what the hell?

First off in case no one figured out, The Team won the CV Talent Show. Now that it was a big accomplishment or anything because there weren't that many participants in it. But still, The Team won. For winning, The Team received a $35 dollar gift certificate to the restaurant of our choice (Claim Jumper). Toni-Lynne was nice enough to tape it for us for... posterity?

Rather than just taping it for us and showing it off her copy of the show, Toni-Lynne went above and beyond what she needed to do. She actually edited the footage to make it look nice and gave us all copies of it! That is so cool (cue emoticon with sunglasses)!

I also took a midterm today for Asian Art History. I spent so long studying this (with lots of procrastination in between) only to have my stupid brain turn off on me and switch around the answers. Gah I am not enjoying the tests in that class too much. Its all pure memorization, which my brain has long since given out on.

Begin long winded rant about Lakers, skip if you want

The Lakers won last night against the TWolves. <sarcasm>GOOD THING THE REFS WERE THERE TO MAKE SURE THEY WON BY 30!</sarcasm>.

By the way, I'm making fun of people who think that the NBA has a conspiracy where the Lakers are winning because they play in a big market and they're a big label. But when you look at it there are definitely better ways the NBA can bring in revenue rather than the Lakers. Hell if the NBA was specifically making sure teams in big cities or big stars got in, consider the following.

The Houston Rockets didn't get in even though Yao Ming in the playoffs would have been huge. That alone would have brought in more internation viewers from China and other asian countries.

The Washington Wizards are a no-brainer. I mean think about the ratings! Michael Jordan, in his last season in the NBA taking this ragtag team of players and leading them into the post season for one last final romp. Oh think about how many tickets they could have sold with that!

Last thursday's game had a controversial call. Now is that "proof" that the referees are trying to help the Lakers win? Maybe. Is that proof that the referees are humans and make mistakes too? Yes. I'm sorry but I've yet to see a post season where the referees have not made a single bad call. Hell there are at least 2 or 3 bad calls per game. Now while I'm not saying that the referees were justified in calling a foul on Szczerbiak against Kobe (although I could not watch the game so I can't tell whether or not this is true. I am just going by what the NBA.com article says), stuff like that happens.

And at least this was reported. There is one man who consistently does not get called fouls against, Michael Jordan. I'm a fan or Jordan just like anyone else but MJ gets away with lots and lots of calls. Not necessarily phantom calls but if there's anyone who gets away with more hand checks and gets saved when he's in trouble, it's him. The one that totally stands out (and replays show it) is Michael Jordan fouling Byron Russell during Game 6 of the 1998 Finals. In it Byron appears to slip but it is actually Jordan's hand that causes Byron to take a tumble. Further proof of his star treatment lies in the fact that while he was a tenacious defender, he's only fouled out of 10 games in his 13 year career.Source of the MJ info

End long rant

But anyways, Happy Birthday to all the April people, last one being Victor. It seems that lots of people were either born in April or July. I guess it is just a big coincidence..

I went paintballing today with CA members over at some place near LA. This was the first time I had gone paintballing at all. It was expensive to play even though we got some stuff discounted. Basically a bag of 2000 paintballs costs $60. Totally weak.

But paintballing was so much fun! First off a lot of the guys who regularly go there helped us newbies out beforehand. The standard paintball gun that we got with the rental was so damn heavy. There was no real way to both aim and hold the gun as the CO₂ cartridge was in the way so you could either hold it comfortably or hold it for accuracy.

Speaking of equipment, the goddamn masks were also uncomfortable to breathe in. The padding on all the ones we had rented were starting to fall off so it was a bitch to constantly readjust your goggles because that stupid piece of foam wouldn't stay properly. You also couldn't take off your mask while you're in the game and you had to wait until you exited the arena and walked down this long pathway before you were allowed to take off those masks.

