fishpatrol

I watched Attack on the Pin-up Boys for a third time last night. That movie is so fantastic. XD I remember back when I first watched it, I had no idea who was who (I only knew Heechul because he's...infamous like that) and I had a really strange impression of Ryeowook. I didn't think much of him even after I got into SJ. But now, after seeing him on screen a lot more in SJ-M, my opinion of him has completely changed. He has such a sweet voice, and a sweet personality to match. ♥

After seeing all those photos of the SJ-M boys decked out in traditional Chinese garb, I wonder if they're going to be doing a reenactment of 西遊记 (aka Journey to the West)... I see a 金箍棒 in there! And 猪八戒's, erm, rake thing!
孙悟空
猪八戒
唐僧
um, 沙和尚?
...白马! ;;;

(speaking of Chinese, 秀=show amuses me every time I hear it; it sounds perfectly natural to me because I like to liberally sprinkle English terms when I speak Chinese XD;)

Hankyung's shirt is plunging lower and lower. Not that I disapprove or anything. :D I find it terribly adorable when the camera catches the boys whispering and laughing to each other (and it's even cuter when their mic catches their whispering -- IDK. I just find it utterly adlfjas;sweet♥). In terms of interviews, I would really rather see subtitles on screen when the boys speak Korean rather than strain to hear the translator's accented Chinese -- but I guess these are often broadcasted live, so it's not possible...? :x It must be awkward if the MC can't directly communicate with more than half of the group. I kind of liked the CRI interview where the MC spoke in Chinese and Korean (she switched between the two languages very smoothly too) and there were Chinese subtitles.

Even if you have no idea what I've been rambling about in this entry, even if you skip everything else in this entry, do watch this! Idk what to say. It's just...IDK. *flails* Just watch? XD;;;;

Beijing Welcomes You is an awfully catchy song (I guess that's the point, huh? ;)). I sent the video to my parents just for kicks and because I was curious how many artists they could recognize. I'm ashamed to admit that I only recognized two of them: Jackie Chan and Han Geng. My mom named about half of them, including Jay Chou. I have over 300MB of Jay Chou songs, but I can't recognize him by face. *epic fail* Same goes for singers like Jang Nara, Wang Lee Hom, Lin Jun Jie...I like their music, but I have no idea what they look like. ;;;

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The latest update about the Spider Issue:
My housemate is terribly good at finding spiders -- I could hear her banging on the wall with the sponge mop and occasionally shrieking. Somehow, within ten minutes of arriving at home, she located five spiders, and then I joined her in the shrieking and whacking and the "you kill it"/"no, YOU kill it!" -- we managed to kill three out of the five. 60% success rate: not bad for two bug-o-phobics, right? After I got back to my room and was comfortably seated in front of my computer, I saw a creepy crawly thing scurry across my desk. I immediately smushed it with some Kleenex and mentally congratulated myself for being brave. And then the revulsion hit and I was all, "aldjfadjOMG UGH...! *shiver shudder twitch*" Maybe I should consider exposure therapy. .__.

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I signed up for Korean lessons a few weeks ago, and now I have three weeks of Korean experience. :D [/Horio moment] And by three weeks I actually mean five hours. This is the first time in a very long while that I've wanted to learn something just for myself and not for school, CV-boosting, etc. Aside from learning the language itself, I also want to see how I learn (pick my own brain, or so to speak XD). With both English and Chinese, I'm fairly good with learning and memorizing new vocab. However, when it comes to memorizing a strung-together sentence, I falter. I'm awful with reciting poetry and I have a hard time memorizing lyrics as well as melodies. In other words, I am good at remembering (and making use of the) parts, but not the whole -- I wonder how this will effect the way I learn a foreign language.

Some of the people in the class are able to look at a Korean character and read it aloud immediately. I have to look at the character, decipher the parts, and translate it into a romanized version in my head, before I can pronounce the word/syllable. I'm probably faster at writing than I am at reading. >__O;; The thing that's slowing me down the most is the fact that I'm still thinking in romanized form, rather than instinctively recognizing the vowel or consonant (which will come with practise, I hope). When I think of Chinese words, I come up with vague images of what the character might look like -- the character might not be accurate at all, or I might be thinking of the semantic meaning of the character, but I would not be thinking of pinyin. With both Japanese and Korean, I always think in terms of romanization, which makes sense since the English alphabet is the most familiar to me, and thus my brain's default setting.

This whole "thinking in certain languages" thing has always been of interest to me. In high school, I used to go around to my bilingual friends and ask them what language their dreams were in, and then try to figure out whether their thoughts featured more of one language than the other. Upon occasion, when my thoughts wander, my brain switches between English and broken Chinese with random bits of French, Japanese, and, recently, Korean mixed in.

Speaking of French, I wonder if I will end up with better Korean than French at the end of the ten-week lessons. French was a mandatory class for six years -- I dropped it as soon as I reached grade 10. XD 20-hours versus six years...well, perhaps personal interest matters too since that does determines the amount of practise and use outside of class, so, who knows.

