Gonna start off with the Serious Business stuff this time before I babble about fannish things.

I found this interesting article about Michelle Obama's efforts to reach out to the poor and disenfranchised in the DC area.

I also recently discovered the work of Jay Smooth on YouTube, who posts short vlogs about pop culture and sociopolitical issues. He has a direct style that is not too "in-your-face" and is easy to follow and understand. "Asher Roth and the Racial Crossroads" is an excellent rebuttal to the idea "that racist/homophobic/bigoted jokes were a sign of a progressive population and therefore anyone who called him on his racist, homophobic, sexist, bigoted jokes is against an egalitarian society" (quoted from this comment over at JF's UnfunnyBusiness comm, where I found the video link). There's also a transcript of this particular video here at racism_101.

Also by Jay Smooth is "How To Tell People They Sound Racist", which should be required viewing for anyone interested in anti-oppression work of any sort, not just racism. No transcript that I've seen yet, unfortunately, but as I said before, he's easy to follow.

At Racialicious, Ay-leen the Peacemaker analyzes two potential colonial visions of America in steampunk, the "nostalgic" and the "melancholic". vyctori, you should probably take a look at this.

It's from that Racialicious linke that I think I stumbled upon Blue Corn Comics, which is a blog focusing on First Nations culture, from history to traditions to modern portrayals and stereotypes, and also branches out into wider implications for anti-racism work and race in America. There's some stuff like Video Games Featuring Indians and Indiana Jones and the Stereotypes of Doom, and then there's also his rebuttal against the notion of "equal opportunity offending".

From that site, I also found "21st-Century Warrior":

In the Sun Dance, I learned what the warrior path was truly about. It had nothing to do with what I had seen in movies, heard in music, or read in books. It wasn't about being destructive, being the toughest person in the neighborhood, or any media-stained image. I realized in my moments of terror, pain, and loneliness that this ceremony wasn't about me but about the people I can serve in my life. The warrior concept is simply taking our own talent and ability and developing it so we can serve and defend others. The warrior's goal was to become an asset to the village they served. The warriors of the past like Pontiac, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Osceola were warriors not only because of their exploits in battle, but because they served their people the best way they knew how and spent their lifetimes becoming assets to their village. Today, your "village" could be your family, community, country, clients, or any other group you serve.

I first stumbled across this piece during RaceFail'09, but it was quoted in one of the Blue Corn Comics pages as well, so I figured now's a good a time as any to point readers here - The Unexamined Propaganda of "Political Correctness".

Underlying every complaint of "PC" is the absurd notion that members of dominant mainstream society have been victimized by an arbitrarily hypersensitive prohibition against linguistic and cultural constructions that are considered historical manifestations of bigotry. It's no coincidence that "PC"-snivelers are for the most part white men who are essentially saying, "Who the hell do these marginalized groups think they are to tell me how I should or shouldn't portray them? I'm not going to say 'mentally challenged' when it's my right to say 'retard', goshdarnit there's only so much abuse I'll take!"*

In this context, the conceit that "political correctness" constitutes a violation of free speech is particularly zany; as though society's marginalized groups wield oppressive power over the dominant mainstream. Actually, as far as I'm concerned you're free to call me "chink" and I'm free to call you "moronic racist loser" (and more if necessary, but I'll leave that aside for now in the interest of false civility). Free speech is the straw man of choice for intellectual bums of all stripes too fragile and vacuous for critical engagement. Calling someone who says or does bigoted things "a bigot" isn't censorious, it's descriptively accurate, like calling a bad movie "a bad movie", even if the bigot didn't intend to come off as bigoted and the movie didn't intend to come off as bad.

Randomly, The Straight Dope discusses Chicago's Anti-Ugliness Ordinance, which thankfully has since been repealed.

So, yeah, I got some serious stuff going on up there in the links. And I didn't even post some of the other ones I found because I need to take time like millennia to think about them. In the meantime, we can take a break and start mixin' us some Avatar: The Last Airbender-themed booze. Drink each of the Four Nations drinks and enter the "Avatar State"! Sporfletini. Relatedly, you can find a recipe for "fire flakes" over at the fan_foods community. lysis_to_kill, we should get together and make the butterbeer!

eyecatching_art had this epic picture of Wolfwood!Hobbes and Vash!Calvin.

Hallelujah, It's Rainin' 300 Men!

Best of the Worst: Twilight Tattoos. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds.

The Angry Asian Man posts about this excellent stop-motion animation piece done by Bang-yao Liu as his senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

File this under "bzuh?": Michael Jackson considered releasing his next album as a video game. H-how was that even going to work? Not that I'm not interested in the results, but the logistics of it are...interesting, to say the least.

***

*glances over link-o-llection* ...rawr. I swear I need to get back to organizing my bookmarks. I've had stuff tagged over at my Delicious account, but I think when I upgraded Firefox I brokinated the extension I had that let me easily add bookmarks to Delicious, and I never bothered to upgrade. So lately I've just been filing stuff under one huge folder in my Firefox bookmarks. But if I'm going to get anywhere in my informal self-education, I need to actually remember where I've been so that I can better map out where I'm going.

Anyway, I deleted my original MySpace account because something got borked with the layout editing feature and apparently MySpace couldn't fix it. I signed up for a new account, then realized from clicking through MySpace Help that, hey, I should've actually signed up specifically for a musician profile from the start, because MySpace can't convert profiles from one to the other! So I clicked on the link in the help page that was supposed to help you "get started", only to get an error message that MySpace had taken the feature down temporarily for some-reason-or-other and that I'd have to wait for an unspecified period of time before I could use it. LE SIGH. So much for trying to pretty up my profile like mia_noire suggested to me. I guess I should just work on my YouTube profile instead.

In the meantime, I'm also going to continue working on a friend's commission and on a piece of original art featuring the two main characters from my NaNoWriMo2008 novel Daemonsong. I'd originally intended it as a quick painting piece, but as soon as I got to Kira's fur I was like pfffffft that is so not going to work. So I'm taking my time on it.

-Reileen
he promises to you, no more tears to cry

---

*Can also be summarized as: "Oh, God, respecting each other's humanity is such a pain in the ass! Do we really have to do this forever? Can't you all just lighten up so that I don't have to respect you any more? Isn't the whole point of coming together as one that I don't have to care what you think?" (Thank you, Jay Smooth.)

Two more blabberings about martial arts flicks.

Robin B Hood: Jackie Chan, Louis Koo, Yuen Biao. Chan and Koo play two successful cat burglars, Thongs and Octopus (...don't ask), who eventually get roped into kidnapping a baby by their boss, Landlord (...again, don't ask), who's looking to pick up the hefty reward money for doing so from a wealthy Triad mobster. But while on the run, the Landlord gets caught by the police, and asks Thongs and Octopus to look after the baby until he can get out of jail. Thongs and Octopus are initially reluctant, but eventually develop a strong relationship with the kid and thus refuse to hand him over when the time comes. Kung-fu hijinks ensue - as well as a couple of instances of surprising tugs at the heartstrings. Favorite fight scene is Chan vs. Biao inside Thongs'(?) apartment.

Battle Warrior: Tony Jaa and...other people who don't matter. Well, okay, maybe I'll mention the random G.I. Joe character, just for the sheer randomness of it. Oh, yeah, Panna Rittikrai plays a zombie. But other than that, hoo boy, this film was a waste of an hour and a half and I wished I'd spent it watching Police Story 4 instead. Horrid acting, boring main characters, and wyrd-ass lighting on some of the shots that made it hard to see anything. (I double-checked; it was definitely the movie and not my monitor.) The way the DVD was packaged and the way the movie was described made it seem like Jaa had a bigger part in the movie than he actually did - which was likely intentional 'cause otherwise I can't imagine that this would be a good-selling film. I only watched the entire thing so that I wouldn't miss any potential scenes with him, 'cause fast-forwarding and rewinding on DVDs would almost be as annoying as just letting the movie run its course. However, the lone redeeming point of the movie (which I shall now poetically liken to the faint remnants of an ancient start in the murky night sky of downtown Chicago) is that Jaa actually plays a villainous character instead of a rampaging Muay Thai Hero of Great Justice. (Jaa is the right-hand bodyguard/fighter/whatever for the over-the-top military general dictator person thingy deep in the middle of bumfuck Thailand. Er...yeah.) I demand to see Jaa in more villainous roles! That would be hot. (Even though Jaa can't, uh, really act. Then again, he hasn't been given a lot of roles that require him to act aside from emoting ">:|!!!!!!", so maybe he just hasn't been given a chance to shine.)

***

I am re-thinking my plans to apply for JET this coming academic year. The issue isn't that I'm chickening out on it - yeah, I am scared to hell about it, but the more scared I get, the more determined I am to actually do the program - but that I simply won't have the start-up funds needed to get to and live in Japan before I receive my first paycheck. Not counting anything that I might need to buy prior to going to Japan (extras of stuff that I can only get easily in the US), I'm gonna need at least $3000 to pay for the first month of rent + amenities, as well as to live off of. I refuse to make my parents pay for that, and there's little to no chance I'll be able to get and/or hold a job during this last year of my schooling.

