cin(T)a; a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and God..

I was doing some of my emails and reviewing some of the assignments the debating team has sent me, which is quite hard work even when it's done in front of the TV while watching Asian Food Channel in a cooled room ^^; when Joan, a very dear friend of mine buzzed me to remind me about the registration for the World Debating tournament that'll be opened this noon..

After that she gave me a link which i will give to you too at the end of this article (i will also accesorize this article with quotes from the trailer). She said to me to have a look at this Indie feature. For those of you who dont know, "Indie" is not a movie made in India, nor is it about Indians and their dancing and it is definitely not about red Indians of north America (^^;) but it is a film made by a relatively "non professional" crew, but this does not mean its ameteurish, it just means their method of production does not go thru the usual corporate production house system, meaning is usually have minimum funding compared to the commercial movies. But often because it has less contraints (commercially, politically, and stuff) it can be more "honest" to viewers, which is why i like indies when i look for movies or features with content. Commercial films sometimes can be way way too diplomatic.

"it's like Newton's first principle; beauty is inversely proportional to brain"

Anyway, I was excited to see this flick. You know why? Because its Indonesian! I've always been a movie aficionado and i am not ashamed to say that more of my favorite movies are productions made not by my own countrymen. This is not because I'm "bling" or "globalised" or "pompous" but because what i seek in entertainment are rarely filled by domestic movies. Don't get me wrong, when Indonesians make good movies, they turn out SO much better I think than ANY Hollywood (or Bollywood) movie ANY kind of day, we do have cinematography senses! But again, i have no idea why production houses choose to ignore masterpieces like Laskar Pelangi, Denias, Daun di Atas Bantal, etc and instead decide to capitalize on stupid horror features like Sumpah Pocong, Pocong VS Kuntilanak, etc..

"That's why God created Love, so that those who are different can unite!"

So this story is a flick madeby a group of very very talented cinemaphiles. It highlights the cultural normatives in Indonesia. It questions the very core of sensitivity in Indonesia; religion. And it highlight something never before emphasized in a movie; inter-faith relationships. The existence of such relationship is a major debate not only in Indonesia, but as the film emphasizes; its chance of survival in Indonesia is very low, because of the normative value-based society that exists in Indonesia.

"Religion is the cheapest propaganda that has caused countless historical human slaughters!"

What do you think? Is love something you can separate from your faith? Are they equal, or hiearchal? And if so, which goes first? Love, or religion?

"Why did God create us differently if God only wants to be worshipped one way?"

I'm a pretty open person, i think people can decide on any and I'd still respect that. I would be one of those who ultimately defend the existence of inter-faith relationships, meaning that I dont necessarily see that religious difference should kill the possibility of the unity of love. I know this is against some teachings in some religion (I'm pretty sure in Islam it is so) but that's just how i view it. Personally i would try to seek a partner of the same religion, but sometimes we cant choose can we? The heart sometimes makes our choices for us, and if indeed every man was created on earth for a woman, then what makes the possibility of that destiny closed to only women of the same religion? If you relationship does not decrease your obedience in personal faith to your God, i see no problem.

"God loves Cina and Annisa, but they cannot love each other because they call God using different names"

But let's not go too deep into that. Let's go back to that flick. Now as interesting as it may be, I have my doubts that it can ever go up for a screening publicly in Indonesia's cinemas. Why? You see, as free as Indonesia's media is, we're still evolving in the sense that heavy sensors do happen. It is not often that the government completely bans the distribution of a movie but it does happen once in a while. Now this movie is provocative (this is not how i would word it, i would use "enlightening"), because it dares to expose a condition in Indonesia's society, however i would imagine not many elements of our society has an open mind to accept the facts stated in this movie. I dont think our society is as prepared as other societies are to put thei own standards under the microscope. Read my article on Aceh and you can see how this tendency even is omitted to treatments upon human rights violation In Indonesia.. This is what concerns me..

