#I think most of them had to be imported from South/Southeast Asia

[canisalbus]

Whenever someone says "This would kill a Victorian child." Or "This would kill a medieval peasant." I have to think about Machete. Would he... would he survive eating a Dorito?

.

[thryth-gaming]

Representation within and beyond Me

This is familiar territory for me.

This thread by Gail Simone is great one that goes into the differences between allegory and direct representation.

Allegory is a pretty strong tool for creating a way to make one story or character appeal to a wide variety of people from different life experiences because the story represents some form of common ground between those grounds. She points to the way the X-Men have been a variably effective allegory appealing to a variety of marginalized populations.

Which is great.

I remember that the last time I got excited about a D&D race was when I read the section on Yuan-ti in Volo's Guide to Monsters. There's a section about the psychology which tried to explain why the yuan-ti were so evil. However, a lot of their justifications were relatable life-experiences and I realized at some point that if you removed the "and this makes them evil" that was appended to most of these bits... the yuan-ti were very much neurodivergent coded.

It came with that mixed bag of their neurodivergence being used to explain why they became evil. But still, here was a playable ancestry that I had found some serious personal overlap with. And in the nine to ten years since the release of that book in 2016 I've played a large number of yuan-ti and each of them was neurodivergent and somewhere on the ace/demi sexual spectrum.

Heck once you add in the way the yuan-ti's primary culture feels very fascist and very eugencist, with some strong parallels to corporate ladder-climbing in the way yuan-ti and their gods devour each other to move up, and the way the culture outright lies about the origins of species (granted that's a revelation only as recent as Candlekeep) then it becomes even more relatable to my position as part of white America growing and seeing layer after layer pulled back from the propaganda of our culture to the rot underneath.

Zihu Asutali, a yuan-ti celestial warlock trying to escape her oppressive culture.

Caress Melani, an ace paladin in service to a benevolent goddess associated with sex and sex-work (Sharess).

Proper Ruin, an artificer from Tal'dorei who had the good fortune to never need to mask.

None of this relatability was deliberate on the part of WotC. Like I said, they were trying to use some typically neurodivergent psychological traits as an explanation for why they are pre-disposed to evil. And the yuan-ti, or at least the Serpent Kingdoms specifically, are still dipped in an aesthetic that is a problematic mix of Southeast Asia and Central/South American as a shorthand for exotic evil cult. So I don't think they quite realized how much the Serpent Kingdoms' brand of evil follows American corporate/nationalist ideology.

This was a suspicion that was confirmed when Monsters of the Multiverse came out with a new version of yuan-ti with all the neurodivergence replaced by a bland statement of "they can be good or evil" and a picture that is admittedly neat but also very European with blonde hair and a hooded tunic with brooch that looks more Celtic or Nordic.

As soon as they decided they'd allow for yuanti to be good, they were immediately set to Euronormative and neurotypical. It was such a huge lost opportunity.

It was just such a disheartening confirmation that they linked all the neurodivergence they described to an inability to comprehend morality. A similar occurrence happened when I got ready to play Zihu and started gushing over the coming challenges of roleplaying a character without what humans considered "normal" emotions. And the GM, very much trying to help, suggested "what if your patron fixed you and gave you emotions." And boy did I deflate fast and very politely said "okay... I guess" or something to that effect.

I've rambled on this on my YouTube channel in the past with a bit moreof the publication history of the Yuan-ti included.

Likewise, there's all sorts of these unintentional allegories in my writing and even game design. The Changeling playbook was an allegory for struggling with realizing my own neurodivergence long before consciously admitted to myself that I was neurodivergent instead of using language like "substandard genius" or "broken" as I had in my youth to explain why I was consistently intelligent but still could not get a handle on how I was meant to act.

The situation of the Community and supernaturals in general from Divine Blood is the same. Most of them are able to pass as human, but they aren't. And there's nothing predatory or dangerous about them any more than there's danger in normal people, they are normal people. They're just not human and often process thoughts in very different ways. And the very fact that there should be nothing wrong with just being who they are upfront and public... but instead they kept secret and some were born outside the Community such that they grew up without knowing what they really were.

Since the personal revelation of being both asexual/aromantic and neurodivergent it's had some impact on my writing. I've been struggling to find a way to re-approach Divine Blood (and finally write a second novel) with this knowledge now conscious in the forefront. But it really helped me polish the Changeling into the version that reached Slayer's Survival Kit. I also deliberately drew on my experience as an expat for The Visitor and my self-esteem issues for The Forged.

The realization of my own writings and creations was immense. But the thing with the yuan-ti made me realize how easily a company can first draw me in and then alienate me. The key element here being that WotC didn't know the impression they were giving with the yuan-ti originally and thus when they answered our requests for people to no longer be depicted as inherently evil, they had no problem dumping that unintentional neurodivergent representation in the trash.

By comparison learning that Kim Howell, aka Parse, of Sentinels of Multiverse was canonically autistic was a much sharper emotion than than than my still strong attachment and identification with yuan-ti. This wasn't an accident. Parse was specifically noted as being autistic. The company wasn't going to rug pull me the way WotC had, because that depiction was intentional.

In addition, Parse is also like me in the way that she's got a belly and isn't the typical perfect physical ideal that superheroes lean into. Granted, she's very clearly in shape, which I'm very much not. Still it's great to know that there's this chunky lady out there in that universe as one of the more dangerous supers in the setting.

Another pitfall that Greater Than Games avoided with Parse is that they avoided making her autism the source of her superpower. Parse has a supernatural ability to analyze things down to a metaphysical level. It's very much the sort of thing a lot of well-meaning writers would imply as autism=superpower. But instead, she has an origin story very much separate from her status as an autistic person.

She'd been part of a project analyzing the programming of a rogue AI robot which had unknowingly been altered by cosmic energies. A burst of that cosmic energy carried through the programs is what altered her perceptions to the point of prophecy combined with truesight. Her powers are cosmic... not autistic.

So, I dearly love Parse. She's amazing and I'm desperately hoping she's part of the Disparation supplement for the Definitive Edition of the game... because right now GTG has stopped producing new projects due to the tariff situation. If not, I still have the older edition of the game in digital form.

Which brings me to another point in the same thread above where Gail makes another comment.

My stories tend to be a bit diverse with main characters often being very different myself and with very different life-experiences. from my own and I am dreadfully terrified that have dreadfully misrepresented some group. Especially on the characters I most love. Am I representing Lucretia's trauma properly in Bystander? Is Hel's disability representation appropriate in Divine Blood? There are certainly several origins that I would not have created if I was creating the characters today.

I don't have too much to say on this for the simple fact that my writing has not reached very far and I haven't heard much beyond my immediate circles. So I can only speak in generalities and paranoia.

I'd love to hire a sensitivity or cultural consultant. I got to work with James Mendez Hodes on Hunter's Journal and Slayer's Survival Kit in the last couple of years, and it is something I recommend to anybody. He pointed out several places where I had made an assumption that was limiting or had an implication that was not intended and he really helped me through that... especially with The Forged and The Visitor.

However... that was part of a project funded by Evil Hat. I live pretty much paycheck to paycheck with what seems to be an ever growing debt said paycheck has issues keeping up with. This has kept consultants and editors just out of reach of my wallet and this rankles at me (there are currently maybe three short novels waiting for me get the money for a professional editor).

In all honesty, I'm unlikely to ever find out. I don't have much reach. I'd be surprised if even a thousand people had read my original works. But that doesn't matter so much to me. I want to have added something good into the world and I don't want to cause even theoretical harm.

What I can say is that if I am ever lucky enough for someone to stumble on one of my books and opt to make it into some sort of 1-season and cancelled acclaimed and popular Netflix series, and I had any sort of control, then I would not be the main author on the project. Same if they were to get taken up for a comic adaptation or something similar.

I'd ask for writers of culture appropriate to the characters to be found and do stuff with my ideas that give more complete representation. I'm perfectly happy to be in the credits under "based on an idea by...".

Might as well add links to my stuff. I need to make myself market more.

My Itch store-front

My Archive of Our Own page

My Patreon for reading unreleased drafts

Both my Patreon and my AO3 have some of my unreleased first drafts on them. More on Patreon. The Patreon posts do require a membership, but only a free one.

I'm really bad at self-marketing.

[unclefard]

shut the fuck up about australia

"australia australia! nope land! too many dangerous animals!"

let's see... they got:

-a bunch of snakes and spiders

-dingoes

-kangaroos

-like 2 crocodiles

-venomous ocean shit:

africa and south asia have all that + big angry herbivores + actual large land predators +political/economic instability, terrorists, war, and shitty societal structures. i would take living in australia over pretty much anywhere else in the world. i definitely wouldn't want to go swimming there, but i wouldn't want to go swimming in the american southeast or basically anywhere else warm enough for crocodilians and lots of venomous shit.

aside from the ocean shit i would be most afraid of going hiking somewhere in the central deserts and getting lost. yeah, they have very venomous snakes, but the snakes that are most dangerous are not the ones that have the deadliest venom but the ones that are extremely common, well camouflaged, and readily bite: Big Four (Indian snakes) - Wikipedia. the humble saw-scaled viper, to which more fatalities are attributed than any other snake, is far deadlier to man's existence than the taipan: List of fatal snake bites in Australia - Wikipedia. not to mention Australia is a developed country with good hospitals and shit.

now, australia does get pretty funky:

memes about it are fun and all, and yeah, there's some scary shit there (i would never touch the ocean), but the problem with memes is because people tend to have a social media induced goldfish attention span and don't want to actually read anything, so they build their opinions, beliefs, etc off of memes. thinking australia is the scariest place on earth is harmless and mostly a joke, but when you build your worldview off of little comedic blurbs of information your worldview is usually bad. there's a reason a lot of far-right bullshit thrives off of innocuous little memes and social media clowns. i'm not saying i'm perfect or enlightened or anything because my worldview is that of an angry, self-centered hermit, and i too have the social media induced goldfish attention span. however, it's important to think and read a little more if you want to/are going to form an opinion/belief on something. it's too easy to see a few little bits of information, take them to heart, and subconsciously decide you are well-informed on the topic and your emotionally induced beliefs are absolute.

#

recently they made "direwolves" and i made fun of it. they don't even seem to fit the pop-culture perception of direwolves, which are basically just wargs, let alone the real animal which would have looked more like south america's modern wild dog species:

these colossal direwolves just look like regular ass wolves. i went to northwest trek sometimes when i lived in western wa and they had wolves that looked just like them: A Tale of Two Wolves - Northwest Trek. it's been said already, a lot, that it's a shitty lie, a shallow grab for pr, so on and so forth.

my problem with these wolves is that there is no real reason to make genetically engineered apex predators besides selling them to rich people as pets. yeah it's cool, yeah eventually there might be gene animal zoos, but these aren't the real dire wolves. they weren't raised by direwolves. they can't fulfill the niche direwolves did. polar bears and brown bears are closely related enough that they can interbreed, but a polar bear is highly specialized for a very particular way of life. if you wiped out polar bears and engineered a slightly larger, white brown bear to replace them, it wouldn't work because the brown bear, however white and large, still has the brown bear software.

there's no reason to introduce these direwolves where actual normal wolves live either, as normal wolves, despite being perhaps the most charismatic apex predators, already have enough to worry about (habitat destruction, ranchers wanting them dead, etc). are we slowly inching towards some kind of designer ecosystems where rich techbro fucks release shitty pop culture ideals of extinct predators, because our modern and already heavily imperiled ecosystems aren't good enough?

now i think there is a lot of value in this kind of work. we have a number of large, charismatic animals that are on extinction's door, already opening it up and starting to walk in. a company like colossal could focus their efforts on stuff like: Yangtze giant softshell turtle - Wikipedia (please do this evil corporation please these are the best animals ever to exist (besides triceratops)) and Sumatran rhinoceros - Wikipedia. not to mention a number of animals who we know for sure were wiped out by humans, like the thylacine and the steller's sea cow. i wouldn't be opposed to creating solid proxies of very recently extinct animals like the thylacine and releasing them in viable habitat, as these kinds of animals should still be here.

i've heard that shit like the direwolves and mammoth is mostly to get funding, public attention, etc, so they can work on stuff like the red wolves and thylacine. if true i can respect that. i'll take selling designer wolves to protect actual modern animals in danger of extinction. however, some of the comments by the evil company people suggest a very shitty view on extinction and bringing back those animals, the surface level bullshit fucking jurassic park was criticizing. the whole "these aren't the real dinosaurs, they're the ones people expect". the ceo apparently went on the joe rogan show or podcast or whatever variant of phlegm it is, so there's that too. at least horner's chickenasaur had/has some sort of scientific benefit.

i could see in the future them making a "deinosuchus" (enlarged alligator) or "titanoboa" (enlarged anaconda). perhaps a tiger with enlarged canines. oversized bison and elk with slightly larger horns and antlers. stating the obvious but you can't bring back extinct animals. when they're dead, they're dead, and gone. deinosuchus may have been essentially a giant alligator, but scaling up a modern alligator won't make a deinosuchus. you can make it forty feet long. you can alter its proportions to match the skeleton. it can look exactly like how we imagine deinosuchus looked. but it won't be a deinosuchus.

there's no reason to "bring back" the vast majority of extinct animals aside from entertainment, as you're not really bringing back the animal, you're making an imitation, and putting it in a world in which it has no place other than as an oligarch's pet.