Even if I do miraculously get a job during the school year, however, I wouldn't be able - well, willing - to put in the hours needed to scrape up that much money. Because I just really, really need to get the fuck out of school. I need to focus on my schoolwork so that I can do well enough to graduate by next spring. That's really top priority in terms of real life issues. Once I get my degree, I'll start worrying about really investing the time/energy/sanity into looking for a job.

For now, I'll continue to cruise craigslist for mini-gigs.

...although I really should get cracking on customizing YouTube and MySpace for my music. And attempting to bid for graphic design projects on Etsy. aldkadjglkjakgjlakjglkja. At least I've got a $70+ CG commission from a friend coming up soon. Which is barely going to start paying off the Vegas tickets that my parents bought for me, but at least it's something. I'm also looking at eLance for writing gigs but am realizing how very little legit credentials I have to list for my editing skills, besides "Ask my friends how much I like to shred apart their writing."

-Reileen
oh, virginia, we didn't know you had it in ya

Because it's not like I already have a messed-up sleeping schedule, last night I ended up staying up into the wee mornings hours watching some of the martial arts flicks that I borrowed from my brother's rather substantive collection while sketching. The problem with having a brother who shares similar tastes in movies and games is that I can easily borrow that stuff while I'm still at home, but once I'm out of the house I'll have to get my own copies... Let me tell you, it was a pretty bloody night.

Ong Bak was first into the ring. Prior to this, I'd seen Tony Jaa in Tom Yum Goong (known as The Protector in the US, which I really liked) and Spirited Killer (which I, uh, didn't), so I had some idea of what to expect in terms of fighting style. Ong Bak is a good introduction to Jaa, but it may not be for those who get squicked by film violence real easily, because Ong Bak is far bloodier than either Spirited Killer or Tom Yum Goong. I'm mostly inured to that stuff by now, and even I cringed at some of the scenes. The film's been described as an unabashed "look what I can do!" demonstration, but seriously, when you can pull off all the crazy shit that Jaa can, why wouldn't you want to show that off?

In the movie, Jaa's character, Ting, is a devout young man from a tiny village in Thailand whose most precious possession is a statue of the Buddha called "Ong Bak". One day, the head gets stolen by a low-level mafia thug, and Ting vows to get the head back even if it costs him his life. With only the donations from the villagers and his own determination to live on, Ting travels to urban Bangkok to hunt down the perpetrator, eventually getting entangled with an elderly mob kingpin who speaks through an electrolarynx but otherwise is a pretty boring character. This is a remarkably similar plot to the later film Tom Yum Goong, so it's no wonder that TYG was sometimes mistakenly referred to as Ong Bak 2. It's a pretty straightforward plot, so all you have to do is just sit back and watch Jaa kick ass and take names. Interestingly, though, my favorite action sequence from the film isn't any of the actual combat scenes against the big baddies like the obnoxious Australian(?) guy and the Japanese guy in a schoolboy uniform with the quasi-Spike Spiegal hair, but instead a chase scene through the alley markets (is that what they are?) of Bangkok, when he and another character Humlae (played by Thai comedian Mum Jokmok, who also appears in a comedic sidekick role in The Protector) are being pursued by a gang of thugs that they pissed off. I guess it's because it injected some humor into a deathly serious movie with a ridiculous plotline? That's fairly early on in the movie, though, and it only gets darker from there, although the ending is relatively "happy."

Kill Zone (originally titled SPL) is even worse in terms of the graphic nature of the violence. In particular, the various death scenes involving the character played by Wu Jing (who is kind of a little bit awesome in his white-clad knife-wielding crazy assassin role) were pretty much the most expensive meal you could get on the Menu of Death: a Whopper-sized Knuckle Sandwich with a side of Supersized Pain and a Big Gulp of Agony. I'm hungry, I haven't eaten breakfast or lunch. I think it all served the plot well, though. I'm not sure what I would peg as my favorite action sequence - maybe the fight between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing? And certainly the smackdown between Yen and Sammo Hung is a thing of Much Awesome.

The movie is, at first glance, a standard cops versus the mafia kind of story, but there's a lot of nuances involved in the portraiture of the characters and the climax and resolution of the storyline that make it stand out to me. (Not that I've necessarily viewed a lot of cops vs. mafia movies, never mind movies in general...) I found myself developing empathy with both sides of the law here (barring Wu Jing's assassin - he had no development at all, but I liked him anyway 'cause he was crazy style like damn), and I think that Kill Zone, outside of being a really badass-looking flick starring a showdown between two of the world's greatest martial arts legends, is also a good study in how to potentially handle nuanced characters. Which is a pretty mean feat, considering that a lot of martial arts flicks, even some of my favorites, aren't exactly huge on either coherent, deep stories or 3-dimensional characters. So Kill Zone is definitely up there with one of my favorite martial arts flicks of all time, with a pretty damn good drama to boot. (Spoiler: Too bad nearly everyone dies in the end. The last scene is pretty depressing, although because I'd read some spoilers a while back, I knew that it was intended to symbolize Simon Yam's character finally dying from the brain tumor he was diagnosed with three years ago. But the movie doesn't really remind you of that fact throughout, so by the time you get to this scene you may have forgotten about it.)

At some point last week, I also watched Invisible Target, which is yet another "cops versus the bad guys!" flick, although this time the cops - played by Nicholas Tse, Shawn Yue, and Jaycee Chan - are chasing after a mercenary group that's wreaking havoc in Hong Kong. Crazy-ass Wu Jing returns as the leader of the mercenaries. Jaycee Chan's father Jackie Chan makes a small cameo near the beginning of the film, as a guard for an armored truck that's being looted by the mercenaries. (He gets shot ded, lulz. It's one of those "blink and you'll miss it moments".)

Invisible Target, similar to Kill Zone, also makes attempts at drawing out nuanced characters and a deeper storyline, but for some reason it didn't resonate with me as strongly as Kill Zone's did. The heroes are all pretty distinct in terms of their backstory and personality: Tse's a rather impulsive officer who lost his fiancee to the mercs (she was collateral damage in their rampage), Yue's an effective but arrogant detective who seriously got served by the mercs' leader early on in the film, and Chan's an earnest and idealistic beat cop whose older brother (an undercover cop) may have gotten inextricably entangled with the mercs. All of them are generally likeable.

On the other hand, the mercs' portrait is a bit more...muddled. They were apparently all orphans raised together in a...military...training...camp...thing? And they hate all cops because of...something-or-other that I'm not even sure the movie knows what it is. THEY JUST HATE ALL COPS, OKAY. AND THEY BE TIGHT WITH EACH OTHER, YO, THEY BE TIGHT. LIKE LEATHER PANTS ON A WELL-CHISELED ASS. Probably the only interesting thing about the mercs (besides the intimidating presence of Wu Jing, who once again doesn't get much development - although it's certainly more than what he got in Kill Zone) is that we actually get a female merc (no development, but she can kick some ass well enough) and we get a merc who seems to have some sort of conscience and is probably the most well-characterized of the mercenaries...for a certain value of the term "well-characterized". (Spoiler: When Chan and this guy finally get to talk, Chan makes the comment to him that "you act like my brother, but you don't look like him". It turns out this guy was responsible for killing Chan's older brother. Echoes of BMJ, anyone?)

All in all, despite the narrative deficiencies, Invisible Target is still well worth a watch for martial arts or action junkies, especially for the bar brawl scene where we get to see Jaycee Chan kick some ass with Tse and Yue (although this only happens after a series of events with Chan that pegged my embarrassment squick liekwhoah). Actually, though, my favorite scene in the movie isn't an action sequence at all: it's a conversation early on between Chan's character and his grandmother, where Chan is describing what his day was like.

Wai King Ho: So, I kissed someone today.
Grandmother: (serenely filling out a sudoku sheet) That's nice. Bring her over for dinner.
Wai King Ho: It was a guy.
Grandmother: Guys have to eat too.

Chan was referring to the fact that he had to give a homeless guy CPR.

Invisible Target also taught me that you can throw a bottle of booze at a lightbulb and break it, and the resulting sparks mixed with the alcohol will cause a nice kaboom! Awesome. [/tongue-in-cheek]

Meanwhile, I found out a while back that Jeeja Yanin (Chocolate) is set to star in another movie, currently called Raging Phoenix (original Thai title Du Suay Doo, meaning "stubborn, beautiful, and fierce"). It's apparently going to revolve around a romantic storyline, and hip-hop elements and moves will be incorporated into the movie somehow. Me, I'm just glad that Jeeja no longer has that fugly haircut from Chocolate. She's a cute girl, but her costumes from that movie were just so damn ugly. Look, she might've been playing an autistic girl, but autistic girls deserve to dress cute too! *eyes her younger sister's closet full of bright cheery outfits* I know some people weren't impressed with Chocolate and they're not overly impressed with what they're hearing about Raging Phoenix, but any movie that stars a gal who can pull off this pose in those shoes has to be worth watching.

