Saturday, June 24, 2006

"Our house, in the middle of our street..."

Hey guys,

It's official. I'm finally moving to my new place over the course of next week. Tonight's my last night with Internet connection as they're coming to take it away ("haha heehee")...kudos to anyone who gets that reference.

But thanks to everyone who put up with my hair pulling during the apartment search. Hopefully the move goes through ok. I'm still staying in the same neighborhood, just a different building.

Anyhow, I'm not gone and far far away, I'm just trying to get myself situated. I hope to be back with some TV and Internet in a week or two.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Seeeeeeeeeggaaaaaaaaa (you know...on the Genesis?)

"The Rise and Fall of Sega" via Slashdot.

Yes, I read Slashdot. The article itself was ok, but I was more interested by the discussion about Sega.

I was a pretty hardcore Sega fangirl for a long while, and vainly held on up until its last gasping breath. However, even I knew that it was slowly losing out and when the Playstation came out, I could see it lowly fading towards an end.

One thing that annoyed the piss out of me was how Sega seemed to come out with a new system every 6 months. My parents weren't rich, and it was hard enough buying GAMES for a new system let alone finding myself looking at an ad for yet ANOTHER Sega system in the newest issue of Gamepro, EGM, (Ultra)Gameplayers...

I always contended to my friends that the Playstation was all marketing. It showered games in a quantity over quality ploy in my opinion, and with big name Sony behind it, it peddled itself like ice cream on a Mr. Softee truck. Rolling through the neighborhood playing its siren song. The Saturn was more like the quaint little ice cream shop in the old part of town owned by a former soda jerk called "Pop." It was good ice cream, but what neighborhood kid was going to ride his bike halfway across town for that unless they were like the kids from Our Gang or Beaver or something.

Anyhow, the lack of games wasn't just because Sega was so hardcore about quality. For example, there were rumblings about how the Saturn hardware was hard to work with. Well...maybe not hard...fickle would be the better word I suppose. You could work with it, but to do it well was where the trip up came from. For one thing, that's why Yuji Naka and the Sonic Team got such great kudos. It was rumored that if there was anybody who could work the Saturn, it was definitley the Sonic Team.

I never thought I was rooting for the underdog, I felt more like the fan of the team that got robbed. It was great to read all the opinions on that Slashdot thread and find myself yelling out, "That's what I thought!"

I don't know, probably hindsight is 20/20, but I distinctly remember similar arguments being raised back in the day...so if so many people knew why wasn't anything being done? Or maybe something was being done.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Tidbits

It is now officially hot enough for people to start cracking open the fire hydrants.

The Korea/France game was ass. I'm sorry. I love you Korea, but that second goal that was blocked was a goal. I'm surprised France didn't make a bigger stink about it.

Also, what annoys me when I watch Korea play is that they play too nervous. I don't know how to describe except that they can't seem to calm the hell down and just let the pace of the game happen.

I was going to include this photo with my last entry about North Korea, but totally forgot, so here is one of my favorite Korean Photoshopped posters:



It says "Let us show the imperialist bastards the rock of the people!"

Alright, maybe it's not as funny to you, but this honestly had me rolling on the ground for a good ten minutes. Especially because the copy is written in wannabe-North Korean dialect. Ah, craziness.

I don't know who created this image, but whoever you are out there in the vast Korean Internet, I salute you.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

'The Foul King' or 'Nacho Libre'?

While I'm debating to see "Nacho Libre" (it's got lucha libre fighting in it, and Jack Black...the former alone makes it 89% tempting to watch), I can't help but wonder why no one's bringing up director Kim Ji-woon's 2000 film "Banchikwang" (English title, "The Foul King." Protip: A google image search for "Banchikwang" in Korean brings up probably as many photos of Anton Ono.)

And I know for a fact this has been released in the U.S. before in some form. And before I get some crazy letters and stuff from people saying "Man, it's a totally different movie," I'm not saying Jared Hess is biting Kim Ji-woon's movie, but I mean to say check this movie out too, ok? So calm down and slowly move that cursor away from the "send" button and hear me out here.