I will say however that I think/believe that a considerable amount of the Pleistocene megafauna should still be here. The whole "it was climate change" argument genuinely pisses me off. People are really good at killing animals. They should shut up about it, but they are. You have two and a half continents full of large, slow-reproducing animals who are dependent on large, stable habitats and are naive to hominid predators, already made vulnerable by the advance/retreat of the ice sheets (which would have caused widespread climate change). there's a reason that all the modern ecosystems with a lot of large mammal diversity roughly coincide with the distribution of homo erectus:

the megafauna of africa+south asia were adapted to humanity. they knew/know how to behave around people. it's a known fact that mammals heavily alter their behavior in areas of high human presence, becoming more secretive, nocturnal, etc. if a highly seasonal, arid habitat with extreme droughts can support this:

then the lush, temperate forests and plains of north america can support this:

of course big animals are vulnerable to major changes in climate/habitat. i think that, if humans were magically not part of the equation at the end of the pleistocene, there still would have been a significant decrease in large animal diversity around the world. but north america would have had more than just deer. everyone says mammoths, which i think is fair. i think without humans we would have still had mammoths way up in northern canada and russia. it's very telling that the last mammoths lived on an isolated little island. that island wasn't prime mammoth habitat. it just had no humans.

large animals are vulnerable to change, but they are still very adaptable, and often better at surviving in and exploiting different habitats than smaller ones. black bears, for instance, can be found in the pacific northwest's temperate rainforests, florida's swamps, the desert scrubland of arizona, and the rocky mountains. ungulates from africa and asia thrive in texas and arizona. there is a feral breeding population of rhea, a south american flightless bird, in germany. mastodons were temperate forest browsers. there were temperate forests then, and there are temperate forests now. by all accounts the mastodon should still be here. the foliage of the ice age is mostly the same foliage as now. there are plenty of relict plants adapted to be distributed by giant herbivores left in north america.

i think that, without humans, the american megafauna would be much more diverse. some would have gone missing, but i think for the most part the ecosystems would be pretty similar. i think good candidates are actually the mastodons+cuvieronis. their diets suggest a preference for the habitats that still cover north america. sloths are another good one. i think they suffered similarly to giant tortoises (these used to be found on the mainland continents) and glyptodonts: their defensive measures, so effective against all other animals, made them helpless to humans. especially seeing as many of the ground sloths were reasonably sized and probably lived in the same kind of tropical forest and savanna south america has today. also, just like mammoths, their last examples were island dwarfs.

mastodons/sloths/etc did die out earlier than mammoths, which i attribute to their living in temperate habitats and thus being more accessible (vulnerable) to humans. easier to find, easier to ambush. mammoths would be living in wide open, freezing tundra. they'd see you coming, at least. mastodons would be lumbering through the mild hardwood forests, with plenty of nearby shrubbery to conceal hunters. i can see the changing climate hurting the more temperate-specialized of the ice age giants, but not outright wiping them out. especially in south america's tropical savannas, which, like africa and south asia, would probably be relatively insulated from the effects of the melting ice.

i don't think people systematically worked to extirpate the megafauna. maybe the large predators, especially if they had no fear of people. it's commonly thought that hunter-gatherer societies have no impact on their environment and live in complete harmony with nature, but they often heavily alter/impact their environment. apparently native americans practiced routine burning to clear forests and make it more suitable for travel and wild game. south american people extensively modifed theirs as well.

that aside, you don't have to completely wipe out mammoths and sloths, rather extensive hunting just needs to fragment and cripple their breeding populations. killing a mature bull elephant has disproportionate effects on the local population. killing a mammoth matriarch could easily cripple a herd. or, if heavily hunted, a herd could not have enough members left to effectively defend each other. with such wide ranges hunting pressure could make it extremely hard, impossible even, for large, slow-reproducers to mate. if you still have mastodons, but it's a couple scattered, tiny groups seperated by hundreds of miles, you probably wont get more mastodons.

yeah, i think mastodons should still lumber north america. giant sloths should still lurk in south america. a few mammoths should join the reindeer in canada. we should experience a greater diversity of large ungulates, and the predators that hunted them. they should still be here, but they shouldn't come back.

there is a massive struggle to preserve what we have, everywhere. the americas are struggling to preserve what wild spaces and megafauna they have left, and there's a major push against it. if you cant be trusted with wolves and bison you shouldn't get dire wolves and mastodons. the places they could live are so heavily fragmented, interfered with, and already imperiled that they could not reliably support populations of these creatures. dire wolves aren't tundra animals, and they're hunters of animals that mostly no longer exist. mastodons could technically, i think, still inhabit most of north america, but there's not a whole lot of extensive, lowland forest/scrubland left for them. they'd alter whatever national parks they'd be released in, perhaps detrimentally for the modern animals already struggling to exist.

now, i am not entirely opposed to the mammoths, mostly because if we could hypothetically get a modern "mammoth" there's still a considerable amount of mostly undisturbed tundra for them to inhabit, and they would have a beneficial effect on preserving permafrost. yes, they'd just be fat, hairy asian elephants. my issue isn't the non-authenticity but rather that there's a lot of issues ethics wise as well as adapting these mammoths to being mammoths. fat hairy asian elephants would still eat and act like asian elephants, tropical forest browsers, not tundra grass enthusiasts. this is where i take issue. more than likely it would be a long time and a lot of suffering test mammoths before we got an actual viable mammoth proxy that could live and act like a mammoth. even then, it would mostly just be for spectacle. the permafrost effect thing could be done with the northern herbivores we have today. it's one thing to make bulkier wolves or a bigger crocodile. creating a mammoth would likely involve a lot of suffering on the part of the prototypes.

the world of the pleistocene should in large part still be here. but it's not. the world has changed massively since. what we think of as pristine, untouched nature is often a recent development, either heavily managed and altered by the original human tenants, or barren, emptied ecosystems filling in the gaps as best they can. it's been said a lot but the focus should be on protecting what we have.

no half-decent wildlife program, department, or conservation group is going to want to reintroduce pop culture Pleistocene proxies into their parks and reserves. no good zoo will likely be able to afford them. it's not an apocalyptic jurassic world "folly of man" scenario. it's just more stupid useless clickbait. maybe in the future, as genetic engineering gets better, and we can do more than designer wolves, it'll be a problem. people will decide that their artificial animals are more deserving of the world than the originals, and we'll get butchered designer ecosystems of artificially bloated populations of furry oc megafauna.

i think that is a good ways off, however. so far we've got normal ass wolves and hairy mice. both could be produced with a couple decades of selective breeding.

on the other hand:

technology has developed incredibly fast.

you can track the development of the generative ai with those stupid fucking ai cat videos

"meow meow meow meow" going from still images to brief, animated clips. the fucking cats run and cook food. it's still shit but the shit is getting bigger, riper.

i've always had a subconscious assumption that the world would remain mostly the same over the course of my life, leaving me free to focus on my little sphere of life. when i was little i imagined the future as centuries later. i didn't think of ai or gene-modified animals. i remember seeing a documentary with horner's chickenasaur and even then i thought it was bullshit. i always assumed the environment, political structure, and technology of the world would sit and fester in comfortable stagnancy. unfortunately things constantly change, frequently aping the past but change nonetheless. i assume the world will be much different in a few decades. for a single person, facing it all by themselves, in its grand bloat of distortion, lies, and selfish indulgence, this is not a pleasant prospect.

endangered species pose a threat to the limitless wealth extraction that the world's greedy, understimulated, underfulfilled fucks have not yet figured out wont make them feel better. but it's okay! we'll make new ones, better ones! you remember the cool ice wolves from your medieval drama thing! They're real now! We don't need those raggy ass normal wolves around anyways! africa a little boring? how 'bout some trexes! you can pay to shoot mammoths in siberia and sabercats in texas! i wont lie that in a way it is cool. but, regardless, fuck this shit.

[zeus-japonicus]

Nemo you are the coolest please tell me more about trice forgotten linguistics

i've never felt more like 3 penguins stacked on top of one another and wearing a trenchcoat until right now - you're very sweet for indulging me, anon, here is a linguistics essay just for you.

For context, I approach linguistics from the perspective of someone who is, and has always been, tragically in love with languages and yet incapable of understanding grammar. As an example, I consider myself bilingual English with Japanese, and yet I still struggle with particles (I had to google the term for them to write this post). I know innately and strongly how to use most of them, but sometimes I'm left floundering. If I'm speaking Japanese, I think in Japanese, until I don't know the word for 'racism' and then I'm reduced to explaining what I mean like a 5 year old. Hell, I barely understand English grammar, and that's the language I have (nearly) 3 degrees in.

I was born and raised in London. I lived with my very white, very middle-class-aspiring grandma for many years. Her friends used to say to me, "your English is so good!" As an attention-seeking child, I very much took that to mean they understood I was a gifted and intelligent human - looking back, I know it's because they saw an Asian, and they were surprised I didn't speak like the Asians they'd seen parodied by white actors in film or on the radio.

Alestes desperately hunts for people who will understand her broken, child's Hokkien while, at the same time, existing as someone both Black and Asian. Fluent English is not expected of her by the society she lives in. Neither is fluent Hokkien.

I don't speak Hokkien at all, and I realise that maybe a few of you probably don't know what it is - so let's start there. I'll say here that all translation was done by my dear friend Yen Ooi, whose English-language Sci-Fi are poetic and beautiful and radical.

"Hokkien originated in the southern area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration, and has since become one of the most common Chinese varieties overseas. [...] Hokkien historically served as the lingua franca amongst overseas Chinese communities of all dialects and subgroups, and it remains today as the most spoken variety of Chinese [in Southeast Asia]."

I will admit, when I first started writing Trice, I defaulted to assuming Alestes and her family would speak Mandarin or Cantonese, the two more well-known Chinese languages - Cantonese especially because it's a trade-language used in many interactions with the British.

Tangentially, I was reading about the indentured Chinese people brought from Batavia (Indonesia) to Cape Colony in South Africa because I was doing research on Cape Coloured people. I'd just interviewed someone for my PhD who talked to me about their family history, which made me really think about ancestries I'd never considered before - and about trade routes beyond the Atlantic.

Then I thought about who had been ejected from China. I remembered an article written about Sek Yeong / Ching Shih - about how she lived through a combined population boom & lack of food & space and so she and people like her took to piracy on the sea. I essentially did a combo of google maps & wikipedia to look around the coast of China for places and languages that might fit who Zhu Anran was in my head.

I settled on Fujian and Hokkien because they're big - and yet absolutely obliterated in the western brain. I don't personally know of any Western media where a character speaks Hokkien - any dialect of it - it's the official language of Taiwan (side note: i did just have to google "was Taiwan ever a British colony" and was genuinely surprised it wasn't - Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese) - and as mentioned, is still a lingua franca in SEAsia - my friends who speak it are mostly Malaysian and Singaporean British people.

I think many people might assume (given our abhorrent history lessons) that a character being Fujian and Xhosa is... a rare or strange mix - but people like Alestes did exist - must have - even if there are no real records - because of how linked Cape Town and Southeast Asia were - even before British/Dutch colonisation.

I first attemped to use online Hokkien dictionaries to translate the work but kept coming across the issue of not knowing what meaning words really had - especially swears - so when I asked Yen for translation help I had a caveat: I didn't want the swears to have ableist or racist meaning. Yen told me she and her dad had an excellent conversation when they were discussing swears - [content note for the list below, there is ableist and graphic language] - from Yen:

'bo jeng sin' or 'tao hong' - these are ableists... they refer to people who are crazy or have mental conditions, so probably not.

'iau siu' - this refers to a baby that'll be born dead - so very extremely aggressive cuss word.

'han ji' - potato. My preference because I grew with this phrase around me - means a useless person.

'jiak liau bi' - a waste of rice. I love the phrase... haha. It means someone who's not worth the rice they're given - useless person. 

han ji and jiak liau bi are the ones that made it into the show. As I mentioned in my previous post, Alestes swears in Hokkien because Baker didn't know what they meant when she was a kid and so couldn't tell her off for it...

And to close us out, here's a nice translation note from Yen about Alestes' attempt to speak Hokkien to the pottery seller: "carp is one of those words that isn't commonly known. It's 'le hu' in Hokkien, but if Alestes's Hokkien isn't fluent, she probably won't know the word. She could say... 'ha mi hu', which translates to 'what fish'. When we can't remember the word for something... like a type of fish/animal, we tend to just add 'ha mi' to the front... like what cat is this? what bag is this?"

The carp story is the one thing that connects Alestes to her past - her last memory of her father - and she can't even remember the word for it in Hokkien.

(Please do go an check out Yen's novels, she also writes games, and is on twitter @ yenooi)

[is-nino-actually-luka]

Top 10 Ninos in Miraculous Ladybug

Hey Everyone! 

Ever since Stormy Weather, Miraculous Ladybug fans around the world have always wondered who the best Nino is. However everyone knows Top 10 list are 10x better than that so we’re doing this instead.

In this list, we used a complex equation to calculate which Nino has the greatest combination of friendliness, superheroics, musical ability, directorial inability, loyalty, and that special something that makes them Nino.

This list had a lot of competition, so don’t feel too bad if your favorite Nino didn’t make this particular list! Plus if you guys reblog this with an essay telling me how wrong I am, the tumblr algorithm will actually promote the post!

10. Shell Shock

In 10th place, we have the superhero turned supervillain Shell Shock! Now although you wouldn’t think he has the qualities of being a Nino, considering how betraying your allies isn’t very friendly, but in his defense akumatizations are no ones fault but Hawkmoth’s. 

Plus this betrayal was the impetus for the Nino Retrieval Arc, which is fondly remembered as having some of the best fights in the show, including the very famous scene where the random citizens in a window drop their training weights and unleash their true power so they can restrain him and 2 other akumatized superheroes with little to no effort.

But the real reason he’s so low is because he’s just Carapace but Red, and turtles aren’t red. That’s silly. Shell Shock is just so silly

9. XY (Ripping off Luka)

On the surface, XY appears to be a talentless hack who clearly doesn’t care about music and is only in it for the money, and he is. But in his defense it’s also pretty clear the dude is obviously a product of his environment since his Dad is clearly the mastermind and even he doesn’t seem to think very much of XY.

