last post for 2006

cabanatuan city public market was partially burned a few hours ago


oh my, i'm here just to have a post again before 2006 ends, i'm still vegetating and possessed by overwhelming laziness, and.. oh well

O!O
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i'll be a better me come 2007.. that's a wish, not a resolution

O!O
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nothing happy about the new year, look what happened to that rapist smith

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t0n turned 2 (two days ago)

"papa.. no'd!" meaning: "Papa, let's watch!" (everytime my son T0n comes to me while i'm in front of the computer he demands that we watch his favorite video clips on the media player)



on October 24, 2004 T0n broke PJG Hospital's record as the heaviest baby born there, his coming made me quit my law studies and it's a couple of universes worth it

O!O
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his name Saulreever is my chosen soundalike of Soul Reaver, a dually existing as physical and spectral sword in the Legacy Of Kain video game series which made me file leave of absences just to play it straight every time it came out (1999, 2001, 2002 and 2003)

O!O
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T0n has tons of hair and we let them grow long and thick, we occasionally let scissors get near his bangs just to let him see, what's the point of him being a Samson having a crappy cropped hair

Oh my sleeping child.. the world's so..
ok stop, i hate Michael Never Learns To Rock

O!O
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T0n, whose DNA is naturally an extension of his mom's late tatay, inherited the old man's love of cooking (Marlyn's pop was a professional cook, too bad i hadn't had a chance to meet him let alone taste-test his dishes.. but his daughter sure tastes ka-boom!.. oh me, my bad!), his everyday playing invariably revolves around mock cooking using our kitchen utensils, his mom bought him a real gas stove a month ago and it was riot, he went completely ape, the problem became apparent when a couple of days later he demanded that real fire be made available to his stove

Wok with T0n

O!O
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there's a gentle nature in the giant T0n, he refers and confides his frustrations (when something he wants cannot be granted) and pains (when he hurts himself - he's hyperactive as an otter) to his little stuffed dog he calls Aww and updates Jesus (who is badly drawn along with the twelve apostles in the dilapidated knock-off Last Supper hanging in our kitchen) on his daily routine like "'Sus, ligo.. bip!" meaning: "Jesus, look i've already taken a bath.. i'm now in my brief."

T0n and his patEng horsing around

O!O
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So now we keep asking T0n: "Ilang taon ka na?" With his fingers all spread out and still no control of his digits yet he enthusiastically answers: "Tu!"

T0n, on his Tita Vowi's lap, contemplates the existential significance
of pancit malabon to his birthday

O!O
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The Reaver blade, devourer of souls

"Eternity is relentless."

(Kain to Raziel on their fateful confrontation
near the very end of Soul Reaver I)



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36

O!O
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it's my birthday today and i was not even able to take a shower or brush my teeth


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patEng turned ten yesterday

"daddy, ano ba'y ibig pa bang sabihin 'non?"

one of the stellar things i could count with E.T.'s fingers that happened to me while at araullo university was that of meeting my future wife Marlyn in 1991, the initial DNA merger resulted into an oversized baby girl i named Semenelin (after the concept album Semenelin by the then Makati-based hard rock band Wolfgang), back in 1996 Wolfgang was one the few (yes, you can only use E.T.'s fingers again) respectable local bands, i was totally hooked into them, as vividly told in the title track Semenelin is a gigantic cybernetic guardian of Earth buried deep beneath the bowels of the.. well, earth!, and when powerful earth-moving equipment used for mineral/oil exploration acidentally reach and rudely awaken the "behemoth" he goes into a kind of amok in slo-mo and the prospect is that its wrath will reduce our technoindustrial civilization into dust because humanity disregarded the delicate biosphere in building and maintaining such a civilization, (it's a disappointment Wolfgang disbanded sometime in 2000)

O ! O
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Marlyn and i were dessicated, err dedicated, public classroom teachers during Sem's childhood and we missed our daughter's company so much during the daily grind, Sem grew up under the care of her aunts from both sides and having us only during the evenings, Sem says her near two-year old brother T0n (Saulreever) is one lucky little devil for having us 24/7, her mom and i fled the DeafEd, err DepEd, in unison back in 2003

