Dr. Horrible

For god’s sake, go watch it now.

http://drhorrible.com/

It’s only up until Sunday at midnight, so HURRY!

UPDATE:

Too late. It’s gone. Buy the DVD…

Jonathan Coulton and Zombies

Two for you - and please note that I don’t like the MV on the first, but the song is so good that it’s required listening…

Oh - and you thought Japanese TV was bad?

Japanese Television

Sometimes the things they put oN Japanese TV make me wonder about Japan… This iS one oF them. I’m not going to tell you What’s going on here, but you’ll be able to figure it out eventually…

Newsflash: Online procrastination reaches new heights!

So I have two projects due, and three tests in the next five days. Instead of studying, I’m online. There’s a surprise.

What to do… Hm… How about inflict my pain on others? Broken into categories for your benefit:

Zelda (Slightly NSFW):

These two are kind of “enh”, but still worth a watch:

Superfriends:

Other:
http://youtube.com/watchtheguild

All of those. Mm… Procrastination…

The Talk

So today we’re going to talk about Sex. Specifically, we’re going to discourse on one of my favorite topics, Sex in college. Ironically enough, my parents never gave me “the talk” - you know the one I’m talking about. The dreaded sex talk. Instead, when it came time for me to go to college, my father sat me down and began, “Son… It’s time to talk… About respecting women.”

Welcome to the south, ladies and gentlemen. In a way, respecting women is what I’d like to talk about in this post. I’d like to start that discussion with something light, so we’ll start this one off with something fun:

For those of you whose curiosity was peaked by the above video, or who wish to avoid any awkward explanations of what, exactly, article 20 consists of, the creators of the video actually provided a slimmed-down version of the form which you can access here.

The next segment of my background filler is this article by Heather Mueller from the Minnesota Daily, who is joined by (as ever) reasoned commentary from none other than the famous Dr. Drew “Dr. Drew” Pinsky.

Both of these links came about via promptings from this article in The Naked Roommate Newsletter.

The video does a good job of portraying the whole thing in an ironic light by juxtaposing the “responsibility” of signing a binding contract (which, oddly, is NOT a response to the more recent “athletic” scandals - I believe that video pre-dates them) with some of the cheesier lines used by both guys and girls in college. Reading these articles, however, it’s easy to get the impression that college students are mindless automatons who largely drink, have sex, drink more, and then have more sex. Frankly, I think that’s a little inaccurate.

The article presumes several things about college students:
1) We’re more routinely-exposed to drinking in an unsafe, and uncontrolled manner
2) We’re highly susceptible to peer pressure and “cultural pressure” to hook up, whatever that might mean
3) Hooking up is always unsafe, rampant, and in the long-run unsatisfying

I recently had a debate with some elder members of my family about the “loosening” attitudes among my generation and the general cultural trend towards the casual. Outside of the context of that conversation (as those of you who know me well will know that in a classic display of German besprechung I tend to cling to positions I take in arguments even if it’s apparent I don’t have the necessary evidence to back them up) I have to admit that their arguments had at least a little merit. I tended to assume that the “earlier days” just LOOKED more innocent because more of the subculture which is so prevalent in my generation was simply hidden, but it does seem fairly evident in hindsight that the very fact that the aforementioned subculture is now readily evident in our lives is a sign that it’s not nearly as controversial as it perhaps once was.

That being said, I don’t think our attitudes are necessarily loosening. I look around me every day and see fellow students rushing to interviews or internships wearing suits; students still attend etiquette classes and write thank-you notes to potential employers; hell, formal balls and galas have become all the rage at my school with upwards of 6 taking place each academic year - and these are no cheap imitation. The last Diplomat Ball employed the National Building Museum as its a-list classy location. It’s only fair to reveal that my school is by anyone’s standards fairly conservative socially, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t influenced by the trends. If I had to speculate, I’d choose to view the trend more as a wave. It’s true that waves move further from shore at low tide, but they also return at high tide and then repeat the cycle. I suspect that what was “uncool” enough to the generation before us to push them into shifting towards the “casual” may eventually be what becomes “uncool” enough to our children’s children to push them back towards some new version of the “formal”.

