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Surviving Agno 101

The sun rises and sets – day after day, time after time – splashing its little avenue of camaraderie with shades of amber and mauve. The haze of aromatic smoke wafts through the whistling russet leaves of shady boughs –carrying with it the intoxicating scent of freshly-cooked food and of caramelized nicotine. Footfalls stir up…

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A trope addiction

It looks simple and harmless, but little did I know that clicking a link as inconspicuous as thousands of other links I encounter online a few months ago would change the way I see fiction forever. And the scary thing is that it really did. Tropes are, simply put, elements authors add to their works…

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Rant and Rave – Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral

Book  ★ ★ ★ ☆ Often, the only excuse novel haters need to convince them to throw a book back in the shelf is, “they’ve got no pictures in them.” To the verbally challenged or the outright lazy, looking at pictures is easiest way to grasp a story. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. If…

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Rant and Rave: Magnum Ice Cream

Food  ★ ★ ☆ ☆ The Magnum fever has hit the Philippines. And no, it is not from the heat, but from a sweet frozen treat. Selecta’s “must-buy for the in-crowd” epic marketing attempt, tided over by a short-lived social networking craze, has whipped up a mid-summer storm for its Magnum bar. At fifty pesos a stick,…

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Rant and Rave – Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

Book  ★ ★ ★ ★ Bookshelves are chockful of love stories with the same plotline of ‘boy meets girl and they fall for each other. Love is everywhere – or so the cliché goes in every song, story, poem, and work of art since man first found words to express a malady so painful “and yet so fair”. But…

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Rant and Rave: ‘Leading Ladies’

Money is the root of all evil, but it also serves as a driving force for many. Money is sometimes the sole motivation of some to resolve to live, despite being confined in a certain situation. Leading Ladies, Repertory Philippines’ latest theatrical offering, features two starving Shakespearean actors, Jack (James Stacey) and Leo (Topper Fabregas)…

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Rant and Rave: ‘Bewitching’ by Alex Finn

Many of us have grown up with fairytales, and at some point in our lives, each of us wished to live in one Alex Flinn makes that dream a reality by adding her own twist to a classic fairy tale in her first novel of the Kendra Chronicles, entitled Bewitching. Bewitching is Flinn’s modern take…

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Rant and Rave: ‘Pure’ by Julianna Baggot

Moving from the popularity of the supernatural in novels, dystopian (or more depressing-themed literature) seems to be dominating the shelves in bookstores and publishing houses. Hundreds of new stories about post-apocalyptic worlds come every year. Sometimes events in these stories are rooted on events in human history. Pure by Julianna Baggot is one of these…

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Composing a composting hero

Environmental problems have been around for a while. Many methods and ideas have been born since to solve such problems,.Most problems, however are difficult to abolish individually and in some cases, completely. Many countries and leaders have tried to implement ambitious policies and initiatives, but maybe the answer lies in something smaller. This month, the…

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Life is a Journey

by Ysabel Cacho & Betina Libre A couple of minutes away from De La Salle University, just behind the Manila Hotel, lies Manila’s south harbor where the Logos Hope is docked. The Logos Hope is part of a non-profit organization based in Germany; it sails ships around the world to bring knowledge, help and hope…