edgy

Something I noticed recently that brands are trying harder and harder to be "edgy" in attempts to gain controversy and publicity as well as strengthen(?) their brand awareness and philosophy.

From the obvious attempts of the french connection campaign (fcuk off, too busy to fcuk etc) to recently this "stupid" campaign for DIESEL.

I think brands have been acquiring tunnel vision in "edginess" and focused on outdoing eachother that they are really forgetting about the message they are sending.

Here are some examples of advertising from Diesel's campaign:

Ad 1

Ad 2

and the irony in this one is great:

Ad 3

in effect, Diesel is calling their target market stupid. And if they truly embrace their own message then they are calling themselves stupid. Nothing that really makes me want to buy their products. But nothing I didn't expect from a label that I already thought was stupid.

today I saw this:

http://mumbrella.com.au/dangerfield-fuck-off-poster-slammed-by-asb-57381

and this after they had to recall those gun and sword shaped umbrellas, it seems like their management staff just doesn't want good PR. (http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-descend-on-umbrella-gunman-20110517-1er0z.html)

Diesel should buy them

free

I remember in grade 6, when we graduated. We all ran around screaming we were finally free.

I remember at the end of year 12, we were all looking forward to our last VCE exam, again: "freedom".

As I sit and stare at my facebook newsfeed, everyone's screaming out that they're free as they finish their last University exams.

I wonder what occasion would warrant this feeling of apparent "freedom" again.

When we retire? When we die?

busted

photobomb win

source: http://www.collegehumor.com/picture/6474378/mythbuster-guys-photobomb-seth-rogen-and-fan

lyn

On my last night in Korea, I watched episode 18 of Invincible Youth. Martin had left in the morning and Ahyoung was busy shopping.

It was the last time I could watch live Korean TV for a while so I decided to switch the set on for any Starcraft or Kpop Shenanigans.

I came across a show called Sketch Book and there was an acoustic cover of a 2PM song in process. I'm not a 2PM fan but man this cover was so smooth that it kept me watching, soon they started playing this ridiculously awesome version of SHINee's Ring Ding Dong, I just had to keep watching. Keeping in mind I have a overwhelming bias against korean boy bands. The lady on stage finished her set with a cover of 2NE1's "I Don't Care".

I just had to write down her name which was apparently "Rin" or "Lin", I couldn't tell based on the Korean script. Eventually I found out it was "Lyn".

Here is the original performance.

Now last night, I decided to check if she had done anything else since, I was to be impressed.

That T-ara cover at 3:20 blew me away. If you want a taste of the original song to get a full appreciation of how good that cover is, check this out:

I acquired Lyn's albums, even though her vocals are still amazing, they were not as good as these covers. I would pay big money to see her just do these covers live.

crazy wings

so I went to crazy wings last in Melbourne last night with a bunch of gay boys.

We spent about 14 dollars each and we ate 4 chicken wings, a stick of pork and some enoki mushrooms.

It attempts to mimic the taste of street side vendors in China, and does this very accurately. However street vendors in China sell this for 10cents AUD where as I'm paying about 4 AUD for 2 chicken wings.

The whole novelty of this place is the "crazy wings". If you didn't know, they are ridiculously spicy chicken wings. And by ridiculous, I mean, half my face went numb after taking a bite.

Literally. No exaggeration what so ever.

I ate 2.5 tubes of wasabi at one point in my life, I am not sure which one was worse to be honest.

These wings lack flavour, you can not taste the chicken and struggle to find the logic behind someone eating this for reasons other than to torture themselves for humorous purposes and/or filming the humorous results as your eyes water up and snot dribbles down your nose due to you losing control of the nerves in your face.

You may as well just be punching yourself in the face whilst drinking lava.

This is not an ironic endorsement, nor a challenge, this is a dire warning, DO NOT GO THERE!

streisand

so whilst procrastinating on facebook, a friend of mine discovered this:

http://gobarbra.com/hit/new-f02df11c0d9a4de357be322bee50ed8e

which reminded me of a question, why was this song called Barbra Streisand anyway?

(someone was kind enough to tell me "because they say it in the song" which wasn't quite the answer I was looking for nor quite the intended interpretation of my question)

my search lead me to this:

and then this:

I still don't know why its called Barbra Streisand

social media

At what point did it become frowned upon to add "randoms"? When did social media become a tool to stay in touch with existing friends rather than to make new ones?

