NANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANANA

NANANANANANANANANANA BATMAAAAAN!!!

Ah, finally I can go and post a review.  This time around, we're taking a look at Micro Action Batman, from way back in 2004. I'm actually planning to do a two-part review of the DC micromen I own, the other one of course is Supes. Buuut... well I'm not really in the mood to take pics or make a write-up for the man of steel. So for now enjoy the guy who's main superpower is that his parents are dead. 

Now, what I have here is the single-packed version, which for obvious reasons isn't colored in black. Instead they went with the then-comic look of batman, which was around  the time when Batman: Hush was the big thing for the guy. 

Really, not much to say here other than it uses a buck microman (most of the costume detail is painted) 2003 body with some slight mods to the forearms for the batman look. The only real thing that's pretty unique is the yellow utility belt. Of course there's the cape which is kinda...unwieldy, and the face sculpt which some people might not like but I think it works and then there's the paint detailing that's used to define the contours of his muscles, which doesn't work at all but instead appear like seam lines in the costume, I like that it does break up the dull gray of the bulk body though . I'd still much prefer the black version that comes with Batgirl. 

Bats comes with a few accessories, all  (except for the handcuffs) seem oversized. There are also extra hands that fail to hold anything securely.

His Batarang may have seemed like a good idea on paper but it's just too big and looks way too much like a manta ray instead of a bat, but the boomerang shape is definitely there. It takes a looot of suspension of disbelief on my part to justify where he hides that thing.

This handcuff accessory on the other hand, I like a lot. For the fact that it works on a lot of toys in the 1/18 scale with similar hand construction (peg and socket). And I can make any one of my toys that wears it look like some sex offender as seen above. 

 The grappling hook seemed to have a lot of potential, if only it had a longer and workable cable. The one the figure comes with is too short and unimpressive. The hook end itself though looks great. 

The real downside of this is that it can't be held too securely by the soft rubbery microman hands.

The gasmask is neat, but I question exactly why it's included. instead of something like an extra batarang, or even a foldable batarang. 

Articulation wise, you won't have any problems, and this batman doesn't seem to be the kind that breaks easily (which is more than I could say about Catwoman), but exercise caution in moving him around too much as his joints will easily go loose through friction at grinding. Such is the fate of hard plastic on plastic joint construction. 

Overall, is he recommendable?

not unless you're a hardcore batman fan or a customizer, because that's all I can envision for this figure. Either you become a batfan or you strip this guy down and make something else from him.  He's fun but you get bored of him quite easily. As a display piece he's unimpressive, and even if he is the only decently articulated 1/18 batman out there he's not the best detailed or sculpted. 

I got mine for 600 php (around $13). Which is a standard price these days. Splurge on this figure if you want to but he's nothing to go 'wow' about.

Stay tuned for the Microman Superman review soon! 

(Someday.)

Revisions to: We Didn’t Know How to Use Molotovs

We Didn’t Know How to Use Molotovs

We didn’t talk about Rizal that day, when Professor Apolonio Bayani Chua decided to sit down with me and talk about revolution. For a change it was going to be his history we would be discussing on that afternoon inside the second floor lounge of the faculty center.

Stirring his warm black coffee as he sat in front of me wearing brown tinted aviator glasses, hiding his small, weary looking eyes, and his silver hair wrapped in a ponytail, he told me that he had just come from a screening he organized for a PI 100 class at the main library. Normally a very private man, who would much rather talk about the poetry of Lamberto Antonio, or the mark of realism that is found in Chapter 26 of Rizal’s Noli, for this afternoon he agreed to just sit down with me and try to reminisce about the First Quarter Storm.

Back then he was a finishing AB Filipino major, a shiftee from AB Journalism who had the unfortunate timing to be graduating when the First Quarter Storm was gaining in intensity.

“Back in the 70’s” he started, “you could leave your books there and attend a rally in Mendiola that same day, and when you come back by the end of the day the books would still be there.” And indeed, he considers that time to be somewhat safer overall, despite being a time of social turmoil and uprising. There is caution in his voice though, as he thinks of what to say next it all fades to silence for a moment.

I wonder if this is some form of distrust, a knee-jerk reaction when asked by anyone what exactly he was doing in those times of forced disappearances, oppression and struggle. But there would be no judging this afternoon, only listening as he would tell me a story or two.

