A zoom in on the time.

My hectic screen from Thursday night.

They say you can only feel the heat of the pot if you get close enough to touch it.

Well, I'm pretty sure we're near the pot now then, because I can feel the blazing pressure coming off of it.

At the end of February, the long awaited CyberFair deadline finally arrives, putting all our efforts in the past month to judgement at long last. Me and my team mates have worked pretty hard for this. I mean, I was pretty much forced to learn javascript and CSS before we even started the lesson to make our site stand out and look like...well, a site, not like an HTML newbie's testing ground.

As if that wasn't hard enough, getting a hold of the Baguio Center for Young Adults-the people we were supposed to interview- was about as easy as getting a perfect score in the last Chemistry periodic exam (and trust me, my score there was BEYOND disappointing). We, or well I, tried contacting them through an e-mail ad my group mate Clarence found in the Internet. They didn't reply, so I sent it again. It was just a waste though, because I didn't hear back from them.

We didn't really think about that much...until the day Sir Tabor decided that it was time to hold the oral interviews. Being strict on his schedule, we only had one day to get an interview with BCYA, something we've been trying to arrange but failing at it for the past weeks. When the day finally arrived, I was thanking my lucky stars that they actually let us in their building despite their practical snub to our request for an interview.

However, I began cursing at them the moment a BCYA rep said that we had to "follow protocol" if we wanted a word with anyone in the organization. Protocol apparently involves writing to them prior to actually going to them. After painstakingly explaining that we sent them an e-mail, their director finally recognized us as the 'third year researchers from Saint Louis University Laboratory High School' that I mentioned in my doubly-ignored e-mail. Yeah, okay, so they didn't really ignore the e-mails...they just didn't reply to them.

I was happy with that answer as long as we can finally hold the interview. Surprisingly, it went well and we got more than enough information. The folks down at BCYA even gave us some photos of their old projects and vids of their past presentations.

After that hurdle was done and over with, a new one came up, this time in the form of the Project Narrative Video. Man, was that grueling as HELL. Not only was my camera on half a battery with a fifth of memory left, but most of my group mates weren't even around for me to shoot them (with the camera, of course). One of them was absent because of Dengue while the others were...I dunno, up to playing hooky?

That left us with about five people. However, some of us weren't even that cooperative! In plain Tagalog, kakaunti na nga kami, di pa mag-participate yung iba. We managed to scrape some good shots of us though, and we managed to do it without my camera dying nor with the memory giving out.

For me, that seems like a lot of challenges overcome already. However, the fun's only just beginning. The real party starts when we finally pass our website and final project narrative. The pressure on us is pretty intense, especially with the school being the previous flag bearer in the International CyberFair. Since the last batch was able to reach that milestone, everyone expects us to do the same.

Aside from that, the people from BCYA are pretty willing to put some pressure on us as well. When we mentioned that we were competing, they were excited at seeing the site and was willing to buy it from us when the competition was over so that they could continue to run it without us.

Still, despite all of the obstacles we overcame and we will overcome, I'm happy to have the experience. Like I said before, I love me a challenge. If this thing ends up an awesome (but medal worthy) disaster, then all the hardships, frustrations and head aches I've encountered would be well worth it.

Oh, hell yes another post about a suicidal cartoon character.

Yeah, alright not really. Mickey Mouse didn't really commit suicide...but someone did.

Sometime in the new millennium (to those who don't know, that's the year 2000), rumors of an unreleased Mickey Mouse video spread. It was a rare, practically never-before-seen episode so not even the most die-hard Disney/Mickey fans caught a glimpse of it. However, according to the story, they were lucky not to see it.

The video was really nothing special. It was just a clip of Mickey walking down a street. Just like most cartoon done in the 1930's, the video had a piano playing in the background. Only, in this one, it wasn't in a cheerful beat. Actually, it wasn't in any beat at all. The keys were just randomly banged and pressed all throughout.

To go with the horrible, or well horribly disturbing, piano playing, a very poorly done, amateur-ish animation of Mickey sadly walking was shown. His hands were folded seriously behind his back and his head was bowed, like he was thinking of something deep while he passed by six buildings and a weird sidewalk in an endless loop.

The video went on like that for about a minute and a half. After that, it turned into black and that was that.

Or so they thought.