So did those paintballs hurt? Somewhat. The first game that I played the two/three guys on my leftside got overrunned and in my attempt to surprise the enemy who had not noticed me I decided to shoot at the guys feet. This of course caused the guy (with a much better, self-bought gun) to shoot me in the ass. Which is quite an accomplishment seeing how the front side of my body was facing him when he shot yet somehow still managed to land a big stain on my ass. So basically when you're hit, it stings and depending on where and how far you were hit is the amount of pay you'll feel. The second game I was on one side of a pretty large rock and didn't happen to notice the guy on the other team standing on the other end of the rock. So I got shot three times. One of the paintballs hit me in the ribs but didn't break. But being hit stunned me to where I didn't dodge his next two shots which hit once on my left leg (this hurt like crazy, and theres a nice red bruise there now).

I also got hit in the collar bone. Now that would have been fine except I was hit by my own goddamn team. Here we are in the middle of the round and we've taken out a lot of the other team. I finally decide to start advancing and I turn to my left because I see a guy. But this guy is on my team and he waves me off as being friendly. Then I turn to my left slightly again and there's a guy there.

Pretend for a moment that you are on the paintball field. A guy to the right and front of you sees the guy thats ahead of you. The guy ahead of you waves the 'other guy' off as a friendly. So when that 'other guy' turns towards you... now keep in mind that neither guy shot at each other and the guy ahead of you is on your team. What is the most logical team to do? YES! Shoot the 'other guy'!

I simply couldn't believe. My own teammate had shot me. I was pissed off too! Not only did he fail to see that I had no identifying bands that said, "SHOOT ME IM ON THE OTHER TEAM" he also had to hit me on the freaking collar bone, so now I have a red bruise there as well.

The final game consisted of me being hit by a very lucky shot. But I'm assuming the guy who shot me had a much better gun than the standard one because it was accurate and actually had enough pressure to reach me and sting. So that is another bruise that I got.

So total out of the dozen or so games I played. I got "hit" 4 times. 4 other games I didn't get hit at all and 1 game I was flanked and had to surrender. The only thing that sucked about the whole paintballing thing was that I couldn't tell whether or not I had hit someone. I was mainly trying to not get hit so I was shooting from the maximum range thus making it hard to judge if I had hit someone or not.

But basically paintball comes down to having a decent gun (which I didn't have) and some decent clothing to protect yourself (which I kind of had) and not getting shot (which I did)...

Wow this turned out to be such a long post...

Edit: I changed the title since Ow! Fucker looks like something else ://

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO !!!

Okay, now supposedly girls are the ones with the fashion sense which I assume requires some ability to match colors together that look appeasing to others in their society. So why the hell can these same "girls" not get down color coordination for a website. Do they not understand a blinding blue background on top of a brighter blue color is tacky and also illegal? (Well it SHOULD be illegal). Also I don't get, the purpose of the Xanga is to read it right? So why won't you go to such lengths just to prohibit other people from reading your website?

Other problems: (Note: none of these technically will destroy your computer, but they will destroy your mind)

1. HELLO I LIKE TO USE UP ALL YOUR RAM BY PUTTING IN 200 IMAGES OF RANDOM IMAGES I FOUND ON TEH INTERNAT AND ALSO I SAW HAMSTERDANCE A LONG TIME AGO AND WANTED TO EMULATE THAT

2. HI I AM A 10 YEAR OLD BOY WHO THINKS THAT MY RAP SKILLZ ARE PRETTY TIZIGHT, BUSTING OUT RHYMING GEMS SUCH AS YEAR AND TEAR! ALSO MISSPELL EVERY SINGLE WORD. POSSIBLE.

3. HELLO, NOT ONLY DO I LIKE TO SCROLL THE TITLE OF MY XANGA, I ALSO DO IT BY ALIGNING THE TEXT VERTICALLY, YOU KNOW HOW NORMAL PEOPLE USUALLY VIEW TEXT WHILE ITS SCROLLING BACK AND FORTH IN AN OBNOXIOUS MANNER. ALSO RATHER THAN USE THE WHOLE BROWSER. I FEEL THAT IT IS MUCH CUTER TO HAVE THIS TINY LITTLE BOX AND MAKE EVERYONE SCROLL AROUND IN IT! NO COMMENT ;)

