A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post.
2022 May
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I started playing Tales of Vesperia in January, since I had just finished Tales of Symphonia a couple of weeks prior. Vesperia is that rare PS3 era RPG that never got an English-language release on that system, so I've actually been wanting to play this for more than a decade now, though I actually bought the game only during last year's end-of-year Steam sales. This game is a vast improvement over Symphonia; kind of a surprise considering the original games were released a mere 5 games apart. I'm not sure if it's just the Definitive Edition remaster, but the graphics -
A Quote In the river I have seen you Through love age and misery In the river I will find you for you will always be you and i will always be me Gwyn Davies, Legends of Tomorrow S07E12 The World PH/Politics: The elections have come and gone and like it not, we must live with the results. I have written some post-election thoughts here. PH/sports: Some good news though: Last Friday the UP Maroons defeated ADMU in the final game of the UAAP basketball season, ending a 36-year drought. The Maroons last won the championship after the dictatorship fell. -
It has been a difficult week, particularly for supporters of VP Leni Robredo, given the outcome of the election last Monday. It's taken me a few days to gather my thoughts, and even then, some of these ideas may still seem raw and unrefined. Some were also the outcome of numerous conversations with fellow supporters both before and after the elections. Disclaimer: I am of course, not an expert of any kind, and these are just my personal thoughts (some refined by many conversations in the immediate 48-96hrs after the election. So very many active group chats!) Hope and Disappointment
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A Quote A single grain of rice can tip the scale. One man alone can make a difference. -- the emperor, Mulan The World PH/Politics: Elections are tomorrow! Destiny is at hand, one way or another. The Leni/Kiko campaign held their final rally / Miting De Avance last night at Ayala Avenue in Makati, with attendance estimates reaching 800,000 attendees (!!). A lot of people, especially the Leni supporters, have pre-election anxiety. I wrote about my ballot and my final pre-election words here. PH/Covid: Thankfully, cases remain low. A lot of people have been predicting we might have a surge -
PH elections are this coming Monday. Sat down to make my final Elections 2022 ballot decisions today. President and Vice President Back in 2016, I actually (accidentally) abstained the President slot because the choices were so either meh or terrible. This time I don't have that dilemma. Leni Robredo was the clear best choice for VP back in 2016, and she is the clear best choice for President today. The VP vote is a bit closer; despite some age-old issues I actually think Sotto is a defendable choice given how long he has been in government service, but we have -
I've been putting my media reviews in the weeknotes but I felt like these two reviews would be long enough to justify a separate post. I posted spoiler-free reviews the other day. This post will have unmarked spoilers. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) (Click photos to view full-size) Watched this with some friends last Wednesday, only my 3rd film seen in the theaters since the pandemic, and the first time I went with friends outside of immediate family. I usually try to avoid watching all except the earliest trailers for MCU film to minimize spoilers, but after -
A whole new month just crept up on us huh. I don't have anything particularly witty to say at the moment. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 10th week. No end in sight. Not sure if it's worth it to continue tracking this here since this may go on for a while. PH/Politics: One week remains until the elections on Monday the 9th. It's the homestretch! There was some kind of Baby Marcos-aligned sortie near our house last night. I briefly considered buying a tomato. I wrote a short note about my thoughts for the last
2022 April
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I am ending my daily Wordle+variants runs. No special reason, I just felt it was time. The number of us who have been doing them daily had been dwindling for a while, and I was at the point where I would occasionally almost forget to do them and at one point I crammed all of them in 5 minutes before midnight. Rather than waiting for the daily habit to slowly fade away, I'll just end it now so at least I get to do a wrapup! (When I announced to our Discord Wordle thread that I would be ending my -
The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 9th week. Russian efforts have been refocused to eastern Ukraine, and Mariupol is about to fall. PH/Politics: VP and current presidential candidate Leni Robredo celebrated her birthday yesterday, and a grand rally was held in Pasay with an estimated over 400,000 attendees. A good number of my friends were there. It's a bit of a phenomenon really. I don't know if she will manage to win the elections, but if she does it's going to be a miracle driven by the people. PH/Politics: The Comelec has released a precinct finder -
I finished Metroid Dread today! The game came out for Nintendo Switch last October and my brother lent me his copy last month. This was only my second time finishing an actual Metroid game; the first one was the original Metroid all the way back on the NES! I loved the game, I devoured it in a bit over three weeks (which is a very quick pace for me already). It is an excellent side-scrolling Metroidvania (as you'd expect) and has a great gameplay loop where every time you beat a boss you unlock a new ability and you want -
