A random memory flashed into my mind a few minutes ago, from about 10 years ago. It was the middle of my 3rd year in high school. My best friend and I had just taken up a card game called Magic: The Gathering, an obsession that would eventually see me spending over PhP60,000 pesos (over a thousand dollars) over the course of the next 3 years.

We were sitting in a quaint restaurant along Katipunan called Chinoy’s, where all the older players gathered in the late afternoons. We didn’t dare play against any of them, because they were far more experienced and had a penchant for using all these elite cards that we had, till that point, seen only in magazines or behind glass cases.

So we kept to ourselves, casting our Sparks and regenerating our Emerald Dragonflies in our own little corner booth. Eventually (and I suppose this was inevitable), some of the regulars started taking notice of us because we were there like clockwork every afternoon. It didn’t happen immediately — some of them would look in our direction when we sat down, or nod at us when they passed our table, that sort of thing.

Then one afternoon, one of the friendlier players sauntered over and actually watched our game in progress. It was a weird feeling, being observed by one of the Masters, and my friend and I both sat up straighter.

The details of the game are vague now, but I do remember exactly how it ended:

I had one of those gold Dragon cards from Chronicles in hand, Chromium, which I had been sitting on for over 8 turns and would win the game for me when cast. I had nothing else in play apart from an Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine, Urza’s Power Plant and a Swamp. I tapped all of them for mana, gave my friend a big shit-eating grin, summoned my Chromium, and waited for applause.

Instead, the Master leaned forward and said, “You can’t cast that. You don’t have the right color of mana.”

My smile faded like a passing fart. I squinted at my cards and answered, “Here, it says ‘Colorless mana’ on these Urza’s lands cards, so I’m using that instead of the white, blue and black mana required by the Chromium.”

He tossed his head back and laughed. I think he might have even had his hands on his hips when he did it. He said, “There’s a difference between ‘Colorless Mana’ and ‘Mana of any color.’ Check your rulebook.”

Then he walked off, still laughing, probably to tell his friends about these two stupid kids who lived in their own private-Magic-dream-world, where multi-colored cards could be cast using a bunch of crap-lands.

My friend and I were silent for a long time. Then, without saying a word, we started packing up our stuff. We didn’t show up in Chinoy’s again for a long time after that.

I remember bitching about that “colorless does not equal any-color” issue for a long time afterwards, blaming the rulebook and ranting about how they could’ve picked slightly less similar names for two incredibly different concepts.

I guess it seems pretty trivial to the average person, but it was a huge deal to anyone who understood how to play MtG. It was the automobile equivalent of putting water in your gas tank … or masturbating to the photo of your first cousin … one of those analogies, anyway.

I honestly don’t know why I suddenly remembered all this today. Maybe it was a defining moment in my life, as abject humiliations usually are. Or maybe I just miss that stupid game.

An advanced copy of the new Decemberists album Picaresque has been floating around the torrent networks over the past couple of days, and although I can’t say if it’s a huge leap forward for these guys, I can definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed their previous works. My favorite Decemberists song from their 2003 album Her Majesty was the whimsical/erudite “Billy Liar”, and “Engine Driver” from this new collection comes very close to topping it.

Colin Meloy is one of those writers that enjoys peppering his work with little winks and nudges, and his lyrics are as witty as ever.

Screenshots of many, many websites that went down in flames when dot-com when kaput, their webmaster ran out of cash, or their site concept proved too unweildy to maintain. By far the most depressing collection of pics I have ever seen.

This news is funny, depressing, and inevitable all at once. Yeah, the bit-torrent heir apparent (self-proclaimed, of course) was released as a public beta 3 days ago. Yeah, it’s not working.

Having held a real Les Paul exactly zero times in my entire life as a non-musician (with a brief, ultimately misguided foray into classical guitar during my high school days), I’ll have to take the reviewer’s word for it when he says that this machine “definitely had the look and feel of a classic Gibson Les Paul.”

Although you will not be surfing for porn or downloading movies on this guitar just yet, the 100mbps Ethernet port does allow a scary kind of power, namely, being able to separate the signals of all six strings, so that each string is captured individually, and can then be sent to a separate amp, or recorded as a separate track. More at the Gibson Digital site.

