argument against alighieri (A)

afterlife: i just finished watching a film (won't say the title for spoilery reasons) wherein a character dies but appears in a scene in the end. now i've always doubted the existence of an afterlife but after seeing that, the chance of me believing in life after death has become microscopic. we've been told that when you die, you either go to heaven or hell, depending upon how you lived your life. that idea alone is sketchy. what if you've been good your whole life then did one bad thing and died before you could ask for forgiveness? or what if you've been bad your whole life but managed to ask for forgiveness for your evil ways just before you die? also, isn't it suicide when you know you're going to die but you risk your life anyway to save someone else's life?

and don't give me the purgatory thing. that's an even bigger nonsense than the concept of heaven and hell. it's like, dude, you gotta wait here until we're done reviewing your case. see, you've been such a do-gooder but you masturbate a lot and we don't like that here so we're weighing the amount of good deeds you've done against that number of times you pleasured yourself. and what do you know, good deeds beat masturbation by one point. all we need now is to get at least 100 people to pray for your soul to gain access to heaven. we're at 99 and the last one, your ex, has just knelt down to pray for you. if she finishes her prayer, you're good to go. oops, she was just going to give a guy a blowjob. sorry. off to hell with you, you despicably nefarious miscreant!

but the one i recently realized, thanks to that particular film, is that your afterlife self is supposed to look like yourself when you die. not exactly at the moment of your death (because, you know, everything is beautiful in heaven and there can't be anyone who has burnt skin, a decapitated head or spilling insides even if they died that way) but your best looking appearance just before. but what if you've had long hair all your life and you suddenly decided to go bald, and then you die, will your afterlife self be bald? if you died wearing nothing, will your afterlife self be naked? if not, what criteria does the afterlife use to choose your eternal uniform? if a guy dies while wearing a jollibee costume, will he enter heaven as jollibee? will we all suddenly have white togas when we die? if a person is born with physical defects, will they have the same physical defects in the after life? if not, why were they even allowed to be born with those defects then?

these are serious escathological questions by the way. im pretty sure religious fundies have multiple-bible-interpretation, dodge-the-real-issue answers for these questions. that or they'll just ignore it. i really hate it when anyone dismisses questions due to their faith. it's not even a test of faith. it's about fully understanding what you believe in. but i guess "understanding" isn't part of having faith. you just drink the kool-aid and ignore why it tastes like cyanide.

p.s. everytime there's an exception to a rule, i think there should be no rule.
p.p.s. anyone who puts "leave everything to god" as facebook statuses should start walking around, crossing streets with their eyes closed.

a blog challenge

so i dreamt i was back in high school... again. the quirk this time is i had my young high school body. i know this because i saw myself in a mirror. i looked at a mirror because we were supposed to present something in costume. and for some reason, mine was the phantom of the opera. so i saw my high school self putting on the white mask in front of a mirror.

anyhow, in the classroom we were told to present alphabetically. that's when i thought of a cure for this blog's content drought: alphabetically topicked posts! dont know if anyone has done this but im going to attempt it anyway for the sake of my make-believe avid readers.

p.s. storytime! back in real life high school, during a foundation celebration, i got caught in one of those stupid jail booths. the deal was i had to stay in their makeshift cell for 30 minutes or choose one of two bail options: a) pay 10 bucks, or b) recite the alphabet backwards. unbeknownst to them, a) i was a cheapskate, and b) i could actually sing the alphabet song in reverse. i did so and nonchalantly left them perplexed. which was, in retrospect, badass and lame at the same time.

my last blog post (if the world ends tomorrow)

i really don't believe that the world will end tomorrow. there are so many reasons it should, but there are many more why it shouldn't. still, i'm 100% sure it isn't going to happen. but for the mayans' sake, let's say that they didn't just run out of rock space and actually predicted that december 21, 2012 is in fact the last time anyone will say tgif. oh how fucked we all are.

