Roy Tang

Resources

The content of this post is regarding my own opinion and who I plan to vote for. If you want to do your own research (I highly recommend it), here are some links to get you started:

• Movement for Good Governance briefers on Senatorial candidates
• Rappler Senatorial profiles
• I would also Google “rappler [candidate name] interview” for the interview article for each candidate (too many to list here)

Here’s a link to a Google doc of my own notes on each candidate, which I used as basis for recommendations below. (I didn’t want to clutter up the blog post with details)

Recommendations

A number of people have asked me to recommend who they should vote; while I prefer that they do their own research I don’t mind giving suggestions. Here are my recommendations:

Strongly recommended: Jun Magsaysay, Risa Hontiveros, Teddy Casino

It’s okay to vote for: Legarda, Escudero, Pimentel, Madrigal, Zubiri, Hagedorn, Poe

It’s okay to vote for the following if you don’t mind them being members of or associated with political dynasties: Cayetano, Gordon, Angara, Ejercito, Aquino

It’s okay to vote for the following if you don’t mind their strong association with religious groups: Delos Reyes, Villanueva

Definitely DO NOT VOTE: Honasan, Trillianes, Maceda, Mitos Magsaysay, Villar, Enrile, Binay, Cojuangco

For the “it’s okay to vote for” groups, just use your own preferences, i.e. if you don’t like Erap you probably won’t vote for JV Ejercito.

My Ticket

The following will most likely be the 12 I will vote on Monday (barring something ridiculous happening):

1. Jun Magsaysay (Team PNoy)
2. Risa Hontiveros (Team PNoy)
3. Teddy Casino (Independent)
4. Legarda (Team PNoy)
5. Escudero (Team PNoy)
6. Pimentel (Team PNoy)
7. Madrigal (Team PNoy)
8. Zubiri (UNA)
9. Hagedorn (Independent)
10. Gordon (UNA)
11. Angara (Team PNoy)
12. Aquino (Team PNoy)

I understand that the choices aren’t perfect (I’m not too fond of some of them…), but we have a limited selection of viable candidates and I’d rather fill up all 12 slots to at least have an infinitesimally small chance that the candidates I don’t want don’t get in.

What about the Party List? There are really too many Party Lists to evaluate. Just don’t vote for some ridiculous group; look for a group with a strong advocacy and track record. My personal preference is for #95 AGHAM Party List, because SCIENCE! Here’s a list of legislation they’ve supported if you’re interested.

That’s the last post from me before the elections on Monday (I’ll probably be ranting more on Twitter). If you have a chance to vote go out and do so, but be sure to do so wisely; it’s your privilege and an expression of what you want for this country. Let’s hope that the surveys are wrong and the voting public miraculously smartens up.

Edit: The original recommendations list missed out Grace Poe. Also added a short note on imperfect choices.

It’s easy to blame the poor, the masses for voting into power devious politicians, the corrupt, those with no track record, political dynasties based on money, survey results, name recognition or who has the most giveaways. But take a look at the number of decisions that have to be made when you go vote in an election (let’s say it’s also a presidential election so that we have a complete view):

• You need to choose a president out of maybe 6-8 candidates
• You need to choose a vice president out of maybe 6-8 candidates
• You need to choose 12 senators from a pool of 20-30 or more candidates
• You need to choose a congressman from maybe 4-6 candidates
• You need to choose a governor (I’m from Metro Manila, we don’t have a guvnor so I’m just guessing here) from maybe 3-5 candidates
• You need to choose a mayor from maybe 3-5 candidates
• You need to choose a vice mayor from maybe 3-5 candidates
• You need to choose god knows how many councilors (I seriously have no idea, is it 6?) from who knows how many candidates
• You need to choose a party-list from over a hundred choices

In order to “vote wisely”, for each of those choices, you’d need to have some idea of who they are, what their background is, what their advocacies are, what their stand is on the issues, what bills they have pushed/sponsored/passed (if they had previous legislative experience), etc. For all of those candidates! I live a comfortable life and have a reasonable amount of free time and even I don’t want to do that! Not to mention that unlike me, a very, very large percentage of the voting population don’t have easily available internet access so that they can do their own research on candidates’ backgrounds. They’re not on Facebook all the time reading about Nancy’s shenanigans or how Jack Enrile doesn’t want you to look closely at a murder rap in his history. They’re too busy with more mundane everyday concerns like how to earn money, where they’re going to get food to feed their large families, etc. They just don’t have the time, inclination or opportunity to soak up all the relevant information that would let them make an informed choice.

So what do they do, they do what any regular, sane person does when faced with an overwhelming amount of information, they use filters. But their filters are silly things like survey results (“Other people think this candidate is okay, so I guess I can vote for him”), celebrity endorsements (it’s sad that former Sen. Jun Magsaysay only got a bump in survey results when he got Sir Chief to endorse him) or worse things like bribery, vote buying through giveaways, etc.

What am I saying, what am I talking about? All this time I’ve been harping about how voter education is important, but how it’s delivered needs to be thought about. We can’t just flood people with information, they’re just going to be overwhelmed and the silly yet simpler things like inane political ads are going to win out. We need to, I dunno, find a way to provide better, easier filters for people. I don’t know how, I’m not that smart. Not yet.

“But Roy,” I can hear you objecting already, “elections are serious business deciding the future of our country! It’s important, and they should take it seriously and think very hard about their choices!” You’re absolutely right that it’s important, but the problem is that for a vast majority of poor people, they have a lot of other more important, more urgent things to worry about. Elections affect what happens to our country three, five, ten years down the road, but a lot of people have trouble figuring out how they’re going to get through the next day. The feedback loop for getting results from elections is just too long for people to take it seriously. Now, we can suggest that maybe, just maybe, we can just ask those people not to vote if they’re not going to take it seriously? Maybe, but that’s hardly enforceable in any reasonable way. And you’re going to get accused of being anti-democracy or whatever.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – William Churchill.

