First.

My earliest memory of a laptop was one of those old, clunky Toshiba (?) or IBM models running on Windows 95. You had a choice between flying toasters, an aquarium, and those black-and-white Star Wars-esque flying stars for screensavers.

It was also the first memory that I have of my father – that clunky laptop was his. It was on his lap where I sat to watch the flying toaster screensaver on the laptop, placed on the study table that was later mine.

Years later, when we met again in a McDonald’s outlet near my house, one of his gifts was a second-hand laptop.

Hundred-and-forty-character Vanity: Plurk and Nehring’s Navel Examinations

Note: This was originally written as a reaction to a discussion in my CW141 – Creative Nonfiction 2 class last year, under Ma’am Chingbee Cruz.

“At once backward-looking and navel examining, these pieces lack Sturm und Drang, a consensus seems to have grown the the genre should be…a bit sedate.” – Cristina Nehring

In this age of the one-hundred-and-forty character microblog, this is slowly becoming the norm. Especially in Plurk. This is not to say that Plurk—once described as the water cooler area to Twitter’s workplace—is entirely worthless. It’s just after a thousand or more dancing bananas and a full hundred Karma, I sometimes feel that plurking just loses its meaning. And all because of the same system that made it so fun in the first place: Karma.

You see, Karma (as evidenced by the plurktrends graph) gets updated every 4 hours. Since you need more Karma to unlock more emotes and dancing bananas, people end up plurking useless plurks just to bump up their Karma. Some even ask for Karma boosts, but at least that’s a straightforward attempt to boost Karma—I’d rather have that than plurks pretending to be interesting.

So how is a plurk useless? When it fails to generate enough responses that would go past hi, hello, and some emotes—though I think the (taser) and/or dancing banana emote would be exceptions, since these are usually used when the plurker has dug his own grave and no extra emphasis would be needed. Classic examples would be: [name] is going to have lunch, [name] is leaving, [name] has just arrived, etc.

At first, these seemed to be pretty harmless; but after a few weeks of only posting that cycle of plurks and my timeline getting filled with that (say, fifty of the hundred Unread Responses/New Plurks), it somehow leads me to think that some people just don’t have enough of a life to post on Plurk. Or just too busy to plurk something better and more creative. Or even yet, they’re secret agents so they can’t reveal too much about what they’re currently doing or Luneta would explode, sending Rizal’s statue flying like a giant projectile aimed at Malacanang.

These are precisely what Nehring describes as “navel-examining” – no one, after all, would really care about your navel except you; and unless there’s something that would actually stir any real interest, why post it?

And I know I’m going to be flamed terribly for that statement there, but maybe that’s just what been missing on Plurk lately (though I sometimes wish that secret agent thing was just true). That’s what made me love Plurk when it was just starting out—it was just weird, wacky and insightful enough because of the debates that it used to have, ranging from morality to just plain soup—and that’s I want (at least my side of) Plurk to have back.

I don’t want this case to happen again: somebody—or whatever that was, since I subscribe to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” adage most of the time—added me as a friend, and when I checked the plurk profile, the timeline was just filled with plurks containing just random keystrokes. How random? Like this: fdsaaasdaasdasdaaaa, then repeat several times over. If that was on some online game, it’d prolly be branded as a bot running on some preset command to plurk at this preset time. So I just clicked the “Add as Fan” button, blocked that, and went on with my not-so-happy life (since I can’t do what I do in the game: kill the bot and leave it dead in some random field).

So I hope that after this three-thousand plus character rant, something will change. Or not, and hope that Ashton Kutcher or somebody as popular would make a campaign on Plurk (since there’s already something like a Plurk Etiquette campaign a few weeks back). And that’s something that would surely kick Twitter’s ass as well.

Wikipedia is one huge paraphrase (along with other similar wiki projects).

Note: Just to warn you – I do believe in the lit theory that nothing is original anymore, and that belief can spill over here.

This blog post stemmed from a plurk made by my Wikipilipinas editor; on that said plurk, she declared that writers should not paraphrase passages Though I may agree with her most of the time, and realize that the plurk is just a knee-jerk reaction, tonight’s going to be an exception (to spark interesting debates, perhaps).

First off, we should start with the definition of a paraphrase, sourced from the Purdue Online Writing Lab (the Purdue OWL, a favorite reference of English 10 classes in my university). It defines the paraphrase as

your own rendition of essential information and ideas expressed by someone else, presented in a new form.

one legitimate way (when accompanied by accurate documentation) to borrow from a source.

a more detailed restatement than a summary, which focuses concisely on a single main idea.

The Purdue OWL continues further, saying that “paraphrasing is a valuable skill because the mental process required for successful paraphrasing helps you to grasp the full meaning of the original.”

