Finally! After 27 years, a room of my own! Just finished moving the last of my stuff into my new room yesterday. I'm now currently putting the final touches. Getting my new room to my specifications involved a lot of pain, but I'm pretty happy how it turned out. Will post more photos (on my multiply site) once I get the final piece of "furniture" in my room.
Until then, I'm going to enjoy my newfound solitude.
Am I a fool for following this path? Maybe. Time will tell. But I want to see what's at the end of this path, even if it kills me. Until then, this song will be my mantra:
You'll have to excuse the sound quality. It's the only video I found that had the complete song. You can find the lyrics here.
Join the world as we give back to Mother Earth by joining the Earth Hour on March 29. From 8-9PM, turn off your lights, television sets and *gasp* computers. What's one hour in darkness compared to the centuries we've been abusing our planet?
Click on the link below to see what happened during Earth Hour 2007 in Sydney:
On 29 March 2008, the Philippines will join countries around the world as we literally "turn the lights out" for Earth Hour - an event that will fuel awareness on climate change and prove that when the people of the world work together, they can make a difference in the fight against global warming.
Earth Hour will take place throughout the Philippines from 8 to 9 in the evening on Saturday night, 29 March 2008. WWF invites you to participate by shutting off lights for 60 minutes, organizing your own "lights-out" event or by forwarding this mail to your friends, workmates and family.
Launched in Australia on the 31st of March 2007, Earth Hour moved 2.2 million people and 2100 businesses in Sydney to turn off their lights for one hour. This massive collective effort reduced the city's energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour. With Sydney icons like the Harbour Bridge and Opera House turning their lights off and unique events such as weddings by candlelight, the world took notice. Inspired by the collective effort of millions of Sydneysiders, many major global cities are joining Earth Hour in 2008, turning a symbolic event into a global movement.
YOUR participation will go a long way in spreading the message that we, as individual droplets working collectively – can create an impetus far more powerful than the mightiest of rivers. For more information, log on to the WWF Earth Hour page at: www.earthhour.org.
If you want to learn more about how else you can help make Earth Hour in the Philippines a success, reply to this email or drop us a line at (632) 920-7931, (632) 920-7923, or (632)920-7926.
Well, it's been 26 days into the new year, and I wanted to try something new with my art. Been drawing "manga-style" since high school and I just wanted to see if I'm able to draw other visual styles. I can still see traces of my old style in there. Guess old habits die hard.
All in all, I'm pretty pleased with this experimental art project of mine. But I don't think I'm ready to let go of my manga art just yet.
2007 was certainly an interesting year for me. I’ve taken a lot of beating this past year, but with the hopeful feeling you get with starting the new year, I would like to look back on some experiences I had this past year that made 2007 worth drudging through. Acquiring all that expensive junk doesn’t really count as highlights of my life (though in many times it is, how sad for me), so I’ll be focusing on stuff that really matter. Here are some of my groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, and life-altering moments of 2007:
Made New Friends It was a week-long symposium I had to cover for work, I went into it without much thought. Who knew that I’d make a couple of new friends from the Lasallian Youth? It was a very amazing experience seeing students from 17 campuses under one roof interacting as if they were all part of the same school. Even more amazing was how the Symposium Committee handled everything behind the scenes to make it fun and enlightening for everyone. It made me more proud to be part-Lasallian.
Reconnected with some Old Friends In 2007, I reconnected with some of my Atenean block mates. I almost forgot the good times I had with these guys going through mid-terms, skipping ROTC and goofing around Katipunan Ave. Lasallians and Ateneans may “hate” each other on the basketball court (or pretty much everywhere else) but you all are pretty much the same good people. I’m proud to have good friends from both sides of the fence (and some from UP as well).
Did Good Things I was invited to join to take some street kids from Madrigal trick-or-treating last Halloween. I guess I behaved well enough to be invited again to their Christmas Party! Ateneo and La Salle always instilled a sense of purpose in their students. I’ve always wanted to help out with some charity work but my selfish materialism got the better of me. I’m glad I was able to finally walk-my-talk (or walk-my-thought, ‘cause I was always thinking of helping but wasn't doing anything) last year. Hopefully, I’ll get to be more active this 2008.
