And so it came to pass that, less than two months after the Glorietta 2 bombing/gas explosion, Makatizens found themselves in the middle of yet another brouhaha earlier today as Sen. Antonio Trillanes, of Oakwood fame, commandeered yet another five-star hotel in an attempt to oust good ol’ President Gloria. According to reports, two people were injured during the incident, although whether it was a direct result of the actual violence, or of the massive amounts of twitters and SMS’s flying back and forth, cannot be determined as yet.

As I watched the twits fly by this afternoon, while walking around Legaspi Village looking for an open coffee shop (there weren’t any, past 4pm), it occurred to me that I had precious little sympathy for Trillanes and his ilk. The 2003 incident was messy and altogether rather amateur, but you had to at least admire the dude’s idealism. And now, 4 years later, he tries the same stunt again – only with less men this time – and you can’t help but feel a bit peeved. You already know he’s going to fold, and you wonder why he even bothers. You know this because it turns out that his idealism is of the comic-book-super-hero variety; he insists on keeping these things bloodless. The thing is, bro, you ain’t Gandhi. If you’re gonna forcibly take over a hotel with a bunch of armed soliders and call for the President (whose government you willfully joined) to step down, then you have to accept the fact that the strength of your convictions will be measured by how much blood you are willing to spill. And if you’re not comfortable with that, then perhaps fasting and spouting thoughtful soliloquy might be a less invasive way to draw attention.

During his exit interview, Trillanes is quoted as saying: “There’s no loss here. We just did what has to be done. It is tantamount to treason if I don’t do anything.” I have a couple of issues with this statement. The first is that there were, indeed, big losers from this incident, and these include the Manila Peninsula and all of the businesses in the CBD. Also, the Philippine peso made a rather strong dip back into the PhP43.20:US$1.00 range in the afternoon (although it seems to have normalized again; geez, even the forex doesn’t take this guy seriously anymore).

The second issue is, exactly what it was that they ended up accomplishing. Apart from sitting in a hotel lobby and sending frantic SMS’s calling for support all afternoon, I mean. If there’s anything that really bugs me, it’s when people commit to something that they’re not willing to go all the way with. In many ways, it’s that half-baked kind of planning and execution that’s left this country in such a poor position for so long now.

If Trillanes has made any kind of statement today, it’s the fact that he’s really got it in for Makati’s hospitality industry. I secretly hope that he visits Intercon next time around; that place really needs to get a facelift.

Time is slowly trundling 2008-wards, which usually means, among other things, scads of link-bait "Best of 2007" lists. Everyone from Google to Random Blogger #1290485093 (yours truly included, of course) will be throwing together zeitgeists with varying levels of success in an effort to drive a little bit more traffic to pre-archive content.

There are a handful of these that I look forward to though: Popmatters‘ "Best Music" list is usually really good (see their 2006 picks here), as is Rotten Tomatoes‘ "Annual Golden Tomato Awards" (2006 was their 8th year running). The coolest one for me though, is the fan-powered Gummy Awards, sponsored by music-blog extraordinaire Stereogum, which I just submitted my votes to this morning. Indie fans plug in their top 3 albums of the year, and optionally, their favorite music video, favorite live act, etc. People who are interested in the indie music scene will already know what the favorites to win are. This year has had some incredible contributions, but a handful of albums have really stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. I’ll be writing a lengthier entry about this within the next two weeks as I finalize my own "Best of 2007" list, but the short list of finest albums includes:

1. Radiohead’s "In Rainbows"
2. Band of Horses’ "Cease to Begin"
3. Klaxons’ "Myths of the Near Future"
4. Sunset Rubdown’s "Random Spirit Lover"
5. The Shins’ "Wincing the Night Away"
6. Animal Collective’s "Strawberry Jam"
7. Blonde Redhead’s "23"
8. Miracle Fortress’ "Five Roses"
9. Modest Mouse’s "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank"
10. The National’s "Boxer"
11. Besnard Lakes’ "The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse"
12. Menomena’s "Friend and Foe"
13. Feist’s "The Reminder"
14. Beirut’s "The Flying Club Cup"
15. Battles’ "Mirrored"

The first 4 are the albums that I listened to the most this year, and each one has their own unique charm about them. Radiohead’s electro-rock sound is majestic and minimal at the same time, Band of Horses is folk-rock if folk-rock could grow Wolverine claws and stab you in the heart with each song, Klaxons is the triumphant rebirth of unapologetic new wave/rave, and Sunset Rubdown is, quite simply, what insanity sounds like.

After some consideration, I decided to vote for Radiohead, Band of Horses and Sunset Rubdown at the Gummy page. I skipped the other optional voting fields, but did pick "Spencer Krug" as Mr. Indie Hottie 2007 and "Leslie Fiest" as Ms. Indie Hottie 2007. (My first instinct was to go with Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, but their album wasn’t quite as good as Feist’s. Chan Marshall is still hotter than both of them put together though; if only she had actually released something this year.)