"We have been given the privilege to learn more. Those who know nothing is easier provoked"

So, go see the trailer, read the blogs, and help spread out this Indie, because it does have prudence! We live to love, but sometimes we love to stay alive :)

- trailer here (indonesian with some english subtitles)
- blog here (indonesian)

revenge of the fallen..

always loved the Transformers franchise, don't see any reason i wont love this sequel

Michael Bay will be directing again, so we can guarantee our buck worth all the booms and bang that'll be on screen :D

Official dates is 24 June 2009, 26th for Indonesia (unless you're a lucky Japan folk who got the invitationals to the first screenings on the IMAX theatres)..

but let's enjoy some pics of the 2009 summer blockbuster, official website here, but great pics, video trailers, and viral marketing here.. Enjoy guys!

camera-playing at night

Very productive article writing night tonite, shows how boring and uneventful my nite is ^^

There's this place in my town called Kali Code, literally translated "the river code" (you read code = cho-day, instead of reading it like it was the title of Dan Brown's book) and me and some pals like to go-a-wandering there, sitting for a few hours (usually midnite) to sip some warm coffee and enjoying the breeze.. its quite a slow nightlife there, just loads of people talking in the outdoors under the starry sky :)

I suddenly remembered last night about a photography trick.. Its partly exploiting the irregularities of the camera at night, its a mix between panning and going bonkers hahaha.. So you put your camera on night mode, if you use an SLR use a slow shutter speed (interestingly you dont need a tripod for steadiness on this one) keep the ISO mid i guess (200-300?), and if you could use a narrowed focus (2.ish) there'e be cooler effects you can get.. In my case i used a stupid handphone camera, so all i can play around with is clicking on the "night mode".. But i found as crappy as this camera is, it apparently could still be played with.. What you do is first you move around your camera (in circles, figure 8s, or whatever, just move it!) then in the middle push the click, and keep it moving (for handphone cameras keep going for 2 seconds, for SLR users as long your shutter speed is).. Make sure you dont point something dark (this only works at nite) if not it'd all be useless --"

then you'd get something like this..




The better your camera is, the better and cooler effects you'll get.. I personally think these are pretty spiffy and entertaining stuff.. So much to play around with when you hold cameras at night.. Start experimenting guys! :)

FB = FaceBook, or FB = ForBidden?

I'm pretty sure that if you can read my blog, that means you're accessible to the virtual world. Most of you also have facebook accounts, i'm most certain. For those roaming on the internet and have yet to find out what in the world facebook is, you probably live in grenland, the artics, or China :D click here to find out..

Now for those of you in the majority, especially as i'm reaching out to those living in Indonesia, how do you take the news that some entities in this country are trying to ban facebook and its usage? To those living outside Indonesia, you now know how compromisable the idea of internet freedom is here.. But let me get one thing straight first, I wont be scrutinizing the government just yet, as this is only so far in the form of "statements" made by some institutions.

Today is my resting day after 2 straight days of sleep deprivation. So after cooking lunch with me house mates, i sat in front of our little and cuddly TV to see the noon news, and lo! I saw headlines saying that there were outcries to make FaceBook "forbidden/anthema" (the Indonesian word would be "diharamkan") I was eager to find out why, sure you are to, read on..

Apparently some institutions i Indonesia have been monitoring this lovable social networking site of ours, and they saw that the basic functions of FaceBook was fine, for social interaction, but they also identified that it has its misuses; trade cons, cheatings, soul-mate searching, date searching, and tainting people's reputation. These institutions even claim that FaceBook allows people to cross the religious steps in leading to marriage; as they do it over the net instead of having all these ritual formalities.

Okay, in this light i'm quite indifferent. I guess i'm a guy that both respects values of religion, cultural practices and such. But I'm also a believer that other people's bussiness is, well, other's bussiness.. When i heard about the guy in Japan who made an online petition to marry an anime character because he didnt feel like human interaction was for him, i didnt really support his intentions, but i never condemned him for trying either.

I'm not saying and telling you guys which is right and wrong, I think there's always, at minimum, two sides of a coin, so you may feel differently from me. Thats fine. Questions of practicality however will arise in the future when it comes to FaceBook banning, which i won't bore you with as i'm sure you get the idea. Law has had quite a hard time enforcing legalities of law precedures thru the net, because its well, virtual. The whole dimension of subject, object, nature of crime becomes so vague and jumbled, while most of our municipal law was designed to regulate tangible occassions. This happens almost everywhere. Remember how China had trouble with Wikileaks.org? Proves that there's so much a state can do.