Wedding Season Begins! The first of my High School classmates got married in 2007 thus starting the wedding frenzy. Well, not really. We all started out as a bunch of gals and geeks, went through our teens as emo high school kids, then young adulthood as wild partying college kids and now, we’re a group of sophisticated young women and geeks. One of us decided to enter the next stage of her life as a wife and someday soon (maybe), as a mother. I am very blessed to be there to witness it all. New Additions to the Family My brother, too, got married last 2007. And I finally have a sister(-in-law) and soon I’m going to be an Uncle! It’s been nice getting to know my new sister-in-law these past few months. Soon I’ll have a crash course on baby-proofing everything in the house. My Dad Retires After 25 years with the Ayala Group of companies, my dad finally retires. Our family has been taken care of by my dad, and now, it’s high time I returned the favor.
•••
These are just some of the things that made my year extra special. There are a couple more things that I could share but I’d really rather be playing World of Warcraft right now.
It's one of those weeks that just doesn't seem to end. But it won't anytime soon because we're approaching the Christmas Rush at the office. I like it that we get a Christmas Break and all but that also means that we have to wrap everything up before then. So in the next three weeks I'll be cramming like crazy. Good thing I had a lot of practice in school. [Ba-da-bum-psh!]
It doesn't really end with work either. I've been possibly food poisoned, this bulge in my right eye leads me to believe an insect may have laid eggs there, and of course I may have screwed things up w[information deleted].
I really need a break from life. No, not just any run-of-the-mill break from work, a break from Life. Wish I could just die for a few days and not exist, not think, and not worry about s#¡t. Then just come back to life again fully-recharged. Unfortunately, I'm told you have to be a Messiah to be able to do that. Otherwise, you'll come back as a flesh-eating zombie. Which is not far from how I feel at the moment.
In Theology class, I learned that freedom isn’t about keeping several options open, but it’s about choosing one of those options and sticking to it. In Fullmetal Alchemist, I learned of Equivalent Exchange, that in order to gain something, something of equal value must be lost. In My Name is Earl, I learned a simple interpretation of Karma, do good things, good things will happen to you; do bad things, bad things will happen to you.
For years I have been living life with principles based on the statements above. I have gotten into arguments with several of my closest friends because of it. I’ve made choices in my life based on said principles and it’s been working out pretty well for me... at least until around three months ago.
Funny thing about life is that everything changes. You may be adamant about one thing now, but something in the future can and will change your mind. I find myself eating the very words I use to preach to my friends. How it got this way totally caught me off-guard. I found myself at a crossroad. Do I stick to my guns and walk my talk? Or do I swallow a giant amount of pride and enter a massive paradigm shift? I think most of you already know which path I took.
The only thing keeping me from totally feeling like shit for giving up my principles is this quote from Natalie Portman: “I don't know why, exactly. Sometimes you make rules for yourself and sometimes those rules are made to be broken. You have to test things out and see what works for you, and this felt right.” And this feels right to me... for now.
Although it should be noted that Ms. Portman did live to regret those words. A few days or weeks from now, I may be regretting this too. But for now, I don’t care. I’ve made some idiotic decisions before. Many of them I’ve come to regret, I won’t lie to myself. But what can I do about it? It’s done. It’s equivalent exchange. I’ve already made my choice, now I have to deal with the consequences. I won’t complain about it. I won’t blame anybody else for it, not God or anyone else. It’s all me.
[End note: After writing this post, I chanced upon an article written by Natalie Portman here. Thought it might be relevant]
Blech. Remember the time when getting sick was fun? Back in grade school, I could've had 40º fever and I'd still have energy to run around the house like a lunatic. But as you age, geh, getting sick starts to suck.
I have been without a (proper) voice since Friday. I usually thought that these things just take around 2-3 days before I can start swearing again, but this one was been persistent. Oddly enough, I've always thought to myself that I could forego the ability to speak since I rarely speak anyway in the office or at home. Who knew God would oblige me? Not that I was asking for it in the first place. Ok, fine, maybe I was... I haven't been exactly the perfect son as of late.
