Today, July 27, marks the 94th anniversary of the Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ), one of the biggest Christian denominations in the country and arguably an incredible (some would say impossible) success story. The INC was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 27, 1914, the same day World War One broke out in Europe. (The members of the Church believe that the simultaneity of the two events is the fulfillment of the biblical prophecy foretold in the books of Isaiah and Revelation.)

From that little congregation in Punta, Sta. Ana, Manila, the Iglesia has grown and expanded vastly, even establishing a congregation in Honolulu, Hawaii only 50 years after its conception. The Church now has a presence in around 90 countries and territories worldwide. More than 100 different races and ethnicities comprise its population. Truly, the Iglesia has gone far since its early days—farther than its adamant detractors could have ever imagined.

To God be the glory on this auspicious occasion.

[The author is a member of the Iglesia ni Cristo.]

As of today I have been relieved of my editor-in-chief position in our school’s official English publication. Seniority issues were raised and the school paper’s adviser finally decided to install a Senior writer in the top post to avoid further conflicts/misunderstandings.

I fully respect the decision and believe that it will ultimately lead to a stronger school publication. Congrats to Ate Eweng for the appointment!

I am, as always, confined to the four corners of my painfully yellow room, again feeling the need to write. It could be the boredom of summer afternoons like this, or perhaps instinct — whatever it is, it’s telling me to write.

I write for many reasons — to while away the hours, to keep my writing skills sharp, to express my feelings. Today, I am again held in a trance by my notebook computer because a question just popped in my mind.

What will become of me in fifteen years’ time?

I have asked this out loud before, and my peers have discouraged me from thinking about it. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, they say. And they aren’t wrong. At thirteen, I still have so much of the world to explore, and so much of my life to live.

But perhaps my greatest fear is that I will live it the wrong way, and that I will look back and regret my actions. Haven’t we all felt regret before? That little, “I wish I did that instead of this.” Didn’t we, at some point, ask ourselves how our lives would’ve turned out had we made a different decision? I have always been afraid to make a wrong decision Now, as I enter the audacious teenage years, and as the rest of my life is starting to unfold, I feel the need to make a plan, to plot things out, so that I live my life to the fullest and the way I want to. I feel that my life is better off prearranged, so that I would not need to worry about it anymore. In other words, I’d be better off without a risk to take.

But today, as I was reading Paulo Coelho’s novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, I came across these sentences which told me that having a prearranged life would probably not be the best thing in the world:

You have to take risks…We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks…because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life’s magic moments will have already passed them by.

“Magic moments” will be understood by those who have read By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Essentially, these are moments in our life when a “yes” or a “no” can change it forever. To quote the book verbatim, magic moments

“may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.”

I feel that this was speaking directly to me (although it is highly improbable). If my life were plotted out prior to my actually living it, then everything I would do would become “just another task”; my magic moments would go unnoticed. I realize that although a prearranged life would be devoid of the precariousness and unpredictability of a life lived spontaneously, it would also be devoid of the thrill of a spontaneously lived life. This leads me to another quote from the novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept:

“The person who is afraid of taking risks…perhaps will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back…she will hear her heart saying…’So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life.‘”

I do not want to waste my life. Taking risks is better than having wasted a whole lifetime. I have a dream to follow, and I will follow that dream. I will stumble, and I will get bruised. I will fall seven times, and get up eight.

What will become of me in fifteen years? I will become an accomplished person. A bruised person, but a learned person. A person with failures, but with even more accomplishments. My heritage will not be the certainty that I wasted my life; instead, it will be the certainty that I lived my life to the fullest.

The freshman politicians of Service Through Appropriate Governance (STAG) Party, one of the two major political parties in Agusan National High School (and the one to which I belong), once again won the recently-held First Year elections by a landslide, with all six of the party’s candidates grabbing the First Year Supreme Student Government seats. You go, guys. Remember, though, that you are now Supreme Student Government officers, and that means you’ve got a job to do. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you.

In other news, you may now call me editor-in-chief Dean. LOL. Not that I mean to brag, but Mrs. Villamor has just appointed me to the position of Editor-in-Chief of our school’s official English publication, The Narra. It’s no easy office to hold, that’s for sure. However, I understand the importance of the post, and will do my best to not screw things up for our dear school publication.

I don’t usually post on weekends (Friday thru Sunday), because no one reads blogs on weekends. I guess I’ll just be writing these kinds of posts (you know, posts no-one will ever care about) on Saturdays so as not to disturb you and your alone time. Kthxbai.

