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In loving memory of that site that many of us grew to love, I’m writing the rest of this post in scrolling marquee text in three fonts, with various color schemes.  - Marocharim

Ah, Geocities.  Truly one-of-a-kind during its time… I remember those days when I fiddled around with frames, fonts, and yes, scrolling marquee.  I was all but 14, maybe 15 years old, playing around with HTML codes that were still a bit distant to me.  Your legacy lives on, in the form of those shiny glittery glowing CSS backgrounds everyone used in Friendster and Multiply.

Geocities made things so much simple back then. Before the days of WYSIWYG editors and WordPress, Geocities – and Notepad or Microsoft FrontPage or whatever – was all we had to conquer this Brave New World called the personal homepage. Good times, before “blogging” became the buzzword. Geocities was our world – our apple – and we ate through its core.

In the moment that you’re reading this – or you’re trying to read this – you probably think that you wouldn’t have wanted to live in a time of 56 KBPS or Windows 95. You probably would be laughing out loud at the prospect of having little to no ads at all, or having to start writing everything with enclosed brackets. It’s nice to see the Internet grow, but like everything else, sometimes you just have to let them go.

And yet that’s what makes it all worthwhile… the passage of time where there is no time, the movement of space where it does not exist. Before celebrities and pundits, before events and awards and media coverage, Geocities was a place where people just… basically fucked around with tables and “Blink” tags that don’t seem to work anymore. Yet that’s the most important lesson we can learn from the death of Geocities; that all of this is temporary.

I don’t know whatever happened to my Geocities – heaven knows whatever happened in those sites of yore – but as simple Web technologies grow, so should we who use it. We should adapt. We should improve. Most of all, we should hold on to what we regard as most important. Our thoughts, our friends, the chronicles of our lives that somehow are not enough for words.

As we all who used it say goodbye to Geocities, let it be known that it had opened a gate for us to be more articulate, to open up our spaces, and to realize and recognize that our spaces are places we should defend and cherish. While Geocities was merely the beginning to this Brave New World called “blogging” or “personal home pages,” we have barely made a stride into the journey that awaits all of us.

Goodbye, Geocities. One day soon, we will meet again. Hopefully.

I write and speak in four languages: English, Tagalog, sward (I passively learned it in college), and tXtsT1cKyCaPz (all I had to do was to die and go to Hell).

Click on the picture for a larger image.

Yes, I have taken it upon myself to translate communication patterns of bipedal amoeba who happen to walk erect… and it’s only because I can.

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I love food.  I don’t necessarily like cooking – heck, I can’t cook – but I like eating.  I like writing about food, too.  There’s nothing like the challenge of putting words to something as abstract as flavor, and something as subjective as taste.  So I decided to put up a food blog: Maro Munchies.

Before you get any ideas on what “munchies” are, lemme explain.  While I’ve written about food many times before, food is the most challenging topic anyone can write about.  I like giving myself a few challenges every now and then, so Maro Munchies was born.

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Once upon a time there lived an ugly duckling named Marocharim… no wait, that’s not right…

I always say that if it’s on the Internet, it must be true.  Save for lapses in grammar (“did” = simple past tense, “showed” = simple past tense, proper usage is “the winner did not even show his face,” I’m just saying).

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I hate writing in bullet-points, but sometimes, bullet-points are all you need.

• Like anyone else, like my friends, for example, I don’t appreciate people taking my picture – specifically my picture – in public, without my knowledge or my permission.  Unless, of course, I find artistic value in a picture like that (like spreading a message, for example).
• While there are many ways to get attention for your blog, the best way to gain that attention so craved is to write really well; to do no harm to others, to live honorably, and to give everyone their due.  Once you got that covered, only then can you gain some measure of respect and credence wherever you go.  Those are things you can only sustain by doing no harm to others, live with honor, and give everyone their due.

Imma have more but Imma let myself finish now, but sometimes people need to chew on bullet-points every once in a while.

When my aunt was diagnosed with – and recovered from – cancer, she started preaching the evils of vetsin. Part of the “healthy living” message she shared to us was that monosodium glutamate is carcinogenic, that it contains bad chemicals that pose a danger to our health, and too much linamnam doesn’t do the body any good.  I didn’t hear her compare vetsin-laden food to asupre at dagat-dagatang apoy, but that doesn’t stop her from taking an occasional bite of shrimp tempura.

Mom, however, is an avowed fan of vetsin. The whole point in her cooking – whether it was caldereta or puto muffins stuffed with pizza topping – was that it wasn’t edible without at least half a pack of Ajinomoto sprinkled on the dish before it is served.  MSG occupies an almost-revered position in the spice rack, right next to sesame oil and liquid seasoning.  Dinner was never “dinner” until me and my brother raid the kitchen for more rice to finish off the viands.  Yet Mom always makes a point about “dieting.”

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