Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

This was imported from my old Tumblr blog posts.

Taking advantage of a small downtime before the coding run for Android comes up again, maybe tomorrow.

• Manny explains death by hanging (Inquirer)
  
  Yes, that’s Manny “Pac-man” Pacquiao for you, folks. He’s a frank dude who occasionally does boxing. And by “frank”, I mean, a few sanity levels above Donald Trump’s.
  
  There’s actually a phrase included in that title that I omitted: Manny’s comment regarding hanging as a capital punishment for heinous crimes: “Sisipain lang po yung upuan”, which in English is “We’ll just kick the chair”. Implication, is that Manny Pacquiao prefers the old-timey medieval method of having criminals be snuck in a noose with a chair separating their feet from the ground, and for the grand climax, as the self-described pious Christian man just alluded to, just, you know, kicking the chair. And since Manny’s a “good Christian”, maybe he would like to go Biblical on these poor sods and hang them on a tree and bury them on the same day (Deuteronomy 21:22-23, I think).
  
  There’s only one appropriate response to that insensitivity coming from an elected official: F*CK YOU. You are an elected official. Yes, I know your ultimate boss is a much more frank talker, but I’m pretty sure if he tells you to jump off a cliff with him, I’m sure you’ll have second thoughts. I’m not telling you to drop the fun in your work, but when discussing grave matters like capital punishment and executions, we expect serious and calibrated responses from our lawmakers, not insensitive off-hand remarks about kicking a chair under a convict.
  
  But, in fairness, somebody else instigated this careless remark: Senate Majority Leader Vicente “Tito” Sotto III. Yes, that guy who shamelessly ripped off a blogger for his speech regarding reproductive health and responding with a verbal middle finger. Oh, and as a cherry on top, he also did a number on Robert F. Kennedy. And probably due to him being butthurt over the copying thing, he inserted a libel provision on the Philippine Anti-Cybercrime Law. So you know that this one is a bad apple. Oh, did I mention he’s also a well-known comedian?
  
  So these two combustible elements (gaffe-wise) was in the same room discussing one of the most serious topics one could deliberate on the Senate floor, and you can guess what happened next.
  
  Sotto asked the neophyte senator if he had a preferred method of executing convicts. The Majority Leader then enumerated four methods of execution: hanging, firing squad, electric chair and lethal injection. The first two, Sotto said, are less expensive. “Para po sa akin ay sa ngayon ay nanaig ay hanging or firing squad,” (For me, right now I’m favoring hanging or firing squad) said Pacquiao, who was just elected senator last May. “Dahil mura?” (Because it’s cheaper?) asked Sotto. “Sisipain lang po yung upuan,” (We’ll just kick the chair) Pacquiao answered and the session hall exploded in laughter. – Inquirer
  
  Ladies and gentlemen, the Philippine Senate. Ta-dah!   And in additional local news…
  
  
• Solon wants Trump banned for remarks against Philippines (Philippine Star)
  
  Apparently, Donald Trump has irked Mr. Jose “Joey” Salceda so much that he’s calling for his colleagues to have the orange menace banned from entering the country for being “inimical to the national interest”, as he eloquently phrased – which is PC for “being an indiscriminating moron”.
  
  NOTE: By the way, you know which of the hundred-or-so Congressmen are small fries in politics when headlines refer to them as a “solon” or “lawmaker” instead of their popular name. Sonny Belmonte gets his name in the headlines, because he’s a salmon. Joey Salceda is an anchovy in comparison.
  
  And what prompted this righteous wrath? Donald Trump, in one of his unhinged apocalyptic speaking engagements (in Portland, Maine), he was rambling on about his imaginary scourge of illegal immigration. 
  
  Trump said efforts to resettle Somali refugees – many of them in Minnesota – were “having the unintended consequence of creating an enclave of immigrants with high unemployment that is both stressing the state’s… safety net and creating a rich pool of potential recruiting targets for Islamist terror groups.” He then listed several immigrants, mostly from Muslim majority countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines – who were arrested for conducting or threatening to carry out violent attacks, teaching bomb-making to recruits and otherwise supporting terror groups. “We’re dealing with animals,” he seethed. – Philippine Star
  
  Donald J. Trump is a modern marvel, in terms of stacking shit. I mean, he just stacks shit so high that the Burj Khalifa is starting to worry about its height. This is one of those instances that I’d agree with a politician and say, go the f*ck ahead and ban this piece of shit. Thank God he’s America’s problem and not ours. Although I’m not sure if this only applies to just Trump or including his harem and his two eunuchs.
  
  
• Social justice, shipping, and ideology: when fandom becomes a crusade, things get ugly (Vox)
  
  Yes, fandom can get very, very ugly. But to be honest, anything with a following can replace the word “fandom” in that headline (plus removing “shipping”) and you still have a recognizable headline. Like, “Christianity”, “Black Lives Matter”, “Veganism”, “Anti-Drug Campaign”, and “Hillary and Benghazi”.
  
  But in all seriousness, fan entitlement is becoming a big issue. They don’t like it when things change, when fan-fueled character storylines don’t become canon, when characters die, or when franchises reboot and some of the old stuff gets retired. It all boils down to obsession, and frankly the fans who ride the waves of change are the fans who have a real-world life. If you’re a fan and you don’t feel like the creators have the power anymore in their creation, well, you’re not a fan in the purest sense anymore, you’re a crazed lunatic with a mental issue that needs a psychiatrist to be treated.
  
  The point is, the fan’s role in this fan-creator dynamic in geekdom is to be a consumer and honest critic. Buy the products, read the material, and if you like it to an extent, maybe follow the artists on social media and say thanks or offer some constructive criticism. Fans absolutely cannot go and troll the artists about having a storyline changed because “I want it” or harassing the makers about something they wish they have in the narrative because they think it should be.
  
  The golden rule for a real fan is not to rob a creator of their desire to create, and these obsessed fans are starting to. The problem is when fans consume the material and let it be their life, and apply real-world mechanisms to something that wasn’t designed or created to handle such. And the alarming this is, they are increasing in numbers, and the rise of technology only makes it easier for them to assert their fandom to the world in more dangerous ways. I’m not saying they are a menace to society, but more like a nuisance that can become a problem to a specific group of people. And this is not a sort of problem that legislation can solve. It’s not an addiction, either. Fans can become normal fans, hyped fans, and crazed fans. The first two are OK, the last one is a no-no. It’s more of a state of mind and the environment they are in.
  
  There’s a reason why non-geeks picture geeks as “smelly people who stay in their parents’ basement”, because back then, there are indeed geeks who are like that, and Hollywood made it into a bad trope. Crazed geeks are more like, you know, the popular phrase “shit happens”. They just happen. And once one becomes a creator with a hit material consumed by thousands of fans, inevitably one or two becomes those fans in social media begging their love pairings be incorporated in the next edition. Nothing one can do about it. Even in Japan, where this stuff happens in droves.
  
  What the creators can do, however, is crucial. They should never enable these kinds of crazed fans, or stoke their obsessions even more. More like, take criticism but never let them dictate anything. I’m sure if we just temper their expectations instead of bending over and giving in, we can at least solve some of the issues that happen with these kinds of fans.
  
  So there. *HAH*