I know I haven’t made a post in centuries and haven’t made a decent one since my first (according to the popularity…), and to be absolutely honest I haven’t thought of anything really inspiring worth a whole post, and I guess I’d much rather quality than quantity (even though I’m a bit loose on that). Don’t get too excited, this isn’t a large post, I just thought I’d clarify something to everyone:

Your = one’s (belonging, possession etc)
you’re = you are

There = that matter, in/at that place/point
Their = the possessive form of they (yea, I totally ripped that from dictionary.com… )
They’re = they are

This seriously is something that annoys the crap out of me and from the point I see one of these mistakes I can’t think about anything else you have to say. I know a lot of people that come here, especially to comment on the martial arts posts, don’t necessarily have English as their first language, so I don’t usually pay people out about it… but if you can’t even get that right, stop trying to be smart with witty insults and swearing… I get confused when you get me to look for my ‘a retard’….

So lately people have decided to get him into the film industry, much like every other Asian star is dragged into doing something they’re not good at. I think his first major appearance was the live action of the popular manga ‘Initial D’. To be honest I liked that movie, however I can’t say that was in any part really attributed to Jay Chou… I mean he played an autistic boy that barely spoke and looked like he was about to fall asleep while he raced… and looking at the random pics above that I got from the first few pages of his google search, you can tell that wasn’t that big a task for him… all I can say is that at least he didn’t ruin the movie.

Jay also produced and directed his own love story with a matching song ‘Secret’… which I must say I really had no interest in whatsoever, those who have seen it please tell me what you think. The next movie I took note of, along with many others I’d assume, will be the role as a prince in ‘Curse of the Golden flower’. This movie I guess wasn’t that good in the first place, all it did was revolve around a lot of incest and a crazed queen… the parts where Jay did much was the last battle where he throws a pole arm around, kills a lot of ninjas, and kills himself… story-wise he was very important, however his part in the actual movie was almost negligible and anyone could play it…. either way, the movie bombed, nobody really gives a crap…

Now the two newest additions to Jay chou’s portfolio would be ‘Treasure hunter’ and ‘True legend’.

‘Treasure hunter’ is pretty much a rip-off of ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘the Mummy’ put together, and seemingly one of the more anticipated movies in China… well at least they did a lot of advertising for it. So I saw the thing… and seriously it was shit… First of all the entire plot didn”t make sense…

1. The story revolves around people wanting to find a treasure hidden in an ancient tomb, and the whereabouts of this tomb is only passed down to the “eagle of the desert”. The movie reveals Jay to be to previous one whom gave it up to a friend, however despite this Jay, along with his companions, spend most of the movie looking for the treasure map that leads to the tomb…. huh? They also spend a bit building up on this eagle of the desert… who appears for about 5 minutes occupied with a bit of fighting, a lot of whinging, and a romance between two characters that haven’t been built up enough for anyone to care.
2. There are roughly… supposedly…. 4 groups of villains in this movie. I hesitate because I really don’t know. The first notable group will be a group that kills the father of the female lead for the treasure map… they were never heard of again after said event and everyone obviously forgot about their existence. The second will be pretty much represented by one person with super-human abilities of controlling bandages wrapped around him as weapons, so the entire battle scene just looked like Jay whipping tissue paper… The third would be these raiders that emerge from a dust storm, whom scared tissue-man away so it’s safe to assume they weren’t together (who, by the way, was never mentioned again). These guys had a random arsenal of weapons such as morning starts, scimitars, maces etc… (which were really poorly made…) and chased our would-be heroes across the desert while a ridiculous amount of explosives were pulled out of nowhere and thrown at them… and after that scene they were once again never to be heard of again … you see a pattern here? The fourth would be some random ghosts that appear in the tomb… you never find out who they are, why they were there, and they have the lamest scene of the girl getting possessed by the ghosts and Jay has to fight her…..
3. There is a guy that barely participates in the movie, playing sort of the ‘mystery guy’ in the movie that seems to know a lot of secrets. The twist was that he has been to the tomb before with friends, however was attack by the “raiders” at some unknown point and they ended up running for their lives, and the mystery man survived by eating his friends’ flesh… so here we have another person that knew where the tomb was that spent the movie looking for the map. This guy has been in the tomb, knew about all the traps and how the burial chamber looked like… yet it also seemed like he’s never seen it before despite actually having successfully raided the place… and what does he do after fighting his way to this glorious end? He decides to get himself killed… that thing he could’ve done while being chased by raiders and walking through the three traps in the tomb….

