NOBODY READS THIS F*CKING BLOG

Indeed. TikTok is bad and your phone is watching you sleep. That dashing Italian you meet on Facebook is actually a loser in Nigeria out to drain your savings. Fake news, cyberwar, hacking, the dark side of AI... all these delicious stuff and more made Col. Marcel Padilla, the military spokesperson, my pick among the lecturers who strutted their knowledge and expertise during the National Information Summit. Apparently, she has more to say other than the motherhood and "reax" statements I have come to associate her with based on her media interviews.

It amuses me to think I just spent a significant amount of screentime looking at Lana del Rey photos. I even started reading a 2023 Rolling Stone UK cover story about her until I realized I was bored. Read a Jack Osbourne interview about Ozzy instead. Learned that in the last chapter of Ozzy's latest book, which he reportedly finished just before he died in July, the man widely credited for helping invent heavy music wrote, "I've had a loud life. I’m ready for some quiet now." I find that touching, condsidering the circumstances.

Spent quite a considerable amount of money fixing and sprucing up my bike last week. Was so happy with the end result that I was looking forward to the weekend so that I could use it for some sweaty me-time on the road. I pictured myself at Bridgetowne on Sunday morning soaking up the sunlight at the foot of the Victor, that colossal faceless statue they put up there for no other reason than to show us they can. I was pumped, excited, eager.

Then Ramil came and dropped a mother load on my weekend plan.

There seems to be a lot of "talking" in my current reading. Finished the Rob Sheffield book yesterday and, after the usual hemming and hawing between books, decided on How to Talk to a Widower for my next read. That's because I'm watching Your Friends & Neighbors, the Apple TV series Jonathan Tropper created, and I like it enough to want to know how his head works. Apparently, it seems to go like this:

It's supposed to be charming having rabbits on your lawn, a selling point, incontrovertible proof that you've made it out of the city and into the rarefied country air of suburban Westchester. We may be driving enough minivans and SUVs to singlehandedly melt the polar ice caps, may be retrofitting our stately eighty-year-old homes with enough fiber optic cable to garrote the planet, may be growing Home Depots, Wal-Marts, Stop & Shops, and strip malls like tumors on every available grassland, but we've got these rabbits, scurrying back and forth across the lawn like a goddamn Disney movie, so case closed. We are one with nature.

Not much going on on this rainy Tuesday morning, so here's a picture of the nifty little notebook I bought recently after reading Ganzeer's 7 Rules for Arists. In Item #6 ("Eliminate Distractions") he goes:

What you want to be able to do is start your day by jotting down a to-do list comprised of no more than 3 or 4 things and actually be able to do those 3 or 4 things with as little to no friction as possible. Anything that attempts to pull you away from getting those 3 or 4 things done needs to be blocked out.

I don't fancy myself an artist. However, my memory is no longer as reliable as before, and I sometimes have trouble keeping on tasks and staying organized, so I think jotting down my to-do's on a regular basis is sound advice. This cheap palm-sized notebook is for that purpose.

Looking forward to how this little experiment goes.

Time check: 11:54 p.m.

There are days when you wake up pissed at the world for no discernible reason. You get up, do the morning song and dance, and, coffee in hand, hope to get through the day without smacking some idiot in the head. Then you work... or at least try to. You find that motivation is a dead dog lying on the street with a bullet hole on its head. There is just no saving the day. And Facebook, with its army of "digital creators" and keyboard warriors and AI freaks, is just burying you deeper emotionally. It's the menace to your sanity.

Saw this at the supermarket earlier.

It figures: piped-in music was that cheery Mariah Carey shit anyway. And according to the weather bureau, the "amihan" season — the closest thing we have to winter here, when the nights are long and it's bring-out-the-jacket cool outside in the evening — is just around the corner (although nights are still drizzly lately). I'm afraid the days and weeks are going to be fast from hereon. Past All Souls' Day and they'd be jacked up on amphetamine. It'll be 2026 in a blink.

I will be 47 in a blink.

In Japan, it is considered rude to converse loudly in public. It is one of the many things that impressed me when I visited the country in 2013 and 2019.

I'm thinking about it now because I was on a PUJ earlier where there seemed to be 50 loud conversations all going on at the same time. Lording over them was this trio of aging yentas who were talking about their recent MRT experience with the mad excited glee of Disneyland first-timers.

Just took the last of my antibiotics. And with that I'm hoping this nasty episode with the sinusitis is already behind me. It was hell, but at least it weaned me off cigarettes. It's been several days now since I last touched a Winston Light. I feel fine and healthy, like a rock star a couple of months sober, but perhaps it's only in my head.

Finished reading Ghost World today, my second Daniel Clowes after David Boring.

Daughter accidentally damaged her iPad's screen this morning. She left for school royally pissed — mostly at herself, I assume. At 16 she has become the clichéd "angst-ridden" teenager, though not as much as to cause us, her parents, sleepless nights. But it's normal now to have rough patches here and there in our daily conversations.

Family movie date got nixed last minute today after daughter found out Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc was no longer showing. Stayed home instead. Kept myself busy by attending to tasks, including cleaning the mess left outside by the recent storms. Also played with kittens. We currently have a pair of them running around the yard leaving tiny little trails of destruction.

Highlight of the day was successfully installing the Apple TV app on our smart TV through an Android TV box. (We didn't know that can be done, we were just tinkering with the device and got lucky.) We celebrated by watching the first two episodes of Slow Horses season 5.

Tuesday night, while a lot of people I know were rocking to "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, I was at home dealing with severe sinusitis and the undeniable side effects of antibiotics. I'm not being a sourgraping moron when I say I'm glad I didn't buy tickets to the concert. I really wasn't fit enough to be anywhere that night except bed.

I know I missed a great night. You know it's an incredible show when it got the likes of Florin Hilbay waxing nostalgic about 90s music on Facebook. I just hope there will be a next time.

I closed 2024 on a Slow Horses high, so naturally I spent the first part of 2025 hooked on thrillers -- in films (The Drop, A Walk Among the Tombstones, etc.), TV (Black Doves, The Jackal, Dept. Q), and print (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a bunch of Mick Herron books). Then I gradually moved on to other sources of escapist joy.

But now there's Black Bag and MobLand, and I find my interest in spies and double agents and rogue cops once again piqued.

I saw Black Bag last Monday. MobLand I'm still figuring out whether to watch it on a per-week basis or binge-watch it later when all the episodes are available for streaming. I'm shaking my fist at HBO Max for giving me this kind of dilemma.