I don’t have a solution, I’m just rambling. Maybe this is really how it’s supposed to work, democracy? We live with what the people choose, even if they’re bad choices. Democracy is very effective at a small scale (“Guys let’s vote on where we should have dinner!”) but I feel like the logistics of it all gets way way more difficult as we scale up to the level of an entire country. Maybe smarter people than me have proposed solutions, I dunno, comment and give me links if you know of them. Who are the best democracies in the world and how do they get away with it? Certainly not the United States with their two-party system and their lobbyists and what not.

Although now that I think about it, it might help if we reduce the number of choices that would need to be made. The simplest changes are to have president/VP be voted in together, same for mayor/vice mayor, and to have regional senators instead of national so that each person only needs to choose one senator (this has the pleasant side effect of reducing the amount of money needed to win a senate seat). I have no solution for party-list, I’d rather have it be removed if no solution can be found

And we need to start thinking about these things even outside of the electoral cycle (probably a bit hypocritical of me, I only post about election stuff during the election season). Going about ways to improve the next elections need to start as soon as the last elections end. Sometimes I feel like the Comelec has crammed a lot of stuff into the past year or so (registration, source code audits, rulings on party-lists, etc.) Why can’t we ask candidates to register 3 years before the election? That way voters have a lot more time to become familiar with them and the candidates are forced to flesh out long-term plans instead of making excuses that they don’t have time for debates.

Okay, I complain a lot, but I’m still going to vote. I’m not one of those people who complains but won’t vote. We should vote because (a) it’s our responsibility and (b) it’s an expression of what we as individuals desire to have in leaders of our country. And it’s probably our responsibility to vote wisely too, though I’m not sure that’s a rule encoded somewhere, the Comelec certainly doesn’t emphasize it.

To be honest, I’m still not sure of which senators I’ll be voting for, most of my slots are up in the air (although there are many candidates I’m surely NOT voting for). I’ll probably finalize my choices the weekend before the elections, and as has been my tradition, I will post my choices in this space. I’m registered in a different district than where I’m currently residing so I don’t vote for congressman and councilors, so my only choices this time around are the 12 senators and mayor/vice mayor of QC.

People who follow me on Facebook or Twitter know that I’ve been recently made a number of anti-Nancy Binay posts. For a while now I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about that and several other election-related thoughts. I’ve decided to present these thoughts it as a fictional chat between made-up characters. Totally fictional characters. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead = pure coincidence. (Although if you must try to imagine these characters, you can imagine jaeger as a dashing idealist, in-in as a cynical pragmatist, ORYLY as a carefree vagabond and Scrappy coco as someone who just wandered into the wrong room.)

10:04:04 * Scrappy coco will Nancy Binay win?

10:04:18 ‹jaeger› it is likely

10:04:28 ‹tzia_n› will you rage?

10:04:32 ‹Scrappy coco› yes

10:04:33 ‹jaeger› not really

10:04:45 ‹jaeger› i don’t mind, idiots need representation too

10:08:03 ‹in-in› tsaka bat hate na hate mo si nancy binay over the other candidates? what makes her extra stupid?

10:08:20 ‹jaeger› nauna sya e

10:08:24 ‹jaeger› i dont hate her

10:08:27 ‹jaeger› but she’s arrogant

10:08:33 ‹jaeger› ok lang kasi yung walang experience

10:08:44 ‹jaeger› as long as you acknowledge it

10:09:02 ‹jaeger› and talk about how you plan to surpass it

10:09:09 ‹jaeger› but she doesn’t talk about anything

10:09:19 ‹jaeger› her ads are just literal motherhood statements

10:09:32 ‹jaeger› and may arrogance kasi, especially from the father

10:09:39 ‹jaeger› na qualified daw sya simply because anak nya

10:10:00 ‹in-in› ic ic

10:10:14 ‹jaeger› pero yung unang commercial pa lang nainis na ko

10:10:21 ‹jaeger› sya ata yung unang nagcommercial

10:10:26 ‹jaeger› before pa nung campaign period

10:10:38 ‹in-in› di ba si villar?

10:10:44 ‹in-in› buti na lang wala kaming tv

10:10:48 ‹in-in› lol

10:10:53 ‹jaeger› ok lang naman ung nagdecide ka magrun for senator kahit walang experience, kahit sino naman pwede mangarap

10:11:31 ‹jaeger› actually, almost all the political ads are annoying

10:11:43 ‹jaeger› una ko lang napanood ung kay nancy so she’s been annoying the longest time

10:12:12 ‹Scrappy coco› lol isa pa yung kay Enrile

10:12:14 ‹Scrappy coco› lel

10:12:24 ‹Scrappy coco› annoying song

10:12:30 ‹Scrappy coco› plus annoying gesture

10:12:38 ‹Scrappy coco› annoying tagline

10:13:14 ‹in-in› annoying everything

10:13:23 ‹in-in› enrile daming pera

10:13:45 ‹in-in› he doesn’t look trustworthy as well. maski si jpe shady din actually yung past.

10:14:09 ‹in-in› i can feel some littlefinger vibes from jpe, sr. actually since before pa

10:14:48 ‹Scrappy coco› daming flipflopping ni sr

10:17:34 ‹Scrappy coco› im really annoyed with the fact na dynasty na ang lumalabas pero sasabihin lng nila “let the people decide”.

10:17:59 ‹Scrappy coco› #randomrant

10:18:53 ‹jaeger› that’s not really a problem

10:19:00 ‹jaeger› kasi ung people talaga ung problem

10:19:17 ‹Scrappy coco› yeah in a way, people din may kasalanan

10:19:20 ‹ORYLY› if only we could somehow leverage the power of the information age

10:19:22 ‹jaeger› the dynasty restriction is just a hack to attempt to minimize the problem

10:19:30 ‹ORYLY› yeah

10:20:30 ‹jaeger› dapat may some sort of viral facebook meme

10:20:46 ‹jaeger› like “change your profile pic to this icon if you’re going to vote intelligently”

10:20:49 ‹jaeger› lol i dunno

10:21:04 ‹in-in› ahahaha

10:21:07 ‹jaeger› marami namang smart people sa pilipinas, someone needs to figure something like this out

10:21:07 ‹Scrappy coco› also binay is arrogant when she said in a statement that sth like ayaw nya makipagdebate, kitakits na lng sa senate floor

10:21:09 ‹in-in› and what will that do?

