As most of you (who have been reading this) know, I’ve been freelancing since the beginning of February. I had been working for six months at Lomography, but it didn’t work out, so I’ve been trying to make it out on my own since then. It’s been somewhat difficult, but I know that God will take care of me, and I’ve got a family who does, too, so I’m not too worried about it.

A group I’ve been working with (for about a year and a half or so now) is Greater Good. It’s a clothing line that pushes social awareness. It’s pretty young, still, and it’s a nice experience, growing with the brand. I usually operate on a per-project basis, but I’m blessed because they seem to like what I’ve been doing for them, and they get me when they need stuff done, yay.

Edric.

Kasey & Mike.

I get to work with Kris! We went to school together, and every Wednesday feels like a tiny catch up, which we haven’t really been doing anymore. Cough, Paulina. Cough, Dave.

Here is a picture of post-apocalypse a collaborative aftermath.

I really like being alone and working alone, and sometimes I forget how great it is to bounce ideas off of people. I’ve long decided that I didn’t like going to the office (waste of gas, energy, etc) but now, I’m thinking that a few days out of a week isn’t so bad, especially when you get to talk to people with the same big ideas as you.

In response to this mix.

There’s a Wicket in my Pocket:

1. Sunlight in a Jar by The Lucksmiths
2. Low Shoulder by Toro y Moi (Daytrotter session)
3. Shook Down by Yuck (Daytrotter session)
4. Not Even Jail by Interpol
5. Honestly by Zwan
6. The Quiz by Hello Saferide
7. I Love How You Love Me (Live) by Neutral Milk Hotel
8. Thirteen by Elliott Smith (Big Star cover)
9. Girl From the North Country by Dear Nora (Bob Dylan cover)
10. Sleep Tonight by Stars
11. Put Your Hands On Me My Love by Owen
12. Christmas TV by Slow Club
13. This Heart’s On Fire by Wolf Parade

Please enjoy! Download link is here.

I am, by no means, a gamer. In fact, I suck so much, I have to elect myself out of team-games because they can do them so much better without me. What I have been quite addicted to are Flash Games, beginning with the Facebook application, Pet Society. Here is a conversation I had with Petra about Pet Society and Philosophy in 2009:

petra magno: omg hahaha ang cute
petra magno: he looks so dissatisfied with being barechested

P.S. We were studying Structuralism (see tab with “Scholes powerpoint”). I know this makes us look smart, but truthfully, I do not remember very much from that class.

Ahem.

Anyway, this obsession grew and I developed attachments to a game called Happy Island and then, horrifyingly, It Girl. It Girl was introduced to me by Karen and Cat, and I am saying this right now because they should share my secret shame.

I like “quest-based” games (that’s probably not what you really call them), and I find the hours ticking away mercilessly as I try to gain more XP and re-sell stuff so I could get more money to get more stuff. Partly because they seem to load a lot slower on Macs.

It’s kind of sad that all of these games, in one way or another, revolve around status and consumerism, and it’s even sadder that I bought into all of it. One day, however, in a fit of Facebook profile cleaning, I deleted access to these apps, and I have never been suckered into paying more attention to a virtual character than my real life ever again.

Until now.

Sarie told me about a cool game called Glitch. It’s Flash-based as well, but exists independently from Facebook. I liked it a lot because it reminded me of Little Big Planet, which is a game I played a lot with my brother. (Funny: for two-player quests and tasks, he would sometimes get mad at me because I was really so bad, we would die. It wasn’t very funny, then, but it is super funny now.)

Glitch is a multiplayer game where your Glitch co-exists with other Glitches in the minds of eleven giants. You choose how to build and shape the world, by learning new skills and participating. It’s really awesome because you are given a lot of creative choices and mostly free will—but you can also choose to do destructive things (e.g. stop mining rocks so they don’t regenerate, poison and kill trees, steal from community gardens, harvest trees without petting or watering them, make and sniff “No-No Powder,” which is basically like an upper). Not that it’s particularly violent. I’m just saying—you are given the option to be.

I signed up for beta testing a couple of months ago, and received an email last July. I played with it a few days and didn’t really get into it all that much. Until about a few days ago, that is. In less than a week, I’ve managed to wrestle my way to Level 15. (This is my profile page! I have 76 badges and 34 skills, and I am beaming like only a proper nerd can beam.) I kind of dreaded that I was back into this Hole of Non-productivity, but I liked the way Glitch is structured (you can chat with players like in, presumably, WoW. I say presumably because I never played it) and how it is designed.

I decided to turn in early last night, and thought about writing an entry about how Flash games continue to ruin my life. I even elected next week to be a Glitch-free week, as I needed to focus on getting things done. Before taking a screencap of the game interface, I thought, “Eh, I can just do it tomorrow.”

