Reactions

Google added a new feature into Blogger called "Reactions", where readers can express their reactions through preset expressions given by the blog writer/administrator. To use Reactions, you just tick one of the tickboxes on the bottom of each blog post to conveniently express your reactions. It's easy right? This should help me get some criticism, constructive or not, when people are too lazy to write something on the comments box.

A second person narrative of a Tropical Storm Ondoy survivor

To explain the scenario I'm going to picture, let's play pretend. Suppose you are a regular Filipino citizen, waking up at 4AM in the morning, either ready to go to class in college or you're fresh from a blackout from the nearest cockpit. When you look outside the window, you realize that it's raining. And it's not regular rain, it's raining hard, as if God decided that the Philippines is some sort of a toilet to piss on with rainwater. You shake it off, reminding yourself that this is another of those Philippine phenomena you can't find anywhere else, and conclude that the rain will probably stop in less than twenty minutes or less.

Two hours later, you are on your way to work, and still the rain has not shown any signs of weakening.

Curious about the current weather situations, you tune in to the radio and hear an announcement that a tropical storm is about to cross the mainland. You turn off the radio and breath a sigh of relief that it's only a tropical storm, not a hurricane. To you, and the majority of society, a tropical storm, when compared to a hurricane, is a 12 year old, 200lb, asthmatic boy with red hair, pale skin, freckles all over the body, oversized glasses, enjoys World of Warcraft and wears a t-shirt with the words, "Mommy's biggest boy" in big, bold letters.

You sit down on your computer, begin typing worthlesss papers your professor told you to type on your computer, when suddenly your noisy roomate bursts in your privacy, in his face, both the expression of happy and shock. At first glance you thought he was just going to tell you about his peephole session last night, but today, his subject was a bit different. There's a fucking flood outside. And no, it's not just a "flow that drags garbage and infants", it's a "gigantic flow that drags cars and stupid people with the minds of infants".

You were very relieved, for probably your professor and his frail body would be dragged by the flood and disappear forever without a trace. You tell your roomate you are going to party it out by pubbing on DoTa. You start to log-in to Garena, when suddenly, it failed to start, because the Internet was out.

You sigh, because you couldn't show off to the world how much you suck at playing DoTa. However, you found hope when your buddy told you tha you're just going to fight with each other mano a mano. You fire up Warcraft III when suddenly the your computer monitor, together with the whole dorm, was covered in darkness. The power was out.

Wh3r3 m4h d0t4 g0?

Your roommate proceeded to scream, "Holy shit", in Filipino. You facepalm yourself, overpowered by the regret of not being able to play DoTa today. You open the windows to let light in your room. You see the scene outside and let out a gasp of horror.

You see different kinds of objects being carried away by the raging flood water - clothes, appliances, even cars - moving in the flow of the liquid as if the streets were turned into an angry river. There's the occassional retard being carried away by the flow, and, in really rare occassions, some of those retards even enjoys the ride.

This, minus Michael Bay CGI.

Suddenly, your thoughts were shifted on your friends outside. Are they ok? You take out your one thousand peso Nokia N93 chinaphone ripoff and sent out a group message to all of your friends about the flood. One by one, the messages failed to send, due to two reasons: (1) You don't have any prepaid credits left and (2) There isn't any cellphone signal.

You cuss at your cellphone failing itself, and decides that it could serve the purpose of being a wedge later whenever the situation comes. You and your friend sit down on the torn, dirty couch you stole from the lounge, thinking about what to do next. Your thoughts were interrupted rudely by a threatening sound that came from downstairs. It was the front door, and it just blew open like a SWAT team inserted some breaching bombs and blew the explosives.

You and your friend cower in fear, lest it was drug law agents searching for the stash of shabu you hid under your bed with your dwarf brother. The threat came up the stairs, only that it did not emit sounds of footsteps and officers radioing for backup. It sounded wet. And angry. Your friend screamed and pointed at the foot of your door. Water flowed underneath the door. The rainwater spread throughout the room, destroying everything unlucky enough to not be on top of some sort of support.


Four hours later, after living on a couple of leftover potato chip snacks and refusing to drink any water (lest it's piss), the flood inside your dorm room has reached knee level. You and your roommate proceeds to the roof of your two-story dorm, where getting bombarded by tiny droplets of water for hours is way better than being tormented by one whole body of water threatening to drown you.

You find other people experiencing the same fate as well - families and households holed up on their roofs, watching in horror as their possessions - televisions, refrigerators, their worthless laptop computers, being towed away by the flood, as if God took them away and said, "Hey, nice stuff. Lemme have it" while giving the family the finger in the process.

This is the situation of the Philippines during September 26-27, 2009. Tropical Storm Ondoy, a regular typhoon destined to only go around the Philippines and wreak havoc on Taiwan, decided to be a dick and went through the mainland. Also, instead of just passing by as a regular nuisance, he decided to be a bigger dick by showering the South-Central Luzon with heavy rainfall, much like mobsters enjoy raining their targets with plenty of .45 calibers from their tommy guns before disappearing from the scene. To meteorologists in and out of the country, this is a once-in-a-lifetime disaster. To the victims of the calamity, it's a huge "fuck you" from God, probably because Pinoys spent too much time betting at cockpits or DoTa games at various computer shops instead of being at church worshipping Him.