4. LOL I JUST DISCOVERED HOW TO MAKE YOUR COMPUTER SHOW A DIALOG BOX, NOW WATCH AS I DO THIS TO YOU 20 TIMES TO SHOW YOU HOW INCREDIBLY COOL IT IS. DONT WORRY ABOUT MISSING OUT ON THE CONTENT OF MY SITE CAUSE YOUR TOO BUSY TRYING TO CLICK ON ALL THOSE JAVASCRIPT ALERTS! MY SITE JUST CONSISTS OF ME POSTING UP IMAGES THAT I LEECHED FROM OTHER PEOPLES SERVERS AND ALSO POSTING UP LYRICS OF SONGS THAT I HAVE NO REAL CLUE ABOUT! YAY GO ME AND MY AWESOME XANGA

5. AS IF MY LACK OF BEING ABLE TO TYPE COMPLETE SENTENCES WASNT ENOUGH I NEED TO PUT A PICTAR OF CALVIN AND HOBBES, IN BLACK AND WHITE NO LESS, UNDERNEATH MY TEXT WHICH IS ALSO... YES! BLACK! ALSO I LIKE TO MAKE YOUR TITLEBAR SCROLL BACK AND FORTH EVERY SECOND BECAUSE YOU KNOW THAT CATCHES PEOPLES ATTENTIONS!!!!!!!

Am I one to really judge? I don't know. But at least I know better than putting a very bright image in my background. (Note, please don't do this. Ever. Yes you. Ever)

My dad called me earlier tonight.

As my mom is usually the one who calls me, and I knew my dad would only call if there was a technical problem, so I knew that there was something wrong.

It took him a while to get the words out. I'm not sure if he couldn't bring himself to say it or if he was too scared for me...

He told me that my grandpa (his dad) had died.

This wasn't exactly unexpected news. My mom had gone back to Taiwan a while ago to visit him in the hospital. They really didn't explain too much to me about it, just that he was very weak and in the hospital.

While I understood the situation. Death to me is still an unexpected thing. This is the first person that I knew who has died. I had seen a video of my great grandfather's funeral when I was little but I hardly knew him.

My only real memory with him consisted of him and I playing catch when I was real young. Since he hadn't visited the States in a while and I never having the chance to go back either, the last time I saw him was when I was in the 4th/5th grade.

When my dad told me the news, I felt empty inside. Mainly because I was trying to imagine that the person who I had played catch with when I was young, didn't exist anymore. To me, that's mind-boggling. It's just so incomprehensible to me. I don't know if that counts as an emotional response but that's all I could feel at the time. Trying to figure out whether someone who once existed and interacted with me could now... not exist, at least in corporeal form.

I know many of my friends this year have experienced the same thing. I apologize if I didn't say anything beforehand and I hope my silence wasn't represented as lack of respect. Like I said, I haven't dealt with death before I would feel out of place trying to comfort someone when I myself have no experience. Even now though I still don't feel that anything I say would help with the loss.

The Team played last night. It was a hard fought battle and although mistakes were made we made off with 35$ to Claim Jumper. More later!

Okay, here is how my weekend went. Keep in mind I was supersick which hopefully will explain all the peculiarities below.

