Friday, March 31, 2006

Why did Jesus teach love?

If you read a good part of the gospel, most of the time the recurring theme is all about faith, hope, and love. According to 1 Corinthians 13:13 - And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. But why did Jesus teach love most of the time if we humans really are capable of loving. We have the potential for love but why must Christ emphasize love to man?

If you were a man devoid of any knowledge about the gospel, you would in all probability, love only those you want and not love those you must. Even people who were taught the gospel are also the same. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. When he was asked who our "neighbors" were, he told the story of the good Samaritan. In essence, our neighbors are the people that we meet everyday and not just the people we interact everyday, nor are they just our friends and love ones. Look at this example:
LUKE 10:27 NKJ
So he answered and said, " `You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,' and `your neighbor as yourself.' "

We are indeed capable of love, but we don't exercise enough love that we just tend to love the people that are easy to love and we shut out (even hate) difficult people. That's the reason why Jesus had to reiterate his gospel. The commandment is to LOVE but we choose to love only those we can.

Monday, March 27, 2006

About me

My name is Bastich, I'm unemployed and I live with my parents. A little George Costanza joke there to liven up the first paragraph, since most of this post will be boring as hell. Anyhow, the Bastich name was politely ripped-off from Lobo comics where Lobo's frequent expression is "Frag 'ya Bastich!" but of course, I have no idea what that means. So you see, the name has a very meaningful history with me being a comics geek and all.

I'm a garbage collector working in the mean streets of the Payatas dumpsite where my main source of living is scavenging for recyclable materials to sell to greedy recycling plants. I'm up about 3 am in the morning to beat other scavengers from gathering the precious aluminum and gin bottles that are about 5 pesos a kilo. At about 7 am, I forage for food from basically every fast food styropor with any remnant of that tasty morsel only rich people get to eat fresh. Yum, yum. At about 10 am, I will usually run to aling Pasing's computer shop to blog in this here site...Yeah, I spend all my earnings just to blog. Then I run back to collect garbage again.

I spent all my childhood reading Nancy Drew novels and drawing crap comics in a one-fourth sheet of paper. I never had the privilege to play a lot of videogames since our console then was a dumb Atari 2600 (found in the garbage dump) and we didn't have a television. So instead of playing dumb games, I was forced by my parents to study garbology at an early age. I have to thank them for their foresight, I wouldn't have been a scavenger today if not for the intense garbology course-load.

The title will not be "About me" if I'm not gonna write about my hopes and aspirations. This is gonna be sleep-inducing so I urge you to skip this paragraph and go ogle the hot anime chicks on my Mouse Anime post. Hmmm, hopes and aspirations. Well, I hope to become the strongest mind in the world, a kind of mind that you can torture but still come out like a conquering hero. Ok, that didn't made any sense, so I guess I don't have any dreams aside from being a top-dog garbologist.

But above other things, there are stuff that I hate, like stupid people. I'm not talking about the IQ40 crowd but people who are intolerant and insensitive jerk-offs. I mean, when I crap on my little part of the garbage mountain, I need my privacy from other scavengers, but hell! When I shit on aluminum, the other scavengers pushes me off like a bag of unrecyclable material while scooping the scrap from under me. See what I mean?

Aside from some jerks, life has been good to me. What's not to love with every and any conveniences in life just a garbage can away. But I have to tell you, I can take all the garbage you can throw at me. So keep throwing away.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

I'm sick

I'm sick. I've been suffering from a brain splitting headache all day. Come to think of it, I've been very sensitive to noise and light these couple of days.

I was bitten by a footlong Japanese peach for crying out loud, I should've known that I'm infected with rabies. Alas, poor me, 'tis already too late to remedy this malady since I am now in the advanced stages of infection. The damn virus has crawled into my nervous system and parts of my brain are already deteriorating as I speak.

I feel excruciating pain in my throat, especially if I drink water. My overflowing production of saliva does not help with my throat problems either. I can hardly breathe and I may soon need machines to help me with my respiration and other vital functions.

Goodbye, cruel world.
*sneaks off*
To hell with this blog, I'm gonna play Tensei. ;)

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Blog me a river

Yesterday and this day Blogger has been acting strange. I've been getting 404 and 403 errors when I visit my blog. Apparently some kind of bad filter was screwing up some of the blogs so "the powers that be" had to transfer some accounts.

The (sic) filer that we have been having trouble with in the last few days failed again. Those blogs that are stored on the bad filer are temporarily not available for publishing and viewing. We are working on replacing the filer and restoring access to the blogs affected.

Google, what have you done to Blogger? Nah, it's not their fault, but Google has been pretty crap lately that I just want to rant against it. The gentle giant has been swallowed by the dark side, it has become what it does not want to be. It has become like the big bad colossus at Redmond. Still, Google has been very innovative and is still grabbing web 2.0 start ups like there's no tomorrow. So they grabbed Writely what's next, maybe a web spreadsheet and a web presentation package.

