little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

And a Merry Hoffmas to You, Too

This came to my Inbox because I do testing for Hoffspace. And by “testing,” I mean “I was a featured member when the social network launched.”

Really, this is the gift that keeps on giving.

Milestones (but only in binary)

Today is my 32nd birthday. If the human race only had two fingers, we would live in a fantastic world based on binary and I would be 100,000 years old today.

Thankfully, humans have ten fingers on each hand, thus making my birthday completely insignificant. (That said, I’m not too crushed; it would be really difficult to hold a fork to eat your birthday cake if you only had a finger on each hand.)

(Although honestly, to give you an idea of the mindset that I’m in: I just spent 45 minutes just staring at a textbox on my laptop, trying to think up something constructive or positive or clever to say. But what was once eloquently blogged about so many years ago is now just kinda bottled up deep inside, because, at this point, I’m not really sure if there’s any mind-blowing revelations to declare anymore.)

Grand Theft Auto 4, in a nutshell

Last week, I bought a Playstation 3. One of the first games I got for it was Grand Theft Auto 4. Over the years, I have bought all the games in the GTA series, and at no time have I ever beat the game. Actually, I’ve never even gotten halfway through the game. This game will be no different, and for all the reviews about the graphics being phenomenal and the story being compelling — all true — I only remember now why I can’t get very far in the game:

It stresses me the fuck out. Take this scene, no less than twenty minutes into the game:

Guy sitting shotgun: [in a Serbian accent] QUICK QUICK! THE COPS ARE CHASING AFTER US! WE MUST NAVIGATE THROUGH THE UNFORGIVING STREETS OF LIBERTY CITY WHILE YOU DRIVE THIS SHITTY CAR THAT DOESN’T HANDLE WELL AND I YELL AT YOU CONSTANTLY.
Ernie: Fuck me.
Guy sitting shotgun: WHAT THE FUCK ASSHOLE WHERE DID YOU LEARN HOW TO DRIVE DRIVE GODDAMMIT
Ernie: [Makes a left turn into a light pole] Fuck.
Guy sitting shotgun: YOU PIECE OF SHIT NOW WE’RE D–
[car gets rammed by 150 Police Squadrons from all sides, MISSION FAILED message appears on the screen, Ernie removes the disc from the PS3 out of frustration and plays Minesweeper on his laptop]

Seriously, I don’t care if this is the highest rated game on the Playstation 3 — if I wanted to be screamed at in an automobile, I could driving my mother around the Bay Area and tell her I was gay.

BoA and the search for the elusive asian popstar

Will BoA be the first Asian pop star to reach super-stardom in the United States? The short answer: No, but it won’t be for a lack of trying.

The long answer: Anyone who has a basic knowledge of J-Pop or K-Pop music knows who BoA is. If you don’t, here’s a brief synopsis: A 12 year old Korean girl auditions and gets drafted into the Korean music scene. She becomes huge in South Korea, then promptly goes to Japan and records a bunch of #1 Japanese records, making her the first Korean to do so. She promptly becomes a superstar all over Asia. Now BoA is 20 and there are dreams for her to make it big in the United States. Don’t they all, really? But this will be easier said than done, because — and let’s be brutally honest here, because I’m actually a really big fan of BoA since her Kimochi Wa Tsutamaru days — the girl can’t pronounce her Rs.

No, seriously. Take this song, performed by teen fashion dolls turned bad pop band Bratz, for example: I played this for my ex once and when BoA butchered the line “All the Girls” as “ARR DE GURRS,” I lost car radio privileges for the next two years.

So now BoA is giving another go at it with her new single “Eat You Up,” and the big guns have been called: the song is produced by Bloodshy & Avant, who produced another song you may have heard of called “Toxic,” by Britney Spears. Her video producer is Diane Martel. And Flo Rida is rapping on one of the remixes.

If I was the agent of a pop star, those are the names I would want to be using, really. But at the end of the day, the great American music machine is more than that — it’s promotion, it’s going to radio stations, it’s going to TRL and having 15 year olds from New Jersey being able to love you through an accent and a lot of peace signs. And it’s a shame, because she has the image skills, she definitely has the dancing skills and watching an exhausted-looking BoA learning hip hop moves and auditioning dancers and dealing with Americans that speak 100-words-a-minute, she most definitely has the drive and the work ethic. And it’s for those reasons that I really want her to do well when her single comes out in digital format on October 7th.