1. Pranav came to pick me up, we drove to USC to pick Don up but Don was handling his ticket and shit and then we realized we're in LA and that there was no way we could go back onto the freeway so we stayed until 7:30. Came back to Fullerton and ate at Flame Broiler then I went home.
2. Saturday morning I wake up and SURPRISE! Bloody nose.
3. Attempted to do long and winded ICS 151 "tutorial" homework.
4. Played Splinter Cell demo. That game is fun as hell even though it's all about sneaking around.
5. Tried to sleep, but my sister woke me up and told me we were going to Rowland to eat dinner with the folks.
6. Right before we're about to leave... SURPRISE! Bloody nose.
7. Ate at that Chinese Bistro place in Life Plaza. Their food was okay but I don't like their soups at all. Not very tasty.
8. Sunday morning I wake up. SURPRISE! Well... no bloody nose Sunday morning but I mean I'm glad there's finally some change in my life!
9. Went out with parents to go eat Dim Sum in Anaheim
10. Came back and watched the rest of the Lakers game.
11. Just as the game was ending. SURPRISE! Bloody nose.
12. Got my hair cut
13. Went to Jeremy's to practice for the CV Talent Show. That didn't last too long. I was really tired and or sick by that time.
14. Came back ate dinner and my sister took me back to Irvine
15. Attempted to study
16. Sick kicked in hardcore
17. Went to sleep at 11 with the intention of studying in the morning
18. Today I woke up... SURPRISE! Bloody nose.
19. Went to Chinese class. We had this worksheet where we watched a video and labelled whether the statement was true or false. In the first video it's these two kids and one of them is being nosy and fumbling through the other kid's photo album. What I thought was funny was the kid looking at the pictures asks, "Is this your older brother... or your younger brother" and the other kid has to come over and look at the album and go, "Ah that is my younger brother, I do not have an older brother." I mean c'mon how do you not know whether or not you have an older/younger brother until you look at the picture of them. Basically you're saying, "Gee I know I have a brother but I can't remember if he was older or younger than me!" Pretty funny.
20. Failed Art History quiz. Not that funny.
21. Current time writing this post.

So I'm sick. I have no idea how it happened, but I'm sick. What I have is a dry throat that likes to make me cough whenever the fuck it feels like making me cough. Goddamn colds.

For helping out backstage at CA Cultural Night, one of the head prop gals, Stacy (is it with an e too?) and her roommate gave us some Cheesecake to eat after the CA meeting. I decided to wait to eat it after I got back to my apartment where I would have a fork. But many many eyes were... eyeing my cheesecake so I took a bite out of it tasted great.

When I got back to my apartment we didn't have any utensils left so I basically picked the cheesecake up and scarfed it down. Big mistake. Although it was probably because I ate the piece of cheesecake waaaaaayyyyyyyyy too fast I would like to think that the cheesecake was instead poisoned. Yes, someone tried to poison me by sneaking it into my cheesecake.

Say It Ain't So is officially the greatest song ever.

Not much activity going on. So here's what I'll do. Leave a question in the comments and I'll answer it! Haha!!!

Edit: Well okay I do have something. A few days ago, Toni-Lynne and Diana, residents of CV and hardcore Weezer fans (They had a Weezer wreath on their balcony for Christmas!) went to a Space Twins show. The band was formed by Brian Bell, guitarist for Weezer! So after the show they went to Brian and asked him to sign one of those paper CD sleeves. They made sure he spelled all our names right (Erik with a 'k', Shuan with a 'ua' and Josh with a 'osh') and they tried to get him to put down. "At least I'm on The Team" but the place was really loud so the words got mixed up as he was signing it. But it's great anyways! First we meet Rivers Cuomo, now we have Brian Bell's autograph. Mad props to the ladies for going to the show and doing that for us. Unbelievable!


Toni-Lynne and Diana are the best!

So I went to go see this movie with some CA members.

I enjoyed the movie but I thought the ending was a cop-out.

Something you should definitely go see when it opens in more theaters

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

CA Cultural Night was awesome!!!!!

TGIFS, Slow ass service

After-Party, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since I'm bored, the classes I am taking this quarter (17 units)

Chinese 1C
Bio 50 (Heart and blood system)
ICS 151 (Digital Logic Systems)
Asian American Art History 42C (Japanese Art)

Wow I thought this site was down. I mean with the lack of updates and all. I keep wondering what the people visiting my website are thinking. Some of you visit it alot... even when there isn't anything. I think that's pretty cool.

The way my schedule works out this quarter is that Wednesday really is my busiest day of the week. I have class starting at 8, then a class at 11, then a discussion at 1:30 and another discussion at 3.

