[Games] Dungeon Siege III (PS3)

It's rather difficult for some PC game franchises to make the transition over to the console market. You just don't have the same level of functionality the moment you take the keyboard out of the equation. And thus game designers are constantly challenged to figure out how to somewhat simplify the game to work with the console setup without taking too much away from the core gaming experience. It's a lot more difficult than it sounds, believe me.

One of the rare good examples of this is probably Civilization Revolution. It still managed to capture a lot of the rich depth of the various incarnations of the desktop version of the game while still keeping things manageable for the console gamer. Thus managing multiple cities, research projects and armies moving across the land still remained efficient and not too annoying an experience.

Now this was a clear attempt to translate a generally successful hack-and-slash PG game into a decent console version of the experience. On its own it's a pretty decent game but it tends to loose luster once you compare it back to the original games. And the fact that this same version of the game was not only distributed to consoles but was also ported back to the PC game market seemed like a bad idea. What we're left with is a game that could have done a whole lot more but instead barely managed to get past the finish line.

[Books] Star Wars: Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand (The New Jedi Order Book 12)

I had started reading the New Jedi Order series of Star Wars books some time ago, but never found time to finish it for one reason or another. Thus years alter with all of the core 19 books along with some of the eBooks already in my possession, I decided to address this open chapter in my geek life. So yes, I have actually read the other books prior to this one (along with a few of the ones that followed), but this marks my starting point as I pick up where I left off.

The New Jedi Order was a highly ambitious multi-author project, one that I greatly appreciated. As much as the Star Wars Expanded Universe has been rather diverse, rich in characters and generally good while more or less maintaining consistency and continuity, this series was particularly focused on telling a single story across a number of years in Star Wars Galactic History. And that's quite a challenge given the number of authors involved and the sheer amount of material that had to work with.

Now this book is actually the second half of a duology - a format that the NJO books seemed to favor heavily. I have to admit, it did present some nice storytelling options for the various writers. A duology means that one can map out fairly extensive events and control the character actions and development quite well. Plus it doesn't quite have the cumbersome nature of a full trilogy. At the same time, it also means that it has some of the challenges of a narrative going on a bit too long, at least in terms of bad writers. Thankfully they made sure to have a pretty solid team handling the entire experience in NJO for the most part.

[Movies] Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Genre mash-ups, when done right, can be pretty fun. You know they're not meant to be totally amazing or award-winning stories. But you do except a certain degree of fun when two rather different concepts are merged together into one fun story, whether it's a movie, TV series or book. Thus the current fixation on adding supernatural creatures to classic books like with Pride & Prejudice and Zombies and other related works.

Now this movie seemed like a fairly safe bet since (1) the story was adapted from an existing graphic novel, (2) they had some pretty big name stars attached to it and (3) a director who had managed to do well with another geek franchise. Thus all the elements seemed to be present to make for a great movie. But then it fell short of everyone's expectations, ticket sales just weren't there and now everyone is just left scratching their heads. Even the "delay" of this review shows how much I felt it wasn't a priority versus some of the other posts I had published prior to this.

Heck, this even had some pretty big-name writers attached to the movie, and it still didn't work! What gives guys? How could you frak this up so badly?

[Technicolor Musings] Singapore Birthday Thinking

Today is my birthday - Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Caley!

Lewis Carroll references aside, it really is my birthday. I'm still "on the calendar" for a few more years, not that this sort of thing really matters to me all that much. But given I'm teetering on the edge, everyone seems to enjoy reminding me of this fact like it's the most important thing in the world.

The timing of this post is pretty interesting - I had not intentionally planned to end up with a Technicolor Musings posts precisely on my birthday. Just another of those coincidences of the calendar I suppose.










Happy Birthday, Singapore! by nonplussed91 via Flickr.

As of the time of this posting, I'm actually in Singapore. Today's the last day of my birthday vacation - but since I'm composing this entry before leaving Manila, I can't really talk about how the trip has gone so far. Maybe I'll take the time to update this post once back in the city, but for now I figured this would be a decent enough post without that kind of real-time data. Besides, I've mapped out a pretty busy weekend and I really didn't factor in a lot of real time computer usage.