But given the track record of Asian in the American music industry? I’m not holding my breath. At all. Here’s to vocoders and chest pops taking you to the top, girl. Vocoders and chest pops.

Dear Internets: It’s Not You, It’s Me

And this little IM conversation between Jason and I sums up pretty nicely why I don’t really post too much to this personal blog anymore:

Jason: I’m wondering if the age of personal blogs that have any meaning are over. It seems that a) you can do your own thing, but be obscure because instead of being one of 200 or 2000, you’re now one of 20,000,000 because the barrier to entry is a lot lower and everyone has an opinion,

b) if you do become popular you get a community of commenters and suddenly you have a relationship with your readers and that steers your site overtly because it’s not all about you anymore, or even subtly because you want to keep the readers you have, and unless you have a personality strong enough to go “fuck you, this is my site” and have people love you for it, you have to deal with that.

c) we’re in the age of mega-blogs, like Gawker and Perez and newsblogs and et cetera, and personal blogs are seen as quaint at best, ridiculously egotistic at worst, and that’s filtered down that

d) some personal blogs have become personal brands and all about selling the writer as an expert, and all the politics that that engenders that gets obnoxious for people like you and me who just want to write something funny occasionally, or make a point from our respective perspectives on culture as it affects us.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m completely aware of this blog as my personal brand. When something mildly hilarious would happen, I would run back to my computer, bring up a text editor and start writing, often adding mildly hilarious embellishments to fully get my point across. Two things happened that really changed this: At 31, the stories I would share back then seem distinctly more private now. Blogging about my parents separation and eventual divorce was therapeutic and defiant then; now, not so much. And blogging about the periodic depressive periods I have would just be, uhm, a downer.

The other thing is that whatever happens, I’m just trying to enjoy the moment, I guess. Owning the moment, as opposed to mentally processing it into an essay to share with others. And while that comes with a downside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life, it comes with the upside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life.

I guess this is just my way of saying that I’m not sure what the status of the blog is at this point. Like a lot of other old-school bloggers fascinated about web based communication tools, I’m on twitter and tumblr, which reminds me a lot of the type of blog posts I wrote my first year or two of blogging. It’ll be impossible for me to hide any of my identity at this point — I work for a social networking company, for gods sake — but as the methods of communication have evolved, so has blogging, and so I will as well. In what ways, we have yet to see.

This is the only anecdote I have about a recent vacation to Barbados

While driving around the island, we turned on the car radio to discover a catchy little Calypso ditty in a major key, with a decent enough hook about a “Silent Scream.” “Silent Scream” ends up being — no lie — a twelve minute song about abortion; a delightfully musical track on how you should never kill your unborn baby, even in cases of “rape, incest and spousal abuse.” In quotes, of course, because those EXACT WORDS ARE SUNG IN THE FOURTH VERSE. (Naturally, they rhymed the phrase with “there’s no excuse.”)

The song ends, of course, with the sound of a baby crying and then a flat-line.

After I pick my jaw up from the floor and Laurie apologizes on behalf of all of all atheists on exactly four people in the Caribbean, we later find out that we’re listening to the religious radio station, shattering my dreams that an abortion song is #2 on the Bajan Top 100. Behind Rihanna. (That said, if I had to choose between Silent Scream and something on a Contemporary Christian radio station, I’ll always pick the abortion song you can dance to.)

An Open Letter to Amy Winehouse

Dear Amy,

I’ve always prided myself on being a fan of yours; my ex got me listening to your first album Frank when you weren’t anorexic and you didn’t have any tattoos or freaky beehive hairdos. When I learned you were working with Mark Ronson I was thrilled, and when you won a Grammy in the brief moment you were sober or not [noticeably] on crack I turned to my friends and said, “see? I could totally be an A&R guy,” even though I’m in tech and, let’s face it, I could NEVER be an A&R guy.

And then you became a mess. A hot, tragic mess.

Now I hear about the video about you going off doing some racist sing-song rant, singing about Paki’s, Chinks and Nips and pulling back your eyes in front of a video camera to your rockstar-lifestyle boyfriend. And here’s the thing: seeing as I started a blog called 8asians.com, keyword Asians, this is usually the part where I wave my arms at how outrageous and inappropriate a remark like that is, and how shocked and appalled I am as an Asian American to see entertainers engaging in this type of behavior, blah blah fuckity blah.

As an Asian, I’m kinda like, “yeah, that’s fucked.” As a Winehouse fan, I’m all, “Girl, YOU’RE SINGING THIS FROM A CRACKHOUSE.”

