Manifesto
Manifesto XVI: Escape from Reality
by otaking on Oct.03, 2009, under Manifesto
Meet Captain Jack Sparrow, professional escapist.
My interests are wide-ranging, as longtime readers of this blog know – anime, sci-fi TV shows, fantasy movies, video games, RPGs, cosplay, comics, fiction literature, and so on. One thing binds all of these interests: they are all escapist forms of entertainment.
LikeManifesto XV: Stand Up or Get In Line
by otaking on Sep.30, 2009, under Manifesto
Irony? What's that? This is so educational!
I’m part of the tail end of the generation labeled Gen X, which was really the first generation in recent memory to adopt irony as a stance. In my early twenties I would routinely be told by people that I was the most sarcastic person they’d ever met. Even now my humor sometimes lapses into well-timed, sardonic one-liners designed to deflate egos and elicit uncomfortable laughter from listeners.
Manifesto XXIII: Change
by otaking on Jul.19, 2009, under Manifesto
LISTEN UP YOU WHINERS!
I have something to say to the following people, no matter who you are or what you’re into, like anime, or cosplay, or writing a novel, or starting a band, or traveling, or drawing a comic, or making your community a better place, or overthrowing the government, or ‘changing the world for the better’:
Manifesto XXII: Classic
by otaking on Jul.17, 2009, under Manifesto
I’m eating lunch at Sizzling Pepper Steak when the group of freshmen college kids from Ateneo at the next table start talking about what classic movies they’ve seen. The list is absolutely disheartening to me: The Matrix, Gladiator, The Truman Show. These are classics now?
But their love for the movies despite their ‘age’ is great. One of the boys tells his rapt female audience about the plot of the Truman Show in loving detail, remembering little plot points like Truman’s father being written off the show as ‘lost at sea’. “But the movie is kinda old na,” he qualifies, “nineties pa.”
I remember talking about Star Wars with my law school classmates and one of the girls said, “All I know about Star Wars is like, Yoda. That’s the little guy with the lightsaber, right?”
So, little guy with lightsaber am I?
Indeed.
Manifesto XXI: Living and Dying Onstage
Manifesto XX: If You Don’t Do It Now
by otaking on Jul.06, 2009, under Manifesto
“If you don’t do it now, you will never do it.”
This is what I tell myself every time I try something new and the fear threatens to stop me.
When I was a child, I was often asked to perform in public. I would act, sing, declaim, orate, compete in academic competitions. I was out of the classroom practicing or preparing more often than I was in it. I would have to be judged by a crowd.
Unfortunately, I was also a painfully shy child. I could barely stand talking to one stranger, let alone dozens, or even hundreds. I was an introvert, still largely am in that I actually like spending time alone with my thoughts. I was a loner who would be pressed into performing for crowds.
Fear would grip me the moments before I was about to go on stage or at the mic or before a panel of judges. I was afraid of what they would think of me. I was afraid they wouldn’t like me. I was afraid I wasn’t any good.
Manifesto XIX: BRAVE
by otaking on Jul.02, 2009, under Manifesto
Shibuya at night. I took this photo while crossing the street, trying not to get elbowed and shoved around.
The Nintendo DS Game The World Ends With You is set in an alternate-reality version of Shibuya, the ultra-trendy fashion capital of the ultra-trendy city of Tokyo. More than anywhere else you will find people dressing according to the subcultures that they belong to — loligoth, urban hip, princess-kei, retro hip, and so on. And unlike more homogenized fashion scenes like, say, Manila, the fashion of one subculture wildly diverges from the fashion of another.
Manifesto XVIII: Kid’s Game
by otaking on Jun.28, 2009, under Manifesto
Before I uploaded my lightsaber-wielding picture to my About Page a few days ago, I thought about it for a very long time.
What was the worst that could happen?
When I was a kid, I quickly learned that being different in any way meant that the people you were different from were going to pick on you, sooner or later. Sometimes the picking was for harmless fun, like a joke between friends. (I’ve always made fun of my martial artist friend’s bald head, knowing full well that if he really felt that I was dissing him just to diss him, he could kick my butt so hard I can taste his shoe. He’s cool with it. Plus it makes him look like a badass.)
Every now and then in any kid’s life, the picking becomes mean-spirited and vicious, a way for kids to show other kids who’s top dog of the playground. This is fine if you realize that the name-calling is all just a kid’s game, even if it’s one that’s played for keeps. It’s not so good when you start letting the insults wound you.
Manifesto XVII: Tags, Not Categories
by otaking on Jun.23, 2009, under Manifesto
You’ve probably noticed how diverse the topics of my blog posts can get. Anime, professional wrestling, media theory, comic books, /b/, the Internet. You’ve also probably noticed that my post tags reflect this diversity.
Now imagine how limited my writing would be if I limited myself to a single narrow topic every time I wrote. Say, anime, without talking about the effect of the advent of broadband or the influence of Western animation or its synergy with Japanese music. And yet this is how we used to define things — genres, individuals, movements.
Think about your Pictures folder on your computer and how you sort individual files. Some pictures fall under Family, for example, and some under Friends. What happens when you have a picture that has both Friends and Family in it? Do you upgrade it into a higher-tier (but more general and vague) category, ‘Loved Ones’? Do you decide that the presence of family members in the photo trumps the presence of friends and sort it accordingly, or vice versa? Do you place one copy in each of the folders? What if your sister is your best friend too?