Honestly the dude ought to become a better person and one of the best ways to change is to stop emulating his father and find better role models. So if he’s ripping off Kitty Section, specifically Luka, then maybe this could be the first step in the journey to becoming a better person like Luka.

Anyways, XY makes number 9 because of his potential 

8. The Right Half of Oblivio

Alright let’s address the elephant in the room about Super Penguino. It’s pretty obviously a stand in for something else, but the show couldn’t exactly say it explicitly since it is a kid’s show after all.

Super Penguino represents how Alya and Nino are mobile gamers.

Honestly considering that their best friends are console gamers, it makes sense that they may try to hide their hobbies, and as a console gamer myself, I agree. They should be ashamed.

But then again I thought it was a cool episode so it’s number 8 even though we barely see Nino until like the last minute

7. Boy in Spanish

Niño takes the number 7 spot on this list for obvious reasons

6. Silencer

Silencer may be a supervillain, but he’s more of an anti villain if we are being honest. Like honestly he was only trying to steal voices from bad people like XY (Who stole his music and insulted Marinette/his friends), Bob Roth (Who encouraged XY to do that and he is literally everything wrong with the music industry), The Mayor (Who is notoriously corrupt), and Ladybug (Remember when she killed Chat Noir during Hero’s Day on live TV?). 

Plus he was only really doing this to help his friends, which is pretty Pog.

Actually the only reason he isn’t higher is because he tries to silence people and that was literally the same thing the bad guys did in Footloose so not very Nino-like if you ask me

5. Bubbler

The Bubbler was literally only akumatized so he could throw his bro a party, and isn’t that the most Nino-like reason ever? Plus it was because of Gabriel Agreste, so can you really blame him?

Although we have to dock points off because he did send all the adults to the sky which is pretty messed up considering I am technically an adult now. Honestly the Bubbler sounded a lot more reasonable when I watched the episode in high school

4. Carapace

Taking number 4 on the list is everyone’s favorite Captain America Ripoff.

And his debut was really something! He actually 1v1ed an akuma without superpowers! He clearly took Ladybug’s advice to heart when she told him that “When you're facing a supervillain, strength doesn't make a difference. Courage and determination do.”

Plus his power is to protect his friends, and can you tell me a more Nino-like power than that? And his transformation sequence and music is a headbanger so it’s pretty obvious to tell that Nino’s under that hood.

Also he’s green. That’s the color turtles are supposed to be.

3. Viperion

Viperion barely edges out Carapace on the list since Viperion doesn’t need to protect his friends from danger. Instead, Viperion can stop the danger before it happens! It’s like Minority Report, and we all know how good of an idea it was in that movie!

It kinda sucks we didn’t get to see more of him in his debut episode, since Ladybug had to sideline Luka at first since she said “When you're dealing with a supervillain, it's better to have a partner with superpowers.” Although he was a hard carry once he did get superpowers! Literally Hawkmoth and Ladybug consider him the biggest threat when facing a group of heroes!

And like any good Nino transformation, the music is a bop, and having an instrument as a weapon really helps on the Nino ranking

2. Luka

The caring older brother who moonlights as a temporary Reptile Hero, Luka isn’t the only musically inclined friend of Adrien who had a crush on Marinette!

Honestly if you didn’t know any better you might think that Luka is actually Nino!

Luka is in almost everyway the best Nino, and he was a very close second to first. Honestly I had some trouble deciding between the two of them, but I think the number 1 pick is pretty unanimous in everyone’s minds

Before we get to the number one pick, let’s take a look at some honorable mentions

Nino Rota: An famous Italian composer whose work includes the Godfather Trilogy’s Score. However the fact he does not appear in Miraculous Ladybug disqualifies him from the top 10.

Saint Nino: Honestly idk anything about her but she was a Saint so I guess she was important. However the fact she does not appear in Miraculous Ladybug disqualifies her from the top 10.

Nino from Fire Emblem 7: She’s doing her best. However the fact she cannot read disqualifies her from the top 10.

1. El Niño

El Niño is a weather phenomena that occurs about every four years and is associated with a warm band of water in the Pacific Ocean which is accompanied by high air pressures in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the Easter Pacific.

It is also the first thing that comes up in Google when you look up Nino.

Honestly I debated putting it this high up on the list, but Nat Geo told me the El Niño in 2016 was associated with coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, severe droughts in Africa, South America and parts of the Pacific and southeast Asia, and wildfires in Indonesia and Canada. I don’t live in any of those areas but El Niño scares me and for my own safety I decided to appease it by giving it the number 1 spot in this list. 

So did any of our choices surprise you? Make sure to leave a like and comment below your favorite Nino!

[writerthreads]

WRITING ASIAN CHARACTERS— ADRESSING STEREOTYPES

@writerthreads on Instagram

In light of the current events, I’ve decided to make this post to help some people out. I understand that some writers want to include POC in their stories, which is a great thing! However, the problem is, they’re not sure how to properly represent them. As an Asian, hopefully I’ll be able to help writers with Asian characters in their stories.

Do note, however, that I don’t represent the entire Asian community, especially because there are so many Asians in the world. This will be an insight to my thoughts and tips I can give you if you’re writing about an Asian character/settings. I’m also not saying that you as a person are uneducated. I’m very aware that there are lots of educated people in the world.

First, Asia is a big ass continent. I’ll put a list of some countries:

South-Eastern countries: Indonesia, Phillippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, etc..

Southern Asia: mainly India and a section of southern China

East Asia: China (Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou), Japan, Mongolia, Taiwan, North and South Korea, Russian Far East

North Asia: a section of Russia, a section of China, (Beijing, Harbin, etc), Mongolia

Western Asia: a section of the Middle East (Armenia, Oman, Saudi Arabia)

From what I’ve personally been seeing, Southeast and Eastern Asian countries are a bit underrepresented! I’d encourage you to develop an Asian character who isn’t Chinese.

Each Asian country has their own culture and practises! We might have the same practises as other countries in terms of food and manners, thanks to historical events, but if you want to write a scene that include festivals or something as simple as table manners, it’s best to do specific research on them. For example, we don’t all bow. But we do take off our shoes when we go into the house in China. Since Asia’s so big, I can’t cover every tradition in each post, so make sure you research your particular country/city to some extent. You don’t need to write a thesis on it, just enough to educate yourself, and make sure you’re giving us an accurate portrayal.

*something about Chinese food: I’ve never eaten from American Chinese takeaways. Y’know, the ones in square cardboard boxes? Those don’t exist in (at least, from what I know) Asian countries, nor do fortune cookies. Totally fine if the setting’s in the US.

Next, let’s talk appearances, because that’s been frequently stereotyped. I’m sure most of it comes from the media. I mean, it’s getting a bit better now, but in WWII, American posters included Japanese soldiers whom were drawn so that they looked like rats, and had the stereotypical Asian eye shape. Basically, they were degrading the Japanese, which, (I’m saying this very strictly) in a time of war, is understandable. But things like this happened before and after the war. In the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly’s neighbour is a Japanese man.

The film’s portrayal of him is similar to the posters— he was made to seem very conservative, and had those stereotypical Asian features. I won’t go into too much detail, but you’ll definitely notice it if you watch the movie. In older movies, Asian characters are also portrayed as gangsters, kung-fu masters, or, uh, submissive prostitutes.

You can call me a snowflake if you want, for, I don’t know, finding everything offensive, but when it’s been happening for years and years, it’s definitely a problem we have to address.

All I’m saying is, don’t base us off of stereotypes, like dark skin, small eyes, or buck teeth. Sure, they might’ve come from an ounce of truth, but the portrayals are highly exaggerated, and mostly incorrect. People from the Middle East generally have pretty big eyes, and some even have blonde hair or light-coloured eyes!

I do believe that because there’s the stereotype that all Asians look the same, and the fact that China is the “only country in Asia”, non-Chinese Asians have been attacked, which isn’t just. Attacking people isn’t right, either, especially when the person probably hasn’t seen you in their entire life.

This is the big tip I’m giving you: treat Asian characters as you would any other character. We’re still humans. However, don’t entirely take away our cultural identity. You can definitely talk about our culture and our practises. In fact, I would personally love it, even if it’s just the little things!

Regarding our personality, hello, not every Asian is a genius at STEM subjects, nor is every Asian obedient to their “aggressive” parents 24/7. For example, my parents are pretty chill. However, I do understand where that thought comes from: in China, exams are really important for students, and if I’m not wrong, it’s the same for Korea and Japan. We’re not all quite kids with bangs. My friend’s pretty loud, and she’s always shouting in public buses, which earns her a glare from other people. Again, treat Asian characters like any other character...give them their own personalities, their own quirks, weaknesses, etc.!

Most Asians have English and native names if they live in an English-speaking country. You could definitely create a native name and English name for them. Your character might prefer being called their native name, or their English name. If you’re worried about giving them the wrong name, you could search up “common *insert country name* names”, or ask a friend who’s from the same country to make it up for you. Just don’t give them a name like “Ching Chong”, that’s offensive.

I totally understand if you’re worried about offending people, especially if you really want a character with stereotypical features. I personally think that you’ll have to be mindful with your tone, because that can really change how the reader perceives your description. But if the features become a common occurrence, then it just becomes a stereotype again.

Some Asians might find some things offensive, while others don’t. If I were you, I’d use general descriptive words if I was describing eyes, like these:

Hooded

Deep set

Prominent

Bulging

Thin

Wide

Small

Puffy

Also, please know that if you find yourself guilty of thinking about these stereotypes, I’m not saying that you’re a bad person! It’s great that you’re willing to read this post and learn more. :)

If you have any more questions, ask an Asian! Or to be more specific, ask someone from the country, someone familiar with the practises! Sometimes, that beats researching on Google.

[rapeculturerealities]

Before giving birth, check that your family has sufficient toilet paper. Prepare ready-made meals for your husband, who surely “is not good at cooking.” Tie up your hair, “so that you don’t look disheveled” even as you go without a bath. And after the baby arrives, keep a “small-size” dress in sight — you’ll need motivation not to take that extra bite.

These words of advice, offered to pregnant women by the authorities in Seoul, have created a backlash in South Korea, where the government can ill afford to fumble as it desperately tries to compel women to have more babies and reverse the world’s lowest birthrate.

The pregnancy guidelines were first published on a government website in 2019. But they caught the attention of the public only in recent days, causing an outcry on social media, where people said they reflected outmoded views that persist in segments of the deeply patriarchal society and petitioned for their removal.

Yong Hye-in, an activist and politician, said that under the guidelines, a woman’s child-rearing responsibilities were doubled by having to care for her husband too. A better tactic for those married to men incapable of doing things like throwing away rotting food, Ms. Yong wrote on Twitter, would be divorce.

Experts called the government’s advice a missed opportunity. “I think it is written by someone who never gave birth,” said Dr. Kim Jae-yean, chairman of the Korean Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He added that the government should have provided practical advice on issues like breastfeeding.

A petition started online last week, which has been signed by more than 21,000 people, called for a public apology from officials, as well as disciplinary action against those who released the guidelines.

In an email to The New York Times, the public health division of the Seoul city government said it felt “responsible for not reviewing and monitoring the contents, approved at the time, thoroughly and closely.” It said it would review its online content, and improve gender sensitivity training for all municipal employees.

While the most offensive parts of the guidelines have been removed, some of the advice remains online, and screenshots of the original text continue to circulate on social media.

“Why are we looking for the cause of the low birthrate from far away? It’s right here,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another said women were infuriated by the rules: “Who made this guideline? There are lots of things to be corrected.”

Some lawmakers criticized the messaging as damaging for South Korea’s reputation.

“It is awkward that the anachronistic admonition on how pregnant women should serve their families is still being distributed,” Woo Sang-ho, a lawmaker of the governing Democratic Party, wrote on Facebook last week, before the guidelines were removed.

Others, however, said the online criticism went too far.

“I don’t think it’s that ridiculous to suggest women prepare food and the house,” said Kyung Jin Kim, 42, a former lawyer based in Seoul, who recently left her career to start a family. But she said the guidelines could have been more useful “if the tone were not so like a middle-aged Korean guy or an old Korean mother-in-law.”

Under the recommendations, women were advised to check their household essentials so that their family members would “not be uncomfortable.” They were also urged to clean out the fridge, prepare meals and find someone to care for their other children.

The advice made no mention of any responsibilities for husbands. But it did have some suggestions for how to remain attractive to them.

“Hang the clothes you wore before your marriage or small-size clothes you would like to wear after childbirth by putting one in a place you can easily see,” the original text from the site read. It added that “when you feel like you would like to eat more than you need to, or skip exercising, you get motivated by looking at the clothes.”

Though South Korea has become an economic and cultural powerhouse, many women still experience misogyny in very practical terms.

According to a 2017 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the gender pay gap in South Korea is the highest among its 37 member countries. Working women earn nearly 40 percent less than men, and many stop working when they have children, often pressured by their families and workplaces.

Other countries in the region, including Japan — which also has an aging population and a low birthrate — have broad gender disparities, especially in relation to pregnancy. In Japan, the term “matahara” (short for maternity harassment) caught on when a woman’s claims of workplace bullying after she gave birth were heard in the country’s Supreme Court in 2014.

These declining populations pose a threat to the countries’ economies, making it all the more important that governments tread carefully in incentivizing women to have children.

Last year, South Korea’s population declined for the first time on record, dropping by nearly 21,000. Births fell by more than 10.5 percent, and deaths rose by 3 percent. The Ministry of Interior and Safety acknowledged the alarming implications, saying that “amid the rapidly declining birthrate, the government needs to undertake fundamental changes to its relevant policies.”

Though the Seoul government may have fumbled in its advice, the backlash, some said, proved that attitudes were changing.

“This is just outdated advice,” said Adele Vitale, a birth doula and Italian expatriate who has lived in Busan, a port city on the country’s southeast coast, for a decade.