***

I changed the color scheme of my LJ layout to something green, in honor of what's going on with Iran right now. I'm not informed enough or smart enough to write anything particularly insightful about this, but I can link y'all to some pages that I personally found well worth reading, for various reasons.

one_hoopy_frood talks about ways to help out and provides other helpful links. ciderpress on Dreamwidth has a pretty short entry on the entire thing, but I'm gonna quote these two lines from it here for Big Fucking Truth:

There are mass protests, students, adults, young and old, and the heavy cost of a revolution, one that has never been required of me to live this good life I have, is being paid. I'm not sure were I asked whether I would be able to pay it.

yasaman briefly argues why the absolute worst thing for the US to do right now is to get involved.

Here's a post on a forum compiling several confirmed happenings in Iran, based on tweets.

And someone - I can't remember who it was, but I saw the entry on my flist somewhere - was talking about the implications of Iranians using Twitter and other social networking services to fight this out and to get the news out about what was happening in their country. As if we didn't already know that we had entered a new information age, this just clinches it, and it's amazing that something so seemingly innocuous and insipid like Twitter could be used in such a world-changing way. It's really mind-boggling.

Also, appropriate icon is actually kind of appropriate. I originally made it from a joke or something during LJ Strikethrough, I think, but honestly, it's better fitting for the people over in Iran right now.

-Reileen
regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all

I don't usually listen to J-pop star Utada Hikaru - my main exposure to her is though the songs "Hikari"/"Simple and Clean", which are, respectively, the Japanese and English versions of one of the main theme songs for the Kingdom Hearts video game. Also, I had some vague inkling that one of her songs off one of her North American albums had a line that went something like "You're easy breezy and I'm Japanesey", which just kind of made my mind boggle a little when I heard about it. (I eventually went and Googled the lyrics just to confirm my suspicions. Besides that ridonkulous line, the rest of the song is actually fairly standard-ish pop.)

Anyway, I don't listen to Hikki. But my gal pal vyctori does, and she asked me last night to boggle with her over the vast difference in style and quality between Hikki's recent Japanese releases and her latest North American album, This Is the One.

First, let's take a look at "Heart Station", the title track of her most recent Japanese album, released in March 2008.



A gentle, sweet pop ballad, with lyrics that are just as sentimental (scroll way down to find the English translation).

Were you able to hear my voice as I spoke?
The Heart Station broadcasting at one o’clock in the dead of night
Requires no tuning on the dial as it lies
On a secret frequency.*

Were the radio waves of my heart able to reach you?
It’s broadcasting from the Heart Station of sinners
And only God knows
How much I miss you.

Not my usual thing, but hey, I can see why Hikki's a pop sensation to rival even homegrown diva Ayumi Hamasaki.

Okay, fine. Let's take a look at "Me Muero", the second track off her second North American album This Is The One, released March 2009.



I...I just...what? Vocals: Fail. Production: More Fail. Lyrics: COMPLETE FAIL">:

Everyday my life's in shambles
since you took your love away
I got nothing left to gamble
I've thrown it all away

Now and then I'm suicidal
Flirting with a new temptation
Happiness inside a bottle
is what I need today

Oh my lover's gone away, gone to Istanbul
Light as a feather
I lie in my bed and flip through tv channels
Eating Godiva
I'm smoking my days away reading old emails
In my old pajamas
What a day, me muero, muero, muero

what is this I don't even. And the thing is, this song might actually be tolerable for me if the lyrics were just simple, cliched, and bland, because then this would just be a fun piece of audio junk food.

This Is The One is apparently Hikki's specific attempt to appeal to the American mainstream and to finally have a "breakout" album here in the States, which is why she went for this R&B/hip-hop sound. Y'know, she might be Japanese-American, but the album sounds like something from a native Japanese singer who thinks that all American are "totally gangsta" or something. Seriously, she should've just stuck to her own style. If she really wanted to use R&B/hip-hop elements, she could fuse it with her usual sound and probably get something worthwhile. Because seriously, it's bad when I listen to a song (this song in particular) where I wouldn't have had any audio cues that this was Hikki's work because it sounds more like a generic song from an up-and-coming R&B singer. I'm not even a fan of Hikki and This Is The One makes me feel so embarrassed for her.

***

Need to get back on my school sleeping schedule so I have more time to be productive. I've been waking up at noon or later these past couple of days, and it's refreshing but also annoying. I had something else I wanted to write about but I've been finding lately that my writing abilities have been severely lacking. It's been nine years and I still haven't gotten the hang of this "blogging" thing.

-Reileen
when I'm drivin' in my car and that man comes on the radio

Typing this on the main computer downstairs, while I've freed up my laptop to do the sole job of trimming and saving updated music clips to be posted on my YouTube. Trust me, this is a huge job for that old geezer to be working on. And we're not even getting into the issue of actually uploading those clips to YouTube, hoo boy.

Now let's see if I can remember how to string together coherent, analytical sentences...

***

Tekgrrl by A.J. Menden was a total impulse buy for me at the DePaul Barnes & Noble - I was browsing the shelves while waiting for my dad to drop by and pick me up. I really should have known better, especially since I don't have any a lot of money to spend in the first place, and superhero stories aren't even really my thing in general. But one of the first pages I flipped to had the main character talking about how she always wanted to be a superhero since she was young, "someone important" who would save the world, but then the glamour of that dream quickly wore off once she joined a superhero squad. The sentiment resonated strongly with a main character from a longtime fanfic project of mine (...which I really should update soon, yikes), so I bought the book in the name of pseudo-research.

In a world where superpowered people exist and fight on both sides of the law, Mindy's genius intelligence and mechanical engineering skills seem almost painfully ordinary. Nevertheless, she's achieved her childhood dream and earned herself a place on a team called the Elite Hands of Justice, America's top superhero squad, where she takes on the name of "Tekgrrl". But things haven't been going so well for her lately: her longtime crush has been flirting with the ridiculously attractive new recruit, her gay best friend has finally found himself a boyfriend while she remains single and pushing on age 30, and the government has been trying to dig its fingers into the EHJ via a rival organization headed by ex-ally Simon Leasure.

Compared with all of that, killer headaches seem comparatively innocuous. But those headaches are a symptom of something more sinister: a forcibly-erased nightmare from Mindy's memories of her time spent on an alien planet. And soon, that very same nightmare will be coming to Earth with plans to utterly decimate the planet.

[/narrator voice off]

I enjoyed this book for the most part, albeit more in the sense of "Well, it could be better...but it could also be worse." Despite Mindy's precious angsty past, it's a light, mostly safe read, almost to the point of blandness. The book is kind of like Lays baked potato chips in that sense. (Sorry to any of those who like Lays baked potato chips!) The prose is standard and the primary characters are generally likable. The villains are laughably one-dimensional, but I guess that's to be expected from a superhero story?

My main issue with the book was how Mindy's primary romantic relationship was handled. Her eventual lovebunny doesn't even get pegged as such until literally about halfway through the book, when he declares his Hot, Burnin' I-Can't-Live-Without-You Love for Mindy. Now, okay, obscuring the identity of the One True Love at the beginning of a story is a perfectly legitimate authorial choice. But when your big reveal sends your reader scurrying back through the previous pages to find any hint that this could have been coming, only to find exactly zero, you've got a problem. Seriously, Mindy and this guy had no chemistry at all prior to the Declaration of True Love, and then all of a sudden he kisses her and she finds herself hot for him and then they go on to have wild monkey sex? No. Sorry. Not buying that at all. My experience of the book was really soured by this inept handling of a surprise romance, and I really couldn't find it in myself to cheer the two of them on, even though I'd previously been rooting for Mindy to find some sort of romantic closure after her unrequited crush.

Then there's also the anticlimactic ending. I'm not sure how you can make an interplanetary war between invading alien forces and a team of superheroes into a snorewar, but the author somehow managed it here. Even given [really spoilery bit], the ultimate showdown didn't feel urgent or emotional at all.

In fact, the worldbuilding was lacking overall. I don't know if it was explained in the previous book set in this novelverse, but I was hoping for some backstory on how and why superheroes became this tour de force on Earth. Are we looking at an AU Earth where superheroes have always existed in some way, or what? Since Mindy was sent to study abroad on another freakin' planet, this is definitely a futuristic Earth, so were superheroes another technological marvel that developed prior to this story? Maybe someone with more of a literary kink for superhero stories would have overlooked something like this, but I found that it only contributed to how shallow the entire novel seemed to me. I probably would've excused it if the characters were more compelling (although I did somewhat enjoy the antics of Fantasia and Cyrus the Virus).

All in all, a standard read. I'd probably recommend it if someone had to choose between this and, say, Twilight, but there's gotta be better superhero novels out there. At least I gained some thotz about how to handle a superhero squad in something resembling the real world.

