On the eve of Monday, 22 May 2023, smoke billowed from the basement of the Manila Central Post Office in Lawton, Manila. Shortly after, the flame that made the smoke became fire. The fire then spread and crawled its way up the building. Paper, wood, and other materials in the post office served as kindling to feed the fire, which grew it into a roaring blaze. For the next 30 hours, one of Manila’s great landmarks stayed alight, to the horror of eyewitnesses and the citizens of Manila. (more…)
Back in August 4, I had nothing else to do and I needed to test my DSLR as a vlogging rig. So, I just swung by Lucky Chinatown Mall, which is a 10-minute walk from my place, and filmed whatever I could in RetroCon 2019 at the lobby for just over an hour. The resulting vlog was interesting in a number of ways, and I’d like to talk about it here. (more…)
Having been enjoying making vlogs so far this year, I decided to look up every single event I could possibly attend. The first non-geek thing I saw was the Manila International Auto Show, which I last went to back in 2013. I went with my friend Jilbert, who’s more of a car guy, and stayed there for over 3 hours or so, then went home. What followed was two weeks of editing hell I put myself through. (more…)
For the third year in a row, I was able to attend GameCon PH. While I wasn’t able to post the vlog on last year’s event, I still got invited as media somehow. I’m quite thankful that this winky dinky blog somehow gets taken a bit seriously in that regard, even as the event continues to grow. It’s now definitely one of the premier gaming conventions in the country, and I hope they grow even larger. (more…)
It was a tiring day as I was supposed to work a (non-MWF) wrestling event on the same day, organized by someone who had no business promoting a wrestling event in the first place. It was the same man who was imploring me to skip out on Retro Gaming Con the previous month to attend one of his “meetings”. However, not even something like that was going to keep me from attending Sticker Con this year. (more…)
It has been well over a week since I was at the Retro Gaming Expo in Fisher Mall and then uploaded the vlog, so I got to think over everything I saw and experienced over 4 hours of being there while getting myself hopped up on caffeine and other legal stimulants. You should be able to sense the weird mix of enthusiasm and dejection from the vlog as I alternated between having fun looking at retro gaming stuff and getting pissed at something else. (more…)
This may be the perfect way to end a year full of personal breakthroughs—becoming the ring announcer of Manila Wrestling Federation (and doing it well) and figuring out how to cover events my own way. The latter has been more hit than miss this year, after having tried making event vlogs for a few years now. Cosplay Matsuri 2017 seems like a great way to cap things off and celebrate the realization that doing this content creation thing isn’t just a waste of my time. (more…)
A week after MWF Balikbayan (late blog post on that coming soon), I had to do another ring announcing gig in the same venue. It was the Andy Kunz Fight Night, an amateur kickboxing event. I did think it was going to be a relaxing day of me just shouting out names of two guys about to beat the shit out of each other, but it turns out I had to do more things than that. In fact, particularly for this event, I had to do even more juggling than I usually do with MWF events. (more…)
A week after vlogging Cosplay Mania 2017, I felt confident enough to do more event coverage. It just so happened there was indeed another one the following week in SMX. Geek Day 2017 was a smaller and more intimate event, focused on things I’m more into. On paper, that seemed like a good way for me to make up for not vlogging AsiaPop Comicon. While I did take a bit longer to finish than Cosplay Mania 2017 due to work and procrastination, I did learn a few things on how to cover events I didn’t plan in advance to attend. (more…)
The event ended up being a mixed bag, it seems. Cosplay Mania 2017 was alright, as far as my experience is concerned. However, plenty of reports suggest they had plenty of problems during those two days. Perhaps it was bound to happen when they tried to do just a bit more than in previous years, or maybe something in their planning went down the drain sometime during the event. Whatever went wrong there, I may have circumvented most of them through both opting for a silver ticket (I bought a gold ticket last year) and just sheer luck. (more…)
This is the first official event coverage for the blog, so I was looking forward to it for a good while. I haven’t been able to attend other local gaming-related events such as ESGS and Pinoy Gaming Festival, so I saw this as my chance at catching up. While I’m only able to publish a post about it already a week after the fact, I was able to put together a video tour of GameCon PH as coverage. (more…)
Up against what could be a sophomoric jinx, Manila Wrestling Federation came up with a card that had less gimmicks and fancy stipulations, depending more on better booking and building storylines to carry things through. There are still some stumbles (like me announcing the wrong guy again), but there is indeed significant progress. With that progress comes freedom to do more things that can make for better shows in the future. (more…)