Ms. Vitale, who works primarily with foreign women married to Korean men, said that though Korean society had traditionally perceived pregnant women as “incapacitated,” she had increasingly seen their husbands adopting more egalitarian views toward childbirth and child rearing.

“Family dynamics have been evolving,” she said. “Women are no longer willing to be treated this way.”

[sawadeekannyeong]

Thailand: Southeast Asia’s unexpected epicentre of K-pop

How Thailand contributes to South Korea, and how South Korea gives back in return

i. Intro

Video: Clip from Thai entertainment show hosted by Moddam Kachapa. (Source: YouTube)

On September 11, 2021, Thai MC Moddam Kachapa talked about the solo debut success of Blackpink’s Lisa.

“This is what we call world class, truly world class, it’s finally happened to our country.”

Lisa (real name Lalisa Manoban), a K-pop idol who was born and raised in Thailand, got her start under YG Entertainment in 2016, as a member of girl group Blackpink. The group itself has achieved worldwide success, even being credited by South Korean president Moon Jae-In for spreading K-pop content across the globe. Lisa is the only member of the group who is not Korean, and the third to break out into solo endeavours.

Her debut single album Lalisa was considered a huge success. With 736,000 copies sold in South Korea within the first week, it broke the all-time record for most sales in a single week for any release by a female musician — leaving her more than worthy of a celebration.

But in acknowledging Lisa’s success, Kachapa discredited the success of other Thai K-pop idols in the industry: namely, 2PM’s Nichkhun and GOT7’s BamBam.

“We’ve never seen a (Thai) superstar go this far - back then we had Nichkhun, but he wasn’t successful to this degree. We also have BamBam, but he too didn’t manage to get this far.”

Photo: Screenshots of netizens’ tweets regarding Kachapa’s statements. (Source: Twitter)

His statements struck a chord with long-time fans of both artists, who felt there was no need to bring them down in order to praise Lisa. Many even acknowledged that the three are friends, and did not see one another as competition.

Photo: BamBam, Nichkhun and Lisa with one another. (Source: various)

This incident proves one thing – Thai fans of K-pop are proud of all the success their own citizens have achieved, and actively acknowledge that debuting in the K-pop industry is an achievement to laud over. It reflects the level of respect Thai netizens have for K-pop, revealing just how popular K-pop is in Thailand.

ii. The import of Thai idols

A survey conducted with 500 Thai citizens in 2019 revealed that 45.6 percent of respondents considered K-pop to be very popular in the nation, with an additional 27.2 percent considering it to be quite popular. The Korean Wave, specifically the rise of K-pop, has been present in Thailand for more than decade now.

The import of talents like Nichkhun, BamBam and Lisa are both a result of this rise, and also help to maintain this popularity. The respect they are treated with in their home country is nearly unparalleled.

Nichkhun (2PM)

In 2005, when he was just 17, Nichkhun was scouted by JYPE Entertainment representatives while at the Los Angeles Korean Music Festival with some friends. He admitted to having no knowledge of Korean culture, and did not understand why he was scouted. 

“I didn’t know any singers, I didn’t know what JYP was and when I was scouted, I was really skeptical about it because I don’t really speak Korean, I didn’t know anybody there.”

The Los Angeles Korean Music Festival (now known as the Korea Times Music Festival) was launched in 2003 to give Korean-Americans living in Southern California a taste of “home”. The festival grew increasingly popular among non-Koreans, due to the widespread recognition of Korean culture in the United States, and in 2013, 95 per cent of tickets were purchased by non-Koreans.

Video: 2PM performing at the 2014 Los Angeles Korean Music Festival. (Source: YouTube)

The booming presence of the Korean community in Southern California and the rise of Hallyu in the United States were both factors that contributed to Nichkhun’s recruitment into JYPE. His debut as a member of 2PM in 2008 cemented his status as the world’s first K-pop idol from Thailand.

He is incredibly popular in his home country, earning the nickname “Thai Prince” for his good looks, wealth and talent. He also acknowledges that as a foreign K-pop idol, he helps to globalise K-pop, and spread awareness of it beyond just South Korea.

I think I’m the international bridge that connects the group to places outside Korea. If the group were only Korean members, the reach would be very Korean. But because I’m there, I make the group a little more international.

BamBam (GOT7)

BamBam (born Kunpimook Bhuwakul), is a member of GOT7, formerly under JYP Entertainment. Growing up in Thailand, his interest in Korean culture was primarily because his mother was a huge fan of singer Rain. The two of them even attended some Rain concerts together in Thailand, a testament to the singer’s popularity in the region.

BamBam actively took part in K-pop competitions growing up in Thailand, like a Rain cover dance competition, and the Thailand LG Entertainer Competition (which 2PM’s Nichkhun and Blackpink’s Lisa were coincidentally both present at).

Photo: BamBam, Nichkhun and Lisa at the Thailand LG Entertainer Competition. (Source: YouTube)

At 13, BamBam passed the JYP World Tour Audition in Thailand and subsequently moved to South Korea to become a JYPE trainee. Debuting with GOT7 in 2014, his popularity in Thailand soared and BamBam went on to receive the nickname “Thai Prince”, just like his predecessor Nichkhun.

He endorses many brands in Thailand, including mobile network operator AIS, Yamaha, and Vivo.

“Someone had called me “nation’s treasure” before. I felt really good when I heard it. I want Thai people to be proud of me. I am proud of being Thai. I always say it wherever I go. We’re K-pop idols or whatever, we’re still Thai.”

Lisa (Blackpink)

Lisa’s story of how she debuted is similar to that of BamBam’s. In 2010, she attended an open audition held by YG Entertainment in Thailand, and was the only winner out of approximately 3000 contestants. Moving to South Korea at the mere age of 13, she proceeded to become YG’s first non-Korean trainee.

Since Blackpink’s debut in 2016, the group has achieved constant success. Lisa’s fame is nearly unparalleled – she is the most followed K-pop idol on Instagram, boasting 61.9 million followers (as of October 2021).

The star, who like Nichkhun and BamBam is highly respected in Thailand, made sure to boast her Thai roots in her debut single.

"I wanted my album to give a Thai feel as its gem, and YG's producer, Teddy, arranged the lead track in the way I expected. I also sported Thai outfits in its music video and made traditional Thai dance movements.”

The ever growing globalisation of K-pop, like Korean music festivals and idol auditions held in other countries, contribute to the growing pool of non-Korean K-pop idols. K-pop is becoming increasingly accessible, not just for fans, but for those aspiring to join the industry.

Other Thai idols have sprouted in the K-pop industry since, like NCT’s Ten, CLC’s Sorn and G-Idle’s Minnie. All of them contribute to growing cultural relations between Thailand and South Korea, as South Korean President Moon Jae-In said himself.

“ In particular, the peoples of our two countries are curious about each other and share a mutual affection. A number of talented young Thais are making a name for themselves on the world stage as members of K-pop acts, including Nichkhun of 2PM and Lisa of Blackpink.”

iii. Getting what you give

Where K-pop has benefitted from Thailand, Thailand has benefitted from K-pop.

All of the “Big 3” labels – JYP, YG and SM – have expanded their businesses to Thailand: JYP launched JYPE Thailand in 2010, its official Southeast Asian branch. The following year, SM launched a joint venture called SM True with Thailand’s The Visions Group. And just this year, YGMM was launched as a joint venture between YG and Thailand’s GMM Grammy.

Korean music festivals and conventions are also commonplace in Thailand. In 2011, to celebrate its 50th anniversary, South Korea’s Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) held the MBC Korean Music Wave in Bangkok. It featured the biggest groups of the time, like TVXQ, Miss A, Girls’ Generation and SG Wannabe, and was hosted by 2PM’s Nichkhun, alongside Yuri and Tiffany from Girls’ Generation. MBC Korean Music Wave returned to Thailand two more times, and its last iteration received a turnout of 20,000 fans.

Photo: Tiffany, Nichkhun, and Yuri at MBC Korean Music Wave in Bangkok 2011. (Source: Soompi)

More recently, in 2018 and 2019, Thailand became the only Southeast Asian country to host KCON. The convention, held to celebrate all forms of Korean culture, originally began in 2012, in the United States, and has since expanded to eight countries. Thailand’s KCON was hosted both times by 2PM’s Nichkhun, and saw performances from artists like Stray Kids, Iz*One and GOT7.

Photo: GOT7 at KCON 2018, including BamBam (3rd from right). (Source: Tofupop Radio)

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic might have halted K-pop concerts and conventions in Thailand for the time being, but the craze shows no signs of stopping. The K-pop phenomenon has trickled its way down to Thailand’s grassroots, benefitting blue collar workers like tuktuk drivers and roadside hawkers.

Photo: Thailand’s popular tuktuks are now adorned with K-pop idol advertisements. (Source: Reuters)

The drivers of Thailand’s distinctive tuktuks have been hit financially by the pandemic, with most of their income normally coming from excited tourists. According to Reuters, avid K-pop fans have been turning to these tuktuks as a way to advertise their favourite idols. As part of a larger anti-government protest, teenagers stopped paying for their K-pop idols to be advertised on public transport, and instead mobilised tuktuks to celebrate birthdays and album launches.

Samran and many others now drive their empty tuk tuks around Bangkok with a banner of a different K-pop sensation each month, stopping for young Thai fans to take pictures and use their service, often with tips.

Similarly, meatball vendors in Lisa’s hometown of Buriram in Thailand have seen a rise in sales of up to 1000 per cent since an unexpected shoutout from her. In an interview on popular Thai talkshow The Woody Show, Lisa mentioned missing the meatballs sold near the train station in her hometown.

Photo: Meatballs being sold in Lisa’s hometown in Thailand. (Source: Bangkok Post)

“People buy and eat them right there at Buriram train station. They’re really popular. The highlight is the sauce found only in Buriram.”

Business had struggled for these vendors as a result of the pandemic, with many people afraid of eating out. Some vendors even had to shut down stalls.

"Now some shops have about 2,000 orders a day. This is unprecedented and business is even better than pre-Covid 19," said Bordin Ruengsuksriwong, the provincial Tourism Industry Council president.

It is no doubt that when pandemic restrictions ease up, more Thais will find themselves flocking to South Korea to follow in the footsteps of Nichkhun, BamBam and Lisa, while K-pop groups will be marking Thailand down in their tour dates.  

[historic-old-guard-lover]

What are your thoughts on the old guards and literacy ( past and present ) ?

I've reblogged some posts here (on why anything goes for literacy in medieval Europe), here (which touches upon oral history), here (a heartwarming take on reading aloud), and here (a humorous take), but I'd love to go in depth for you! As usual, the mega-post with pictures and more detailed explanations is below the cut-off.

TL;DR Summary of Literacy for Each Member:

Lykon: never needed to read or write, probably did neither

Andy: we see her read in the film, but might have only picked up reading in the last few centuries; doesn’t necessarily know how to write but would also be a fairly recent skill*

Quynh: may read or write, but similar to Andy would have been “recent” in the terms of her lifespan*

Yusuf: likely can read and write Arabic before his death, values literacy

Nicolo: total wild-card for either reading or writing, but we see him reading silently in the film so he has learned to read at some point; unclear whether he values it

Booker: very background-dependent for reading and writing, but values literacy as a social status symbol and clearly enjoys books from the film

Nile: can read and write and views it as an essential skill, but likely knows people who are illiterate and understands the socio-economics behind US literacy

*This is based on the fact that they never needed literacy to go about their lives, but they could have learned to read and write by the time that Yusuf and Nicolo die if they enjoyed it.

First off, what is literacy? If you ask someone or google it, chances are you’ll encounter the definition along the lines of “you can read and write.” This is a definition of literacy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines it as “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.” To summarize academic arguments, “literacy” could mean anything from “is able to read a newspaper” to “understands internet meme language” to “understands the doctor’s write-up after a visit.” For this post, I’ll broadly address the ability to read and the ability to write in an character system since that is what I imagine you are asking.

You can’t have someone read something if you don’t have someone to write in a mutually-intelligible language, so let’s start with the history of writing. The invention of writing has been awarded to Sumerian Cuneiform in ~3,100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq and Iran near the Persian Gulf). It was done on clay tablets by trained scribes, primarily for boring things like business and government. Below is a picture of a tablet so you can see what cuneiform looked like. They eventually settled on writing left-to-right and didn’t have any punctuation (not even spaces between words!).

[ID: “Sumerian cuneiform tablet, probably from Erech (Uruk), Mesopotamia, c. 3100–2900 BCE; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City” from here. The Met attributes it as “administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars.”]

Another notable old language is (Old) Egyptian. The first complete sentence dates back to 2690 BCE and was done using hieroglyphs (shown below). This language was used throughout Egypt and Nubia, which translates to modern-day Egypt and Sudan. The language didn’t really pick up, from what archaeologists can tell, until around 2600 BCE where writing starts proliferating...and then is soon replaced with Middle Egyptian. Fun fact: the word “hieroglyphs” comes from the Greeks, but the Egyptians referred to their script as (transliterated) “medu-netjer” or “the god's words” because it was a gift from Thoth (yes, that guy with the falcon head who may also be accredited as Thot).

[ID: picture of a seal impression from the tomb of Seth-Peribsen. It reads “The Ombite (i.e. Set) has given the Two Lands to his son, Dual King Peribsen.”]

Skipping over a few more writing systems developed in the Middle East and surrounding regions, we finally get to the first records of Old Chinese in 1250 BCE with the inscription on oracle bones shown below. From the get-go, there were at least three different scripts of Old Chinese: oracle bone, bronze, and seal. I’ve also added a bronze script so that you can see the differences.

[ID: ox scapula oracle bone from the reign of King Wu Din. The fragments read “ ...divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters...  (day 40) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. (day 41) ... cleaved to (day 42) ... fifth month, in Dun...  (day 50) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. ...   (day 50) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. Third day, (day 52) ... (day 54) ... The Gui will also have sickness ...” ]

[ID: Rubbing of an engraving found on multiple objects which notes the appointment of a man named Song as supervisor of the storehouses in Chengzhou.]