Later on Erik and I went to some ICS Student/Alumni Career/Internship night thing. We only stayed for the first session which was about startup companies. Afterwards we headed back and on the way we went into a showing of the documentary for Better Luck Tomorrow. I'm really excited about this movie and from what I've heard it was very good. The best part of the documentary is where they're at the Sundance Film Festival, and some dude criticizes the filmmaker, Justin Lin, on how he could do such a thing to Asian Americans (the thing being portraying Asians in such a bad light). And then random people in the audience started getting up and arguing against the dude. Then Roger Ebert, who had been in the audience watching, stood up. Now since this was at the Sundance Festival, I can safely assume that most of the people were real movie snobs who watch independent films. So when Ebert stood up, a whole bunch of people were shush-ing everyone else and tellnig them to be quiet even though Ebert was speaking in a pretty loud voice. You know the situation where the people who want it quiet and are shush-ing you are actually just making it harder for the person that they want to be heard. Well it was exactly like that. So the main argument that Ebert has was, if the actors were all caucasian no one would say anything critical about the storyline and how it disgraces white people.

Specifically quoting...

"There was a person who stood up [after a screening] and said, 'How could you make a movie that was so denigrating to your race?'," explained John Cho, who plays Steve, while hanging near a basketball court at L.A.'s Pan Pacific Park. "[Ebert] stood up and said, 'You wouldn't say that to a white filmmaker,' which is probably true."

Thanks Phil

I hope this film does do well so there are opportunities for Asian actors to do something other than being kung-fu guys (although that's still cool), the pizza delivery boy, or the nerd.

Oh yeah, also I went to some Chinese Caligraphy seminar on Monday for 2 hours. The guy who was speaking had been doing caligraphy for a very long time. Although I forgot the exact time, he started when he was a boy and he looked at least late 50's-70's. And basically he was showing us this famous poem written a long time ago that was about 800 characters long. He spoke of how this Chinese Official back in the mid 90's was very found of caligraphy and this poem especially and over the course of his lifetime had copied it 220+ times. The instructor personally had done it 30-40 times, which is way more than I could ever imagine myself doing.

Let me say, it definitely showed that he had been doing caligraphy for a long time. We had some sample paper on the board, and he mentioned how he never stood up to write before. But his writing was unbelievable, they were straight and no sign of any part of the character being too fat or too thin than the rest of the strokes. It was so unbelievable. It's too bad I didn't bring my camera.

I went to go see Phone Booth on Friday with Erik, Josh and Kenny. Not to say it was a bad movie but I'm not sure if it was worth the $7 bucks I paid for it. The movie was short although I'm glad they didn't try to stretch it out longer. Does anyone else notice that Colin Farrell is in every single movie made in the last 2 years?

After we got back, I watched Secretary... Okay let's stop right there. This was a really strange movie and I guess I wasn't paying attention because I didn't get it. Weird storyline and helluva weird subject. The girl, Maggie Gyllenhaal was purrtty in the film. But that's all I can say about it. Too weird for me.

And then yesterday Erik and I went to UCLA to visit whoever was there, which turned out to be just Eliot and Esther. Kenny came a while later and we stayed wayyyy late. All I can say is that I'm envious of their dining facilities and the campus.

While watching TV we came across the finale of ARE YOU HOT?. Some superficial show on ABC to determine who is the hottest guy/girl in America. I swear what the hell is this shit. The shows ending consisted of two guys and two girls. The announcer is like, "Who is the sexiest man in America, is it Joe?.... OR is it Roger?" And they pan back and forth between the two guys. And then finally one of them was called. "JOE IS THE SEXIEST MAN ALIVE" and then the crowd cheers and the guy who won is really excited. The funniest part is when the announcer says, "YOU ARE NOT HOT ENOUGH" as the loser exits the stage. Apparently the actual show is worse. One of the judges actually had a laser pointer to point out the faults of all the contestants, which I assume is pretty funny to watch. The end was the greatest though. They had one of the losers from a previous show (a guy) and he was all in tears because he had lost. You shoulda seen him, oh wait you can, he was also dressed in like some kind of fur coat... Anyways he was crying and sobbing saying stuff like, "It's so sad that I won't be a supermodel anymore, *SNIFFLE*.

Just wondering, was this a popular show? I've heard so little about the show.

Courtesy Mark