10:21:28 ‹jaeger› in-in at the very least raise awareness

10:21:39 ‹jaeger› and baka may peer pressure

10:21:49 ‹in-in› sabagay nagawan nga ng TRO yung cybercrime bill

10:21:51 ‹jaeger› not just the profile pic thing

10:21:57 ‹jaeger› dapat may some sort of manifesto

10:22:02 ‹in-in› from just changing our profile pics to black

10:22:45 ‹jaeger› well, most of the internet is already against nancy lol

10:23:13 ‹jaeger› the problem is really the loads of people who are easily fooled by the going around and shaking hands, cheap giveaways, mababaw na commercials

10:23:42 ‹jaeger› *easily swayed

10:24:45 ‹jaeger› oh, and one should talk to people

10:24:47 ‹jaeger› on the street

10:24:53 ‹jaeger› taxi drivers, jeepney drivers

10:25:06 ‹jaeger› not necessarily to convince them of anything

10:25:11 ‹jaeger› but just to get them thinking

10:25:44 ‹jaeger› i say this but i dont really do it. may risk of getting into a politically heated debate with a man who could get you killed if he gets careless

10:25:57 ‹ORYLY› hehe

10:26:22 ‹jaeger› > ‹jaeger› but just to get them thinking <- and maybe convince them to talk to other people too. parang pyramiding

10:26:24 ‹ORYLY› but does it help when you do it at that scale?

10:26:34 ‹ORYLY› ah, try to get a meme going

10:26:36 ‹jaeger› that’s where the pyramiding comes in!

10:27:00 ‹ORYLY› kasi you need to make it virulent

10:27:09 ‹ORYLY› catchy songs are virulent

10:27:09 ‹jaeger› kaya nga kelangan maraming tao ang gumagawa

10:27:12 ‹jaeger› it cant just be me

10:27:20 ‹jaeger› oh man, have you seen the comelec ads

10:27:26 ‹jaeger› about ung mga bawal na election practices

10:27:33 ‹jaeger› grabe ang obvious na low budget lol

10:27:39 ‹in-in› > ‹jaeger› the problem is really the loads of people who are easily fooled by the going around and shaking hands, cheap giveaways, mababaw na commercials >> nahh they’re easily swayed by the MOOLAH

10:27:40 ‹ORYLY› I haven’t turned on the TV since forever

10:27:56 ‹in-in› and the intelligent people are not registered

10:27:57 ‹Scrappy coco› si mr bawal!

10:28:06 ‹jaeger› ibang issue pa yung vote buying

10:28:09 ‹ORYLY› that’s because the really intelligent thing is to sway other people

10:28:15 ‹ORYLY› not to vote intelligently yourself

10:28:19 ‹jaeger› pero unti-unti rin yun magtuturn if people start thinking

10:29:07 ‹ORYLY› yeah, but isn’t that the riddle of the century?

10:30:47 ‹jaeger› what do you mean?

10:30:55 ‹jaeger› i was thinking of writing a blog post about all of this

10:31:03 ‹jaeger› but now i think i’ll just paste this chat log lol

10:31:12 ‹jaeger› it covers most of the things i was thinking about

10:31:39 ‹jaeger› probably cut the part about enrile (libel lolz)

10:32:11 ‹ORYLY› making people start thinking is hard

10:32:23 ‹ORYLY› well, doing it at a scale that matters

10:32:42 ‹jaeger› if it was easy, it would already be done

10:32:47 ‹jaeger› anything worth doing is hard

10:33:06 ‹ORYLY› yeah, I mean you’ve come back to the same problem that everyone came across before

10:33:08 ‹ORYLY› other people!

10:33:53 ‹derp› > ‹in-in› and the intelligent people are not registered <– woohoo! I’m intelligent!

10:34:05 ‹jaeger› we just need more ideas. there are lots of smart people that could be helping – social scientists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, etc. – who might be able to come up with ways to more easily propagate stuff like this

10:35:22 * ORYLY they’re working for advertising companies and the campaign management

10:36:54 ‹jaeger› voter education is important, but practically no one is talking about it though

10:37:15 ‹Scrappy coco› should the media?

10:37:16 ‹jaeger› not even self-professed reformists

10:37:16 ‹ORYLY› funds, yeah

10:38:08 ‹jaeger› feeling ko delikado kasi to talk about voter education kasi you might offend the masses? I dunno

10:38:53 ‹ORYLY› is that it?

10:38:56 ‹ORYLY› sounds like a neutral topic

10:39:01 ‹ORYLY› maybe because it’s a boring topic

10:39:33 ‹jaeger› well that too

10:39:41 ‹jaeger› it’s not like candidates actually talk about issues!

10:39:50 ‹in-in› offend the masses?

10:39:53 ‹jaeger› well sometimes they do, but not when their audience is the masses

10:40:14 ‹ORYLY› maybe the important things just have to be framed correctly?

