Inked

Whoever said that getting a tattoo doesn't hurt is a big fat liar. I'll get back on that topic in a bit but first, I'd like to talk about our new friends, Frances and her hubby Franco.

Frances is the owner of My Little Ink Shop, the tattoo studio in Shoppesville, Greenhills. She's a small but terrible woman and I meant that as a compliment. She's about 5'2", slimmer than I am (I'm considered scrunny by some standards) but she's a helluva'n artist with her needles. Her own skin art will make Stieg Larson's heroine awestruck. Her tattoos go all the away from the neck to her lower legs. That's though right there. But...

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Screen Cap: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

All the hullabaloo with vampires this decade has made me allergic to movies, TV shows and books about the blood-suckers. I used to worship Anne Rice and even Buffy. Twilight ruined the enigma of vampires for the rest of us completely. The first exception I'll make is True Blood, the smash TV hit starring Anna Paquin. I didn't care much about the vampire storyline but the steamy sex scenes are worth the risk of being called a "vampire fan" by girls half my age. With True Blood, it was like "ok, so he's king of the suckers and she's the damsel with some-kind-of special ability... and everybody on the cast gets to be naked! Holy cow, this show has good production value!"

I tried to stay away from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (I'll refer to it as ALVH for this review), for as long as I can but the good reviews from people around won us over. That and nothing else is showing except Magic Mike and Ice Age. I deduced that it has got to be entertaining at least.

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Screen Cap: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Fun facts:
For more than 2 decades (from 1940 - 1961) DC Comics was the number 1 comics publisher in America with titles such as Batman, Superman and The Green Lantern. Marvel supplanted DC as the prime name in comics in 1961 onwards with Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Avengers and the X-Men. The hero that became Marvel Comics' icon that came out on that same decade would be Spider-Man.**

Spider-Man's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15

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I wasn't exactly excited to hear that the 4th modern Spider-Man movie was a reboot of a blockbuster movie that came out just a decade ago (Spider-Man, 2002). Didn't they use to do 'remakes' applicable only for movies that came out during the the 80's or older like when you saw "Color by Technicolor" on a film's opening credits?

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A Polaroid a Day

I've been developing a photo each day since I got my new Polaroid camera (the Polaroid Zink technology calls it "printing" rather than "developing" but I'm going for the latter just for street creds). I'm not yet daring to complete a whole 365 project (Instagramers, for example, take a photo each day for 365 days) because those damn Zink photo papers are expensive but we'll see how far I can go. At least for now I need around 44 for this wall craft made with Polaroids I'd like to decorate our living room with. Enzo tried to make pencil drawings on the wall once. Probably thought it was too bare. We were like "what do you think you're doing!?", "those are ugly!" and we made him dry erase everything. I think that's when he totally abandoned sketching altogether. Way to go to crush the kid's dreams.

Anyway.

For now, I made that photo in the middle to pay my respects.

That's it, no cursing for now. No wait, I already did... shit.

Dolphy Passed Away Today. ABS-CBN Sends a Mixed Message of Mourning and Anticipating It.

Of course I love the man, our comedy king, I would've mourned properly in silence if not for ABS-CBN's effin' insensitivity. Instead of being sad, I was angry. I posted the ff on my FB:


"Just a minute ago, ABS-CBN interrupted their program for a live news broadcast about Dolphy's passing. Immediately after that newsbreak we see an AVP tribute to Dolphy complete with narration and (other) snippets. Now, we do onsite videos BUT nobody can produce an AVP that fast. Meaning the AVP was made days prior. How disrespectful is that?"


On a related matter, the other insensitive guys over at Bandila (still under ABS-CBN) posted the FB status below:

I had to do a quick screen capture before those fuckers at Bandila changes things.

I mean, couldn't they just do away with the exclamation marks for that particularly sad headline? What's amazing is that as of this writing, 165 morons hit the 'Like' button for that post. That's like adding insult to fatality. If you posted that your mother just died, how'd you feel if I replied on your wall with "Super Like!!!"?


Meanwhile, this Newsbreak newscaster lady appeared on tv announcing her report saying something like "I'm here on location at the Medical City where Dolphy passed away..." Well, nothing disrespectful there except, she was standing right in front of a Makati Medical Center logo. And she did it twice.


Ok, they're humans, but it really is transparent how the media is more concerned about churning out the fastest update than thinking about how those updates sound to the public.  


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Welcome World!

About 5 years ago, my then blog, Confessions of an Insomniac ended with a cliffhanger goodbye. It lasted more than 3 years and I got an international audience. A total of 5 readers, who were mostly living abroad. I'm spam-tagging them all again because I have a freaking new blog!

And because I need to re-introduce myself again, here it goes. My Facebook name is Daniel Lei. Clients and co-industry friends call me either Daniel or Lei. My friends call me Lei. My parents call me Leidan which is cool because it sounds like I'm a Tekken character with a newbie ranking. High school friends call me Lei, iel or bogsa. All of them I'm cool with except for Omar Tansio who called me Cherry Pie because I resembled the actress. We became friends eventually but during my first days in UST High, he was a total bitch.

Really?

Alternately, the more cruel kids at school grew fond of calling me Weng Weng. The 2-feet actor who's mostly a secret agent on his films. I think I was actually OK with it because his movies are funny.

As agent 00. He gets all the women. 

Moving on.

Currently, I'm a cinematographer and photographer. Yep, we don't have a boss. Gets to travel for work. Don't have a time card. Those are mostly the pros. The cons go rather longer - some clients feel like they own our souls. We don't have holidays. Benefits are null. If our son doesn't have classes like the weekends, we're mostly out for work. Clients feel like our rates are 'flexible'. Yeah, like our goddamn Meralco bills are 'flexible'.

To be consistent with my former blog, readers can expect the following here:
Life events
Food, movie, TV, music reviews or whatever I'd like to complain about.
My poems, songs and artworks. Probably some work related photography.
Travelogs to exciting places, interesting locations, vacations and exotic destinations.
I'm a commuter though so it'll mostly be Megamall, Greenhills and Quiapo. We can include Metallica in Quezon Avenue just so we get 'exotic' covered.
Also, there'll be the occassional cursing.

That's about it. Hello big damn world!

Sincerely, Lei