The Dark Crystal (1982)

The Dark Crystal Movie Poster

First film is Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal (1982). Before CGI and 3d, puppets and anamotronics we’re used to create creatures and the special effects we see in every hollywood blockbuster. Master puppeteer Jim Henson, and his colleagues created at the the time first full-feature fantasy film with no human beings.

Every character in The Dark Crystal are puppets created by Henson. They are so skillfully animated, to me they move even more naturally on film than any CGI character (take that Na’avi).

The film looks at the nature of good and evil but in a very different fashion as most child-oriented films at the time. It does not portray a good overcoming evil but of harmony of both dark and light.

The film wasn’t as much a success as its competition at the time (ET: Extraterrestrial) but it receive critical success by winning BAFTA and Saturn awards.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (戦場のメリークリスマス)

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence original japanese poster

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) is bilingual English-Japanese film based on Lauren van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970).

The setting is a Japanese prison camp in Indonesia, Ryuichi Sakamoto plays young stern captain of the camp Yonoi who becomes fixated on the new rebellious prisoner Major Jack Celliers (played by rockstar David Bowie). In the same camp, Lt. Colonel John Lawrence (Tom Conti) is a japanese speaking british soldier who has become well trusted by both Yonoi and Sgt. Hara (played by Takeshi Kitano of Battle Royale fame).

The film is an interesting look at cross-cultural communication as the japanese and british constantly butt-heads on different cultural habits (such as Gyo and Christmas).

The users as well as the usage of the internet has evolved within the past decade (2000-2010). Through web 2.0 technology, social media, css based design, not only have the aesthetics of webdesign but the users as well.

Back in high school the only heavy users of the internets we’re the tech geeks who liked fiddling with code, fanboyed over their video games, created websites and shrines and then blogged by hard coding html. The net was being used by people who actually took time to understand the net, how pages are made, the time it took to get something online, in all senses geeks. We’d blog and blog and its was all in good fun.

The problem with the internet now a days is that social media has made the internet a past time for more people than before and it has become so easy everyone thinks their a genius at it. It’s not just the tech geeks anymore, it includes journalists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, vanity-obsessed-shopping-everything-and-eveything-I-do-is-interesting-air-head girls… you name it there’s a clique in the internet for it.

This is not to say that I’m a networking genius but I simply just miss the days when we had a little less idiocy on the net

Risa Hontiveros – Again, the RH bill, we need that law passed. I feel it really should be top priority, even if the whole Carper thing puts her on shakey ground

Franklin Drilon – The big man is a powerful writer and excellent debater.

Alex Lacson – I rarely am supportive of politicians who don’t have an actual track record or platform to put into action but he does have a focus on specifics each time he speaks.

Well thats the most I can think of when it comes to senators.

Now what everyone has been waiting for.

President

I am and have always been a strong Gibo Teodoro supporter. To tell you the truth, I find there really isn’t a bad candidate if you take out Villar and Erap (seriously people? a womanizing ignoramus?) but Gibo has the most realistic platform I have seen out of all the presidentiables (filipinos like inventing terms don’t they). He has an actual step by step plan for the implementation of his platform and I like that he doesn’t promise the eradication of corruption or poverty cause seriously you’ll never be able to do that in one term. I like how he sees the Agrarian reform project as only a start and wants help develop and equip these farmers so they can actually use the land (and not sell it to Villar to turn into some real estate subdivision).

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Philmug revamped its appearance 2 days ago

I’ve been a member of Philmug even before I got my mac (and I don’t own an ipod to justify joining philmug before getting anita).

The community has shown resilience and strength over the years even though the forum design and backend has become dated over time.

A few days ago, Philmug got a facelift! It now looks and emulates the feel of the modified aqua/platinum GUI theme of Mac OS X: 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. The vBulletin was also supposedly upgraded which is always good.

One thing I find annoying though is how the forums keep asking me to retype a captcha image each time I search. This is somehow ok I guess since I don’t get the usual parse errors I normally get when searching.