O ! O
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sometime when she was about four years old Sem scared the flying shit out of Marlyn and me when one night she moved in weird irregular patterns, alternately walking and crawling, forwards and backwards and sidewards WHILE STARING STRAIGHT AND UNBLINKING ON SOMETHING OUTSIDE AN OPEN WINDOW AND TALKING TO HERSELF ON AND ON SAYING "TINGNAN MO O, KANINA PA TINGIN NANG TINGIN SA'KEN 'YUN KAHIT SAAN AKO PUMUNTA" (Look, it has been looking at me for a long time now wherever I go), almost in perfect unison (again) Marlyn and i ran and grabbed her and the three of us almost hit the floor in our panicked and terrified reflex to remove Sem from as far away from that window as possible, Sem burst into a wail suddenly terrified and confused at what we did, her mom went "Anak, anu 'yun.. ano 'yung tinitingnan mo sa labas, ha!?" (What's that thing you were looking at outside), still wailing and almost passing out from it Sem managed to simply point at the window and say "'Yon.. bilog.. 'liwanag" ("There.. round.. shining"), the three of us inched toward the window and there in the cloudless night sky outside we beheld a beautiful full moon

O ! O
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Sem grew playing with imaginary playmates as there were no physical ones around, Marlyn and i got used to watching her produce, direct and act out skits with multiple characters whose dialogues were nothing but gibberish, she would meticulously arrange her toys and household what-nots in rows and stacks and played store owner,she would struggle to walk around in her mom's shoes saying "late na'ko sa mga co-chicher ko," she came to love Little Foot & Co. by watching the complete The Land Before Time series and finally, she learned to write with her left hand

O ! O
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Sem is now in grade iii and she never get past the fourth place overall in school, who knows but maybe she is not driven enough to go past that mark, academics is not the be-all and end-all of life especially of a young budding life (i waited for Sem to tell us when she was ready for school that was why she was already about six when she entered kindergarten) so nothing really drives her hard to wrestle with books, this early i just make her take to heart the basics of life: her decisions are what would make her feel happy or sad and that if she does not find happiness at the moment when would she?, she enjoys dancing and is in her school's dance troupe since grade i, she also enjoys electronic games mainly rpg's (role-playing games),

O ! O
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Marlyn and i also waited for Sem to tell us when would she be ready to give up her title of "Our One and Only Baby," on October 24, 2004 Sem finally became a big sister (Ate or Ateng, and later on evolved into Pateng, as is the penchant of my family to make words degenerate into something weird, funny or offbeat) when her brother Saulreever arrived (the second outcome of the DNA merger)

O ! O
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Happy Birthday, patEng!

O ! O
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"... a decade, big One O!" (Alex to Marty in Madagascar)

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tagalog

siyam na taon pa lang ako nang lumipat kami sa valdefuente mula gen. tinio st., nagkaroon ako ng mga bagong kalaro, ang isa ay si Ogot na inakala kong August ang buong pangalan (Edgardo pala), ang isa naman ay si 'Usto na inakala ko namang Justo ang pangalan (August pala)



isang buwang singkad na hindi ko nasundan uli ang aking huling tala, maiiling kang talaga sa isipin na napakadaling tangayin ang diwa ng samutsaring nagsasalimbayang mga pamukaw- at pambihag-pansin sa makabagong daigdig kung kaya't may pagkagulat ka pang maiino na isang buwan na pala uli ang nalipad ng panahon

O!O
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ang wikang tagalog ay patuloy na sinisira ng texting, nakararaming mga artista, manunulat, mangaawit, mamamahayag at oo, mga guro sa lahat ng antas ng edukasyon, nakita ng unggoy gagawin ng unggoy

O!O
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may pilantik ng lungkot ang malaman na ang pluto na bahagi ng agham-pangkalawakan ng salinlahing kinabibilangan ko ay inalisan na ng katayuang planeta ng mga dalubhasang "may kapangyarihan" batay sa mga pamantayang sila-sila rin ang bumuo

O!O
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kamatayan ni ninoy noong ika-21, wala pa kong muwang noong 1983, unang taon ko pa lang noon sa hayskul at sa pagiging isang tinedyer, makahulugan daw ang kamatayang yaon ng isang dakilang pilipino, naging daan daw yaon ng paglaya ng pilipinas... wala akong alam at wala akong maunawaan sa pinagsasabi nila hangang ngayon

O!O
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"ang kalayaan ay ginagawa" - lolita carbon (lokal brown)


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just had my second lower right bicuspid extracted

note: i started this post yesterday right after getting home from having a dentist plier my rotten tooth off but as the effect of the anesthesia began to ebb away i could only finish it today


if the advertisements were to be beLIEved, toothpastes do magic and they are the only key to having a set of hassle-free, adamantium-strength pearly white teeth, but our body's wear and tear (and eventual disintegration at the molecular level) is decided by the genes we inherit and we could only do so much to slow down our bodies' destiny as carcasses, maggot food and fertilizer

