The Fat Man Today

The other day, the writer Raissa Robles asked a curious question over Twitter. You can read it after the jump:

Well, to be honest, I haven’t had time to write. So once I have a goodly-sized bank of articles to post, our regular M-W-F (and a special Caturday post, if ever!) will resume. Until then, we’re on radio silence. Sorry folks!

Two things grabbed my attention yesterday. One was Lucy Liu’s remark about being compared to a Filipino. The second was Jessica Sanchez’s stint in Glee. I wouldn’t be surprised if the two items were trending topics in Twitter for at least an afternoon.

Today, members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Philippine government are signing the framework for the creation of an independent Bangsamoro jurisdiction in the extreme south of the country. If you’d like to know more about the whole deal, you may read more about it at the official gazette .

This is a story in progress. I will post it in chunks, for the next few weeks, as I complete it. A warning: this tale is definitely not for children, so parental advisory is advised. Or don’t let your kids read this. At all. Story begins after the jump.

If you guys thought we were done with Robert Blaire Carabuena, think again. The last I heard of this man was when he 1) apologized to Saturnino Fabros, and 2) when he was publicly heckled, and was brought to the hospital. Now, he’s going to jail .

A couple of years ago – nearly a decade ago, truth be told – my ex-girlfriend gave me a cat who looked, with the way his fur was colored, like a combination of Charlie Chaplin, Hitler, and local funnyman Katchupoy. I decided to name him Zardos, after Prince Zardoz of the Boazanian empire. In this case, he was delegated to nothing more than a funny lolcat.

I break from my schedule to remind you folks that today, the Supreme Court deliberates on the constitutionality of Republic Act No. 10175, otherwise known as the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

I don’t know if any of you have read this yet, but if you have the time to do so now, please read the article “ RH Bill, Ateneo, and La Salle: Of Lemons and Cowards ”. I’m sure many of you will find this to be a rather interesting read, for a variety of reasons. ( Here’s another link , in case the one above isn’t working.)

Hi folks. Just to let you know that this little writer’s been busy and hasn’t been working on his stories, so today’s post will be delayed to tomorrow. Apologies all around, people.

As a person who lives on the Internet throughout my daily life, I cannot state in words how sad, disappointed, ashamed, and disgusted I am with our government for the massive oversight that is the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.

This will be a short post, and will probably be a very opinionated one at that, so caveat emptor and all that jazz. Today is the first of October, and we have two more days to storm the Supreme Court with our prayers. There are proper avenues of complaint, and if everyone were to try to show their displeasure with the law, there’s a small chance – small, but a chance is a chance – that we can make a difference.

This is a story in progress. I will post it in chunks, for the next few weeks, as I complete it. A warning: this tale is definitely not for children, so parental advisory is advised. Or don’t let your kids read this. At all. Story begins after the jump. Note that this update was posted later than usual. My apologies for the delay!

A bit too late to talk about the Cybercrime Prevention act, but let’s get to it. A couple of posts ago, I wrote about what the Pinoy blogger’s role in the Internet of 2012 was / is. Last week, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 was turned into law. For those who aren’t aware, this law possesses several intrinsic positive traits, including the penalization of fraud, cybersquatting, child pornography, and other ways of trafficking illegal substances online. However, this law also criminalizes libel.

I’m breaking my supposed routine today because of a video posted by Jim Paredes over Twitter last Saturday. This is not for the weak of heart, and is not safe for work, but not because of nudity, profanity (though there are some words), or violence. It is not safe for work because of how it will affect you. Anthony Griffith is well-known in most circles as a very talented comedian. During the peak of his career—strangely enough, during the peak of “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson—the man lost his daughter to cancer. As he quotes from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” This goes out to everybody I know who suffered the loss of a loved one due to cancer, to everybody who is currently fighting cancer, and to everybody helping somebody deal with cancer. You are not alone.  

This is a story in progress. I will post it in chunks, for the next few weeks, as I complete it. A warning: this tale is definitely not for children. Story begins after the jump.

Sorry guys. Things happened. I'll try to have something up by Wednesday. In the meantime, take a look at some of the sites I link to over at The Fat Man Follows.

This is my flagship story. Black Hole was published under the pseudonym Kilawinguwak in the Philippine Graphic Magazine back in the early 2000s (I forget which date, exactly). The story begins after the jump.

This happened to me a couple of weeks ago while I was on my way home one early morning. I was on a jeepney, riding through Sampaloc en route to Pandacan, via Vicente Cruz street. It was around 5AM, and everybody I was riding with was either sleepy or drunk (there’s a Padi’s Point near SM San Lazaro, the terminal of this jeepney route), and all in all, you could say that it was a very idyllic ride. But that turned out to be a mistaken assumption.

One of the biggest pieces of news that the Internet missed by a mile last week was the junking of the Freedom of Information bill. I narrowly missed finding out about it by chance, that chance being that I decided to listen to AM radio while on my morning constitutional. Erwin Tulfo and Martin Andanar, dropped that bomb whilst I was on my second lap around the Pandacan Linear Park, and I think I sorta screamed at the radio then and there. I scared away several kids, in the process. I was wearing earphones at the time.