(The Foul King meets Nacho)

The story of "Foul King" is about Dae-ho. Movie cross-reference tangent: Dae-ho played by the great Kang Ho-sung, probably better known to the Americans who read this as the wronged father Park Dong-jin in "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" or Detective Park Doo-man in "Memories of a Murder." He does great comedy too folks. One of his break out roles was playing an ignorant gangster leader wannabe in the comedy "Number 3", a sort of satirical look at the third-rate people that populate society.

Dae-ho is the typical downtrodden salaryman. His boss yells at him all the time, no one takes him seriously and he's treated like a chump. Despite his meek nervous exterior, he's a big fan of wrestling and one day takes the plunge to learn how to wrestle. He first starts out as the fall-guy type of role in the wrestling circuits, losing and getting beat up, but then he begins to fall into the the bad guy superstar role of the Foul King, with his mask and utility chest "belt" filled with cheating utensils.

Of course, this means the wrestling leaks out into his real life and his life changes and yadda yadda.

I highly recommend anyone hoping to watch "Nacho Libre" to also try to get a hold of "The Foul King." Both are comedies, but "Foul King" comes from a pretty sharp look at Korean society. Dae-ho lives the everyday type of boring life that most Koreans live: Frustrations with an overbearing boss, not really being able to retaliate and the pressures of having to be a decent person in a Confucian society. It seems like everyone who plays foul in Dae-ho's life gets the better of him as he suffers as the typical nice polite person society expects everyone to be. While this movie isn't saying that you have to be a terrible person to succeed, it does seem to say that life isn't fair and you have to be able to expect some unfairness and to get through that, you need to have the ability to break out of the norm.

Lazy Saturday

Well, I read the schedule wrong and I guess Korea's not playing until tomorrow. Either way, today's my break day.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

You like Asian movies?

The New York Asian Film Festival will be going on starting tomorrow.

The line up looks pretty good so I'm going to see if I can catch a few. I really want to catch "Cromartie High School" (cartoon/comic book is hilaaarious) and "Krrish".


There's a couple of things overlapping this weekend, though.

The Film Forum's showing "Pandora's Box" starting tomorrow (starring the ever so divine Miss Louise Brooks), Korea's playing France this Saturday, so I was going to make this Saturday my World Cup day and just watch the games for that day...but then a friend is having a housewarming party later on during Saturday...so this is going to require some hardcore day planning.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Grant Morrison is super nice

Yea, yea, happy birthday to me, but that's not important.

Yesterday I stood in line at Forbidden Planet for close to 3 hours so I could get a chance to meet Grant Morrison.

I only got to meet the man for scant minutes, he was genuinely nice to me in those minutes. He didn't even seem tired for one bit though he had been there for hours signing and chit-chatting with folks. I don't know how he did it.

I ended up making a fool of myself for totally geeking out. As I walked up to him, the only words that tumbled out of my mouth was "Oh my God...I'm quietly freaking out on the inside."

Without missing a beat he answered, "Don't worry, I am too."

I didn't have any real erudite questions to ask him about his work and my mind blanked on a questions someone wanted me to ask in the moment, but I managed to somehow convey to him that "The Filth" was how I popped my Morrison cherry, running into back issues here and there, finally reading a good chunk of them at once and just buying the trade paperback. My first, and still my favorite.

I informed him that June 11 with my birthday and he signed "The Filth" with "Happy Every Birthday" and told me that it should cover me for the rest of my life. I also got my tpb of "The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution" signed too, but he signed "The Filth" with the special birthday message, so I'm going to delude myself into thinking that he was actually listening to what I was saying to him and chose to sign that one that way since I mentioned it was near and dear to my heart. Damn, now I just sound creepy.

Afterwards, I told people I was worried that maybe I came off all weird and geeky to him, but was then promptly informed that he probably met plenty of people who have been equally if not quite a bit more weird and awkward than I had been to him.

I also got my picture taken with him. I felt like such a nerd asking because it didn't look like anyone else was getting their picture taken with him, but I had to ask and kind squeaked "If it's not too much trouble...would you mind taking a picture with me?" and he said it was no problem at all and jumped up. He even pulled out his red-tinted sunglasses saying he'd do "the rockstar thing."

