park-haena - Tumblr blog

park-haena · 5 days

Text

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

This wildly popular science fiction novel first caught my attention through the League of Legends Wiki, where it is cited as the reference for two of Heimerdinger's most repeated voice-lines in the game:

"Aha, 42, I knew it! Now - er, what was the question again?"

"42… there's just something about that number."

After hearing him continuously mention the number 42, I had to get to the bottom of why. Online, answers only mysteriously stated that this number was the answer to the universe as described in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. At that point, I took it as a one-off easter egg and moved on.

However, 42 was engrained into popular media (particularly video games and other works fiction), and I could no longer escape after first notice. The reference also cropped up in Doctor Who, Star Trek, and other video game communities. Published in 1979, it seems as if this novel had become a common artefact of knowledge for everyone in a community that could be considered "geeky."

Years later, I saw a copy in the WILG library and decided to read it. It took less than 24 hours to read 216 pages, and it was not the deep philosophical answer-to-the-universe book that I thought it'd be. However, it was a laugh out loud and quirky sci-fi adventure that I think is worth reading at least once for everyone. Douglas Adams has a charming way with words and a wicked sense of humor that most will enjoy. No, it does not offer deep insights into society or the soul as may some other literature, but it positions all of Earth into both insignificant and meaningful roles at once in a unique twist of fate.

What I took home was a lighthearted sense of our own human-ness and a wonder for what life could be outside of our own understanding. Overall, it was a quick and fun read -- I don't regret it!

#books #reading #the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

0 notes

park-haena · 6 days

Text

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

This novel, first spotted in the WILG library, caught my eye because of its striking graphics. The cover features an East Asian hip-and-gable roof auspiciously colored in saturated shades of red, yellow, and green. A foreshadowing of what's to come, the title "Interior Chinatown" is typeset in a font reminiscent of the Hollywood sign, supported by beams to complete the theme.

I held this book and read the back cover several times in passing, although I refrained from adding it to my already overbearingly long queue of books to read. That is, until I learned via video call that my partner's mother -- who I would be meeting in less than a month -- was reading the same novel. Although hidden away and blurred in the background, I couldn't mistake the unique cover for anything else. So, determined to connect with a vicariously significant figure in my life, I decided that this book would be the key and immediately began reading.

What I found is the story of a man in Chinatown struggling for success as an actor, mainly the role of Kung Fu Guy, despite the challenges he faces as Yellow in the cop show Black and White. Fitting into the experimental fiction genre, the novel is formatted as a script and broken into seven acts, often blurring the line between reality and theatre. Ultimately, Interior Chinatown is about Asian identity in America, humorously touching on topics of immigration, assimilation, culture, and success.

As the daughter of two immigrants from Korea, this novel was food for thought to reflect on my own life as well as my parents'. In the midst of reading "Act IV Striving Immigrant," which recovers the story of the protagonist's mother and father, I decided to call my own mom. In the novel, the parents marry in a restaurant, and I realized that I didn't even know where or when my parents got married, much less see a photo from their wedding.

To my surprise, she had no wedding. No one was invited to the government marriage, and they both wore jeans at the stand. How did she even break that kind of news to her family? I was disappointed upon hearing this news, but she reassured me that rings and wedding dresses are not in her interests. Doubtful, I asked her if she would change anything from her past in America (something that I often wished I could do on her behalf) and she refused. I can't tell if she can't bring herself to share regrets with her daughter or if she's telling the truth... I'm sure it's a mix of both.

From there, I changed the conversation. Over the phone I couldn't ask everything I had wanted to because it felt rude to suddenly interrogate my mother's personal life without need. These included:

Having lived in America for so long, how have parts of your identity assimilated into American culture?

Did you ever wish to live in a Koreatown?

Were you ever worried about your children being "too Korean"?

What did you imagine for yourself when immigrating to America?

On my end, I related with the words that Charles Yu wrote on several fronts. Just like William Wu in the novel, I felt shame for being unable to fluently speak my mother's language, close yet distant from American culture, and embarrassment over my own Asian identity in the American South. Reading this, I wondered if the largely Asian MIT campus, in some ways, serves to me what Chinatown served to William in the story. I wonder how I would feel living in a Koreatown after college and even Korea itself? Do I feel a need to prove that I am Korean? Do I feel the need to prove that I am American, despite my appearance? How would I want my own children to be raised? Luckily, I feel more prepared and confident in my identity now than ever to answer these lurking questions. The book ends with a reckoning of inferiority and race as well as a review of American policy towards Chinese immigrants throughout time. I knew America was racist, but damn -- it still hurts to see how yellow (especially Chinese) people were systemically defeated in the past. Overall, it's a quick and fine read that would go a long way for people who are Asian-American and be new for those who are not. I found comfort in the mere fact that William Wu existed as a character as well as insight into perspectives I had not considered before. I'm happy to have read this novel!