10:40:28 ‹ORYLY› framed interestingly, I mean

10:41:00 ‹ORYLY› framed scandalously

10:41:00 ‹jaeger› framed with MONEY

10:41:01 ‹jaeger› jk

10:41:07 ‹jaeger› ooh scandalously haha

10:41:32 ‹jaeger› may scandal video talking about voting wisely

10:41:52 ‹Scrappy coco› lel

10:41:56 ‹jaeger› or or or

10:42:13 ‹jaeger› kris aquino complaining about her ex husband not voting wisely

10:42:34 ‹jaeger› may iyak iyak pa

10:42:43 ‹ORYLY› fund it

10:42:47 ‹ORYLY› err

10:42:50 ‹ORYLY› crowdfund it

10:42:54 ‹ORYLY› grassroots

10:42:55 ‹ORYLY› yeaaaah

10:42:56 ‹jaeger› lol kickstarter

10:43:27 * ORYLY poof for social change

10:44:06 ‹Scrappy coco› or or or Janine Tugonon breaking up with BF on Kris TV for not voting wisely

10:44:07 ‹jaeger› ok i guess that’s enough material

10:44:10 ‹jaeger› lol

Wednesday, March 20, 7:56pm We were four of us walking down the barely lit passage on the side of the building. The guard had lazily pointed us to a large open door near the back of the building. The interior was a studio-type area and there was a group of three women dressed in white who had arrived ahead of us and we followed them up a narrow set of stairs to an elevated lounge area with chairs and tables. We recognized some of the faces already there so we knew we were in the right place. No, we weren’t there for some illicit meetup of any sort; we were there to participate in something a bit more geeky. We were here for a quiz night.

Quiz nights (or pub quizzes, as they’re known in Britain) at their heart are simple affairs. You get a bunch of friends to form a team and you go to the event venue for a night of answering questions on various topics, competing with other teams. There’s usually food and alcohol involved too. This particular quiz night we were attending was Geekfight, a monthly event which was coming back from a three-month hiatus. Their questions usually revolved around pop culture and traditionally geeky exploits. That means you knowledge of the minutiae of movies, TV shows, comic books and other such channels of geek culture.

We’ve arrived early since we didn’t know where the venue was and didn’t want to get lost. Aside from the organizers we are the only team already present. We jokingly said that maybe that meant we could win the event for once. I’ve been participating in quiz nights for more than three years now by my reckoning, but we’ve never finished first, the closest being a previous Geekfight where we tied for first place and I dropped the crucial tiebreaker question.

We’re looking to change that tonight though. Each quiz night is usually divided into several rounds of questions, with each round following a certain category of questions. For Geekfight, the categories are announced ahead of time so we know that tonight’s questions will be all about movies and we figure we have a solid chance. Two more of our group arrive so that we hit the Geekfight maximum of six members per team. We order some pizza from the pizzeria out front since the venue doesn’t serve food.

The place starts to fill in with other teams just as we’re finishing our pizza, though we don’t really mingle. “I feel like a lot of the people here know each other except for us,” one of us jokes, which starts a healthy discussion on our being introverts and our Myers-Briggs classifications. Still, we recognize many of the teams and attendees by face and by team name, and a few by name. A number of these players and teams also attend another of our regular haunts: quiz nights at Amici Greenhills which is held every first Thursday of the month. Amici’s question set is a bit wider and less involved with details as compared to Geekfight but still focused on pop culture, and the food is usually much better.

It takes a while before all the teams are assembled (probably had the same trouble as us finding the place) so the event starts off a bit later than the 9pm call time. The organizers have a projector set up to show slides against the far side of the room. The host (a guy who looks like one of our ex-officemates) calls out the rules and categories. Each team is approached by a scorer and is given a small whiteboard and a marker to use to show their answers. The host is going to call out each question as they appear on the slides and give the teams some time usually around 30 seconds to scrawl an answer onto their boards. After some time the host counts down from 5 then asks the team to raise their boards. The host will then call out each answer (or not, depending on how lazy he’s feeling) before going to the next slide to show the answer. Each round will have ten such questions.

Rounds one and two. The event kicks off with a round on Sports Movies which gets us scratching our head over questions such as what team Tidwell played for in Jerry Maguire [1] and what Kevin Bacon movie has him recruiting basketball players in Africa [2]. Halfway through the round I predict that we’re going to get a Dodgeball question and sure enough the very next slide asks us to name the gym opposite Average Joe’s in that movie [3]. The second round is on Science Fiction movies which leads to me struggling to remember the name of Emmet Brown’s dog in the year 1955 in the movie Back to the Future [4] (it’s not Einstein!) and the technical name for the liquid metal that composed the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day [5]

Unlike Geekfight and Amici which focus more on pop-culture topics, the first time we went to a quiz night was at a venue that tended towards more academic subjects – which was how we found out about our team’s unfortunate weakness to geography and history questions. That was at the first establishment to start running quiz nights in Metro Manila: Murphy’s, an Irish pub in Makati which still runs their quiz nights weekly every Tuesdays. It’s still pretty fun and challenging, so we still go there every few weeks or so, but the best our group has done there was third place.

Rounds three and four. Geekfight continued with a round on Gangster Movies, which sees us naming the lead character in Scarface [6] trying to guess the two leads of the 1976 movie Bitayin si Baby Ama [7] and luckily one of knows the name of the movie where Brad Pitt plays famous outlaw Jesse James [8].

The next round was a picture round, each slide showed a scene from a movie and we were to identify both the name of the place and the movie it appeared in (2 points each slide, so this round was worth twice as much as others!). The first question was a scene from the local movie Ang Nawawala which by coincidence some of the people who worked on it were at Geekfight that night! When we were shown a shot of Luke Skywalker leaving behind his dead Uncle and Aunt, I wanted to write “Lars Water Farm” or something like that instead of Tatooine and it turns out that we did indeed have to be more specific (part of quiz night is knowing when to override your team!) I felt a bit redeemed later when I successfully named the Firehouse from Ghostbusters.

Breaktime! After the first four rounds, it was halftime. We scored 26 points (out of a possible 50), which left us a sixth place out of 16 teams. Not bad, but certainly not good enough, we had to step it up. We took some time to vote on a category to joker. The joker was a common feature of the local quiz nights; it basically meant that each team gets to choose the category they’re most confident in and the team would earn double points for that particular category. Before my vote, it was split between Animated Movies and Rom-coms I just went with Rom-coms.