But that's practicalities. What about the foundamental analysis? Look I may be indifferent, but my opinion is of a fragile alliance, I won't be indifferent no more if they decided later on to ban universal use of FaceBook, i mean all i'm doing with my account is to connect with friends, how wrong can that be, in like ANY religion?

Have you Indonesians heard of this news as of late? What about you living outside the country, what are your opinions on this? Is it ethical? It's a free blog to discuss, I wont impart any indoctrinations, dont worry =)

berryberry crazy laah

Why do people like blackberries? Is it because the name reminds them of strawberries, or blueberries, or even raspberries? It's an amazing fact that a new product entry like this can grab so many market in so little time, i mean its only marketed in Indonesia for a couple of moons now..

I've been paying attention ya, to the blackberry craze, and the thing costs like IDR 8.500.000 for the average type, that's like USD 750.. Of course you can get the black market ones for 70% of the price, but i wont go condoning that in here :p I've always been amazed at the market absorption rate of Indonesians, people always complain that they live in hardship over here but once we're talking about consumer electronic goods, i think we're quite comparable to other consumers in other countries (Indonesia is Asia's leading market in electronics, it is also Toyota's biggest market in Asia)

So why oh why do people acquire these goodies? I've been asking around, as i know in countries with 3G, 3.5G, 4G, or even G-String communications technology ^^ they have a specialized network for handheld like these.. In the US i think Palm is a bit more famous in terms of jargons (are palms = blackberry?).. Indonesia is pretty slow i think in adopting these specialized connections, so even if you have a blackberry with tremendous technology like EDGE, 3.5G, and ooooo it has like a screen, a keyboard, and a camera! :D you can't even optimize it, right? Some say that "well its to anticipate someday when we do have the proper connections" well i think only God knows when, and what if by the time Indonesia adopts the technology there's already a newer line of blackberries, ones who can walk and speak by itself? ^^

Is it because of fashionable utility? Is it simply because it looks cool? Maybe so. Is it true that when 2 people are standing side by side both are typing text messages but one holds a blackberry and the other like one of those liberacci style phones you see in scarface where you have to use both hands and your bulging biceps to even holh, would the one with the blackberry look cooler? I suppose so. Not necessarily true in my eyes, but i know some who would say "L'Accord"

And its not as if they have these massive campaigns on the mass media, you still see more bullcrap competition among phone connection companies waging war against one another in seeing who has less 0 digits in their phone rates..

So what is it, eh?
- Technology? Sure but not applicable optimally anyhoo
- Price? You can feed 10 mid economy families for a month with the price of a unit
- Fashion? Sure it looks cool, it's the wave of 2009. But is that it?

Maybe it'd be good if someone wrote a paper on it, it could really be a good basis of a thesis. I dont think i would suit to make one, it has nothing to do with law @.@

But what do you think? Do you own a blackberry? How would you see it from a utilitarian point of view?

the truth really is out there

after the International Law class today, which was the only class for today, i had nothing better to do.. I actually have quite a funny article coming up, yet it's still in the cooks, so i'll throw you some fascinating info that you might or might not have known..

I was browsing the internet just for some references of my next article, but instead stumbled upon what i think is quite interesting. Apparently the smart people of astronomy found in this galaxy called Alpha Centauri (uuuuuu my mind remembers directly to a Command and Conquer game xixixi) there are two planets orbiting a star they named Gliese 581 that might just be the "twin siblings" of our beloved earth.. Read on a quote from Wikipedia i found;

"Gliese 581 d (pronounced /ˈɡliːzə/) or Gl 581 d is an extrasolar planet approximately 20 light-years away in the constellation of Libra. Because of its mass, nearly 8 times that of Earth, the planet is classified as a super-Earth. In late April 2009 new observations by the original discovery team concluded that the planet is within the habitable zone where liquid water, and therefore, life, could exist.