Making fun of Amy Winehouse nowadays is like making fun of Whitney Houston three or four years ago: the “crack is whack” meme was hilarious for a while, but the story would get more tragic in passing. When it gets to the point that you see photos of her cracked out in a fur coat at a gas station at two in the morning and all you can really say is something like, “man, I hope she finds Jesus.” And I’m Agnostic.

With Amy, it’s the same thing. I would say something like “I’m so offended I’ll never listen to your music again,” but that’s not really true, because you were probably so twacked out you have absolutely no recollection of saying it, and there are other perfectly legit reasons why I may never listen to your stuff again: you keep getting dropped from labels, and the stuff you HAVE been doing sounds a little lackluster. (Your cover of “Cupid” is still good, but seriously, it sounds like you’re hitting the bottle between takes.) I would keep writing, but it really just depresses the living hell out of me.

Amy Winehouse, from one non-religious person to another: you need to find Jesus. That is all.

The Nice People of Davenport

On Friday I went to my friends wedding. Okay, maybe not so much “friend” as it is the cousin of my best friend Royce. They live in Davenport, which is a sleepy hillside town, off a road built for white people when they want to drive by the oceanside to Santa Cruz. With a population of around 350, Davenport looks straight out of a Thomas Kinkaid painting, if Thomas Kinkaid imagined his paintings inhabited by crazy-ass drunk Mexicans. All of whom are related to Royce.

There are the things I have learned about a Davenport wedding:

1) I’ve only been to Catholic mass a couple of times, all of which were part of a wedding ceremonies. While I don’t necessarily believe in the Catholic faith, I’ve always felt that there’s a grandeur to it that’s fascinating to watch. You know, the cantors, the candles, the solemn “Thanksbetogod,” “Andalsowithyou” back and forth between the priest and his congregation. There’s something calming about the ceremony of it all.

Yeah, not so much with this one. I’m fairly sure this will be the Catholic mass I attend in a while where the wedding crowd “whoos” while the bride goes down the aisle. Twice. And where there are cholos waiting in the parking lot. And a guy with a pimp hat with a neckbrace in the audience. And a bridesmaid with three neck tattoos. (In her defense, she was very nice, so long as you don’t fuck with her, which meant “look directly at her.” Just kidding. Kind of.)

2) As someone who’s been to his share of Filipino weddings, I’ve decided there really isn’t much of a difference between a Filipino wedding and a Mexican one; one plays more Mexican ballads, the other plays more songs to do the thirteen-step cha-cha to. They both play latin freestyle. And serve pork. Pork, I have learned, is the sacred food of the Catholic people. And since pork is fucking delicious, I am okay with this.

3) Chinese wedding banquets might serve champagne - maybe beer - but it’s purely for show. After all, old Asian people don’t really drink at weddings, and they sure as hell don’t party with their own family. Mexicans drink at weddings. A lot. They also sneak in kegs, which unfortunately didn’t sit too well with the rent-a-cops. Six police squadron cars were called shortly afterwards a broke up the reception at 9:30pm, and while I can’t say I attended my first wedding-reception-turned-angry-racial-melee, I can finally cross “Attend a wedding reception broken up by cops” crossed off my life’s To-Do list. Baby steps, I suppose.

That is all.

(Flickr photo credit: Cordelia)

xxxSEXYMOMMY83xxx, the representative from Ohio, will now have the floor

From my Inbox: LiveJournal Advisory Board Nominations Begin.

This morning we are opening the nomination process for the user-representative positions on the LiveJournal Advisory Board … Everyone here at LiveJournal is looking forward to this first-ever User-Representative election!

A motherfucking LiveJournal election. Sure, it’s for an Advisory position but for all you know, people are going to treat this as a shot to be LiveJournal Supreme Being of the Universe. And holy crap, that’s awesome. It’s just like the upcoming political elections, really, except you have to replace all the candidates with bulimic girls, furries, self-cutters, hirsute gay men and angst-ridden Russian teenagers. In other words: just like the upcoming political elections! These are going to have the best smear campaigns ever.

(As to why I’m getting LiveJournal updates? Uhmm…. uh….)

“Now, I want you to look like you’re on a deserted island”

Having learned my lessons, I’m not going to blog much about my job but I will say this — the CEO of the company I work for was featured on the cover of Fast Company this morning. This photo looks a little bit like an ad promo for an ABC drama series, I’m just saying. All we need now is two Koreans and a burning plane in the background.