And so, with the success of various sci-fi-laced serial dramas over the past 3 years (and the relative failure of a sequel in the original medium), the producers behind my favorite action sci-fi flick of all-time have brought the Terminator franchise to the small screen, with the mildly-anticipated Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show itself isn’t scheduled to start airing on Fox until mid-January 2008, but I saw the pilot episode this evening and thought I’d write down some thoughts.

As you can guess from the title, the story is set somewhere between "Judgment Day" and "Rise of the Machines," as Sarah and John Connor continue their lives as wanted criminals on the run from the FBI. The cast has some potential: Lena Headey (300) plays Sarah, Thomas Dekker (Heroes) plays John, and Summer Glau (Serenity) plays a high-school girl that turns out to be John’s robot protector. The usual hallmarks of the franchise are all there: two Terminators slug it out in an effort to change the future, while Sarah and John have mother/son pep talks and run from various exploding vehicles.

The particular choice for Evil-Terminator was not quite as good as any of the regular cast unfortunately: Owain Yeoman does his best to create a facsimile of Robert Patrick’s stellar performance in Judgement Day, and he busts through walls and tears apart school buses with a casually blank "robot" look. I have to say that nobody has ever really managed to pull off the "Terminator stare" quite like Patrick did over 15 years ago. (Even Arnold himself was never quite as menacing.) The difference, you see, is that Patrick always looked like he was sizing you up, calculating the most efficient way to break you in half; other actors have simply kept their faces neutral, and imho it just lacks the gravitas of a real killing machine.

The story itself is a tricky thing to review this early on. The Terminator mythology is relatively thin, when compared with the labyrinthine foundations of shows like Heroes or Lost. Everyone knows that John Connor is eventually going to lead the resistance against the machines in the early 21st century, and has been dodging time-traveling robots for most of his life. Apart from that, there’s precious little else that matters. (In fact, one could argue that the essence of the Terminator movies  lies in how the screenplay was a near-perfect distillation of the killer-robot-from-the-future concept. With no unnecessary details to worry about, all that was left was an astounding juggernaut of an action movie.)

Another issue I had was that the SCC cast is tiny, so aside from waiting for the next big machine-on-machine slugfest, it’s difficult to see how this show could actually work from week to week. The Terminator movies, I think, were never written to be drawn-out in this manner. What made them so great was the fact that the pacing and story were as merciless and to-the-point as its characters. Punctuating the action with the usual pep-talk or moment-of-silent-introspection was something they avoided like the plague, but in a TV setting, it’s difficult to imagine how they wouldn’t eventually do this.

Overall, the pilot was mildly entertaining, and Summer Glau is, as always, interesting to watch. It’s not Firefly, but then again, neither is anything else on TV these days.

It looks like syndeo::media’s first in-house product is finally coalescing into something usable. This is particularly exciting for me because it was right around mid-November last year when I first sat down and wrote out the original brief for the idea. Over a full year in gestation, wow. I can honestly say that I’ve never worked on anything pre-launch this long in my entire life.

That said, I’ll be the first to admit that the product as it stands right now still needs a lot of polish before it’ll be ready for primetime, so I’ve been putting quite a bit of thought into exactly how to launch this thing without our collective inboxes being inundated with 500 errors. It’s a tricky situation, because testing in the wild is the only way to really get a good feel for what else we need to improve. Too many testers, and we’ll be overwhelmed with bug reports. Too few, and we won’t get enough.

(Notice that I’ve completely glossed over precisely what this app is, or what it’s for. At the moment, all I can say is that it’s a social-network, and that at its core, it takes its cues from the looking-glass theory, as originally posited by the sociologist C.H. Cooley over a century ago. Yeah, I’m pretty old-school that way.)

The solution I’ve decided to run with, at this point in time, is to very slowly introduce the product to more and more users over the next two months. This week, we’ll start doing private-testing within syndeo, and maybe include some (very) close friends. Total population of not more than 25 early testers. The goal here would be to make sure the most embarassing bugs are squashed before we actually push to a larger audience.

If all goes well, we’ll start inviting alpha-testers from the local online community soon after. (The official milestone sits in the middle of the last week of November, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that we can get that process going sooner.) Because the year is almost ending, we’ll almost certainly have to keep the alpha-test version going well into January/February of 2008 and probably only move to beta in the second quarter.

Of course, all of that’s just a rough timeline. syndeo is growing in fits and starts as this is going on, and it’s difficult to predict where we’ll be two months from now, let alone five. We’ll get this thing out the door no matter what though; you can be sure of that.