but what's going to occur? there should at least have been a global doomsday precursor every day for two weeks, each being different from the other. and no, the recent catastrophe in our country or the shooting in sandy hook are to localized to signal the approaching apocalypse. (and damn every priest and person who'll say it's the rh bill) it had to be something felt worldwide. so far, we've had none of that.

i'd also like to point out that we have different timezones. it will still be thursday in america when it's friday in the philippines. it can't be like, everything's crumbling to ashes in our part of the globe and it's all peace and quite in another. it also cant happen to us on friday while someone in the u.s. would be like, but it's thursday. a warning-less armageddon has to strike in one go.

to me, only one scenario is possible: alien invasion, the same aliens who met the mayans and told them, yousa be prepared on this date, bitches, 'cause wesa gonna be back to do some shit (yes, they were gungans). the mayans owed them big and there was no way to pay it back at that time so the space mafia gave us thousands of years to come up with the cheese. so tomorrow, a ginormous wormhole will appear near the moon, aliens will come out and bust through our ozone to do some damage.

i typed a bunch of farewell messages but they were quite awkward so instead im going to link to an article i wrote on the topic at hand. click here before the earth disintegrates.

the end?

baroque concerto grosso

today's topic, kids, is music. but first a little music background (not background music). i basically like rock and, to cut the inevitable long story short, i used to buy casette tapes and cds. but then the internet happened and mp3s became the universal format for auditory stimulation. however, unlike most downloaders, i give a shit about musicians losing money to piracy. buying overpriced albums at this day and age of physical player extinction is impractical. and the only other option for me to pay those guys back is to go to their concerts.

im a casual fan. i do not idolize any of them. i do not define my life by their lyrics. i just love their music and want to see them perform live and actually pay for it which is worth every peso because no amount of speakers or hertz of quality can match the real deal. there, it's not just listening anymore. it's an entire experience. you the vocalist actually sing the lyrics and the other members actual play their instruments all while surrounded with (hopefully) other true fans. so i find it stupid to see people brand themselves as big fans of some bands and not go to their concerts.

Or, inversely, i find it even stupider that there are people who worship musicians and claim to be diehard fans just because of one song, as dictated by being in. a coworker of mine just now said that psy is her idol, because of gangnam style. my wife showed me someone's tweet about a girl saying she is the number one fan of maroon 5 despite the fact that the only song of theirs she knows is payphone. these people are not fans. they're trend slaves. if for some reason, justin bieber released a song of nothing but farts and the media eats it up, these people would be preaching it's the best thing that penetrated their ears. this "phenomenon" is also because of the internet. it is now easier to start a fad and follow them, regardless of everything else.

i watched the first maroon 5 concert in moa back when payphone and moves like jagger weren't hits. they just played their classic songs. im sure there were people there who just went because they thought adam levine was hot and could care less about what he sang. but there wasn't this thing that there is now. on the night of the 2nd concert which was in araneta, i was watching the news and this guy was interviewed. he said he'd been a fan of maroon 5 for many years. and then the clincher: he said he was excited because it was his first time to see them live. so i was like, no, dude, you just drank the kool-aid.

p.s. also, may the idea of walking around wearing headsets is cool die.

blueprint for disaster

somebody awesome, god-looking and very humble is celebrating his birthday next week and so i thought a little blog overhaul is in order. and by little, i mean some minor visual changes, and by overhaul, i mean i really did not want to use the word makeover. which kind of explains my preference for some big words and different ways of conveying messages. unlike a lot of the pretentious blogs ive encountered where they trade sense and clarity for forced scholarly meta-bullshit, my vocabular druthers are mandated by inner writer voice and there are words i would not speak with that voice. id even invent a word or phrase in place of such verbal aversions.

anyway. so the plan is to do some digital renovation and then, for the umperteenth time, post regularly. as much as possible, weekly. will i be able to strictly adhere to this? probably not. but with the recent developments life-wise, the necessary factors to accomplish this goal are present so failure to comply is to be blamed on laziness (which, as my millions and millions of imaginary fans know, i have an abundance of). by the power of his noodly appendage, i will do my best to stick to the shtick.

