Monthly Archives: March 2010

me want earrings

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I love earrings. Now you know what to get me for my birthday and/or Christmas! Or on any random day, really. :D (You can also get me some nice earring compartments or a cheap jewelry chest. Right now I store them all in an ice cream tin can from Yellow Cab. They all look rather sad in there.)

I bought these yesterday:

I love this pair!

I also bought a necklace for good measure.

In they all go to the tin can! Ha!

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Right now I want some bracelets. And wide headbands with feathers (yeahhhh). And some rings. Big, chunky, clunky rings. I’ll look for those next. Any recos? Shops or personal stash or whatnot? :) They better be cheap. None of those 300-peso-a-bracelet nonsense.

And more earrings of course, for one can’t have too many earrings.

* * *

And there you go: another worthless blog post. :) I’ll stay offline for the rest of the week, writing and reading and making myself fat.(I’m about to finish one story, and I think I have one that needs editing. Hopefully a poem idea slaps me in the face soon so I can write one again. But fiction’s treating me fine, somehow, so it’s all right.)

Till then!

early reviews for “Salot”

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The story won’t advertise itself (it certainly won’t put on a glittery dress and a feather boa and strut its stuff for more readers) so I posted the Demons of the New Year link at the LJ comm ontdcreepy (it got the LJ spotlight some weeks back). Some of the members were kind enough to leave comments about my story:

of course, I had to sit here and read at least yours before starting the day. I loved this! I particularly loved how you ended it, and I won’t say anything more along those lines so as not to spoil it for anyone else. You’re an amazing writer! :-D (dark_sinestra)

Wow! Loved it…you really have a way with words. :) (chromachord)

I love your writing style! You’re certainly very talented. The story had a very dreamy, almost nightmarish tone, and you balanced the narrator’s skepticism and half-belief very well. Amazing. (rtuko)

Thanks, guys!

If you want to read my story, come on over. (Edit: I forgot to say – this story’s based on a personal experience Almi related to me one slow day at the office. I first encountered the “salot” imagery in an article about diseases during the American occupation. I believe it was by Gilda Cordero-Fernando, let me go check. I have used it in my story “Reunion”, which appeared in the Philippines Free Press, and in the prose poem “Dreams After the Storm”, which appeared in the Ruin/Resolve charity anthology.)

If you have an LJ account, you can add me. My LJ blog’s called blissery blogs.

Feel free to share the link to the e-anthology. Orayt! :D

rare cuts

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If you haven’t read Hellblazer before, and you don’t have the time and resources to read the entire series, this is the best volume you can get.

From the DC website:

RARE CUTS is a treat for longtime readers and newcomers alike, assembling six issues of JOHN CONSTANTINE: HELLBLAZER that have never before been collected. Created by some of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers and artists in comics, the issues featured include: #11, which relates the horrifying events of Newcastle, 1978, that ended with an innocent girl’s soul condemned to Hell and Constantine confined to an asylum; #25-26, in which new weapons testing goes awry and looses terrible psychic impulses upon a dying northern town; #35, which tells a tale of Constantine’s roughand – tumble childhood and the beginnings of his unique skills; #56, an object lesson in the perils of narcissism and doing deals with demons; and #84, which reveals the origin of Constantine’s friendship with his best mate Chas.

I’m confused though: DC also said that Rare Cuts was created to “help celebrate the release of the Warner Bros. Pictures film Constantine”. Er, is this to show the ignorant moviegoers that Keanu Reeve’s Constantine looks nothing like the original Constantine? Or that Chas isn’t supposed to be young? Or that the film’s story, in comparison with the comic series, just feels…wrong?

I’ll have to admit though: I watched the film when it came out, and without having read the comics first. And I liked it. Yeah. Heh.

Anyway, this volume also contains an updated Hellblazer timeline. Neat.

* * *

And just like that, I have run out of comics to read. Back to the House of Leaves then.

kingdom come

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What a way to interpret the Book of Revelations.

Minister Norman McCay is present during Wesley Dodd’s (Sandman) final moments. Dodd has been having nightmares, which he believes are visions of what is yet to come. For McCay, however, the world cannot experience anything worse than this – ten years before, the Joker has opened fire on the Daily Planet offices, killing Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane. Superman has exiled himself. With Superman and his peers gone, the world is overrun by metahumans, who battle openly on the streets.

During one such fight, the entire state of Kansas is irradiated. Superman returns after the tragedy, but will the younger and amoral metahumans, who believe the S on his chest means “senile”, listen to him? And what if they don’t?

McCay now has Dodd’s visions. Everything looks bleak.

* * *

Great comic. And the art is just amazing.

Just one thing, though:

WHAT?

Transliterally this means: “The Siva head is here! He will kill head!” Perhaps “Siva” is a typo. If Siva is meant to be “sira”, this means: “The crazy man is here! He will kill head!”

That doesn’t make sense.

It should have read: Nandito na ang sira-ulo. Papatayin niya tayo. “The crazy man is here. He will kill us all.”

That makes more sense.

Do your research! *shakes fist*

:-p

open gaming meet

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Did you hear the wind on Friday? I was in QC at the time, and it was howling and we thought it was going to pour, so we just stayed indoors and ate pizza and chocolate. Diet becomes non-existent in the face of apocalypse.

On Saturday the wind died down, and I went with Jaykie to my first Open Gaming Meet (OGM).

I’ve never been to an OGM before. In fact, I’ve never heard of the event before Jaykie mentioned it during our dating days of yore.

