TRESE 7: COMING SOON





Previously in TRESE...
Read all the latest cases of Alexandra Trese at:
http://tresekomix.blogspot.com

Telling True Stories in the Living Room

Hey, you’re here!

You’re just in time.

Grab a chair. There are still a few empty chairs up front. The band’s just about to start. Can I get you anything? San Mig Light? Vodka 7? Tequilla?

Welcome to The Living Room. Now on stage is the beautiful Kelly Flint the rest of and Dave’s True Story.

SPASM


EVERLASTING NO


DOG STORY


There is a playlist in my iTunes marked TYPING, which is the music I listening to when I’m typing down notes I’ve written in my notebook or when I already know what to write and just need to bang away at the keyboard. Included in that folder are the songs of Dave’s True Story.

I found out about them when I was looking for a soundtrack that would get me depressed. At that time, I was re-writing a storyboard for Globe called “Closure” (and for those you who are familiar with that story, then it just means you come from that G-moment batch of Harrison… I still hope to get that approved and produced some day. But maybe it’s not for a cellphone. I don’t know. Anyway…)

So, I was listening to Sugarfree’s UNANG ARAW (which had the lyrics, “Ito ang unang araw na wala ka na.”), but it still wasn’t putting me in that mood that I needed to be in, especially for the “Closure” story.

At the far end of the Creatives area in Harrison (and this was during the time we were still in First Life Bldg), I could hear some blues song floating out of someone's computer speakers, which meant that Roach was still in the office. I walked over to her cubicle and asked, “Do you have any sad, depressing songs I can listen to?” And explained the story that I was working on. She reached under her desk and pulled out a tower of CDs and handed them over to me.

The CD at the top of the pile was Dave’s True Story.

My favorite songs from that album are “Sex Without Bodies”, which talked about cybersex (very William Gibson) and “Trollope”, about a girl who stopped reading her favorite author because it reminded her of the man who broke her heart.

While working today, I remembered a text message from Zach of IMAGO that their latest video was now on YouTube. That made me wonder if there were any videos of Dave’s True Story. So many thanks for must go to Mr. Anthony Pepitone for uploading those wonderful videos.

Hope you enjoyed the show.

I’m going back to typing now.

The Illegal Facilitator
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.

“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.” —Spook Country by William Gibson

In Gibson's first novels, his characters surfed cyberspace by jacking-in, literally plugging themselves into the net with a hardwire connected at the back of their necks. With his new novels set in the present, they jack-in using the usual monitor and keyboards and by going to Google and Wikipedia. Still, he introduces concepts like "locative virtual art" that just gives you the same mindfuck you got when you first read about the concept of cyberspace.

So, if the IF was texting in "an approximation of Russian", he could still be Pinoy and was just spelling words in what looked like Russian words. In the great words of Ate V, "You can never can tell."

Jessica Zafra (and her Twisted disciples) provides a working list of novels that have been set in the Philippines or feature Filipino characters:
http://jessicarulestheuniverse.com/2007/09/04/unable-to-make-ethnic-identification/

IMMORTAL KOMBAT

There are no decent comic book shops here in KL. (Well, they're not like Comic Quest, Comic Odyssey, and Druid’s Keep.) They do have enormous stores like Kinukoniya and Borders where they have a huge selection of graphic novels and an even larger section with manga. In their Chinatown, I found two stores / comic book libraries that had original manga and anime DVDs.

Anyway, since I have no access to the single-monthly titles that come out, I’ve had to do with reading their summaries at: www.majorspoilers.com. (Yeah, I know I can probably down scans of comic books, but I don’t.)

The site recently reviewed Matt Fraction’s THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST. Fraction’s work has been getting rave reviews from the likes of Brian Bendis and Warren Ellis, which takes a whole lot of restrain from buying the IRON FIST HARDCOVER TPB that I saw in the store recently.

But check out these very, very cool villains from the latest issue.



THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST will definitely be on my pull list when I get home.

What am I thinking of right now?

Couple of months ago, Arjun showed me this site called TWITTERVISION, where you see a map of the world and every couple of sections a word balloon would pop up on some part of the map and it would be someone leaving a note on this big world map about what they were doing in their part of the world.

At that time, Arjun thought that would make for a nice execution for a TV commercial. (Has anyone done anything like that lately?)

Anyway, I later found out that the foundation of Twittervision was the site / service called Twitter. I eventually got an invitation get a Twitter account, which I did and got excited by the feature that let me text in my “blog entry” or my whatever it was I was Twittering about. It also allowed me to receive (via text) the Twittering of other people.

So, ever now and again I would get a text/Twitter from the people I’m linked up with and I’d get to know little things happening in their day. They’d Twitter about where they were, what they were eating, how their meeting went, and if they were already going home. (I was using to it to pimp my blog and comic book.)

I really wasn’t sure I needed to know all those things about my friends, so I switched off the text function.

Then I got to read this article in WIRED:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson

And he said, Twitter was like “social ESP”. The more technical term he used was “proprioception.”

It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: She was nervous about last week's big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and became addicted to salt bagels. With Dodgeball, I never actually race out to meet a friend when they report their nearby location; I just note it as something to talk about the next time we meet.

The funny thing was, way before Twitter, me and the guys were already talking about how blogging can affect meeting people face to face later on.

With people blogging about their lives so much, conversations might eventually become something like this:

BUDJ: Hey, I got a the latest copy of…

MARK: X-Men! Yeah, I read it your blog.

(silence)

MARK: Did I already show you…

BUDJ: The pictures from your vacation? Saw it in your blog.

(silence)

BUDJ: So… now what?

So, now it gets worse with Twitter.

One Pinoy blogger (and I’m sorry I can’t find your link again) did point out that if you create a Twitter account and just link up with, for example, everyone in your barkada, you could then use Twitter as a cheap way of sending out a text blast to them.

Mark’s been thinking (via Twitter) why the Pinoy (who supposedly resides in the Text Capital of the World) didn’t think of this wonderful idea in the first place.

I think there were attempts in the past.

A long time ago, PinoyExchange allowed people to text in their messages, but the problem was all the messages ended up on just one page. It wasn’t personalized. It just became one massive message thread that was filled with all sorts of topics.

Recently, comic book newsblogs found a great use for Twitter when the whole of geekdom attended the San Diego Comic-Con. Some of them were reporting/Twittering from the convention floor.

Just a matter of time before people figure out what else they can do with it.

So, if you want to know what I had for lunch (for some weird reason), then follow me at Twitter: http://twitter.com/Budjette

If you need advice about...


... what to play.

http://thelonegamer.wordpress.com/

... what to watch.

http://fiveleggediguana.blogspot.com/

... or just advice in general.


http://coffeespark.com/