The planet was discovered by the team of Stéphane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland using the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory 3.6 meter telescope in La Silla, Chile on 24 April 2007. Udry's team employed the radial velocity technique, in which the size and mass of a planet are determined based on the small perturbations it induces in its parent star’s orbit via gravity.^[2]

The team is confident that the planet exists but recognizes that unlikely events could mimic its existence. They believe the issue will be settled by upcoming studies.

Dynamical simulations of the Gliese 581 system assuming that the orbits of the three planets are coplanar show that the system becomes unstable if its component masses are so high as to correspond to an overall inclination angle of 10° or less.^[3] For Gliese 581 d, the upper bound of its mass must be half that of 581 b; that is, 581 d's maximum is 44 Earth masses.^[4] At this mass it must be held together with a central heavy-element core like Saturn and maybe even HD 149026 b."

Now, after reading that, its apparent that there might just be the possibility of inhabitance in this planet. As a movie geek, my mind is jumping from one space movie to another (star wars, star trek, wall-e ^^).. Now I really think that maybe not now, not in my lifetime at least, it's still impossible, but imagine like 100 years, or 1000 years haha from now, people of earth might just immigrate between solar systems and planets, either for tourism, or in the case of wall-e because earth becomes so inhabitable that humans have to move to another planet and ruin the goddamn thing over again ")

But what if that's only the best case scenario? What i think is that if that planet sustains the possibility of living entities to survive, wouldn't there be possibly already existing creatures there? Its only good stuff if we're talking about insects and stuff, what if its like really advanced civilization, creatures with human-like brain but with heads like a cat but teeth like a shark and body like a hamster and can fly as fast as the speed of sound? (hahahahaha) i wonder if they would accept us gladly? I wonder if WE ourselves would be willing to share? If no, wow it'd really be War of the Worlds.. I'm already imagining a galactic republic like the one in Star Wars for soft diplomacy ^^

Maybe for now this is only a fragment of my imagination, but what if someday its true? This takes the notion "survival of the fittest" to a whole different ball game doesnt it? What do you think?

decadence in gaming..

i havent been writing for my HD World chapter, so today i'll be writing about Alienware, a company in high-performance gaming that's in my one-day-i'll-get-it-if-i'm-wealthy list (which is a tremendous list given my small hedonistic perk hahaha)

Okay, so most of you had probably crossed in your lifetimes, one way or another, the idea of video gaming. For some people it's the thrill, for some people it's the storyline. For me its mostly about sheer technological appreciation these days. I've been a gamer all my life, and when i say this i do not in any way impart that i'm very good at it, but i see gaming as a way to channel your stress. Eversince i was in early childhood my parents introduced me to video games, starting with the classic Nintendo (NES --Nintendo Entertainment System). Okay so i wasn't born in the day Atari was still a trend, but nevertheless if i remember Mario Bros, or that Duck Hunting game, i always cherish the moments.

Some of you may have grown out of it. I haven't. I think that's whats compelling about video gaming nowadays, it appeals in categories that spans pretty much all ages. Heck, even my dad still enjoys playing Sim City (from the first version, 2000, 3000, until the recent SimCity 4). And that's not wrong, games are now available that contain the bulk only adults can bear. So in my defense, it's not childish :D

For me now, it's all about the technology. I am always amazed at what mankind can now create. If we remember those games like Mario, or Contra, where you see the guy from the side, then you have a look at the graphical power games like Crysis of Far Cry 2 has, with all its interactive environment. Madness.

A company that i've been eyeing for a while is Alienware. As other hobbies, it takes a serious kind of gamer to appreciate the raw gaming power that Alienware can unleash. And it takes another level of gamer to understand why some would churn out USD 5,000 for a single gaming CPU. But as with other hobbies; it's not fair to be measured by money. Cheap is absolute, but expensive is relative.

"5 grand? On a CPU? Did i hear right?" i hear you say. And no i didnt pull a typo. A service Alienware dishes out is that we can order our CPU online as if it's some ebay stuff. Buying gaming rigs is now like going to the tailor; what processor, intel extreme or AMD Phenom? How many RAMs? Good VGA, how bout crossfire 2 powerful VGAs? Blu-Ray or just DVD burner? The sky's the limit..