Anyway, set-up is simple: you pay an entrance fee, and you and your friends get to play whatever boardgame/card game is available on the center table. I suppose you can also bring your own game.(The OGM is held once every month in SM Marikina. Entrance fee is P50.)

Simply put, this is the place where a fairly large number of geeks gather together to play instead of conducting, I don’t know, experiments for nuclear research. (Because this can’t be done in Marikina. Have you seen the garbage dump site just outside the mall? The damn place would explode.)

Jaykie gets to have a big-ass ID because he’s an OGM regular:

We played the card game Bang (me, Jaykie, Jme, Beej, Phil), wherein I played the Sheriff, and I won!

Then we (me, Jaykie, Sam, Derps) played Kragmortha, which I thought was a brutal game. Reminds me too much of Truth & Consequence and high school. I won’t play this again LOL.

Jaykie and I watched some games for a while, then played Labyrinth.

Last game of the day for us (me, Jaykie, Derps) was Kill Doctor Lucky. God, what an infuriating game. I wasn’t even able to take a picture of it, because we couldn’t kill Dr. Lucky. (Derps offed him, eventually. After what felt like five hours.)

That was fun. I’d go to the OGM again. :) (This picture’s from Sam.)

* * *

After that, off we go to Mandaluyong for Carl’s housewarming party. AND WE GOT STUCK IN THE FUCKING ELEVATOR. Well, just for three minutes but did you read that? WE GOT STUCK IN THE FUCKING ELEVATOR. I sort of freaked out when I imagined the elevator car falling down to the ground floor. Damn my brain. But then two guys pried the doors open and we were free! We were between floors 4 and 5 (Carl’s on the 8th). A scene straight out of Being John Malkovich, as Jaykie pointed out.

The hell with nuclear research. Let’s make overloading a myth. An elevator with infinite space! Yes? Yes?

I really need to diet.

demons

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The e-anthology “Demons of the New Year” is now live! (-live -live)

From Karl de Mesa’s introduction:

From the traditional bestiary of underworld nasties literally knocking on our door (Eliza Victoria’s “Salot”) to the breed that’s bent on inciting us to sell our souls (Rommel Santos’s “Best Served Cold”), up to the very 2000s variety of whispering devils that motivate us to go walking through the urban abyss unarmed (Don Jaucian’s prosaic “Different Degrees of Night”), or the flimsy reasons that incite us to perpetrate vile things upon our kind (Marguerite Alcazaraen De Leon’s “K-10 Mushroom”). All of them, their name is demon.

The stories are here. My story is here. Enjoy!

the league

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Finally! I’ve read the first two volumes, and I don’t know who’d be kind enough to lend me Black Dossier and Century (the third volume), but isn’t this so much fun? Adventures and witty writing and I envy Alan Moore you know. What an exciting story to write. Cross-over fan fiction. I see Mina Harker (Murray here) from Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde (well mostly Hyde) from you-know-where, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and ooh the tripods from War of the Worlds – bet I know what H-142 is, wink wink. I’m not too familiar with the other characters (sorry Quatermain), so it’s possible I just missed some hilarious in-joke. Still, great read.

So maybe I should watch the movie just to annoy myself, meeheehee.

dinner party + weekend

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Dinner with Research peeps and friends for Ate Julie’s birthday. Thanks for the invite! So much food I even had some chicken to take home with me, har har.

Kroc Grille, Shangri-La. Photos from Cyril. And Andrea.

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Weekend was too much Project Runway and Top Chef and stir-friend veggies with oyster sauce and homemade chicken noodles. I like boys who can cook. This boy in particular yihee. ;)

synecdoche, this place

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Synecdoche, New York

Photo from Amazon

Quotes from IMDB

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, which was enough to make me want to see this film. Just dove into it not knowing the story, and not knowing how to see the story. A mistake.This is a film where the edges blur, where dream and reality merge and interact. I was a stubborn viewer; I kept insisting that everything I saw onscreen was literal. And so the images came and I just filed them away as frustrating and inaccessible. One character lives in a house that is eternally on fire, and I kept thinking “fireplace gone awry” and “arson” and finally, “what the fuck?” Only after I saw the film did I realize I was looking at it the wrong way. It is a dream. It is a view of a life that looks in places other films avoid – from a bloody stool to a man’s many neuroses. It is a synecdoche – a part for a whole, a life representative of other lives. (“What was once before you – an exciting, mysterious future – is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen.”)

Only in looking back did I fully realize how brutal this film is, how big and incredible and haunting and ambitious. And frightening. And sad. It is a story of a life (“As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving – not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are…Gone.”) – a life I didn’t want to have, but probably had or will have (for don’t we live many lives, don’t we suffer and un-suffer from many crippling sadnesses?), even for just a moment or two.

In the Loop

A comedy about the bureaucracy and sound bites and leaks and spins, and  how a single word in an interview (“unforeseeable”) can lead to war . Ah, politics. Also says something about climbing the mountain of conflict, like a Nazi Julie Andrews. Really smart writing.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Stupid film. Didn’t even bother to finish this.

new story

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I just heard from Lit Ed Sarge Lacuesta that my story “Sand, Crushed Shells, Chicken Feathers” will be appearing in the March 22 issue of the Philippines Free Press. Based in part on my grandmother’s witchcraft stories, and in part on a drug addiction docu I saw some years ago. (Yes you read that right.) Do buy a copy! :)

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I wasn’t able to attend the Gaiman event (work and all), but hey congrats to the winners! Rocket Kapre’s got a partial winner list here. Here’s a full list from Bibliophile Stalker.

I felt bad for Manix’s disqualification. I mean, Fully Booked did take a looooong time to announce the winners.

But anyway.