Rounds five and six. Rom-coms happened to be the very next round too! We had to think about who played the lead roles in the remake of the Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina [9] and we had to fill in the When Harry Met Sally quote “Waiter, there is too much pepper on my [blank]. But I would be proud to partake of your [blank]” [10]. We did fairly well in the joker round, only slightly worse than our best round which was the next round on War movies. The War movies round has us naming the ships in Master and Commander: Far Side of the World [11] and failing to identify the Oliver Stone war movie filmed in the Philippines [12]

Rounds seven and eight. The last two rounds were good for us so we just have to do well in the last two rounds (Fantasy and Animated Films). Shouldn’t be too hard right? You’d think so. The fantasy round had questions on old fantasy films we hadn’t seen such as Willow and recent films we weren’t fond of like Kingdom of Heaven. The animated round featured questions like who voiced Wreck-gar in the 1986 Transformers movie [13] and what was the name of the kart racing gaming in Wreck-It-Ralph [14] alongside questions on stuff we hadn’t seen like an obscure animated short that won some Oscar and a picture question asking us to identify which movie a character came from (we didn’t get the answer; it was, embarrassingly enough, The Little Mermaid.)

Wrapping up. When all the rounds were done, we had score 29 points in the second half, with only one team scoring more points than us (30) in the second half. When we perform badly, we usually don’t bother waiting for the final rankings to be called out, but I felt like there was an outside chance of us actually winning here since most of the top scores were clustered together. It turns out that we finished with 55 points, just below the fifth-place team with 57 points, so it was the same rank we had in the first half. =/ Interestingly, the 1st and 2nd placers are tied, as are the 3rd and 4th placers, so an additional tie break question had to be done. (I’ve been there before!)

Ah well, we’re used to not winning anyway. Yet we still keep coming back to quiz nights, Geekfight and Amici and Murphy’s. We enjoy the challenge I guess, and we love digging deep trying to find the answers to those trivia questions. Yes, we enjoy it even when we have trouble figuring them out. But next time we’re going to win for sure! (Or so I keep telling myself)

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This might be the longest post I’ve ever written. Here are the answers to trivia questions marked in the post body:

[1] Arizona Cardinals

[2] The Air Up There; the person to grab our whiteboard started writing down “The Gods Must Be Crazy” until I talked her out of it

[3] Globo Gym

[4] Copernicus! I could only remember that it was some older scientist so I just hastily scrawled “Newton” as time was called. I got mocked for this because my teammates know I’m a big Back to the Future fan.

[5] Memetic polyalloy

[6] Tony Montana

[7] Rudy Fernandez and Alma Moreno. All the teams actually assumed one of the leads was Bembol Roco

[8] The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

[9] Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond; the guy who answered for our team kept beating himself up because he mixed up Julia Ormond with Juliette Binoche. I didn’t know who either of those two was at that time

[10] paprikash, pecan pie

[11] Acheron and HMS Surprise

[12] Platoon

[13] Eric Idle

[14] Sugar Rush

“Sir, baka pwedeng lipat na lang kayo ng taxi,” the driver said to me apologetically. “Hindi na po kasi ako aabot sa garage sa Sta. Mesa.” He offered to drop the flag-down fee from the fare so I just agreed. I got off and looked around.

One of the reasons I agreed to let him off despite the late hour was that I knew the place where we were passing by – a well lit area where I could easily get another taxi or take an alternative form of transportation if needed – it was the neighborhood I grew up in. And by some happenstance the exact spot where I got off was right across the corner near my grandparents’ old house where we used to live ten-odd years ago. No more than thirty to forty meters away was where most of my childhood took place.

I look down the road and there’s already another taxi coming down the stretch. I could hail it and be on my way home. But I looked across the street and considered the alternative. A quick trip down memory lane wouldn’t hurt right? I’ve been by this road before since we moved, many times even, since it was one of my common taxi routes home. Sometimes I even passed right by where the house used to be. But it was always in passing, I’ve never gone there simply to take a look and remember what used to be.

The taxi passes by, and I’m crossing the street. There’s a Mercury Drug here now at the corner, it didn’t used to be there. I try to remember what used to be on this curved corner even though I must have walked by it a thousand times. It was probably some residence, neighbors I never really knew.

I turn right after crossing the street and down the sloped street. On the other side of the street, there was this building with a truck in front and a familiar side door. The family who lived there sold ice out of that door and when I was young I would sometimes be sent out to buy ice for our sari-sari store from that door. It was only a short walk away and I would earn a crisp five-peso bill for my efforts. That five pesos was a lot for me back then, enough to buy a small coke with. Yes, we had a sari-sari store at our grandparents’ house when we were young, which meant I drank a lot of soft drinks back then.

A few meters later and I’m at the fork in the road in front of where the house used to be. There used to be a basketball board and hoop set up in the middle of the fork, but that had already been taken down before we moved. Now there was just a pillar with the names of the local officials (epals) and a sign that declared it was illegal to park in that spot.

Our grandparents’ house was pretty big back then – there were three families of relatives living there (counting ours) and as mentioned we also had a sari-sari store that catered to neighbors. More than a decade ago the family decided to sell it off and move to separate houses. It had since been replaced by a set of three townhouses, the usual size for residential areas nowadays. The townhouse gates were right against the street with no room to sit outside the gate or anything. I remembered our old house had a small area in front where we could stand around and watch cars pass by, plus a small elevated platform to the side where we often sat as kids. That was just outside our very low security gate (By the time I was twelve I could reach over the gate and open it from the other side)

The neighboring house on the right side was also gone, replaced by townhouses as well. That house – compound, really – used to be lived in by this guy who drove a blue jeepney. I never knew that family’s name but more than once I had ridden in that jeepney and the driver recognized me and insisted that I didn’t have to pay. Sometimes at night when the jeepney was parked outside their house we would sit inside the jeepney, sometimes at the driver’s seat pretending to drive.

I walked a bit past where the house used to be and saw the neighbor’s gate on the other side – I think it was still the same neighbor. I couldn’t be too sure since my memories are a bit hazy and I wasn’t really familiar with our neighbors but it looked like most of the houses down that part had stayed the same. I turned back for the fork.