-Reileen
I am the thorn within

Having finished my JPN106 final (likely got a few things wrong on it, especially WRT to the particles and conjugations for passive and causative-passive and blah blah, but I'm working from like a 95-96% in that class, so I'm not worried) and my ART264 project (presenting at the final critique tomorrow afternoon), I have some time to finally post something more substantial than whining and short links. :D?

***

Vienna Teng

Despite having a shitload of music that I still haven't listened to even once, I've been returning rather frequently to Vienna Teng's Inland Territory. It's basically the musical equivalent of comfort food for me at the moment, and healthy comfort food for me, at that. I'm still floored at how rich and full the songs are, and how, despite the title Inland Territory, it's actually the least introspective of Vienna's albums so far. No...that's a misleading description; if you looked up "introspective" in the dictionary you'd find Vienna's picture. What I mean to say is, when you compare the subjects and the handling of those subjects in IT songs versus her earlier songs, there's a stronger tendency in the IT songs to reach out beyond personal, interior experiences. Or rather, the IT songs are remarkable for this fusion of the external world of events that may or may not be beyond our control, with the internal world of emotions and thoughts. It's a skillful, refreshing blending of themes into an audiophiliac frappuccino.

One thing I didn't consciously notice about the album until someone mentioned it on the VT forums: it's framed by two songs that both have what can be referred to as "instrumental choruses". It's especially spine-tingling on St. Stephen's Cross. (Incidentally, both were songs that needed to grow on me for a while before I came to love them, in their own way.)

Vanessa Carlton

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Carlton has debuted two new songs, "Fair-Weather Friends" and "London". Unfortunately, the quality is so bad on these recordings that you can't understand what she's singing, but melodically it sounds like stuff that would fit in with Heroes and Thieves. According to Wiccapedes, she's apparently almost halfway done with the album and will release it later this year, holy shit.

My liking for Vanessa Carlton's music is mildly perplexing to me. She's not necessarily an excellent vocalist - I wouldn't care to hear her a cappella - but it's such a distinctive voice and it fits her songs. Similarly, I get bored real easily playing her piano arrangements because they're so simple, yet I haven't really figured out a good way to transform those arrangements into something more complex (and thus more interesting) for me to perform as a cover. And her lyrics didn't really become compelling to me until Heroes and Thieves, but they've always had a certain je ne sais quoi about them that was uniquely VC.

At any rate, I look forward to VC's new album.

Yousei Teikoku

With their latest release, the single "Gekkou no Chigiri", it seems like YT is moving towards a more pop sound, though they still retain their distinctive gothic, neo-classical, and electronica elements. I was actually underwhelmed by the three songs on "Gekkou no Chigiri", but then again I was also underwhelmed by the songs on "Irodori no Nai Sekai" and now I actually really like the songs for the most part. In particular, I keep on coming back to "Alte Burg" for some reason. I think I'm fascinated by the chord progressions and the melodic structure, the auditory tension pulled tight like a bow in the stanza melodies before being released in a graceful arc into more musically familiar territory for the chorus. They've done this on other songs as well (including other songs on "Irodori no Nai Sekai"), but for some reason the pattern really caught me in "Alte Burg". I'm not entirely sure that it's an effect of this song being necessarily better than their other songs; it may be that I was listening to the song at the right time and in the right mood.

Charice Pempengco

You can sample her music on her MySpace; her Wikipedia page is here.

I first heard about her through the Angry Asian Man. Charice Pempengco is a young Filipina singer who placed third in a Filipino talent show called Little Big Star, loosely patterned after American Idol. However, she only gained worldwide recognition after an avid supporter named "FalseVoice" started posting videos of her performance on YouTube, garnering millions of hits. Through a series of fortunate events, she eventually landed a performance spot on Oprah, which led to her being signed by music producer David Foster. She is supposed to have a US debut album sometime soon, though I'm not entirely sure how soon.

Charice really has an impressive set of pipes, but she seriously needs to learn how to control that voice. She's cited Celine Dion and Mariah Carey as influences, and boy does it show - and not always in a good way. I think it's great that she has such a good range, but I honestly despise it when singers "oversing" their melodies (see also: Christina Aguilera). It seems so unnecessary most of the time. I prefer her softer vocals in "Smile" and "Maalaala Mo Kaya". But hey, what do I know? I think that, with this style of vocals, she may actually have a chance to break into the American mainstream, somewhat. She's already got two albums released in the Philippines, and a single here in the U.S.

Dragonforce

So cheesy! So retro! Yet so gloriously awesome and epic! I wanna write my own Dragonforce-esque song. Not that it would be hard, technically, but still.

***

I have some book discussion I want to do (namely, The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd and Tekgrrl by A.J. Menden - neither of which I was impressed by), but it may take some time for me to formulate coherent reviews about them, so I'll leave y'all with a long-overdue link-o-llection instead.

Jeff Yang: What Does It Mean to be Asian-American?

Four decades later [after the late Ronald Takaki taught the first-ever Black Studies course at UCLA], however, it's worth considering how far the idea of Asian America has come, and how far it can go. Does Asian American identity still have meaning? Have prevailing attitudes towards race evolved to a point where the term "Asian American" limits us rather than lifting us up? Has the moment passed?

Truth be told, the current picture isn't pretty. Many prominent Asian American institutions, particularly those associated with arts, culture and media, have either shut down or are in danger of doing so. Some of this is due to the larger economic crisis, but if pressed, many of the former leaders of these organizations will quietly admit that the core issue they face is simple: Audiences and subscribers for their work have been dwindling, and without collective support from within the community, it's been an uphill battle getting support from outside of it.

On the political front, the vibrant grassroots movement of the '60s and '70s never produced a broad-based pan-Asian American advocacy organization along the lines of the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza. While reinvented old-guard institutions like the Asian American Justice Center (formerly the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium) and exciting new-school entities like Asian Pacific Americans for Progress offer hope, the history of Asian American activism over the past few decades is largely a mosaic of short-term coalitions that were built with a single issue in mind and vanished after that issue no longer seemed pressing.

And those issues are rare these days. It's hard to point to a critical political event that has galvanized pan-Asian communities since 1982, the fight for justice for Vincent Chin, the Chinese American murdered by laid-off Detroit autoworkers for being "Japanese." (Some might suggest the protests against the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon" fit that bill. Even so, those took place in 1991 -- nearly two decades ago.)

All of these factors point to the uncomfortable truth that bringing together Asian Americans has often seemed like herding cats, if those cats were randomly mixed in with, say, dogs, sheep and giraffes -- a metaphor that reflects the staggering diversity of our community, which incorporates dozens of nationalities, each with multiple linguistic, religious and ethnic subsets, and a varying historical record of immigration to the U.S.

Yes, the challenges are enormous. And yet, the stakes are high. Those who seek to suppress racial discourse have gravitated toward Asian Americans as the weakest link in the multicultural chain. They suggest that the successes some Asian Americans have achieved mean we no longer need the protection of a racial category; they point to the difficulties we've faced in organizing as evidence the category never should have existed in the first place.

Ray Fisman @ Slate: Want more women to study science? Hire more female professors.

The researchers also found that the influence of professor gender was even starker for the set of students who were math whizzes when they entered the Academy (those with math SAT scores above 700). For these students, a female instructor eliminated the gender GPA gap entirely—and solely because high-performing women did well in their classes rather than because high-ability men underperformed.

What's more, having a male instructor didn't just affect female cadets' performance in their first-year classes—ramifications could be seen throughout their undergraduate careers. Not surprisingly, students who did well in their introductory science classes were more likely to go on to obtain science degrees (and presumably go on to science-related professions). Among high-math-SAT students—those most likely to be the ones to go on to obtain science degrees—the authors calculate that having a women-only roster of faculty would create gender parity among science majors.

What is it about a woman instructor that is so important for female pupils? It's unlikely to be simply the sense of empowerment of seeing that women can in fact make it in science. If that were the case, then having all female professors should help their female students catch up to the men and having all male professors should cause the male-female performance gap to widen. Yet the authors found that, while female students perform better on average in classes taught by female professors, there are some male professors under whom there's no achievement gap between male and female students (and also some female professors for whom the gender gap is as big as that of some of their male colleagues). So some men are very good at mentoring women, just not nearly enough of them.

John Scalzi: The New York Times: We May Slide into Irrelevancy But At Least We Update Daily

The thing about this Times piece is that it feels almost endearing anachronistic; not to run down blogs, but they’re not exactly the hot new kid on the block these days, are they. These days it seems like the only people starting new blogs are laid-off journalists, which says something both about blogs and these journalists. Everyone else has moved on to Facebook and Twitter. Which is something I personally applaud; I like my blog, but I’m a wordy bastard, by profession and by inclination, and online social networks actually do a far better job of what people wanted blogs to do, which is be a way to act and feel connected online with friends and family. No one gives a crap if your tweet or status update is short and utterly inconsequential (”Hey! I just ate a hot dog!”) — indeed, that’s kind of the point.

nonfluffypagans has a post discussing the idea of pagan community centers. It touches on a number of issues that PCCs face, including money, interpersonal politics, and the lack of support from the broader community.

