Why we have not posted in like forever.
FINALS.
That will be all.
Deconstructive Criticism
Here are some musings of questionable usefulness.
Parabole and a Half (or Bubble Tea Woes)
Because I am wholly unoriginal, today I will be mimicking the blogging style of Hyperbole and a Half. Cause plagiarizing imitating more talented people is exactly how you become famous.
So yesterday was the finals for the Singing Competition organized by my school’s Chinese Student Association. Being relatively whitewashed, especially when it comes my music, this normally isn’t really my scene. However, my best friend (and/or enemy?) happens to be the president of the Chinese Student Association in question, and most of the other organizers are friends of mine as well. Plus, I knew the MCs, and I knew that they’d make the night terrific and memorable, even if the rest of the show was lame. Not that the show was lame; in fact it was quite epic. But the MC-ing was something special.
I’d gone to an all-you-can-eat sushi place for lunch with a couple of friends and we sat there for about three hours, chatting and gorging on dead fish. Most people will know that I absolutely adore seafood and will devour mountains of the stuff until I either make myself sick or run out. And once everyone else is done, ordering more just makes you look like a pig and/or make you sick. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t eat far more of the stuff than is reasonably healthy.
Anyway, because I ate so much at lunch, I ended up not eating supper because I didn’t even realize that it was suppertime. By the time I realized it might be a good idea to eat something, it was past 9 o-clock and the show was over. Luckily, the show was in Chinatown, so I simply stopped by one of the five million asian bakeries on the way to the metro station. Unfortunately, the bakery also stocked something else, almost as deadly irresistible as sushi.
Despite the illustration, I didn’t actually get strawberry bubble tea. I got coconut. Why? Because coconut bubble tea is about 100x better than any other flavor of bubble tea. Except maybe honeydew; that’s pretty good too. But anyway coconut bubble tea is white and kinda hard to color. So I’m taking artistic liberties and making it pink.
So anyway. Despite it being ridiculously overpriced (like all other bubble tea places), I placed my order.
And crystals ARE fine. I mean, they taste like coconut are much tastier than bubbles, which don’t taste like anything at all. But the consistency is all wrong, and it isn’t a sphere with the exact radius of the straw, which of course made them terrifically problematic.
Of course, this simply meant that I every time I managed to triumphantly ingest a delicious crystal, the victory was all the sweeter.
However, due to the many crystal-related difficulties while drinking it, by the time I got to the bottom of the cup all the ice cubes had melted, diluting the bubble tea.
Needless to say, I was not amused.
Why Twilight is Not a Work of Fantasy
Let’s start with the fact that I don’t like Twilight. I find the plot contrived, the characters bland, and the writing mediocre at best. Bringing it up in conversation will with me probably lead to an angry rant about how terrible it is. In fact, I could probably write an entire paper on the subject if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d have to reread the entire book multiple times in order to do so. And that is the kind of torture that I refuse to subject myself to.
We are all entitled to our opinions of course, and so those who actually enjoy this drivel may question why I dislike it so much. The fact is, I didn’t always loathe it the way I do at present. When I first read the book, I didn’t really have much of an opinion towards it. Other than boring me out of my skull for the first 200 pages before the bad guys showed up, I didn’t think too much of it. I remember vaguely questioning how on earth it ever got published, but figuring that you can’t account for taste, thought no more of it.
It was only when the hype started that I began to hate it.
This isn’t your usual hype-backlash though. My hatred towards the book isn’t simply a case of “The masses like it, and the masses are stupid, therefore it sucks.” I mean sure, there is some bitterness with regards to “How the hell did this thing get so much attention while my own not-exactly-inferior writing lay at the bottom of a ditch somewhere,” but that also fails to account for my dislike. The real reason I hate Twilight is that, for some incomprehensible reason, people insist on classifying it as fantasy.
When I first read it, I thought, “Ah, it’s a romance book. As I know nothing about this genre, it’s really not my place to judge.” And so, I didn’t judge. But if you’re going to insist on pushing this thing into my domain (ie YA fantasy), well then, I am damn well going to take issue with that.
I can hear the fangirls arguing now, “But Twilight made YA fantasy popular! Now you get all sorts of new and interesting books in there because publishers are more willing to publish the genre!”