I remember the fun in adding someone I didn't know on ICQ, in fact I'm pretty sure thats all people used to do. You could search for people via age and interest and then you can send them a msg. I used to search for people aged from 8-16 (even though I think you needed to be at least 16 to have a ICQ account) and chat about Pokemon all day.

It would be such an occasion when you ended up speaking to someone in the same city.
I distinctively remember once when I gave someone my phone number (horrible decision in retrospect) as a kid and I talked about Pokemon on the phone with a stranger.

Now I've realized that people from non-english speaking countries tend to use facebook to make friends rather than adding existing friends.

I wonder why that is? When did adding randoms become creepy in our social norms, because at one point it wasn't. I remember making homepages on geocities with photos for the world to see, from that to writing on xanga and then eventually social networks as we now know it.

Will other cultures go through similar usage patterns? Or is there something that sets our behavioral evolutions apart?

Confucian philosophy which heavily dominates Asia insists that one does not exist to you unless formerly introduced, whilst Australians like to think we are friendly and could make friends everywhere.

Why is this reversed when it comes to the internet? (As far as I know)

el cider

Every once in a while you meet someone so oblivious to things that go on in our world that you can't help but laugh and take advantage for humorous purposes.

This person shall remain unnamed, lets call her Murphy.

So Murphy approaches me with a query, "how do you pronounce this word?"

The word she was referring to was "Monarchy".

I was baffled, I explained to her what it was and what it meant and stated it was odd for her not to know as Australia was a "Monarchy", she gave me a confused look.

I soon discovered that she did not know a royal wedding had occurred lately. Which I was also baffled by. You did not need to be interested in this topic to know that it occurred, I mean for gods sake, it was all over every type of media for the the last few weeks.

Murphy explained she had been in Phillip Island for the last week, which I reluctantly accepted as a plausible excuse, who cares about the wedding anyway?

She soon approached the topic of Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, she asked me what was the proper method of pronouncing Al-qaeda which was also followed by a "What is it?"

Explanation as follows:

Al-qaeda was a grammy award winning arabic rock group lead by it's controversial leader Osama Bin-Laden, a rebellious Saudi aristocrat. They were extremely controversial last year with the release of their hit single "Bombs in the USA" which caused a wave of alcohol abuse all over America by teenagers and young adults in the form of "Jager-bombs".

They are commonly confused with "El-Cider" and it's leader Obama Bin-Laden, a Mexican based terrorist group with a business front selling fermented apple beverages.

Murphy: So did they just killed Osama?"
Me: No, no. They killed Obama, not Osama.
Murphy: Oh! Ok.

Now to give Murphy some credit, she didn't 100% believe me and was highly critical when I explained to her that the UN was started by a group called the Famous 9 that included the lights of Albert Einstein, George Washington, Ghandi, Sai Baba and a few other people.

Oh and I also explained to them the Lemon Party was a political party in Indonesia.

Springvale Chronicles: Day 1

The Duma Guy - Springvale Chronicles

For all y'all who didn't know, I am working on a web series with a team of people including Matt Pastor, Andrew Mai, Christina Peng, Takako Kajiya and I'm sure many others to come.

For this particular series, I'm the main writer with Matt contributing to the plot and pretty much the rest of the cast contributing to the script as we film.

Day 1 of shooting was today and required me to get up at about 7am after a big night out...good times.

Follow Duc Tran as he traverses the hurdles of life as leader of the D.I.X. crew. Be there as he smashes heads in, traffics "merchandise" and eventually falls in love. See life from a whole new perspective and re-discover the Duc Tran that lived in each and one of us...

radwimps

Recently, I was shown a song by a Japanese band named Radwimps. I felt so strongly about the song itself that I shared it with many people over facebook and have recommended it to a few people in person.

I think this song, Oshaka Shama, speaks for itself.

After watching this video, I acquired their entire discography. I am slowly churning through their discography, having really only listened to 2 of their albums (Okazu no Gohan and Altcolony no Teiri) , but they both have been great.

When people ask me what kind of music I listen to, I usually stutter and find myself unable to answer that question. But I think once I said my favourite type of music is music made with intent and music that sounds epic and grand. Radwimps definitely satisfies those two requirements.

My only regret is being unable to understand the lyrics, which I have been told are even more epic. Oshaka Shama speaks about humanity's place in this world in regards especially to our religious beliefs.