But what to write about that's both queer and Singapore-related? Surprisingly, there's a lot to say.

[Movies] Enemy of the State (1998)

I've never been a big Will Smith fan.

It's probably because I've never really taken to his particular style of acting, which is essentially the same regardless of what movie or TV show he's been cast in. And considering that we've seen him in so many different movie genres, you can imagine that his wisecracking tough guy routine doesn't always work with every single role he has played and is bound to play in the future.

However he also seems to have a knack for getting cast in movies with a science fiction slant to things. Just look at how his body of work includes the Men in Black movies and even I, Robot. Thus despite my hesitations when it comes to Will Smith movies, I know that I'll inevitably end up catching him here or there as directors like to put him in action-related movies. As of late he's been really pushing the drama side, and I fully endorse him exploring that if he leaves me alone in my science fiction world.

While this movie isn't precisely science fiction, it did feature what a lot of people assumed to be a speculative premise on the surveillance capabilities of the government. Of course such capabilities are about as accurate as the alien technology in Independence Day, despite that the movie still had a fun story to tell and an interesting way of presenting it.

I had been putting off seeing this movie for reasons unknown to me. But finally my partner had me sit down and watch it, and that wasn't too bad an experience.

[TV] Star Trek Voyager: Season 6

It's a little hard to explain my love for Star Trek: Voyager at times, since admittedly the show had a lot of detractors during its original seven-season run. Maybe it's as simple as a lot of Trek fans not being ready for a show with a female captain in the spotlight or whatever other reasons fans come up with to reject any new incarnation of a beloved franchise. It's just how fandoms work at times.

If anything, one of the main drivers of my continued appreciation for Voyager was its general sense of continuity. When you set up a show about an interstellar crew trying to find their way home, you know that it can only end in one way - getting home. Thus over the course of the show's run, the driving force behind a lot of its storytelling was how the crew would eventually get home. I don't think it was even a question in the minds of fans whether or not they'd be able to achieve this - having them die away from their loved ones on the other side of the galaxy just wouldn't fit with what we understand to be the Roddenberry vision of the Star Trek universe.

It's hard to describe what the general theme for this season might have been despite our having watched it only recently. I guess it draws from the fact that the show did feel a little less than cohesive compared to prior years. Was it because the writers were already writing towards the end of the series as a whole? Was there a conscious effort to minimize excessive plot complications to get the crew home? It's anyone's guess at this point, I suppose. But it's still worth watching, to be sure.

[Personal] SINGAPORE!

Singapore Business Centre at Dusk-1= by John / Sheba_also via Flickr.

Today my partner Tobie and I are flying off to Singpore! This is our first out of the country trip together and it marks my very first trip to the country as well. I haven't been outside of the Philippines since my US business trip in 2008, so I have to admit I'm pretty excited.

We have a pretty busy itinerary lined up given this trip is meant as a way to celebrate my birthday this Sunday, August 28. Our plan for the vacation weekend includes catching The Lion King at Marina Bay Sands, visiting a number of art exhibits here and there, visiting Universal Studios Singapore and a bunch of other fun activities.

Thus over the next few days, expect that comment replies and email responses will be a bit more delayed than usual. If anything, I promise to reply to all posts no later than Tuesday, August 31. If you have suggestions for things that we should try or places that we should see, feel free to leave a note in the comments!





P.S.
If you want to share in my birthday celebrations this weekend, I'd greatly appreciate if you took a look at my Amazon Kindle Wish Lists and picked something out for me! I have one for various science fiction, fantasy and LGBT books and a more "professional" one for business books. I'd greatly appreciate anything you'd opt to contribute to my ever-growing Kindle library!

[Books] Speaker for the Dead

In popular culture, our collective history is littered with various child stars who failed to make it big in their adult years. It's become a bit of a meme at times - it being poking fun at failed child actors. But then what can we really expect, right? The way we select children as actors for roles isn't necessarily the same as what we need for more adult roles. Thus a lot of folks crash and burn in the transition effort and we're left with a weird result.