Yes, well, do you know what it is you get when publishers are willing to publish anything resembling the current Big Thing ™? Quality dilution and a saturation of copycats. So now, just like before, there are some well-written and beautiful works of YA fantasy being published. But, unlike before, they are lost amidst the five million exactly-like-Twilight-but-without-copyright-infringement. So no, Twilight didn’t make the genre more popular or more accessible. All it did was turn YA fantasy into Teen-Romance-but-with-supernatural-stuff. Someone needs to coin a new word for this thing so it can get the hell out of my fantasy section. Romantasy?
“But,” argues the fangirl again, “How is Twilight not fantasy? It has VAMPIRES.”
Well then. Here is a quick and easy fantasy litmus test for your pleasure: Can you replace the supernatural elements with something mundane and leave the general gist of the plot unchanged? If yes, this work is not a work of fantasy and should be categorized accordingly.
Twilight pretty much falls flat on its face with this test. Simply replace the vampires with the mafia and you’ve got yourself a terrific piece of romance… but not fantasy. Watch:
Bella: I know what you are.
Edward: Then say it.
Bella: You’re… a mafia don!
The only real reason for Eddie’s vampirism is to make him mysterious, rich, dangerous, and mysteriously rich and dangerous. By making him a mafia don, you can pretty much accomplish all of these without any hassle.
Edward: Bella, it is too dangerous for us to be together; my presence puts you in mortal peril. I must leave you.
Bella: Boohoohoo! I’m going to run into the arms of a member of the rival gang now!
See, even the lycanthropy can be replaced this way.
Edward: Bella, the Familia has heard that we’ve told you all our secrets. They want to kill you now because you know too much, so you must go hide.
Bella: Well, maybe if you’d just initiate me into the gang…
Edward: No it’s too dangerous. You cannot become a mobster.
Actually now that I think about it, Twilight would probably make even more sense with mobsters than with vampires. In fact, if Twilight was about mobsters, I might even have liked it.
And now of course the fangirls are going to say, “But mobsters can’t replace Renesmee! Mafia kids don’t age super fast, and mobster men don’t imprint on the daughters of their ex-girlfriends.”
Well, let me just say that the entire Renesmee thing was the most forcibly contrived way of tying up plot threads in the history of storytelling. I mean, pair-the-spares happens quite frequently, but actually going out of your way to create another spare just to keep all the lovin’ within the circle of the main cast? And in the most WTF-inducing way possible? That’s like the literary equivalent of breaking someone’s arm and then calling them a contortionist. Great job, Meyer.
The mobster equivalent for Renesmee would probably be something like Jacob meeting Bella’s 12-year-old cousin and falling in love or something. Which, while still creepytastic and pedophilic, is dramatically less so than imprinting on a freaking infant. It’s also less likely to cause fans to kneejerk so hard that they decided to disown the canon. I mean seriously. It takes a special kind of fail to pull something like that.
Which all goes to show, really, that Twilight would’ve been much better as a book about the mafia. Really, Stephenie Meyer, was it worth it to go out of your way and include vampires and stuff just to be able to call your book a piece of fantasy? You’re not fooling anyone: Twilight is a romance novel. Nothing more.
Wierd shit I got recently.
Recently I got a few things that are a bit odd as it were, so I decided the wisest thing to do is to post pictures of them on the internet. Hope you enjoy.
1. A henna tattoo of an albatross.
Well there is a bit of history to this one, one night me and my friends were talking about what kind of tattoos we would get, if we ever decided to get one; we were drunk. One of them made a suggestion to get some kind of bird tattooed, and I decided to pick the albatross. I like albatrosses, it’s a good poetic symbol used in Baudelaire‘s poem the Albatross and in the rime of the ancient mariner by Coleridge. It symbolizes freedom and the desire soaring to unreached heights. Apparently I was quite insistent that I should get it done. My exact words were: “Guys you have to remind to get a henna tattoo of an Albatross, tell me that I have to get that shit done.”. Being a man of my word I did get it done. I also used the tattoo to convince my english teacher to dress up as Waldo in class, telling him that if I get an albatross on my arm he will have to dress up as Waldo, and it worked. All in all the tattoo worked out pretty well for me.
I call her Abby.
2. An Italian made pipe and a bag of David’s house blend pipe tobacco.
For Halloween I decided to dress up as Sherlock Holmes so I went out and bought this pipe. I was actually quiet expensive I think about 40$ after tax, so I got this bag of pipe tobacco. I figured might as well as smoke from it since I paid 40$ for this thing. I actually skipped my morning math class to go downtown to buy the pipe. (Dress up day for Halloween was on Friday at school. I bought it the day of.) I always wanted to have a pipe, so this way I can pretend to be a 19th century British person at home. I would drink tea, smoke from a pipe, eat crumpets, do opium, have sex with disease ridden prostitutes at the harbor district, mock the poor, mock the french and then go to the Anglican church on Sundays.