One thing about Google is you just don't know what's in the works. Google, next agenda - World domination, anyone?

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Playstation emulation

Since college I have been playing old console games (nes, genesis, snes) emulated on my PC. Recent technology has allowed me to play my old Sony Playstation CD's on my PC. It wasn't an easy road since most PSX emulators can't run on WinXp under a Pentium 4 chipset, fortunately I found a fix to play Connectix Virtual Game Station for WinXp and Pentium 4. Below are relevant links to help you play PSX games on your PC:

1. Full version CVGS (PSX emulator)
2. VGS XP video patch (Fix for WinXp, P4, and everything else)
3. Daemon tools (Virtual cd, makes games faster unlike reading the cd-rom)

There you go, if you've used a computer for about 1 year, you'll have no trouble using the programs above. Don't email me that VGS sucks 'coz <insert name of PSX emu here> is better. I just like VGS, noob.



Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Mouse anime

Mouse Chu Mouse!

This anime is crazy. Imagine an oversexed Lupin III and 3 willing Fujiko's always begging for love.

Muon Sorata is just your ordinary college student by day, but his alter-ego is the great thief, Mouse. Mouse is so badass that his legacy is passed from father to son in every Muon generation. Legend has it that Mouse can steal anything, so he opens the first episode by stealing the whole museum when he only wanted one item from the building, great!

Sorata has 3 subordinates or slaves, as they want to be called: Momozona Mei, a computer and physics expert; Kuribayashi Yaoi, a chemistry expert; and Kakio Hazuki, an agile fighter, good at combat and sports(Info from AniDB). They're sex hungry, loyal servants begging for Mouse's sexual attention every minute.

This hilarious series has a lot of ecchi, action, and laughs. Nydia and I enjoyed laughing out loud to this anime, although it's not the funniest, but sometimes it's inadvertently funny. Not for kiddies, ok.

Testing Writely

Yup, I'm testing www.Writely.com again since I can't download anything to save my life around here in the office. Qumana is a great blogging tool but I can't install here. This post is a test. If this appears in the frontpage then the test is a success.

Enough about tests, I'm also here to present to you the blog of Derick , it's called "Derick versus the stupidity of the world." First let us analyze the title: "Derick" - this is usually a name given to a person; "stupidity of the world" - the "world" is where persons usually reside, right? So the title says it all: Derick's blog is about making out of this world comments about things ranging from the idiotic to civil rights and press freedom. Derick will fight for your right! Now go and send him hate mail.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Emulation gaming again

Guess I have to eat my words now. I posted earlier that the gaming bug's poison is out of my system, but here I am playing Shin Megami Tensei for the Snes. The game was originally Japanese but was translated by Aeon Genesis led by the great Gideon Zhi. I have to say that this game is very difficult and may require more patience than most RPGs, so get ready to dungeon crawl and beat the crap out of monsters from extremely frequent random encounters.

For a basic idea of MegaTen, read this article from Hardcore Gaming 101 to see screenshots and a lot of extensive information about the series, the 3rd most influential RPG in Japan next to DQ and FF.

There, I'm back gaming again after almost 3 plus years. For good or for ill?
Who knows.

You can get the translated rom here. You can use Snes9x or Zsnes for emulators but I found that Zsnes has some text glitches on the menu, not a big thing just use Snes 9x. Now, back to the game!

Monday, March 06, 2006

The bacteria will resist

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

This is a strange article - "Anitbacterial soaps may offer little protection against germs and could even be producing more powerful strains of bacteria, according to doctors. "

I guess no matter how much we fight bacteria they just get stronger and stronger:

"Doctors are particularly concerned that antibacterial soaps could be contributing to the growing problem of drug resistant bacteria.This may be because it is killing the weakest bacteria, leaving the tougher, hard-to-kill strains dominant."

All this time we may have been living in a false sense of security. I'm sure all of these big manufacturers have research and developement teams with millions in budget that would conclude the same thing but then are not obligated to disclose such data even if it will slowly kill innocent consumers.

Sigh - may the almighty $$$ bless you all.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Golden boy

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

This manga is great and is highly recommended for mature readers.

Oe Kintaro is a law school drop out at 25 years old, however, he has completed all the course work. He goes out as a student of the world, thirsty for knowledge about anything and everything. Kintaro just wanders around Japan looking for temporary jobs in a spur of the moment caprice. Along the way he meets people and completely change their lives before leaving them.

His adventures usually consist of hot women, nudity, and a lot of sexual escapades; but no matter what scrapes he gets into he gets himself out with his sunny attitude and aptitude for learning. He is a jack-of-all-trades but he masters them all.

Will he be able to save Japan - or the world? Maybe.

Another warning: This manga is definitely for adults only.
Google Analytics Alternative