O!O
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early milk taste fatigue syndrome and dependence on caffeine (a habit rubbed off on me by my mom who, at 71, is a lifetime caffeine junkie) ensured that i have a fragile dental setup, beginning at age six i have become a habitue of dental clinics (next only to opthalmic and optometric ones), my first dentist was a guy (i later doubted his "guyness") whose idea of making me shake off the tooth extraction fright was to make me grab my balls and hold them tight until the tooth was pulled

it may all be in bad taste to the pitifully lacking in sense of life and living but what the F,
here's my offending tooth i parted ways (and all connections) with yesterday

yesterday, i had my lower right premolar tooth pulled, its decade old filling/sealant (pasta) had somehow chipped away for some time exposing the cavity triggering the prompt resumption of the rotting of the dentin and the pulp upon oxygen exposure and gave that familiar pain of which i have zero tolerance

O!O
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my firstborn Semenelin has far superior dental health at the very outset, her mom had fluoride pills when she (Sem) was still in utero, her milk formula from infancy to being a toddler was the kind advertised as capable of transfoming kids into superheroes, she is still in love with milk at nine, i collected, tagged and preserved her milk teeth which were all in mint condition when pushed out by the outcoming permanent ones, i wish Pinoys have the kind of Sem's teeth when it comes to deciding matters pertaining to nation-building

some of Sem's perfect milk teeth i preserved for future fossil hunters

O!O
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if the biblical accounts are to be taken seriously, the only humans who did not undergo teething were Adam and Eve.. and had no belly buttons either

O!O
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in 1983 Metallica released their debut album Kill 'Em All , it altered the history of metal music forever, blah-blah, included in the album is an amazing bass solo track by their bassist Cliff Burton (Cliff died when the band's tour bus had an accident in Sweden on September 27, 1996) called Anaesthesia (Pulling Teeth)

Cliff 'Em All. Burton on top of his form

O!O
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sharks keep replacing their old teeth with new ones throughout their lives

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reeking of greek geekiness

i don't put silly paranormal flavors in the explanation of coincidences, coincidences are just what they are: COINCIDENCES, in my case at the moment 2006 has been heaping cool greek coincidental stuffs at me, i've posted earlier about how i came across with a dirt cheap pre-owned paperback of Steven Pressfield's mighty Gates Of Fire, a novel about the 300 Spartan warriors who delayed the quarter million Persian hordes' advance to the heartland of 480BC Greece, Pressfield's deft and erudite narrative is so "literarilistic" (my own coinage) that i spit traces of grit, blood and spears' splinters everytime i put down the book momentarily to rest not from eye strain but from the battle fatigue i myself suffer just by reading the detailed account of the carnage;

O!O
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and then there was this casual pc gamer haunting my place who graciously lent me his hi-res scans of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, i was a comics geek back in the 80's and my youthful awe and passion for the illustrated novellas are rekindled after going through the issue # 1 (there are 6 issues in all), Awesome, Brilliant, Captivating.. (you may complete this ABC..), it is better drawn than Sin City (my opinion) and it is also destined to become a hit flick in 2007 (it's shooting with live actors [Gerard Butler as King Leonidas, yeyz!!!] has been done ages ago but the process of CGI hocus pocus keeps the fans in rapt and paroxysmal waiting);

O!O
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and finally, Iron Lore (through THQ) released Titan Quest, a Diablo II clone of a game that for a couple of weeks now has me falling into a relapse of anemia, the game is idiotic and simplistic (by default, it only requires you to move the pointer across the monitor screen and left-click the mouse in varying intensities of frenzy), what arrested me is the epic premise of the storyline: the character you will build and develop (in an addicting and fun way of points allocation, item and accesory blending, skills and masteries management, etc., - like i said, it's an action RPG Diablo II clone) will hack, slash and spellcast his or her way from the polises of Greece to the cavernous dungeons under the Great Pyramids of Egypt and through the Silk Road to Mongolia and the Great Wall of China, all this in an effort to stop a trio of Telkines hellbent on freeing the Titan Typhon, and i won't try to tell about its graphical beauty because something meant to be seen must not be desecrated by written or spoken words (suffice it to say that my 128MB/128-bit GEForce FX 5900 could only run the game at a satisfactory frame rate after i begrudgingly set some video parameters like anti-aliasing, filtering, shadows and reflections to medium level in 800 x 600 dpi resolution (the cost of my dream video card replacement is equivalent to a complete high-end pc unit itself), i have not been into RPG before because i lacked the patience in character management, i played Final Fantasy X when it came out for the Playstation 2 in 2002 because i was simply intrigued by the advent of real-time voice overs in an RPG game, Titan Quest routed the last of my inhibitions and hang-ups toward the RPG genre and i am now happily left-clicking the mouse all through the night, guzzling coffee and losing red blood cells, hoping to finally kill level 42 Typhon (who has now irreverently holed himself up in Mount Olympus) when i finally get my character equipped with hard-to-find anti-elemental and anti-stun equipment or add-ons

