Thank You, 2022!
Whenever someone asks me how I am, I usually make a face and grudgingly reply, “still alive.” I think this is because I was brought up not to talk about myself, and that telling people about myself was a bad thing. That’s something that I’m still trying to unlearn. 2022, despite its ups and downs, […]
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Seek Ye Whore Book Signing at Mt. Cloud Bookstore, Baguio City
The first photo is the only one I took of my book signing at @mtcloud last weekend. It was a fun and intimate event filled with unexpected and serendipitous occurrences that can only happen in Baguio. I really had no plan beyond showing up, but then Frank Cimatu arrived and before I knew it, I […]
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Food, shelter, and wards: three musts when living in the wilderness
I doubt I would have spotted the things I had if I weren’t interested in both plants and folklore.
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An Ibaloy Mummy in the Baguio Museum
Visited the Baguio Museum, which was originally built in 1975 and restored after it was damaged in the 1990 earthquake that has left a scar on the City that can be felt to this day. The Museum is inspired by Igorot architecture and features artifacts from Abra, Apayao, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, and Mountain Province, as […]
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The role of ritual and spirituality in diasporic Philippine cultural tattoo practices
It’s impossible to talk about cultural tattooing without talking about colonisation and history, so first, a digression: Los Pintados Tattooing isn’t generally thought of as part of modern Filipino culture, unless it’s from a Western context. Tattoos are thought of as marks of a rebellious and suspicious nature, or of someone with a big enough […]
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MYS Universe now available on Quento app
MYS Universe (Ms. Yvette’s Strange Universe) is now available on the Quento app. Aside from being a horror fiction writer, I’m also a paranormal enthusiast whose been interested in the realm of the weird since I was a child (I thank 80s TV host Inday Badiday for opening my eyes to the true weird). While […]
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An afternoon in Intramuros (Or: Any tour can be a ghost tour if you ask the right questions)
This was to be a regular historical walking tour. But since I’m me and I know that our tour guide does not shy away from dark tourism (a real moneymaker in other parts of the world), I knew that I could get a few ghost stories out of the adventure.
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Where does the Filipino urban legend of elementary schools being former cemeteries come from?
If you went to grade school in the Philippines, chances are you’ve encountered the urban legend that your school—yes, your school—used to be a WWII hospital (it doesn’t matter if historically, there was nothing in the area during WWII), but before that, it used to be a church and a cemetery as well. The order […]
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What we will lose if we don’t take care of the Pasig River
Went on a Pasig River Heritage Walk organized by Renacimiento Manila. We started at Plaza Lawton in front of the Manila Post Office, crossed part of the Jones Bridge, and ended up at the First United Building along Escolta. The walk showed me how small Manila can be on foot, even for someone disabled like […]
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Exorcism in the Philippines
The first time Gabriel Cabaltera* noticed that her mother was different was when she was four. She had awoken at three in the morning to find her mother gone from the bed. She searched the house, then wandered outside, where she found her mother Tina” standing on the roof of their house. “I don’t know […]
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MYS Universe 