Just a couple of updates on this blog. You guys may have noticed that I’ve been changing the layout (and the RSS feed) rather frequently the past few week/s. While you may still experience that in the coming days, I think we’ve settled down on a format that I’m happy with.   Also, in order to get Technorati to recognize that I own this blog, I need to post the following text: P7XDU3M5UJC7. So there, Technorati. I hope you’re happy.  

One of the most amazing things about procrastination is that your mind wanders. Back in the age of lesser technology, your mind was the sole source of imagination. Thanks to the Internet, when your mind wanders, there’s solid proof provided by the number of browser windows you have open.

I think most, if not all of the readers of my website have seen exactly what kind of ass Tito Sotto has been making of himself the past few days. The unraveling of the man continues with every word that escapes from his mouth, but the sad fact remains that the true danger of recent events lies not in the deconstruction of the man with the mustache, but in what these events could mean for the evolution of the Philippine Internet.

I don’t know why, but we Filipinos are too nice. There’s nothing wrong with asserting your right when you are absolutely sure that you’ve got the right to be an ass to other people.

A post from the New York Times says that Electronic Arts is up for grabs. CTRL-ALT-DEL made a parody of the whole thing, stating that the company could be bought for a measly $100. Which isn’t that far off, seeing as to how, if the news report can be trusted, EA stocks sell for $13.09 apiece.

Okay, enough with the current events talk. Unless something else equally interesting happens this week, we’re sticking to scheduled programming. There was a time when I tried growing long hair. I even tried to naturally braid said hair into dreadlocks (by naturally, I mean without using chemicals and / or salon treatments), although that failed, much to the relief of some of the people I know.

I had something else lined up for today, but man, the news has been buzzing nonstop since the other week, and I just can’t help it. For those of you with short patience: this is a long read, so pop some popcorn in the microwave, we’re going to be in for a long ride. Senator Vicente Sotto’s legal team has a big problem. During the morning of August 23, 2012, Hector Villacorta said, during a breakfast meeting with the press, the following: “Copying is a common practice. Why do you need to think of a brand-new measure when a good one that was not enacted already exists?” as evidenced in this article on the Philippine Daily Inquirer . To his defense, Miriam Defensor-Santiago states that plagiarism really isn’t that big of a deal in the Senate, which can be read on this ABS-CBN news article . But that’s where it gets tricky. And this is the root of all of Villacorta’s problems.

The past week, we Filipinos were treated to another show of dualities. In just the span of seven (give or take a few) days, the two types of public servants we are forced to live with were brought to the limelight in two equally tragic events. I speak of the deconstruction of Senator Vicente Sotto III’s turno en contra speech against the RH Bill, and the plane crash of DILG Secretary Jesse Manalastas Robredo.

Edit August 20, 2012 @ 5:21pm: The plane carrying Robredo and his companions was a Seneca, not a Cesna. Last week, DILG secretary Jesse Robredo was in a plane crash en route from Cebu to Naga. You can read more about the event on this story by GMA News .

If you’re working in the BPO sector like I and a vast majority of my friends do, then you will often have to deal with clients who don’t pay.

Last week, Metro Manila suffered from one of the worst monsoon seasons the Philippines had ever had to endure. Things got so bad that I think a report said that almost 90% of the metro was submerged underwater.

A couple of weeks ago, I was given the privilege of writing about Casa Roces , which became one of my favorite restos in the metro just after one visit!

Today’s update will be short, because I’m still geeking out. For those who are not aware, today we landed another rover on Mars. Curiosity’s front hazecam checking out the horizon of Mars! Well will you look at that. I can’t really say how exciting this is. All I can tell you is that this is beautiful, and if you watched the command team throughout the entire ordeal, when Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere, when parachute deployment was successful, and when the six wheels of the rover touched Martian soil – man. That was emotional. I don’t think I could even begin to imagine the stress the whole command crew had to go through just for those short seven minutes. If anybody’s interested in learning more about the whole Martian mission, be sure to follow Mars Curiosity’s Twitter profile .

Every so often, I decide to update my blog’s layout, even if I don’t really end up using the darn thing as much as I should. But ever since the last layout change, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want my blog to look like something you’d expect to see on old newsprint.

Ayep. They’re over. Back in 2005—I was still over at Tabulas, then—the entire blogging experience was a new, exciting trend. There were thousands of fresh new voices to read over the Internet, aside from the corporate websites that one visited to get new information about the next upcoming Megaman game. And I liked it. I was part of it. I was hipster blogging before hipster even became a word.

I’ve always thought that the big G was strict with its keyword rules, which basically meant that SERPS were only relevant for the exact search terms that you were trying to rank for.

That’s what I am. A behemoth of the deep. A plesiosaur, Lochnessian monstrosity rearing its ugly head from the depths of the aqueous torpor to check how things are going in the blogosphere today. So hi guys. What’s up?