When I ask him of his most vivid memory of the First Quarter Storm, there would be a brief pause from him as he tries to think back, staring at the side, his gaze going beyond the solid concrete walls just beyond the walls of the faculty lounge and the faculty center and fixating on the area where the previously burned down chemistry building stands.

He remembers running, panic stricken, and frantically passing by the corner of Quirino Ave. and Velasquez St. (or by the corner of the Chemistry Building and Nismed) with his friend and author Ricardo Lee, meeting with this young—and he remembers her as being pretty too—female chemistry student handing them these gasoline filled coke bottles that had cloth wicks stuffed inside them while she would look from side to side, infected with the paranoia going around.

Sir Apo could remember just staring at the bottle.

They stumble inside the Kamia Residence Hall, a dormitory exclusively for women and find themselves holed up in a room with similarly startled girls, wondering whether there were soldiers hiding behind the foliage taking aim at the dormers through the windows. Perhaps his head was already within the crosshairs of some rifle. He could feel his grip tighten around the coke bottle.

“They didn’t tell us how exactly to use it, later on I would find out that you would light it up by the cloth end and throw it…towards whoever it was that you had to throw it at, but at that time we really didn’t know. We didn’t know how to use Molotovs”. He laughs.

Hours would pass, the sun would go down and all would be dark, save for the streetlamps creating an illusion of a road of fire leading you out of the university. The scare would eventually pass, though many more would come, and he would still safely walk home (all the way to Tondo!), passing the University Ave. and into the greater Quezon City area.

Despite the feint presence of the military around (“There was one military jeep parked around there”) and the paranoia of being suddenly taken captive by soldiers and taken to god knows where and being at best, interrogated and sent home in one piece, he would never find himself being in such a situation, he would always make it home.

His friend, who would eventually go on to write many screenplays, and finish two novels while making a third would go home passing through Krus na Ligas and evading any patrol that would be after him or anyone else, a route that professor Chua was unfamiliar with and in hindsight could have used as an alternative to the University Ave (Later on he would also discover Katipunan as another way out of the university premises, but by that time he would no longer be part of the activist scene).

Other memories would be hazy or incomplete, he would witness a math professor heatedly admonishing the students and faculty at the lobby of Palma Hall for even daring to go and disrupt the order of the university, a few days later that same professor would be involved in a shooting of a student activist, and his car turned over and smouldering by the University Ave.

Sir Apo would recall riding on a red bus bound for the US embassy, with complete strangers mixing with familiar friends and classmates bringing signs and posters laden with the anti-administration slogans of the time, and their feet stamping violently on the pavement, shouting fiery statements and singing spirited songs, something he would later comment on with “the only thing that changes would be the name of the administration on those protest signs”.

He would think back to these songs he would hear, recite to me lines he would recall word for word, written and performed by artists (including, in his recollection a young Jonas Baes who would eventually become a faculty member at the College of Music, and compose more experimental music), and repeated by union leaders, workers or other students, many of whom would never see the light of stardom shine down on them.

Or for some they would never see the light of freedom ever again.

“Activism, he said, “was, back then more spontaneous. And there was no other discourse during that time”. The culture that they had spent the most of their youth in was to be a culture of reaction towards the Marcos dictatorship. It was the immediate agenda. And it seemed like whether you were a college student, part of the faculty, or as a worker, whether you had your denims or mini skirt and go-go boots on, you would be in the throngs marching towards the palace gates, ducking into alleys to evade the constabulary or throwing molotovs at a police car.

After the dictatorship, the spontaneity had diminished, and to some degree fractured. Professor Chua openly admits to not being part of the new activism of today, and so he cannot really comment on how the face of activism stands now. But he does observe that the university activism of his time has gone “On Hiatus”.

“Nung Cory na, wala na.”

I would tell him that there are still rallies going on today, with student-activists just as fired up as they were in his heyday, but he is right to some extent, activism now lies fractured on many levels, no longer under a red banner but with as many colors and methods as one can think of. But whether this is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.

Sir Apo thinks though that such a trait of the new activism of today can be an advantage if taken in the right direction. Today, after all is vastly different from yesterday. The issues perhaps may remain the same, but the people or rather their social consciousness is different, and who could hope for things to remain the same anyway? In the past three decades so much has already changed at a rapid pace, and yet Sir Apo just wonders why the spectrum of culture hasn’t changed.

When I ask him if there was anything else during that time that he would remember, he simply tells me that there isn’t. There was only this one vivid memory stuck in his mind that he would never forget out of order. Like an automatic recording it would go off, the moment he realized where he was standing.