A classy way of getting lung cancer.
3. A giant basket. I saw this thing on my way home from school on a Friday. It was so awesome I had to take it. I was thinking of making giant fruits to put them in the basket but I got lazy. How do you even make giant fruits anyway? Is there a shop that sells giant fruits? This thing is huge by the way about half my height in diameter.
If you ever need to abandon a giant baby come find me.
4. A cane. I suppose this isn’t really that weird all in all. But the strange part is that I traded a pack of cigarettes for this cane with a friend of mine. I once used it to get a seat on the bus because people thought I was crippled. So yeah it’s a good investment. Now all I have to do is make it into a cane sword then I’m all good.
All I need now is a monocle... also a giant peanut suit.
5. A mandolin. I traded my violin for this. it’s a pretty cool instrument but it’s kinda hard to play since it’s a double string instrument. It really bites into my fingers. Well now I can use this to swoon the heart of fair maidens with my tales of great adventures, like back in the olden days, when hygiene was unheard of. I think I should be a bard and travel the land for a year, anyone down to come with? We’ll go fight dragons for xp and shit, it’ll be great! It’ll be like larping ( Live action role playing, watch this video to get an idea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw). Except it’ll be less retarded of course.
It can also be used as a blunt weapon.
A duet with Owl City… sort of.
I was playing around in Audacity today and decided to record myself improve harmonizing to Fireflies by Owl City.
It kinda sucks. Maybe I should’ve done Viva la Vida. Ah well, next time.
Here for your amusement:
Fireflies — Owl City + Rose
It is full of mistakes and screw-ups and things that could’ve been done better. But that’s what you get when you try to improv something in one take.
Why I never get anything done
I swear this is a highly exaggerated account. I don’t ACTUALLY air guitar when I dance to P!nk at 11 o-clock at night.
Choosing our pies.
My colleague Rose brought up a good point regarding the whole “I don’t know what I should do with my life” thing. Very few people that I’ve talked to seem to know what they want to do down the road in 10 years. But really there is nothing wrong with not knowing.
A lot of people are stressed out by this, not sure what to pick, worried about making a mistake in choosing their programs/career paths. But really there is no need to be worried. Our culture puts too much emphasis on not making mistakes, being perfect all the time. Really even if you did end up in something you didn’t like, or feel you aren’t cut out for, it’s never too late to switch career paths/programs. I’ve known people with 3 masters because they got bored of their jobs and returned to school to pursue a different career, and they live quite happily. In fact I would even recommend switching careers once in a while; doing the same thing over and over again can get very boring.
As cliché as it sounds, mistakes makes you learn more about yourself, eventually you will find what’s right for you. You never know what life has in store for you, and I’m pretty okay with that. In fact I don’t even want to know where I’ll be in ten years, but I think I will be pleasantly surprised when I get there. There is no undo button in life, nor would I ever want there to be. Who knows where your mistakes will take you? I think we have too great of a need to control things as humans; we’re waaayyy too OCD of a species.
Blueberry Pie
In psychology class today, we talked about sleep deprivation. Every single person in the class suffers from it, in one way or another. It’s an inevitable characteristic of the modern student.
Anyway, because of the above, I fell asleep on the bus home today, standing awkwardly, squished between two strangers. And then I had a dream, or maybe it was a vision, or just a hallucination. I don’t think you’re supposed to have actual proper dreams until a few hours into your sleep cycle, but anyway.
A little girl was crying. Impatiently, asked her why. The ground was shaking and we had to leave; there was no time to work out the problems of a ten year old child. She told me that she had tried to bake me blueberry pie, but didn’t have any blueberries. So she tried to make the filling by mashing up blackberries and blue food coloring. It didn’t work, and so she cried.
As it turned out, that little girl was me.
I don’t think it’s remarkably difficult to identify where the dream comes from. Sometimes, our subconsciousness isn’t nearly as deep and profound as we’d like to pretend. The preoccupation with baked goods obviously stems from stress pertaining to the bake sale I’m to run this coming Friday. The child is obviously associated with having to do things we’ve never done before, as well as a sense of helplessness in general. The shaking ground was the motion of the bus, and the impatience is due to all the impending deadlines I seem to be facing. Easy peasy. Case closed.