"We kill crows because there are too many, we rid of monkeys because there are too many, we raise more pandas because there aren't enough, yet we raise more humans and there are too many"

Here's another one of my favourite songs from these guys, I am not sure what hes singing about yet, but this music is very cinematic without even understanding the lyrics. The bridge with what I assume is a new born crying, gave me chills the first time I heard it. Check it out:

jigga man

average

so heres apparently the "average" faces of women from countries across the world

very interesting

source:
http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/index.htm

burqa

"A SYDNEY artist whose anti-burka mural has infuriated left-wing and Islamic activists is vowing that the provocative artwork will stay in place despite death threats, abuse, a string of vandalism attacks, a violent weekend protest and a police request to remove it. "




source:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/sculptor-sergio-redegalli/story-e6frf7jx-1225990694187


the anger obviously arises from the issues of racism and intolerance towards other cultures.
I was one to believe that it is extremely intolerant to ban the burqa anywhere in the world, however things have changed slightly...

take for example, the lily foot, a practice in china that survived a whole millennium.




if you don't know what the lily foot is, basically girls had the bones in their feet broken at a very young age and bounded til it was transformed into the shape you see above.

by "today's standards", this practice is extremely cruel and unjustified, i mean men finding deformed feet extremely erotic? urghhh

"Another attribute of a woman with bound feet was the limitations of her mobility and, therefore, her inability to take part in politics, social life, and the world at large. Bound feet rendered women dependent on their families, particularly their men, and, therefore, became an alluring symbol of chastity and male ownership, since a woman was largely restricted to her home and could not venture far without an escort or the help of watchful servants." - Wikipedia

yes, wikipedia isn't the best source, but my great grandmother was in the process of having her foot bound and I have been told the same things many times.

so this practice has disappeared as far as we know. the eventual ban of this practice was definitely due to foreign influence.



If i were to take a different perspective and judged this as a religious practice, would it then be intolerant for us Australians to outlaw this practice? Would it make me a racist if I deemed this practice inhumane?

if you knew anything about the lily foot, you'll know that it was definitely not a choice (your parents made that decision, its either binding your feet or you will be rejected by society). where as many people will argue that muslim women have a choice, but do they really?
if i told you, you had the choice to pay your tax or go to jail, is that really a choice?
if i said you had free-will as long as you do what i say or else you burn for eternity, is that really free will?

so, is it really "racist" and "intolerant" for us to ban something like the burqa in our own country?

you decide

denon

i bought some 50 dollar denon headphones last week (Denon AH-C252) to replace the horrid horrid potentially harmful to your health ipod headphones

i was extremely extremely disappointed, disappointed enough to never buy denon headphones again.

they sound just like the crappy ipod headphones if not worse, the cable feels cheap and rigid, whilst the headphones themselves hurts my ears, there is so much distortion in both bass and treble, feels like i bought these at a two dollar shop.

i will be making half arsed attempt to return them.

will be buying sony again when i get a proper job, hopefully i don't go deaf from these denons by then.

21st

thanks to everyone for coming! this picture sums up my feelings for the night pretty well! =D

jeep

public service announcement:

my friend zeineh the warrior princess is trying to win herself a jeep and needs everyone to "like" her photo, apparently she will throw a beach party and buy everyone booze if she wins, hooray!

you'll need to "like" the page jeep australia and then "like" the photo itself

check it

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=131884803538121&set=t.577436337

educate

"In fact, 15-year-old Chinese students in Shanghai out-performed all students internationally in all three categories, including math, science, and reading. According to Time Magazine, this is the first time China participated in a PISA study, and the results are stunning because researchers did not expect the country to do as well as it did." - Ana Kasparian of Young Turks

Full article here: http://www.examiner.com/politics-education-in-national/china-beats-the-u-s-education-1

I really don't think these studies mean too much. Definitley that Math, Science and Reading are the foundations of a good education. But the quality of education is not and should not be defined by these basic building blocks. As far as I can see, the building blocks are there, but no one knows how to put everything together in the right way.

So what if the 15 year old kids in your country can do advanced calculus? if they're not going to pursue a career or life that will utilise their education, then it is useless.

Kids in China are not given a choice of specializing in their secondary education and only recently were tertiary electives introduced.