However, this is a book review and not a movie / TV show review.

But I use this concept as a springboard for this review since I feel like we had to go through a similar transition. But instead of some adorable kid who grew up really badly, instead we end up with a character who we grew to love and / or respect as a child but has left mixed feelings now that he's an adult. I suppose the transition from Ender being Andrew Wiggin felt like this to me - a bit awkward and definitely needing time to get used to.

Or maybe it's because the setting / tone of the book changed drastically from the first title. Before we were dealing with the rigors of military training as the Battle School prepared for interstellar conflict. But this time we were brought to some colony world all by its lonesome without a battle in sight. Thus the shift from a more action-packed adventure to one that came off a lot more philosophical certainly resulted in rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.

[Movies] Catfish (2010)

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Or so the "old" saying goes, if you consider 1993 to be old these days.

One's anonymity has always been one of the big draws of the internet. Maintaining your privacy and sometimes even your real life identity has been one of the pillars of the early internet as people learned to socialize behind the protective screens of pseudonyms, handles and alternate nicknames.

In recent years, the rise of social networking has lead to a new paradigm - one that calls for a more open internet where people's online identities and offline identities have aligned into one. Thus we have more and more people who maintain rather public profiles in order to better market themselves, sell their services, get hired or whatever.

But just because we live in an age of social networking doesn't mean that everyone is exactly who they say they are. If anything, the adage above will always hold true for a certain segment of the online population, and thus it remains important to keep your guard up in meeting new people online for the first time.

This movie acts as a stark reminder of that fact.

[Movies] You Should Meet My Son! (2010)

The world of LGBT movies is one that mostly exists in direct-to-DVD releases and very limited-run film festivals in other parts of the world other than here, for some reason. Why we have such lousy LGBT movie representation in the country is a little beyond me and thus such filmmakers seemed destined to just compete against other indie filmmakers instead.

Now that certainly sounds like an idea for a future geek project - putting up our own LGBT film festival here in the country. Unless there already is one that I just never hear about. Let's write that down. *makes note to self*

Regardless, it does become a little difficult to navigate through all the different movies and figure out which ones are worth seeing and which ones don't help us in anyway. It's quite a challenge and I'm sure I together with the rest of the LGBT movie reviewing blogosphere are doing our best to slowly add to the collective knowledge of the web in terms of our experiences with such movies.

Admittedly, this one surprised me a heck of a lot. The poster / DVD cover images aren't much to go by and the movie was made on a shoestring budget. And yet beyond such constraints, there's a pretty fun story to be discovered that'll make the movie a bit more worth your time than most.

[Movies] Working Girls (2010)

In 2010, Eugene Domingo managed to participate to varying degrees in six different feature films. I thought it might be an interesting adventure to try to watch as many of these movies as possible and see if I'd survive the experience given that I don't watch many local movies at all. While I don't have copies of all six movies just yet, I have managed to watch two of them plus her more successful movie that came out the year before.

That count includes this movie, which may be the movie that has officially broken me and for now has stopped me in this mad quest of watching so many local movies one after the other. While I maintain my respect for Eugene Domingo as an actress and as an individual, my disdain for the majority of our local film industry, especially when it comes to the hackneyed writers who put these things together continues to grow. Until we truly set the bar higher for ourselves and try to produce truly original and innovative work, then this industry will never get anywhere.

If anything, while I could practically feel the liquefied remnants of my brain starting to trickle out my ears less than halfway through the movie, I do hope Eugene was paid well for her efforts. Making this many movies in a single year had to be a bit of a windfall beyond it being quite the achievement in terms of time management and schedule juggling. I just wish more writers, directors and producers come up with work more worthy of her diverse talents and unique comedic stylings.

[Theater] Sweet Charity (9 Works Theatrical)

Admittedly most of my theater time is divided between the plays put up by Atlantis Productions and Repertory Philippines. I suppose because it's largely because of familiarity plus the ease of acquiring tickets given already established contacts and / or channels. But every now and then we come across another play of interest that seems worth investing in from the other theater groups active in the country.