And speaking of Korean, the k/g sound is too subtle for me to figure out under which circumstances the consonant is pronounced "k" and when it's pronounced "g". Also, all the different writings for the "eh" and "weh" sounds drive me nuts. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO USE. D: "ch" and "j" sound the same, and I don't understand the difference between "k/g" (kee-yuhk), "k" (khey-euk), and "double k/g" (ssang kee-yuhk -- and alksdfjl; at the double letters D:). It would probably be easier if I could type out the actual characters. But I can't figure out the Korean keyboard either (I know how to turn the function on...but each key stands for something different and if you press them in the wrong combination something funny comes out D:).

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eta: I originally uploaded this for dear_whimsy, but in case some of you guys are interested, here are a bunch of songs (12, to be exact :D) by 12 Girls Band. Find out more about them at Wikipedia and sample some of their songs on Youtube. (I'm too sleepy to write anything coherent nrrrgh)

I just spent the past half hour flailing a sponge-on-a-mop-handle thingie with one of my housemates. She came knocking on my door at a while ago, asking if I was afraid of bugs. I hate creepy crawly things that have more than four legs (crustaceans aside because I can eat those -- don't tell me about stir-fried cockroaches. I don't want to hear about it. >__o). But I followed her to the bathroom anyway, to see the big millipede. Akdlafsdljf. It was disgusting and I didn't want to go near it, even with the sponge-on-a-mop-handle. So we stood there, flailing at each other for ten minutes. None of the other two girls on our floor were home, but fortunately, the man who lives on the second floor came in with some friends and we implored him to help us.

After that problem was resolved, my housemate started pointing out all the spiders that apparently reside along our kitchen wall. She would hit one with the corner of the sponge-on-a-mop-handle and as soon as the spider started running, she would scream and toss me the sponge-on-a-mop-handle, and then I would smush it with the sponge-on-a-mop-handle. One of them was extremely difficult to get because it was cleverer than us and we screamed and flailed and slammed the sponge-on-a-mop-handle against the wall. I think we got it in the end. We're not sure though. :| So now I am completely paranoid and am compulsively looking up and checking out corners in fear of more spiders.

(Oh man, I even have a tag just for bug-related entries. *FAILS*)

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In other news, I was watching 非常大明星 on Tudou.com today, but this scene was not shown. D: Maybe it'll be in next week's segment?

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Yunho's Spokesman feat. Donghae is all kinds of ;dajfsdkl awesome. *___* Junsu should have more songs (Junsu's little dolphin scream at the end, lol♥!)featuring Eunhyuk's rapping. And I'll bet Changmin and Kyuhyun and also Jaejoong and Yesung would sound fantastic if they did ballad duets together (speaking of Jaejoong, he sounds amazing in Crying. I wish there were HQ MP3 versions of these solos. :x:x) But what I would really like to hear is Yoochun and Kibum rapping together in Engrish about bling-bling balls.

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I can't wait to see Junjo Romantica anime subbed! I bought the fourth volume the other day, and ;akjfdsl, Misaki is such a cute spazz and Usami is oblivious as always and Hiroki is going to get an ulcer if he keeps getting so worked up. Personally, I like Misaki and Usami's storyline more than Hiroki and Nowaki's. Both Misaki and Usami are so damned clueless, and their relationship is so dysfunctional, but in an awesome way. <3<3

What does it mean to "be in a fandom"? To my BFF who does not read fanfic, look at fanart, slash (she does do the whole het-shipping though), to be in a fandom means trawling through communities and forums for photos and video clips and the newest songs by her favourite bands. Being in a particular fandom simply means to be a fan of that particular something. To me, an avid reader of fanfic, an ardent slasher (of the boy-on-boy variety and none of that saw and hacking stuff), and a dabbler of fanart, being involved in a fandom means going above and beyond the available canon. The way I see it, while being a fan and being a fandomer are not mutually exclusive concepts, they are also not the same thing.

The non-fandom fan squees over the latest episode of an anime, the newest album of a band, the last Harry Potter book. The fan-fandomer squees over the latest episode, and then proceeds to trawl through the Internet, searching for fanfic that depicts their favourite characters or pairing interacting based on the most recent canon development. The non-fan fandomer disregards the latest episode, and probably the whole of the latest arc, and thinks that "sometimes life is pretty awesome" when stumbling upon fanart that shows two characters who may have exchanged all of two lines throughout the anime in a compromising position.

Even using these categories, it's still hard to pinpoint what being in a fandom is all about. The fanficcer is a participant of the fandom. But what about the fanartist that only draws portraits based on the pre-existing photographs? What about the icon makers and the layout makers and the people who keep everyone else on top of the latest news?