When he would walk from the faculty center to the corner of Quirino Ave. and Velasquez Street that, by turning his head to the chemistry building he would see the terror-stricken students racing past, in the periphery of his vision, the wooden school chairs piled up as a barricade along Roces Street, blocking any attempt by the constabulary or the military to enter the university, and he would see, in front of him, this curious girl reaching out, handing him a coke bottle filled with gasoline.

His coffee has already gone cold.

A Brief History of the Annoying Mime

So hey, I figured since I started collecting modern body variants of Snake-Eyes now I should at least try to archive the ones I think stand out, it just sucks that I'm missing the most crucial one the black commando variant (or the modern 1982 version) never mind, acquired it through a friend.  So here are the modern representations of the character, from 1985 to 2012.

Original Black Commando

Classic Ninja Commando

Ninja Commando Re-Design

DIC Re-Design 

Resolute (my personal favorite)

Pursuit of Cobra/ 30th Anniversary Commando

Renegades

An Angry Man's Two Rules on Dealing with People.

This is actually something I answered on my Facebook account about a year back, with an added note on number 2. Looking back, I'm not that angry anymore, lol. 

Rules: List down your 10 most important rules in dealing with other people. This is to gauge and share your parameters of social interaction, as well as a way to see why so many people get into conflicts with each other. Perhaps these rules may also not be what you currently follow, but you'd like to do so in the near future. Just write down what you think is sensible, then pass this around. Certainly, we can learn something from each other.

1. You are a total fuckwit until you make a good impression, we've hung out more than once, or a bro I can get along with  online. (this applies to me as well). but I will tolerate your bullshit because we wouldn't even be interacting if we didn't seem cool. 

2. Are you a woman with nice boobs or really cute bangs or can sport glasses in a hot way? Disregard rule 1. Let's get to know each other. 

minor fixes.

I never thought I'd have to buy this figure twice, but the bright colors drew me in.

Besides, now that I place it next to the first release of the Extremis armor, I'm beginning to like the new release even more. It just needed some minor fixing to really work (remove the gold on the chin, add more white to the triangular unibeam and palm repulsors).

It also came with this nice unmasked head. Unfortunately the stock color was gray and not gold like the undersheath appeared in the comics. 5 minutes under the airbrush fixed that little nitpick.

Although really, I think I'm just about the only one who even cares for that sort of minor detail.

With Apologies to Rizal and Miss Sandra Roldan.

The Following is a draft for a profile I'm writing about a professor of mine who had lived through the Martial Law Days. Still working on the kinks of it. 

We Didn’t Know How to Use Molotovs 

We didn’t talk about Rizal that day when Professor Apolonio Bayani Chua decided to sit down with me and talk about revolution.  In fact it was going to be his history we would be discussing on that afternoon inside the second floor lounge of the faculty center.  

Stirring his black coffee as he sat in front of me wearing brown tinted aviator glasses, hiding his small and often weary looking eyes, and his usual silver hair wrapped in a ponytail, he told me that he had just come from a screening he organized for a PI 100 class at the main library.  He is normally a very private man, who would much rather talk about the trends in Philippine literature, or the mark of realism that is found in Chapter 26 of Rizal’s Noli. But for this afternoon he agreed to just sit down with me and try to reminisce about the First Quarter Storm.

 “Back in the 70’s he had said,  “you could leave your books there and attend a rally in Mendiola that same day, and when you come back by the end of the day the books would still be there”.  And indeed, he considers that time to be somewhat safer overall, despite being a time of turmoil and uprising. He hasn’t touched his coffee yet.

When I ask him of his most vivid memory of the First Quarter Storm, there would be a brief pause from him as he tries to think back, staring at the side wall, his gaze fixated onto the same area where the chemistry building stands, just beyond the walls of the faculty lounge and the faculty center.

Back in those days he was a finishing AB Filipino major, a shiftee from AB Journalism who had the unfortunate timing to be graduating when the First Quarter Storm was gaining in intensity.

He starts off by remembering running, panic stricken, by the corner of Quirino Ave. and Velasquez St. (or by the corner of the Chemistry Building and Nismed) with his friend and author Ricardo Lee and meeting with this young female chemistry student handing them these gasoline filled coke bottles that had cloth wicks stuffed inside them. He could remember just staring at the bottle.