I’ve gone through Netscape Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird (my favorite PC mail client so far) and now I use Mail (the pre-installed mail application in mac os x). One thing I can conclude so far is that I cannot live without an email client application.

Though the trend in technology is switching to doing everything on the web (including email accessed from browsers we know as webmail ex. Gmail). I still find the usefulness of email clients to be undeniable specially when you live in the Philippines where wifi access isn’t always possible. This is even more useful if your in school doing a lot of org work/ group work or you work in a field that needs fast information decimation.

For those of you who have ignored email clients for the longest time. Email clients such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird and Mail use either a POP or IMAP protocol to get and copy email from your email accounts to your local hard drive. In the old days of the internet this was the only way to check email but now we have email client’s biggest competitor webmail which allows us to access our inboxes from any computer with just the use of a browser.

Most people would think, why should I use an email client when it would use local space on my hard drive not to mention I’d need a whole other application just to check mail as compared to using webmail which is readily accessible through browsers that are pre-installed in our operating systems?

Though this is a huge drawback to using an email client it still doesn’t lessen the utility value of having a local copy of your email. This is specifically even more highlighted when you are an extremely mobile person and may sometimes find yourself without internet access.

Here are a couple of my experiences that can show the notable use of my email client

1. During an EBAM (Editorial Board Aspirants Meeting) the executive aspirants we’re trying to take note of the suggestions of some of the absent aspirants that we’re sent via mail the night before. Most people with a laptop would go to their browsers and log on to gmail to access the previous nights set of emails but the problem was the campus network group was having trouble with the WiFi in our building at the time. Luckily I use Apple Mail and had a copy of their mail already downloaded.
2. Normally checking mail would be a chore that you had to go through periodically (students normally doing it in the evening) opening a separate tab and then logging on to their email accounts. During the different hellweeks in my semesters specially during Marketing and Leadership and Strategy class, I found it really easy as I received and downloaded attachments with probably only a 1-second delay to the time the person sent it. I got updates as they we’re updated and news as it was being written. Did I mention it doesn’t feel like a chore? Thats because I can leave Mail running constantly (with it checking for new mail every 5-10 minutes) while I just browse along facebook or finish my design comissions, I don’t have to open a new tab just for email.

Case number 2 is specifically important to me as a student and as a member of the school newspaper where the rule is to ALWAYS ALWAYS reply ASAP to every email and text message.

But with those big reasons alone why aren’t most students making full use (specially as macs are becoming more and more popular in school and macs have pre-installed email clients) of their laptops and using email clients?

Well one big hurdle so far (within the ateneo) is that the our incampus Wireless Internet security prevents downloading email to clients. This however does not hinder reason 1 as there are multiple wireless hotspots in Katipunan that allow POP and IMAP access.

People usually think of it as hard simply because they have to actually do something before recieving email. For many of you who think this is the case (specially you mac users who never get to use your mail application) below is an image at how idiotically simple for the internet generation it is to set up their Mail applications (the process is actually quite similar in other email clients)

Most email providers with pop or IMAP access will have more detailed instructions. A good email provider that does this that I know about is gMail so check out their website for more info.

If your asking what email clients you should use? For PC users, I highly recommend Thunderbird over Outlook but either is still quite good. For Macs, the preinstalled Mail client is already there so why not use it?

First of all Gurdy says happy gregorian calendar new year!

Gurdy says happy new year

My way of starting the new year is by getting a 39 degree celsius fever and a soar throat that cripples my speech I’m actually feeling better now after spending most of the day not talking at all (I actually replied to my philosophy teacher’s question by writing a note on a scratch paper:lol:).

I also started my Communication 14 “Dream Project” today by not drinking any carbonated or sugar-compressed drinks (coke and my school C2 addiction). I actually do feel healthier after a day of drinking 80% water (10% was my morning fresh milk and 10% was my evening tea).

