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Lynn, QC, PH.

I edit and proofread academic papers and books. I write here and elsewhere. I also talk way too much about P-pop and beauty pageants over at Pop and Pageantry.

Get in touch if there’s a project you think we can work on together.

Category: Stuff I do

  • I renamed my Youtube channel to “Pop and Pageantry”

    A couple of months after I posted about my Youtube channel, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and renamed it Pop and Pageantry, which is pretty clever of me, I think. Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on P-Pop or Pinoy pop, with the occasional video on pageantry, so the name only seemed natural.

    Since I last blogged here, I gained quite a lot of followers thanks to a commentary video I made about how poorly trained P-Pop groups shouldn’t be made to debut before they’re ready. I have a related video stewing, this time about the explosion in the number of P-Pop groups, though that might take a while to come out because I have other videos lined up. I’ve been trying to post every week and doing a decent job so far. I’m not doing anything too complicated by way of video editing, but it’s been nice to do what I AM able to do with Davinci Resolve, and these videos have been a good reason for me to write.

  • A little bit about my Youtube channel “late-night chips”

    A little bit about my Youtube channel “late-night chips”

    I wasn’t always big on watching Youtube, but during the pandemic lockdown, it became one of the things I enjoyed doing, along with making candles and miniature houses. I don’t remember what I first really started watching, but I do know that having my nth viewing of J. Lo and Shakira’s Superbowl halftime show interrupted by an ad was what made me decide to get Youtube Premium. Super worth it.

    I wandered into the video essay and commentary space somehow, watching the works of Contrapoints, Jessie Gender, Princess Weekes, and Alice Cappelle, among others, eventually adding Swell Entertainment and münecat to my subscriptions. I also became heavily into drama channels and could recount in exhaustive detail what happened between Gabbie Hanna and Jessi Smiles, and Colleen Ballinger and Adam McIntyre. I was there when Hbomberguy eviscerated plagiarists, and I witnessed the rise and fall of iilluminaughtii. I also watched the Try Guys drama unfold. I’d known about them for years, but tuning into the drama made me a regular Try Guys viewer and now a 2nd Try subscriber.

    As I got deeper into Youtube, I started entertaining the thought of having my own channel containing video essays on various topics. I’d joke about it every time Miss Universe season came around. I’m very interested in beauty pageants and a few years ago, I felt like I had plenty to say about it from a feminist and sociological perspective.

    Then in January 2023, I just decided I was gonna go for it.

    I’m terrible at naming stuff, but I ended up going with “late-night chips” to refer to my habit of late-night snacking. And maybe as a nod to chewing on a memory, an idea late into the night.

    My first video was about the movie The First Slam Dunk, which I wrote, recorded, and edited in a hurry the moment I got home from the movie theater. Afterwards, I made videos about probably quite niche topics, like the long-gone Manang’s Chicken, the 1980s young adult horror book series Twilight: Where Darkness Begins, and the 1990s movie Baby Love. My most popular video is the one about the Miss Universe 1994 semifinalists and what happened to them after the pageant. It has more than 52,200 views so far, which should tell me that I found a potentially popular niche to work with, but I absolutely insist on posting about other things 😀

    I’ve written a bunch of stuff I want to make videos about, but I’ve unfortunately not gotten around to recording them. I do everything for my channel: research, writing, narrating and recording, and video editing. It’s a lot of work, but I get a lot of satisfaction doing it.

    Have I achieved Youtube fame and made tons of money from my channel? Heck no. I need 1,000 subscribers and I’m not even halfway there, and thousands of watch hours, which I definitely do not have.

    Recently, I started making videos about SB19, a group I love and admire. None of the videos have cracked 1,000 views, but it’s all good; the channel has been idle for months, and even having a few hundred people watch my work and listen to me talk is already huge. It’s been fun because it’s testing my ability to write quickly and produce a video mere hours after a bit of SB19 news came out. And it’s bringing my channel back to life. I’ve even gotten started writing something I’ve put off for half a year.

    This project is pretty big for me because I’m painfully averse to being perceived, but perhaps there’s a part of me that’s not because I’m perfectly willing to put my writing out there and use my actual voice.

    I have to admit that my ultimate goal here is to have a modest following and to earn a bit of money too. For now, though, I’ll settle for having 100 views per video.

  • Reposting some old posts because in retrospect, they were pretty good

    Nothing more to it than what the title says. I’m looking at my old blog via The Wayback Machine and I realized I wrote some pretty good stuff back in the day. I think some of them still deserve to be read, so I’m putting them here as well. Enjoy.

  • I love my lifestyle blog so much

    Almost 10 years ago, I started a Quezon City-oriented blog called QCitizen. I had big plans for it—so big that I got overwhelmed and ended up not doing anything for it at all, save for the occasional post here and there.

    Last year, I decided that, because I keep harping on about how much I miss the blogs and websites of old, I should start working on QCitizen again. The posts are still sporadic, I admit, but there’s a lot more there than there ever was, and it looks the way I want it to look—still a blog, but more of a magazine, with big, clear images. It’s one of the projects I’m proud of working on in 2025, and I really want to keep it going for a long time.

  • The hike to see the Pinatubo crater lake broke me as a person lol

    On December 5, 2025, my sister, my boyfriend, and I went on a private tour to see the Pinatubo crater lake. “There would be a hike before we make it up to the lake.” Okay, sure, we’ve all hiked before. “It would be a 3.5 to a 7 km hike, depending on the day’s and the path’s condition.” Yeah, sure no problem. “The trail is mild with little elevation and some stairs.” Sounds great.

    Reader, that was one of the most hilarious mistakes I’ve ever made in my life.

    We’ve made some hiking-related missteps before, like when a hike in Sagada ended up involving some scrambling over boulders, or when we visited Masungi Georeserve and were stunned when we saw that we had to climb down ropes a few times. This Pinatubo hike was an extraordinary experience, because while 7 km didn’t sound daunting, the trail was rough, and there were so many river crossings.

    But the crater lake itself was beautiful, and it was a very cool, sunny day. We spent an hour up there admiring the view, winding down from the hike up, and psyching ourselves for the hike down.

    We were the slowest among all the groups that visited that day; we were expecting to catch up to a group or two resting at some point, but it appears that they were all superhumanly fast. We still can’t figure out how everyone else appears to have completed the hike so swiftly; my only guess is that the volcano hated us and did its best to inconvenience us, although if it did hate us, then wouldn’t it have wanted us gone as soon as possible?

    The return trip to where our 4 × 4 vehicle was waiting was pretty hellish; we could see the vehicle from afar but even after a half-hour of walking, it didn’t seem like we were getting any closer. There was also the panic-inducing fact that the rivers were rising and flowing more powerfully than they did in the morning and that the sky went dark a few times that I was honestly worried about getting caught in a possible downpour and dying by flash flood.

    My takeaways from the trip:

    1. Lose weight
    2. Own hiking sandals
    3. Even the toughest experience can be fun when you’re with the right people.

    I’ll be posting a video of the trip. I’ll even make it look like the most amazing time I’ve ever had. But holy shit, that hike was TOUGH and, if I can be honest, seeing the place once is enough.