edit: just gave the blog a thorough eyeraping and decided to hold off on the overhaul. i really want to make some changes but i admit i pre-typed the post above without having decided on a new look. still contemplating on going retro red and using a static banner.

p.s. the other day, i had some sort of nightmare marathon. i wanted to tell my wife about it but she said she'd die did that as per a superstition. but what if i post it here? does that cancel out the curse because i wont be telling it to anyone directly or would everyone who reads the post die?

this is where your taxes go

sometime ago, they decided to strictly enforce the speed limit. fast and furious drivers traversing the south luzon expressway suddenly received a piece of police literature. it's a good law. it lessens accidents. but what about those bozos going way below the speed limit? do they flag them down and ticket them as well? i bet no or else i wouldn't find myself driving in a very long queue behind a hearse-velocity truck on a highway which i paid the toll for. why do they let these slugs go by? don't say they don't cause accidents because im pretty sure that a lot of those accidents were due to drivers overtaking these motherfuckers. cop dudes, dont single out the speedsters. implement the law completely. go after motorists who go over and below the speed limit. get these slowpokes out of my way and stick tickets up their shitholes. i mean, chasing them shouldn't be that hard, right?

one of the things i hate seeing on the news is the shenanigans against piracy. they confiscate piles of 8 in 1s, apprehend the vendors and give a job-well-done interview. that's it? that's the only thing in their job description, mission and vision? take the fakes and smile for the camera? what about the legal ones in the video stores? why are they overpriced crap compared to the pirated copies? how about the theaters? why are they still showing the same old pinoy ideas-stolen-from-hollywood movie crap in the cinemas? where can the rare films destroyed in dvd form be seen? why rate a film r and release it if there are going to be cuts? and why are the cuts done by a 5-year-old using windows moviemaker? your job does not stop at hunting down the dvd cloners. make those films available legally and ensure quality viewing in cinemas. (also, instead of showing a stupid comedy skit about illegal recording along with the trailers, they should threaten the morons and the assholes that they'd be kicked out with no refund for talking, texting, answering calls, commenting loudly, reacting unnecessarily, bringing children and ruining other folks' experience during the movie.)

now the issue regarding plagiarism, i don't want to even begin. ive already wasted two long paragraphs worth of your time and i'd rather start concluding this post than make it any more longer due to a topic i so strongly oppose. i'll just say: plagiarism is wrong, whether there's a law against it or not, and anyone who does not understand that simple fact should not be in public office.

why are there road constructions (ongoing or abandoned) everywhere? why do streets quickly turn into lakes after a little rain? why do we get our butts kicked in the olympics? why is it that no matter how hard you work, you'll never be richer than the already rich? because this country is being run by a bunch of buffoons doing half-assed jobs for double/triple the pay stolen from our pockets.

whose timeline is it anyway?

every week i take a bus to go home and i ride a particular line because it has a lower fare price. in fact, it is even lower than the regular discounted price for senior citizens. so i find it irritating, nay, insulting that an old man, with all the free movies on monday, dedicated queue and car on mrt/lrt, and all the other discounts available for him, would think that he deserves a discount for the already low fare. his reason? everybody was paying the same price so him being above 60 years old should pay less. the gall of this geriatric goon.

why people have this false sense of entitlement, i'll never understand. in this vein...

everybody, please shut up about not wanting to have your facebook timelined. this issue is really getting on my nerves. facebook is free. you are posting irrelevant blow-by-blow details of your mundane life every minute as statuses for free. you are connected to a ridiculous amount of people not even half of which are your real friends for free. you are sharing hypocritical quote photos, linking music videos, and putting stuff nobody cares about day after day on your wall for free. you are given the privilege of doing all of these things for free and yet you act like everything should be done the way you want. you are no different from a bum begging for money and scoffing if its a mere peso or that old man demanding his extra special treatment.

if getting timeline is that much of a problem for you, then by all means, deactivate your account and slither back to friendster, myspace or multiply. but if you can comprehend that not paying a single cent makes your complaint pointless and invalid, then shut that bitching hole up and deal with it.


p.s. how do you protest against protesters?