Let’s face it—personal blogging is a profitable niche no more. It’s a sad fact, seeing as how the original purpose of blogging was to serve as a sort of online journal. People’s tastes have changed, and blogging isn’t the obscure medium it used to be. Now, no one can wade through the Interwebs without hearing the word “blog” being mentioned—and boy, what a meaning the word has. The term now conjures images of fat geeks making money from home, and of websites that deliver to us breaking-news information even before television and print media get a hold of the tip.

True enough, amidst all this information being shared at the speed of light, the personal blog has become lost, obscured, inglorious.

Here I am, a personal blogger, one of only so many, lost in the buzz of daily life. Why has personal blogging become so recondite, why haven’t I stopped personal-blogging, and how does a personal blogger in this blog-eat-blog world where personal blogging has gone to the dogs?

Reasons why personal blogging has lost its luster

So, exactly why has personal blogging stopped appealing to writers/bloggers? Maybe because of the following reasons…

Changing tastes for the changing times

In the twilight of the 20^th century and in the dawn of the 21^st, I would’ve guessed that personal blogs were all the rage. And why not? After all, it was an ingenious idea—the thought of having your journal published online and being viewed by the world. Brilliant!

Not so now. Somewhere along the way, people began realizing, “Why the hell should I care about your personal life?” The blogosphere evolved into an information portal that rivals conventional media, and in that riptide of megabytes being zoomed back and forth across the Internet, personal blogging has lost the luster it once held.

Social networking is the new personal blogging

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it more convenient and less tedious for people to share their lives online. To be perfectly honest, it is so much easier to simply upload a picture or video onto MySpace or Facebook than to write, in a dull, tedious fashion, about how your day went on a weblog.

Personal blogs tend to spread out too thin

In the world of niche blogging, there is a rule that goes, “Look for a nice, profitable niche you can blog about constantly. A niche you’re interested in. Blog about that niche, and that niche only—never step out of topic.”

Personal bloggers needn’t have such a rule, simply because “personal blogging”, in my opinion, isn’t a “niche” in the same sense as, say, technology or lifestyle. We can therefore write about anything and everything under the Sun. Although that means that we have potentially limitless topics to create content around, it also means that we spread out too thinly—and blog readers aren’t too keen on following blogs with no specific niche covered. Do you think this is why personal blogging has lost its grandeur in recent years?

Why I haven’t switched to a niche

So, personal blogging has lost its appeal. Some would argue to the death that it has lost its importance and relevance. So, why am I still writing a pesonal blog and not a niche blog?

I suck at niche blogging

Hey—better to shamelessly admit your imperfections than foolishly pretend you’re good at something you’re not. I’d rather enjoy writing about something I’m comfortable with (i.e. my life and thoughts) than to try to write good content about something I know nothing about, or have no interest in.

Freedom, baby, freedom!

I’d mentioned earlier that niche blogging means you have to restrain yourself so you don’t step “out of bounds”—that is, to write about something outside your niche.

Personal bloggers know no limits. Admittedly, it doesn’t come with much promise, financially speaking, but the freedom to blog without restrictions is… well, it’s amazing!

Training ground

Darren Rowse started his blogging career in the personal blog world. In his outrageously popular blog, he even wrote a blog post entitled “Seven Reasons Why Personal Blogs Rock“. I can certainly say that some, if not all, of the reasons Darren wrote about in that blog post, apply to me and my personal blogging life.

Anyway, in that post, Darren says:

My first entry into blogging around four years ago was on a free blogspot blog which was largely a personal blog in which I reflected upon many aspects of life including spirituality, movies, politics, my church, work and miscellaneous ramblings from the various hobbies that I have.

And look where he is now. Personal blogging is to bloggers as boot camp is to would-be soldiers; as infancy is to humans. It’s the formational years of a blogger’s life, the era of “discovering oneself”. As Darren said in the aforementioned blog post, personal blogging opens your eyes and reveals to you how the blogosphere operates and helps you define yourself.

Over to you

I’d love to hear your take on personal blogging. Is it being driven to the extinction, or is it very much alive and well, if obscured? Do you think the personal blog can make a comeback? Are you a personal blogger, and if so, then why choose personal blogging? Did I miss a point in the blog post? Fire away.

[Editor's note: This post was first published on April 3, 2008 in QWERTY Confessions by me. Enjoy.]

I live in a small city in Southern Mindanao, Philippines. Small is the operative word there, rather than city. We have a small, sub-par mall. Small communities. Narrow roads. Only one or two social watering holes.

