Babbling Point

Before me and Brandie started collecting Star Wars action figures, my parents bought us Fisher-Price Adventure sets. These action figures and vehicles didn’t come with any backstory, they didn’t have any animated series, they didn’t even have names.  So, we were free to create stories about that. We were free to think up of brand new adventures using them as the cast and our bed, blankets, pillows as the surface of a new planet. Of course, when the Star Wars figures started to come out, all those Fisher Price toys got put aside. They were sometimes brought out to play when we needed an extra space ship for Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. When the G.I.JOE action figures were released, the Fisher Price toys became the Joes’ back-up unit and were used to transport the assault unit to Cobra’s base. Aside from the Alpha Probe spacemen sets, we also had the safari sets. The safari set had a little boy in blue which my Uncle Jimbo named Johnny Quest, which I thought was the coolest na...

As far we can remember it, my mom always cooked spaghetti during our birthdays. Eventually, she taught Manang Terrie, our loyal cook, how to make that spaghetti with ground beef and hotdogs and basil leaves and it became a staple for every birthday celebration. When we were kids, we associated birthdays with big celebrations, where the house was filled with family and guests. At the end of the evening, when all the guests had left, our friends would stay behind and we’d continue talking late into the night, occasionally standing up to get our third or forth helping of spaghetti. After two months of living here and coming home to an empty apartment, it felt wonderful to come back to my apartment and be welcomed with a home-cooked meal made by my mom, Brandie, and Wella. Indeed, it was a very happy birthday day.

I started listening to NU107 when I was in college because of a girl. I found out that NU was her favorite radio station, so I thought if I tuned in as well, I’d have something to talk about with her. “Hey! That Midnight Countdown! That so rocks, yeah?” Did it work? Well, let’s just say I freaked her out and she didn’t talk to me for an entire sem. But I kept listening to NU anyway. It’s always Station #6 in my preprogrammed settings. It was 1993, I was trying to find parking in that patch of dirt that was considered the university car park when I heard these lyrics on NU: “Ilang isaw pa ba ang kakainin, o giliw ko? Ilang tanzan pa ba ang iipunin, o giliw ko? Gagawin ko ang lahat pati ang thesis mo!” Me and my blockmates were in the middle of preparing for our thesis and as far as we were concerned, that was the impossible task that needed to be done that year. When I got to the barkada tambayan I was raving about this song from a band I’ve never heard of, a song about a guy willing ...

Saw this ad in the Philippine Daily Inquirer today: Which makes me wonder... is the owner of this company a Star Wars geek? is the writer/art director of this ad a Star Wars geek? what will Lucas do when he sees this ad? (here's the complete page)

Last Wednesday, in between last minute meetings and last minute revisions, I went to the clinic to get a boil checked. The boil aka a carbuncle aka a “pigsa” was under my left armpit and was becoming a source of major discomfort. So, the clinic referred me to the surgeon on duty. He took one look at the pigsa and said we needed to incise it. The procedure took less than five minutes. He cut it open, cleaned out the puss, put a whole lot of gauze pads and medical tape and sent me out of the clinic with a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers. I stepped out of the clinic around 5pm. I went back to work, attended one more meeting, rewrote a script and finally got to have dinner around 10pm with Wella. Got home a little before midnight. In the bathroom, I took off my shirt, looked at my bandaged underarm, and noticed the gauze was soaked with blood. I poked it with a finger to check if it was dried blood or fresh blood. It looked okay. I suddenly felt this warm, liquid gush on my ...

I got this text : Hey budj!! I'm in Bohol airport,sitting beside a pink-studded tweener. She's reading Trese instead of Twilight. And that just made my day. But I do wonder how Trese's younger readers are liking the book. Most of the people who email and blog about it are already in college or are already working. Last Christmas, my boss bought TRESE for her nephews and nieces. The day after Christmas, she started getting text messages from her sister, saying, "Why did you give my kids this comic book? It's scary and violent!" Couple of months ago, a similar thing happened. A friend got his kids copies of TRESE and I got a text about how his two boys were now sleeping in the same because they got scared after reading the book. It took that as a compliment. At the recent comic book conventions, a 12-year old girl approached the table and asked for our autographs. Her mom was standing right behind her. The girl looked nervous. Her mom was smiling. I wasn't ...

