Jaded Perspectives

Ever since I was a child, I’ve always had this strong sense of justice – albeit, that might sound a bit self-righteous by modern standards. Still, it is a personal virtue (in my opinion), that I’ve always held true to.  Partially at least, I would attribute this to the myriad of superhero cartoons and other shows within the same genre that I grew up with. My favorite was definitely the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I religiously waited for every Friday night on ABS-CBN together with my big sister. Sometimes, the show would be canceled for something else for no particular reason. It also moved timeslots several times over the years. We loved the pilot episodes of the show when we first saw it via a rented betamax tape. Of course, we did start to notice that as the show went on, the turtles weren’t even using their weapons anymore. Eventually, the fighting devolved to tripping up their opponents with booby traps or smacking them with pizza pies to the face. The Shredder went f

Taking a short break from blogging this week to give you this compilation. Any new entries will be appended here as well. Read the ebook for free here . Here are some new fanart pieces I've finished recently btw. Sailor Moon Redraw... but it's not Usagi

Human memory is often quite unreliable. As such, our fondest memories are often idealized to portray ourselves as the main protagonists of this unpredictable, ever-shifting, mixed genre adventure called “life.” With this in mind, rather than fighting against my personal biases, I am a person who will gladly embrace them as indelible parts of my own individuality. After all, there is no one in existence who can actually claim to be completely neutral.  Furthermore, as aptly stated by Eli Weisel: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” Fortunately, I am rather confident that no feelings (or at least no one worthy of note other than those willing to find offense at every little thing) will be trampled and no persons shall be victimized by the admittedly biased, oft-unreliable, but hopefully entertaining recollections of a middle class almost-rich kid from the 90’s. You may or may not be surprised by this, owing to my apparent loquaciousness, unnecessary verbosity

One thing that I’ve noticed from Philippine movies and TV series is that there is always this idealized version of the so-called pffft… “class struggle” between the rich and the poor. This is something that has existed since the heydays of stars like Nora Aunor. Always, with a probability of 90% (I’m making up the percentage), the rich are portrayed in a negative light as the oppressors of the poor who are discriminated and bullied. Now I’m not sure how much my anecdotal experiences echo that of others, but for me at least, the reverse has always been true. I’ve been through at least six different schools in my lifetime – three during my grade school years and I’ve had the privilege of interacting with kids of my age from different walks of life including super rich kids whose families could afford three mansions with three cars each and less privileged kids who basically lived in a one-room, two-square meter house made of bamboo and dried coconut leaves. With that said, one thi

She doesn't die in the remake... yet A few days ago, I was reading the most recent chapters of Tonikaku Kawaii when I came upon this panel of the manga – which, if you are a gamer, you would immediately recognize as being an obvious reference to Final Fantasy VII. Here’s a confession: the online nickname I use, “lordcloudx” is actually a reference to FFVII’s main character, Cloud Strife. Back when I was playing the game in early 1998, the internet was experienced via unreliable dial-up modems and you paid by the hour to view pages that sometimes took anywhere between 5-10 minutes to load a few text and images. Therefore, looking up spoilers on Gamefaqs (yes, it existed) was actually the least of my concerns. Anyway, me and a few High School buddies were actually taking turns playing the game (on my save) at home when we reached the Forgotten City where Aerith (then known as Aeris by default) was praying, and we were just rushing to get to the end of the first disc already.

The flow of time is relative. From a scientific standpoint, this is factually true. Time is influenced by the several unique forces that act upon matter in the universe such as gravity. Certainly, here on Earth, the dilation of time may seem insignificant, but if you can imagine how time ceases to exist completely and comes to a total standstill at the center of a black hole, then you would have a less ambiguous conception of the relativistic nature of time. You could basically live forever if you could somehow survive the spaghettification of your physical form that would occur long before you can even get near a black hole. Far detached from the realm of quantum physics, which I am in no position to speak of, time can flow as equally subjective for an individual person. Time, for a human being, can flow very quickly or sometimes come to a complete stop, based on how the brain processes what is happening around that particular individual. For example, back when I was in Grade 6, m

Life for a middle-class kid in the Philippines in the 90’s was really far detached from how things are today. It was a simpler time before the advent of the information superhighway, a term that’s actually become a bit dated by modern standards. Back in 1995, “The Lion King,” which had been released in theaters a year before, was still the hottest topic among kids my age. That, along with Street Fighter II, which most of us only knew from looking at collectible cards with 2D chibi illustrations of the characters performing their special moves. Some lucky kids who grew up near the arcades actually got to experience the game first-hand, but I wasn’t among those. To bring things into context, there were many things back in the mid-nineties that would probably make a modern 9-12 year-old kid nowadays roll their eyes and cringe. Sure, some things like bikes and roller-blades remain timeless, but there was such a huge lack of information that all we had to rely on when it ca

An accurate depiction of how it must've looked like to onlookers This is a story from nearly three decades ago... Growing up in an upper-middle class family, we could almost be considered rich in the Philippine context. My father was already a pretty well-established lawyer by the time I was born, so according to my sister, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth... which might not have been much of an exaggeration.  We were raised on tenderloin steaks, ox tongue, and sizzling blue marlin from the most expensive hotels here -- which at one, point, we had on an almost daily basis. We also had cable TV, Betamax, a Family Computer (NES for western audiences), a PC, Playstation, cellular phones and other modern luxuries from the western world before anyone else did. Anyway, this isn't a post to brag about our affluence, nor to reminisce those days when we were kinda rich -- which I am not right now. You see, my most vivid experiences from growing up were my colorful inte