Nikki Gil is certainly and up-and-coming star in the local theater scene. She totally blew us away when we first saw her in Atlantis' Legally Blonde and since then I've been curious to see where her career will take her. Thus when news of this play came along despite it being from a largely unfamiliar theater company, I couldn't help but be curious.

An opening appeared amid our ever-hectic weekend tabletop gaming schedules and so we went ahead and booked some tickets. And I definitely don't regret having watched this play. Despite high expectations given their claim of being able to recreate or at least pay homage to the dance mastery of Bob Fosse, we came out of this production smiling.

[Call Centers] Sales - More A Mindset Than A Skill

Prior to my current career in call center marketing / business development, I spent a good number of years in the training profession. Strangely enough, over the years I found myself teaching sales class after sales class even though people who had known me in school would never have associated me with being a salesman of any kind. But then the way my call center career has developed, I have found myself back in the sales sphere time and time again and I'd like to think I've developed a pretty good grasp of how it works - something I've made sure to factor into all of my sales training classes to the best of my ability.





Happy salesman from Qom by Erwin Bolwidt (El Rabbit) via Flickr.

In all my encounters with call center agents in the Philippines, time and time again I've encountered a lot of folks who are very particular about what jobs they can perform. In other words, once an agent has started a track in customer service or technical support (for example), they'll almost always say that they can't do sales. A lot of folks even make very principled stands when it comes to this question and adamantly protest that sales is not the kind of job for them.

So why is that? Is sales all that bad, really? Does getting into sales inevitably mean steeling yourself to violate personal ethics in order to succeed? These are the kinds of questions I've had to address in training classes over and over again, and I thought it might be interesting to document some of the things that I end up discussing, if only for future reference.

[Books] Ender's Shadow

I think this is the first time that I've ever encountered a "parallel novel" - a book that aims to tell the same story as another one but from a different perspective. Sure, I've encountered individual tales that like to shift the POV mid-story as it backtracks over a previous scene as viewed in a different light. But for an entire book to do this? To re-tell and entire story and make the reader go through everyone once more?

It was definitely a risky move - one that not many authors would probably venture right away. But thankfully, this one did and we're all the better for it. Admittedly it probably helped that the protagonist of this book was already a fairly popular character from the original Ender's Game, thus he was a good peg for people to affix to and want to follow this the adventure. Thus being able to follow-along with him and find out more about how he came to be was a pretty crucial piece to things.

And yes, I'm needlessly avoiding mentioning his name just yet since I like to save stuff like that for the synopsis. It's a thing I do.

Admittedly I was a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It's hard to determine if this was solely because I really liked the central character or it was just that much fun to revisit the book from a different part of the story. While it may feel like a bit of a gimmick, it certainly made for a more interesting adventure in an already established universe.

[Movies] The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

I always find it a little quirky how Hollywood in general tends to have very clear ideas of what they assume people enjoy the most. Or at the very least, their market research teams tell them a very specific story as to what they expect audiences to like and then they run with that.

This is most true whenever I encounter a short story somehow adapted into a feature-length movie. True, one could argue that the short story medium tends to provide some very intersting concepts that just beg to be developed into a movie. But by developed it does not mean to tack on a completely separate storyline on top and just loosely play around with the original premise. That's just not the same deal and yet movie makers love to indulge in this manner. And so we end up with some pretty strange films that are decent on their own but don't make as much sense when compared to the original source material.

And this is why I do my best to remain as impartial as possible when reviewing adapted works. One most try to evaluate the movie based on its merits alone, thus ignoring all previous incarnations in other formats since that's a completely different story. Plus this practice in my reviews helps prevent what I can only refer to as Fanboy Disappointment, where almost nothing can live up to the original material in the mind of a fan.

And this practice ultimately keeps me sane in these remake-heavy times that we now live in.

[Technicolor Musings] About Being Single

Over at PG4M, a local queer-centric forum, a contact asked about posts related to being loveless and single. And looking back at past Technicolor Musings posts,  have to admit that I've written a lot about relationships and the concerns around them but I haven't spent that much time talking about being single.





