Day Sixty-Five: Boracay? More like Fun-acay

8/17/14, 12:01 AM PDT

Woke up at 5 AM to hit the airport for our flight to Boracay. Found a few neat things while looking around the airport.

These are banned in America, right?

Seeing as they're seldom seen in America, I would've bought a Kinder Egg, but at a dollar each, that price was a bit too steep. No way was I gonna shell out a precious 53 pesos for glorified chokeolate.

You know what I was more willing to spend my money on? This cute little drink with Nata de Coco (the fancy name for "jelly things") floating around in it.

The natives call it "Mogu Mogu."

I call it "Effing delicious."

IT IS SO GOOD. I don't know if it's just because of the jelly bits in it, but I can NOT put this drink down when I take a sip. Since I'm writing this from the future, I'll give you a little foreshadowing by telling you that you'll definitely be seeing more of this drink as my vacation passes.

We flew Cebu Pacific again. Which means I once again volunteered for their piece-of-cake coin purse raffle.

Ooh, inverted colors.

More interestingly? We flew to Boracay in this plane:

It's... kinda small, huh?

Notice the starfish-like things on its wings. Yeah, those are called "propellers." They spin really fast to "propel" the plane forward, hence their name. Then the wings take care of lift and all the jazz, magic happens and the plane's in the air.

You know what's equally magical? This video of the propellers I got in action.

What the heeeeeeeeeck? Why are our propellers all broken? And how are we not falling right out of the sky, requiring us to drop the load? The answer: Wizards.

"You got me, Michael."

Just kidding. It's a weird little phenomenon that happens because of how my iPhone camera works. See, when you take a picture, as hard as your camera tries to, it probably can't capture every pixel instantaneously. Instead, it has to take pictures line by line, rolling in one direction as it does so. This is what is called a "rolling shutter," as illustrated by the gif below.

Science!

This rolling shutter is normally fast enough to not cause any noticeably changes in the picture, but when things move faster than the shutter can roll, you get distortion, as illustrated in this gif below.

More science!

Taking that pinwheel to the real world, since my iPhone's shutter goes from left to right, you get pictures like this:

THE PROPELLERS CAME OFF OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE SCREWED.

In the case of the video above, my iPhone's frame rate (the number of "pictures" it takes per second when it shoots video) exactly matched the propeller's revolutions per second (the number of times it makes a complete spin every second), which made it look like it wasn't moving at all.

Yeah. I'm a nerd. Deal with it.

So when we landed, we immediately looked to see what the island had. And boy, it didn't disappoint. The water was INCREDIBLY CLEAR, it was like liquid glass except it didn't hurt.

Woah.

"Stretching to infinity, in such a way that the boundary between
sea and sky blurred, the two becoming one."

I'm actually ankle-deep in water right now, if you can't tell.

We rode a speedboat and explored the periphery of Boracay, during which I took a bunch of pictures with my GoPro. Pardon the fisheye and the bad composition on some of them, the GoPro doesn't have a viewfinder so I had to guess where the frame was. I also have a bunch of videos, which I will save for a big edit later, so for now, have these pictures:

The speed boat we rode on. Notice it is owned by the police.

The iiiiiiiiiisland.

The family, holding on for dear life.

Pretty island thing.

It sorta looks like a Torterra. The pointy triangle rock is the head.

These things remind me of muffins for some reason. Maybe I'm just hungry.

Our boat captain had an awesome pose.

The sandcastle building skill.

This picture was taken underwater, can you imagine?

RFotD: Yes I know, summer's already over. Shhhh.

SGAT: None.

Day Sixty-Four: Jubeat Copious, The Greatest Game Ever

8/16/14, 4:19 AM PDT

This morning, I FINALLY found a reliable and decently-fast WiFi connection, so I dumped a hell of a lot of blog entries. I would've dumped more, but the one I was about to upload had some errors with uploading pictures, so that might have to wait until later.