As you can see, early writing would not have interested the earliest members of the Old Guard. The things that were being written down were things that were important to those governing and those in business. I really don’t think that Lykon, Andy, or Quynh would have cared much about the barely distribution or who’s in charge of the storehouse, and they wouldn’t have been important enough to keep their own oracle on retainer. If we use the timeline I developed for my history of language asks (~8,000BCE - 7,000BCE Horn of Africa Lykon, ~5,000BCE - 4,000BCE Caucauses Andy, and ~3,500BCE - 2,500BCE Southeast Asia Quynh), then they all predate the invention of writing excluding the younger range of Quynh’s possible birth which places her after the invention but still culturally separated from it. Lykon could have died without ever having to learn how to read or write, Andy was old before it was invented let alone became popular, and Quynh is from a time where writing was not common. This is a hot take, but there is a non-zero chance that if Quynh disliked reading/writing and resisted learning it, she could have been locked in the coffin without being solidly literate. Imagine the first language you really have to read after 500 years now that literacy is a requisite for society is French, which doesn’t even sound how it looks (I’m looking at you, silent -ent at the end of most present-tense verbs). Painful.

This brings us to the next question we should answer for these older members: when would reading or writing have become useful and important to them? This is obviously much more difficult to answer. Because of oral history traditions, they wouldn’t need to read for entertainment (that whole concept must be mind-boggling). Because they probably didn’t do much large-scale trade coordination, they wouldn’t need to write for business. I can’t see any of them working for the government. As much as I love the joke about Quynh recognizing wanted posters, that wasn’t a thing until right before the 19th century in Europe. Quite frankly, I don’t think Andy or Quynh has a compelling interest in learning to read until the 1700s at the earliest unless they want to and enjoy the idea of writing (perhaps introduced by the younger immortal couple?).

Yusuf and Nicolo are a different story altogether, as they were both born after the invention of writing had become fairly common (ie. books were a thing and people used them, though they were rare and expensive). A longer and far better post than I could write explains that literacy in medieval Italy was in no way uniform: Nicolo is a total toss-up. He might have only known how to write, only known how to read, done both, or done neither even if he was a monastic priest or even a scribe who copied manuscripts. As a member of a merchant family, this still holds because 1) he might not have been the child raised to take over the business; and 2) you could pay people to do that pesky writing thing for you if it was absolutely necessary.

Yusuf came from a society which valued reading, especially in religious contexts. It’s called the Islamic Golden Age for a reason! Young children were schooled in Arabic and the Quran, though it might have been memorization-based. Older students would be taught to read and possibly to write as well in order to engage in scholarship around their sacred texts. He is from the beginning of the creation and popularity of madrasa (literally just “place of study”) as institutions of learning. He probably had an entire curriculum he studied, like modern schooling. Given that we can all agree that Yusuf comes from a wealthy background, it is a safe assumption that Yusuf can read Arabic and it is probably also safe to assume that he can write in it. I’d say that, if you are writing him as particularly wealthy or scholarly, he is probably even trained in the art of calligraphy (see an example below) which is to say he can write BEAUTIFULLY. The example picture is simply words on paper like we’d expect of a modern book, but calligraphy would be integrated into architecture and pictures. Don’t tempt me to make another post on this beautiful art form.

[ID: Maghrebi script from a 13th-century northern African Quran, thanks to Wikipedia.]

Moving on to 1770s France, literacy was becoming common but still varied with social class (especially before the Revolution) and it’s not clear whether Booker would have learned to read and write. It’s ironic that many areas of the country did not have had more than 40% MEN’S literacy while at the same time the country was considered a hub of the Enlightenment with it’s institutions of higher learning. The North/South cultural divide that I’ve hinted at here and here, shows up in the literacy rates as well. As a Southern sharecropper or laborer, he would be very likely illiterate. As a Southern peasant, we approach a 50/50 chance as he becomes more wealthy. As an artisan (if anyone headcannons this), he most likely is literate though the extent varies with wealth. Whether Booker knows how to read and write before his death is closely linked to class and wealth, but he would value literacy as a major social status signifier and be motivated to learn if he didn’t already.

[ID: four maps depicting “men” and “women” literacy rates for the period of 1686-1690 versus the period of 1786-1790. Adapted from "Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry, 1982."]

This brings us to modern history for Nile. Compulsory schooling for children is present in the US and being illiterate is (unfairly) associated with being unlearned. She was definitely taught to read and write in school, and literacy has been an essential skill throughout her entire life. This doesn’t mean that she is necessarily disrespectful of any illiteracy, because thirty percent of Chicago adults would “benefit” from literacy instruction. Literacy is still tied to class (and thus race) for a lot of Americans, though less strikingly for 1770s France. Nile probably knows some adults in her life who are illiterate or struggle with literacy and would understand that this is tied to socio-economics.

[theculturedmarxist]

Should We Have War Crimes Trials?

By Neil Sheehan

(https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/sheehanwarcrimesnyt71.pdf)

The New York Times Book Review March 28, 1971, pp. BR1 ff.

“The tragic story of Vietnam is not, in truth, a tale of malevolent men bent upon conquest for personal gain or imperial glory. It is the story of an entire generation of leaders (and an entire generation of followers) so conditioned by the tensions of the cold war years that they were unable to perceive in 1965 (and later) that the Communist adversary was no longer a monolith . . . Lyndon Johnson, though disturbingly volatile, was not in his worst moments an evil man in the Hitlerian sense . . . Set against these facts, the easy designation of individuals as deliberate or imputed ‘war criminals’ is shockingly glib, even if one allows for the inexperience of the young.” -- Townsend Hoopes, the former Under Secretary of the Air Force, January, 1970.

Is the accusation glib? Or is it too unpleasant to think about? Do you have to be Hitlerian to be a war criminal? Or can you qualify as a well-intentioned President of the United States? Even when I saw those signs during the March on the Pentagon in 1967, “Hey, Hey L.B.J. How many kids did you kill today?” they didn’t make me think that Lyndon Johnson, the President of the United States, might be a war criminal. A misguided man perhaps, an egomaniac at worst, but not a war criminal. That would have been just too much. Kids do get killed in war. Besides, I’d never read the laws governing the conduct of war, although I had watched the war for three years in Vietnam and had written about it for five. Apparently, a lot of the men in Saigon and Washington who were directing the war didn’t read those laws either, or if they did, they interpreted them rather loosely. Now a lot of other people are examining our behavior in Vietnam in the light of these laws. Mark Sacharoff, an assistant professor of English at Temple University, has gathered their work together into this bibliography. By this simple act he has significantly widened our consciousness. If you credit as factual only a fraction of the information assembled here about what happened in Vietnam, and if you apply the laws of war to American conduct there, then the leaders of the United States for the past six years at least, including the incumbent President, Richard Milhous Nixon, may well be guilty of war crimes.

There is the stuff of five Dreyfus affairs in that thought. This is what makes the growing literature on alleged war crimes in Vietnam so important. This bibliography represents the beginning of what promises to be a long and painful inquest into what we are doing in Southeast Asia. The more perspective we gain on our behavior, the uglier our conduct appears. At first it had seemed unfortunate and sad we were caught in the quicksand of Indochina. Then our conduct had appeared stupid and brutal, the quagmire was of our own making, the Vietnamese were the victims and we were the executioners. Now we’re finding out that we may have taken life, not merely as cruel and stubborn warriors, but as criminals. We are conditioned as a nation to believe that only our enemies commit war crimes. Certainly the enemy in Indochina has perpetrated crimes. The enemy’s war crimes, however, will not wash us clean if we too are war criminals.

What are the laws of war? One learns that there is a whole body of such laws, ranging from specific military regulations like the Army’s Field Manual 27-10, “The Law of Land Warfare,” to the provisions of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which are United Slates law by virtue of Senate ratification, to the broad principles laid down by the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals. These laws say that all is not fair in war, that there are limits to what belligerent man may do to mankind. As the Hague Convention of 1907 put it, “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” In other words, some acts in war are illegal and they aren’t all as obviously illegal as the massacre of several hundred Vietnamese villagers at Mylai. Let’s take a look at our conduct in Vietnam through the viewing glass of these laws. The Army Field Manual says that it is illegal to attack hospitals. We routinely bombed and shelled them. The destruction of Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army Hospitals in the South Vietnamese countryside was announced at the daily press briefings, the Five o’Clock Follies, by American military spokesmen in Saigon.

So somebody may have committed a war crime in attacking those hospitals. The Manual also says that a military commander acquires responsibility for war crimes if he knows they are being committed, “or should have knowledge, through reports received by him or through other means,” and he fails to take action to stop them. President Johnson kept two wire-service teletypes in his office and he read the newspapers like a bear. There are thus grounds for believing that he may have known his Air Force and artillery were blowing up enemy hospitals. He was the Commander in Chief. Did his knowledge make him a war criminal? The Army Manual says that “every violation of the law of war is a war crime.”

Let’s proceed to one of the basic tactics the United States used to prosecute the war in South Vietnam -unrestricted air and artillery bombardments of peasant hamlets. Since 1965, a minimum of 150,000 Vietnamese civilians, an average of 68 men, women and children every day for the past six years, have been killed in the south by American military action or by weapons supplied to the Saigon forces by the United States. Another 350,000 Vietnamese civilians have been wounded or permanently maimed. This is a very conservative estimate. It is based on official figures assembled by Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate Subcommittee on Refugees and on a study for the Subcommittee by those eminent government auditors, the General Accounting Office. The real toll may be much higher. This conservative attitude makes the documentation put together by the Senator and his staff aides, Jerry Tinker and Dale S. de Haan. among the most impressive in the bibliography. Many, perhaps the majority, of those half million civilian casualties were caused by the air and artillery bombardments of peasant hamlets authorized by the American military and civilian leaders in Saigon and Washington.

The United States Government tried and hanged in 1946 a Japanese general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, because he was held responsible for the deaths of more than 25,000 noncombatants killed by his troops in the Philippines.

Can a moral and legal distinction be drawn between those killings in World War II, for which General Yamashita paid with his life, and the civilian deaths ordered or condoned by American leaders during the Vietnam War? Again, if you accept only a portion of the evidence presented in this bibliography, and compare that evidence to the laws of war, the probable answer is, No. And President Nixon has spread this unrestricted bombing through Laos and Cambodia, killing and wounding unknown tens of thousands of civilians in those countries.

...

continued

[alethia000]

Korean boy band member Nichkhun on life as a K-pop idol

By: Natasha Gillespie-Wong

December 29, 2020

Singer, songwriter, rapper, model and now Hollywood actor, Nichkhun is a man of many talents. The Thai-American, who’s currently based in South Korea, gives Natasha Gillespie-Wong an insight into life as a K-pop idol. Moving effortlessly in front of the camera, Nichkhun Buck Horvejkul, better known as Nichkhun, obviously knows his best angles. A quiet confidence shines through as he expertly works each garment into the frame. A few more outfit changes, a quick snack and he’s ready for the interview. Without the cameras on him, Nichkhun’s demeanour changes and a soft-spoken, almost shy man sits before me.

Brought up between Thailand and California, Nichkhun was scouted by JYP Entertainment as a teenager in Los Angeles, and so began his whirlwind adventure to K-pop superstardom. Speaking fluent Thai, English and Korean, Nichkhun quickly became the darling of Southeast Asia. Now, he’s treading the boards in Hong Kong ahead of his Hollywood debut in Hong Kong Love Story.

You’re multilingual and have lived all over the world. What aspects of your international upbringing influence your work and work ethic?

I think being and living in different countries, experiencing so many cultures, opens doors. It gives you perspective. When I talk to someone who’s been around the world or has lived somewhere else before, they tend to be more understanding. Experiencing different cultures gives you an understanding of why people behave the way they do. So I think in that sense it plays a big role in my career and my work ethic.

When you’re working, you deal with a lot of different people, from different upbringings. A lot of the time people don’t even know they’re doing something you’re not used to so when you’re understanding of different cultures and norms, you don’t get frustrated. I really encourage my friends or people around me to travel more, not just for a couple of days, but to get out and meet local people and talk to them, learn a bit about their language and about their culture. I think that that really helps a lot and not just for work, but for your life.

You were scouted at 18 and had to learn to sing, dance and speak new languages. What new things did you learn about yourself through your work? Was there anything that surprised you about the training?

I was never very good at singing and dancing. [JYP Entertainment] recruited me to go to Korea. When I was there, I started training and they would ask me, “Why are you not good? Why can’t you sing? Why can’t you dance?” I was a bit taken aback because I thought to myself, “You saw my audition tape, you know what I can do”, which, to be honest, at the time was nothing. But then I started to understand that they just wanted to motivate me. I’m part of the company and I have to measure up to their standards.

The guys who were already in the company had some skills before coming in. So I had to work extra hard; I think that was the hardest part for me. Living and moving to Korea and adapting to Korea wasn’t that hard, just the training was not easy. I think what surprised me most about working in this industry is myself. I started off with no skills and zero confidence and I was so shy that I couldn’t even speak in front of a class to give a presentation or anything. I surprised myself. I think the first couple of times I went on stage, I thought I was going to freeze, but I didn’t. And that taught me that if you try hard enough, if you want something, you can do it.

I read that your mum never expected you to pursue performing as a career. What fuels your passion for the arts? Did you perform as a child at all?

When I was growing up, I would do school concerts and festivals but never anything serious. I never thought I would perform in front of a real audience, outside of my school. Once you’re on stage professionally, it’s a different story. When I found out that I could perform, maybe not that well or maybe not as perfect as I wanted it to be, that just drove me to be more thirsty and I just wanted it more. I just wanted to be better.