Perhaps my BFF has the better definition of fandom: being in a fandom means being a fan of a certain source who interacts with other fans of the same source. That explanation doesn't quite sit well with me though. Several years ago, back in my Harry Potter days, I wondered, as a fan, what was the difference between me and my friends who could not care less about the multitude of fan-created works, but would jumping with glee at the announcement of the release of the next HP book. I loved the books, I loved the world and the characters that JK Rowling had created. But what I loved more were the fanfics and the different possibilities that fandom and fanon made available. HP fans who talked to other HP fans about the books and analyzed them to the last detail -- are these people participating in the wider HP fandom? What about the people who read only half the books, watched half the movies, and read/write a disgusting amount of Mary Sue-in-Hogwarts fic -- are they in the fandom?

(Now I've taken myself in a full circle and can no longer conceptualize what I was trying to argue in the first place. Whoops.)

On a similar topic, I find with non-story based sources, it's trickier to define canon. With TV shows and anime and books, there is a clear-cut story: these events happened, these events did not. This character hates this one, but loves another. With real people, it's hard to say what precisely is canon; people's behaviours are fluid, and it's harder to predict what a real person would do in any given situation. The easiest way for me to conceptualize canon and fanon is simply: canon is the way I interpret the original source; fanon is everyone else's interpretation. XD

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And for the obligatory Suju part of this entry:

I've noticed a general tendency that the LJ Suju fans and the Soompi Suju fans have opposing views on the issue of E.L.F. Many comments I see on the LJ comms seem to portray "elves" as rabid fangirls whom you would not want to approach with a ten-footmetre pole. Given some of their actions (and reactions), I can see why this claim is widely spread among non-"elves". Now, on Soompi, every Suju fan is an E.L.F. "Elves" are wonderful fans who will support the boys (but only13) to the end of the world and will protect them from everything and anything (but who will protect the boys when the rabid fangirls attack?). I was going to make a comment comparing the intelligence the level of rabidness LJ fans and Soompi fans, but I shall refrain because this is a public entry. ^0^; (I suspect that I have something against fan-bases on forums)

Note, though, that I'm not entirely familiar with the ELF vs non-ELF issue and may be making an over-generalizing statement; I apologize in advance if anyone is offended by my comments.

Now that I've bashed a certain subsection of the Suju fans, I'd like to point out some very pretty awesome fanworks done by some pretty awesome fans:
Chinese fans perform Happiness -- The clothes, the hairstyles, the actions, the backdrops, the camera slices and angles! *__* The whole thing is an amazing imitation of the original Happiness MV. *boggles*
Korean fans perform U -- Again, fantastic imitation of the original U MV. I think this was meant to be more of a parody than a pure imitation...? But either way, the dancing and the clothes? PRETTY AWESOME.

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I totally just ate nine fried spring rolls in one afternoon/night. I'm sure they are awful for my health, but damn, those things are yummy. :9

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eta: Is it really awful of me to be looking forward to AST1's debut? :D;; I thought the strategy for their promotional video wasn't such a bad one. It certainly garnered them plenty of publicity (though, admittedly, a good chunk of it was negative publicity -- but hey, isn't it also true that any publicity is good publicity?). When I saw this I thought of all the potential AST1+Suju crossovers, haha, oh, self. *facepalm*

I have a friend who draws quite well, yet she doesn't enjoy it because she finds it very agitating and stressful when something doesn't turn out the way she had intended. The majority of my drawings turn out very differently from what I had pictured in my mind. XD;; However, for me, my mind can completely relax when I'm sketching, even if I don't like the final product. I can easily spend two to three hours listening to music and working on a sketch. Inking and CG-ing (especially CG-ing) are much more stress-inducing though!

I was listening to Jang Ri In's Timeless (Chinese ver.) the other day and I was thinking about how there was so much implied ShiHan-ness in the MV (because I am a biased fangirl like that). And so, I drew this:
( Hankyung & Siwon, Timeless AU )

And the following...is a cracked-out-comic version of Timeless. XD; It makes more sense if you've seen the music videos. Er, relatively more sense, anyway.
( IDK;;;; )

I just realized that I have missed my one year LJ anniversary by six days. :'( This journal, fishpatrol, has now been around for one year and six days. *insert applause* It was originally created for the purpose of Avoiding All Things RL, and it has been serving me well to that end. :)
**(my other journal, you see, had become too RL-oriented and too many RL-people were on my flist)

I hate daylight savings because it messes with my sleep pattern and eating pattern and if it wasn't daylight savings, my assignment would be due in one hour and ten minutes, instead of just...ten minutes (I ought to get cracking on that). I have already accepted the fact that time passes more quickly when I'm on Youtube, but time goes on super-speed setting when one combines Youtubing and daylight savings. One hour makes a huge difference!

eta: I have the Wonder Girls' "Tell Me" song stuck in my head. However, the image that comes to mind isn't their music video or them doing the dance. Rather, these two (six year old! cowboy boots!) videos (Heechul's "o mo na~" face slays me every time) come to mind. XD;