Unfortunately I won’t be able to do one of the things that I was looking forward to do this year. Because of a) my dad’s unpro-activeness and procastination (he kept saying oh there’s going to be a voter’s registration at the club house) b) my inability to keep track of things that made me ID-less the whole Christmas break (thanks to Joseph Teoxon by the way for keeping my ID safe), I am still NOT a registered voter. So kill me if you deem me extremely sinful. Again this is a justification of why I should get a driver’s license already (where else in the world would you see a 21-year-old city kid without a drivers license).

I’m retiring early (if you count 20 minutes before 12pm early… this post seems to have a lot of asides) tonight lol maybe I should continue the I can’t speak charade tomorrow

The GUIDON EB race started a few weeks back which prompted me to put training into a hiatus while focusing more on webdesign and press rather than dancing. I still love dancing but I really have to put it on hold, graphics and web design are still of course my first love.

Speaking of graphics on the web, Tata made a post about this a while back. In the good old days when PHP was just starting to creep its ways to the regular filipino web designer as a helpful tool and Wordpress was still called b2. Back then we seem to all worship and adore sites like Aethereality.net, Blinding-light.com and Daydreamgraphics.com. I wanted to reminisce and take a look at them and well I sort of saw that many of them have become stuck in the past.

All three of the sites mention above have not been updated in more than a month. Two are still using the sort of fan-girlish anime type layouts we all used to use when we started out. Daydream graphics has embraced wordpress as a CMS and let go of its home grown database of tutorials and layouts but well I no longer worship the layouts that are posted there. On the sidenote, the only premade layout I did and submitted to aethereality is still the last updated pop-up layout available.

Unfortunately, sem-ended far too soon…

None-the-less I enjoyed it, I finally got to bond with my childhood best friend the Playstation 2 and read up on the Marvel Universe. I finally got to finish New X-men, New Mutants, New X-men: Academy X. All that’s missing now is Astonishing X-men and Uncanny X-men.

I’ve also been replaying Valkyrie profile: Silmeria. Odd how it just seems so much easier now that I grinded my main part characters (and certain einherjar) to level 20-25 as early as chapter 3 while keeping certain einherjar (mosly the useless ones like milidia and alm) at the levels that I got them (below level 15) so I can learn skills faster .

Sine July we’ve been encountering an old couple there and they’ve really started to interest me a lot. We’d normally see them already at one of the couches either asleep or eating breakfast beside their numerous plastic bags and bayongs filled with clothes (I think their clothes at least). Sometimes I’d see the old woman wear an ateneo shirt or jacket to warm herself up and she’d normally bring an ateneo bag. She seems like a really nice old lady, and the Mcdonald’s staff seems to have become acquainted with her as I saw her talking to the manager one time and the manager seems to be laughing really joyfully (though this is part of her job).

I asked my dad this morning what he taught of the couple this morning and mind you I’m not one to seriously believe everything my dad says right away but well…

He says he’s seen them before, back when he owned a shop in filbars he’d find the old lady hanging out at dunkin donuts. He’d spoken with the old lady a few times before and he says that she says (ok this sounds so unwell reported) she used to be a spanish language teacher in the ateneo but she retired but she’s been trying to re-apply for years but she has never recieved a single word about her application. She spends her time in Katipunan now waiting if there would be a follow up, she used to sell watches and small trinkets along katipunan and she’d wash her clothes in the dunkin donuts CR.

It really didn’t take long during july for me to realize she was homeless but she seriously doesn’t look poor, she pays for what they eat at mcdonald’s everyday, she doesn’t beg but I do think that’s where they sleep now.

That couple just really interests me and I don’t know I’m writing this hoping that someone else might get interested as well and try to find out more. Its really intriguing, an old woman in a manang style skirt or daster wearing an ateneo jacket one day just appearing in mcdonalds in the morning with bags full of clothes and cloth.

This friday when we go to Mcdonald’s for breakfast again I’m gonna ask the old couple to sit with us, this is just really sad.