As a member of 2PM, what do you think your personality specifically brings to the group? And what are some of the challenges of working as a group?

I think I’m the international bridge that connects the group to places outside Korea. If the group were only Korean members, the reach would be very Korean. But because I’m there, I make the group a little more international. Me and Taecyeon, because he grew up in Boston.

In Korean culture, younger people usually can’t speak up to the older ones. But we’re all friends, colleagues, partners. So whatever problems we have we talk it out. It doesn’t matter if you’re the youngest or the oldest, we just call a meeting and we talk about it. I think that’s how we’ve remained so close for so long.

Because music is art, sometimes less is more but sometimes more is more so we have to find a balance. We haven’t perfected it, but we’re still on the way, still learning a lot. What I’ve learned is you can never satisfy the public completely.

What was it like to go out on your own as a solo artist?

I never thought I’d do my own music, because in 2PM I have five other members to cover for me if I make a mistake. But when they went off to the military, I promised the fans that I wouldn’t leave them. That’s when I came out with an album and started touring. I called my first solo album ME, because I wanted the fans to hear what I listened to or what I wanted to make, not what’s trendy. I never thought I could sing and dance all by myself for two and a half hours on stage, but I’ve done it. I just keep learning new things about myself through work. I’m very fortunate that this is my job, it’s a blessing. The music industry is so dynamic. Do you find it hard to keep up at all or do you not pay too much attention to that?

I don’t think about that much. To me, music is timeless. I listen to the same old songs that I like, and I think that’s just who I am. It’s not just with music but with fashion too. My fans are always saying, “Please go shopping! Please update your wardrobe!” But growing up, my dad would wear the same shoes until they broke. Then he would fix them and wear them more, until he couldn’t fix them anymore. So my mentality is very much, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? I find buying things for myself hard as well. I would rather spend money on things to share, like food and good experiences. I pay for things like taking my family on a trip. We all have fun, make good memories.

For me, the most important thing is staying true to myself, because the industry will always want something new. The latest sound or instrument, you might use it in your music, but then because it takes maybe four or five months to produce, the sound has changed. So that’s why with ME, because I didn’t know what the audience would want to hear at the time of release, I just stuck to what I wanted the public to hear. I’m not aiming for a number one hit song every time, I’m just trying to show off my colours.

How did you make the leap from music to TV and movies? Are the industries very different?

Acting was kind of a natural next step for me. In this industry, there are so many avenues you can explore. You start in music, you can move from performing to production or recording music to recording film. For me, I think I was always interested and intrigued by acting. I’ve had so many great opportunities, I got lucky and now I’m in an American film and it all came from a series of opportunities and me being fortunate.

The main difference I’ve noticed is the feedback. With music you get an immediate reaction from the crowd, you perform and you get recognition. With acting, it’s delayed. It can take months or even years for a movie to come out so the feedback is very, very delayed. I think that’s the only big difference between music and movies.

You’ve portrayed characters from a marathon runner to a student involved in a murder case. How has acting helped you discover new aspects of yourself?

The roles I’ve played so far have just been characters that people can relate to, that I relate to, it’s just a bit of myself. I’m not a method actor. I just kind of forget it when I go home and then when I’m back on set I get back into it. I don’t take it home with me; I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

Because I haven’t had a very intense, sophisticated role, I don’t know if I could pull to that extreme. I would need to spend a lot of time with a character like that.

I’m still in the learning stage and am always happy to have a new challenge. I’m just trying to go deeper with each character, even if he’s not a serious person or, you know, like a psycho killer. But still, I’m trying to dig in a little more, trying to give this character more dimension, and also bring a bit more fun. I think I’m just starting to learn to worry less about getting the script right and just becoming a character.

Before I was just feeling I can’t get the lines wrong. And that’s not the most important thing. You know, you can play around with characters, unless you meet a really strict director, which I haven’t yet. I think that’s the greatest thing about being an artist for me. You might get given a subject, but within that radius, within that circle, you can bounce around so much that you don’t have to be just one thing. I think that’s the beauty of the industry.

You’ve made a big impact helping UNICEF raise awareness and funds for children’s rights. How important is it to you to give back to society?

There are so many issues that we are blind to. Little things like clean water to drink, safe places. It’s very important that these kids have the opportunity to grow up to be healthy, educated and strong. I’m so thankful that UNICEF chose me to be one of their ambassadors. Being a spokesperson is more important than just donations. If I’m spreading the message, then that will hopefully have an impact on others too. In my position, I live off of people’s love so it’s very important for me to give some of that love back and not just take all the time.

Who is your #legend?

My parents. I’ve met so many great people throughout my life, but no matter where I go or what I do, I find myself thinking back to things my parents said. I’ve realised that you can have hundreds of idols in your life, whom you really respect, but the people you should respect the most are your parents. Even though I didn’t really listen to them as a child, they made me who I am today. I’ve been living on my own for 21 years now and I could have gone the wrong way, but thanks to my parents’ teaching I’ve managed to stay on a somewhat straight path. Whenever I went off the road a little bit, I always came back, thanks to my parents.

CREDITS Creative Direction and Styling / Alvin Goh Photography / Erfan Shekarriz Art Direction / Djiun Wang Videographer / Feicien Feng Video Editor / Feicien Feng & Simarpreet Kaur Panjeta Make-Up / Alvin Goh Hairstyling / Peter Cheng Assistants / Feicien Feng, Elizabeth Kezia, Lyly Chan, John Marcus, Kenna Chiu

Source: https://hashtaglegend.com/magazine/digital-exclusive/nichkhun-brooks-brothers-kpop-interview/

[zmwrites]

What are the countries and kingdoms and cities of your world? How did you come up with them and how did you name them? I suck at naming places

hello!! i have been afraid to answer this bc i don’t want to ruin whatever is suggesting i know what i’m doing, but here we go!

most of my wips are set in the same world but on different continents and in different time periods. for example, a group that brought the Ukrainian language influence to Draiobia in Indigo Wars is from the area that Remnants takes place in, hence why Remnants also has a strong Ukrainian language influence. except Indigo Wars is set in 719 and Remnants is set in 1674.

i don’t have a map for Remnants yet, but here is the map for IW:

so you can (hopefully) see the different language influences in all countries here. the very top country, without any named cities visible, is Achar. below that is Edristan, then Draiobia, then Echium is the little island off the south of the continent.

then in Remnants, the countries are Kethyia, Yetrar, Vrarok, and Esmudor. the cities (all in Kethyia) are Brenik, Pyarovsk, Lesopa, Marlytsia, and Nemný.

i make extensive use of Fantasy Name Generators when i’m naming places. 

for countries/kingdoms: i use either the Continent, Country/Nation, or Kingdom name generators on the site. sometimes i’ll dip into others if i want a place to sound particularly outlandish, but i’ll open a few in different tabs and click through until i find something i like. i’ll also save ones i like but that aren’t right for the project in a different document to refer to later.

for cities: i decide what kind of linguistic influence i want the setting to have, then find the appropriate generator on the site. i don’t keep strictly to one language influence, bc i prefer to believe that people can share culture and language and space without killing each other. on the IW map above, there are cities whose names are derived from French (West Europe), English (aka the basic “City Name” and “Fantasy Town Name” generators), East Europe, West Asia, and Southeast Asia. i think i even pulled some names from the South Europe generator.

once i’ve picked a generator, i’ll put together a list of names then decide where to place them and how important i want them to be to the story. for example: Nemný is a great name for a city, but placing the accent is a pain (this is from someone who has an accented letter in their first name) so it has been relegated to a less important role in the story.

i wish i had a better answer, but the truth is that i also suck at naming places and allow Emily from Fantasy Name Generators do most of the work for me. i just click “generate” until i get enough names to populate the part of the world i’m working on.

[the-diagnosis-archive]

Typhus

Typhus is a disease caused by infection with one or more rickettsial bacteria. Fleas, mites (chiggers), lice, or ticks transmit it when they bite you. Fleas, mites, lice, and ticks are types of invertebrate animals known as arthropods. When arthropods carrying around rickettsial bacteria bite someone, they transmit the bacteria that causes typhus. Scratching the bite further opens the skin and allows the bacteria greater access to the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, the bacteria continue to reproduce and grow.

There are three different types of typhus:

 epidemic (louse-borne) typhus is a rare variety spread by infected body lice. It’s unlikely to happen outside of extremely crowded living conditions. One type of epidemic typhus can be spread by infected flying squirrels, again, very rare.

 endemic (murine) typhus is passed by fleas to people if the fleas bite infected animals, mainly rats. Most U.S. cases have been reported in California, Hawaii, and Texas

 scrub typhus is spread by infected chiggers, or mites, mainly found in rural parts of Southeast Asia, China, Japan, India, and northern Australia.

All three kinds of typhus can cause serious illness, so get immediate treatment if you think you might have been exposed to it.

Causes:

Typhus is not transmitted from person to person like a cold or the flu. There are three different types of typhus, and each type is caused by a different type of bacterium and transmitted by a different type of arthropod. The type of typhus you are infected with depends on what bit you. Arthropods are typically carriers of a typhus strain unique to their species. Insects and other parasites spread murine and epidemic typhus when they bite you and leave bacteria-laden feces on your skin. When you scratch the itching bug bite, you can spread the infested feces into the open bite wound or other cuts on your skin’s surface. That deposits typhus bacteria into your bloodstream. You can get scrub typhus if a mite infected with the bacterium bites you, even if you don’t scratch the bite. The disease is transmitted by the human body louse, which becomes infected by feeding on the blood of patients with acute typhus fever. Infected lice excrete rickettsia onto the skin while feeding on a second host, who becomes infected by rubbing louse fecal matter or crushed lice into the bite wound. There is no animal reservoir.

Typhus outbreaks usually only occur in developing countries or in regions of poverty, poor sanitation, and close human contact. Typhus is generally not a problem in the United States, but you may become infected while traveling abroad. Untreated typhus can lead to serious complications, and it’s potentially fatal. It’s important to see your doctor if you suspect that you may have typhus

Typhus fever occurs in colder (i.e. mountainous) regions of central and eastern Africa, central and South America, and Asia. In recent years, most outbreaks have taken place in Burundi, Ethiopia and Rwanda. Typhus fever occurs in conditions of overcrowding and poor hygiene, such as in prisons and refugee camps. The risk of being infected with typhus is very low for most travelers. Humanitarian relief workers may be exposed in refugee camps and other settings characterized by crowding and poor hygiene.

Symptoms:

Typhus is a series of acute infectious diseases that appear with a sudden onset of headache, chills, fever, and general pains, proceed on the third to fifth day with a rash and toxemia (toxic substances in the blood), and terminate after two to three weeks. It is caused by different species of rickettsia bacteria that are transmitted to humans by lice, fleas, mites, or ticks. The insects are carried person to person or are brought to people by rodents, cattle, and other animals. The onset is variable but often sudden, with headache, chills, high fever, prostration, coughing and severe muscular pain. After 5–6 days, a macular skin eruption (dark spots) develops first on the upper trunk and spreads to the rest of the body but usually not to the face, palms of the hands or soles of the feet. The case–fatality rate is up to 40% in the absence of specific treatment. Louse-borne typhus fever is the only rickettsial disease that can cause explosive epidemics. With any kind of typhus, you’ll start to feel ill about 10 days to 2 weeks after the typhus bacteria get into your body. At first, you’ll feel chills, run a fever, and develop a severe headache. You may start to breathe fast and get full-body muscle aches like what you’d have with the flu. Stomach pain and vomiting are common, too. A few days later, you might notice a spotted rash on your chest and midsection, which often spreads to other parts of your body. With scrub typhus, you might see a dark scab on the area where the chigger bit you. Complications from untreated typhus can include conditions such as pneumonia, meningitis, or septic shock.

Symptoms vary slightly by the type of typhus, but there are symptoms that are associated with all three types of typhus, such as:

headache

fever

chills

rash

Symptoms of epidemic typhus begin within 2 weeks after contact with infected body lice. Signs and symptoms may include:

Confusion

Cough

Eye sensitivity to bright lights

Fever and chills

Headache

High fever (above 102.2°F)

Low blood pressure (hypotension)

Nausea

Rapid breathing

Rash that begins on the back or chest and spreads

Severe headache

Severe muscle pain

Stupor and seeming out of touch with reality

Vomiting

Brill-Zinsser disease

Some people can remain infected, without symptoms, for years after they first get sick. Rarely, these individuals can have a relapse in disease, called Brill-Zinsser disease, months or years following their first illness. When this happens, it often occurs when the body’s immune system is weakened due to certain medications, old age, or illness. The symptoms of Brill-Zinsser disease are similar to the original infection, but are usually milder than the initial illness.

The symptoms of endemic typhus last for 10 to 12 days and are very similar to the symptoms of epidemic typhus but are usually less severe. They include:

dry cough

nausea and vomiting

diarrhea

Symptoms seen in people with scrub typhus include:

swollen lymph nodes

tiredness

red lesion or sore on the skin at the site of the bite

cough

rash

The incubation period for the disease is five to 14 days, on average. This means that symptoms won’t usually appear for up to five to 14 days after you are bitten. Travelers who get typhus while traveling abroad may not experience symptoms until they are back home. This is why it is important to tell your doctor about any recent trips if you have any of the above symptoms.

Diagnosis:

The symptoms of epidemic typhus are similar to symptoms of many other diseases. See your health care provider if you develop the symptoms listed above following travel or contact with animals.

I f you suspect that you have typhus, your doctor will ask about your symptoms and your medical history. To help with the diagnosis, tell your doctor if you:

are living in a crowded environment

know of a typhus outbreak in your community

have traveled abroad recently

 have had contact with flying squirrels or their nests.

Diagnostic tests for the presence of typhus include:

skin biopsy: a sample of the skin from your rash will be tested in a lab

Western blot: a test to identify the presence of typhus

immunofluorescence test: uses fluorescent dyes to detect typhus antigen in samples of serum taken from the bloodstream

other blood tests: results can indicate the presence of infection

Laboratory testing and reporting of results can take several weeks. Your health care provider may start treatment before results are available.