Not being able to speak, to my surprise, sucks. My officemates have been using this "quiet season" to get back at me for all the times I've.. eherm... exercised my wit. I've been taking meds like I was an addict. These lozenges my doctor gave me have an anesthetic that makes my whole mouth numb. Not sure if it was to keep me from talking more or to soothe the irritation. And God, these meds are damn expensive! I guess there is some truth to those commercials on TV.
[UPDATE: Re-reading this post made me realize that the last few lines made no real sense. Hmph, must be the meds talking.]
"Geek" has been a derogatory term used to label people who have, according to the dictionary, an "eccentric devotion to a particular interest," in most cases, any person who is absorbed by computers, video games or any other subject linked with technology or science. Well, thanks to the interweb, Geeks are now retaking the name as a badge of pride. And why not? We're all geeks in one way or another.
Think about it. Sure, it's easy to make fun of a person just because he/she knows the square root of 16,384. But isn't it the same as calculating how much fat you'll burn in a 2-hour session at the gym? Or knowing the field goal percentage of Michael Jordan? Or even perhaps knowing how much torque the Honda S2000 has? What's so different about knowing dialogue from Star Trek by heart from memorizing your favorite poem of Pablo Neruda?
Know the difference between a MacPherson Strut and a Torsion-Beam? Then you're a Car Geek. You can summarize all the films made by Martin Scorsese? By jove, you're a Film Geek! You get angry at the referee for calling a personal foul when clearly it was a charging violation? Hello, Sports Geek. Can you tell what ISO and Aperture Settings to use when shooting at midday? You're a Camera Geek.
So face it, you're a geek. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Don't worry. No one's laughing at you. You love what you love, that's not a crime. You're amongst your fellow geeks. So be proud and proclaim your geekdom! [Illustrations by Scott Johnson. See more geeks here.]
It's a saturday night and I'm at home feeling non-active. My body is too lazy to go out, too bummed to watch TV, too fat to eat any more junk food but my brain is too active to sit still. It's a weird mix. The mind wants to move but the meat says hell no.
So what do I do? I think. I'm told thinking is a dangerous pastime. But what else can you do when your body won't cooperate? So I think about a lot of things and go through my usual process:
First, I lose that good feeling.
Next, I start to realize that the world is a shitty place.
It's been a crazy week. Things haven't been, well, "peachy" in my life. But as they say, when you hit rock bottom, nowhere else to go but up. (At least I think this is rock bottom, I would dread to think I can sink any lower.)
Hoping the next week will be much happier. Have a nice Sunday, y'all.
We all know Uncle Ben's greatest advice to young Peter Parker: "With great power comes great responsibility." I've always thought of myself as a very moral person. I liken myself to Hiro Nakamura, an otaku with a heart of gold, trying to be like the heroes I've grown up reading. Like Hiro, I'm pretty sure if I had "great power" I would use it for good.
So if I'm such a goody-goody kid, why won't God grant me powers to help save the world? Well, a few things come to mind, most of which dealing with my short temper and raging hormones. I've come up with a list of superpowers I'd like to have, and the reason why I probably don't deserve them.
Harry Potter: Magic Sure, I'll probably start my own order to fight Lord Voldemort but the only real spell I'll ever learn is "Brassiereus Disintengratia."
Magneto: Master of Magnetism In a severe case of road rage, I would have flung half the cars on EDSA into the Pasig River. Star Wars: The Force With my greed, I will surely become a Sith Lord, but instead of plotting to take over the Galactic Republic, I'll probably be too preoccupied using the Jedi Mind Trick to get free meals and getting Supermodels to sleep with me. Hey, it only works on the weak-minded. (Ba-da-bum-psh!) Fullmetal Alchemist: Human Transmutation In a heated debate, I would have transmuted my opponent's mouth with his asshole within the first few minutes.
Superman: Super Everything The obvious thing for any guy with Superman's powers is to look through women's clothing with his X-ray vision. But for the sake of creativity, I would probably fly illegally parked cars on top of buildings or maybe flip them over just to piss off the drivers.
Spider-man: Does Everything a Spider Can Two words: ultimate paparazzo. Who cares about taking pics of myself fighting crime? The real money is getting the juiciest shots of those crazy celebrities! Death Note: The Power to Kill Anyone I would probably be the most unfair Grim Reaper out there. That guy that got the girl I like? Death by hamster bites. Corrupt Political Family? One way trip to the Bermuda Triangle. That girl who turned me down and humiliated me? Death by contaminated tampon. Kris Aquino and Ruffa Gutierrez? That's easy. Death by every STD known to man.
