… and I really like it so far.

So, apparently we’ve had the game in certain Timezone branches since the middle of December, according to a friend of mine. I only got around to trying it today (solo playthrough using Feng and Miguel) and I gotta say that I’m impressed with what they’ve done with the tagging system. It seems they’ve kept everything from the first game and added a whole lot more on top of it.

While I haven’t quite figured out how to properly use Tag Crash and Tag Assault, I like how they open up a whole new bunch of combo and strategic possibilities. In the end, I’m glad that this just isn’t simply Tekken 6 with a bare-bones tag mechanic slapped onto it.

Now, let me go over the presentation a bit. The game looks gorgeous, period. I really looks like the graphics department went went the extra mile rather than just rehashing Tekken 6′s assets. Well, I’m guessing they just added to what was already existing in terms of character models, but it really just likes like everything’s animated a lot smoother now. Special goes to whoever did the animation for fabrics in the game. Whoever you are, I want you to know that your work is excellent and it really shows. See? Admiring little details like this is why I get my ass handed to me every so often, but I digress.

I’d like to talk more about the game’s presentation and more importantly, the soundtrack, but I guess I’ll save that for a future post.

Smugglers, for better or worse, are romanticized in popular culture. Two very prominent and contemporary examples of this are Firefly‘s Mal Reynolds and of course, one of Star Wars‘ most iconic characters, Han Solo. Then again, both are examples of smugglers in the sci-fi genre. So, what about real-world smuggling? Is it as adventurous and full of the same thrilling peril that the aforementioned two face on a regular basis?

Enter Contraband, which opens tomorrow (Jan. 25th) and stars Mark Wahlberg as a former… you guessed it, smuggler, who gets forced to do one last run (that’s smuggler talk for… well, smuggling stuff) in order to pay off a botched job his brother-in-law got involved in. With his family’s safety at stake and a very angry, scenery-chewing, Southern-drawl speaking Giovanni Ribisi breathing down his neck, will he be able to successfully pull off the run?

Joining Wahlberg are Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster, Caleb Landry Jones, J.K. Simmons, and Diego Luna in an equally hammy turn as Panamanian crime lord, Gonzalo. Okay to solid performances all around, I’ll give ‘em that, but what really caught my attention was how hammy the movie’s bad guys were. Ribisi, especially, with his near-cartoonish Southern accent, which at times, you’d think he sounds more like an old lady. Surprisingly, he still manages to be menacing. Wahlberg on the other hand, has his usual “tough guy looking out for his friends and family” routine and plays it straight.

For a movie about smuggling, it does tend to get a bit slow in certain parts. It certainly is a long movie, clocking in at nearly two hours. I suppose that if the second act were a little more streamlined, it would’ve been a tighter experience overall. Surprisingly, there’s not as much action as trailers are leading audiences into believing. However, the only real gunfight in the movie has a good sense of tension and danger thanks to some basic, but nifty camera work and reliable sound design.

The real fun begins in the third act when Farraday and company come up with some pretty ingenious ways of hiding the contraband and getting it on dry land. I won’t spoil anything here, but there are some pretty humorous bits that ensue.

Overall, Contraband is a good choice if you’ve got an afternoon to burn away at the movies or if you’re a fan of Mark Wahlberg. Illegal as it may be, there is some fun to be had watching how smugglers (well, fictional ones at least) work their way around and outsmart the authorities.

This is the trailer (NSFW, by the way) of a 1983 film called The Killing of Satan. I found it by way of a post on io9 on my RSS reader, but the post has since then been taken down, from the looks of things. Thankfully, through the magic of Google’s web cache, here it is.

The io9 post pretty much says everything you need to know about how outlandishly weird the trailer is, but let me add a few things. First of all, this movie has Ramon Revilla in his prime going up against Satan, played by no less than Paquito Diaz. If anything, this movie could be alternatively titled Battle of the Mustaches 1983, or something along those lines. Second, we actually made a movie about a guy fighting the devil that’s actually all sorts of violent, has nudity, and still manages to play it with a straight face? Well, sign me up!

This makes me wonder, though, if our local film archive actually manages to keep a copy of every film we’ve ever produced since motion pictures made their way here in the early 1900′s. Not just those that are considered classics, but I do mean everything. And if so, it would be cool if some of them actually get released into the public domain. I’m guessing it won’t happen with The Killing of Satan, given that Ramon Revilla’s still around would probably want a slice of the pie if it ever gets re-released. But for everything else, I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff that’s worth revisiting, even just for the sake of seeing how varied and creative our movie industry used to be.

Think about it, we’ve had two massive natural disasters just in the span of a month a soon-to-begin impeachment trial, and charges of graft and corruption being filed left and right. Sure, they’re big stories, but sometimes I can’t help but mutter to myself “Man, we’re seriously fucked.” at the end of the day.

Sure, as journalists in training, we’re supposed to keep an air of separation from the things we report, but it sure does make me wonder what goes on in the heads of those who’ve been in the profession for far longer. Do they say the same thing to themselves, or do they keep it all in stride?

I hope I can find the answer to that soon enough.