an unupdated shot of my Battle Mage character G0m0Lz, i affectionately
call my wife Gomolz when she is not in those moods where she responds
by hurling either a CPU unit or a PC monitor at me

O!O
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life is easier than a video game, using cheat codes is simply lame

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si patEng at si tOn

life's purpose is to make more of itself, you are a hopeless dumb fool if you add or subtract something from that fact, i have so far done my part in serving that purpose twice:


name is Semenelin, from Wolfgang's 1996 second album Semenelin, seen here 6.14.06 ready to waste another ten months in school, we call her "Pateng" because she is the "ate"

O!O
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saulreever, from the Soul Reaver sword in the Legacy of Kain interactive game series, is eight years and one month junior to Pateng, seen here getting the hang of a plastic battery-operated ATV a couple of weeks ago, known to us as "Ton" because his cousin Chantal's hyper-advance vocalization sounds "Saul" "Ton"

O!O
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pee. s.

the effing digital camera used in snapping the photos here has a Richard Collier phases (remember the late Christopher Reeve in Somewhere In Time?) wherein it picks a certain time in the past all by itself and stays there for as long as it likes, what? deus ex machina?

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NoobTube

should have been done with a new post yesterday but my eyes were balls of pain due to sleep deprivation, i stayed up late the other night (well, until the wee hours of the following morning) taking advantage of YouTube's faster loading of video files (those hordes of cyber sociable kids preening their Friendster's page with embedded videos bring YouTube to its knees during the day), i didn't know what had gotten into me but others call it nostalgia: i watched all (well, maybe not all, but a lot, A LOT) those music videos i missed when i was about those Friendster kids age, back then our poorly angled four-element TV antennae caused me a lot of heartache as it usually picked up nothing but static especially during the weekends when i could have caught America's Top Ten, Video Hot Tracks or Video Hit Parade on Channels 9 and 2, respectively, cable tv then was just beginning to creep in our neighborhood and it was such a luxury my poor parents could ill afford, i simply listen with glassy eyes to my better blessed high school classmates talked about China Crisis' Wishful Thinking was incoherent yet an eyecandy nevertheless; or A-ha's Take on Me was amazing in that it's rotoscoped presentation was both traditional and futuristic (!?!); or Joe Jackson's Breaking Us In Two was ohhh sooo mushy but unforgettable (who can blame the romantically hopeless adolescents); or Belinda Carlisle being a standard wet dream in her suggestive movements in Heaven Is A Place On Earth, it was a blast wallowing in the memories of my younger time in front of the pc monitor burning my eyes in all its bright radioactive glare, guzzling coffee by the mugs, tapping my feet on the floor, drumming the desk with my fingers, nodding and bobbing my light-as-hot-air-balloon head and plunging myself into a world of regret in hindsight

O!O
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come the morning after, my head was a mass of throbbing living pain reminiscent of another dimension in my life when quality time with friends was measured by blood alcohol content and the intensity of the hangover, but back then simply losing a night's sleep was no big deal, but then again checking reality reminds me that i am only younger in my daydreams, so i endured the penalty for my previous night's romp down memory lane aboard YouTube: a whole day of fighting monstrous sleepiness to keep myself from keeling over while babysitting part-time students part-time cyberwarriors, phoney chatters and copy-paste-print "re-researchers," and when you are sleep-deprived other unnameable sensations of tortures simultaneously kick-in to remind you with a vengeance that Hypnos and the Sandman are not to be messed with: you seem to feel your brain has somewhat shrunk a bit and its attachment to the inside walls of the cranium (is that the meninges? the surface that gets inflamed in meningitis? oh well, i'm where?) has loosened and every little movement of the head rocks the "suspended" brain sending violent responses in megavoltages of shimmering pain particularly targeting the eyeballs, ahrg!, and true to its essence Murphy's Law rule the moment: there's nothing left of the stockpiled mefenamic acid just when you need to pop the whole blister pack

