Big changes over at Gibbity.com recently:

1. Private-messaging system
   Instant communication between members, great for swapping opinions about games you have in common.
2. Social-networking tools
   You can now do a Friendster by inviting other members to join your friends network. At the moment, all the friends page does is give a quick summary of your friends’ recently-reviewed games, but I hope to extend this functionality much further in the future.
3. Referral system
   And since we’ve got all these new features I thought it’d be nice to have some way of telling people about it. Entering your friend’s name and email address will fire off an automatic email invitation. Once they’ve signed up, they’ll be automatically added to your friends network.

Other small changes include shortcut icons for quickly messaging or inviting members on the individual game pages, as well as improved navigation within our growing Member tools page. Also, because of the new "friends" functionality, I’ve added a checkbox to the "Profile" page, which you can select if you want to make your email/IM information available to friends, but not the general public. Email is still automatically obfuscated either way, but this is just an additional privacy option.

Lastly, viewing a particular member’s page now displays a "similarity HUD," which tells you how many games you and the current member agree on. (The current definition of "agree on" is that you rated a game within half a star of each other, so if you gave a game 3.5 stars and he/she gave it either 3.0 or 4.0 stars, we’d consider that "similar.") Obviously, for this feature to work, you have to have at least a few games rated yourself, otherwise there would be nothing to compare. I have lots of other ideas for the similarity HUD, so expect this feature to grow soon as well.

I finally finished watching HBO’s magnificent Rome today. With only 12 episodes in the entire season, I’m amazed it took me this long to finish watching all of them, but it’s the sort of series that you want to stretch out for as long as possible. Every episode is an intricate kaleidoscope of Rome during the time of Julius Caesar’s ascension, and it’s quite easily the best of HBO’s original programming.

I can’t rave enough about this series, but I should mention that the version prepared for HBO Asia censors a couple of the scenes that give Rome so much of its attitude. For example, in one of its opening sequences, a wealthy Roman couple is shown having sex in their bedroom. Standing a few feet away, slaves are fanning them to keep them comfortable. It’s bits like this that gives Rome its street cred, and is what makes it so convincing.

One of the things I’ve found most fascinating about the series is the way its opening credits uses roman graffiti as its centerpiece, because it plays a fairly important part in the show. The vandalism on the walls and posts of Rome were like the blogs we have today: they were the means by which ordinary people voiced their opinions on what was happening in their country. On one occasion, Caesar tries to send one of his senators, Brutus, away from Rome because the graffiti on the walls depict Brutus stabbing him in the back. On another, vandalism depicting Caesar’s extramarital affairs set off a chain reaction of betraval and revenge that ultimately ends in his assassination.

But what really gives this series its soul is the fact that it’s written from the point-of-view of two foot soliders, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, whose many (mis)adventures are wonderfully interwoven with the bigger picture of Caesar and his bid for power. It’s through them that we become acquainted with the more underprivileged side of roman life and the fascinating little details like street-gangs and court”room”s and slave labor.

That said, my favorite character is of course, the ever-conflicted Brutus, who you probably know was the senator who planned Caesar’s assassination. What’s great about Brutus is that he knows that Caesar is a tyrant, but he feels a certain amount of loyalty toward him because of their long friendship. When he eventually makes up his mind that Caesar’s death was for the good of Rome, he becomes angry when his co-conspirators suggest poison or taking Caesar’s life while he slept. He says, “It must be done honorably. In daylight, on the senate floor, with our own hand. With my hand.”

At the Senate, Caesar is struck down and stabbed while Brutus watches. The look on his face is just classic: he loathes the task that has been set to him. Unlike Shakespeare’s version of the assassination, Caesar does not, in fact, say “Et tu, Brutus?” when he finally sees who is behind the plot though. By this time, he is so overcome by his wounds that all he can do is try to weakly pull his robe over his face as he bleeds to death on the floor of the Senate.

Check out Rome if you can. I’ve seen DVDs collecting the first season already, and the second season isn’t slated for release until sometime in 2007 so you have lots of time to catch up.

This is a "brief update on my personal life"-type post, so anyone who visits this blog for gibbity/oks/music/tech news should probably skip this. Or read it. Whatever.

