Tuesday, January 05, 2010
On Escape (no, not that crap by Enrique Iglesias)
Woke up at 2:30pm, which is a big deal for me considering the fact that I honestly did not want to get out of bed today. My eyes hurt from reading and writing for too long on the computer (they feel heavy, as if they're trying to force me to close them), it was wayyy after lunch and nobody was home (and I had this stupid notion that the less I moved my body, the less hungry I would feel and I would be able to survive until dinner time at least), and I was right smack in the middle of a funny dream where I was talking Timmi the Internet Tough Girl about how gutsy she was during that Hong Kong incident of hers (this coming from her Facebook rant being the last thing I read before going to sleep).Sigh, dreams and escape. This coming from the fact that the second to the last thing I read before going to sleep was the graphic novel Blankets by Craig Thompson. You see, the problem with all the melodramatic, emo stuff going around nowadays is that it gets easier and easier to distinguish the works that come straight from the heart, and those that are simply trying hard to get attention. Thompson's is a memoir of sorts, so that should tell you something about how heart-tugging this work is. In short, go read this, and see if you don't shed a few tears, or at least feel your heart beating just a little bit harder in the process.
Craig (who is also the protagonist) has two ways of escape from reality: his drawings and his dreams. And I guess this is what my eyes want me to do, at least for today: to escape the harsh realities that are the fact that there's nobody at home, that I'm totally unproductive due to this wasted schedule of mine, that my thesis is still unfinished.
As I am writing this, I hear the first lines of "World Spins Madly On" by the Weepies: "Woke up, and wished that I was dead, with an aching in my head, I lay motionless in bed". Which what I was exactly just a few hours ago, tossing and turning, with a stiff neck, and wondering if it was worth getting up at all.
I flash back to the time I was back in first year. It was the first class of Humanities 1, under Ma'am Ai (who wasn't my friend yet). As an icebreaker of sorts, she asks us what books we like to read. I, being a geek who was obsessed with the Legend of the Five Rings and Magic: the Gathering mythoi, answer:
Me: "I like fantasy, science fiction, that sort of stuff."
Ai: "Oh, so you're an escapist?"
Me: "Um, not really."
Ai: "Ahh, okay. Next?"
To tell you the truth, though, I never knew my answer to Ma'am Ai's question.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
All this microblogging shit is giving everybody ADD
51 character title! Which I can totally Plurk/Tweet! Not!I mean, 140 characters is more than enough for real-time news updates (The best use I've seen so far for the medium. Ingenious, actually). But honestly, if you're planning to write anything more profound than that, then one hundred and forty letters, punctuation marks and spaces combined is not going to get you anywhere near what a good rant, gush or simple musing about anything under the sun and moon can reach. There's a reason why people used to allot entire pages for diary entries, you know.
In short, nobody reaches for the sun and moon any more, content with the airy weightlessness of every hackneyed quote and insignificant detail of their lives for everyone to give their own hackneyed and insignificant comments to.
And please, do not even get me started on the karma system.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Psychometric nostalgia but not really: a not really review of Transformers Encore Generation 1 Optimus Prime for both collectors and non-collectors
(Psychometry is a psychic skill wherein one is able to sense the vibrations that are left on an object by somebody who has handled it, enabling the psychic to sense various details about the object's owner or most recent handler by simply touching the object)
For the longest time, I have wanted a G1 Optimus Prime, my own copy of the now-so iconic mold that has entertained kids until they were old enough to entertain their own kids by buying them their own toys, so they would leave those of their dad alone. Never mind which version it was: I can't afford the vintage one, and besides, I'm going to be playing with it anyway. The TFC (Transformers Collection) series version was wayyy too expensive (around 10-12k, to be exact) for my taste, and Hasbro's recently released 25th Anniversary Prime was fugly and getting lots of bad reviews, so in the end I decided on the most recent Japanese release, the Transformers Encore version: not too expensive (usually around 2.5-3k, but I got mine for 2k yay) and one of the more decent-looking versions nowadays.