Treatment:

Antibiotics most commonly used to treat typhus include:

doxycycline (Doryx, Vibramycin): the preferred treatment

chloramphenicol: an option for those not pregnant or breastfeeding

ciprofloxacin (Cipro): used for adults who are unable to take doxycycline

The most effective therapy for all three kinds of typhus is the antibiotic doxycycline. A single dose of doxycycline has proven effective against epidemic typhus. Doxycycline also works quickly on other strains of the disease. For the best results, you should take it as soon as possible after your symptoms start.

If you’re allergic to doxycycline or if it doesn’t work, doctors may choose another antibiotic such as ciprofloxacin (Cipro). Epidemic typhus should be treated with the antibiotic doxycycline. Doxycycline can be used in persons of any age.

Prevention

There is no vaccine that can protect you from typhus. But basic hygiene helps. This includes very simple things like bathing at least once a week and changing your clothes on a regular basis. Wash louse-infested clothing at least once a week. Machine wash and dry infested clothing and bedding using hot water (at least 130°F), and dry on high heat when possible. Clothing and items that are not washable can be dry-cleaned OR sealed in a plastic bag and stored for 2 weeks. You should also keep a safe distance from wild animals known to carry typhus, such as rats, flying squirrels, and opossums. Don’t leave food waste or other trash in your yard where it could attract them.

For murine typhus protection, you may also want to spray flea-control products on your furry pets and in your yard, and don’t let your pets share your bed. If you travel to places where murine typhus or scrub typhus are found, use an insect repellent that contains 20% to 30% DEET.

Do not share clothing, beds, bedding, or towels used by a person who has body lice or is infected with typhus. Treat bedding, uniforms, and other clothing with permethrin. Permethrin kills lice and may provide long-lasting protection for clothing for many washings. See product information to learn how long the protection will last. If treating these items yourself, follow the product instructions carefully. Do NOT use permethrin products directly on skin. They are intended to treat clothing not people.

sources: x x x x x

[orenonahaichigoda]

I had a rough day, and came to a realisation. I will say a bit about my own experience, and then, after having to lay the groundwork of explaining 400 things about Japan because American schools and media think the whole world is the US, Western Europe, and places to blow up, making explaining necessary, will tie it to Ichigo, or at least how I portray him.

I'm Post Dankai Juniors, growing up in Japan. So's Kubo, actually. The boundaries of this Japanese generation are roughly '75 to '85, Yutori, the following generation that's always translated and localised as Millennial, pretty solidly set as beginning at '86. These things are always fuzzy because you can't vivisect living brains and find the part that likes char siu buns and the part that likes jazz fusion. I *majored* in Social Science. You'll have teachers who say "it is absolute that we date people who are similar to us because we're all actually narcists." (It *might* be because they're like our beloved family or community. Narcistic Personality is not universal) But it really just is fuzzy, and that teacher/book author is an idiot. Anyway, Yutori is always translated as Millennial. I don't know the end boundary. Post Dankai Juniors covers almost totally a debated throe for Germanic nations (I know Britain, Germany, and Nederland use the same generations as America, and their languages are Germanic) because of how fuzzy it all is, though.

Anyway, so since coming to the US, my interactions with other Asians, again, how is this defined when China, Mongolia, Japan all border Russia and West Asia includes Jordan and Saudi Arabia, South Asia is India's area, Southeast Asia is Laos, Thailand's area, I mean, find the Arabic kanji. I don't think Thailand even uses soy sauce. What the heck IS Asia, really? (Or "Middle East" when half of that's Africa and the other half shares plate with Europe? )

Anyway, my experience with Asians that are Boomer ages tends to be people who immigrated as adults, who more identity with a generation like "Dankai" or "Sirake." My experiences with Latinos older than me... I've never actually asked if the generational labels are even the same.

The thing about that is that when the name is the same, it means enough cultural traits are shared.

My biggest experience with people who grew up under the term "Boomer" are Black and white.

I've noticed a unifying trait.

If they're something oppressed (Black, gay), their attitude tends to be"it is mandatory to stand up for *my* demograph...but kicking the person behind me on the ladder in the teeth is wholesome, pure, and fun."

Outing me to large groups and saying I "speak Asian" seem to be the most common two. Calling me "Chinese" long after I've cleared this up for them is a close third.

I mean, don't get me wrong--my experience with Italian Americans past GI generation has been that now acquiring the "white" label, just like biphobic/aphobic/transphobic cisgays, they're more often staunch priveledge defenders than cishet people of Anglo descent! And it's just as true for X and Y as it is for Boomer (for the latter, one need only look at NYC destroyer and trump defender Giuliani) I actually don't really identify with my Italian side at all because I was kinda locked out of making any meaningful connection.

But back to my point that even in so-leftist-it's-almost-not-America Bay Area, Boomers are still like this!

The kind of stuff that flows out a X/Y TERF's mouth, or the mouth of an X/Y person with a Confederate flag on his wall, American-raised Boomers say with ease regardless of their alignment! It's banananas.

(Please note that I also just have not met a whole lot of Native Americans, period, nor enough people significantly older than me from any one place in Africa, that was an omission of lacking data, not intended as erasure)

How I tie it to Ichigo--

So Kubo avoids specifying birth years for anyone.

When I see something like this, I generally assume date of publication, as do most people in most fandoms (which of course gets screwy when you have something endlessly rebooted like Superman or Batman or something eternally unchanging like Detective Conan)

Anyway, the first Bleach something published was the comic in '01.

I generally assume it was supposed to be the start of a new school year, as Ichigo doesn't know many of his classmates until at least the first test scores come out. So it's probably April or something.

If Ichigo was 15 then, he'd also be Post Dankai Juniors, just barely. If Ichigo TURNED 15 shortly after, during his adventure, he'd be undebatably Millennial.

Now, there is still something up with Dankai and Sirake. PM Abe is the latter, b. 1954. A lot of his age-peers are behind him. This is the guy who supports remilitarisation and was caught funding a private militarist/fascist high(?) school that teaches that people from countries Japan conquered during its brief phase of trying to beat colonial Europe are less than dogs.

Now, I left there as a teen. Clinton was US president. Scandals still got people kicked out of public office in Japan. I hadn't figured or come out yet. Sure, I got bullied for being mixed, but kids will pick if you like different singers than the "cool" ones. They'll pick based on what's in your lunch. That data is sausage.

I'm not 100% sure what Ichigo would face day-to-day sociopolitically as he grew up/aged. I haven't had living family since'95 there, and friendships don't get deep enough to ever last distance until at least high school. For me, adulthood.

But I've kept/caught up enough (you try keeping up in the South before the internet was more than ten University sites!) that I know he'd face fascists (c'mon, the guy takes on a martial law government to save a new friend--that's anarchist, he just doesn't seem anarchist in his own world. He only fights humans in defence) I'm not sure how he'd feel about the JSDF, but he only fought the sinigami's war out of feeling like it was his responsibility because the adults around him kinda made it so. I super don't see him being for *starting* wars. In a human war, I see him actually being like Sugihara Chiune, a historical figure who died when I was a kid who I majorly admire. He worked at a Japanese embassy in Nazi territory, and when the embassy was evacuated,he continued throwing passports to Jewish people to go to Japan from the train he was departing on,and is hidden from Americans in the same spirit that Martin Luther King is...pulled the teeth out of. (PS, speaking of,go Google Steven Kiyosi Kuromiya)

Also, Ichigo's whole schtick is defending those worse off than him. He's not someone I see defending Yamato Japanese priveledge. Heck, I could see him joining Uchinanchu efforts to get Parliament and the US base to leave them alone. I can easily see him sticking up for a Filipino domestic worker he met thirty seconds ago.

To this end, I think regardless of what he is, he'd have a large rub with Japan's equivalents of Boomers.

Not to mention that Abe supporters tend to be very sexist and queerphobic, which isn't even homegrown but imported from Américanisation. I mean, there were female warriors--assasins, which is what Yoruichi and Soi-Fon are styled after, and go look at some Ukiyoe, like Utagawa Kitamaro. Quite a few artists in the 200-ish years of the Edo period depicted life in the queer districts. I've also had people posit that Noh might've been a welcoming draw for trans people the same way drag was all over the US in the twentieth century and still is in rural areas, where there's less cisgay gatekeeping. But this isn't something I can reasonably research without access to plenty of older and not well known dusty documents, and lots of time, and I live in the US many years now. And do you know how much round trip airfare alone is!? Also, the language changed so much and I can't read anything before Meiji without dropping words. Rukia, Byakuya, Yoruichi all have made for TV old-sounding Japanese like period dramas. Actual 18th Century Japanese would be unintelligible to the unspecialised.

So this stuff isn't really native, but Abe and a lot of people his age support all these -isms.

I super don't see Ichigo being happy about this.

(I also feel like Issin's old enough to remember before these -isms, but that's my own thing. In my project, he was in those districts, but that's me)

At the same time, I'm still writing this through my own lens. Also, not still being there, I just don't have enough data on Yutori in adulthood, or the grown Yutori lens. Honestly, even most other immigrants I meet are older than that. Or older than that and their adorable three year old children. So I have no clue.

In the early 2000s, I got myself from the South to CA and began to reconnect, but began to is the key phrase. I can tell you right now that Abe is as much of a second phase of Nakasone as trump is of Nakasone's buddy Regean. But what shifted when, I can't say. I'm not entirely sure how Koizumi ran the ship, as it were. I know some things, but not enough to say.

But whenever things shifted however, and whichever year Ichigo was born, I just cannot imagine him being any more on board with current events than really anyone in my area not born between 1946-1964 and raised in America.

I feel like he'd probably be too tired or self-effacing to fight for himself, but he'd take on, loud and proud, any bigotry against *others.*

I...also can't really say I'm much different, except my joints are held together by the power of wishes, so I'm more like "get the victim to safety" than "give the attacker plenty of regret." So, I can only do anything in limited ways.

Ichigo is also entirely fuelled by the power of love. Lost his ability to protect and feels like his sinigami friends ditched him? Mondo depressed, however much he wants no one to notice--which most do a great job of ignoring! Everyone in his world turned against him for a guy who has attacked people close to him? Terrified, and murder can now be an answer. (Fullbring Arc)

I was going somewhere with that. I've forgotten, but I'll leave it.

But anyway, I feel like he really only comes close to fighting for himself when others are taken away from him in a way that's also wronging them.

So yeah, I super don't see him happy with current events or Sirake gen.

I'm not sure how much I see him fighting for himself as mixed panromantic grey-ace. I mean, we know he fights people who are about to punch his face in for his looks, but what else can you reasonably do at that point? Get your head bashed in? I'm not sure how much I see him fighting hateful words pointed at him versus resigning himself to "people are the worst." I mean, when he talks about being picked on, he kinda seems resigned, or at least like it's a fact, like shoes being for outside or something.

I guess I tied it to Ichigo a lot better than I thought!

But also, the struggle against people born just after the war is not just you, and not just America. It's a major problem.

And it's likely that Ichigo would agree.

[goldstarnation]

SEPTEMBER 2019 GOLD STAR MEDIA SCHEDULES & REVIEW

Members may earn 3 points each (up to 6 points) for writing, by the end of October 7 KST:

A solo para of 400+ words based on their monthly schedule (does not count toward your monthly total).

A thread of six posts (three per participant, including the starter) based on their monthly schedule.

Threads do not have to take place directly during an important date listed on the schedule, but must be related to what the muse is mentioned to be doing in the paragraph explaining their schedule/the company’s schedule for the month and/or their thoughts on the mentioned activities or lack thereof.

These schedules may be updated throughout the month if new information needs to be added.

Reminder: August schedule posts are due by the end of September 7 KST.

Overall Company

In the aftermath of their company concert, Gold Star executives are pleased with the turn out and there’s talk they’re considering taking the family concert overseas in the future to take full advantage of the pull their company name has in places like Southeast Asia and the US. In the meantime, everything is back to normal around the main building, and all Gold Star idols get a three day break for Chuseok unless they’re beholden to other voluntary individual schedules.

Important dates:

September 12-14: Chuseok break (no activities save for specific voluntary individual schedules).

Gold Star Soloist 1

This month marks her eleventh anniversary since her debut, an achievement few in the industry can rival, especially with her kind of success. To celebrate, Gold Star has arranged a schedule VLive on her anniversary which will be advertised as an online fan meeting of sorts. She’ll have mostly free rein over what she does during the live stream as long as management is informed in advance. The following week, she’ll be doing a free public “busking” event performing some of her songs and select covers. It won’t be completely authentic busking, as the time and location will be announced following her anniversary VLive and she’ll be performing on a small raised stage with adequate security.

Important dates:

September 18: Scheduled 11th anniversary VLive.

September 25: 11th anniversary public busking event.

Gold Star Soloist 2

On top of recording for her upcoming album the whole month, her Seoul concerts have finally arrived for the weekend right after Chuseok. Gold Star anticipates a more general public audience than a fandom one, so most of the promotion for it is out of her hands and she’s encouraged to focus on being in her best vocal condition for the concert instead.

Important dates:

September 15: I AM concert at Olympic Hall in Seoul, South Korea.

September 16: I AM concert at Olympic Hall in Seoul, South Korea.

September 21: Performance at K-Crush 2019 Concert at Impact Challenger Hall 1 in Bangkok, Thailand (also performing: 7ROPHY)

Gold Star Soloist 3

The first three weeks of the month are spent finishing off his promotions for “Runaway”, so the short Chuseok break is only a brief reprieve from music shows and the expectation is for him to keep himself in top shape for his tour to continue once promotions wrap. He’ll get only a one day break on the 22nd before he flies out to the first stops of his Europe tour.