Hiro Nakamura: Time & Space Manipulation You heard of the insult, "fuck you and your ancestors?" It can happen.
That's all I can think of at the moment. What about you? What superpower would you most likely abuse? [Image taken from: http://amtog.blogs.ie/2007/04/17/]
Took 6 days off from work for some R&R. Spent that time with a few friends in El Rio y Mar Resort in Busuanga, Palawan. I'm a bit tired from the plane ride, so I'll probably post my (800+) pics at my Multiply site tomorrow. For now, it's just good to be home in one piece.
It's election day today and I still don't know who to bloody vote for. This is the only time in this country where normal people (should) feel more powerful than politicians. Quite frankly, it should always be like this. Not the gangland political killings, mud-slinging, unsincere hand-shaking, and goofy dancing, but the ass-kissing. Politicians should always kiss ass to the people. It's the natural order of things.
Name: Jin
Occupation: Graphic Artist/Pirate Geek Toys:
20" iMac Core Duo, PSP, iPod (3G), EOS350D Special Attack(s):
La Serpiente Strike
El Gato Fist
Being the mindless drone of fashion that I am, I decided to jump on the Blogging bandwagon. This site contains all my rants and raves about current events, technology, video gaming, cinema and the occasional snippets of my own geek life. (Yeah, quite original, I know.)
Best viewed at 1024x768 on Firefox or Safari. Internet Explorer 6 sucks donkey dick.
Finally! After 27 years, a room of my own! Just finished moving the last of my stuff into my new room yesterday. I'm now currently putting the final touches. Getting my new room to my specifications involved a lot of pain, but I'm pretty happy how it turned out. Will post more photos (on my multiply site) once I get the final piece of "furniture" in my room.
It was a week-long symposium I had to cover for work, I went into it without much thought. Who knew that I’d make a couple of new friends from the Lasallian Youth? It was a very amazing experience seeing students from 17 campuses under one roof interacting as if they were all part of the same school. Even more amazing was how the Symposium Committee handled everything behind the scenes to make it fun and enlightening for everyone. It made me more proud to be part-Lasallian.
In 2007, I reconnected with some of my Atenean block mates. I almost forgot the good times I had with these guys going through mid-terms, skipping ROTC and goofing around Katipunan Ave. Lasallians and Ateneans may “hate” each other on the basketball court (or pretty much everywhere else) but you all are pretty much the same good people. I’m proud to have good friends from both sides of the fence (and some from UP as well).
I was invited to join to take some street kids from Madrigal trick-or-treating last Halloween. I guess I behaved well enough to be invited again to their Christmas Party! Ateneo and La Salle always instilled a sense of purpose in their students. I’ve always wanted to help out with some charity work but my selfish materialism got the better of me. I’m glad I was able to finally walk-my-talk (or walk-my-thought, ‘cause I was always thinking of helping but wasn't doing anything) last year. Hopefully, I’ll get to be more active this 2008.
The first of my High School classmates got married in 2007 thus starting the wedding frenzy. Well, not really. We all started out as a bunch of gals and geeks, went through our teens as emo high school kids, then young adulthood as wild partying college kids and now, we’re a group of sophisticated young women and geeks. One of us decided to enter the next stage of her life as a wife and someday soon (maybe), as a mother. I am very blessed to be there to witness it all.
It's one of those weeks that just doesn't seem to end. But it won't anytime soon because we're approaching the Christmas Rush at the office. I like it that we get a Christmas Break and all but that also means that we have to wrap everything up before then. So in the next three weeks I'll be cramming like crazy. Good thing I had a lot of practice in school. [Ba-da-bum-psh!]
We all know Uncle Ben's greatest advice to young Peter Parker: "With great power comes great responsibility." I've always thought of myself as a very moral person. I liken myself to 
Took 6 days off from work for some R&R. Spent that time with a few friends in El Rio y Mar Resort in Busuanga, Palawan. I'm a bit tired from the plane ride, so I'll probably post my (800+) pics at my 