So: 

I woke up with a hangover today, after a run-in with some Artic Vodka and BTIC the night before. Whenever we drink vodka, bad things happen.

… well, that’s not exactly true. This is only the second time we’ve had anything that wasn’t 20 bucks per bottle this year, but bad things certainly did happen the last time we broke out the ol’ 80-proof. I won’t go into the sordid details but let’s just say the specter of that fateful night will continue to hang over us for the rest of 2006. At the very least.

Fortunately, last night was a lot less sordid and almost certainly less fateful. I did have to sneak out and upload some client-work in the middle of the session though, which wasn’t exactly the most appropriate thing to do, but what the hell, we were getting smashed on a work night for goodness’ sake.

Over the past week I’ve also been reading a couple of books: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 40 Signs of Rain, Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, and Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park. 40 Signs is a techno-thriller, as far as I can tell, although I’ve only read the first 3 chapters so I don’t really have an opinion of it yet. Robinson’s writing style feels truncated and "staccato" at times, and I’m having trouble getting used to it.

The World is Flat is a dissertation on how the global playing-field is being levelled by various technological, economic and social forces, and how new business strategies are emerging to take advantage. Basically I’m reading it to convince myself that I’m in the correct line of work (as if I had a choice).

Lunar Park, meanwhile, is Ellis’ mock biography, a real mind-fuck of a book that gets progressively more fucked up with each new chapter. (Ellis is, if you didn’t already know, the author of some of the most controversial books of the 80s and 90s: American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, etc.)

This blog has been a bit quiet over the past few days, and believe me, it isn’t because I’ve been on vacation or anything. Apart from the ever-annoying client-work that I have to contend with (because apparently you can’t live on the combined Adsense proceeds of 3 unpopular community websites), I’ve been building a bunch of new things for Gibbity, including a private-messaging system, a "Refer-a-Friend"-type function and the oh-so-important social-networking component (yeah, my vision for Gibbity is a kind of Friendster-for-gamers … or MySpace-for-gamers, for those non-Filipinos who may be reading this).

I’ve also — and this is the part that I’ve been really enjoying — been reworking all of Gibbity’s CSS to comply with the Strict-mode Doctype. I don’t know why I didn’t do this from the start, but I’ve been learning alot of new CSS hacks along the way, which is always good. On the surface, you won’t see any difference of course; the rewrite is purely an ego-trip (although I do shave a few bytes off of the overall page size by using DIVs instead of TABLEs). As far as ego-trips go, this is definitely one of my more unnecessary forays, but hell, it’s super-fun to do.

So: still nothing substantial on this blog for the time being, friends and neighbors. My apologies again.

========= 

If you’re into indie-rock and like Rilo Kiley or Metric or Call and Response, check out the Scandinavian band The Concretes. Their new album, In Colour, was released very recently and is just faaabulous. This 8-piece band(!) sounds like (how I imagine) hippies used to sing, back when love was in and being emo was romantic. (Download one of the In Colour tracks, "A Way of Life," here.)

I’m super-busy today, so I don’t have time to work on any of the various articles I’ve been planning on posting on guttervomit. Here’s a fun Katamari Damacy Flash game, just to keep y’all entertained in the meantime.

Back soon! 

Over the next 7 days, I’ll be moving Highfiber.org, oKs.ph, guttervomit.com, trinity-cross.net and several other domains to a new home with a new host. I’m getting a slightly better hardware deal on the new server, so hopefully the crappy performance that we’ve been experiencing on these domains over the past two months will finally be alleviated. If not, well, at least I’m not spending more money on it.

That said, we can expect spotty reception until we get everything sorted out. I’m targeting the 24th of February to do the final switchover, but we will be configuring the new server and transfering files starting tomorrow. (I hired an admin service to do the transfering for me, so hopefully there’ll be fewer screwups. I can’t honestly imagine myself shunting 10gigs worth of data from server to server all weekend, not to mention that my bash knowledge is still painfully lacking.)

"They’re everything wrong with culture, and everything wrong with art."