AND THEN I WOKE UP TO THIS:

The Glitch world is currently closed! I checked their Twitter account and they closed beta testing seven minutes before I woke up. Imagine my horror. Imagine my grief.

Now, I know this is not the worst thing that could happen. It could very well be the best thing that could ever happen to my career right now. But, I just really, really want to nibble on my pigs.

After the shoot last Friday, Sarie took me to one of her favorite places to eat, Sandaya. It’s a Yakiniku place, where people are served raw meat to cook on a grill built into the table. I have been a big fan of this method of dining ever since my first experience with Benihana as a kid, but I don’t go on these food runs all that often.

I don’t quite remember exactly what we ordered, except for the Kobe beef, but these entire spread is comprised of four orders of meat.

This one that Sarie is cooking is my favorite. We had two orders of this. I forget what it is, but it’s really good. (Boy, am I helpful, huh?) I honestly just could not stop eating it.

EDIT: Two orders of CAB Angus Beef Boneless Short Rib (Php 350 per order)

This is pretty good, too. I couldn’t figure out how to cook it with the leeks, though, which I very much wanted to do. I tried to… but was obviously unsuccessful.

EDIT: This is an order of the US Hanging Tender (Php 300)

Kobe beef! So fatty, but so good. This melts in your mouth. It was Sarie’s first time to eat this in Sandaya, and she wasn’t disappointed. Neither was I.

EDIT: This is an order of Kobe beef short ribs (Php 450)

Cooking our meat on the grill! The best part about Sandaya is that you don’t smell like food after eating. I love Japanese food, but I hate smelling like I just came from a kitchen. The fact that I emerged from Sandaya smelling nothing like what I had just eaten made me so happy that I very nearly cried.

Okay, not really, but big points for that!

Happy belly. The big dump of sauce in that platter in front of me is comprised of 80% of the spicy orange one, and 20% soy sauce, with a little bit of raw garlic that you have to request from the waitresses. This mixture is a tried and tested one by Sarie, but you are obviously free to make whatever kind of sauce you like.

We usually cook the meat first then dip it into the sauce, but I also tried slightly cooking the meat, dipping it into the sauce (like a marinade), then putting it back on the grill. This also produced good results, giving the meat a more of a smoky, charred taste to it.

I don’t know. They give you a stick of gum after, and I guess I made this face.

It was such a great dining experience. Three days after, and I am still dreaming about the food. I JUST WANT MORE. The beef they used was so nice and tender. I can’t get over it. Apparently, Sandaya is also way cheaper than most Yakiniku places. It’s not cheap or a budget place to eat (each order of beef ranges around the Php 200-700). I just mean that you leave feeling like you got what you paid for.

Sandaya is located along Pasay Road in Makati. It’s on the second floor of a building with a wine/liquor place downstairs, and something called The Love Garden. It’s pretty easy to find—their sign says “SANDAYA” in red neon letters.

Operating hours are: Monday – Friday, 5:00pm to 11:00pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12:00pm to 11:00pm. Parking might be a little bit problematic, but it is so very worth it. Thanks to Sarie for introducing me to it, and for taking some of these pictures.

I love it so much, I’m taking my a few of my oldest friends, Isa, Barby, Den, and Val to eat there one of these days! Soonest would be ideal. Like, maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been a big fan of Visual Editions ever since they released Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. Aside from the well-known fact that I am a Foer stan, I love that book because it was different and refreshing and ambitious. I love the publishers because they dared to do what most people would have written off as impossible.

(Lately, I’ve been thinking about the real difference between ‘impossible’ and ‘difficult,’ and I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes, what we really mean by ‘impossible’ is that it’s a little bit too ‘difficult’ that we don’t have much of a desire to try. Sometimes, all we really need are a tiny push and a little bit of courage.)

Visual Editions’ latest offering is a re-imagining of Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1. Initially, I was pretty unimpressed by what it comes off as—a loose-leaf book that seemed to be too much trouble to bother with. However, here’s the clincher: you can rearrange each page to tell the story in a way that makes sense.

It was Jean-Luc Godard who said that “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.” (Marc Saporta is, coincidentally, a Frenchman like Godard.) Composition No. 1 does follow a narrative, but you choose how the story will go. Google’s Tom Uglow writes in the introduction: “This is a work that confounds the convention of literature. Composition No. 1 was the first book to demand active participation, or what we might call today, interactive. There is nothing as disconcerting as the sensation of holding a loose sheaf of papers, with no numbers, no chapters, with a hundred and fifty beginnings and a hundred and forty nine endings.”