Funny how toys have changed in the last twenty years, I say to myself as I look at the box's contents. Back then, you had to take time to clip stuff and stick stickers onto your Optimus Prime toy and its trailer before you could play with it properly, a pre-play stage of sorts where you could sort things out mentally before actually handling the toy the way it was supposed to be handled. Compare this with today's toys, where everything is practically ready to play with out of the box, hence the frustration of some kids and parents when they find out the toy was supposed to have a launching missile that they accidentally threw away with the box.
Of all the Optimus Primes designed and released through the years, Generation 1 Optimus Prime still probably has the best looking truck mode. Why? Simple: it was meant to look good as a truck more than anything else. Nowadays, designers try to make it look as both truck and robot. Even the Masterpiece version (the largest toy in the cabinet shot, Generation 1 Optimus is the truck on Masterpiece's back) pales in comparison of truck modes, and the Masterpiece toy, I will tell you, is anything but simple.
Transformation is as simple as it gets. Thanks to the lack of intricate joints to hide something as big as a fist in, you have to plug in two fists from the included extra parts in order to transform Optimus into robot mode. Somewhere, somebody is reading this now and wondering when exactly did he lose the fists of the Generation 1 Optimus Prime he had when he was little.
There are hinged joints on Optimus' shoulders, elbows, hips and knees. By today's standards, articulation like this would only count as decent if it were on a figure less than a third of its size. The head can't even move from side to side. Sure, you can place him into an 'I am raising my gun because I am the leader of the Autobots and I want all Autobots to transform and roll out!', but that's about it.
Oh yeah, and in case I forget to mention it: for all its simplicity, Generation 1 Optimus Prime still affords to have a decent amount of metal parts, specifically its legs and feet. You weigh him in your hand, and you know that you're holding a good, weighty toy. Nowadays, even the Japanese, the genius toy makers that they are, hesitate to use metal as generously, due to its heaviness and because, well, it's just a lot more expensive to incorporate into toys nowadays. And this is why chromed plastic is so popular nowadays.
As I transform Optimus into robot mode and back into a truck for the third time before typing this and going to sleep, I get a weird feeling, something I can only describe as akin to a mix of psychometry (which is impossible since this toy is brand new) and nostalgia (which is impossible since I have never owned a Generation 1 Optimus Prime toy before this). It's somewhat an endearing look, the way a mother looks at her son, as she both savors the present moment and looks back as the time he allowed her to carry him in her arms: a look at a past time when toys that could both transform and actually move their arms after being transformed were the coolest thing ever, when oh-so-durable metal was a staple for toys, when nobody cared for such alien concepts as 'poseability' and 'show-accuracy', when toys felt more like toys when you held them with both hands (and needed more care as well, lest you lose a fist).
Don't lose a fist.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Because I missed writing for the heck of it...
Amidst the information overload that is a Jeopardy episode (never mind if it is the Teen Tourmanent, where the questions are easy as hell), my mind is swimming with a hundred thousand thoughts: stories, both real and not, that I have neither time nor effort to place on paper, for reasons too stupid to rationalize. My thesis, a look at three contemporary Filipino marvelous realism novels, is, as always, at the forefront of my mind, but at the back of my fingers. It stifles me: nothing can escape, can come into existence, whether on paper on the binary. Anything that does manage to escape is turned random, into a senseless pile that appears not to deserve to be written in the first place.Life is a meaningless cycle of food, movies and the Internet. I need to write, something that doesn't involve Transformers or my thesis. I need to get out of this before my parents get too pissed off at how the cycle has its grip on me.
No, photography, the Transformers forums and Facebook aren't helping.
Monday, September 07, 2009
If only it was this easy to write all the time...
I wish blogs were like sale threads in a forum. That way I could simply shout Bump, Update or Bumpdate and everyone would be looking around again.But that's just me. Bleargh.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Just so I can say I still write something here every now and then.
I am typing this in the hospital because I am here to visit my lolo after an unsuccessful toy hunting morning. My lola jokes to my recovering lolo that I only came to show him that I had a haircut and had my beard trimmed, which I did last Wednesday. Lolo hated my long hair and beard, he always told me I looked like garbage. Good thing that lolo is recovering nicely, the only thing I could think of alongside thinking of typing this out was whether I would say that little piece of trivia about my hair and beard on lolo's funeral, which, thankfully, does not seem to be coming anytime soon.Blame mama's ominous mood this morning, when she left to be with lolo on his operation.