This concept car from Ford isn’t much to look at on the outside, but its reconfigurable interior is a real beauty. Seats can be adjusted to face towards the back of the vehicle, where a 45-inch Sharp LCD doubles as a rear windshield. You can do everything from browsing the Internet to watching DVDs, and the whole package is controllable via a WiFi-enabled notebook.

Other bloggers have apparently been quite vocal about that Digital Pinay contest I wrote about a few days ago, confirming my suspicions that the people at PCS are, in fact, complete idiots.

Blogger Sacha Chua writes:

[ The PCS ] also deny that it’s a beauty pageant and claim they never intended it to be one. And oh, oops, the first application form was a complete mistake–they didn’t mean to send *that* version to the press mailing list. They *really* meant to send these [other ] sanitized application forms …

The first application form she’s referring to included fields for Bust Size, Height, and other superficial physical attributes. I figure it actually wasn’t the real application form, but something meant for internal-use only: after all, what self-respecting pageant organizer would allow beauty contestants to send in forms with doctored vital-stats right?

Although rumors that LG was in talks to buyout Siemens’ mobile division were ultimately denied, the German company is definitely trying to get rid of their money-losing cellphone business. This makes me sad because I never got to try out any of their high-end units, although I sure did read a lot of reviews. The SK65 (pictured on left) got pretty lukewarm reviews when it was released last year, and its rather unwieldy form factor certainly didn’t help its chances.

I noticed a couple of days ago that Villman, one of the biggest PC retailers in our small nation, has begun offering their own brand of laptops (pictured here). Now, it’s obvious that they don’t have the ability to actually manufacture these things themselves so I was interested to find out how the original manufacturer was. Of course, that proved to be a bit more difficult than I thought, because none of the Villman staff have any idea about these things, and since it’s a fairly generic bit of engineering, looking at the make of the laptop itself doesn’t really provide any clues.

In fact, there were only two things unique about this machine: 1) its sloping keyboard, and 2) the included Power Cinema app (which allows you to play DVDs and other media without booting into Windows). Now, Power Cinema isn’t exactly the most common of utilities to be preinstalling in your laptops, so finding other retailers that sold laptops with this app included was pretty easy. This notebook, available at Walmart of all places, was at the head of the my search results and it matched the specs almost exactly. It turns out that the manufacturer was this Taiwan-based company called Tatung, who has been trying over the past year “to build its brand name in the US after gaining more recognition in the market from sales of its flat-panel televisions” (writeup here), which explains why I’ve never heard of it.

Anyway, after looking at the Tatung notebook images, I can say with reasonable certainty that the Villman Viper Notebooks are rebranded Tatungs. Of course, I’m not saying that that’s bad or anything — it’s not like I know anything about this brand, so I can’t rightly comment on their quality.

To be honest, I don’t even know why I went to so much trouble. I guess it was fun playing detective … too bad the “mystery” unravelled itself so easily.

Holy crap … here’s something I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently, ASUS has been quietly working on their very first smartphone model, the P505 (pictured on the left) since early last year, and the word is that they’ll be debuting it soon in the States, which probably means we’re not too far away as well.

What I love about this is that I’ve been buying ASUS hardware for my PC since I first started assembling my own rigs and I’ve never been disappointed by the level of quality of their products. (Granted, I never got around to trying the ASUS Pocket PC –the rival iPAQ line at the time was just too good to ignore.)

The P505 uses a P900-style half-clam form factor to partially hide the screen when in “phone mode.” The reverse side of the lid (the bottom half of the picture) contains the numeric keypad. It’s a lot smaller than the P900 though … this photo shows that it’s just a tad wider than a closed S700.

ASUS manages to pack in a lot of goodies though, despite the small size: it’s got a 416MHz processor, 128mb of internal memory, an SD/MMC card slot, a 1.3MP Camera with Flash, and Bluetooth, Infrared and USB 1.1 connectivity. I’m not sure whether it’ll be packing the Windows Mobile Magneto though (the spec sheet says Windows Mobile 2003, so probably not), which is the only not-so-good thing about this little wonder. Oh, and no WIFI yet. Drats.