Important dates:

September 21: End of music show promotions.

September 24: Self-titled tour concert at Time Out Studio in Lisbon, Portugal.

September 25: Self-titled tour concert at Cool Stage in Madrid, Spain.

September 28: Self-titled tour concert at Santeria Social Club in Milan, Italy.

September 30: Self-titled tour concert at Lucerna Music Bar in Prague, Czech Republic.

Silhouette

The members finish recording their upcoming mini-album this month and begin learning the choreography after they return from their three-day Chuseok break. They’ve also been chosen as the new faces of sportswear brand Mizuno, so they’re scheduled to film their first CF for the brand and will be hosting a fan sign at the end of the month after the CF begins airing nationwide. With Origin’s comeback mysteriously delayed, what had previously been a low-pressure comeback ups the ante and expectations from management to perform well have increased in a way that is unlikely to go unnoticed by the members.

Important dates:

September 8: Mizuno Sports CF filming.

September 29: Mizuno fan sign in Seoul.

Aria

As rehearsals continue for their concerts next month, the members are given the opportunity for solo (or duo) stages as listed below. Members will be given the chance to suggest what stages they would like to do, but the final decisions are made by management, whether that aligns with the member’s choice or not. They’ll be rehearsing those all month on top of several of their latest title tracks and b-sides, and have also booked another mobile game CF to film after their return from their short Chuseok break.

Leader/vocal/rapper & main dancer/lead vocal - I Didn’t Go To School

Main vocal - Domino

Maknae/vocal/rapper - Gashina

Main rapper and lead vocal - All Hands On Deck

Lead dancer and vocal - New Face

Important dates:

September 16: The Rulers mobile game CF filming.

September 28-29: Performance at Super K-Pop Festival Indonesia 2019 at the Indonesia Convention Exhibition BSD in Tangerang, Indonesia (also performing: Aria and Decipher).

Origin

A meeting is called on September 9 when the members come in to record in the studio and they’re told that a decision has been made to go back to the drawing board with parts of their album. This means scrapping songs, including ones members may have had a hand in and had been told were confirmed for release, and working on “a better quality album”. It’s a shock considering they’d begun comeback preparation with everything in place at the end of last month and this has never happened before, but management doesn’t take time for questions. There’s bound to be rumors about all of the reasons behind why, but it does in part mean a slightly less heavy workload this month, though they’re still as packed as always. They’re sent right back to the studio to record something that was already planned and has now been moved up, which is a series of unit track collaborations with Western artists for the soundtrack of Origin World. They won’t meet or directly record with any of their collaboration partners.

Vocal 1, lead vocal/lead dancer, maknae/main vocal/lead dancer - Dream Glow ft. Charli XCX

Main dancer/lead rapper, vocal 2 - A Brand New Day ft. Zara Larsson

Main rapper, lead rapper - All Night ft. Juice WRLD

Important dates:

September 11: Photo shoot for Anan Magazine October issue.

September 15: Origin 2020 Season’s Greetings photo shoot.

September 17: Lights/Boy With Luv (Japanese Ver) hand shake event in Tokyo, Japan.

September 18: Lights/Boy With Luv (Japanese Ver.) hand shake event in Osaka, Japan.

September 24: Lotte Duty Free CF filming.

September 26: UNICEF Love Myself Global Campaign video filming.

Impulse

They kick off their world tour at the beginning of the month with their Seoul concerts and follow up with a KCon Thailand performance as headliners later in the month. That all means a lot of rehearsals and long night practices together as group save for the brief three-day Chuseok break. From he beginning of the month, members are also in the studio recording for another new Japanese album release before the end of the year, which means members are expected to be brushing up on their Japanese too.

Important dates:

September 5: End of music show promotions.

September 7: Keep Spinning 2019 World Tour concert at KSPO Dome in Seoul, South Korea.

September 8: Keep Spinnign 2019 World Tour concert at KSPO Dome in Seoul, South Korea.

September 28: Performance at KCon Thailand at Impact Arena in Bangkok, Thailand.

Fuse

The end of one comeback promotion period doesn’t mean a break for Fuse. As soon as the month starts, they hit the ground running on concept meetings and recording for songs off of their next mini-album, which will drop before the end of the year. The concept seems to be much more summery than Zimzalabim despite its slated late fall release date, which is sure to raise questions as to what Gold Star is thinking and whether they may have prioritized Femme Fatale having a successful comeback at the detriment of Fuse, but management claims it’d all part of Fuse’s “experimental” concept design.

Important dates:

September 11: Release of Sappy Japanese album.

September 28-29: Performance at Super K-Pop Festival Indonesia 2019 at the Indonesia Convention Exhibition BSD in Tangerang, Indonesia (also performing: Aria and Decipher).

Element

Element are saved another month from Gold Star’s love of VLives to connect with fans, although this is a double-edged sword as won’t go unnoticed by the fan base, who wanted more activities for the group in addition to the fan outreach versus instead of. In addition to concerts in India, making them the first group from Gold Star to perform in the country, and a festival in Germany, Element have been picked for their first group brand ambassador deal since they came onto the scene. It’s a deal with a Japanese footwear brand, but they’ve been chosen as Southeast Asia regional ambassadors instead of serving as ambassadors within their own country, a reminder of their struggle for popularity domestically.

Important dates:

September 15: ASICS CF filming.

September 20: 4lement tour concert at Talkatora Indoor Stadium in New Delhi, India.

September 22: 4lement tour concert at Shilpgram North East Zone Cultural Centre in Guwahati, India.

September 28: Performance at Finger Heart Festival in Mannheim, Germany (also performing: Alien).

Femme Fatale

The members are performing in their first major concerts since their debut this month as their Japan arena tour kicks off in Osaka (please see August’s schedule for their assigned solo stages). The attention their latest comeback has gotten internationally is particularly noticeable for them this month, as they’ve been booked for photo shoots in both a Chinese and Japanese magazine and have signed a deal as the new (and first)  regional brand ambassadors for Shopee in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Important dates:

September 8: Photo shoot for Grazia China October issue.

September 16: Photo shoot for Glitter Magazine Japan October issue + individual interviews.

September 17: Femme Fatale Arena Tour at Osaka-Jo Hall in Osaka, Japan.

September 18: Femme Fatale Arena Tour at Osaka-Jo Hall in Osaka, Japan.

September 22: Shopee CF filming.

[chiseler]

Imagine Electing Pete

On September 12, 2019, during the Democratic Primary debate in Houston, Texas, something strange, even epiphanous occurred. At least for me. The current Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, one Pete Buttigieg, evidently (for this was by no means visible to the eye) fell into a trance-like state and began to channel a voice that was, oddly, not of the spirit world.

The voice was that of Disc Jockey Glenn Beck, and the words were from a 2009 Mission Statement that he had composed for some extraordinary thing he'd started called the 9/12 Movement; a kind of protest/support group for those citizens longing for the rare fragrance of unity and togetherness which intoxicated all of America, we were told, on September 12, 2001; just one day after that thing happened in Lower Manhattan. "We were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties, the color of your skin, or what religion you practiced. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created. We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again." Beck continued. "On September 12th, and for a short time after that, we really promised ourselves that we would focus on the things that were important -- our family, our friends, the eternal principles that allowed America to become the world's beacon of freedom." Amen. I suppose. Of course, how formidable the words, and how entirely sincere (or not) the sentiment may have been -- one cannot, I suspect, locate much nostalgia for that moment beating in the hearts of this country's Muslim communities, ever since marked for harassment (and frequently far, far worse) at the hands of those basking 'neath freedom's beacon -- it seems to have been a uniquely durable one. Personally, I had completely forgotten that . . . anyone . . . had told ev'ry little star just how sweet they thought everything was on that day. What I remember most Is the kind of unusually animated daze people were walking around in. The American Imagination was in high style that day. All anybody could talk about was What Happens Next, with many of these people consumed with their own, homemade fantasies of national vengeance toward those responsible. Their hearts were full, and grim. The Mayor of South Bend, as I say, appears to remember things rather differently, and one cannot question it. Six years later -- the clear sky of American unity having, for the rest of us, clouded over once more -- Buttigieg would remain so enthralled by this singular hour in Our American Story that he would leave his two jobs (it was, yes, that kind of economy) as a consultant for McKinsey & Co., and as a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project. He would enlist, voluntarily, in the United States Navy, jumping into our ongoing war of military aggression against the country of Afghanistan with both feet for a period of fourteen months. He ran numbers and drove officers around. Not exactly Audie Murphy in 'To Hell and Back' . . . or Abbott & Costello in 'Buck Privates' for that matter (if he triple-tapped an elementary school or watched our drones wipe out a house party or two, he has not admitted to it) . . . but it provided this future Presidential candidate a chance to build character (and, naturally, his resume). So, unlike a professional grifter such as Glenn Beck, when Buttigieg waxes nostalgic for those days of unity, one doubts his sincerity at one's peril. Buttigieg, during the debate in Houston, stated "All day today, I’ve been thinking about Sept. 12, the way it felt when for a moment we came together as a country. Imagine if we had been able to sustain that unity. Imagine what would be possible right now with ideas that are bold enough to meet the challenges of our time, but big enough, as well, that they could unify the American people. That’s what presidential leadership can do. That’s what the presidency is for." He concluded, of course, with, "And that is why I’m asking for your vote." To someone like Buttigieg, September 12, 2001 is a day that, I'm certain, he wishes could have gone on forever. But whatever he wants people to think, it was a day when the entire country was crouching as one, it seemed, gazing at everyone around them in fear and outright bafflement; a day that our rulers could have done (and in some senses did do) anything they wanted with us, and we probably would have gone along with all of it because we didn't know what else there was to do; a day, in other words, when our empire was never more firmly in the grasp of those who own it. Despite the loftiness of his rhetoric on the debate stage -- a mode of high school valedictorian speech he is often given to -- Pete Buttigieg is, underneath it all, a born technocrat; a classic, Eisenhower-era Republican; a creature of our institutions. He is not Franklin Roosevelt (that Bolshevik). He does not aspire to lift a frightened nation out of its slough of despond and keep its people safe from Capitalism's consequences and depredations; or anything, by all evidence, more inspiring  the citizenry than the 'Shut Up and Shop' society finally urged upon us in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He is only here to apply for a job to manage this empire of ours, nothing more. But I can't help feeling there's something quietly monstrous about his true, evident nostalgia for that time when unity was accessible to some Americans and not to others. I had my first inkling of this a couple months back when he had to get off the campaign trail for a day or two because the cops in South Bend had been for too long conducting themselves like Cossacks under Nicholas II, rampaging with too much impunity through that city's Black neighborhoods (safely separated from the more upper class College Town South Bend is known for being), finally dropping too many bodies with too little pretext. After pleading to the national press that he had essentially no control, no control at all, over the police in his city, and every poll showing that Black voters utterly despise him, he headed over to the part of town in question to inform the residents to please stay on the line, as it were; their questions and concerns were important to him. In full Damage Control mode, Pete Buttigieg read his statement through a bullhorn to a group of women, members of a grossly victimized community, all of whom had had enough and were giving their Mayor the earful his White ass deserved. And he stood before them, this diminutive block of American cheese in shirtsleeves, collar and tie; the guy who blankly tells you he's sorry, but you're being let go and there's nothing he can do about it; standing with a bullhorn in his hand and not a hint of emotion in his voice as he droned into the instrument to his city's Black community: "I'm not asking for your vote." Some people in this country, you see, are asked for their vote; others are not. Matters of race aside -- and not much good can be said on Buttigieg and that subject; which is not to suggest, I hasten to add, that the man is racist. With his background he's probably never had to think very much about race -- one thing was clear to me: He's a real calm customer, this guy; doesn't break a sweat. Everyone says so. Smart as a whip, too. You hear that one constantly from his supporters: swooning over his credentials, his evident intellect, his grasp of languages ("Norwegian! Can you believe it?!"). It all feeds into the overarching perception of his ability to handle crises with the right character of detachment. Our media adores him, largely for this reason; and why shouldn't they? He's perhaps the closest thing to a polar opposite in this race to the dread Donald Trump without his skin being at all darker. With Pete Buttigieg as President, I have been told, we won't have to think and worry so much about what's going on in the world, the way we do now. We won't be on pins and needles, waiting to see what the President of the United States does next. We can, at long last, relax again; get some sleep. He's got this. I can understand the enthusiasm for Buttigieg on the part of those who wish to see him elected President (there aren't too many of them, if polling has anything to say about it, but they do make themselves known). I even can find it in me to share it. To some extent, anyway. There is, after all, true intrinsic value in the election, should it happen, of the first (openly) gay President of the United States; just as Barack Obama's election possessed similar intrinsic value; just as the election of our first Woman President will when it happens. It's the only, unambiguously good thing about a prospective Pete Buttigieg Presidency. But beyond that, and the fact that most of what is claimed for him is probably true, I actually dread his ever being President (that he is not the only candidate currently in the race who I can say this about does little to ease my anxiety). Last night's single file march down 9/12 Memory Lane tore it for me. I know what he is now, and no mistake. He is a living, breathing, competent, talented, educated, cultured (no Alfred E. Neuman for this guy), credentialed throwback to the brain trusts and planners of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rostow, McNamara, Bundy; every Ivy League war criminal Halberstam wrote about in 'The Best and the Brightest', who cooly, carefully ran the numbers, made their calculations, and executed a wholesale genocide in Southeast Asia. Buttigieg has the potential to be precisely the kind of cool, detached, analytical monster that will tell us, sorry, but entitlements have to be cut (numbers don't lie) or, worse, successfully oversee the ongoing, unending US war on Islam while our once again fat, dumb, happy country sleeps an untroubled sleep. In that sense (if no other), Pete Buttigieg is the most dangerous of all the candidates currently in the race. He's what Noam Chomsky warned us about fifty years ago.

by R.J. Lambert