#books #reading #interior chinatown

0 notes

park-haena · 9 days

Text

Learning Blender Part 1

Today I learned:

Navigating Blender Interface

Deleting/Adding Objects

Navigation

Render Mode

Moving Objects

Moving Camera

Editing Materials

Scaling

Rotating

Reflections:

It's fine and everything makes sense so far. I'm able to move faster because of the overlap with Rhino, but there are some differences. The ones I struggle with are the change in navigation and selection. It's inconvenient, but not a major setback. The lack of coordinates and snapping when placing and moving objects are a little foreign, but also less restricting. Sometimes I'm not sure if I should be in CAD or visual artist mode haha. Anyways, overall excited to learn this skill!

Thank you Blender Guru for tutorial-ing me through this masterpiece today:

#learning #blender

0 notes

park-haena · 1 month

Text

People With Blue Eyes: Close-Reading a Meme

I could not anticipate the image that would have me keeling over in laughter for days. On January 9th, 2023, Twitter user @Pubby_Kat tweeted an image with the caption: “nobody: / blue eyed people: ” (Figure 1). The image, a Microsoft Paint drawing of a person with bright blue eyes and folded arms smugly staring at the viewer, became a meme format humorously parodied by users online. It was a viral Tweet, garnering over 6,100 retweets and 59,900 likes before being deleted, but I had only discovered it about a year later while browsing the Internet (Philipp, 2023).

Figure 1

Coined “People With Blue Eyes,” this meme fits into a broader genre labeled “MS Paint drawings,” often characterized by their distinct appearance and viral exploitability. These memes usually feature black outlined figures and use bright colors found in the default options of MS Paint, making them easy to edit and parody (Sav, 2011). This lowers the activation energy needed for virality and spread, as more users may participate in the reappropriation and sharing of the image (Milner, 2016). Attesting to the success of this category, the sub-genre of “Rage Comics” are a dominant era in meme history during the mid-late 2010’s that would proliferate the idea of an internet meme remarkably (Figure 2). Additionally, since the genre of MS Paint drawings often define form instead of content, they stay relevant throughout time as users adjust them to meet their own needs. Examples include MS Paint drawings of “Yes Chad,” “Doomer Girl,” “Trad Girl,” and currently “People With Blue Eyes”, which have all developed after 2017 in relation to other popular media (Figure 3).

Figure 2

Figure 3

While part of the success and virality of “People With Blue Eyes” can be attributed to the MS Paint genre, it is important to explore why the content of the meme resonated with users to begin with. Taken literally, “People With Blue Eyes” is a crude figure drawing featuring blue eyes and a smile. In physical settings, it is unacceptable to laugh at someone’s smiling face for having blue eyes. That said, why do people find the digital abstraction of the same idea funny?

Generally, the content of this meme can be contextualized by a broader set of memes collectively titled “Blue Eyes Slander” by Know Your Meme. These typically make humor of the perception that blue eyes are unnerving and the stereotype that people with colored eyes love to have them noticed (Figure 4, Figure 5) (Sakshi, 2023). For those who are already familiar with this trope, “People With Blue Eyes” could immediately be recognized and interpreted into humor. Even for those who are not, the text can easily apply to one's own experience. Additionally, a sly refinement in the “People With Blue Eyes” meme is that it does not explicitly state why it is funny as compared to the previous examples. For those who resonate more with the experience of enduring a piercing blue-eyed gaze, the stark blue fill color contrasting the black and white of the image lends to that experience. For those who resonate more with the experience of a blue-eyed person expecting a compliment, the expectant body language of the figure lends to that experience as well. In a sense, “People With Blue Eyes” could be considered a one-size-fits-all meme for the “Blue Eyes Slander” genre.

Figure 4

Figure 5

However, the image itself is quite literal, and viewers who can not relate to these experiences may be left confused, especially if others can relate to it in a seemingly secret way. How can one explain that blue eyes have an unnerving or piercing effect to those who don’t feel the same? To further complicate the matter, blue eyes are a genetic trait that is strongly associated with race, culture, history, and so on. The blue-eyed demographic, who are likely least susceptible to these experiences, may feel othered by the enigmatic meme. Moreover, the Know Your Meme page for “People With Blue Eyes” featured a parody image showcasing the experience of viewing people with brown eyes (figure 6). The image features warm colors and symbols often used to depict cute, kind, and warm characters. This image, taken in conversation with the original, creates a stark hierarchy between how blue eyes and brown eyes are interpreted. So, is the “People With Blue Eyes” meme inherently problematic?