I want this corset like burning.

Iraqi teen cracks 300-year-old math puzzle.

Tokyopop recently raised the prices on its individual manga volumes, but it looks like readers are actually getting less for their money.

And then finally, an article from The Onion that is sure to be a classic: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!

-Reileen
fire's getting closer but I've got to stay calm

Kotaku: Golden Sun DS announced at E3

Video footage here.

dafkjadkfja you have no idea how happy this makes me. I want to own my own DS (instead of stealing my brother's) just for this. Just for this.

Oh, Camelot, I have forgiven thee thy trespasses. Hudson, on the other hand - you're still on my shitlist! Though depending on how much I enjoy Custom Battler Bomberman, I may be inclined to temper my eventual explosive revenge a bit.

-Reileen
did you ever know that you're my hero?

I want to win this contest on Tuts+ like Burning Fire Bomb. You basically sign up for a free account at one of the listed websites, then you create a collection of 30 images based on a theme like "holidays" or something, then you make the collection public and link it in the comments to the entry I just linked - and you can enter as many times as you like.

The grand prize? $3500, the photo files in your winning collection, and a year-long subscription to the Plus program at Tuts+.

Fuck yeah I am doing this. I think I might start working on my entries tomorrow in-between group meetings for my design classes. The deadline's not 'til June 15th but like hell I'm going to be waiting 'til last minute on something like this. Procrastination cannot defeat me now!

There's other things I wanted to talk about, but I need to finish the second set of mockups for ART264. It won't be hard, but it'll require time, and I'd like to be able to get as much done as I can for the mockups so that the final version won't take so long.

-Reileen
sometimes it's hard to make things clear

Have been up since 6:50am. Running on less than three hours of sleep. Have been walking around downtown Chicago for nearly four and a half hours straight looking for possible places to work. Am praying that the computer labs in the art building will be free enough for me to print the mockups for my ART264 project critique at 6:40pm, since doing it at Kinko's would've killed my wallet and then some. May return to the building early and wait there if I finish with doing job apps in the general computer labs or if I get bored.

Planning to apply at...

*House of Brides
*Borders (Beverly, State & Lake, North & Clybourn)
*The Body Shop @ Water Tower Place
*Through DePaul's Career Center online resume thingy...
*WetSeal
*Michaels(?)

Need to eventually follow up at...

*Target
*Kohl's
*Blick
*Urban Outfitters
*Dots
*Staples

I also want to check out some of the Belmont shops (though I highly doubt any of them are hiring), but I am way too tired to do it today. And I'd like to check out stuff near Orland Park as well. I'd really prefer to have a downtown job, though, just so I could hop a ride with my dad during the week and have him drop me off there on the way to work.

On a slightly lighter note, I bought this cute aqua-and-purple scarf at Nordstrom's using a gift card I had there. I'm...not entirely sure how I'm supposed to wear it (it's a square-shaped scarf), but that's what Google is for.

EDIT: Also, I am mightily annoyed that, once again, design advisors are not returning my inquiries! In this case, I e-mailed the professor of one of my required classes for fall quarter to manually add me to the class, since it was already closed when I went to enroll in it for fall quarter. Of course, he hasn't e-mailed me back!

Fuck this shit. When fall quarter rolls around, I'm showing up in that class and demanding that I be let in. I need that class; if I can't get into it for fall quarter, I can't graduate by next spring.*

-Reileen
and now I wait my whole lifetime for you

---

*Well, technically, this applies to any course I'll be taking during the next academic year. I'm miffed because the single HON350 listing is closed, and the Honors program has a policy of not allowing more than 20 students a class, so it's not like I can plead with the advisors to let me into the class. I was hoping to get it over with during fall quarter, because that meant I could focus on my experiential learning course for winter quarter and then my senior capstone for spring quarter. Maybe I can do a little something to get a spot to open up over the summer...

In anticipation of summer break, which cannot come fast enough, I've compiled a list of things I hope to do over the summer.

*Language learning - Reviewing Japanese and teaching myself Cebuano in a semi-formal manner.

One of the things that I think has been making it hard for me to learn Cebuano (besides the weird-ass verb conjugations) is the fact that I don't have a textbook to follow from. I do have the next-best thing, which is a grammar handbook, but while there is some thematic organization to the book, it's primarily with regards to vocab (e.g., "fruits and vegetables", "animals", etc.) and parts of speech (e.g., "Nouns and How You Use Them"). That is to say, this book is not "practically" organized.

What I plan to do - and which may or may not break my brain even further - is to start reviewing my Japanese lessons, right from the beginning, and translates those lessons into Cebuano. Example - am I learning how to say where something is in a room? Okay, then I'll review how to say it in Japanese and then find the Cebuano equivalent. Have I come up against those pesky counters? I'll beat myself over the head with them and then do it again for Cebuano! Ad nauseam.

I also hope to finally finish up an amateur translation of a rare Golden Sun 4-koma anthology that's been in the works for a few years now. I'm over halfway done with it, and I'll have the help and enthusiasm of my friend kiirobon, who is way better than me at reading and translating, so I'm pretty sure that if I just apply myself (HA!), I'll be able to get this done.

My fandom cred will be OVER NINE THOUSSAAAAAANNNNDDDDD

*Career advancement - Freelance work, self-teaching, Artist Alley

Feeling bad that I did so crappy on my earnings from Artist Alley this year, Lauren specifically called me up on my cell phone one night a few weeks ago to tell me about the Alchemy section of that crazy site Etsy. Alchemy is where members can put up requests for custom handmade goods - with "handmade" covering the field of graphic design services - and then interested people can bid on the request. Uh, hell yes I'm going to do this! MONEY MONEY MONEY. Even though I looked at some of the requests and started emoing about how inexperienced I am and how I have no talent at all and there's no way they'd ever choose my designs over someone else's even if I offered it for free and even if I tried I'll totally do everything wrong and they'll hate me and blah blah glitterfries. Alas, I must get some experience somehow, so I'm going to attempt to dip my toes into doing freelancing work, since it's what I want to get into eventually. (I also kind of want to open my own design firm, but that's far in the future, if it's in the future at all.)

Another thing I'd like to do is to get more familiar with Adobe Illustrator. I love Photoshop to death, but I recognize that Illustrator is, like, fucking huge for things like logos and layout and typography and such. Which are all things that I'll probably end up doing for a while to pay the bills after college, so I'd best start making that program my bitch. I've already found this site and its Photoshop equivalent, which made me SQUEEEEEE so hard because LOOK AT ALL THE SHINY NOMG. I'll attempt to work my way through some of the tutorials so that I become more familiar with the workspace of Illustrator and so I can start finding my workflow for the program. I'd also like to learn Adobe InDesign because it's specifically for working with heavy text layouts, like in books and magazines, but I'm sort of afraid to install the progam on my arthritic heap of a laptop, so I guess that'll have to wait. Anyway, trying to learn Illustrator will be headache enough. And I'm also hoping to get more familiar with photomanipulation techniques, since, y'know, that's what Photoshop is for.

And somewhere in-between, I have to find time to work on stuff for Artist Alley! Although I'm not even sure I'll do it next year, because 2009-2010 is going to be my senior year (oh, Gods, please let this be true) and therefore it's going to be jam-packed with all sorts of academic goodies to swallow whole. I guess I oughta at least start working on original illustrations, like for my Teng Shui series and for Shiroko.

*Wasting time - Playing video games, continuing to perform at Borders, writing fanfic and maybe some minor work on original fic.

I totally lost my gamer cred years ago, which is why I'm going to attempt to regain some of it by completing a few of my dust-bunny-covered video games when I can. Contenders include Baten Kaitos (...although first I have to actually purchase this game, oops), Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (and maybe I'll even re-play the first game as a refresher! And maybe Hudson will actually do a reboot of Bomberman 64: The Second Attack), and Xenosaga.

I...actually have no idea if I'm going to be able to do any music over the summer. I was thinking of trying to hit up another Borders closer to my home in addition to the LaGrange Borders, but I'd like to get some new songs on my repertoire before then. In particular, I'd love to be able to get "Eidolon" done, because I think this has the makings of something relatively epic (for me, at least, I don't know if that'll apply for other people). And I'm starting to get a little bored with "Gospel of the Shadow of Nobody", which I guess is a good/bad sign that I really need to be working on new things. Might be nice to get a better arrangement for "One Day" as well. Oh, and I oughta finish up "No Longer Yours Truly", too.

...uh, yeah. Writing. Uh. Me write pretty one day! *thud* When I get some real talent and not the adulterated bland stuff I've been sniffing for the past couple of years.

Speaking of writing, I'm not sure if I'm going to do NaNo this year, what with having to focus on school and such. If I do decide to tackle NaNo again, I'll probably lower the goalpost to 25k and do a fanfic instead of original fic.

*Real world - Getting a part-time summer job.

