– Susan Calman, Edge magazine
In one sentence, Calman explains the problem with the series finale for Legend of Korra.
The whole point is NOT to have lesbian protagonist, it’s about understanding the main character’s feelings and motivations, and emphatising with them. If the viewer is unable to genuinely connect with Korra and Asami’s relationship, then I’m sorry, you have failed as a writer.
Writing this down immediately before I forget about the details.
I just had a Kill la Kill dream about Ryuko. She was fighting this massively powerful enemy who had huge horns. Ryuko allowed her opponent to gore her with their horns, but she immediately followed up by sinking her teeth into their skull. She then transformed the canine portions of her teeth into giant, spinning jackhammer-like drills to utterly obliterate her opponent.
Think of it like her Senketsu Senjin moment where she rips apart Gamagoori’s armour from within, except this time using her teeth only. And of course, accompanied by a lot of furious screaming: “RARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
…
Okay. That was a pretty bloody badass dream with some of Ryuko’s trademark ingenuity (and shouting). This is probably a sign that I’ve been thinking way too much about KLK. I’d let you sink your teeth into my skull anytime, please kick my ass in real-life, Ryuko.
This is the way to be more strong.
My good friend Victor directed my attention to the 19 Feburary 2015 edition of The Straits Times, our biggest national daily. I was quite surprised to see my name mentioned in the article near the end. I had commented previously on Mr Roy’s earlier article, but it wasn’t anything noteworthy to be honest. Just a simple “Welcome to Singapore!” (damn you Chow Yun Fat for turning this movie quote into our national greeting) and a show of support.
Now, all of my secondary school friends who read that article have started calling me “Defender of the Internet”. To be honest, the Internet is not worth defending to begin with, but that title sounds cheesy enough to be worthy of Edward.
I will not pretend to ignore the immigration problems we have in this country, where the sudden explosive influx of foreigners has led to overcrowding and a strain on our country’s resources. But I cannot make any further comments about this issue, because if I choose to work overseas in the future, it would turn me into nothing but a bloody hyprocrite.
It’s not okay for foreigners to come to Singapore, but okay for me to travel to other countries and live there? That’s an incredibly moronic double standard.
Are you a moronic, hypocritical double-standard?
After watching Ibra’s campaign video, I remain absolutely convinced that going vegan is the right decision. Too much crops are wasted to feed livestock for meat consumption. One person going meat-free can clear up enough land to feed as many as 19 other people.
You can call Ibrahimovic arrogant and narcissistic for all of his actions and comments in the football world. But he is one arrogant Swede with a strong heart.
I don’t know why when I read his reply “if you have changed your net”, it ignited a lot of internal anger inside me. His reply sounded very sarcastic, with the implication that our poor delay connections was due to my own fault.
Unfortunately, that’s not how peer-to-peer connections on the net work. If one end of the pipe is slow, the entire connection on both sides will be slow no matter what.
I know I am thinking way too much on this minor IRC exchange at 11.15pm after a long and exhausting day at work on a Sunday. But I felt that it was important to pen down because I’m interested in keeping a record of what pisses me off.
Understanding and accepting your demons and negative emotions is the key to improving oneself.
I told my mum first about my plans to become vegan after Chinese New Year, and so far she has been extremely supportive and open-minded about my decision. Probably because she herself, is limited in the types of food that she can eat (she can’t eat chicken, soy, and sunflower seeds, for example), so she is sympathetic to the meatless lifestyle. She also does not like to eat meat to begin with, and abstains from animal products such as cheese.
Apparently there are a few hidden vegetarian food stalls and shops in the neighbourhood that I live in, which I had had no prior knowledge about. Shows me just how much I know my surroundings. Lousy Serangoon-er.
I’ll do more research, and start a vegetarian shopping list in the coming days. Then it’s time to hit the kitchen and start studying some simple vegan dishes. I’m sick of falling sick from eating meat, so I’m going to rectify this the only way I know how: by taking my own action and learning something new.
Tonight for dinner, I ordered porridge with pork. There’s a reason why I always ask, “[buying] from where?” whenever someone is buying takeaway for the family. I need to know how long it will take for the food to travel back home, so that I can order an appropriate meal that can survive the journey without perishing too quickly.
This time, I didn’t ask “from where?” because I had automatically assumed that it was going to be from a porridge stall close to my home, which is about a 10-15 minute walk. Still acceptable for porridge, so long as it is consumed ASAP while it’s still fresh.
So when I sat down for dinner with my mom and sister, I opened the plastic bowl packet and was greeted with… water? A slimy, watery mess of what used to be porridge, clumped with pork ingredients.
Without saying a word, I turned to both of my family members with the most dumbfounded expression I could muster.
“WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?”, read my face.
Turns out that the porridge was purchased from Lau Pa Sat in the Downtown area of Singapore. That’s a 40 minute train journey at least from my house. Porridge + 40 minutes of waiting time = death.
I am normally not picky about food — I will consume anything so long as it is served fresh and does not contain poison. I also hate to waste food. But there are still certain benchmark standards of human tolerance that have to be met. I ordered porridge. What I was eating… was not porridge. It was crap.
I couldn’t bear to finish the meal, and instead filled my stomach with a red bean pastry snack, and headed to the fridge to grab some soy milk and chocolate.
Firstly, I had to endure mild diarrhoea after eating chicken rice. Next, I fell ill with a sore throat and borderline flu after ordering Burger King. Now, pork porridge debris.
Three strikes in a row. I think this is a divine sign from the heavens that it’s time for me to switch to vegan food.