The screen was black for about three minutes and they really thought that the weird video was over until they noticed that the clip was about nine minutes long. At around 5:04, Mickey came up again, doing the same thing that he has been doing as before. The bad piano playing was gone this time, though, only to be replaced by somewhat of a...um...murmur. A controlled scream, if you will.

The noise grew louder and more distinct as the next minute entered and the visuals started to get weirder. The sidewalk Mickey was walking on started to twist and contort into weird directions and the whole scene got twitchier. When minute 7 was hit, a sudden scream blasted through the speakers and the clip got even more weird.

Colors were tainting the clip, which was definitely strange because that wasn't even possible back then and suddenly, Mickey's eyes just rolled off of his face. The six buildings were now floating, pretty much disconnected from the sidewalk and the sidewalk itself continued to contort into impossible directions.

Leonard Maltin, the Disney animator who was watching this back then, got too creeped out, so he left the room and sent an employee in to finish the video, write down what happened to the very last second, then keep the disc of the cartoon in a vault. Sources say that the screaming from 7:00 continued till 8:00 before the usual Mickey Mouse face at the end of every MM cartoon appeared with somewhat of a broken music box for background audio. That lasted for about thirty seconds.

A security guard who was posted outside the viewing room claimed that when the employee who was instructed to watch looked very pale as he stumbled out. "Real suffering is not known!" he proclaimed 7 times before taking the guard's pistol and shooting himself.

Of course, everyone went into panic mode when this happened and Maltin decided to see what the ending of the video was. Apparently, the last frame was a clip displaying Russian text that, translated, said: "The sights of hell brings its viewers back in."

I've searched the video on YouTube and found it pretty easily. I've seen it myself, and honestly I was quite disappointed. Why? Well, find out for yourself.

WARNING: DON'T READ IF EASILY FREAKED, because I am seriously not kidding about this.

Keeping up with the unconscious theme I made for my recent blogs, I managed to find this weird urban legend. Now, normally I'm not flapped by any of the "scary" things I post here.

However, this one is just disturbing.

Why? Well, for one thing, it involves a famous cartoon character killing himself.

According to a an old intern from Nickelodeon about five years ago, he, other interns and the lead animators for Spongebob Squarepants were in the editing room to clean up and produce the final cut of a SB episode, Fear of the Krabby Patty. Now, in their office, they usually named episode titles something that was completely unrelated to the content. For example, the title in the production office for "Rock-a-by-Bivalve" - an episode where Spongebob and Patrick adopt a baby scallop - was "How Sex Doesn't Work." It's their little inside joke. So when the title card said "Squidward's Suicide", no one took it seriously.

As usual, the usual cheery, beachy music played and the first scene came up. Squidward was playing his clarinet (badly, as usual) while Spongebob laughed noisily outside. Squidward told him to shut up because he needed to practice for his concert that night. Spongebob agreed and went to goof around with Patrick and Sandy.

This was where all the normal scenes end.

The bubbles rushed up the screen - a usual scene transition for the show - and the last bits of Squidward playing was shown. Frames start to repeat themselves and no sound was played despite the fact that during that stage of animation, scenes were already synced with the sound and that their speakers were working perfectly.

When he was done with his clarinet, the sound came back again and murmuring was heard from the crowd of fishes. After a few seconds, the mumbling turned into booing. Yeah, any Spongebob fan or watcher knows that Squidward's ALWAYS booed, but this time it was different. The jeers had malice in them, and the worst part was, Spongebob was part of the taunting crowd, which was definitely weird because he's practically the only supporter Squidward's got.

The bubbles transitioned again, this time cutting to Squidward sitting on his bed directly after the concert. He looked very sad and depressed, which is understandable, I guess. Again, the sound was absolutely cut. For about thirty seconds, Squidward did nothing but stare and blink. After that, the silence broke and he began to sob and cry with his tentacles in his eyes. The background sounded somewhat like a breeze blowing through a forest.

A close up of Squidward's face then came to view. His soft cries turned into loud and tortured sounds of clear sullenness, offense, and anger. The breeze turned into a storm as it blasted through the speakers and Squidward's sobs no longer sounded cartoon-ish. They sounded dead real, like a real person was crying from behind the screen. The scene started to twitch and return to normal then back again in a fast speed.

At this point, all the people in the room were starting to wonder if the episode was really appropriate for children to watch, and how it relates to "Fear of the Krabby Patty", which was the episode they thought they were watching.