I found an old journal entry, the year I turned 30, where I was sulking about how I wished that I was going to celebrate my birthday with a book launch – a comic book launch! Of 100-page comic book! In full-color! Which, of course, didn’t happen because I had not written a single page of said comic book. Which reminded me of the joke about the guy who kept going to mass every Sunday to pray to God to make him win the lotto. One Sunday, he was so frustrated, he yelled, “Dear God! Give me a break! Let me win the lotto! Please!” And God finally said, “Give ME a break and go buy a lotto ticket!” So, kids, the lesson here is you gotta go out and buy your own lotto ticket -- or maybe the better lesson here is -- you have work hard to make your own luck. On my bookshelf now sits the first three Trese books and a copy of Underpass . (I guess the universe heard my birthday wish and granted it seven years later and didn’t exactly get all the details right, but I’m not really complaining.) Aside...

Hosted by Kevin Smith, with guests Jason Lee, Stan Lee, Mark Hamill and JJ Abrams. DINNER FOR FIVE was show conceptualized and hosted by Jon Favreau. My cousin Oliver gave me a copy of the first season. I lent it to someone and now I don't remember who has it. Thank God for YouTube and I was able to find this episode where Kevin Smith played guest-host of the show. I like the format of the show. It's very informal. Not the usual host behind the desk and the guest is seated on the couch. I think more interesting stories are told over food and drinks. The guests end up talking about things they wouldn't normally mention during an interview. Ever since I saw this show, I thought it would great to replicate it locally. I have seen some local shows attempt something like this, but somehow it doesn't come off as interesting. I think what makes DINNER FOR FIVE work well is the editing. They've chosen all of the good parts of the conversation and edited out the boring part...

These days, it's interesting how you post something on your Facebook, Twitter or Plurk and even at 2 in the morning, someone will reply to you. Which made me ask the question, before all of this came online, what were we doing at 2AM? And they answered... BLUE EAGLET: There are naughty answers to that... and then there are geeky answers like mine--reading. Haha JPANGILINAN: nothing good happens after 2 am GIZOPHRENIA: staring at space Gavin_E_Hoh: talking to each other face to face at some cafe or roadside stall? Gavin_E_Hoh: some do ... But they're sitting there sms-ing someone else. Or at least that's what one sees in KL psychoCOW: we'd rent out like a dozen VHS tapes and have movie marathons. Or get plastered. Or both. jovefrancisco: reading comic books, watching tv, listening to music and eating. Merlinda Betorin: sleeping our hearts out... Telly Arce: reading books Krischelo Delgado: why, WORKING, of course! Erica Kaiserin: Watching tv or movies on CD... After midn...

“What’s the most important thing this year? TO BE HAPPY! We only have one life, so let’s really enjoy it. Ok?” –Mr. Kanamori http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armP8TfS9Is "In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates." I found the link to these videos via Jonathan Carroll’s Twitter . The documentary is 48 minutes long, divided into five parts, five episodes that focus certain students, talk about specific topics like empathy and death and bullying and teamwork. Hope you have the time to watch the entire film. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc7S8HAfDzk&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd7Y...

I just clicked on http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/ and saw this headline: ... and I thought, "I got nominated? With Gaiman?!" Oh... Shaun Tan! (not Budjette Tan) hahaha Maybe someday.

“There’s the life you live and the life you leave behind. But what you share with someone else –especially someone you love—that’s not just how you bury your past. It’s how you write your future.” --Cal Harper (from Brad Meltzer’s “The Book of Lies” )

It has become a habit of mine, when surfing the web, to just cut-and-paste articles that I’d like to read later on and file them away in one of the folders on my desktop. Reviewing these things that I’ve saved, I came across these two entries that were both posted last March. The first one is from Neil Gaiman’s blog (March 08, 2009) , where he talks about the death of his father. My agent, Merrilee, told me last night that the first time she met him [Neil Gaiman’s father], at a signing in New York, she said to him, "Neil is doing so well. I bet you must always have known he'd be a success." "Actually," he told her, "I thought I'd probably be supporting him for the rest of his life. Well... he wanted to be a writer." And I thought, the best thing about that is I never knew. The other entry is an interview with Joe Quesada on the Times Online (March 21, 2009) . Towards the end of the interview Mr. Quesada, talked about his most personal story “DAREDE...