Wolfsburg fans paid tribute to the late Junior Malanda before the start of their top-of-the-table clash with Bayern Munich last weekend, by unveiling a magnificent tifo (choreographed banners).
Malanda’s fellow countryman, Kevin De Bruyne, contributed two goals and one assist as Wolfsburg pulled off a stunning 4-1 upset win to finally end Bayern’s unbeaten Bundesliga streak.
It is these amazing, unbelievable moments in football that make you believe that there are some divine, higher powers at work here. Malanda’s death was tragic, but his passing will never ever be forgotten by the fans at the Volkswagen Arena on that day.
Well done, De Bruyne and Wolfsburg. This is why we love the sport so much. And rest in peace, Junior Malanda. I hope you had an enjoyable time seeing your teammates run riot over the German champions.
Video highlights of the match can be viewed here (Disclosure: the author is a freelance writer at BallBall).
“English voice actors generally cannot make it (CMI).”
“She is voiced by none other than the legendary Miyuki Sawashiro, no English voice can compare to her.”
Every time I see such generalised posts online, it makes me cringe a little. Because these fans are giving the English dubs ZERO chance, all because of their habit in listening to the original JP voices. And it’s simply unfair to the hardworking voice actors who have put in lots of work into their craft.
Which is very ironic, because how many of you actually understand the Japanese dialogue to begin with? How does listening to Japanese voices, a language that many viewers outside Japan won’t understand without subtitles to begin with, automatically make it better than an English dub that you can fully comprehend?
For the record, the very first anime that I watched and enjoyed as a kid was the original 1992 Sailor Moon, but I watched it on Singapore television with Mandarin Chinese dubs. Five years later, I fell in love with The Slayers, the show that ignited my interest in watching anime. I watched The Slayers for the first time on Singapore television with English voices.
Lina Inverse’s English voice actress, Lisa Ortiz, was absolutely amazing. So were Crispin Freeman (Zelgadis) and Eric Stuart (Gourry — he also voiced Brock in the Pokemon anime English dub). Several years again later, when I finally continued with Slayers Next, I decided to rewatch the original first season in Japanese. I loved it just as much as the English version, and it’s not just solely because of Megumi Hayashibara.
If you don’t know who Megumi Hayashibara is, she is the original Queen of J-Pop (get lost, Ayumi Hamasaki), and she has been doing voicework since 1986 — the year that I was born, and over a decade before Sawashiro’s career even started. If Sawashiro is a “legend”, then Hayashibara is the undisputed Alpha and Omega. She is still doing voice acting at the age of 47, and she was the first true anime VA star. No one else came close before her. But that’s another argument for another day.
There is a certain magical X-factor at work when listening to voices that you fully understand. It makes the viewing experience so much more entertaining. It happened for the Kill la Kill English dub, a series that I believed at one point, was almost impossible to dub because of the insane amount of screaming (especially from the crazy badass female protagonists) in almost every episode. Fortunately, I was happy to be proven wrong and Ryuko Matoi’s VA, Erica Mendez, did a marvelous job. It’s exactly how Ryuko would sound like if she spoke English. Please kick my ass in real-life and marry me, English Ryuko.
So I guess what I am trying to say in the end is: be open-minded to English dubs. Not all of them are bad. Even Japanese voices are not infallible. To this day, the English voice of Son Goku in Dragon Ball Z is still far superior to his Japanese kiddie counterpart.
Update (12 Jan 2015): Added images of the 5-0 scoreline and Junior Malanda.
Original: On my 29th birthday, I finally got the present I wanted: a Maya Yoshida In-Form (IF) card in FIFA 15. He’s only a Silver centre back with a rating of 73, but because of FIFA Ultimate Team’s (FUT) lopsided economy, he was grossly overpriced at 70k coins. I didn’t care, because it was my birthday, and I wanted to pair Yoshida together with Winston Reid’s IF card in the centre of the defence.
And then, Mario Gotze and Robert Lewandowski both scored their first goals for my Bundesliga squad in the same match, right after I had criticised them. Gotze’s goal was a magnificent long range curler from outside of the box that gave the keeper no chance. It was an important, difficult match on World Class difficulty against Torino. We eventually won 2-0.
Then earlier this morning on the train, I read the horrible news about Junior Malanda who died in a car crash in Germany. Malanda played for Wolfsburg, and I had three Wolfsburg players (Kevin De Bruyne, Sebastian Jung, and Diego Benaglio) in my Bundesliga team. I decided to honour Malanda by playing a couple of quick matches against the AI. I subbed Benaglio in for Roman Weidenfeller who is my usual goalkeeper, and I slotted De Bruyne in the leading Central Attacking Midfield role in place of Gotze.
De Bruyne scored with a beautiful shot from the outside of his right foot (incidentally, it was also his first goal for my team), and Benaglio kept two miraculous clean sheets with some outstanding goalkeeping. Although I had to take De Bruyne off early in the second match because of an injury, he had already left his mark in the best way possible — by paying tribute to his fallen countryman with a goal.
The match ended 5-0. I was quite speechless, it was as if everything had been preordained as De Bruyne, Benaglio, and everyone else played with all of their heart and soul. Even Adrian Ramos managed to score.
I can’t believe I’m devoting my birthday to a group of digital football players. This is why we love the sport so much. Rest in peace, Junior Malanda. You died on my birthday, and I hope you enjoyed the match from the spectator heavens above.
Image of Junior Malanda taken from Klaas-Jan Huntelaar’s Twitter account.
I like videogames, and I like good videogame writers. Plays almost everything except for rhythm games. Also enjoys sports, animation, comics, Japanese language studies, and the occasional American TV drama. Contributes to BallBall and No Game No Talk.