But, on a deeper level, I think it reflects some serious issues not uncommon to people my age. Faced with the decision of what to study in university, what career path to follow, I’ve been stressing over my future a lot. What do I do with my life? What if I make the wrong choice? What if it turns out I’m not cut out for such-and-such field? What if I won’t be good enough? What if I decide to make blueberry pie when I should have make blackberry pies instead? There is no undo button in life, and it plagues me with insecurities.
I suck at making decisions.
But then I think. In the dream, the pie turned out alright. I mean, sure it wasn’t exactly blueberry pie, but it was tasty all the same. Maybe, in the end, everything will turn out alright. Perhaps it won’t be exactly the way we envisioned it when we set out, but everything’ll work out in the end, or so I hope. But I don’t claim to dream prophetic dreams.
Things I would do if I was really rich.
We all thought about it, the things you would do if you had unlimited amount of resources at your disposal. I figure if I was rich enough I would have a bit of fun with the money. So here is a short list of the things I personally would do:
1. Train an army of power rangers. I would have them be my bodyguards/servants but also some kind of vigilantes who would protect the town. Yeah I always thought having my own power rangers would be awesome. First of all who the hell would mess with a guy who had an army of power rangers? No on that’s who! I would have them fight crime and stuff, clean up the streets of Montreal. Then you would live in a city protect by not only the police but also power rangers! It would be great for tourism. Also they will have giraffes for steeds.
2. Get a lot of giraffes. For the aforementioned power rangers. Also because they’re pretty great.
3. Own a castle. To fend off my enemies, I would need a cool fortress, complete with moat and alligators or maybe crocodiles. Of course it would get lonely living in a castle by myself, even with the power rangers. So that’s why I would build it in downtown Montreal next to the paramount theater. They castle would of course be equipped with canons and pots of hot oil for those rougher days, when that Goddamn black knight attacks. That bastard lever leaves me alone.
4. Create real life Pokemon. This one is pretty self evident. Only the original ones of course, I can never remember the names of the newer ones. Oh wait the only say their name, shouldn’t be hard to tell which one is which then. So yeah all of them will be made!
5. Find bloody sesame street. The song never did tell me how to get there. So I’ll just hire a bunch of private investigators, I’m sure they’ll find it… I wanna see big bird! But not Oscar… he’s a douche.
6. Buy an island. There I shall hunt the most dangerous game of all… Hipsters…
7. Find a cure for the disease which produce hipsters. If that plan fails please refer to number 6.
8. Change a million dollars into pennies. I would melt them all down and cast a giant penny. And then I would drop the giant penny onto Stephanie Meyer’s house. I think this one is pretty self explanatory as well.
Pythogoras, genius or bat-shit insane cult leader?
Everybody’s heard of Pythagoras; you know, the guy who’s credited for A squared plus B squared equals C squared. He was also known for starting a religion entirely based on math. Yeah that’s right, he thought math was so cool that he might as well worship it as God.
Surprisingly the sect caught on, although you might think the idea of worshiping math is completely retarded; you have to keep in mind that back then you were dealing with a bunch of half naked dudes wearing togas who thought that the sun is pulled by a bloody chariot. Another surprising fact is that the sect actually brought an age of enlightenment in ancient Greece. The members of the cult would spend their days proving the theorems which are now part of the foundation of modern mathematics.
Now, the sect also had other stuff going on for it besides worshiping math. It practiced pacifism, and if you didn’t comply, well, they kill you. They also practiced a strict code of silence. The official reason was that “language failed to describe accurately what the world truly is”, and only numbers can describe the world with accuracy. But really Pythagoras wanted to keep everybody silent so he can claim credit for the theorems that his followers proved. And if you talk they will kill you. There are also records of him ordering the execution of a man who proved the existence of irrational numbers {numbers that cannot be expressed by a fraction, like the square root of two or pi}. He just wasn’t down for irrational numbers, it ruined the idea that numbers are perfect for him.
So all in all Pythagoras was a pretty crazy dude who thought that numbers were not only his friends but also God. In a way he is the predecessor to the modern math nerd, except you know slightly more dangerous. Yeah that’s right you shouldn’t pick on math nerds, because they might just fucking kill you…
Hello Thar
This is a little blog from Rose and Yanbo. We talk about stuff. Sometimes people listen.
rosefae
yanbotang