God makes more awesome "signs" thes days.

Others who were lucky to move out of dangerous places were holed up in makeshift evacuation centers, where at least a hundred families are forced inside school buildings (Hint: School buildings in the Philippines are roughly quarter the size of a hospital). They fight over resources and attention that bored volunteers give them, probably because their schedules of beating the shit out of each other were interrupted by the sudden outburst of weather.

Pictured above: Evacuation center without the usual in-fighting.

Today, the receeding rain has lowered the flood levels to knee deep, but still, the people are devastated for the loss of their clothes, belongings and shelter. Moreover, they're depressed about losing a day of not wasting their lives playing DoTa and/or texting on the phone. I guess that's the positive effect of this massive fuck-up, despite the whole country labeling this as one of the worst disasters of the year.

A plethora of suckage: 5 reasons why Philippine TV shows suck

You might have seen a few TV shows in the Philippines. If you're a Filipino, you've probably seen them all, as for every two Pinoys, there's a television among them, whether if its a shitty 80's 10" CRT or a 60" LCD HDTV. However, it's not the television set that has a problem here, it's the shows they're broadcasting everyday.

The story is awesome. The characters are rich and vibrant, and everything seems to go smoothly. But why do these shows still suck? There are plenty of reasons for this mishap, but we'll only cover five, like...

5. Too many commercial breaks

Nobody likes commercials. Even the talents promoting the commercials don't enjoy looking like an idiot in front of a camera to help a retarded douchebag become less retarded.

Pacquiao: Honestly, I don't know why the fuck am I endorsing shampoos or speaking English.

If you happen to be watching a show in the Philippines, be prepared to take a break for every ten minutes. There are rare occassions of commercial breaks every five minutes, featuring products shittier than Head-On.

On the bright side, getting a break every ten minutes seems to be good for the fitness of Filipinos. After a commericial starts rolling, you can go to the bathroom, eat something, then come back before the show returns. That increases the frequency of walking, and everybody knows walking is the best exercise, right?

Above pictured: TV, without commercials.

4. Lame dubbing

If it's one thing Filipino TV is known besides fake reality shows, it's anime/Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese shows dubbed in Tagalog, because the majority of the population doesn't understand the show's original language nor English.

Here's an example of a dubbed show:



Holy shit! Could it get even worse?

Well, yes it can.



Strangely, Gost Payter seems a lot better. Genius dubbing I must say, even for a $10 mic bought at the market and 10-year olds on the microphone.

3. Repetitive themes

As a popular quip goes, Filipinos can't get enough. True, but for storyline plots, it gets boring and boring for every minute you spend watching.

You want a plot concerning children? Make one, and pedophilic women will embrace and hump the TV screen as it broadcasts. You want a plot concerning cheesy romance? Make one, and probably TV geeks will rival at the pathetic green-screening and think everything they see are real.

This is even more real than the hallucinations we get while snorting chemicals.

Hell, Meet Dave has a way better storyline than these.

2. Lame death scenes

A majority of Philippine TV shows, especially those of the soap-opera type, showcases death as an equalizer of the plot. However, sometimes the cause of death fails to equalize the storyline and instead baffles the critics and once again turns middle aged women into necrophobic hags, forcing them to pray the rosary 10 times a day to "not fall to the ground and dying after clutching the chest for no apparent reason".

WTF? Clutching your chest then dying? Heart attack, probably, but the one dying here is 28 years old in the plot, and has no record of heart disease of whatsoever. Skip to 1:10 in this video and you'll see what I mean.



Can't we have better and more realistic death scenes here? Can we have none of those insanely-retarded "small-car-at-20kph-instantly-killing-200lb-sturdy-man" twists and "getting-shot-in-the-arm-and-dying-without-even-bleeding" deaths? Can we have something a little bit more gorey, like exploding heads?




Much, much better.

1. Unexpected story line cutoffs

Let's me explain this in a more common scenario. Let's say you came to a concert of your favorite band. Now, the lead guitarist is already in his solo's climax when suddenly, the music stops, and the vocalist sadly announces that the stage will now be taken by some "lame singers who can't sing but pays money", much like Chris Brown. Then you stand up, leave the theatre, and swear to yourself that you will implode the heads of anyone who bites arms and makes wack music. I mean, really.

Yeah, that's it, keep punching yourself in the face.

In reality of Philippine TV shows, every timeslot needs something to occupy it. It doesn't matter if the show is the next big hit or the next big failure, something, anything that doesn't resemble a commercial should fill in that time slot. However, producers of TV shows seems to rush the production of their shows, which leads to shitty shows, which leads to shitty shows already being broadcasted on TV to have their plots cut and the vital parts skipped, to give way for the next shitty show to replace it. And the process goes on and on.

Lolcats are just plain awesome.

So if you happen to watch some Pinoy TV, be sure to take a piss in every commericial break (use that as an excuse to not watch the horrible commercials), try to understand the expressionless and bad dubbing, the same storylines, the lame deaths, and the capitalism involved in marketing television shows. All this writing makes me want to go back to good old Pinoy TV, where plots are plots and there's always 20 minutes of beatdowns every day.