Secondly the special effects and CGI were poorly done, I usually won’t pick on these things in a Chinese production but since this is a rather big movie you’d think they’d put more effort into it. Finally, the biggest problem of them all: they had Jay Chou as the male lead… and he played his usual self… now just imagine ‘The mummy’ or ‘Indiana Jones’ and neither Brendan Fraser nor Harrison Ford had any expression and didn’t even TRY to be funny…………………………………………… yea… really, don’t watch this movie!!!

Now we get to ‘True legend’, which only got to cinemas in China last week. It’s another pretty big production with high expectations, with the director/martial arts choreographer of movies like ‘Fearless’ (Jet Li) and ‘Drunken fist’ (reeeaaaallllyyyy old Jackie Chan movies), and some partial 3D fight scenes (which really wasn’t an asset… in fact it got in the way of my enjoying the movie by making me wear the damn glasses). Jay Chou only really plays a cameo appearance (and yet he takes up the biggest spot in the posters…). I went into the cinema with the hope that he won’t be in much of the movie as they did say he only has a special appearance, and although he did end up being in a fair bit of the first half of the movie, at least he didn’t say much….. the thing is though he plays the ‘God of Kung fu’, I won’t spoil anything else, but as the name implies he needs to fight a lot in this, however Jay Chou really isn’t a good fighter, so you end up with really easy to handle moves along with a lot of special effects fighting (like dragonball Z style). I won’t go as far as to say he ruined those bits for me, though I think it’d be a lot better that someone else played his part. If you want a short review on the movie, the basic layout of the movie is separated into two chapter which I can tell you is unnecessary and if fact was what ruined the movie. The first half is very typical Chinese fantasy with people that can leap across cliffs and crush boulders with their bare hands, and the main villain is a guy with metal plates sewn to his skin (which really isn’t practical at all if you think about it… in fact it’ll just make it easier to tear your skin off…) and has toxic hands. this half of the movie was very cool despite the pointless 3D graphics… the only problem was that it didn’t really stay on topic. The Chinese name of the movies is “蘇乞兒”, and in fact the alternate name they gave to the movie was ‘the true legend of beggar Su’; the other emphasis of the movie was the drunken fist fighting… and both the agonist doing drunken fist or begging were not present in this first half… So I think the director and producers realised this, but didn’t want to remake the entire movie, so they decided to make a second half to what would’ve already been a finished story. This second half starts Su (which I think you would’ve guessed by that title to be the main agonist) being drunk and on the streets… so that got it right this time; however instead of being set in the ancient fantasy world with flying people and deadly flying hula hoops, we have gone back to normal people with a backdrop much like fearless… in fact the final battle was a lame fight between Su doing break-dancing and 6 wrestler led by David Carradine (yes, I was surprized he was in it too, especially with the notable handicap of being dead)…. my word of advice…. watch the first half of the movie, then leave!

So here I am, sitting on the couch drinking some sago with coconut milk I made earlier watching deep impact due to a lack of a better option, and once again I am critisizing how people choose to spend their last moments, knowing a month in advance… and here there are people still going to work, watching TV, and wandering aimlessly around the streets… but then again if you think about it, if everyone knew they’d die soon noone will run the shops and clubs, the news and reruns of  the simpsons will probably be the only thing left on TV, most power stations will probably go off line, and gas stations will probably run out of gas in the first 4 hours the news was given… so you can’t even go very far…

So now nothing’s working, nowhere to hang, and you need to think of your own activities because those diving lessons you always wanted to take won’t be there anymore… now I’m sure everyone has a hit list of people you want dead… now assuming you don’t have a top 200 list, this will only occupy you for so long assuming your targets aren’t too tough.. (don’t forget these guys may have already killed themselves)… then there is that girl you’ve liked all these years… now assume you don’t sadly get rejected in these circumstances… what else can you do? Right now I can’t think of anything besides to find the best view to see whatever disaster is about to strike me…

And you know what, I really can’t think of anything so I’m gonna end it here. I’ll be happy to accept suggestion or at least what everyone else would do, at least I’ll have a plan when the apocalypse comes.

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mmMMMmmm… babies…

[This is for the Chinese/Japanese/any nation that uses Chinese characters: the two characters in the logo (one Korean and one Chinese), look like the Chinese words "子宮", which means "uterus". Now just out of curiosity, does anyone know what the Korean character means? Cheers]

I’ve been on this thing for a while now, mainly due to the overwhelming number of invites flooding my junkmail… now after around 2 years on it, what have I found?