They would eventually make their way inside the Kamia Residence Hall, a dormitory exclusively for women and briefly sharing a room with similarly startled girls, wondering whether there were military men taking aim at the dormers through the windows.  He could feel his grip tighten around the coke bottle.

“they didn’t tell us how exactly to use it, later on I would find out that you would  light it up by the cloth end and throw it…towards whoever it was that you had to throw it to, but at that time we really didn’t know. We didn’t know how to use molotovs”.

The scare would eventually pass and he would still safely walk home (all the way to Tondo!), passing by the University Ave. Despite the feint presence of the military around that area (“There was one military jeep parked around there”), and the paranoia of being suddenly taken captive by soldiers and taken to god knows where and being at best, interrogated.

His friend, who would eventually go on to write many screenplays, and finish  two novels while making a third would go home through Krus na Ligas and evading any patrol that would be after him or anyone else, a route that professor Chua was unfamiliar with and in hindsight could have used as an alternative to the University Ave (Later on he would also discover Katipunan as another way out of the university premises, but by that time he would no longer be part of the activist scene).

Other memories would be fuzzy and incomplete, he would remember a math professor admonishing the students and faculty at the lobby of palma hall, a few days later that same professor would be involved in a shooting, and his car turned over and burned by the University Ave. and of riding on a red bus bound for the US embassy, with strangers and classmates holding signs and posters laden with the anti-administration slogans of the time, something he would later comment on with something like “the only thing that changes would be the name of the administration on those protest signs”. 

He would also think back to the songs he would hear, written and sung by artists  (including, in his recollection a young Jonas Baes), many of whom would never see the light of stardom shine down on them, for some they would never see the light of freedom ever again.

“Activism, he said, “was, back then more spontaneous. And there was no other discourse during that time”.  The culture that they had spent the most of their youth in was to be a culture of reaction towards the Marcos dictatorship.  It was the immediate agenda. And it seemed like wherever you were as a college student, part of the faculty, or as a worker, whether you had your denims or mini skirt and go-go boots on, you would be in the throngs marching towards the palace gates.  

After the dictatorship, the spontaneity had diminished, and to some degree fractured.  Professor Chua openly admits to not being part of the new activism of today, and so he cannot really comment on how the face of activism stands now. But he does observe that the university activism of his time has gone “On Hiatus”.

“Nung Cory na, wala na.”

When I ask him if there was anything else during that time that he would remember, he simply tells me that there isn’t. There was only this one vivid memory stuck in his mind that he would never forget out of order.

When he would walk from the faculty center to the corner of Quirino Ave. and Velasquez Street that, by turning his head to the chemistry building he would see the panicked students running past, in the periphery of his vision, the wooden school chairs piled up as a barricade along Roces Street and he would see, in front of him, this curious girl handing him a coke bottle filled with gasoline.  

His coffee has already gone cold.

Just Drop Me Off Near TV5

Travel by way of taxi can be a nightmare in Manila, aside from the maddeningly high fares, so many times there have been incidents and numerous facebook notes where people would share these encounters of being robbed or worse by some fiendish drivers in the dead hours of the night they’d tell you how there was no way to open the door locks from the inside, or how the air conditioner would release some sort of gas that would make them fall asleep, but more often than not they’d just be lead around by the cab through the wrong route until they’d end up too far from any help.

The opposite is sometimes true, where every other night on the news you hear of a carnapping and the unlucky victim would be some generically poor and out of luck driver who just wanted to earn some honest money and would end up on the side of the road or in the trunk of his own car.

It’s stories like that that keeps my mother awake in the wee hours of the morning when I’m not home yet, and sending me a message every ten minutes that I’m not fiddling with my keys by the gate of the house to get in. She can’t sleep. Too busy hoping I won’t be getting stabbed, robbed, or shot among other things tonight, which is unlikely because my thesis has already claimed first dibs on my life anyway.

But in all the times that I had needed to take a cab home I’ve been lucky enough to pick the nicer ones, the ones where they’d just ask for a little extra tip because I’m hiring them to send me home to Novaliches, which they assume to be a region away, full of traffic, on a road full of holes brought to you by the MWSS. I just tell them that since my house is near TV5, they might get lucky and meet Willie Revillame on their way out of our subdivision. Maybe he can give them that extra five thousand for their trouble. But once we get there I cave in and hand them an extra hundred, for karma’s sake.