Mostly because I'm feeling really guilty over making my parents pay for a lot of my stuff, including the non-necessities. Also, I have been watching lippy_addicts and other goth/punk-fashion related comms and sites and have been wanting to revamp my wardrobe something fierce. But I would feel really bad if I made my parents pay for this stuff...not that I think they'd pay for that kind of stuff in the first place, anyway. I just started getting apps and turning them in a few days ago, and I have to follow up on some things. I also need to check out more places downtown and on the North Side near DePaul, since I got the A-OK from the 'rents to look for work there. If I have to, though, I'll go back to Gamestop (shudder) or resort to McDonald's (SHUDDER), because like hell I'm going to make my parents pay for...

*Livin' la vida loca - GOING TO MOTHERFUCKIN' LAS VEGAS!

Even if that trip does happen to fall on my birthday weekend.

Yeah, so the story goes, me and a bunch of friends decided we wanted to do something crazy over the summer, so we're gonna fly out to Vegas for a weekend and generally be, uh, crazy. And...stuff. The hotel rates are relatively cheap now because of the recession, and since there's going to be a fair amount of us going, the hotel fare will be split up into manageable portions. We'll be staying at a tower suite at the Stratosphere, I think?

The main problem for all of us is the airfare, which going to and from Vegas ends up being around $340. There's no way I'd be able to make that kind of money freelancing, so I gotta face the real world and go get a job. I hope I end up with something tolerable - I did the math, and even if I worked a slacker schedule of only, like, 10 hours a week, if I worked from the middle of June through July I'd still have enough money to go to Vegas with some left over for extraneous expenses.

***

oh dear gods my ART264 .psd file is fucking huge. That's what she said! I hope my computer can handle it, because I'd hate to have to be stuck at the computer labs just to work on this. I know, I know, that's probably what the majority of on-campus design students do, but dammit, if I can help it, I don't want to be at school any longer than I have to! Even if the Mac computers in that one lab are some badass muthafuckahz. I'm really leaning towards getting a Mac as my desktop!

Anyway, gotta do some Japanese (which I actually mostly completed earlier in the day, YAY FOR BEING A RESPONSIBLE STUDENT WHEN IT'S ALREADY THE END OF THE YEAR AND NOTHING REALLY MATTERS ANYMORE) and then this three-page peer review paprt for ART227 which I totally forgot I had to do.

-Reileen
hear me out, I'm not your enemy

Have been sick with flu-like symptoms over the past few days. No idea if it's swine flu. Am annoyed that I cannot be productive, but otherwise am not dying. I think. Been staying home the past two days anyway.

In the meantime, DePaul has had its first confirmed case of swine flu.

***

I also got a Dreamwidth account, though hell if I know what I'll use it for. I'm not really active in many communities yet on this account, and I really only got a DW because a lot of people I followed here ended up moving their primary posting platform to DW. Feel free to add me or not.

***

Quick notes on stuff that I've listened to recently.

Dragonforce, Inhuman Rampage: Wow, it's amazing how every song on this album sounds exactly the same! I mean, yeah, okay, I happen to really love "Through the Fire and Flames", which is the first song on the album, but I don't want 7+ iterations of it on the same album, okay? Maybe it'll grow on me after a few more listens, but the crazy guitar riffs, as awesome as they are, get tiring when you listen to them one right after the other.

Pentaphobe, A Tribal Metamorphosis: Nice atmospheric music, if you need something dark and primal.

Yael Naim, Yael Naim: A nice low-key serving of quirky folk/acoustic, with a wide sampling of musical tastes. It hasn't settled with me, but maybe one of y'all might like her?

Tori Amos, Abnormally Attracted to Sin: Reminiscent of To Venus and Back with its electronica elements and darker sounds. I actually prefer this kind of sound for her. My main gripe with this album is that it's too long - listening to it is like dealing with an overflow of tomato sauce in a cheese pizza. I haven't decided yet which songs she should've cut, though. My favorite so far is "Give", which is the first song on the album; will be giving this a few more spins once I'm actually conscious enough to pay attention.

-Reileen
the sound of evil laughter falls around the night

Visit foc_u for more details.

In light of the most recent instance of RaceFail in fandom (now called MammothFail to distinguish it from RaceFail '09, which happened earlier this year), I thought I should, at least, step up and say that, o hai, i r fan of color.

However...I am also a Clueless Fan of Color.

I have lived a life in which my numerous other privileges - class and education being the most obvious ones, but there are probably others that I'm not aware of - have allowed me to live a fairly colorblind existence up until recently. It wasn't that I never thought of myself as not being Filipino-American; it's that I never, never experienced something that made me attach negative connotations to that identity, and in fact I view it primarily as a badge of pride, as a mark of ~*~specialness~*~ (sometimes to the point of exoticness, I fear). There's a lot of layers of colored sand that's being shifted around here in my experience of racial identity as a second-gen Filipino-American, but I don't have the words or energy (...or courage) to put them out there for others to read just yet. But in short, I have never consciously experienced anything (yet) that made me hate being different. Being Other.

But I know that many, many other fen of color don't have that same privilege. So this short entry, this posting of a shiny banner and a link to a helpful community, is for those fen who are being silenced, who are being made to fade into the background, who are being ignored.

***

In more mundane news, I have been sick since Friday and it doesn't look like things are getting better. Mommykins wants me to stay home tomorrow if my fever gets any worse (it was hovering around 100*F for the past few days, then I took it today and I was at, like 101.4*F or something).

-Reileen
what would you go wild for?

I didn't make a lot from Artist Alley this year, but that was about what I expected. I did, however, learn a lot, and will be better armed to take over the Alley next year. (Beware an invasion of Kirby pumpkins!) I think, based on this initial experience, that I actually prefer being in the Artist Alley as opposed to being a regular patron of the con, because at least that way, if I don't want to go to any panels, I won't be stuck in my hotel room feeling like I should be doing something. (It also prevents me from wandering the dealer's room for too long and dropping my cash on stuff. As my friend Lauren said: "Earn, not burn!")

Major highlights for me include seeing my two pet fandoms - Bomberman and Golden Sun - in meatspace, holy crap. I ran into this Bomberman cosplay and this Isaac cosplay, both of which surprised the hell out of me. I also found Gintoki and Neuro and Yako! There was also a bunch of Abyss and Symphonia cosplayers. And I discovered two other Bomberfanatics in the Artist Alley. We are out there, yay!



Here's the booty I scored from the con this year, which isn't much but which I am very satisfied with. Am trying to figure out where I want to put the Gintoki and Bomberman pins. Missing from the picture is a $2.00 Okami fanart bookmark that I got from Lydia's friend, who had a table in Artist Alley. The clips were made by another artist in the Alley who graciously let us hang out by her when we were in table limbo early Friday morning (long story short: there was a database error that assigned two studios to one table, and the other studio had claimed the table first, so we got shuttled to a free table that was in a dinky corner of the Alley).

-Sora G. Silverwind
I want to be awakened right now

The first version of this was written while bored in HAA115 one day - which was actually canceled today for whatever reason.

Lament to the Wordmaster

Wordmaster, hear me, pity me, grant me this chance:
Why does my pen refuse to behave in my hands?
Why are my words born dead from my throat?
Why am I unable to drink from the cosmic well
Of tales to be told, though I thirst more
Than a fool who wanders Saharan shores?

Wordmaster, I know I am an imperfect tool for You
To record the many events that never once happened true
But let my blood flow as Your ink
Let my crippled fingers dance once more
In honor of Your wisdom and wit without end
For it is upon You that my own talents depend.

***

So, y'all are familiar with Chuck Norris "facts", right? Like "Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird" and "Chuck Norris CAN believe it's not butter" and all those other things.

In light of Norris' most recent act of fail-fu (which he started training extensively in a couple of years back), I offer up, instead, substantially more awesome Bill Nye facts. Nope, no scare quotes this time. Because they're true.

Bill Nye can split atoms with his bare hands.

Bill Nye decides if Schroedinger's Cat is alive or dead.

Bill Nye can rhyme seven words with orange.

Bill Nye invented inventing.

When Chuck Norris has a problem, he asks Bill Nye.

Some people can recite the first few thousand digits of pi. Bill Nye can recite the last thousand digits of pi.

The reason light is so fast is because it's running away from Bill Nye.

Bill Nye drinks water with ice cubes that read at below 0 Kelvin.

***

Okay, time to figure out what to do for my ART227 and ART264 sketches. Mrr, I am so tired. Probably 'cause I've been drinking Dr. Pepper instead of Mountain Dew since we ran out of the Dew in the house.

-Reileen
you feed it once and now it stays

Looks like I won't be getting my usual nap today. In addition to having to work on the final version of my poster for ART264 (which shouldn't really take that long, but just in case), I need to:

1) Continue doing the necessary research and sketches with regards to getting saleable goods for ACEN. (Which I just started during ART227 class this morning, lol.) MAN! It's even more expensive to get 500 custom Post-It books printed (that's the minimum number of pieces I have to order) at that one site I was looking at than it is to order 144 multi-color screened T-shirts (again, min. number of pieces). Le WTF?! Back to the drawing board again.
1a) I have to design my business card, some sign stuff (commission information + product pricing), and then a banner for our entire table. Will have to talk with Lauren about this. I still need to work on Selasphoria's logo. lkjelkranldkfmlakdmfadf WHY DID I PUT THIS OFF SO LOOOONNNG.