Across the street from where the house used to be, I remembered there being a wide house with two gates. During the times when there were often power failures in our area, we were always envious of that house across the street because they always had power whenever we lost ours. That house was no longer there either, replaced with a smaller townhouse and a larger four or five story building.

I had back up the street and down the main road in front of the Mercury Drug and cross back to where the taxi had dropped me off. That side had a different set of shops that I remember, but there was still that small hole-in-the-wall barbershop where my dad would take us for haircuts. Our favorite barber was this small guy who was always smiling but I don’t even remember his name right now.

I looked back to the other side of the street and saw the police station a few meters away from the Mercury Drug. That police station used to be a small and simple one-story affair. Now it was a well-polished two-story building and it had what looked like new police cars parked just outside. There used to be a small side street beside the police station which led between the houses back to the fork in the road, and when we were kids we often went down that pass as a “shortcut”. I don’t think it was ever really faster to take that route but as a kid you often found enjoyment in just passing down a different route.

I walked a few meters away from the Mercury Drug towards the next corner. On that corner there used to be a shop that would rent out betamax and VHS movies. They also had Family Computers for rent that my brother and I would sometimes play at on weekends. Even though we had a NES at home, that shop had games we didn’t have and I had my first encounter with a romhack here (though I didn’t know it at the time) when we played a cartridge that claimed to be Super Mario Brothers 4. The shop was no longer there, I believe it had closed up years before we moved. The corner was now occupied by a small carinderia but with the same name as the old shop. probably owned by the same people.

I thought about walking a bit farther down the road because I knew the bakery was still there. It was an old bakery, as far as I can tell it had been there for more than thirty years now, surely nothing to scoff at. We used to buy pandesal there in the mornings for as long as I could remember. I thought about buying some right then and there just for nostalgia sake but as I recalled their best pandesal was when you bought it at five in the morning.

By that point I was satisfied with my unscheduled trip down memory lane. I stood there for a few minutes trying to see if I could get a jeepney ride, but the jeepneys running the route I had to take where all full despite the late hour – that hasn’t changed in more than a decade. Eventually I gave up and just hailed another cab. We drove away back towards the present, leaving the past behind

Writing regularly is something I’ve always wanted to be able to do but like most things I have trouble with, it’s the lack of discipline that gets me.

Take this blog for instance. I randomly think of things to write about while I’m idling or commuting or waiting in line or any of the dozen or so other opportunities during the day when my mind wanders, but because of laziness and/or lack of discipline, these ideas never get very far. I think one of the problems is that because this is a personal blog, I don’t have any focus. That is, in this space I can literally write about anything I want so I end up not writing anything. Does that make sense?

Anyway what I decided was: I’ll just start a new blog. What the hell right? But this time, I’ll focus on a topic for the blog. Restrictions breed creativity, or something. I needed to choose a topic that (a) I was fairly knowledgeable and passionate about; and (b) I would have something regarding that topic to write about on a regular basis. I’ve actually tried this before for Magic the Gathering, since I pretty much enjoy that game a lot, but the problem with MTG was that I was an irregular player and rarely had something new to write about. So I’m going to choose something else right now.

The easiest area that covers the above requirements for me right now is easily reading comic books. I read a ton of them and I enjoy them and I follow the regular weekly releases and am usually excited for the next week of releases. So it seems like something I would be able to write regularly about. So, here we go: I Read Comic Books (originally I was just going to go with a wordpress.com site, but I was like aw what the hell, domains are cheap)

Hopefully it helps me get into the groove of regular writing, and somehow that groove propagates back to this blog.

When I was growing up, our mom would make this sandwich spread concoction that was a mix of cheese, butter, sugar and milk. I loved it, and when my mom told young me what the ingredients are I quickly gave it the name “Cheetergarmi” (I’m sure you can figure it out). She still occasionally makes some for us to this day, just had some for a midnight snack!

Also, I pretty much wrote this post so that I could have a Google search term that returns a single hit to a blog post of mine.

The last two entries (here and here) took too long to write, and there’s a helluva lot of other titles to go through. And many of them don’t deserve much comments, so I’ll just go through the rest quickly or I might never finish.

Action Comics – the younger Superman stories are interesting, but occasionally Morrison goes off on one of his weird tangent stories. Superman’s early years are largely re-written, and that’s understandable, he’s never had particularly interesting events in his history anyway
Superman – meh, needs more spice
Superboy – interesting, but the character has yet to find a status quo
Supergirl – interesting, but the character has yet to find a status quo

Green Lantern – interesting, though it implies Hal is currently a GL in the league with a “fake” power ring. Most of the GL history seems to be intact, and the GL books are all leading towards some sort of “third army” event, I hope it happens soon.
Green Lantern Corps – interesting enough for me to want to read it before AvX #6 this week
Green Lantern: New Guardians – interesting, but I don’t see where this is going. Is it possible for Raynier’s “Rainbow Guardians” to become a real team?
Red Lanterns – mildly interesting, but I don’t see where this is going. I’m not convinced the Reds were the best corps to give their own series

Teen Titans – interesting for me, but only because Red Robin is here. The team’s “coming together adventure” has been going on for far too long and they need to reach some sort of status quo
Blue Beetle – interesting, but the character has yet to find a status quo
Legion of Super-Heroes – interesting storylines, but way too many characters, not very accessible
Legion Lost – interesting, but they can’t get back to their own time without changing the book title, so it kinda limits what’s going to happen and makes them always on the run