I asked my parents a question, I know many people that excel in areas that my parents do not consider as part of a traditional education. Now some of these people chose to drop mathematics and sciences in favour of subjects like Visual Communications or Studio Arts, they excel and gain recognition and proceed to have a prosperous career doing something they love, should they be forced to do Mathematics and Sciences instead?

I think the problem with the Chinese education is a completely different problem from what we face here in the "Western World", its more so that people are being shoved into jobs that they never had a passion for and thus mediocrity breeds more mediocrity and new ideas are always one step behind, because that person who had a passion to be innovative and creative in a field they love was forced to do subjects they didn't like and is probably in a tertiary course they have no love for and is now stuck in a job they hate.

Now this doesn't just apply to professions that require artistic creativity, but a good example is indeed jobs that require artistic creativity. During my time working with designers in Shanghai, I have never seen such uninspired work coming from profession designers. The skills are technically all there, but there is no passion. This is mainly due to the fact that most of these designers did not get into design as part of their passion, but as a last resort for a career due to failing at something else they were forced to do.

To demonstrate the macro-effects:

When you think of America, you think of Apple, Ford, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google etc

Japan: Honda, Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba etc

Germany: Mercedez Benz, Volkswagen etc

these are some of the world's largest economies, China ranks above all except America...yet there are no brands (at least that we know of, Lenovo would be closest) that has become synonymous with industry defining innovation, possibly due to lack of creative marketing skills or possibly because that most people in the workforce are uninspired. If China's education system is not revamped, then China will be stuck with copying the rest of the world forever.

(however, I am also aware that the Japanese schooling system is also very strict and arbitary, I am not familiar with the details, but its interesting that their schooling system can produce so many talents and innovative companies...curious)

watchmen

i've been watching the watchmen movie again and also in light of recent issues regarding wikileaks has got me thinking.



freedom of speech and transparency is something we often take for granted in a country like Australia, but do we really have freedom of speech and how transparent are our systems really (thats a topic for another day)?

now many politicians in the USA have condemned Julian Assange, some going as far as calling for his execution.

our own prime minister, Julia Gillard has stated that Julian Assange and Wikileaks have conducted illegal activities (though remained silent when asked what laws Wikileaks have breached). Paypal and Mastercard have suspended Wikileaks account and donations towards the organisation.

show you how far our freedom of speech really goes. if wikileaks has been engaging in illegal behaviour then every single news source that has since reported its leaks are also engaging in illegal behaviour.

how can our own prime minister be so irresponsible, condemning a fellow australian who has yet to be convicted of any crime to be a criminal?

how is this any different from China or Iran (or any other country that does so) censoring the media to potray the government in a favourable light?

again...how free exactly is our freedom of speech?



classified information is of course kept secret for a reason, keeping the population in the dark in regards to certain topics and issues insures peace and stability.

so whats better? violence based on truth? or peace based on a lie?

arnuld

i should start by saying i am by no means a fan of 2pm like the hordes of asian girls out there, but i saw this a while ago and oh man did i crack up.
so this is a song called "i'll be back" and yes the reference to terminator is intentional...

this is probably the worst attempt at looking...post apocalyptic bad ass, instead they look like anorexic pandas shuffling to a song a few writers wrote whilst watching terminator drunk

oh man did the choreographers get lazy with that stupid running on the spot move and that thumbs up whilst slowly sinking into the molten steel move... oh dear lord

heres something thats actually worth your time:

emi hinouchi

through my random wanderings through youtube, you discover many new and interesting things.

i love discovering new/old music that i haven't heard or wouldn't ever be put into contact with otherwise, example include:

apparently this has been a meme for a while but i've only discovered it, musical genius!!

but humour aside i discovered this japanese vocalist, whose name is in the name of this post.

i first heard her in this song with the teriyaki boyz and thought it was pretty chilled out and energetic at the same time, i thought she was cute but didn't look into it too much.

but recently, whilst going through my old favourite list, i found it again and decided to listen to it, and then decided to check out some of her other songs. i don't know if she writes her own songs but the girl knows how to sing

i decided to check out her solo stuff which reinforced my impressions of her vocal abilities.

now i know theres a lot of people who don't like to listen to music of a language they can't understand. it'd be great if i could understand what shes singing and would definitely increase my appreciation for the music, but good music transcends language and everyone should keep an open mind :)

i think i shall do more research into this young lady and acquire more of her music