2) Attend a Visual Art and Design career workshop in the student center from 4pm-6pm. Well, okay, so I don't need to do this, but it would help. A lot. And I want to get there early so that I can get as much information as possible before I have to leave for Typography I at 5:45pm.
2a) Melissa forwarded me an e-mail she got from Tokyopop. They're apparently looking for design interns?! OMGYESPLZ. Alas, Tokyopop is located in L.A., which is decidedly far from me. However, I'm checking with them now through e-mail about when their winter and spring sessions are - I'm just wondering if I can just move to L.A. for my winter vacation next year and do the internship during that time. If I can (...which seems unlikely), then I have to check with my advisor to see if it'll actually count for credit (junior year experiential learning, hopefully), and with my family to make sure that they're actually willing to let me fly out to L.A.to do this internship. It seems unlikely, but it's for school, so maybe they'll relent. I wonder if Tokyopop also has available summer sessions...?

Am debating on whether it's possible for me to do most of my schoolwork in advance so that I'll have more time to cram (if needed...which is probably is) when it comes closer to ACEN time. I think it's feasible for JPN106 if I just sit my ass down for a couple of hours with my workbook pages, textbook, and a heavy dose of Japanese music blaring in the background. I'll definitely need to do research for HAA115 early on and turn that research paper in early (not that I have any idea what the fuck is going on in that class). I'm a little less certain on getting ahead for ART227 and ART264, but I should be able to stay current with those classes, at least.

***

Slowly rediscovering Metallica's Load album. I liked a lot of songs from this album already ("Hero of the Day", "The Outlaw Torn", "Until It Sleeps"), but there were other songs that didn't grab my attention from the outset, so I'm giving them a closer listen on my commutes on the train (well, when I can hear them over the roar of the El) and seeing what I make of them now. I really prefer the musical styles on Load, Reload, and the Black Album over Metallica's other work, such as from Death Magnetic, which is too thrashy for my tastes. I can't listen to the Black Album anymore, though - I think it wore out its welcome for me a couple of years back. (That album was, incidentally, my gateway drug into Metallica.) I still like the songs on it, and I still think it's a pretty solid album, it's just...I don't know, the thought of listening to the album now is like taking stale gum from the bottom of a chair and trying to chew it.

I have a similar problem with Evanescence's Fallen, which was my gateway drug into Evanescence's music and into gothic/symphonic rock in general. But at least with Fallen I can sometimes load it up for the sake of nostalgia. Despite discovering Metallica around the same time as Evanescence, I don't have that same sense of nostalgia for the Black Album.

(But I guess I should actually listen to the album now and see what it feels like, instead of just thinking about what it might feel like listening to it.)

I was also able to listen to Karl Sanders' latest solo installment, Saurian Exorcisms. Initial impressions were positive, but since I had it on as background music for something else I wasn't able to give it my full attention, so I'll try to give it a closer listen later and write up moar thotz.

Unfortunately, I was less thrilled with Lacuna Coil's Shallow Life, which should be out in the U.S. today but which I was able to listen to earlier. With Karmacode, Lacuna Coil's been moving away from the gothic stylings of Comalies, Unleashed Memories, and In a Reverie, which is disappointing to me. But Karmacode still felt lush and full to me when I listened to it years ago.

Shallow Life, on the other hand, feels...well...shallow. Again, I had this playing in the background while I was doing something, so maybe I'm just missing something, but I honestly wasn't very impressed with it. Then I went on Wikipedia and found out that it was produced by a Don Gilmore, who is well-known for producing Linkin Park's first two albums, Hybrid Theory and Meteora, along with some other work for Avril Lavigne, Good Charlotte, and others. Take that as you will.

On the other hand, I love the album cover for Shallow Life.

***

Am I the only person who can tell the difference in taste between bottled soda and canned soda, and prefers canned soda?

-Reileen
the higher you are, the farther you fall

Vienna Teng and her crew gave an amazing performance at Schuba's on Friday, as they always do. (I have video evidence of this fact, but alas, it doesn't even begin to capture the magick of the moment.) I stalked caught up with her later and got her to autograph my copy of Inland Territory - yay! She also thanked me for my review of the album, which I think she found through the forum - double yay! And I found out that the reason they haven't played "Augustine" live yet is because they haven't really found an arrangement that they really liked for it. So now I await with bated breath the fateful day that she gives a live performance of "Augustine."

The opening act, Ben Sollee, was pretty damn amazing too. I'm not sure if his music, which could probably be described as "country on cello", is my thing or not, but lemme tell you, he's damn good on the cello.

After the performance, I crashed at lysis_to_kill's place with Lauren and Melissa. We watched Crash, which isn't exactly a "fun movie night" kind of film, but I'd heard about it back in HON301 and Lauren had brought it with her, and no one really cared which movie we watched so I just took charge of the viewing materials. (I'd say that this is such a typically Leo thing of me to do, but then, Melissa and Lauren are both Leos too...) Crash is an incredibly uncomfortable film to watch because of the way it takes on a lot of major racial issues in America, and the characters of the large main cast fall into a lot of grey areas. Some are more redeemable - or redeemed - than others.

By the time we finished this movie, it was getting kind of late, but somehow we decided that we wanted to watch something else, so we popped one of the DVDs I had for the first season of The Big Bang Theory and watched the first episode. Much lulz were had. I seriously need to watch the rest of this series; it's flippin' hilarious and I love all the geek jokes even if I can't understand half of them. (Tangentially related - I also need to finish watching Firefly - I think I'm on the second DVD of the boxset that I got for Christmas two years ago. I'm so bad with sitting down and just watching shit.)

Despite the late bedtime, all of us were up before 8:00am, WTF. However, the early wake-up was sweetened - literally - by a pack of cook-it-yourself Cinnabons that Liz managed to pick up in the fridge aisle at Jewel. OMG SO GOOD AND SO UNHEALTHY FOR YOU. I'm afraid to find and buy these for myself, because I'll probably be eating them all. The. Time.

***

So, the final chapter of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro was released on Friday. I'm sad that MTNN has to end, but if we had to get an end, this was a pretty good end to get. And Matsui is supposed to be releasing a new series this July - I'm not sure if it's a new ongoing series or a one-shot, though.

( These minor spoilers are on the tip of my tongue. )

Fare thee well, Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro. It was sweet while it lasted. Now if only someone would pick up the tankoubon for English localization!

-Reileen
I run but it stays right by my side

I found this lovely poem from the POV of an aswang:

I am the dark-hued bitch; see how wide my maw, my bloodmoon eyes,
And in daylight, see the tangles and knots of my riverine hair.
I am the bad daughter, the freedom fighter, the shaper of death masks.
I am the snake, I am the crone; I am caretaker of these ancient trees.
I am the winged tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik, tik-tik; I am close,
And from under the floorboards, the grunting black pig,
Cool in the dirt, mushrooms between my toes, I wait.
I am the encroaching wilderness, the bowels of these mountains;
I am the opposite of your blessed womb. I am your inverted mirror;
Guard your unborn children, burn me with your seed and salt,
Upend me, bend my body, cleave me beyond function. Blame me.

The author talks more about the mythology of the aswang in the blog entry. I need to do more research into the aswang and the babaylan...

-Reileen
why am I loved only when I'm gone?

Every time I think about how much I still have to learn about racism, sexism, sizeism, ablism, insert-ism-here, American government and politics, world politics, the environment, society, religion (my own and others), and so forth, I remind myself that all of the voices I admire on these topics have at least 10 to 30 years of life on me. I can only hope I'll be as awesomely smart and educated as them when I reach the age they are now. And that I can't be an expert on everything - I have to pick and choose my battles. At the same time, knowledge of one battle potentially informs knowledge of another battle, and so forth...

Of course, one must start somewhere. I am toying with the idea of setting up a semi-formal personal "lesson plan" for various topics, but I have horrible self-discipline, so while the idea sounds appealing, I fear it is merely a well-intentioned road to intellectual hell. Still, I think I need to find some way of retaining concrete bits and pieces of information that I pick up through my list of usual blogs and the things they link to. I'm good with getting the broader picture of things but horrible with picking through details, and if I'm to eventually dive into Topics Of Graver Note either here or elsewhere, I'm going to need facts. (Much as they may confuse me.) One possible solution I'm seeing with regards to how I organize the information I learn is to use my main topics of personal interest - Greek paganism, for example - as a way of framing and looking at other topics (i.e., feminism, sexism, and the environment being obvious ones for a follower of Artemis). This seems like one of those "duh" moments, but it doesn't hurt to concretize this somewhere.

