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"

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.."

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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)

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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"