Ang langit sa piling mo

Watawat ng Pilipinas

Nanood ako ng Game 2 ng UAAP Finals kahapon. Dahil ni-remind ako ni Mimi sa traffic at hirap ng parking pag games, maaga ko dinaanan si Dax. Bihira lang yun, lagi akong sakto or fashionably late. Maaga kami nakapasok at naka-upo, before pa lumabas ang players sa court.

May konting kwentuhan habang parami na ang mga tao. Medyo di ko inexpect nung tumugtog ang Lupang Hinirang—first time ko sya marinig since election day.

Di ko alam kung kakanta ba ako. Para akong nawalan ng boses bigla. Medyo emotional yung pakiramdam, parang galit na naiiyak na walang maintindihan. Para akong nag instant analysis ng lyrics line-by-line, pilit na nire-reconcile yung kanta sa mga nangyari sa nakaraang mga araw.

Nag-advance yung utak ko sa huling parte ng kanta kaya kinuha ko na lang ang phone at nag-video na lang ako. Wala akong nakanta. Sa pagkakataong yun, hindi ko maisip na handa akong mamatay para sa’yo, Pilipinas. Hindi ko maramdaman ang langit sa piling mo.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/709211724]

Kulay Rosas ang Bukas, Pilipinas

Bumoto ng tama, para sa mga bata!

Sa Lunes, pipiliin ko ang mga taong pinapahalagahan ang kinabukasan ng aking mga anak, pamilya, kaibigan, at lahat ng mga Pilipino, mayaman man o mahirap.

Boboto akong mulat ang aking mga mata, gising sa katotohanan ng ating kasaysayan. Ramdam ko rin ang ating kasalukyan, dahil dito’y hindi ko hahayaang mangyari muli ang mga pagkakamali ng nakaraan.

Ikaw, handa ka na ba?

The toaster fucker problem

Photo by Sara Julie/Unsplash

I was reading this interesting article on people who don’t tweet or engage in social media, and this comment led me to another comment from an older submission, discussing the toaster fucker problem:

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

First Be Human

Paradox of tolerance quote.

In my world there’s always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however

In your world there’s no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn’t it?

Please, my fellow Chinese, first be a human, then a Chinese, finally a CCP member (if you want).

Best Wishes.

This is the excerpt from a reddit post by Purdue student Zhihao Kong addressing the current issue he is presently embroiled in. The student was allegedly harassed and threatened by other students from China after writing a post commending the heroism of the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The issue blew up after the Purdue University president addressed the original offense in an email, with him declaring a more sweeping ideal:

Read more »

Marcos, never again!

Image courtesy of bantayog.org

Should you vote for Bongbong Marcos? This is a question that many Filipinos sadly cannot answer with conviction (pun intended?). More than 30 years since their ouster, it seems those who didn’t suffer through Martial Law find it easy to buy into the propaganda that it wasn’t that bad—and maybe it was even a golden age for growth.

But it wasn’t. It was really bad.

Read more »

Make your todo-lists better

Pens.

With so many todo-lists systems championed by various productivity blogs and advocates, you’d never run out of workflows to try. But instead of forcing your brain to accept a new mindset each time you switch, why not simply improve what already works for you?

Lifehacker shared 10 ways to improve your todo-list and at least one or two would make your system work better for you:

  1. Formulate your to-do list with three things: must, should, and want
  2. Make a “Have-I-Done” list Instead of a to-do list
  3. Separate paper and digital to-do lists
  4. Follow the 1-3-5 Rule
  5. Destroy and rebuild your to-do list
  6. Turn your to-do list into a story
  7. Subtract one thing from your to-do list
  8. Plan rewards for extra motivation
  9. Try Warren Buffet’s two-list system
  10. Ditch your to-do list and schedule your tasks instead

I put emphasis on the things I’ve already been doing, but would love to learn more on the benefits of the other items when I get to try them.

42

A photo showing the number 42.
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

They say the number 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So as I celebrate my 42nd birthday, I wonder if the next 364 days work their magic and fulfill their promise. Unfortunately, my obligatory research on how Douglas Adam chose the number has already burst my bubble:

It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.

So much for the pandemic ending soon.

Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people

So Reddit consists of 97-99% of users rarely contributing to the discussion, just passively consuming the content generated by the other 1-3%. This is a pretty consistent trend in Internet communities and is known as the 1% rule.

This reddit post is both funny and thought-provoking that you can’t help wonder—is it possible that the virtual world we see is shaped only by a small percentage of internet users?

I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years.

The only explanation for this behavior is that he is insane. I mean, normal people don’t do that. We read maybe 20 books a year, tops, and we probably don’t write reviews on Amazon for all of them. There has to be something wrong with this guy.

If we consider the implications on politics and how we see real-world social issues, we just might be doomed for a long time. So much for hoping that the 2022 Philippines presidential elections will be one not ruined by fake news and false propaganda.

Goodbye, 2020!

We’re into the last hour of 2020 here in the Philippines, and just couldn’t resist a quick blog post to send it off and forever etch into memory how terrible the year was. The internet will forever remember it, certainly.

Here’s to a hopeful new year for all of us.

Victory is the child of struggle…

Filipinos don’t realize that victory is the child of struggle, that joy blossoms from suffering, and redemption is a product of sacrifice.

— Jose Rizal

Today we Filipinos commemorate our Independence Day, a good time to remind us all to protect our freedom and fight for our rights. And if you have 15 minutes to spare, listen to this podcast to understand the possible threats we may have to face if we fail to let our voices heard.