“I’ve been trying to contact you over the weekend, but apparently, you didn’t submit your contact info at the start of the semester.” my prof says.

Of course, my first thought was “Am I in trouble?”

He said he selected me to be part of the reaction panel up front. It took about two to three seconds before the thought actually sank in. Of course, I was a bit skeptic (and maybe with a tinge of doofus in there because I actually doubted my professor). Then, it all sank in and I proceeded to the front and plant myself there until the program started.

The day’s lecture was about returning migrant workers, more popularly known as Overseas Filipino Workers or OFWs. The talk, delivered by Andrea Soco of Ateneo de Manila University’s Social Sciences and Anthropology department, dealt with returning OFWs’ reintegration into Philippine society, the cultural implications, and the challenges they face when at home and abroad.

The lecture started off with a rather slow burn, but the pace thankfully picked up when anecdotes from respondents of Ms. Soco’s survey were shared. Suffice to say, putting a human face on what we’d normally see as numbers or statistics in the news and academia does give most regular student folk like us a better understanding of how things really are.

Anyway, the presentation lasted for about an hour and a half, by my estimate. There was a short open forum afterwards, and this is were my other classmate and I come in. Thing is, I’ve been sharing so much about my background in class lately, that I guess my prof picked me because it pretty much fit the topic at hand. I’m the son of a former OFW, after all, even before the term OFW actually became a thing.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I was nervous as hell during the open forum. Fortunately, I still managed to hold my own and react honestly and accordingly to the presentation. I also managed to provide a little more background on the state of OFWs from my past and more recent experiences. However, they might’ve deviated a bit from what was expected of me since my dad held an ofice job back when we lived in Saudi Arabia, and the lecture mostly focused on non-skilled/non-professional workers. Somehow, I did managed to swing things back to the main focus of the talk, and I’m thankful for that.

I’ve always thought that location-based-check in services were stupid, that’s why I’ve more or less given up on Foursquare and don’t even get me started on FB Places. I’m really not one to announce to the whole world “Oh hey, I’m at this place thousands of people go to everyday.”

Don’t want stalkers? Stop making yourself so, for the lack of a better term, stalk-able.

Hell, just for shits and giggles, I’d list down a place called “Your Mom” and check into it every couple of hours.

I told you I didn't have a camera with me.

Earlier today, I took part in Old Manila Walks’ Power, Palace, and a Shot of Beer walking tour of the Malacañang complex and old neighboring San Miguel complex. My cousin was supposed to accompany her visiting American friend in the first place, but due all her leave applications shot down, I was asked to step in to go in her stead. Now the thing is, up until late last night, it had completely slipped out of my mind that I was going on the tour. And so, I went there pretty unprepared. The biggest failure of all? I didn’t have a camera on me. It’s a shame, because if I did, I’d have no trouble at all filling up a memory card with photos. Well, that, and IT’S FREAKIN’ MALACAÑANG.

Glaring omission aside, the tour itself was pretty awesome. My American companion and I managed to catch up to the rest of the tour group, despite being stuck for about an hour in some pretty maddening morning traffic pretty much the entire way through. Then again, when the hell was traffic not maddening to begin with? Anyway, after going through a quick security check (my lighter will always trip metal detectors, who cares?) and some verification, we caught up with them.

The tour covered most, if not all of the Kalayaan Hall, which I learned was opened for guided tours relatively recently. Kalayaan Hall itself is now a museum of sorts with bits and pieces from various colonial governments organized according to which country they’re from. Mike, my cousin’s friend, was pretty intrigued about the Filipino-American War and commented on how it’s rarely mentioned in textbooks and history classes back in the States. I, on the hand, was particularly interested in the preserved copies of old newspapers they had, like what I assumed was the frontpage of La Independencia with a photograph of Rizal on it. It was cool seeing an actual piece of it considering that we’ve only been talking about it and other newspapers from the revolutionary period in class.

The second floor housed the Maharlika Hall, along with other rooms that were witness to a handful of moments in Philippine history. In one room, we even saw the exact chair that Ferdinand Marcos used when he put Proclamation 1081 into effect, placing the entire country under Martial Law back in 1972. My favorite discoveries, though, were the copies of Filipino Heritage and the drawings inside Maharlika Hall. The former, because everything I know about local folklore I learned from those books and the latter simply because, well, they’re drawings! Really good ones, to boot.

At this point, I’d be repeatedly punching myself for not brining a camera, in my head anyway.

We moved on over to Tita Moning’s for merienda, which, by the amount of food on hand, was actually more like lunch. The guisadong sotanghon was really nothing to write home about, but man, the rellenong manok and guinataan were pretty damn good. That last bit even made me feel a bit homesick and miss the times when my grandma (rest her soul) made batches of it on rainy days. The only thing missing was chunks of jackfruit, which, I guess is kinda hard to come by here in the city. Of course, true to the tour’s name, we were given shots of San Miguel beer, which was born in the very same district that we were having lunch next to. I ended up having three shots of beer, and so did Mike, since some of the other members of the group passed on their shots and handed them over for us to drink instead.

