iTunes. I tend not to articulate stuff too clearly during spur-of-the-moment listening sprees.)

No, this album does not contain Ligaya or Pare Ko. (UltraElectroMagneticPop!) It does not have Spoliarium, Hard To Believe, Para Sa Masa, or Andalusian Dog. (Sticker Happy.) It doesn't have Maskara or the vastly underrated Ultrasound and Outside. (Carbon Stereoxide. P.S.: I honestly believe Wala is one of the best E-heads ballads people have never heard.) And no, it doesn't have the one-two punch of Fill Her and (the immortal) Ang Huling El Bimbo. (Cutterpillow. I'll get to that one eventually.) But God help me, Circus is catchy, funny, witty, and occasionally chocked with touches of gallows humor.

In other words, Circus is a good album, God damn it.

Punk Zappa is a hilarious character. The surprise endings of Kailan and Magasin have become my moments of Late To The Punchline Fridge Brilliance. (Apologies for the TV Tropes jargon.) And With A Smile is surprisingly intimate yet transcendent. Admittedly Wating is baffling as hell with the Pinoy cinema klasiks sound bytes, but you can definitely still sort of sense the weird brilliance of it. The Regine Velasquez-esque outtro is unintentionally (or is it?) funny as well.

And oh my god, I may have never gotten plastered out of my mind before, but Alkohol is freaking awesome. And hilarious.

I'm not sure if the bonus track showed up on older presses of the album, but the lounge version of Kailan makes for a surprisingly good easter egg that doesn't feel like a waste of CD space, which is more than I can say for most other "bonus tracks" you'd find on other albums. The sheer afterthought-ness of it even meshes well with the album's overall concept in its own Bizarro way.

Almost makes you overlook the fact that this was a young Eraserheads, a fresh new band just on the blush of fame. (Wait, did that make sense?) I'm having a time trying to imagine this album back when it first came out, picturing in my head the stoned teenagers and closet music snobs all concurring that Circus is in fact the omen of greater things to come for this then-young group.

(Stay tuned while I attempt to form a solid opinion on "Sembreak" and "Minsan"!)

Ick.

2010-06-21T06:36:00.006+08:00

There is a very odd infestation ongoing in our area.

Frankly I have never seen this happen before, and I'm surprised I'm actually scared shitless (if not grossed out) by these things. Currently one of the worst invasive species ("pests" in layman's terms) in the world, it is not the cockroach, it is not the sewer rat, heck, it's not even those wacky janitor fish that all the local government units were buzzing about a few years back.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the East African Land Snail.

Click on, my friends, as the ~~invasion~~ infestation progresses in all its terrifying glory!

(and it just goes on and on...)

Russians are weird.

2010-05-31T13:10:00.005+08:00

(via TV Tropes and my buddy Abdul)

No, no, don't worry. This isn't a blatant rip-off of a certain gamer webcomic print collection cover at all.

"OHMYGODDIDYOUSEETHAT?!? That bird. Right there. Yeah, that's the one. The one giving me the evil eye. You see it too? Right. Let's grab our drinks, sit down, and pretend we didn't notice him... Maybe he'll go away."

Anyway, this isn't me expanding into a new culturally insensitive blogger niche. This is just me paying homage to the universal power of humor: The Russian Edition!

(and it just goes on and on...)

Geeks + Conquest = Epic Hilarity Ensues?

2010-05-12T17:58:00.005+08:00

... At least that's what I (and surely a whole medium-sized municipality's worth of Interwebz-going sheeple nerds) will be aching to find out next week when the Nostalgia Critic and the other faithful, genre-savvy citizens of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com attempt a hostile takeover of the real-life micronation of Molossia.

Pictured: Enough gamers and pop-culture reviewers to invade an acre of semi-sovereign land with.

It's over!

2010-05-12T09:51:00.002+08:00

The automated polls are finally over!

I voted.

And it's a good thing too. Can you imagine what a logistical nightmare finding a decent enough contingency plan for a failed nationwide election would have been?

Then again...

TAA-DAAAAH!!!