ANG MASKOT by Macoy 48-pages, black-and-white (P50.00) Available at Comic Odyssey and Sputnik Comics If I were to do the Hollywood-pitch for ANG MASKOT, I’d say : it’s WASTED meets ELMER which then crosses-over with CREST HUT BUTT SHOP ANG MASKOT tells the story of what happens when you put a very angry man in a very cute, chicken mascot suit -- someone’s going to get hurt. (Thankfully, nobody gets killed, which is what sets it apart from “Wasted” and “Elmer”.) The story starts with a guy wearing the chicken outfit and he’s seated on the sidewalk, outside of a McBird fast food store. The chicken’s head/helmet sits beside him, ogling at something in the distance. He’s smoking and realizes that his shift is about to begin and the first words out of his mouth is, “Siyet.” He gets called in and is introduced as Jholeebird and the kids mob him. He counts down his mandated 15 minutes, sweating and cursing while inside the chicken suit. At the end of his shift, he stands in the middle of the ...

every day feels like Thursday / the smell of Friday / just around the corner / but Friday / Friday never comes! / never comes too soon! / (one of my favorite songs from the BLUESKRIEG album)

G.I. JOE RESOLUTE Story by Warren Ellis http://gijoeresolute.com/ 1 2 3&4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Thank you Warren Ellis for making feel like I'm in grade school all over again. (And thank you Hasbro for letting Mr. Ellis play with all those nifty toys in your toy box, even if it meant that some of those toys would get broken.) If my memory serves me right, the very first G.I.JOE toy I made my dad buy was Destro. Back then, me and Brandie still collected Star Wars action figures and were still big fans of the Force. I got Destro because I thought he'd make a cool villain to pit against Luke Skywalker. Couple of weeks later, we saw the Snake-eyes and StormShadow actions figures, and since I was also a big ninja freak, I just had to get those toys as well. Soon enough, the Joes were outnumbering the Rebel Alliance in our toy closet. Then there was that one Sunday when we drove all the way to Magallanes, to visit a small video rental store. That's where we borrowed one VHS tape o...

When I was working on that photo meme last week, I found this pic in my Flickr page. I wrote and drew these comic books when I was in grade school. (Because it would be very embarrassing if I just wrote and drew these last week.) JBB were the first letters of my name, my brother's and my uncle's. I’d use whatever paper I'd find lying around and draw with colored pens and stapled the pages together. JBB COMICS had three titles back then: COSMIC MAN, who rode the cosmos in his cosmic ship and fought evil with his cosmic gun and cosmic net and cosmic utility belt. LIGHTNING HAWK, who got his powers after he was bitten by a hawk that was struck by lightning. I had a team book called THE COMPUTER CREEPS. They ordinary computer parts that suddenly came alive when they were struck by lightning.(Yes, I wasn't very original back then.) The team was composed of The Monitor, The Keyboard, The Hard Drive, The MicroCHiPs (who rode on little motorbikes), and The Transformer (because ...

Failure. The mere thought can paralyze even the most heroic thinkers and keep great ideas off the drawing board. But is failing really that bad? We get an inside look at the mishaps of Honda racers, designers and engineers to learn how they draw upon failure to motivate them to succeed. From poor color choices to blown race engines, these risk-taking individuals provide an honest look at what most people fear most. Watch the film and discover the upside of failure. After I saw that documentary, I remembered this story which I blogged about three years ago. CHAMPIONS (june 19, 2006) ...we found out today that we lost the Tuseran pitch. That was the other project we were working on for the past two weeks. We really felt that we had a really great campaign and that client would like it. Well, they didn't. This is the second time we're lost a Unilab account in a pitch. Last year, we lost Enervon. So, on the cab ride back to the office I remembered something my friend Rog once to...

I found this photo meme at http://otherjoseph.livejournal.com/54402.html#cutid1 It looked like a fun thing to do. Took me a week, going through the files in my computer and the ones on my site, to find the right pictures. I wonder how I would've answered this five years ago, ten years ago or how I would've answer it back during my college days. Maybe I'll dig up all those photo albums at home and open the boxes hidden in the closest and see which pictures would fit these descriptions. 1. a picture of you in your room 2. picture of with someone you don't really like (well, there are times when I don't like being with me) 4. a picture of you on your birthday, or your favorite holiday 5. the youngest picture you can find of yourself in digital form. (ok... ok... I cheated. This is a digital photo of an old photo. Below is the oldest digital pic I've got on file... taken 2002) 6. a picture of you in one of your favorite outfits. (i love this ja...

Comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis talks about … MAKING YOUR LAST COMIC BOOK: I’m always amazed by the people who work so hard to get here [a job in Marvel], or so lucky to get there. It takes an insane amount of work to get there and when they get there and they start bucking around, they start diva-ing it up and get high and mighty and totally forget … [you have to remember] what job you have in comics, someone else had that job before you. Settle down! And work! Now is the time to do the work of your life. Now is the time to express yourself like no one else has ever done. You should [write or draw this comic book] like it’s your last, like you’re going to be fired after this. And I do this. Remember … someone else had this job and someone else will have it after you. It’s up to you how long you can keep it. Big name people –BIG NAME PEOPLE—cannot get work because they act the fool. PROMOTING YOUR WORK: Just getting the book out … just birthing it to the world… is not enough. T...