WE are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.
(Arthur O'Shaughnessy)

      Pen Wrath     


Monday, February 27, 2006

Phase of Darkness

Last week was not my kind of week. Good intentions indeed pave the way to hell, as I have learned to my utter consternation in the last two working days of the past week. Here’s to hoping (and praying) that hell is indeed comprised of several levels, and that last week’s version is the only one I’ll ever touch, and that it ends then and there.

But my headaches pale in comparison to what the nation is facing. I’m not one for rallies, and sometimes it’s a case for bully to the opposition. Friday’s and Saturday’s events, however, do not make for a convincing case for the current administration.

I can do my darned best to believe the reasons offered by the Arroyo administration for cutting down on dissent and criticism, but it has gone too far down the road of curtailment in the past few days.

Sure, it’s easy to understand why businessmen from all over would hesitate to make significant investments in a scandal and uncertainty-ridden economy, but political drama aside, our economy has been showing some signs of recovery. In the weeks preceding this last, I had begun to think that perhaps Arroyo and her people have been doing something right. Not so now.

The President seems hell bent on undoing everything that has appeared to work for her. PD 1017 is a self-serving piece of executive legislation with no other intent but to shush up anything that shows the President in a bad light. Too bad Her Excellency never stopped to consider that PD 1017 tars her feathers several shades darker than anything ever thrown at her by the opposition.

What state of emergency is she so strung up about? The coup that Malacañang says it has stopped hours before the release of PD 1017 unto the unsuspecting country? If there is no coup, what danger does she have to guard against? The masses who wanted to gather at EDSA, wave their flags, sing songs, make speeches, and generally litter the streets with what the administration considers to be the unwelcome debris of democratic dissent?

The EDSA celebration has been caricaturized beyond recognition by the President and all the President’s men. Imagine the cheek, saying that the EDSA shrine is a place of prayer and that there is no place for rallies around it! Memory is a convenient tool, but even more so the imagination. Did not Her Excellency dance attendance to and benefit from the rallies held around the same Shrine in 2001?

What gall. The sheer nerve. Or is it pure paranoia? After all, what goes around comes around.

The true state of emergency is the fact that PD 1017 exists. The true cause for alarm is that information and expression are both being controlled. Balls and chains are not feared because of their names, but because of their existence. The unnamed fear does not become less valid just because it has no definite nomenclature.




Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Midnight of Dreams: The VLM Soup


I’m not into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though I did dig Angel once. Yeah, I’ve a thing about the undead and the preternatural. The stuff freaks out my roommate, and I certainly did not get this fascination from my mother. She’s so scared of the dark, she won’t go down the stairs once it’s ‘lights out’.

I started out with Anne Rice – boy, can I quote from her early books! Lestat de Lioncourt was my poster boy for the undead during high school, with whining Louis, out-of-place Armand, and fascinating Marius as runners-up. Nicolas and Magnus do not have the same allure as the Coven of the Articulate, though.

I still have substantial recall of the first lines of The Vampire Lestat, and I admit to being almost word-perfect with Lestat’s “Requiem for the Marquise” in Queen of the Damned: “And does she hear my hymns tonight/Of kings and queens and ancient truths/Or does she walk some distant path/Where rhyme and song can’t find her”

I’ve branched out, though. It’s not just vampires that I find fascinating. Now, I find the combination of vampires, lycanthropes and mythology a very tasty soup for the imagination.

Isn’t lycanthrope a fine euphemism for werewolf? You might be thinking that. Or you might not. Ever read a Sherrilyn Kenyon DH (that’s Dark-Hunter for the unitiated) novel, or an Anita Blake? If you have, I guess you’ve had your lycanthrope cherry popped.

In both authors’ books, the “were” is a suffix not only for wolves, but for panthers, bears, tigers, jackals, and yes, rats. Most kinds of predator mammals, I guess – except the lion. I have yet to come across a were-lion, and I must admit, it doesn’t quite have the same ring as werewolf, or were-tiger.

The term vampire isn’t all about Count Dracula anymore, as well. In Kenyon’s novels, vampire is a generic word applied to several classes of blood-drinkers. We have Artemis’s elite (and hot, Alpha male) warriors, the Dark Hunters, as well as the Apollytes of Apollo (pardon the pun) and the Daimons.

The paradox portrayal of the vampire as sexless seducer has also changed. Blood will always be a part of the vampire tale. It is a significant foundation of vampire literary history. But it is not only about the blood.

That vampires have an emerging sexuality may be a reflection of changing mores. The growing acceptance of the place of sex in the preternatural scheme of things in literature may also be due to the way it is portrayed.