- David LaChapelle, on Jessica and Ashlee Simpson (via the wonderful popbitch)

Caught Aeon Flux today, finally. I’d been dreading seeing this movie ever since I first caught wind of exactly what Hollywood was planning for everyone’s favorite psycho assassin back in 2004. You know how sometimes, when you go into a movie theater expecting the worst, you actually end up being mildly entertained by the movie, just because it’s not as bad as you thought it’d be?

Well, this isn’t one of those times.

You can tell that this movie is going to be a stinker within the first couple of minutes (that is, right after the fan-pleasing eyelash-fly-trap intro). Charlize Theron’s hushed voiceover tells us the story of the world of 2415, where the last vestiges of humanity live in a walled dystopia, ruled by a tyrannical government, opposed by a handful of enlightened rebels, blah blah blah blah blah … Essentially, it’s Brave New World. (In other words, nothing we haven’t heard a dozen times before.) She ends the monologue with yet another piece of startlingly obvious information, that she is, in fact, one of those rebels.

No shit, Sherlock.

Now, it’s not that I have anything against the dystopic-society plot. Many movies and books have built on this classic concept and created something fresh and invigorating (the upcoming V For Vendetta, the classic and soon-to-be-remade Logan’s Run, the first Mad Max, Brazil, Minority Report, etc.); Aeon Flux, meanwhile, joins the myriad other works that borrow too much from Brave New World, but have precious few ideas of their own. Towards the end of the movie, I had been reduced to counting how many times Charlize Theron’s wrinkles showed through the layers of makeup.

I suppose the really painful thing about this movie (as is often the case with films based on works in a different medium) is just how far the proverbial apple has fallen from the tree. Regardless of whether you actually understood any of the original Aeon Flux animated shorts, you could tell that there was a kind of bizarre genius behind each episode. The movie, meanwhile, is equally bizarre, except that instead of genius, I see … retardation.

The filmmakers try so hard to capture some of the surreal, bordering-on-nonsense stylings of Peter Chung’s classic series, but it simply eludes them for most of the film’s running time. The problem, I think, is that they were operating under the assumption that if their audience couldn’t understand what was going on, they’d get turned off. So all of the tricks and all of the "crazy" gadgetry are these dry, run-of-the-mill things that do little to impress or awe the viewers. What the hell man, not getting what was going on was what I loved about that darned show.

I’ve been trying out Ma.gnolia.com recently and thought that "group-bookmarking" feature was pretty well-executed (easy to understand, easy to use). I think that I might be moving all my del.icio.us bookmarks over soon, just because Ma.gnolia.com does all the same stuff (including a few Firefox bookmarklet-type scripts) and does it with slightly more panache.

Anyway, so I started a Pinoy Blogs bookmarking group, which aims to compile a really big list of all active Pinoy blogs (and by "really big," I mean every single one of them, if at all possible). The great part is that if we can tag and rate them all properly, it’ll provide a way to quickly search and find practically any Pinoy blog out there. The group page is here, it’s open to the public and totally free to use. Jump in and add your blog now!

I was finally able to get a hold of Pupil’s Beautiful Machines album a few days ago and give it a good long listen. What can I say — it took 5 years but it seems Ely Buendia may have finally hit his stride post-Eraserheads. The album is slickly produced and confidence oozes out of each track. More importantly though, these new songs are sharp as a whip. The single "Nasaan Ka?" is a great introduction to the new sound, but it can’t begin to represent the breadth of the other 13 tracks on this album. "Dulo ng Dila," "Beautiful Machines" and "Gamu-gamo" are all the kind of songs that could sell an album single-handedly.

The only track on this collection that I feel weird about at all is the closer, "Lost Guide," which sounds so Semisonic-esque that I had to check my player to see if I was still listening to the Pupil album. Apart from that one rather misplaced track though, this album is a real treat, because it doesn’t sound like it’s consciously (or un-consciously) aping other more established bands (coughPedicabcough). If Ely Buendia can manage to keep this group together until their second or third albums, he just might pull off the impossible feat of revolutionizing mainstream OPM twice in his lifetime.

Of course, until then, my fingers are well and firmly crossed.