i normally don’t comment in celebrity blogs ’cause i’m too shy and i don’t care for their opinions of me anyway and i’m sure the feeling’s mutual. i usually post comments when i feel too strongly about the subject of a post. like when zafra posts about the ayala brothers (esp. if it’s fernando). or when i am really vexed by the self-righteousness of the author. case in point, this post and this post. i’ve been a fan of hers since i clicked on her link from zafra’s blog. i think she’s really cool and see nothing wrong with her insane spending habits, since they’re justified by the cool things she buys. but then she starts bringing the nasty on some things. like bad shit about other celebrities, name-calling, encouraging her “fans” even more through their comments. it’s okay to do that to kris or ruffa because both have jobs that actually require intrigue to maintain their popularity/notoriety. but then she starts going political, hurling her off-tangent opinions at noynoy aquino’s presidential campaign all because she missed the point of his political ad. so i called her out for her haterama and hypocrisy because they make her seem like her motives are rooted on the fact that she wants to vote for “self-made” (just don’t look at his wife) Manny Villar instead, and here she comes ragging on me about my spelling? and when i correct my spelling and call her out on her red herring, she deletes my comment and bans me because i’m criticizing her? and then she invokes her readers to answer for her off-topic comments? mind you, my language was perfectly civilized, involved no curses and no hint of flame-warring, because i only did flame-wars in high school when the word didn’t even exist yet.

fan-girling officially ends here! chuvaness is officially condemned to unsubscription-hell. btw chuva, i can see your “protected” posts on my rss reader because just so you know, livejournal has crappy security. that’s all.

the wakefulness at 4 am

the wakefulness at 4am is a pre-occupation of people who work the night shift, those with restless thoughts too loud to ignore, and those who cling to the comfort of night fighting against the certainty of daybreak that will snatch away those few moments of bliss. i wish you could see.

(video reminds me of that foo fighters song “walking after you”. knock-off. but i’m such a sap, i think i’m gonna watch nicholas sparks’ “dear john” on the basis of this song. hayyret.)

how do you rip mp3s from myspace?

it is with fondness and melancholy that i remember that it could’ve been five years today except that it will never be because of almost five months ago. but i’m okay now, i think.

there was a female cover of the cure’s “boys don’t cry” from an obscure compilation by jam 88.3 which will always remind me of 2004, when it was blaring over the speakers of every stinky, dirty, speeding bus i was on then. it also happens to be a nice ending track to a playlist. (click on “boys don’t cry” in this playlist. check out the lovely arrangement around the instrumental. sorry, don’t know how to rip mp3s from myspace)

short and sweet blog ad

completely forgot to add a future palanca awardee to my blogroll, so i’m making amends by making a short post about it. to my 2 friends (imaginary and real) out there who are constant visitors, and those who happen to pass by looking to leech a reaction paper, cecil’s blog is a literary must-read. it also has some super nice photos of her adventures, plus the occasional poignant short story or thought-provoking, sometimes tear-duct-exercising essay. enjoy amigos!

MJ: “i gotta cue that” (or something to that effect)

i confess that i am a closet michael jackson fan. i know the lyrics to his most popular songs, i used to buy collectors’ edition “song hits” where all of his songs were featured and i was always fascinated by the man who sang and danced in brilliant music videos that validated MTV. “thriller”, “billie jean”, “smooth criminal”, “black or white” and “remember the time” (that scene where he turned to dust was very cool; and iman as queen of egypt? classic.) were the ones that i vividly remember watching as a kid growing up in a place where MTV came too late. i never really planned on seeing “This Is It” for i cynically dismissed it as a way to profit off of a dead celebrity. the same way i dismissed his announcement of a last, great concert that will serve as a “curtain call” to his long floundering career. my sister convinced me since our cousin told her it was good. the reviews from similarly cynical-minded critics were encouraging also. so i went. and i remembered why the man is a legend, an artist and why i was a fan. he was a perfectionist, a control freak, and self-assured. he did choreography, designed sets, arranged his own songs, and even chose the principal dancers. he said in the middle of rehearsing “the way you make me feel” (lounge version) when a drummer made a misstep: “i gotta cue thatam the cue” (corrected myself because misquotes are as embarassing as grammatical errors i might’ve paraphrased this for dramatic effect, but whatever). it was so telling of how everything in that concert revolved around the man, how he wanted everything to turn out, and how it was to be done. he wrote those songs, sang them and danced to them, and so everything else should be an extension of the man, as one of the choreographers said. he pushed the guitarist doing the “Beat It” riffs because it was her time to shine. he told the musical director to “let it simmer” when he felt that a note was too sudden to be played, make it slower “like you’re just getting out of bed”. “this should be funki-ER” about “wanna be starting something” when he wanted more bass lines in the arrangement (i think he wanted to one-up prince here, or emulate at least). and those were just the part of the musical direction of the concert. he seemed to have a lot of respect for his crew not to embarass or chide them on their faults, or do some diva-outs (of course they may have ended up in the cutting room floor, but the guy’s dead, let him have the benefit of the doubt). his crew respected him so much as well, that you can feel their own guilt when they aren’t prepared enough or when they don’t deliver what “MJ” expected. i think it’s all because aside from being mere dancers, back-up singers and instrumentalists, they are fans as well. and they know first hand that he had an immense respect for his audience not to give them less than the best, less than what they deserve. i could be wrong, but i don’t think that come concert time, “MJ” would do a britney and suddenly blurt out “Merry Christmas” at the end of a successful night or lip-sync his way through even one song. those are for fucking amateurs and poseurs who lose control of themselves and just go through the motions of fame, according to what their parents force-feed into their heads. watching the man work to recover his legend once more, i was transfixed on his amazing performance that made me look past the nasty accusations of child molestations, his odd skin pigmentation, the alleged multiple plastic surgeries, the hyperbaric chamber, etc., etc. fine, his fount of songwriting magic has indeed dried up (the OST was a re-hashed paul anka-cowritten piece from the ’80s), but he’s still got IT-those string of hits, the cool moves to match, the glimmer in his gloves that made him a legend in the first place.