Pros:

• Makes it easier to track down that girl you met once at the club… so long as you remember her face and she put it on her profile…
• Easily quantify the number of friends you have.
• Simple to invite said friends to parties and events by just ticking them off the list without really needing to think of them; they also have no excuse for not getting a notice
• Quizzes allow you to know more about yourself: the more you do the less enthusiastic you are of your work and the more time you are trying to waste
• Posting photos of absolutely everything lets you convince people that you have a social life…
• Games applications allow endless fun at uni and other public computers you can play anything on
• Know when people have birthdays, get into relationships, get married, divorced, make-up, stop being friends; all without actually needing to endure 5 hours of painful moaning/giggling/showing off/ bitching… marvelous~
• Increase stalking potential by 500%
• Superpoking makes sexual harassment acceptable
• By wasting a bit of time every 6 hours, you can buy a person you know and make them do shit… and it’s legal this time!
• You find long lost childhood friends and find out previously unknown mutual friends and relations

Cons:

• You realize that ugly blob from last night found you and is spamming you with invites
• You realize there are less than 100 people in your friends list and you know none of them
• Random people keep inviting you to events in another country
• Chain quizzes keep traveling back to you… over and over and over and over…
• An overflow of applications that tell you when you die and what your favourite sex position is, with their respective notifications that somehow make it to your email…
• People not taking the relationship status seriously, making it really hard to make a move
• People manage to annoy you without even needing to be on the same continent, and you can’t block them because that’s just plain mean!!!!
• Random guys keep spanking you and chest bumping you…
• Random people buy you and make you into a notice board
• Someone tries to add you, and you don’t know if it’s someone you just don’t remember or a pedophile….

So in the end really, whether facebook is the greatest invention know to man or the cause of all your mental problems…… ultimately just depends on whether you’re the one looking for that special someone from last night…. the the ugly blob….

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Quick! Before they have a closing down sale!

The question of what Asians are so small has troubled mankind ever since Anime made it to morning cartoons and JAV became a threat to the American adult entertainment industry. Many say the claim is simply racism: a separation  composed in the mind of xenophobes and religious fanatics. However the morphological differences between Asians and white people are obvious, and here we shall explore the plausible theories.

Endocrinology: Asians work too hard and stress too much – stress causes an increase in the secretion of insulin into the bloodstream, which has a antagonistic effect on growth. This relationship is clearly shown in the fact that Asians are all short little bastards, with the exception of those with pituitary tumors or steroid abuse whom coincidentally aggregate in the sports teams of their countries.

Adaptive evolution: High levels of air pollution in Asian countries – to better avoid the pollution produced by the overproduction of POS cars, sweatshops, DVD burning companies, and children; which due to higher kinetic energies tend to rise towards the atmosphere, Asians have adapted by growing shorter.

Conservation of Resources – the strengthened bonds between Asia with the rest of the world in the past century has caused an exponential increase in export of food, electronics, fabric, people, hello kitty, and other natural resources; leaving very little resources for themselves. To cope with the lack of resources and biomass, Asians thus reduce their individual mass, thus requiring less food to reach maximum height. Due to the small deviation in overall size and morphology, commodity such as clothing and organs can be shared and recycled.

Congenital Acrophobia – like mice are born afraid of cats, and Americans of everything; Asians are born acrophobic, therefore those that are short stay happy and live longer, while those that overshoot the average Asian height become overwhelmed by constant fear and development chronic mental diseases such as depression. An experiment can be done where you yell at the tallest and biggest Asian you know: he will undoubtedly cower in fear or at least pretend to ignore you, thus avoiding standing up.

Even with all these theories, there is still no dominant view as to why Asians are so small; but what is known is that there is evidence suggesting they are growing bigger, which probably means that they are getting lazier, moving to other countries, getting richer, and forgetting their heritage. I hereby employ the help of everyone here to observe whether this is the case, if so, then the above theories can become valid and we can begin to learn to manipulate the size of Asians. And who knows, we may be able to fit more of them into cargo holds or sweatshops.

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The immortal…

Here is a list of the type of people that should be brutally shoved down a garbage disposal and join the great river of waste in our sewers:

1. That guy at school that thinks he knows more than you do at everything because he’s a year or two your senior, and at uni, these are the social science retards that try to give you medical advice.
2. Ugly girls that think they’re hot:
   everyone’s met a few of these in their lifetime, these are those ugly both inside and out and still try to frame you for secretly having a crush on them. The only reason you will hang around these people will be because these people often attract pretty girls that have low self esteem, whom which need said ugly girls to make them feel better.
3. Ugly girls
4. Ugly people in general
5. People that like Twilight:
   This also includes people that like any other vampire type romances such as… well Vamps and goths. There is nothing sexy about someone forcing their canines into your carotid… it’s a little bit more than a hickey but that doesn’t make it more delightful.
6. Pauline Hanson:
   
   … need I explain that to you too?
7. The audience on the funniest home videos show that laugh at everything.
8. The administrative staff at the University of Queensland:
   The most incompetent people that I rely on (I don’t rely on the social sciences people).
9. People that think it’s alright to be racist to any race as long as they’re not white:
   This does not apply to people that make fun of their own races.
10. Telemarketers.

