Calendar of Events for September

Aug. 30 - Sept. 7: Bookfair at Megatrade Hall

Sept. 9: Charm's birthday

Sept. 13: Level-Up Games Ragnarok Convention at Glorietta

Sept. 13: Carlo Vergara's comic seminar at Ateneo

Sept. 13: Carlos's birthday

Sept. 19: Eda's birthday

Sept. 20: Anime on Ice at Megamall Ice Skating Rink

Sept. 20: UP AME Karaoke Contest

Sept. 21: Neutral Grounds Gaming Convention at Megatrade Hall

Sept. 21: Dean's "birthday"

I guess the next month that I'll have my hands full will be on December with C3 and all the other planned events that's going to happen.

On Orals

Orals scare the life out of me. I'm not really afraid of failing. I'm terrified though of disappointing my teachers. It's one thing to fail a written exam since all you have to do is submit the test paper, hope the teacher doesn't check it until he or she gets home, then get the hell out of the classroom. With oral exams though, you face the teacher and see the look on their faces when you fail to meet their expectations.

Having said that, I guess there was a lot of pressure on me for my philo orals last Thursday considering I've known the teacher for more than a year and I've been his student for all two semesters of my third year. Sure, the rest of my classmates were pressured to pass. But for me, I had a year of knowing the teacher as an incentive to do my best (or at least get a B).

Pinoy Exchange

I've stopped visiting the "literature" messageboards for the past two months until today, where I had to respond to a lot of SF&F threads running amok.

Throughout the years I've been visiting those forums, threads about books people love eventually degenerate into "actors I want to portray this and that character". It's a pet peeve of mine but... books have a medium of their own and from experience, a couple of novel to movie adaptations turn bad (though of course, there are exceptions). Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. But the pre-emption of who people think best fits the character of a novel for the screen... well, leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth. Unless, of course, the actor really fits the character (but that's not the case).

And another annoying thread is when people pit one book against another. "Lord of the Rings vs. *insert book name*", or "Harry Potter vs. *insert other book name*". It even goes the way of "*insert SF novel* vs *insert Fantasy novel*". I mean even SF&F has its own sub-genres. Sometimes, people give unfair comparisons, such as a stand-alone novel against a multi-epic series of books. Or a science-fiction story against a fantasy novel. Or even unfinished series against an already established line for the genre. It's as if the books themselves couldn't be reviewed in itself.

And let's not forget spoilers. People sometimes blurt out spoilers without giving a spoiler space. Especially in book reviews (even when they don't have to) since people have a tendency to summarize the story when giving a review, when that isn't necessarily so. So watch out for message boards, bulletin boards, emails, blogs, journals, review articles, and columns that suddenly give spoilers, whether it's a film, a book, or a comic.