365.107 - reflections (a melancholy self-portrait) by Michael Verhoef / nettsu via Flickr.

I admit that I'm probably not a very good expert on the subject, mainly because a lot of my thinking has already adapted to being in a relationship and thus the focus remains there. But if anything, maybe my insights can help those who want to be in relationships, if only to act as a point of comparison and maybe even a possible peg or target to attain. While I know my geeky gay relationship is not necessarily typical when it comes to local queer circles, it should still provide some degree of insight, right?

So let's take a stab at this, shall we?

[Movies] Mamarazzi (2010)

Regardless of how talented certain actors or actresses may be, sometimes there's nothing that can be done to salvage a movie. A movie, after all, is the culmination of a lot of effort by different pieces working together. While the actors do help bring the story to life, the writers are the ones who define those stories and the director assembles the pieces to tell that story. The cinematographers help establish the world that we're about to experience on the screen and the sound engineers do their best to create auditory reality that matches the images on the screen. The list of players goes on and on but in the end it's about all pieces working together and not just one or two of them.

This movie was, well, bad. It was really, really bad, but I suppose it was a necessary stopover in my efforts to catch up with Eugene Domingo's recent filmography. It had a really lousy story with a lot of less-than-talented folks acting alongside her with the kind of dated and hackneyed direction that has pretty much defined a local film industry. It's like we've trapped ourselves in our own molds and concepts for what the studios believe to be popular with local movie-goers instead of daring to do something more. And while we also see a lot of silly slapstick comedies in Western markets, this one just gave up on any pretenses of making any true sense.

For a moment I even considered not posting a review for this movie at all since it was a struggle to even finish. But then given that (1) I had actually spent time watching the movie and (2) my blog isn't just about good movies alone, I decided to get around to this review.

[Theater] Little Shop of Horrors (Ateneo Blue Repertory)

So I was invited to watch the preview show for Ateneo Blue Repertory's latest production last August 9, which was nice thing. I don't often get invited to such things plus it's even rarer that I get to rearrange my work schedule so that I can actually go to these "regular" events. But one thing led to another and things generally worked out this time around.

I think I discussed the challenge of evaluating college theater productions in the past, probably when I reviewed the last BlueRep play that I had the opportunity to see. Some would argue that college theater is generally still a "training ground" for theater professionals and hopefuls. I suppose you could compare it to the minor leageus in terms of sports versus going full professional.

I generally hold to the thinking that you shouldn't lower your standards when evaluating a college production. Perhaps for grade school and high school shows that may be the case, but college shows often involve talent that we already consider to be adults. And if you don't hold them to the normal standards, then how can you expect them to better themselves in the long run, right? 

And so when I first heard that BlueRep was staging a musical as challenging as this one, I was definitely curious to see how things would pan out. They had certainly set a high target for themselves with this particular production and I was rooting for them to manage to pull off a decent rendition of this show.

[Call Centers] Rethinking Recruitment - Lead Sources

Last week, I shared a few of my thoughts on possible alternative strategies for call center recruitment here in the Philippines. The post went on a lot longer than I expected and has generated a decent amount of traffic and responses, so I figured it may not be too bad to continue on in my discussions. Besides, I had generally committed to discussing more of the concepts I presented and how to address some of them.



 2010 Fall Job & Internship Fair by uwgb admissions via Flickr.
Now for the usual disclaimer, I don't claim to be an expert at this point nor do I directly work in Recruitment. My key specialties are more related to training, business development and related support functions. Thus my perspective here is one of a sales person trying to marry the traditional sales cycle with how we handle Recruitment locally, since the two processes are essentially the same. And beyond that core strategy as presented previously, we still need to address the challenge of where to get the people to fill our recruitment funnel. And that's what we'll discuss today.

 

[Books] M is for Magic

I already have a fairly decent collection of Neil Gaiman's works - definitely some of the gems of my collection that I'm pretty proud of. At the same time, there's always the risk of modest duplication here and there with a man who writes so prolifically and is quite popular across different reader segments.