All-Star Western – interesting, but weird. Not really a superhero book, though it has ties to Gotham City. I’m not particularly interested in the backup stories though
Deathstroke – not interesting, seems to be mostly just Slade killing a bunch of guys for one reason or another. I’m not confident about it with Liefeld coming on, but I’ll probably still read it for a while since I can’t resist a  train wreck
Suicide Squad – meh, the squad composition at the moment isn’t very interesting, the only real personalities there are Deadshot and Harley (at least they’re giving her something to do aside from being a Joker fangirl)
Stormwatch – mildly interesting, if only because they’re going to need to be fighting the JL at some point. Some of their science-y explanations are ridiculous though
Grifter – meh, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere serious.
Voodoo – meh, not sure where it’s going. Also, with all this Daemonite activity going on, how is it Stormwatch isn’t seriously cracking down on them?
Resurrection Man – I like the concept, but the storyline seems to be going nowhere serious
Man O War – I tried to bear with this, but it just bored me. I only managed to read up to issue 7

Justice League Dark – interesting, though they’re not really a real “team” at the moment. But the team composition is solid, especially they dropped Shade who wasn’t really doing anything for the book. Andrew Bennet seems a better fit
Swamp Thing – interesting, but might be a bit too weird for some, since a lot of the book feels like Alec Holland being on an acid trip of some sort. Feels very Vertigo.
Animal Man – see Swamp Thing. Art is pretty good, but still weird.
Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE – interesting enough. Art is… unique.
I, Vampire – surprisingly interesting, even if I’m already reading another Vampire series (American Vampire). Curious to see where it goes.
Demon Knights – surprisingly interesting, the team composition is nice and varied (Vandal Savage, wut) and the storylines are a fresh reprieve from superhero stuff

DC Comics Presents – Deadman was ok, Challengers less interesting for me. Good series for them to keep around and showcase lesser-known characters

And the second wave of the New 52, of which we are only one or two issues in:
Batman Incorporated – looking good, easily better than both Detective and Dark Knight
Earth 2 – the second issue was a bit slow, but it looks interesting enough
Worlds’ Finest – the first issue wasn’t the best, but I like the idea of this comic so I’ll keep reading it
Dial H – off to a good start, but I can’t help but wonder whether they’ll be running out of hero ideas at some point. Also, Pelican Army!
GI Combat – okay, I didn’t like the last war book, I’m not gonna bother with this one.
The Ravagers – giving this a shot, although at the moment it just seems like another “bunch of super teens on the run from evil forces” kinda deal, and that’s already what Teen Titans is doing at the moment.

I’m probably going to keep on reading a good 70-80% of the books going forward, I don’t feel compelled to read every single one of them any more. It’s still a good chunk of books to read, and makes me look forward to the new releases every week.

Last weekend was Grand Prix Manila 2012, held at the SMX at Mall of Asia. I don’t really consider myself a “regular” Magic player anymore so I’m not going to give a full tournament report, though I will record some details for posterity.

Let’s start with the deck. I played some version of Naya Pod, limited by what cards were available as usual:

It’s a pretty straightforward deck, what with the turning guys sideways and all. And the round by round results:

1 BR Zombies WIN 2-1
2 UW Humans WIN 2-0
3 Gb Pod WIN 2-0
4 UW Delver LOSS 0-2
5 Frites WIN 2-1
6 RG Ramp LOSS 1-2
7 Wb Tokens WIN 2-0
8 UG Infect WIN 2-0
9 RG Ramp WIN 2-0
10 Pike Delver WIN 2-0
11 Delverless Delver LOSS 1-2
12 Sun Titan Delver LOSS 1-2
13 Some Delver WIN 2-0
14 Spectral Flight Delver WIN 2-1
15 Solar Flare WIN 2-1

As can be seen above, I made day 2 for the first time, and I believe this is already my sixth Grand Prix. I finished 11 and 4, which was good enough for 39th place despite my pretty bad tiebreaks. This means I finished in the money, hooray! Feels good to have a decent finish after playing this game for what, seventeen years now? Playing in Day 2 was great, the tables weren’t as crowded as Day One! Hah. I still made a lot of bad plays though, I mostly got lucky with a lot of my wins. With tighter play I might have gone as good as 13-2.

39th!

Aside from the main event, another thing I participated in during the second day was the Magic Rules Challenge! This was a fun thing they had where they set up a booth manned by a couple of judges. You could go up to them (no entrance fee) and answer up to three rules questions in a row. If you get questions right, you get foil cards! Well, the foil cards I won weren’t very useful or valuable, but I had a lot of fun with the rules questions themselves, I really enjoy that stuff. I’d hang out there between rounds not only to join but also to watch other people play. The questions ranged in difficulty from quite easy (“You play Grim Lavamancer‘s activated ability and your opponent uses Tormod’s Crypt, how much damage is dealt?”) to an actual layers + [card]Humility[card] question! It was a nice relaxing change of pace to play between rounds to take some pressure off.

My crappy foil winnings from the Magic Rules Challenge

The weekend was exhausting, especially the nine rounds on the first day and the needing to travel back and forth to MOA, but it was a fun experience and definitely worth it (not sure if I’d say that if I didn’t place haha). Makes me excited about playing Magic again. Looking forward to the next GP Manila in a couple of years!

This is part 2 of my DC New 52 Review. Part is here. Hopefully I finish this series before the reviews become too out of date.

Batman

I decided to read every book of the New 52 to widen my horizons regarding my comic book reading, and one of the greatest advantages has been exposure to Scott Snyder’s work. I have a tendency not to remember writers and artists of comics I read, except for the very famous ones, so I wasn’t aware that I had read his work before during the Black Mirror arc in Detective Comics pre-New 52. But he’s quickly become one of my favorite writers to date, with his work on Batman quickly bringing me to appreciate his work on other books like Swamp Thing and the phenomenal American Vampire. His writing on Batman is up there with those other books. He’s introduced a whole new mythos and underbelly to Gotham, adding a new dimension to Batman’s fight to keep his city sane. And the artwork by Greg Capullo  is simply fantastic, an awesome backup to Snyder’s plots. Capullo is another creative whom I wouldn’t have encountered if not for the New 52, his work previously been mostly Image-related. The excellent creative team easily makes Batman my favorite of the DC New 52 so far (it helps that I’m quite the Batman fan.)