Ordering a gaming CPU is like a game itself in Alienware. The fun starts from even before your CPU is delivered to your door. After picking your unique specs, the team at Alienware will assemble, and test-run your CPU to make sure that when you're in the middle of that last chapter level going against the WarShip in Crysis, your CPU doesnt do a David Seaman in 2002 World Cup and flop..

They also have gaming laptops pre-built to suit your needs. But usually one would prefer a PC to use for gaming. More stable is what they say. I've no idea really.

The point of the matter is, if you do have the resources, and you are someone who understands what it means to sink in your thousands into "just" a gaming device, i'd say Alienware should come up in your list of potentials. This is a company who grosses out USD 170.000.000 in revenues annually, that's how trustworthy their market are to them.

If you wanna know more on the company profile, take an easy reading here but if you want to dive directly to seeing the major gaming products in Alienware's lineups, then do click here. 

So who wants one high-performance ultra reliable and fashionably cool CPU to go, eh? I do. :)

Counter Strike and the concept of gaming longetivity

Eversince me and few mates decided to become house mates (a sorta frat house wannabe hahahaha), we realized that since we used a router to shoot wireless fidelity (wi-fi) signals to our coumputer, that there was now an open opportunity for multiplayer gaming.

Just so you guys know i'm big on multiplayer games (not meaning that i'm good at it per se, i just say that i love the idea of multiplayer gaming). When i worked in the Federation (another story for another day) since i had the resources nearly everyday i go to this gamehouse in my town, and in those days i play an average of 3 hour sessions (up to 8 on weekend nights) of Gears of War (abbreviated GoW).. it's bloody fun i tell you, the idea that you play not only a "bot" or "AI" and actually conduct social interactions with your nemesis (be it in form of psy war, or complementing, whateva) is brilliant! I love it I love it I love it..

Anyhoo, back to the Pitik Frat House boyZ haha.. Just to keep the games within range of our rigs and connection, we decided to drop modern day games like Crysis, or Gears of War (back then when i played everyday, it was on the 360 you see).. Sani (whose blog you can access in a menu on the right) pitched the idea of Counter Strike, a simple game that i know has existed from when i was like elementary.. It's sort of when i talked about blogs, it's like skiing to me (read post on blogs! :D) 

All right, i gotta admit that at first i kind went pffft pffft iuw iuw why can you still see humongous pixels on the screen as if like seeing massive pimples on Nanda's tomato like face (another one of my housemates).. but hey, there's gotta be a first for everything, even for things as simple as farting, so i did (not fart, but played!)..

Hey, i am now ashamed to say that i'm ADDICTED!!!! (imagining x-zibit running out pinching the shoulder part of my tees saying you've been pimped!) this game is an FPS (one my least favored types --First Person SHooter for those blind to the jargon--) but yet it's intriguing, especially since Sani (who have played since he was in junior high) is quite a few levels in terms of gameplay for me.. so it has the "fun", and "challenge" appeal for me, 2 things that tend to wear off from game nowadays..

This is why CS is pure genious, its basically start, buy guns, run, look for enemies, shoot, depending how shitty you are you either die or live to die 5 seconds later hahahaha.. anyway, i read an article on product longetivity and that law of economics on diminishing return (blah blah blah how there's a maximum point of goods usage before people's interest wear off and it becomes shitty in sales blah blah blah) that Nintendo uses; so they developed the Wii not to target just gamers, but even non-gamers to become gamers, by creating an HUI --Human User Interface-- that appeals for everyone. I thought hey that's kinda true, the true value of video gaming entertainment is not only about realistic graphics (where when you shoot opponents using 1200 x 1900 pixel setting you can actually see people's pimples falling off their face if you shoot them.. yech!) but its about gameplay.. If you're not a gamer before, there's no reason for you to pick up a SIXAXIS control, or a 360 control, as most of the games were sequels, using buttons similar to previous games and they're complex.. Wii and CS countered that.. simple concept, simple controls, yet everlasting appeal..

Simplicity in complexity.. that's absolute genious!