Seriously, so nice.

Weird thing was they were playing Catatonia's "Dead from the Waist Down" in Forbidden Planet and I haven't heard that song in a long while.

Speaking of music, some chick was playing the hurdy-gurdy at the 42st A stop. How cool is that?

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

"Oh wake up my love..."

"Another drawing? In mere days? That can't be!"

Well it can be. This time around I finally fulfilled my ambition to create an illustration of lines from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere" (lyrics here, if you're interested...but popup warning).

There's actually several lines that are quite illustrateable from this particular song, but I've always zeroed in on, "You come for me now with a cake that you've made/Ravaged avenger with a clip in your hair/Full of glass and bleach and my old razorblades/O where do we go now but nowhere."

Now, I have many (obviously unofficial) interpretations for this song, but in the case for this drawing here's the backstory for those lyrics. Bear with me, I'm just trying to explain the imagery here a bit. Once again I'm just going with one of many interpretations I have made, none of them I claim to be correct. If you don't particularly enjoy the idea of overexplanation and would rather see the image first, then skip this next bit. Don't worry, you can always come back:




"A man is haunted by the apparition of his dead love who died either from a terminal illness, or injury from a severe accident that resulted in suicide on the man's birthday. The other lyrics from the song hint at some sort of extended medical stay or long-term medical treatment. The man's survivor guilt is manifested in an image of twisted domesticity as the tortured ghost of his love comes to him from the beyond. The cake can either be reminescent of the cake she had made for him before killing herself or just an imagery to remind him of the day she killed herself."






Now that we've got that over with, here's the drawing.

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Sunday, June 04, 2006

More webcomic talk

One webcomic series that I've been enjoying and feel bad about not introducing sooner is "Estancia." I particularly didn't enjoy the drawing style all that much and a lot of scenes/ideas seemed a bit too derivative (without giving away too much, the premise seems like a meshing of "Galaxy Express 999" and "Escape from New York" or "Mad Max" or something like that, and let's not forget the reaver/om - like creatures) of other things. However, it is all pretty compelling. The story's not bad at all and now it looks like it's drawing to a close in an episode or two. So go check it out.

Also, Daum is gearing up for a new series called "Dorothy Band." I'm looking forward to it just from seeing the preview art work. It looks like it'll be pretty interesting.


(Above image from Hong Jak-ga's "Dorothy Band.")

According to the bio info, Hong Jak-ga got his start in the amateur "I'm a comic artist too" section of Daum, and his debut series "A Short Story You Can Share With a Cat for a Day" (First episode, for those of you who are curious). Anyhow, this new comic is supposed to be a take on "The Wizard of Oz."

This guy's a pretty good artist, check out his site.

I know I haven't mentioned and webcomics from Paran much, but after the way "Samban Ijo" fizzled out I kind of lost interest in the webcomics they featured so I haven't been really up to date with that. Though I heavily followed the basketball comic "Jiral Balgwang" for a while I got lazy keeping track of it, now the episodes are up to the hundred-something. It's funny and well-drawn so I also recommend this comic.

I haven't checked these out yet, but they do have a bit of variety with the new comics. "Sambong Barber Shop" looks interesting. "Fly, Robin!" looks like typical shoujo romance fare if that's what you're interested in (not me).
"Forest of People" looks extremely interesting, and "The Crime's Reason" doesn't look too bad either. Anyhow, need to look into these more before I can give a full report.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Elizabeth, John Dee and Sir Francis Drake, oh my!

Yep, one last Elizabeth-themed drawing. This one's got a court drawing feel to it. The fleet of airships in the back mimic some portraits of I've seen where there's fleets of ships heading out into the horizon. The globe is an element I saw a lot too so I incorporated that.

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I've been listening to metal since 10 a.m.

The title of this song is how I feel about this week.


DragonForce - Through The Fire and Flames

After the longest 4-day week known to man (I worked 12 hours on a FRIDAY), I woke up this morning and thought, "You know, today's a DragonForce kind of day."

And for those of you who don't know about this video, wait for the dueling guitar solo that kicks in around 3:22.