And if you don’t agree with me you also belong to this list, and you know what you must do.

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And God sent his most able agent to earth to cleanse man of self-worth: the Balder!

Ouran High School Host Club: 10/10

Haruhi, a girl from the grass-roots gains a scholarship to Ouran High, a prestigous school for the extremely wealthy. In some unusual circumstances she is mistaken for a guy and was forced into the Ouran High Host Club where a whole bunch of weird and wacky things happen and everyone besides the 2 on the right fall for her.

The so called ‘host club’ is pretty much a high class male escort service, and why so many girls hang out there all the time is a mystery. The girls also seem to get turned on by everything… if only girls I know were that easy… Anyways, as screwed up as everything sounds, it’s a really good show and quite hilarious. It’s mainly for girls so there are a few cheezy bits but I can live with it, and it’s not the whole “I love you, you love me, let’s cry a lot” type so don’t worry. [though you could end up with the phrase "kiss kiss fall in love" stuck in your head from the intro song...]

Busou Renkin: 8.5/10

The show is about a war between alchemist warriors and the homunculus (beings created by alchemy). The human warriors can only kill the homunculus using ‘busou renkin’, which sort of means ‘battle alchemy’, which are weapons with special powers and take shape depending on their users.

The theme and the elements seem a bit cliche, but the story turns out pretty well and the characters develop pretty well and most characters have more dimension in their personalities than “I must save my friends” or “I will destroy soul society, which apparently isn’t a real world”. It’s got a good balance between constant action and comedy, something I find quite essential these days. The fights are well animated and you don’t get the dragonball Z fighting where giant beams get fired and everything just disappears.

Can’t really think of any others that fit this catergory, so I’ll leave it at that.

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Don’t eat where you pee I always say… :

Gundam Seed: 5/10

Ok, this isn’t that bad a show by itself at the beginning, but the lack of an original story and a bunch of gundams that pretty much look the same is just very annoying. The Jap voice acting also makes people want to hurl their remotes at the screen when the guys cry… seriously, it sounds like a gagged cat trying to swallow cotton… The lack of originality also goes on later in the sequel: Gundam Seed destiny, where ‘freedom’ gundam is upgraded to ‘strike freedom’, and ‘justice’ gundam to ‘infinite justice’… fuck… and the whole “we have secretly been developing all these weapons, we just haven’t been bothered to bring them out when we needed them, and waited until someone came to steal them”… (seriously, almost all the suits the main characters use are stolen from somewhere…). The animators also get very cheap and lazy, and they just keep replaying stock footage over and over and over again… which I reckon they might as well not put it in at all… but they did gain a few more points from the music, which I think is great (TM Revolution FTW!!!).

Bleach: 4/10

This show started out very well admittedly, I liked the concept and the first ark was awesome. But like all shows that drag on for too long and producers just want to squeeze as much out of a successful show as possible, the stories have started to drag and repeat (ie “WHAT IS THIS CRAZY RIATSU?!” “I am a new powerful enemy that can easily crush you, but I think I’ll play around with you first” “omg! he flashed across me and cut my shoulder, BANKAI!!!” “omg! there’s no possible way that you could’ve beaten me, but logic doesn’t work here, I die now!”… whatever, you get the point). The animators here are just lazy to begin with, and the fight scenes or comprized of constant weapons locks and teleportation, the only cool thing is the revealling of the special abilities (i.e. it’s boring after that…), and even that’s getting a bit unoriginal, having Ichigo’s bankai being a less stylish sword with even more flashing around… The planning of the show also adds to the disappointment, with about 20% of the run time dedicated to recaps… in which not that much has happened in the first place… just lots of talking with their weapons out… The movies aren’t great, just extra long episodes without even improving the artwork… feels like dragonball Z all over again…

Jigoku Shoujo 4/10

Once again, another show that had a good original concept. The gist of it is people can log onto a website, type in the person they hate, and if they accept you they will come to you and give you a doll that you can use to drag that person down to hell, only catch is that after you death you will go to hell too. The artwork is decent and great music, unfortunately the stories were very restricted, having individual stories per episode ( save the last 3 or so) with a very linear progression, you know pretty much exactly what’s going to happen and almost when as well (the girl says the same lines every episode! the voice actor probably just had to come in for half a day to do all her recordings for the entire show!). The artwork was good except it didn’t go far enough to make it scary and didn’t have any impressive special effects, which was a big theme in it; the fundemental philosophies and plots are very shallow and it’s just single-mindedly pushing the concept of “revenge is bad”. More of a kiddy show really, heck I’d prefer pokemon over this… great music though…(like… intro and ending…)