Hit up yet ANOTHER mall today. Big ol' Glorietta mall in Makati. And I mean BIG. Glorietta is actually composed of five big buildings connected, each designated as Glorietta 1, 2, etcetera. In turn, the Glorietta buildings are ALSO connected to other malls, which include SM, Rustans, Greenbelt, and Landmark. It doesn't really show the immensity of it, but take a look at the picture I grabbed of the spot where the Glorietta buildings all meet.

Biiiiig.

We visited Landmark first since mom wanted to buy a sweater. They had a whole Chinese theme going on to celebrate a Mooncake festival or something.

Not very Mooncake-y, don't you think?

Asking for this picture was a pretty awkward ordeal,
but I did it for you guys.

While looking around, I found a pretty cool pair of sunglasses with one of the lenses missing its reflective bits. I know it doesn't make it too practical, but hell, this pair of monosunglasses is cool.

Maybe if Cyclops could only fire lasers out of one eye, he'd
appreciate this.

But the bulk of my time spent here was in Timezone, the local arcade. Played a bunch of shooting and racing games with my sister, including House of the Dead, which Megan was surprisingly good at.

Firing Glocks and... Kicking rocks? Rhyming is hard.

Being the rhythm game enthusiast that I am, I of course played Guitar Hero, where I got a high score playing Knights of Cydonia on Expert.

It would be impressive if most of the names on this high score list
weren't the default names.

I also found this AWESOME new rhythm game called Jubeat Copious. What first attracted me to the game was it's crazy cool futuristic look.

Look at those crazy squares.

Trippy stuff.

See those white squares in the first picture? The way the game works is that notes would flash on those squares and you had to press them to the beat. Simple, yes, but it gets CRAZY FUN, especially in the fast songs that require you to stretch your hand out and use multiple fingers. Songs kinda like this:

Thanks, Jubeat Copious, for making me live out my Launchpad/Midi Fighter fantasies. I spent around 300 pesos in total playing you while I was here, and those were the best 300 pesos I've ever spent.

"You're welcome, Shawn Wasabi."

I wasn't the only video game virtuoso here though. Check out this guy, who absolutely ROCKED OUT on this drum game.

Oh and we found Om Nom from Cut The Rope impaled on a spike too.

The humanity.

RFotD: You can buy your very own Jubeat Copious machine for the low, low price of 8,000 dollars. Or you can download the free iOS app and try it yourself right now. DO IT.

SGAT: Figured out that I really want that game in my life.

Day Sixty-Three: I Won

8/15/14, 12:01 AM PDT

We left Butuan today. As always, my grandma cried, which made my mom cry, which made my sister wonder what the hell was happening to both of them because she couldn't understand Tagalog.

"Pupunta sila sa boarding school bukas umaga. Bakit hindi ngayon?!"

In the airplane to Manila, got a window seat again, so I took many a pretty picture. Check it out.

Next thing you know, I'm six trillion miles away and it takes me more than
a year to send messages to Samantha.

I think this volcano actually erupted a few days after I took this picture.
Not sure.

Metro Manila.

Cebu Pacific, the airline we decided to fly out in, also does this thing where they play a game on the plane and the winners get a prize. This month's game involved saying a tongue twister that went something like "Sydney Low-Fare, Cyndi Lauper" (I'm not quite sure how to spell it). But since we also flew Cebu Pacific when we went to Butuan, I already knew that being able to say it correctly didn't even matter. You just had to volunteer and you automatically win.

So I volunteered. And I won this coin purse.

It's reversible. I do not know what that means.

I'm sure this could make a pretty good story to teach kids to dare to try new things or to take leaps of faith. But considering I actually knew what would happen ahead of time and the reward wasn't fantastic, I'd say the moral of this entry goes more like:

"Do nothing until you know what works. Then, do what works."

Yeah. Thanks, I know. Morrie-level philosophy right there. Class dismissed, see you next Tuesday.





RFotD: That coin purse was the most useful thing to me during my trip.

SGAT: Took a leap of faith. Sort of.

Day Sixty-Two: Awesome Possibiliteas

8/14/13, 1:03 AM PDT

Guess what I did today. Go on. Guess. I'll wait.