Detective Comics

Detective isn’t the best, but that’s okay. The art is above average, I kinda like it, though it smells a bit like the usual gritty comic-book art I’ve grown up with. The story lines so far have involved the Dollmaker and the Penguin, and they involve a lot of Batman knocking around thugs to get information. The stories are always narrated in Batman’s third person voice which gives it a weird edge. Not sure what’s the final fate of the Joker, based on what happened to him at the start of the book. The book is promising, but needs to show something excellent to gain attention. Still, it’s not like DC’s gonna cut the titular Detective Comics, so neither am I.

Batman: The Dark Knight

Batman seems to be the Wolverine of DC Comics: he has a lot of his own books, and he even makes appearances in other books to help shore up their popularity (see: Hawk and Dove, I Vampire) . As a Batman fan I’m glad to read more Bat-stories, but the character might just be stretched a little bit too thin. And if we had to cut one Batman book from the New 52, I’d choose this one (we certainly can’t cut any of the other three). Batman: The Dark Knight‘s storyline so far has involved a mysterious white rabbit and a hodgepodge of Batman’s enemies escaped from the asylum. Seriously, there’s a new one every issue: Two-Face in #2, Clayface as  Joker in #3, Deathstroke in #4, Scarecrow in #5, Venom in #6 and #7, Mad Hatter in #8. Then there’s the cameos by Flash, Superman and Wonder Woman. It’s like the writer finally got to his dream of drawing Batman and just wants to play with all the characters he can use. It’s not really a bad thing, but I’d appreciate more story arcs that didn’t just involve Batman punching a new supervillain every month. The art is so-so and reminds me of every guy who ever graduated from the Kubert school. The style is very much the same. The book is ok, I’d keep reading it if it were around, but probably wouldn’t miss it if they cut it.

Batman and Robin

What makes the current combination of Batman and Robin interesting is that unlike Bruce’s relationship with the previous Robins Dick and Tim (and even Jason) where having a partner was seen to improve Batman’s temperament and bring a lighter side to the superhero team, in Damian’s case he’s very much as grim as his father what with the whole being raised by assassins bit. And we get exactly what we can expect – Bruce trying to teach Damian how to become a better person despite his upbringing and despite forces around them trying to bring Damian down into the dark side. The art is a bit uneven but it works, and the book is well worth the read.

Batgirl

It was a bit controversial when they revealed Barbara Gordon would be getting her legs back with the reboot. Oracle had been a staple of the Batman family for so long that fans would surely miss her, not to mention the fans of previous Batgirls Cass Cain and Stephanie Brown (neither of which have been seen in action in the New 52). While the events of The Killing Joke haven’t been retconned away (Barbara explicitly recalls the shooting incident in several flashbacks), they haven’t explained yet as of this writing the “miracle” that gave Barbara back the use of her legs. The current storylines haven’t been particularly exciting; I think I enjoyed Stephanie’s schoolgirl problems more, but they’re entertaining enough I suppose. The art is okay, if not a bit too shiny. Will continue reading.

Batwing

I like Batwing if only for the fact that a superhero from Africa has his own titular book. Most of the first story arc (which spans the first eight books) takes place in Africa and delves into the history of superheroes on that continent. It also shows a bit of what life is like under the grip of African warlords. The exposure to something non-American is nice, although the story arc manages to drag itself over to Gotham for the finale (and it looks like Batwing is going to become part of Justice League International‘s roster). The art style is crisp, unique and refreshing, I approve of this book.

Batwoman

I really like the artwork here and the panel layouts. They all feel so crisp and I love paging through them. The stories are okay, except that they don’t put enough effort towards the accessibility of the character. I’ve read some of Batwoman’s history before so I know a bit what she’s about, but this book mostly just dives straight in and expects the reader to “get it”. It’s nice that Batwoman doesn’t end up as one of Batman’s “formal” allies. Instead she ends up working with a certain government agency. (This book is also not part of the Night of Owls crossover I think). However, I find some story details a bit tough to follow, not sure if it’s because of the unusual layouts or the lack of introductory detail – I find myself having to read each issue one more time to get most of the details. They’re usually worth it though, and this is a book I’m going to keep following.

Nightwing

The story arcs so far dig into Dick’s background with the Haly Circus, something I haven’t been too familiar with before. Near the end of the first eight books it ties in to the Batman Court of Owls storyline, adding a deeper back story to Haly’s Circus than previous story lines had shown. The book is interesting and the art is okay, though it’s not one of the titles I feel like I have to read immediately.

Catwoman

This book has trouble keeping my interest. It’s mostly Catwoman getting into thieving hijinks (and occasionally having sex with the Batman). Well, at least the story gives us a different perspective of life on Gotham’s streets. The art isn’t spectacular, but it’s not bad. I’ll probably keep reading it, at lower priority.

Birds of Prey

I’ve never read the previous Birds of Prey series, so I’m not sure how this compares, but the book is interesting enough. I like the team’s variety – there’s one of Batman’s archvillains here, Black Canary is always cool, I’m not entirely sure Katana is sane, and I like the way Starling handles things. The art is passable, though not really standing out for me. No reason to drop this title.

Red Hood and the Outlaws

This series kicked off with a bit of controversy regarding the mangling of Starfire’s character. In fact it confused me a bit with Starfire’s vague recollections of being with Dick Grayson; I’m not sure whether the New Teen Titans era exists in the New 52 (the Teen Titans book seems to imply that the New 52 incarnation is the first one). Despite the problems with Starfire’s characterizations, I’ve found the stories so far pretty interesting. The plots mostly delves into Jason Todd’s background and what happened to him between the time he was brought back by the League of Assassins and when he resurfaced as the Red Hood. The art is pretty good, it’s probably one of my favorite in the entire New 52. It’s nice and shiny and not too conventional. This is one of the books I read immediately when it comes out.

Ugh, these reviews are taking longer to write than I thought. Next up: Superman and Green Lantern.