Figure 6

By zooming out on the “Blue Eyes Slander” category, a comprehensive genre of memes regarding the white demographic emerges. This category includes jokes about white people having no rhythm, being unable to season their food, mistreating their parents, having high starting credit scores, using certain phrases, etc. After looking through the Know Your Meme database to find these jokes, I noticed that many of the ideas stereotyping white people had counterpart tropes in other races. For example, it is a well-known stereotype that the black demographic can cook or dance well. In Part II of Ryan Milner’s book “The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media,” he discusses antagonisms regarding race and gender in memetic texts. One group pushing back against these antagonisms were “counterpublics, who use participatory media to find internal support and to challenge dominant antagonisms” (Milner, 2016). Although difficult to trace when and where specific antagonisms occurred between races, it is clear that some share common roots. One such example of this is the prejudice that Africans had unusual food as compared to the Europeans in early U.S. history. Today, this idea is flipped with the notion that white people can’t cook while black people can in America today. Could the history during colonial America, through centuries of counterpublic interactions, have directly led to this meme today?

To return to the brown-eyed parody of the “People With Blue Eyes,” it would not make sense for it to be a counterpublic interaction against the original blue-eyed meme. The original is already poking fun at those with blue eyes without antagonism towards other eyes. Instead, it resonated with the society’s Eurocentric beauty standard, which affects ethnic communities throughout the United States. In response to this, I believe that the brown-eyed parody was made as a counterpublic against the light-eyed preference in society to help people find comfort in their ethnic features. In other words, this brown-eyed parody was not a method to put down those with blue eyes when compared to the original “People With Blue Eyes” meme, but to defeat the Eurocentric beauty standard.

In conclusion, both the “People With Blue Eyes” meme and the brown-eyed parody are not inherently problematic, although interpretation of the two together may seem deceptively so. As a meme, “People With Blue Eyes” is well constructed, relatable, and easily variable for appropriations by other communities.

In short, “People With Blue Eyes” is a quality meme that I enjoy.

Bibliography

Philipp. “People with Blue Eyes.” Know Your Meme, January 30, 2023. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people-with-blue-eyes.

Sakshi. “Blue Eyes Slander.” Know Your Meme, August 12, 2023. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blue-eyes-slander.

Sav. “Ms Paint.” Know Your Meme, October 26, 2011. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/ms-paint.

Sav. “Rage Comics.” Know Your Meme, May 20, 2011. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/rage-comics.

Milner, Ryan M., 'Antagonism: Race, Gender, and Counterpublic Contestation', The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media

#people with blue eyes #meme #media studies #essay

0 notes

park-haena · 3 months

Text

Make It by Aaron May

I hold Make It, the first title in Aaron May's album Chase (2019), in my heart as a reliable stone in the cobbled foundation of my mental.

---

I hope you make it I hope you make it real far I wish you greatness and stars I hope you know who you are I pray you can take it Pray you can pray to the lord Pray he can heal up the scars Pray he take care of your heart 'Cause niggas don't care about you More than you care about you They never care about you More than you care about you So I hope you make it I hope you make it real far I wish you greatness and stars I hope you know who you are

#music #lyrics

0 notes

park-haena · 3 months

Text

Reading for Pleasure

At the beginning of 2024, I resolved to read more. It was a dusty entry on my list of "It would be nice if..." tasks, and I hadn't revisited the idea since high school during quarantine.

Not that I wasn't reading at all during that time, but my diet mostly consisted of WEBTOONs, manga, news articles, academic essays, etc... They weren't exactly "literature" in the same way books I read during adolescence (like Eragon or City of Bones) were and lacked the physical intimacy of an entity existing exclusively for reading.

So when I bought Industrial Design by John Heskett (review coming soon) from a second-hand bookstore, I was excited to embark on a journey to rediscover the novelty I had once lost. This was just before my travel to and month long stay in a remote village of Kazakhstan, where I was sure to find the dead time to read a book.

However, by the time I landed in Boston I had only fought through about one-fifth of the pages, and by the next two months, no more. I was bewildered by my lack of progress. Yes, there were challenges to reading such as seeing someone new, school, and other hobbies, but this was something I had resolved to do. Why was it so difficult?

Relatedly, at the beginning of spring break (March 22nd), I uninstalled Instagram in a bout of social mania. That same evening, I picked up A Happy Death by Albert Camus and started to read.

---

Now approaching the end of spring break, I've finished both A Happy Death and The Alchemist (reviews coming soon). It's not an impressive achievement in terms of difficulty or volume, but I'm excited by the possibility of overcoming reader's block and deriving enjoyment from books again.

Looking back, the main culprit of why I could not focus on reading was probably because I was distracted by everything. In Kazakhstan, I would rather talk to people. During the semester, there would always be something else to work on. Behind both of these, internet addiction loomed omnipresent. The part of me that enjoyed reading was forgotten, and I didn't know how to recall it with my other indulgences fighting for attention.

Moving forward, I hope that I can continue reading for pleasure. The time I spent with books this spring break was kind and private, and they told me about the secrets of the world. It was almost as if I had the benefit of a wise friend's philosophies without having to do the work of actually befriending them. Hooray to avoiding the awkward talking stage.

In any case, if you aren't reading yet, take it from me -- pick up a book and get lost in it.

#books #reading

1 note · View note