Another thought: what I may -may - start doing is to practice speed reading through articles or blogposts (using methods outlined in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading - yeah, yeah, I know) and, in a notebook set aside specifically for this purpose, writing down bits and pieces of what I can remember before going back and filling in the blanks. I barely keep up with the "daily pages" outlined in Julia Cameron's excellent The Artist's Way, though, so I can't imagine that this will go over well.

I don't know. I frequently feel like I don't have the intellectual capacity to comprehend most of this stuff. But I feel that this is something I must make myself figure out, as an artist with fingers in various creative pies, because that is the way to make what I do - something which is frequently seen as being superficial, superfluous, or otherwise unimportant - relevant to the greater world. I'm not necessarily talking about making overtly polemical or political art; that's not the type of person I am. But the things I learn about people, about society, about the world at large, will and do inform what I do and why I do it: how I decide to interact with the world.

-Reileen
no use in spending all that emotion when there's someone else to blame

I actually have a number of LJs. My oldest one is almost 10 years old by this point - I got it when LJ was still invite-only, in 2001. IIRC, my first LJ entry in that particular LJ was about school and grades. I discovered while re-reading both my old digital journals and my old dead-tree journals that I bitched about school and grades a lot. What can I say, I had a boring life. I might've rambled on a bit about anime, too.

My first entry in reileen was basically a faux-contemplative thing about why I chose the name "Reileen" and about where I was at that point in my life, which was...not really in a very good place. Better than some, worse than I would've liked.

***

Skipped ART227 today in favor of taking an early nap (about 8:30am to 10:15am) before working on my poster mockups for ART264 later tonight. I'm slowly getting used to Illustrator, and am beginning to see why people would like using it, especially for layout and logo design. Because it's vector-based as opposed to pixel-based like Photoshop, it's easier not only to get smoother lines, but also easier to resize things if you decide that you fucked up on something. And it just feels...more organized, somehow. I can't imagine using Illustrator solely for - lulz - illustrating, though. I might try experimenting with doing outlines in Illustrator and then importing those over into Photoshop, especially because Illustrator has that miter thingamabobber thingy that lets you get points on all your sharp corners, which I've always had to add by hand when doing outlines in Photoshop. I think I need to get my hands on an Adobe Illustrator CS3 bible or someshit, to get more familiar with all the doodads and thingamajigs in this program. I've become quite competent with the Pen tool and its crazy Paths over the past few years, so I think I should do fine in picking up Illustrator over my time as an A&D major and then applying it to other stuff (work, play, in-between).

I still have no idea what the fuck is going on in HAA115, but I'm going to have to do some early research on the three-eyed hairerection-sporting deity statue. The professor hasn't handed out, like, an official outline sheet for this paper or anything, but the paper is due May 8th, which is, uh, the day of ACEN! Yeah. So I might as well get familiar with some general stuff. In the meantime, I suppose none of y'all out there would be able to help me out on making sense of the history of ancient Indian art, would you?

I'm going to need to start going to bed earlier on Mondays and Wednesdays; taking a nap in the library is good for a decent recharging of the biological battery, but it's not exactly the most comfortable thing in the world, and I could be using that time to work on homework, or at least to get my urge to dick around on the Internet out of my system before I start being productive.

***

I've suddenly been trampled by a bunch of hangout plans. First up is the Vienna Teng performance at Schuba's Tavern this Friday, which I'll be attending with lysis_to_kill, Lauren, and Melissa. Before that, we'll be eating out (probably at Clarke's Diner), and then after that we'll be crashing at lysis_to_kill's apartment overnight. I might have to bail out early, though, because I need to get homework done and then do Artist Alley stuff which I still have not started WTF. D:

Then there's ACEN from May 8 to May 10. The crew this time 'round consists of myself, Lauren, Melissa, lysis_to_kill, Melissa's friend Susan, and Susan's friend, all crammed into a four-person bedroom at the Crowne Plaza. All of us are flailing around a bit as we're ironing the wrinkles out of plans for things to bring, when we'll be checking in, et cetera and so forth. This has the distinction of being lysis_to_kill's first ever anime convention, so I imagine that the vets in the group will all have fun playing "horrify the anime convention n00b" with her. :D! (Also, Liz, if you want, I'll lend you the first five volumes of a manga called Death Note. You may like it - it's got serial killers, the FBI, and other such things, but with a supernatural twist. Also, the art is purtyful.)

And then finally, it seems that there are plans in the air amongst Lauren, Melissa, and others to go on a weekend Las Vegas trip over the summer, since the prices there have dropped to ridonkulously low levels and airfare is also dirt-cheap. Now this should be interesting if we can get this off the ground!

***

Random: I freakin' want Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.

-Reileen
it seems that the whole experience is terrible and crippling

In some ways I really don't feel like writing anymore. The ease with which writing used to come to me is stilted now, the flow dammed by piles of insecurities, of weaknesses, of other sorts of dark, messy things that one usually finds in a sewer or in three-week-old boursin cheese. It will come again, in time, I suppose. But words are not my strength at this moment. I'm not sure what is.

Nevertheless, I keep trying here in my nigh-invisible corner of the internet, because I feel as though it will be important somehow, someday. I don't expect to do anything world-changing, as much as it would be nice; I merely want the confidence that I can express what I want to express. And writing things down makes them real, in a way. (Which is why I stopped doing a lot of reflective journaling during the darker phases of my life a year or so ago, I think.) It forces me to make clear the haze that clouds my vision, so that I can move forward with more certainty of where I am going next.

***
I headed out to the Art Institute today to pick out my topic for an HAA115 research paper. The paper's not due 'til May 8, but we need to have our topic chosen by Monday. It wasn't that hard - I'd been through the Asian Art galleries of the Art Institute before with a fellow classmate in ART200, so I had an idea of what to find there. I quickly settled on a piece that had caught my eye previously: a statue of the Japanese Buddhist deity Shukongo-jin, who I would conjecture is a record of the earliest known instance of a hairerection in Japan. (Close-up here.) Seriously, though, check out the physique, too - this guy is like a proto-Dragonball Z character, and more terrifyingly badass than one.

Since it didn't take me long to choose my paper topic and get the required information, I decided to wander around the Art Institute a bit and get the most out of my $7.00 admission. I explored the Yousuf Karsh: Regarding Heroes exhibit, and was pleasantly surprised by it. Karsh was an Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer with a long, esteemed career, spanning over 60 years and many famous subjects, including Pablo Picasso, Indira Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Audrey Hepburn, and Winston Churchill. I was very impressed with how the lighting rendered the various details in the portraits, especially the facial details. The posing and settings were impeccable, as well - they full capture a sense of the power of the subject's personality. Whether the power and the personality depicted are actually true to the subject is, of course, up for debate, but seeing as Karsh was an optimist, it may be better to temporarily put aside those misgivings and to simply enjoy the portraits for their craftsmanship. Portraits, either photographic or rendered by hand, are harder to do well than one might think; I wonder if it's the case that one should be genuinely interested in people to be a good portrait artist.

I also stopped by the Thorne Miniature Rooms, featuring a collection of intricately constructed miniature models of various European and American interiors from the late 13th century up until the 1930s. Pure eye candy, I tell you. I could've spent the entire day in there, if it weren't for the fact that I was starving and the tiny viewing area smelled like humid people and...'twas not very pleasant. I want to get my hands on the Art Institute book about these rooms, though - they're simply amazing. There was something like this at The House on the Rock when I visited it a long while back, too, which was equally enthralling for me. I appreciate it primarily for the scenery porn (the upholstery! the floor plans! the different furniture styles! the stuff and thingies on the walls!), but I think it's also valuable as a historical record, as well.

Tangentially related, but just outside the Art Institute, there was this group of...I don't even know what they were, so I'm just calling them the urban taiko drummers, 'cause that's what their performance reminded me of:



I wonder if I should eventually invest in a membership to the Art Institute. That would depend entirely, of course, on how long I end up staying in Chicago. And it's hard enough for me to get my ass up and out of the house; me and lysis_to_kill keep on making plans to visit the Field Museum or the other hotspots on the museum campus, but then we get distracted by shiny things on the Internet. Or cheeses at Baker's Square. Le sigh.

***

I finished reading Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara today. I liked the book well enough, but am not sure if I'm intrigued enough to keep reading. If I get some free time and can get the books from a library, maybe I will (I bought Cast in Shadow when I ordered my spring quarter books off Amazon). I do like the five different races featured in the world of the book, and the characters are well-portrayed. Unfortunately, there were frequently times where I'd be reading along, and then I'd have to double back and re-read, because I had stumbled across something that made no sense to me, and I'd be like, "What? How did that logically follow from the thing prior to it?" I can't tell if this is an actual flaw with the writing style of the book or if it's just my poor reading habits, though. And while I like the main character, Kaylin, decently enough, it's more of a "well, I don't hate her and she hasn't shown any irredeemable traits for me" kind of like.

Also, the book cover is kind of fugly. (Bitches, I am an art & design major in addition to being a bookworm, I have every right to whine about ugly book covers! Not that a fugly cover has any bearing on the quality of a book; it's just something I like pointing out.)

-Reileen
all you people look at me like I'm a little girl