Now this particular collection was one that I was a tad hesitant to purchase initially. My main concern was the fact that most of the stories had appeared previously in other anthologies. The goal of this book, after all, was to repackage a collection of his stories for younger audiences, although it's clear that Mr. Gaiman is one of those writers who respects children and their ability to understand more complex concepts. I totally agree with this and thus I've never seen the point in writers needing to overly talk down to younger readers.

But I eventually found the title on sale and I figured it was still nice to have. After all, there were still a story or two that I had not read before and it had been quite a while since I had read some of the others. Putting them all together in one book like this creates a particular reading experience, at least in my opinion. While the stories remain independent of one another, it doesn't mean that you can't develop a parallel narrative flow of sorts when you read them all in succession.

[Movies] Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Remakes are almost always bad. Reboots are tricky. Prequels are almost always a death sentence. At least this has been my general experience, although I admit that there have been exceptions to these "rules" of sorts, but in the movie world they're almost always true. Books fare a wee bit better, of course not counting novelizations of books.

When we first saw the trailer for this movie, we were extremely skeptical of this being a worthwhile piece. In many forums, they started to call this the movie prequel that no one was asking for. I mean, come on right? The original Planet of the Apes remains a classic science fiction movie that is loved by many fans. It may seem a tad campy and dated by modern movie standards, but it does remains to be a great example of the kind of true storytelling we used to see even in the cinemas.

So for them to decide to create a prequel movie felt like yet another step backward by the greedy nature of Hollywood. And yet when the movie started playing over the weekend, the initial reviews were surprisingly good. Despite how lousy the trailer seemed to make the movie appear, people were enjoying it. And not just your average joes alone - even film critics were saying the movie was quite good.

And so we took the plunge and watched it. And man, that was an enjoyable movie.

[Books] Boy Meets Boy

A few years ago, I was delighted to find that local bookstore chains like National Bookstore and Power Books had setup separate sections dedicated to gay and lesbian fiction. While the pickings were a bit slim, it was still nice to see that the LGBT community had reached a point that they warranted a shelf section dedicated to books written by members of the pink community. So over the years I did my part to buy a few of the books whenever I could - which meant when my money wasn't going entirely to new science fiction and fantasy titles.

Recently I noticed that the shelves are gone. Thus we're now limited to the few "popular" writers who just happen to have LGBT touches in their books as a possible source for LGBT fiction in the country. Were it not for my Amazon Kindle, I'd probably lose all access to such titles and that part of pink culture outside of paying ridiculous customs and shipping charges or having friends bring books over as part of their luggage. It's a sad thing really - LGBT writers need all the support that they can get, whether local or foreign.

And LGBT fiction has a long way to go. A lot of publishers still have the notion that marketing to the LGBT segment means borrowing what has worked for female readers. Hence the prevalence of trashy queer romances and plucky gumshoe detective stories. There are some good ones out there to be sure, but then still I feel there's a lot more than can be done for the genre, if we even what it to be a genre as an end result. And it's a good thing that there are authors who are trying to think beyond the current times and trying to speculate as to what queer fiction might be in the more tolerant future.

[Movies] Kimmy Dora (2009)

A recently renewed interest in Eugene Domingo has led me on a merry adventure of exploring cinema. As expected, the movies have been an odd mix of the hilarious, the horrible and all the infinite degrees of absurdity in-between. While I don't doubt her talent as an actress and a comedian / impersonator, I still question the direction our studios prefer to take with movies and probably just how little they think of Filipino audiences at time. Then again, this treatment of movies isn't necessarily unique to the country but is merely my assessment of the local movie environment in particular.

But then sometimes the relative "stupidity" (for lack of a better term) just works for me and manages to cut back my usual intellectual barriers. Good comedies are like that - the ones that make you laugh even though you have no logical reason to do so. And as your brain rebels and tries to figure out just what is triggering such a strong emotional reaction, the rest of you just gets to enjoy the ride, for what it's worth.

This movie was like that - initially I think I had one eyebrow permanently up as I tried to dissect the movie. But then it managed to slip past my defenses and genuinely made me enjoy the darn thing. And for that I definitely have to give credit to the folks behind this movie.