O!O
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YouTube, iFilm and other flash-based video sharing websites may become a thing of the past or may be reduced into a stale watered-down stump of its current lively form, the battering ram aiming to dismantle these successful sites is the focused effort by the copyright lobby (think RIAA and MPAA) and its growing influence on the US lawmaking body which in turn has the power to whip out international carrot-or-stick compliance mechanism, i have several night stands and quickies more to indulge with YouTube to get to watch some more of my teen year's music videos before the copyright police finally reduce the site into a repository of largely amateur videos whose significance barely deserves neither bandwidth nor server space

O!O
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the music i mentioned above represent my musical taste back in high school, in the middle of blah! college i heard Metallica and i was eaten alive by metal music, i have grown somewhat compromising lately and i now enjoy other musical genres like corny pop, tiresome r&b, relaxing trip-hop, danceable reggaeton, trippy reggae and confrontational gangsta rap, my YouTube trip the other night was capped by great heavy new ones: Pearl Jam's Life Wasted (a stylish anti-war protest), Amorphis' House Of Sleep (forget these Swedish guys' usually-lost-in-translation lyrics, their new vocalist gives a more evolved Amorphis sound) and Sepultura's Convicted In Life (a metal animal rights advocacy anthem, PETA people are having multiple orgasms with every spin this music video), go check them out

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four days the earth was standing still

my digitel's internet service came back early in the morning yesterday after spending four days in the toilet, i had been bugging their call center whose talkers kept informing me of their internet's widespread on-the-blink status due to some "technical problems" while assuring me on the same breath that their men in hard hats were shaking heaven and hell to bring their net back to life, and i kept on calling them still to the extent that they just played muzak on me..

O!O

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it's not like there's no more life when there's no internet connection, it's just that you realize your life's colors go stale when your internet browser just present you with a SERVER NOT FOUND report especially if your job only requires you to monitor a stable internet connection so that gamers can keep roaming their virtual worlds; student-researchers plagiarizing for their assignments; chatters shooting bulls with each other.. well, ok ok, the net has become my constant IV drip feeding my artificial addiction to news, audiovisual entertainment, this blog and all sorts of clutters and banalities unnecessary to an otherwise wholesome, bare bones living

O!O
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seconds after discovering that i was online again my phone rang and it was a digitel talker asking if my net was back, i said yes and i asked if the snafu was caused by some sort of sobotage, he was stunned silent for about three seconds and he stutteringly assured me that "naku hinde, hindi po, wala po namang ganon.. sir..," then he asked "sir, ano ba pangalan n'yo?!," i thought i was the only one paranoid, "ah, ako si Lightning McQueen.."

O!O
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call me an optimist-rationalist but there's always an upside to a loss, i had no internet for four days but i was able to spend a better time finishing Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War (a quirky RTS game i started more than a year ago) and Steven Pressfields' Gates Of Fire (a blood, gore, glory, tears and testosterone novelization of the 300 Spartans' last stand against a quarter million Persian hordes at the Battle Of Thermophylae, the paperback of which i hunted [and found and had for a song at SM Pampanga BookSale outlet, yeah!] after drooling over Frank Miller's 300, the graphic novel rendition of the same historic and history-altering battle); finally, i (together with my wife, Marlyn) was able to take my daughter Semenelin to our common dream movie Silent Hill (based intelligently on the interactive survival-horror game of the same name which i-played-and-finished-while-Marlyn-and-Sem-were-watching in all its four mind-disturbing iterations)

O!O
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the net going on the blink on me for a while reminds me of the line the obsessive-compulsive stripteaser Sharon Stone in Sliver said when she turned off the network of personal TV monitors kept by thevoyeur extraordinaire landlord William Baldwin: "Get a life!"

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what was with "the myopic's compendium" then?

"tmc" then was a trash bin my personal opinion re: campus goings-on: student body politics, campus celebs, campus activities and some music reviews (i was beginning to fall in love with hard rock, metal and protest music back then), basically that column of mine contained the mishmash of my current bias on anything campus, har-har, i kind of miss my writing days, i guess i could have another round of such fun through this blog

why "the myopic's compendium?"

back in the day when my only worry was jeepney fare to and from Araullo University (Cabanatuan City) i had an "opinionated" column in the school paper called "The Myopic's Compendium"