And, a small airport.

Maybe you’re wondering why I placed that last sentence in a paragraph by itself. Since my childhood, I’ve always been thrilled by airplanes and flying. (Never mind the fact that my first time aboard a plane was September of 2007.) My father always flew to Manila while I was growing up (and continues to do so now), and I’d always wanted to meet him at the airport every time he came home. At around noon, a siren would sound–indicating that the airplane was making either its downwind turn or final approach, and I would excitedly rush to a gate which separated the parking space from the airport apron. From there, I would watch the airplane land. You’d imagine how wide my eyes would get as the plane crept to a halt on the apron in front of me.

My dad’s once- or twice-a-month travel to Manila meant trips to the airport, and every time I watched a plane land (and, on occasion, take off), my fascination for the big flying chunk of metal was fed. Slowly, the back pages of my notebooks became occupied with drawings of different aircraft–very funny- looking ones, thanks to the fact that I was never very good at drawing. Soon, I was begging my folks to buy all sorts of airplane toys, and of course, to take me on an airplane ride.

I thought I’d get over the whole airplane addiction as I got older, but I didn’t. Recently, I downloaded a flight simulation system called YSFlight, and then later, FlightGear. For some time (until my first plane ride), using the flightsim was my most tangible sense of airplane flight.

I’d thought that this affection for flight was just that–an affection that stuck with me since my younger days. It would seem to be nothing more than that, come to think of it.

But perhaps my love of flying is a representation of my aspiration to soar high. (Yes, I’ve been thinking again. My theories may be somewhat weird, but stick with me here.)

Since my preschool days, I have always been pressured by my parents and peers (and myself) to excel. Whether it was the honor roll or the Speechfest or the journalism contest or the student government elections, my name was always expected to be at the very top of the winners’ list. Second was not an option. These high expectations drove me to at least try to soar high. Ever since, that has always been my goal: to get to the top.

To get to the top. For me, those words invoke so many thoughts. To get away from this city, to move to Manila, where more opportunities await. To at least get my name on the banner roll. To climb back to Section One. To finish high school. So many definitions of soaring high, of getting to the top.

I haven’t been there in a while, to tell you the truth. My academic heyday was way back in preschool, in Kindergarten, when I was accelerated to first grade without experiencing graduation. Perhaps the skies are the best representation of academic excellence for me. To fly and be amidst the clouds, to soar in the sky as much as I would like my grades to soar.

You could say that the skies are my asylum, my temporary amphetamine. So long as I cannot achieve the academic excellence my peers, parents and I aspire for myself, my admiration of flying will be one of my refuges.

Pressuring a student to excel is not the best thing to do—many an educator can tell you that. But I could say that the need to excel has been wired into my DNA. I now and forevermore feel the need to soar. Since I cannot do so academically (at least not yet; I promise I’ll start doing my assignments come June!), I guess the skies are my best bet.

Off the coast of Sibuyan Island in the Philippines, the underside of the sunken M/V Princess of the Stars rises above the waters in an ominous fashion. Still inside the vessel, bodies lay lifelessly, waiting to be excavated from their watery grave. Above ground, other bodies washed ashore in neighboring islands are being retrieved and buried by authorities, as they prepare to refloat the vessel and extract even more cadavers from the floating coffin, as well as remove toxic chemicals in its cargo hold.

While it looks as if Sulpicio Lines, the shipowner of the capsized vessel, is handling the situation gracefully, it has actually left the mourning loved ones of those who perished in the maritime tragedy annoyed and irritated. It is quite evident that Sulpicio has, as this write-up says, “put business above humanity” and money above life. Despite the fact that authorities are still not sure about who is to blame for the capsizing of Princess of the Stars, the negligence of Sulpicio’s management is indeed a possible factor.

And when you take into account the past misfortunes Sulpicio has encountered at sea, such as the M/V Doña Paz incident in 1987, the shipowner’s credibility shrinks even more.

Should we really be willing to take such risks anymore? Sulpicio’s track record for keeping its ships afloat isn’t so good. Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):

[Sulpicio Lines] is famous in the Philippines and around the world for owning and operating the vessel MV Doña Paz, which figured in the worst maritime disaster during peace time in December 20, 1987 where 4,375 people lost their lives when the ship struck an oil tanker (M/T Vector) in the Philippines. Throughout the company’s history, its vessels have figured in four major maritime disasters, killing a total of more than 5,300 passengers and crew members.