happy halloween!

…and a good All Saints’/Souls’ Day to all! let’s celebrate the long weekend by watching some fine vintage cartoons brought to you by Charles Schultz c. 1960s. haven’t watched the vids yet, but i’m sure they’re the best. watch out for lucy, my other cartoon alter-ego. :)

too much info

there comes a time in a voyeur’s life when all of that raw information at one’s fingertips (mostly force-fed from narcissists) just gets, well, too much. the best thing to balance it all out is to at least react/opine on those possibly-sensitive-but-mostly-unnecessary-details or to throw out something TMI about oneself as well.

frankly, my google reader count is way beyond the 500 count but i’m already exhausted. these days, it’s hard to pick out the trash from the treasure. but me being OC sometimes (not to mention having the incessant need to know everything regardless of the effort it costs me), i’ll probably wade through that proverbial muck and do the job anyway.

hm, which reminds me of that time in college when i volunteered to help with the garbage disposal in a national Boy Scout thing held in our town. it was sembreak, ennui got to the best of me and so i ended up in a garbage truck. literally.
—
so there goes my 100th post. not that it’s worth celebrating or anything. i just thought of how far i’ve gone, all those “small” grammatical errors along the way, the bitch fits, amounting to a hardly well-adjusted me. i hope my sister gets into med school next year so she can specialize in psychiatry and i can finally have my pro bono therapist on call.

not yet

i considered leaving a comment after getting an update about you. but then as i typed the things i want to say, it didn’t feel right. resentment, betrayal, green, murky, mossy stuff inside me started to come up in my head into my chest then down to the pit of my stomach prompting me to hit the backspace button and take back all those nice genial things that friends who used to be friends say to each other with the underlying assumption that it’s now all good between the two of us and all that bad blood is water under the bridge and we suddenly dismiss all your mistakes much like we go about throwing cliches nonchalantly because they’re disposable and shit. and that was a really long sentence about how i am not okay with you right now and no, it’s not yet cool. maybe next time.

at para sa mga malisyoso at chismoso diyan, hindi ito tungkol kay “z”.

show and tell

we recently made the following surprise video for a colleague celebrating her 10th year at the office. she trained me to become what i am now – a tester who can decently break a program apart, if i may say so myself. bwahahaha.

about the video: this is the first ever video that i had a post-prod hand in. jayjay had the idea to shoot in time-lapse using his trusty SLR. the whiteboard thing is sooo chaka i’m not gonna talk about it. but yes, it was my idea and in fairness to us, it was only done in one take because we were too busy with our tasks. later, i did the post-prod work by trying to put together the frames in a time-lapse program, but it didn’t work out. so i tried doing it in windows moviemaker following some instructions online. it was just a matter of laying down the music (splicing it so that it can fit right into the 1:30 movie length) and then here it is. an 8-fps time-lapse to the tune of The Goops’ “Build Me Up Buttercup”.  thanks to brian and jayjay for the help!

lately i’ve been…

…liking rap. saying random urban slang in rapid, almost-monotone succession is rather liberating. and i like the feel of the words rolling around my mouth as i say them, modulating my voice in the appropriate words that i feel i need to punctuate. and cursing is welcome. yeah, it does dwell most of the time on booze, boobs, ass and cash but on some rare occassions, it is unwittingly elevated to poetry without the need for drama or profundity. it seems all too easy to find a beat in a bunch of ordinary words that rhyme and say them out loud in a variety of inflections in between “uhms”, “ahs”, “uh-uhs”, “yeahs”. with a little sampling, some auto-tune and a common hook, that’s highly doable. but do they really stick? maybe for a few weeks on the billboard hot 100. but tupac’s rap has been made into a book, and the guy’s still dishing out posthumus records of remastered/greatest hits. public enemy has probably spawned the rap-metal genre and influenced lots of acts from run-dmc to the beastie boys. i’m not really a hard-core fan just yet. my tastes are very much mainstream but i’d like to hear more, i guess. not just the ones that show scantily-clad women on boats.

its subversive quality is also appealing in that, combined with the cuss words, it is sometimes the most fitting tool to vent about the system, stick it to the man, or tell all the haters to suck it. in fact, i think there’s a striking similarity in the rallying cries of a picket-line and a rap chorus – except that a rap chorus has minimal commie implications (unless it’s from any of the Iron Curtain states).

and so here’s my current LSS – he’s a jerk but the dude can rhyme and collab-ing with daft punk and takashi murakami, that takes some fine taste. i also loved the original akira-inspired vid: