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Nocturnalfrolic: The Best Time Waster Blog… Ever… is moving
The blog is moving elsewhere. The new blog will still have the same content (there are still fixes from here and there).
One of the reasons I am moving is now I can enable ads (here in WordPress you need to upgrade first before being allowed to have ads) since the blog has now a decent number of traffic. I don’t want be a hypocrite not to pursue an ability to earn while writing time-wasting articles for you. This original blog will still stay here but newer posts will be over there. I will try to squeeze my noodle to create new content in the blog.
The new Nocturnalfrolic Blog’s address is http://nocturnalfrolic.blogspot.com
I would like to thank WordPress for hosting and providing everything I need when it comes to blogging.
Post of Rage 4: The Headache Sequel
Currently, I am recovering from a terrible bells palsy, probably due to enduring stress for back to back events that happened for the past few months. I still get minor headache behind my head even if I overslept for both weekend days. My head is like being jack hammered and it is the perfect ingredient for another entry of the post of rage.
Novelty Radios
Again, the proverbial different folks for different strokes, but come on, we need to have good music, not ear wrenching novelty music which compose of horrible old love song ballads, one hit wonders from local talents that loves mashing the sampler machine like there is no tomorrow, combine with terrible, self labeled awesome novelty DJs.
Ahhh! sound of novelty radio station! Ahhh! tugstugstugs!
I fondly remembered Rein was an avid listener of a popular DJ. Later and rightfully she regretted being a fan after seeing the real DJ on TV, a very complete opposite of what the listeners usually engraved to their minds due to his “witty” one-liners that probably taken from a nearby tabloid newspaper, and they tend to think he is one of God’s greatest contributions to handsomeness but you will shake your fist in disappointment. I don’t mind not so popular songs be played on radio because for one, I love every kind of music but please, advertisers, ditch the novelty radios and go with the stations that plays good songs accompanied by not headache inducing DJs, and lastly, the listeners has the buying power to buy whatever you are selling.
Filthy Public Comfort Rooms
One of the worst things that can happen to you while you are out around the metro is when the Gods of bowel movement suddenly crumpled your stomach and tells you need to unload your feces, like now. Unfortunately in our dear country, especially in our polluted power capital, finding a decent comfort room in public is quite hard.
The correct “Public comfort room usage preparation mode”
A lot of public rest rooms are filthy and full of crap smacked all over the place, figuratively and literally, yes I did saw a comfort room with splattered feces in the wall once. Of course, the blame will fall to the ones assigned to make the room squeaky clean and worthy to put our butts on, but everyone knows that maintaining such task with consistency is a sort of allergy to some of our countrymen.
Showbiz Talkshows and Gossip Suckers
I despise showbiz talk shows, especially the local ones packed with showbiz “journalists” that jerks off backstage when he sees his favorite actor on set. Gossip addicts and being gullible is one of the most popular traits of our nationality. They know more about other persons lives than their selves. Always hungry for scoop and over excited when a revelation is about to broadcast on national TV, complete with epic yet hilarious score and sound effects. Some people actually fight over some gossip and sometimes a kitchen knife is involve.
Gossip, gossip, babble, babble, bullshit, bullshit
Instead of talking about the private lives of our actors and actresses, why don’t we talk about on what they are doing in the first place, which is acting to entertain their fans. Talk more about the movies, TV shows and other miscellaneous projects, that’s good TV. Imagine a world without any gossip addicts, that would be awesome.
Well, at least I felt a little better and I usually say, I hope some of my post here in a way impart the world to make it a better place.
The Late Yakimix Valentines Date
My original plan was to take Rein dinner in either Yakimix or Saisaki back in February 14 for valentine’s day of course, but a disaster strikes, an effin bells palsy slaps and distorted the left side of my face. Currently, I am 70-80% recovered from the bells palsy and I will just waste your time with my bells palsy story probably in the next entry. Since I am in a way functional and I finally got to bring Rein for a late valentines date, I want to talk about our little dinner in a restaurant called Yakimix. You may consider this my first restaurant review in blog format.
Japanese foods, not WTF
So we went to Yakimix at SM Mall of Asia and as expected, the place was already packed. We waited for our turn and fortunately, the turnaround was unexpectedly faster and the table was already neatly polished before we laid down our tired butts on the chairs. Yakimix is kind of the love child of Saisaki for their Japanese buffet goodness and Tong Yang for their on the table grille complete with a piece of a tong wherein you can act like one of the overacting Japanese Iron Chefs and their chairman.
Iron Chef Chairman: The Final boss of food
I for one, absolutely loved Japanese food even if they have a lot of what the fuck moments over there but their collection of food concoctions is the best. The very first set I graciously munched was a big plate of every sushi available at the buffet area. I am a glutton when it comes to sushi. Even if the sushi creation was not a familiar one, I will still try to eat it.
Fish are friends
There is something about sushi that I absolutely love. Back when I was younger, I can eat more than 2 plates of sushi before heading to the main course. Now, one big plate is good enough for me. Afterward we start collecting our choices of fresh meat and seafood in the buffet area and placed it in our grill set up in the middle of our table. Good thing the machine is smoke less and the noise of the grill is not distracting.
Failed Iron Chef
Just like in Tong Yang, your tummy starts screaming profanity while you wait for your food doing his self grilling thing before shoving up in your mouth in full force, of course, in delight. The result of each grill is, in an over acting expert food blogger term, exquisite. Every meat and seafood we threw in the grill came out good, just right and in another over acting food blogger term, ambrosial.
I am cooking, I am cooking
We end the dinner by munching lavish and mouth-watering desserts. They offer a good variety of desserts like cakes, ice creams, salads, fruits and ice pops. I ate strawberry and mango ice cream while Rein indulged in fruits. In the end, we enjoyed eating at Yakimix. The only thing that I did not like is their first serving of the drinks. We already finished the sushi set yet our ordered drinks have not arrived yet. Our drinks arrived before we head to our main course and from that, the waiters are kind of refill addicts wherein you just drank 10% of your drink, they will immediately teleport behind you and refills your drink. Maybe a minor annoyance but a good compensation for their slow first drinks service.
Overall, me and Rein highly recommend Yakimix. I spent around 1,300 for both of us and I think the price was just right, just be ready because the restaurant, in all branches are notorious fully packed even in early hours.
Year One of Nocturnalfrolicking Around – a very long rambling
The first year anniversary of writing something
This is my second longest running blog in the history… so far. My first blog, created way back in my college days, which is already deleted and thrown somewhere by the gods of Blogspot, packed with a lot of emotional nonsensical nonsense and unmentionables… it was horrible and the only one viewing are my ex girlfriend and some ex classmates.
Just like what I wrote before, one of the primary reasons why I blog is to improve my brain, because I have a short-term memory loss of some sort and I tend to forget things easily. I read in some articles to improve memory is just simply read and write a lot. Right now, I think writing to this time waster blog really helped me a lot. It improved my memory and voilà, I can remember things easier today. As I write this, I now remembered that I really love to write stuff ever since the first time I wrote something on our wall with a marker pen.
Writing: The Early Years
Looking back way back in elementary, one of my favorite things to aside from illustrating, drooling all over the place and defending why Sega Megadrive kicks more ass over Super Nintendo is to write. I just write anything and doodling some stuff on top part of every page of my notebook. My classmates called it as patalastas or in English, commercials. Back in my Grade 5 days, I actually wrote and drew a comic series entitled Deadly Planet, a play on Superman’s Daily Planet. Packed with forgettable visuals, horrible storylines, it’s just hodge-podge of every pop culture back then.
I think I made around 10 comics back then, all written and drawn in newsprint, stapled and given to some of my classmates. I just treated it nothing as a time passer, which in a way, planted the seeds to the future version of me wasting reader’s time by writing time-wasting articles.
When I hit high school and being acquainted with good music, I started writing poetry, even song lyrics on my spare, non videogame time. I think I filled 2 notebooks that I still carried over in college. Currently, I have no idea where the hell were those 2 notebooks, maybe they are somewhere in my room. Speaking of writing song lyrics, me and some of old classmates even thought of starting a band named “Nocturnal Frolic” but never pushed through, I was the designated drummer.
College time, aside from poem writing, I became more interested on reading books, especially thriller novels by Lawrence Block and Tom Clancy, and graphic novels by Marvel and DC Comics. I start buying and collecting novelty books like The Simpsons Guide and High Score: The History of Videogames. I think there are some books left somewhere in my room that I haven’t finished reading.
During my fourth year in college and I was in the middle of one of the most dreaded phases in college life, to write and create a big ass freaking thesis. After presenting and receiving rejections to a number of proposals, I ran out of ideas to present. Later I just decided since I love to play Grand Theft Auto games in the old PS2, I made a proposal of an interactive graphic novel with a premise of GTA style storyline and called it as The Misinformed.
Fortunately, I got my well seek approval for my proposal, and my first big challenge is to write the main story, oh boy, that was hard and I have a week to finish. In the end, after completing the first story it was the time to make it into a workable interactive graphic novel. Nitpicking with Flash, Photoshop, Soundforge and Director, I finished the thesis, defended it for 2 freaking hellish hours, and I got a 2.5 grade or 85%. I only made 2 copies of the project, one is safely locked in my old alma mater and the other one… was missing.
Since I already have the Misinformed short story, I decided to expand it to a very long novel that after almost 10 years of writing, it is still not finished and locked away somewhere inside of my computer. The title was also changed to “The Memoirs of the Warman”. Right now, I hope I can finish the novel and hopefully have it published.
The Content
One of the most challenging aspects on creating and maintaining a blog is what will be the blog’s overall content. Originally, I wanted the blog focuses solely on graphic design but with the great amount of graphic design blogs out there and have potential limited content ideas because a lot of them were already using it, I might run out of topics immediately.
My second choice is to make it as a blog about the soap opera for men, wrestling. Sadly, wrestling, the fixed kind is still a minority here locally and the market over here consists mostly of gossip addicts and fad exploiters.
One of my old plans have a Youtube channel, and start ripping horrible Filipino movies ala Nostalgia Critic especially the comedy ones that have nonsensical dance numbers and climaxes always end up in an abandoned warehouses. Fortunately it didn’t happen because foremost I suck on acting, second I have a terrible stage fright and third, I realized I love watching old Filipino movies for its sheer absurdity and awesomeness.
Since Internet and social media is already a norm today and I, myself, an Internet addict and participating to many message boards that deals with a lot of things for years, I just say effed it and just write anything under the sun. My main inspiration of this approach is of course, one of my favorite websites of all time, Cracked.com, which covers a lot of interesting topics. I just emulated some of their writing style and treats all the topics as collections of ramblings. Granted, Cracked.com have a number of writers under their wing and this blog is a one man writing time killing contents just to please on whoever reads my ramblings.
Most of the time I can’t think anything to write, even if I have a topic on my mind, the creative juices betrays me to write something coherent from the idea. I threw a lot of topics and some of them were already 80% photo finish because I felt I can write something better.
Marketing it as a time waster blog
Since most of my writings are not actually help save the world in any way and basically just waste your time, I christened this site’s secondary designation, as THE BEST TIME WASTER BLOG EVER… of course, self-proclaimed and not endorsed even known by the elites around the local blogosphere.
A bottom of the barrel time waster blog with real traffic?
This little blog in a way, was a success. I never expected that this little part-time stuff is actually getting traffic, even though there are only a few comments, but the important thing is someone is actually reading all the things I wrote for the past year.
The Gods of WordPress sent me the following:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 61 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 110 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 76 megabytes. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was November 8th with 73 views. The most popular post that day was Rest in Peace Nu107, Our Rock and Roll Haven.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were pinoyexchange.com, gamefaqs.com, baguioautoforums.com, en.wordpress.com, and facebook.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for nu107, combatron characters, music the offspring the kids aren’t alright weight:+10, combatron, and combatron ending.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Well, what can I say.. the blog had a successful run in 2010, I hope the blog will do better this year of 2011.
Moving on and what the hell is a Nocturnalfrolic?
As I celebrate in a way the first year of my blog, I want to say thank you and yes, I will explain where and how the hell I got the Nocturnalfrolic moniker. Nocturnalfrolic is simply an insomniac guy having fun. Well, today, I prefer to catch more zzzs than bum around during the ungodly hours. I originally got the name from my older brother, the name of his “posse”. I remembered seeing a very old 80s style sticker with the words Nocturnalfrolic on it, placed it in their vintage 80s DJ equipment.
They were into disco and euphoric music that guarantees that can make any sleepyhead awake. I just unofficially inherited the name and used as a moniker since I, during my teenage and college days, is always awake and doing something, productive or not, till a hint of sunrise appears.
There you go, I am celebrating the blog’s first years anniversary by doing what I do best when I am not doing anything productive, just watching TV or DVD with Rein, while munching heavenly unhealthy foods while drinking sugar powered drinks.
Thank you for visiting my blog and I will write more time-wasting ramblings, movie reviews and graphic design topics for you loyal readers in the future. MARAMING SALAMAT PO SA PAGBABASA NG AKING BLOG
MMFF What Is Your Major Malfunction?
As we end the year I want to talk about something that coincide with our local Christmas season, that award festival. The Metro Manila Film Festival or MMFF for short, the so-called prestigious award giving body that kills both foreign films that blossomed anywhere in the planet around Christmas season and well deserved local movies.
The festival has a terrible history of controversies and questionable decisions yet the masses and gossip addicts still embraces the horrible chosen movies every year and not recognize movies that are obviously better.
I still don’t get on how they choose the movies that will compete for the festival. Recently, the committee is quite obsessed including movies that are just rehash of old ones, unnecessary sequels with actors that feeds on the gullible masses and movies that most likely written in a day, shot in a week, and post edited while playing a PSP.
MMFF Guy: Whats a good movie?
Since the festivals main marketed description is prestigious, and as others say the MMFF is in the same level of Oscars, the movie selections should have the following important characteristics, even if the movie is a comedy and horror.
- The story is good
Sorry, I only came up with one characteristic, but believe me, that is the most important factor of a movie. The story comes first, the actors are just the tools to execute the story, guided by a director that knows what the hell is he or she doing and accompanied by a well-organized crew.
MMFF Guy:What could go wrong?
The big day has arrived, it’s the real awards night, but what’s this, obviously needed stuff is not done… properly? or not done at all?
First and foremost, since they only had a very, very limited selected movies, why the hell they still limit the nominees for each categories? why not have every movie has its own representative? There was a massive backlash when one of the movies that has a female protagonist (I wonder if the committee members knows the word protagonist) that is obviously entitled be nominated in the best actress group, since again she is a female and lead performer, was not included in the nominees.
I read somewhere that the nominees is already pre-selected by the “new and improved” jurors and they only chose 3, among 8 movies, per category. Well that is stupid, there are 8 movies fighting and killing your Christmas movie selections, not 3 films and in this approach, the nominees are stupidly inconsistent.
Other award bodies, especially the foreign ones, release the nominees before the real event to create buzz, even gossips that some of our local country men die for. Here in our dear MMFF, they only show the nominees, fueled with their idiotic nomination process, on the night itself.
Since we are talking about nominations, the festival is heavily promoted and well-funded (they even had a lengthy commercial on theater) yet they can’t come up with decent “the nominees” nomination highlight video. You know, the one they say each nominee, and the video will show something from the nominee. Like if I say nominee A, the video will show nominee A doing something from the movie. God damn, the presenters looks embarrassingly stiff and awkward while reading the nominees one by one like a disgruntled underpaid employee.
MMFF Guy: Our event is awesome
The recent one, oh boy, there are a lot of technical disasters and dumb decisions occurred throughout the night. Even if it is a delayed telecast, they should have done something to redeemed the influx of event related problems which include.
- Few mics not working and no immediate replacement mic was given to the speaker. He has to walk a few meters just to get a working mic
- Lots and lots of dead air (meaning nothings happening)
- Playing the applause music when they show the crowd that only around 5% was actually clapping
- Terrible lighting in some scenes
Lastly, their main animated event ID, the horrible early 90s look video probably rendered in a Windows 95 computer. An arts college student can do better event ID than that crap.
I hope they will do a better job next year, and hopefully, the rumored text to vote scheme is true, at least the choices will be from the people. Then again, a lot of our country men here votes on who and what is popular like in every election.
The only good thing MMFF has done this year is to recognized some indie films. Who knows, these future big time movie makers will offer the MMFF a set of movies that are actually good.
And one more thing, can they move the festival in other dates than Christmas? please? Hollywood always come up with good holiday films and we are still stuck with local MMFF selected movies that are 70% dreadful and painful to watch.
Thank you for reading my last and a very world saving entry and have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all you again.
The Nocturnalfrolic 
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