That, coupled with how crappily and greedily Sulpicio is handling the situation it is in right now, should be enough to raise more than a few eyebrows.

I believe that the families of those who perished in the incident should be compensated at least ?200,000, and promptly so. I believe that whoever is responsible for this tragedy—be it Sulpicio or the government, or Del Monte or your neighbor’s cousin’s sister’s friend—pay the consequences of their negligence.

Should we as a nation and our government fail to take the proper steps to prevent this kind of maritime disaster from happening again, more lives will be lost and more shame for the country. At this point, no one can afford to take risks anymore.

Stop Sulpicio Lines.

P.S. This is the first time I’ve ever participated in a blogswarm. It was my pleasure to contribute to this. The capsizing of the Princess of the Stars is really tragic, and I am only thankful that I was not on that vessel during its final voyage. Link to the blogswarm post

Apparently, Section One isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

When Section One and I parted ways in Sophomore high school year, I missed it. I missed the fact that I was part of the top brass of the Special Science Curriculum, of the entire school in fact. Being in Section Three was an uneasy feeling. I felt like I didn’t belong, in an arrogant sense. I felt like the gods had smoten me for no reason at all, that I’d done something wrong and they punished me by sending me to the third section. For ten months, in Section Three, I toiled long and hard into the night in the hopes that I would soon return to the glory that is Section One.

Looking back, I now realize that I’d gotten it all wrong.

Because Section One doesn’t necessarily mean top brass. By sending me to the third section, the gods weren’t smiting me—they were blessing me plentifully. And, although my mantra is that life is too short for regrets, I now wish I hadn’t toiled so hard to get back to Section One.

Because it just isn’t worth spending that much time on. It just isn’t.

Section One—hereon in referred to as III-Avogadro, or simply section Avogadro—is a mess. A total, depressing, happiness-depleting mess. When I come into the room every morning, everyone is wearing either a grumpy, pissed, irritated, or panicked face. “I forgot about the Chemistry test! Dang, I forgot about the Social Studies assignment!” The word disgruntled could be appropriate to describe what state section Avogadro is always in. Even a simple and quick question would be met by the “talk to the hand” gesture, because everyone’s so busy with their books and shit. This is where I don’t belong. This is where I seek asylum from.

I could swear that people would be ready to kill just to get high grades here. I’m just counting down the days to when all hell breaks loose, when grades will have become such a priceless treasure that we’ll start throwing armchairs and maiming each other with textbooks.

Which would be sad, because grades aren’t priceless treasures. To quote a good friend of mine, grades are merely numbers. They don’t total one’s personality. While I do agree that education is a priceless treasure, report cards aren’t accurate gauges to measure knowledge. The effects of education aren’t felt during school. They can be observed during life itself, and the Great Periodic Test is when we stand at the edge of our precipice and ask ourselves, “What have I done with my life?”

Grades are numbers. A combination of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens, eights, nines, and zeros. And such useless things aren’t worth maiming people over.

Some people in Section Avogadro can also get arrogant. At the risk of being called a hypocrite, I daresay I hate arrogant people. Shit. Like you know everything. Always managing to sneak intelligent phrases no one gives a shit about into your sentences. Whenever quiz-checking time arrives and the owner of the paper you’re checking gets a wrong answer, you quickly quip that he’s stupid/dumb. Sometimes I wonder whether you bring all this failure upon yourself.

And then there’s the invariably crushing pressure to perform well in Avogadro. I don’t do well under pressure. Nor do I think we should be pressured at all, but hell, we are.

I actually have the option to transfer sections, to move to a lower, less-pressuring classroom, perhaps with less [insert adjective here] classmates. I’ve actually really thought about it a lot.

Why haven’t I?

Fucking regret, that’s why.

Why would I toil for ten months to get to Section One and then transfer to Section Two? Thanks, but no thanks. (Mia, I respect your decision.)

Avogadrites, sorry, but this is just how I feel. Ahh, it felt good to relieve myself of that burden.

Twitter‘s been down in the dumps for a long time now. Downed servers, features being disabled (as of this writing, IM still hasn’t been restored). Twitter blog posts are never about new features, but instead about what has gone wrong with their system (and about how they’re “working to fix it”). Nobody knows why our favorite microblogging application’s so buggy—it might be because they use MacBook Airs, it might be because they use Vista—it could be anything!