The final part of the tour was in the very same place they started from, the Legarda Mansion. In all honesty, I’ve never seen a family with such a well-preserved and well-documented history such as theirs. The entire house itself has been converted into a veritable museum with a dining area that acts as an extension of Tita Moning’s. The library was filled with the smell of old books and paper, a very comforting smell, if you ask me. Ivan, our guide, said Don Alejandro himself was quite the photography enthusiast, as he showed us the good doctor’s equipment and works.

It was one of the biggest rushes of nostalgia that I’ve ever had. Simply being in the Legarda Mansion gave me some ideas about what to do with my maternal grandparents’ house back in Mindoro. Seeing as my mom, aunts and uncles have moved out, it would be a shame to let an ancestral home such as that one go to waste. There’s a rich history in my family, and it’s only been faintly hinted at by some of my uncles and my late grandfather. If I had the resources, I’d definitely try to look more into it and save the house. That, folks, is the most important thing I took away from today.

Seriously, more people need to experience tours like these. This saying’s been run into the ground more times than I’ll ever care, but we do have a rich culture. It just saddens me that the act of preserving and honoring it isn’t so high on a lot of people’s priorities these days.

Image from manilagateway.com

Update:

There’s hope for our ancestral home yet. I talked to my mom about plans to restore my grandparents’ house, and guess what? She was thinking about the same thing for a few weeks now.

Snapping photos of my drawings can only get me so far, especially now that I’m in the process of trying to fine-tune my style. I’m trying to move out of my comfort zone; using more perspective, dynamic poses, and such. My anatomy and proportions are still hit-or-miss most of the time, the way I see it. But in the end, I like how it’s slowly developing over time.

I know a lot of people will say that you should draw pretty much everyday to get an optimal amount of practice, but I have to disagree and say I’m more comfy doing in bursts every couple of days. I mean, there’s also my school (and eventually work) schedule to take into consideration. Besides, it only makes things worse when I try to force myself to produce something on a somewhat routine basis.

I guess this is why I don’t think I’ll do well in a creative industry. I don’t like having schedules and deadlines when it comes to art. My two animation-related gigs over the past couple of years? Look where those got me. Yes, I’ve been asked time and again about why I’m not taking up Fine Arts. I just keep on saying that I don’t want it to be a full-time job.

I’d rather keep this as something I do in my spare time, thank you.

For today’s Journalism 100 class, we had a discussion about the early days of the press and how technology helped it advance. We got to the part about telegraphy and my prof asked if any of us had any experience with telegrams, let alone knew what they were.

“Seriously, no one here’s familiar with telegrams?” she asked in Filipino.

I sheepishly raised my hand and muttered “God, I’m old.” I’m 25, by the way. Everyone else probably ranged somewhere in the late teens to early 20′s. I was then asked to explain how they worked… if I could still remember, of course. Well, I managed to, and that probably made me the official cranky old man of the class. For the record, there are about seven or eight of us in that class. Hey, what can I say? I attend a pretty small (but still good) college.

For the record, I knew I’d inevitably be the oldest in some of my classes. It’s just that being the oldest plus having to recount stuff from two decades ago really does have a high chance of rubbing it in. At the very least, I get to enjoy even just a little smidgen of seniority. Just don’t call me ‘gramps’ of something.

Hands down, this past weekend simply has to be one of the best I’ve had in recent memory.

First off, a friend from college got married last Saturday. It’s always awesome to see friends you a) haven’t seen in a while and b) haven’t seen in what could be described as forever, or something close to it. The ceremony itself was a relatively private, but very dignified affair with a cool live string quartet to provide the music.

Getting to the wedding reception’s venue was also a bit of an adventure. I hitched a ride in a friend’s car to get to Oasis along Aurora Blvd. from San Juan, and eventually just ditched the provided map from the wedding invitation in the process to rely on shortcuts. I know how much I bitch about being the dude his friends ask directions from, but this was one of those rare occasions where I felt pretty badass and accomplished providing said directions.

The reception was school/library-themed, with names of various people who’ve influenced the newlyweds serving as markers for each table. The agonizing wait for our table to be called (#9, Oscar Wilde) was punctuated by Viking-like growls and raised fists. Obviously, we drew a lot of attention with that, but yeah, I guess we were *that* hungry. The food was really good, particularly the roast beef and fish fillet with wasabi mayo that I now regret not getting more of.

We tried our best to set Edlyn and her boyfriend up during the games, but it kinda backfired so the host, our friend Quincy, had to figure out something else. It was a really clever move on his part, but it really would’ve been a dozen kinds of awesome if everything went according to plan. You can’t win everything, they say.

Well, after more photo booth hijinks, the party wrapped up and soon we were on our way to Holiday Inn over in Ortigas. Now here’s the cool thing about it… my mom also happened to be checked in at the same hotel. To say that it was one of the best coincidences ever is an understatement, if you ask me. As a result, not only did I get to hang out in a hotel room with some college friends, I also got to spend a big chunk of my weekend there, too.

I capped off the day with beer with three other friends. Conversations ranged from relationships, existential discourse, videogames as art, and who in my old creative writing block was going to get hitched next. We’re not sure, either, but we do hope to find out really soon.