Today is Easter Sunday, if you celebrate that kind of thing. It's kind of a good time to start afresh. And maybe also to remember we are already three and a half months into this year, the third of the pandemic. A Quote 'We're all just people.' Nanny blew a cloud of blue smoke at the chimney. 'Everyone's just people.' -- Terry Pratchett in Wyrd Sisters This one felt really poignant to me for some reason. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 8th week. Ukraine has managed to sink a Russian warship. PH/Politics: A bunch of -
It seems we are once again blogging about blogging. Such is life. (When I talk about blogging here, I am mostly talking about what Tom Critchlow calls "small-b blogging", or maybe "sincere blogging" as I have called it. Basically blogging that isn't designed for pageviews or scale.) Wouter of Brainbaking.com writes that None of His Best Friends are Content Creators: Again, I can second that. He then elaborates different attempts at getting people into blogging. Most attempts failed (second that). Most people just give up after a while, citing various reasons: nothing important to say, too difficult to write, too
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Today is Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. When I was growing up, Holy Week was traditionally a quiet time of prayer and reflection; my grandmother would chastise us if we were noisy, especially from Thursday through Saturday. The period feels a lot less sacrosanct in the modern world, either because I'm an adult now or because people usually just take this time to go on vacations or whatnot, or maybe some combination of both. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 7th week. More and more Russian war atrocities are coming to light. PH/Politics: -
The jam This past weekend I participated in the 50th LUDUM DARE game jam. This is my second time participating in Ludum Dare and 3rd game jam overall. My last attempt was Ludum Dare 48 last year. I had to skip Ludum Dare 49 due to a hospital stay, so I was looking forward to this one. The jam started 9am local time on Saturday April 2nd. Same as before, I chose to participate in the "Compo", the more challenging version, with a 48-hour time limit and restriction that you can only work solo and all assets must be created -
It's April! Still the world turns. Sigh. This entry is coming in a day late because I was busy during the weekend. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 6th week. The Russians have withdrawn from the Kyiv region and more of their atrocities have been revealed in their wake. PH/Politics: There was another Comelec-sponsored presidential debate last night, apparently the last one, but I was unable to watch. Sounds like my preferred candidate did well though. PH/Covid: Cases continue to remain low, but we should keep our guard up. Showbusiness: The big news last week was -
I think more people should blog, and more people should follow people who blog, so I've been meaning to do some posts to promote other people's blogs, in the hopes of accelerating the return of real/personal blogs. (As opposed to those commercial blogs that are just for selling stuff or being content farms or whatever.) With that in mind, here are some blogs I can recommend you follow: Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow has been blogging for a while; he used to blog over on BoingBoing (as mentioned in my Blogs of Yesteryear post), but now he has his
2022 March
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March is almost done. The summer heat is undeniably here. I am so very tired. A Quote "A single grain of rice can tip the scale. One man may be the difference between victory and defeat." - from "Mulan" (A reminder I need when I feel bad about the current state of the world and PH politics and feel like there's nothing I can do.) The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 5th week. Ukranians are fighting back from Kyiv, and Russia has refocused it's effort around the Donbas region, claiming that was the plan all along. -
I keep shifting between writing individual posts per thing I want to review or doing one of these "Watching Lately" posts that consolidate several items at the same time. I guess when it's a number of "less important" films or shows it's okay to consolidate them together? But if it's something like The Batman or an MCU film which are generally bigger fandoms for me, then individual posts are ok, since I'll usually have a lot to say? IDK, I'm just making this all up as I go along. This one is the last two weeks worth of movies and -
Yesterday I finished Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, a platformer released on Steam in 2019. I started playing this one in mid-February, mostly because I wanted a shorter non-RPG game to play alongside Tales of Vesperia, and I had this in the backlog for a while. Not a big fan of the aesthetic (it's obviously geared more towards kids), but the game itself is fun enough. The game consists of a top-down Zelda-like overworld where you unlock secrets and new chapters, and the chapters themselves are individual 2D platforming stages, in the modern Mario style: you just want to get -
A Quote "We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people all our lives and that's okay, we've got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people you used to be." - the Eleventh Doctor The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 4th week. PH: The first comelec-sponsored presidential debates were last night, with one notable absence. I didn't feel the need to watch the debates this year (unlike in 2016 where I posted live commentary). I feel like the choices are much more clear-cut for this election and watching them