Anyway, mixing in with the sound of the crying and blazing storm was that of faint laughter. Thirty seconds of this later, the screen blurred and started twitching again. There was a sudden change in scenery, like a single frame was cut and replaced. The animator went through that part again in slow motion to see what the replaced picture was only to find a gruesome picture of a six year old boy. He was clearly dead on the pavement of what seemed like a road in nothing but his underwear. His left eye was popped out and there was a messy gash somewhere on his stomach. Lying beside him was a pile of his entrails.

While they looked at the picture, one of the interns noticed that there was a shadow of a man on the road. He had his arms raised in the manner you would if you were taking a picture, which meant that he was the photographer and possibly the killer of the boy. No tags or police lines were found, which meant that the still was clearly not part of an evidence file.

Of course, everyone was horrified, but watched further in hopes of finding an explanation for all this. The scene flicked back to Squidward, still crying. His sobs were louder now, more disturbing. The camera focused on the Squidward to show his eyes blood running down from them. The storm was starting to sound like a full out cyclone and the laughing grew louder, longer, and more disturbing.

The scene twisted into another morbid scene, this time of a little girl about the same age as the boy. Her hair was drenched in her own blood and she was laying face down on the street. A similar opening was found at her lower back, her left eye was popped out and again a pile of entrails was found beside her. Like the previous image, she was only in her underwear and the photog/killer's shadow was part of the still.

The only female intern couldn't take it anymore and ran out of the room and the others looked like they just choked down vomit.

The show went on again, this time with Squidward's eyes bloodshot, still with the blood dripping from it. He did nothing nor say anything. He just stared forward, as if watching whoever was watching him.

Can't picture it? Here's what it looked like.

At first glance at the title, I'm willing to bet that you thought I was talking about puberty or something. Though, yes, puberty really is something that we shouldn't be ashamed of (as it happens to everyone), I'm referring to something even bigger, something that's somehow more...affective since it's mostly part of the emotional and mental aspects of our being.

I'm talking about fear.

If someone ever tells you that they aren't afraid of anything, news flash! They're lying. Everyone is afraid of something whether they are actual things like spiders or something weird born out of their imaginations. Fear, however, of these things is totally minor when compared to fearing fear itself.

Does that sound too deep? Don't worry, it gets simpler.

According to John Maxwell, fear is the very first battle anyone ever faces before marching forward towards a fight to the death or simply before standing up to a bully. Indeed, this is dead on true. In reality, we aren't afraid of, for example, death, but we are afraid of the fear that comes with dying process.

So how can we make all the fearing stuff stop? Easy. Overcome it.

The following steps are what Maxwell said (in his brilliant blog found here) we need to do in order to defeat the small but powerful force of fear in our heads.

1. Try and find out what's causing the fear. - When you realize and accept that most of the fear you have is basically born out of nothing, you can start getting rid of it.

2. Admit your fears - Again, it's nothing to be ashamed of. Just because you're scared of something doesn't mean that you're not courageous. Besides, by accepting your phobias, you can see which ones are totally irrational and baseless.

3. Accept life as it is - If you're afraid of natural occurrences that are supposed to happen and are going to happen like death, then it's time to move on. There's nothing you can do about it. Death is a part of our human nature. Once you have planted and accepted that into your brain, you can start noticing the things that you can do something about.

4. Fear is the price of progress - As long as we'll keep stretching ourselves to improve and to make progress, fear will tag along for the ride. How? Well, no one ever ends up successful by playing things safe. Risks have to be taken in order to make it worthwhile in the end, but with those risks come fear that the gamble wouldn't work and that you'd fail.

5. WANT to overcome the fear - Hey, determination can make a lot of things happen. By really and truly wanting to overcome our fears (and of course taking action), we can. I know it sounds cliche, but it's true that "Anything is possible if you just believe."

6. Get your attention on what you can actually change - By doing step number 3, we will be able to get a hold on ourselves and focus on what we can control, not to moan and weep over something inevitable. By doing all that we can do to make things better, overcoming fears would be a lot easier.

7. Today is the day - You can't do anything about the yesterday, so stop mulling over that. Tomorrow won't happen till this day ends, so it's useless to start worrying about it right now. That leaves us with today. Now. The present. The time when we can do something or change something. Regretting the past wont do anything and worrying about the future would just make things worse. Focus on what's in front of you in the present.

