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Nothing says “party” more than Multiplex.
Back when mini-component systems were the “in” thing, the big radios came with a collection of Multiplex tapes that were always at war with “minus-one.” It was a great way to spend Halloween; the days before All Saints’ Day were spent with doble-kara performances of “Endless Love,” where half of one’s body would be dolled up like Diana Ross, and the other half dressed up like Lionel Richie. There’s also the birit competitions that go with Whitney Houston falsettos, particularly that of “I Will Always Love You.” Quite a number of performers were born from the folds of Multiplex lyrics pamphlets, painstakingly memorized for the Tanghalang Bayan at the town fiesta.
Never mind if it’s a rendition of a song by Simply Red. I hope you comprehend.
Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left. - Matthew 27:38, KJV
The woes of last-minute registration all have to boil down to a simple act of pasensyahan. The bureaucracy isn’t as efficient as it should be, and last-minute registration shows that people can push citizenship to the very last minute. Last-minute registration, in many ways, is a window to last-minute citizenship.
There was a time in Philippine basketball that all plays were made on clutch: “last two minutes.” Unfortunately, that kind of mindset does not translate to something that should be sustained, and something that, for all intents and purposes, should be done on reflex.
Maybe the Commission on Elections has issues to resolve on its own when it comes to registration and information dissemination. Yes, we all need to make a living, we all need to go to school, and many things can get in the way of us registering anyway. Yet our insistence – perhaps even penchant – for being citizens at the very last minute can be a good reason why, in many ways, we get what we deserve.
Transience can be a bitch, so suck it up.
In loving memory of that site that many of us grew to love, I’m writing the rest of this post in scrolling marquee text in three fonts, with various color schemes. - Marocharim
Ah, Geocities. Truly one-of-a-kind during its time… I remember those days when I fiddled around with frames, fonts, and yes, scrolling marquee. I was all but 14, maybe 15 years old, playing around with HTML codes that were still a bit distant to me. Your legacy lives on, in the form of those shiny glittery glowing CSS backgrounds everyone used in Friendster and Multiply.
Geocities made things so much simple back then. Before the days of WYSIWYG editors and WordPress, Geocities – and Notepad or Microsoft FrontPage or whatever – was all we had to conquer this Brave New World called the personal homepage. Good times, before “blogging” became the buzzword. Geocities was our world – our apple – and we ate through its core.
In the moment that you’re reading this – or you’re trying to read this – you probably think that you wouldn’t have wanted to live in a time of 56 KBPS or Windows 95. You probably would be laughing out loud at the prospect of having little to no ads at all, or having to start writing everything with enclosed brackets. It’s nice to see the Internet grow, but like everything else, sometimes you just have to let them go.
And yet that’s what makes it all worthwhile… the passage of time where there is no time, the movement of space where it does not exist. Before celebrities and pundits, before events and awards and media coverage, Geocities was a place where people just… basically fucked around with tables and “Blink” tags that don’t seem to work anymore. Yet that’s the most important lesson we can learn from the death of Geocities; that all of this is temporary.
I don’t know whatever happened to my Geocities – heaven knows whatever happened in those sites of yore – but as simple Web technologies grow, so should we who use it. We should adapt. We should improve. Most of all, we should hold on to what we regard as most important. Our thoughts, our friends, the chronicles of our lives that somehow are not enough for words.
As we all who used it say goodbye to Geocities, let it be known that it had opened a gate for us to be more articulate, to open up our spaces, and to realize and recognize that our spaces are places we should defend and cherish. While Geocities was merely the beginning to this Brave New World called “blogging” or “personal home pages,” we have barely made a stride into the journey that awaits all of us.
Goodbye, Geocities. One day soon, we will meet again. Hopefully.
In a way – in many ways, at that – I made Nicanor Perlas.
A group of foreigners and expats have a Ning group where the Nick “Badass” Perlas campaign has apparently gone full force: in many ways, “Badass” is now a new marketing campaign for a Presidentiable no one knows, much less cares about. I like to believe that I caught on the badassery by osmosis: I am not campaigning for Perlas, but in a way – in many ways, at that – I am. I am satirizing and openly mocking his campaign, but in a way – in many ways, at that, I’m not. See what I mean?
With that said, I am not the online campaign manager for Perlas 2010, but Nick Perlas is such a badass that I actually became his spokesman without me knowing it. That’s how badass he is. Forget illusionists that vanish into thin air, or fashion models that take off their underpants while they’re still wearing trousers: anyone who can actually speak for me is a freakin’ badass.
A group of foreigners and expats have a 