Contrary to what my editor believes (and this is, I hope, something just out of sheer exasperation), paraphrasing is a valuable skill. We should then hate the way the technique of paraphrasing is employed, but not the technique itself.

Personally, I have found these points made by the Purdue OWL to be true. As a contributor to Wikipilipinas, I have found myself paraphrasing some passages to use in the articles I write; which is mandated by this policy:

Content posted in WikiPilipinas must be verifiable. While WikiPilipinas cannot check the accuracy of information posted to the website, claims made in WikiPilipinas must be verifiable. Unsourced articles may be challenged or removed without further notice by WikiPilipinas administrators.

Despite Wikipilipinas’ allowance for original research, the necessity for verifiability can serve as a deterrent to publish these original researches. But it is already an improvement over Wikipedia’s “No Original Research” policy:

Wikipedia does not publish original research. The term “original research” refers to material—such as facts, allegations, ideas, and stories—not already published by reliable sources. It also refers to any analysis or synthesis by Wikipedians of published material, where the analysis or synthesis advances a position not advanced by the sources.

This means that all material added to articles must be attributable to a reliable published source, even if not actually attributed.

Since there is no space for original research – which is totally understandable, since it is easy to make unfounded claims, and there will always be unscrupulous individuals who can just abuse that fact – then Wikipedia will just be, in essence, a paraphrase of all reliable information.

However, this policy of “no original research” can also work against Wikipedia by preventing the site from becoming more than just a paraphrase of what “established” sources know, of even making the production of information more democratic by opening it up to everyone.

Then again, maybe I am just asking too much from these two wiki projects; after all, the truth can be relative (hello postmodernism!) and opening a space like this can be disastrous, especially if many still cannot – or do not, refusing to – think critically. Or, to paraphrase Ma’am Issy Reyes’ remarks during one CW199 class, we may destroy the establishment only to become the establishment ourselves.

Noynoy should be in Malacanang – not Times Street.

So it’s one of the issues that’s been in the news recently – Noynoy doesn’t want to live in Malacanang, and since Arlegui is supposed to be returned to its original owner, he wants to live on Times Street. Personally, I don’t agree with that decision because 1) it’s not practical and 2) it’s not even symbolic in the right way.

[Yes, there are other more pressing issues out there, but since someone's choice of residence - and how s/he lives there - can give us an insight into how someone thinks, why not use this chance to gain an insight into the president-elect's mind?]

So here’s why I think Noynoy should remain in Malacanang – and not Times Street.

1. It’s not practical.

As described in an editorial from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Times Street is a bungalow. Compare that to the sheer size of the Malacanang compound – which you can see from this Google Map. However, the entire Malacanang compound is not just a house nor just the office of the president; it also has a museum, several function halls, and other government offices such as the Office of the Executive Secretary (the Wikipedia article is a quite comprehensive guide to the palace).

Obviously, the government offices won’t fit in the Times Street residence. If Noynoy does want to hold office in Times, then it would be a lot of hassle (especially for his Executive Secretary) coordinating with someone whose office used to be just a few blocks away.

So, let’s say that he’s going to live in Times, and will go to Malacanang everyday to work.

There are several routes from Times Street to Malacanang (or basically the city of Manila) – the long one will be via EDSA (which we won’t tackle here), the other one via Quezon Avenue – Espana (which is shorter, but because Espana traffic is hell you wouldn’t want to use that route), and the Quezon Avenue – Araneta Avenue – Aurora Blvd/Ramon Magsaysay route (which is longer but has a lot less traffic than Espana). You can follow this Google Map to see how far Times Street is to Malacanang.

Whichever route the presidential convoy might take, it’s still going to waste a lot of gas paid with tax money by being stuck in traffic or by taking longer routes to avoid traffic. Not to mention the time spent from getting to and from Malacanang, which can be better spent on other matters.

2. It’s not even symbolic, either.

Times Street cannot be a symbol of the ordinary Filipino neighborhood- most residents in that subdivision belong to the upper-middle class (and I can attest to this fact, having studied near the area and knowing some of the residents there). It is isolated in a way already; on Times Street there are no houses which have walls made out of scrap material, nor entire families cramming themselves into something that you can’t even call a proper room. If Noynoy seriously considers living on Times Street as already connecting with the Filipino people, then we have a problem.

There is also the fact that the presidency is not some day job which starts at 8 in the morning and ends at 5 in the afternoon; it is a 24/7 job that for the most part, doesn’t have weekends nor leaves. It’s not just something that you can leave behind once you step out of the office.

The presidency is, after all, a six-year commitment to the Filipino people. And being in Malacanang will always remind you of that.