Saporta’s novel was first published in the ’60s. Think about how revolutionary and pretty much unheard of this idea was at the time. Today, it’s still considered something that goes outside the box of conventional publishing, what more then?

To push the boundaries even further, Visual Editions enlisted the help of Universal Everything‘s Matt Pike to create an accompanying app. I think it’s a great response to the growing dilemma (dialogue? contest?) between technology and the old ways of life. The presence of an app could discourage buyers from buying the book, but Uglow outlines the difference between the two: “The physical edition of Composition No. 1 is an object to be held, owned and loved. The digital edition is to be read, pushed, shared, discarded and reinvented.”

Most unconventional books have to battle the question–“So, what is it about?”—as though they had any more reason to prove themselves than the typical book. This is what Composition No. 1 is supposedly about:

“Composition No. 1 is about the interconnected stories of a group of Parisians during the Second World War German occupation. There is Marianne: a gifted Sorbonne graduate turned disappointed house-wife and mother. Long shut down by news of her husband X’s extramarital affairs Marianne begins to emotionally unravel when she has to nurse her close friend, Francine, through terminal cancer. Her husband is X, the mysterious narrator of this novel, who never speaks and is never described. A young artist, Dagmar, is working on an abstract self portrait painting called Composition No. 1 and once dated narrator X.”

Obviously, I have not read the book, but doesn’t that sound like an absolute wonder to read, and rearrange, and read again? What I love most about Visual Editions is that it concentrates on creating a unique experience for the reader, where the narrative is a part of the format, which is what they seem to be keen on reinventing. They play a lot around with the meaning behind the “bodies” of these texts.

I wrote about Foer’s Tree of Codes over in my pretty dead book blog, Book Report. It was the second book they ever printed, and it was such a glorious read. I can’t wait for their future books. Their website says they have two new ones on the way!

Visual Editions also claims to concentrate on making works that they file under Visual Writing, which is:

“…writing that uses visual elements as an integral part of the writing itself. Visual elements can come in all shapes and guises: they could be crossed out words, or photographs, or die-cuts, or blank pages, or better yet something we haven’t seen. The main thing is that the visuals aren’t gimmicky, decorative or extraneous, they are key to the story they are telling. And without them, that story would be something altogether different.“

One of their examples is my favorite book in the world, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It is often thought of as annoying and gimmicky, but I don’t think Oskar Schell’s story could have been told any other way.

I love Visual Editions because they aren’t afraid to take risks, and they aren’t afraid to explore and exhaust all available possibilities. I’ve always wanted to work in books and publishing, and these people represent what I want to be making in the (hopefully near) future. Their work is always exciting to me, and I appreciate that they constantly show me that it can be done.

So, this Friday, I found myself in two new (and somewhat peculiar) situations, one of which was a shoot for co.lab. The idea behind co.lab is the raising up of a shared space for “freelance professionals, home office workers, startup businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and graduate students.”

Arriane would mention it a lot in her blog, so I knew about co.lab, but it was nice setting foot in the actual place. Here’s her post on the shoot! She has loads of great photos, and is apparently pretty sick right now, so I’m sending her get-well-soon vibes from over the Internet. Will it work? I sure hope so.

I’d first heard of this concept from Swiss Miss, who works in a similar environment called Studio Mates with the likes of Jason Santa Maria and Frank Chimero (!!!). It’s so nice to see a similar place opening up in Metro Manila, so I’m hoping it takes off, and that I somehow find a way to be a part of it when it does. I currently live quite far from this place, so I don’t even know if I will get to, but it’s such a nice space filled with positive energy and great, creative minds.

There were a number of rooms, but we mostly stayed in this one. I met a few interesting people like Chiara, who is a graphic designer, but who is also brilliant at makeup.

They have a well-stocked pantry!

And it seems to be a puppy-friendly place.

Full room! Gabby, Stick (the mind behind Anouck), me, Sarie, and Chiara…

…taken by Bia! She’s making a full-length film now on modern-day heroism. I can’t wait for it to be done, so I can watch it. HEH.

The shoot was done by WYD Manila.

It was a nice change of scenery. I had gotten used to working by myself (with the exception of something pretty collaborative on Wednesdays—which I will talk about soon), it was nice being able to just hang out with people. I’m not so good with offices, but maybe it’s not really the office-environment that is stifling. Maybe it’s the type of work I used to do. With this set-up, I would be able to go to work with great people, on my own projects.

It’s refreshing, because I think I really am starting to experience a bit of cabin fever, and this scheme is something I’d really love to look into. You’re left alone to do your own thing, but when you feel like going crazy, there are people around to keep you from going crazy and/or talking to yourself.

I’m not exactly the most social person, but this seems pretty perfect, if you ask me.

More photos under the cut, clickety!