No, the correct answer isn't "your mother."

If you said "went to the mall," you're correct! Also, I can hear you through your microphone.

Robinson's had a Just Dance arcade station, which cost 50 pesos (a little over a dollar) to play for 30 minutes. My sister really wanted to play it, on the one condition that someone else from our family dance with her. My parents were too public-shy to do it and grandma would probably break a few bones if she did it, so I stepped up to the plate. We paid a dollar...

And we absolutely rocked out. Even though it was my first time playing Just Dance, I figured out that the main thing the Xbox tracked was a person's right hand, so I emphasized moving that.

That's not to say I didn't just wave my arm like a pendulum. I moved the rest of my body too. I looked a little like this, I think:

Yeah, I was fabulous. I actually got a small crowd of people to watch me. I'm not sure if they were impressed that I had moves like Jagger or if they were laughing at me, or if they were just hoping we'd leave so they could use up the rest of our 30 minutes, but a crowd's a crowd.

Might as well get used to it.

My sister and I also WRECKED this hammer smashing game. Check out our sweet high scores.

IGS got nothing on me.

Not too shabby, Megan.

BRING IT, IGS. Also notice my name in 5th place.

We also played this pogo stick machine where all you had to do was jump up and down on a platform. Or at least, we tried to.

It's a really small display, huh?

It couldn't take my massive, massive weight.

I also bought more bursting bubble tea from Cobo. Mango-peach tea with mango bursting bubble things. I bought the same thing from the same vendor so frequently that they actually remembered what I normally get today.

I just became a regular.

Too bad I leave Butuan tomorrow.





RFotD: I haven't posted a legitimate random fact in weeks.

SGAT: Befriended the people that make Cobo tea at the mall.

Day Sixty-One: Dropping Tablets and Cutting Hairs

8/13/14, 12:01 AM PDT

Dad arrived today, a fact that my mom is not too happy about. My other grandma arrived too, a fact that my mom is much happier about. This morning, I was tasked with bringing her stuff to her room, which consisted of two purses, a smartphone, and a tablet. It should have been no problem for a man of my physique.

Basically.

I had a death grip on all that stuff. A white-knuckle, space-Alcatraz, we-will-not-let-you-go death grip.

But my grandma's tablet made a jailbreak. It made the most explosive cracking sound ever. And the back of the tablet broke.

As broken as my future.

I. PANICKED. Literally less than five minutes after she landed, I managed to break something of hers. And not just any old thing either, a TABLET. TECHNOLOGY.

Over a thousand years old and I managed
to break it.

It was only the back plating though, it's not like the screen shattered or anything. And on closer inspection, the damage wasn't too bad either. I put the wires back into the tablet's body and after a bit of ingenuity, I put the back plating back.

Good as new. Right?

In less tragic news (or more tragic, depending on who you are), we went to the mall again today. I got me a haircut.

You don't need to see the rest of me, right?

And I also played with Ice again. The niece, not the state of water.

Yeah, she's smiling, but she secretly wants
to murder me for taking pictures of her.

Ice, about to do the Five Point Palm Exploding
Heart Technique.

My family watched a movie too. My mom, my dad, and my sister watched the Ninja Turtles movie. I, having something against Michael Bay movies, opted to watch Lucy alone.

How dare you do this to me, Michael Bay.

And I mean I watched it ALONE. There was literally NO ONE ELSE in the theater with me. An auditorium for 40, 50 people and I was the only one in it.

It was wonderful. I got to comment as LOUD as I wanted to at whatever happened in the movie, a privilege which I took full advantage of because there's just SO MUCH going on in Lucy that it gets confusing as hell.

Of course, when that random checker dude came in every so often, I'd shut up and pretend that I was a normal, civilized moviegoer. Which of course, that day I wasn't.

RFotD: Lucy would've been a good movie if it weren't so confusing. I mean first it's acting like a revenge movie, then it's all philosophical, then it turns into an episode of Through The Wormhole. What?

SGAT: Learned to keep my films concise.