Count Dracula jumping into the sack with his virgin? I agree: Eeew! Turn off the lights! But a date with some sexy “Mad, Bad, and Immortal” like Kyrian of Thrace and Acheron Partenopaeous? I guess ‘immortal’ is a better inducement for getting the reader hot to trot than ‘undead.”

It’s getting a bit late, so I’ll put the cap on the pen. But do watch this space. I’m not yet done with the VLM soup.



Friday, February 17, 2006

Midday meanderings of my mind



Music may be food for the soul, but could it also be the key to physical starvation? If I don’t watch out, it just might be.
I blew several days’ allowance to acquire not one but two CDs while running some bank-related errands at SM North. I’ve always wanted to buy Maksim’s latest CD, but due to a series of unfortunate or inopportune events in the past few weeks, I had to temporarily shelve that particular goal. I guess I just ran out of patience a hearing, two midterm exams, and several class days after my Nunc Pro Tunc post.
I headed for SM North’s Tower Records immediately after IPL, and picked up a copy of Maksim’s A New World album. Not new age, but classical crossover. I can tune into straight classical without falling asleep but classical crossover music makes me feel alive. It helps that the seriously talented pianist is quite a piece of eye candy, too.
Just as I was about to have the CD tested, another CD caught my eye. It was a 2-CD compilation of classical music – soundtrack pieces, and film devotee that I am, I just had to have it.
So, now, after having seriously dented my intended budget for this week, I find the prudent part of me raising its rarely-seen head, and the prospect of spending a lot of money on food makes me feel as if my guts are tying themselves up.
I have an eye on buying the Grammy 2006 nominees CD, Linkin Park’s Meteora, and Shakira’s Fixacion Oral vol. 1 & 2 next. At the rate I’m going, I’ll have to cut back on pocketbook purchases. Not that my little bookshelf will mind – after all, it’s already groaning under the weight of all the books piled on it!

Addendum: I can almost see eyebrows rising. Banking … in a mall? The idea’s not so outlandish, especially when the bank has a branch within the mall. It has a tinge of the counter-intuitive, though, where building a bank account is concerned. The mall is one of the most effective innovations in inducing people to spend.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Sex, Law & Gaming 1

I entered the world of PC gaming during the sem break of AY 2002-2003 via Bioware's Neverwinter Nights, and I was so immersed in it that the PC was on virtually three-fourths of any given day. I hacked and slashed my way as a Rogue through the Docks and other parts of Neverwinter's first Act, and I remember thinking that it was a pity I couldn't convert all the gold and jewelry I could lay my mercenary little virtual hands on into real-time cash.

I accumulated virtual money, lived a life of virtual crime and heroism (depending on whose side I was on as a Rogue with a neutral evil alignment), and breathed PC gaming for a fortnight until law school beckoned once more. While it was only a fortnight, the time I spent playing before I went cold turkey piqued my interest in gaming as an environment of social, economic and legal possibilities.

I never returned to Neverwinter in the three years that followed mainly because
  1. Of PC specs and (several) hardware failures.
  2. I was scared of getting addicted to the point of neglecting my studies.
  3. There was a lot of law school stuff to deal with.
Then, last semester, while banging my head on the wall in frustration after having two topics for SLR virtually rejected for (1) having been done to death and (2) being unique but [the professor was] not sure if [my] concerns [were] involved, I sort of stumbled back into PC gaming when I found intriguing references on the net to the link between law and gaming.

From what I've encountered on the research trail, it's clear that many economists and legal theorists see at least one nexus between online gaming and the law. While there is a connection, they just can't agree on how to view the relationship between the two.

After getting the go-signal from the professor, I got more and more involved in PC gaming from a legal view point, and at the end of the semester, I turned in a 50-page paper entitled Play/Law: Identity, Property and Control in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.

And now, several months after turning in that paper, I find another interesting twist to the online gaming scene. It's funny, really, but not unexpected, to see that nothing is completely asexual. Sex is a subject that screams "relativity", and in online gaming, it's no different.

Do gaming guilds have to be apparently asexual so as to keep the nod of game developers? When the game gods rule adversely against GLBT guilds, can the guild members retort in real time, "F--- you. We've got rights and you're discriminating against us"?

We know that chatrooms can be sex dens, where words at play jog the imagination as well as some other interesting ... uh ... parts, but what about game avatars? When one player comes on to another player in, say, a Guild Wars campaign, and they get on like a house on fire and "have sex", is it sex? If it is sex, is it then an act subject to censorship?

In Newsweekly has this news item on GLBT in the monster MMORPG, World of Warcraft. There are some interesting posts on gaming blog Terra Nova, too, like "But is it PrOn?" and "Virtual Transvestitism: An Introduction". I wonder what's going to be said next?