Enter Plurk. Apparently using the wtf-is-wrong-with-Twitter buzz to generate buzz for their service, Plurk opened up to users only very recently and was (unsurprisingly) met with cheery welcome. Personal observations reveal that Twitter has become quiet of late, while Plurk is always busy.

Which can only mean more people are Plurking than Twittering! Countless people have “converted” to Plurk from Twitter—author included—and for good reason: Plurk. Kicks. Twitter’s. Ass. Why? Here’s why.

Timelined updates

Twitter shows you a boring old list of updates—observe my timeline, for example. It’s nothing but a vertical pile of words. My Plurk timeline is a much more enjoyable place—a draggable horizontal list that makes pagination obsolete, and the page more visual instead of textual.

Threaded Plurk replies

Granted, Twitter basically allows you to reply to tweets (updates) made by other people by doing this:

But it doesn’t foster discussion (because of the fact that a reply to a tweet cannot be readily viewed by another user). Plurk encourages discussion because you can reply to a plurk (Plurk version of tweet) by clicking on it and then typing in your reply, like so:

I don’t know about you, but I’d choose the service that encourages replies. This puts the blogging in microblogging. Comments are the life of every blog—the same goes for microblogs, and as you know, people on the Interwebs are a busy bunch who don’t like having to go through a lot of work just to find conversation.

Bolden, italicize, underline, and hyperlinkify your text

Say for example I want people to check out my blog. On Twitter, I do that by typing “Hey fellas! Visit my blog at www.deanlozarie.com!” Whereas on Plurk, I just type in “Hey fellas! Visit my http://www.deantastic.com/ (blog)!” and the plurk would come out as “Hey fellas! Visit my blog!”

If you want to italicize the word stinky in “boogers are stinky”, just Plurk in “boogers are *stinky*” (asterisks before and after the word), and Plurk processes it and outputs it as “boogers are *stinky*” (yes, asterisks are retained). Four asterisks—two on each side of the word—make it boldface. Two underscores (“__stinky__”) will underline the word.

To the best of my knowledge, Twitter has no such formatting options. Twitter=Phail.

Karma and Smilies

To encourage user activity, Plurk employs a point system called “Karma”. Basically, the more you plurk, the more Karma you get; the less you plurk, your karma is decreased. More Karma gives you access to more features, like the ability to name your timeline, change the creature on your timeline background, change your display name, and get more smilies.

Onto smilies. Know how when you type “: – )” into your favorite instant messaging client, it turns into a ? Twitter, very much like the French, refuses to do that for you, instead choosing to leave the semicolon, hyphen and closing parenthesis alone. Granted, : – ) and mean pretty much the same thing, but looks a helluva lot cooler, don’t you think?

Plurk has a whole array of animated smilies for you to use. Some of the cooler ones can only be accessed by plurkers above a certain karma threshold. Still, many websites such as this one have lots of smilies available for embedding into your plurks. Which brings me to my next point:

Ability to embed images and video onto plurks

Twitter folks type something like this: “Check out this YouTube vid: [enter URL here]“. Plurkers needn’t go through such tiresome work, thanks to the ability to embed images and video into your post. How, you ask? Simple! Say for example I want to insert this video into my plurk. All I need to do is type in some text (e.g. “check out this video”) and then the clip’s URL. Heck, I could even plurk only the video. So, I type “testing image/video insertion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk9QGZUYcEE” and here’s what appears:

Look closely, to the left of the “Plurk v Twitter: A First Look” mini-window, and you’ll see the plurk containing the video.

No downtime!

Now, in fairness to Twitter, saying that Plurk suffers from zero downtime would be preposterous. However, one thing’s fo sho: Twitter not suffering any problems is an uncommon occurence, while the reverse is true for Plurk. Right now, Twitter replies are disabled. Replies have been restored, IM functionality still down. Plurk’s all good and well. Plurk even automatically checks for new plurks and new replies for you without refreshing the page (contrary to Twitter, where if you want to check if there are any new tweets, you have to hit F5).

Conclusion

Overall, it’s Plurk FTW. Don’t get me wrong—Twitter used to be good, until the database crashes and server downtimes came. Plurk took over, and although the great exodus from Twitter (to Plurk) hasn’t quite happened yet, it’s bound to soon. Still, all hope is not lost for Twitter. What they have to do, IMO, is get their act together, fix their database crashes, earn some money (plaster one or two AdSense units on our pages if you have to), and then invest that money on more servers, developing more features, etc. It’s a microblogging-platform-eat-microblogging-platform world out there, and Twitter’s down for the count. Can it get back up in time?