[TV] Star Trek Voyager: Season 5

Star Trek: Voyager will always have a soft spot in my heart for one reason or another. Maybe it's the way that Janeway orders coffee, black in that nails-on-a-chalkboard voice of hers. Maybe it's how pathetic the bromance between Harry Kim and Tom Paris really is. Or maybe it has something to do with how B'Elenna cab only decently manage the emotions of rage and sad vulnerability. Whatever it is, I love the show and I felt it was a good call to use this as a way to introduce my partner to the wonderfully geeky worlds of Star Trek.

The fifth season was definitely a mixed bag. The addition of Seven of Nine does make for some interesting episodes and some highly tropey ones as well. The show has its own internal set of amusements as manifested by the on-going holodeck stories that seem to shift in theme with every season. But hey, at least we don't have to deal with the annoyance that was Kes, right?

But still this season had a lot of good points that kept the voyage pretty fun. Admittedly I think there were more weird and quirky episodes that I would have liked, but then what can you do, right? You just take the good with the bad and all the fun stuff in-between to boot.

[Call Centers] Rethinking Recruitment - A Strategy Discussion

Call centers have become a pretty big deal here in the Philippines. With over 400,000 employees bringing in about $6.2 billion in revenue during 2010, it's pretty clear that this is not some flash-in-the-pan deal that's going to go away anytime soon. And with CCAP projecting to more than double industry revenues and headcount by 2016, the call centers certainly have their work cut out for them.



IT Park by Brennan Mercado via Flickr.

But as any call center practitioner knows, the true challenge of the industry remains to be Recruitment. In order to reach the 15+% annual growth target that CCAP is setting for itself, it's going to take more than what a lot of call center recruiters are doing today. It means a lot of significant changes in how we do things in the hopes of keeping up with the constantly increasing demand for Filipino call center agents before the other countries look elsewhere for solutions.

Now while I'm not a Recruitment expert, I do think that in my 8+ years in the industry I've come up with some alternative ideas to explore. If anything, a fresh perspective may be just the thing that we need to revitalize this industry, right? Doing the same thing every day while expecting different results just won't cut it.

I think this might become a series of posts as I flesh out these ideas further. That also depends on the kind of feedback that I might get for this post - good or bad. Either way can still work - it'll just set the tone for things.

[Books] Interesting Times

This book marks the end of my efforts to "catch up" with the Rincewood segment of the Discworld books and pretty much my efforts to read all the Discworld books in my possession. In fact, the only Discworld book missing from my collection is I Shall Wear Midnight, the most recent Tiffany Aching book released (as far as I know at the time of this writing).

I have to admit it's been a mixed experience thus far. While Rincewind definitely isn't my favorite character, he has managed to get a bit of respect for himself over the progress of the books and now I at least manage to appreciate him. And I don't hate him anymore, so that counts for something, right?

Or maybe it just helped that the complexity of the stories has just gotten better and better over the years regardless of Rincewind. After all, he's hardly ever essential to the plot, at least not really. In truth he's more of a decorative piece of China on the top shelf - an interesting curio that is fun to tinker with once and a while but never sustain's ones interests for long. And this book definitely gives the reader a lot more to invest himself in apart from the hijinks of Rincewind. And I know I use the term "hijink" quite liberally there.

[Movies] Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

One of the bigger annoyances of superhero movies in the past is how they've all acted as independent story worlds. Despite belonging to larger comic book franchises as defined by the likes of Marvel or DC Comics, the movies have had to stick to the stories of individual heroes since the licensing issues around involving other characters even as remote mentions is far too difficult.

But thankfully Marvel has decided to take a more active role in its movie franchises and clear steps have been taken over the years to get towards a movie based on The Avengers, its flagship team consisting of heroes who had pretty strong comic book titles as individuals. Such a thing seemed impossible in the years past but now we're pretty much on the bring of this truly happening.

For the most part I feel this is a great thing for the movies since it expands the universe, provides greater potential for more diverse stories and all that good stuff. At the same time, it's hard to tie entire movies to one another without either going overboard or too minimal an investment of screen time and writing resources.