8. Overcome what you can - Not all of life's fears are gargantuan and intimidating. Some are actually pretty small and easily fixed. When we can, it's best to overcome these mini-fears to earn us some courage and some confidence. With these two in our arsenal, it would be a lot easier to topple down the bigger ones.

9. Do it NOW! - Why wait until tomorrow when you can do it now? The world today is moving in a blurry speed. Time can move without us even noticing it. Though procrastinating seems like a fairly tempting idea, it's best to do it at present when you still can. If you won't, then that would just be another regret.

If you were to think like some money-hungry producer of a mega-hit game or movie, of course you'd want to make a sequel to it to bring in even more dough. While some games really do need sequels, like the Sims 1, and other movies just need something to conclude the story already, like Toy Story, most really do not, repeat, NOT need it.

Seriously, sequels right now just ruin the story and make it, as we say in Tagalog, "nakakasawa." Disagree? Well, you must like repetitive, slightly "improved" second/third movies/games then.

My recent blog post got me thinking of other urban legends that some people presume to be true. Though scientifically speaking they're not (where's the proof?), there's still that teenie tiny possibility that they could be.

Let's hope that the following won't give you TOO much nightmares.

Baby Bridge

Ah, yes. Another story concerning a baby.

The bridge you see on the left is what most people from Georgia call the Cry Baby Bridge or the Baby Bridge.

Legend has it that during the 1800's, a poor man and his wife had a kid. Seeing as they already had five children and the family was poor, another baby wasn't really a very good idea. So, the man struck a deal with the doctor that they would lie to his wife about the baby's birth, telling her that it was dead, then dispose of the baby by throwing it off a bridge.

They did what they planned on the night of the birth and the mother never found out about what happened.

According to the story, when you drive on this bridge at night, stop on the very middle of it for about ten minutes or so. Get out of your car and sprinkle some baby powder around it. Make sure that you turn off your light and your engine. Soon enough, you'll hear the cries of the poor man's baby and you'll see baby foot prints on the powder scattered around your car.

I would really like to try to do this, but I don't even know where the bridge is and for one thing, I don't even know how to drive.

Humans Can Lick, Too


There might not be monsters under your bed, but disturbing people might be.

The story says that in a village somewhere, a woman lives alone with her dog. Every night, she would leave her hand dangling from her bed because apparently, the dog, who stayed under the bed, liked to lick it.

One night, she went to bed and left her hand to dangle off the edge as usual. The dog started licking it and she started to fall asleep before a dripping noise kept her up. She got off her bed and looked at all the faucets and drains, looking for the source. When she checked that everything was tight and closed she went back to bed, dangled her hand, and the dog licked again.

Later, the same dripping noise woke her up again. Irritated, she went to check outside if it was just some leftover rain trickling from the roof. Seeing that it was not that, she went back inside and the dripping continued. She went back to all the bathrooms until she reached the one nearest to the living room. The noise seemed to be louder there so she inspected the sink and even the toilet. Nothing seemed to be causing the dripping noise.

Finally, she realized that it must be the tub or the shower. Angry, she hastily pulled back the shower curtain only to find her dead dog suspended from the ceiling with its blood dripping down to the tub. On the wall, written in the dog's blood, were the words "Humans can lick too."

If you don't find this disturbing, something is seriously wrong with you. Or you could be me.

Black Aggie


When you get a woman angry...

According to the Maryland legend, Aggie was a nurse in a hospital sometime in the past. Though she was caring, concerning, and was a generally nice person, all the people placed under her care ended up dead. Convinced that this was all Aggie's doing, the hospital staff had her killed.

The very next day, they found out that she was innocent and obviously regretted killing Aggie. To try to make up for it, they made her a statue in Druid Ridge Cemetery they called 'Black Aggie.'

Something was seriously wrong with the statue. No grass grew in its shadow and at midnight, her eyes would glow a deadly crimson, giving anyone to look into them total blindness and pregnant women who passed by her had miscarriages. If ever you're stupid enough to sit on its lap at night, she would crush you to death with its embrace. Like any violent ghost, you can summon her using a mirror as well. Just mention her name three times in front of a mirror Bloody Mary style, and she'll drag you to hell with her.

And to think some people consider this statue as that of a grieving angel.