I ride in cabs when it’s too late because I think the view from the window is nicer there than on a bus or a jeep. There’s a tiny bit more time to look outside and see the blur of lamps and the shapes of buildings drawn by their lights, sometimes it even transforms the structures, and you begin to notice corners and contours you wouldn’t normally see in the daylight.

The posters and billboards look nicer as well, especially along the stripbars by Mindanao Ave going to Quirino Highway. For reasons other than boobs and overly made-up dancers, I just like staring at the bad photoshopping and font choices and even more terrible one-liners and taglines. It reminds me that I’m almost home.

These past few weeks I’ve been coming home from places that are sometimes unfamiliar or very far (or both) from my house or campus, wishing that just once I’d actually come home either happily wasted or happily laid but more often than not I’m just very tired and stressed out from some assignment that needed doing on the other side of freaking Manila. Not wanting to be adventurous with my way home, since the last time I took mass transport I led my friends right into a bus full of a hold-up gang (thankfully we were able to get out with our things), and last week a friend of mine almost got robbed on a jeep.

But mostly, I was just looking for a comfy back seat, an fm radio tuned in to Easy Rock, and some sleep.

I hailed his cab at around 12 in Eastwood, dressed in my severely wrinkled, sweat-dried long sleeve polo and slacks, and acne marred face, looking like I just got off my shift at some call center . His car wasn’t any better, with faded paint, noisy engine, and busted lights the thing almost looked like it was about to disintegrate once it would stop in front of me. I don’t know what made me even get in, I only started wondering when we were already in Katipunan and he started talking to me startling me out of looking towards Marikina and the dots of light that make up the houses that crowd it.

His hair was white and wiry with eyes that sunk deeply into his head, and his complexion burnt brown by the sun, the hands holding the steering wheel were thin and bony, abundant with veins. He stared intently at the road, and not at me while he asked in a raspy, cigarette ravaged voice,

“Where do you live boss?”

“Just drop me off near TV5, manong”

Spandau Ballet’s True drowns out the silence until we pull into C.P. Garcia , where out of my own curiosity I begin to ask how long he’s been a taxi driver. He tells me he just started recently, and I begin to wonder how long ago that was, and whether it was true considering how crappy the car was but then again the cab still hasn’t fallen apart, and the air conditioner was still strong.

“Hardly enough to pay for fixing this taxi, it’s hard to draw in passengers with a bad looking car. Pati pag nag-chicks ka, diba ser? Dapat swabe yung kotse”

Manong had a point, if it was anyone other than myself, he wouldn’t be getting paid later. He drove a jeep before this cab, he told me. He thought it might bring in more money, but being unfamiliar with most of the roads beyond his usual route from Lawton to Project 6, and not being told by passengers how to get back to familiar roads after they depart, he’d usually make less money at the end of the night than he did when he was driving a jeep. B reakfast was pandesal and cobra, lunch is carenderia and cobra, Dinner is turo-turo and cobra and Marlboro. The red ones I think.

Pretty soon we were riding through Mindanao Ave and passing Tandang Sora, between the bright signposts of McDonalds, Jolibee and Mang Inasal, past the Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation with its luminous neon green rosary-shaped lights decorating the outline of the church, we drive into a drag race between trike drivers from I think Don Jose street, the roar of the bikes rattling both of us from our inert zombie like states. I remember saying “Tanginang yan” in disbelief. It wasn’t often that I’d see these races happen but I never expected that we’d be riding in the middle of one. It didn’t last though.

Manong jokes, asking if I’d pay extra to see him beat both of the bikes racing. I did my best The Rock impression and just raised an eyebrow at him, he just told me that he didn’t have enough gas for it anyway as he smiled. In my mind though, part of me just thought ‘sayang’. I wondered out loud how much the trike drivers bet each other, as we entered Quirino Highway.

There wasn’t much said as we were passing Holycross, and I told him to turn left at the next corner. We pulled into the two-lane street leading to the subdivision where I lived, passing the small born-again church and the empty, tall grass laden lots, past the half-open, hardly lit gate and the half-asleep guards, boxy townhouses and pulled right up to the only house with the lights still on by the outside gate.

The cab was still intact as I handed the taxi fare with the extra hundred slipped in, I told him to keep the change, which I assume made his night. he had asked me where he’d have to drive to get back to Quirino Highway, and I told him through the same way he got in.

In a minute or so he was gone, driving back into traffic, as I stood outside our gate, fiddling with the house keys, hoping that my mother had already drifted off to sleep. It was, after all, already two in the morning.