These attitudes also apply to sex. Claims that students “nowadays” have more casual sex than our fore bearers are probably anecdotal at best. Does anyone out there remember the 60s? Any time characterized by “free love” sounds to me a little more relaxed than the time I live in. My parents would be quick to point out that the “free-lovers” of the 60s were a radical minority, so I feel it’s only fair to retaliate that anyone who believes the statistics put forth in the afore-linked article about the percentage of college students in my generation who’ve “hooked up” has never attended college in the 2000s. It’s true that many choose to, but it’s also true that many don’t, won’t, or can’t. I suspect those statistics fall prey to the terminology trap. Dr. Drew himself admits that “hooking up” means different things to different people - why then would those results not be skewed towards the liberal by bravado, anonymity, and self-favoring bias? Hell - I’ve done that myself. You could argue that only men would want a survey to think they’d hooked up more than they had, but I think any careful look at a college campus would turn up just as many women who actively seek a hook-up on any given Friday night.

That doesn’t address the article’s three claims, though.

1) We’re more routinely-exposed to drinking in an unsafe, and uncontrolled manner

Yes, we drink a lot. Our parents’ generation drank a lot. Actually - I have friends whose parents drink more than they do, and given how few alcohol-related deaths of college students there are in the states each year, I hardly think our alcohol consumption is “unsafe” or “uncontrolled”. If anything, there has been a heightened awareness of late due to diligent efforts by student and administrator activists. Students at Georgetown University actually threw quite the hissy-fit when alcohol regulations were tightened on campus without any clear reasoning. It is true that students sometimes use alcohol to justify abnormal behavior, but that goes hand in hand with the realization that students CHOOSE to drink in order to give themselves a reason to behave that way. That leaves two questions: 1) What are the root causes of this choice? 2) Are the behaviors they exhibit all that bad?

Despite what recent Fox News Articles would have you believe, most college students do drink responsibly and behave more-or-less responsibly while under the influence. The US government certainly believes there is a problem. Their numbers, however, fall into the typical traps of failing to ask questions like, “what do the students count as a drink?”, “over how long a period were these 5 drinks consumed?”, etc… I don’t find these studies conclusive. There are always exceptions to every rule, and I’ll admit I lead a fairly sheltered college existence, but a drinking culture causes an alcohol-related death to be national news is not an indication that there’s a problem - just that some students (as some percentage of every group inevitably will) make bad choices.

2) We’re highly susceptible to peer pressure and “cultural pressure” to hook up, whatever that might mean

This, again, most likely depends on the school. Perhaps I’m exposed to a skewed sample of college students, but my experience has been that this “trend” towards “individuality” means that students are encouraged more to more to think for themselves and to develop their own beliefs and values. At least at Georgetown, that means that any pressure that exists is met by an opposing pressure to make responsible decisions. Students know that they will have to justify these decisions, and “I was drunk” doesn’t always cut it. Of course, that doesn’t always work, and to a certain extent there is an ever-present pressure placed on us by media and outside influences to be sexually active and to become comfortable with our sexuality. This pressure is exerted not necessarily by the easy targets like contemporary advertisements, but also by all the Dr. Drews in the world who make it their mission to educate us about sex. Websites like his lead students to believe that their peers are predominantly sexually-active and place further pressure on those who aren’t to join the norm. That’s sad, because websites like his are also a vital resource as more and more young people become open and sexually active. Influences like these, however, do not exclusively affect college students - they affect everyone.

3) Hooking up is always unsafe, rampant, and in the long-run unsatisfying

While my experience, once again, is limited to the college I attended, I haven’t found this to be true at all. This consequence assumes that college students are making bad choices by failing to think through their actions. While it’s true that many people regret hooking up the next morning because of the associated stigma (and other reasons - my favorite example of which being the (probably) room-mate yelling “WALK OF SHAAAAAAAAME” after one Georgetown Woman as she left a townhouse I walked past on my way to work), it’s not true that they don’t go into it with the full use of their facilities. Girls are probably less susceptible to this, but many men do go out looking for a hook-up on Friday night.

Their success rate is another story. Most college students that I’ve talked with aren’t as sexually active as government statistics and conservative activist groups and authors would have us believe. Pardon me if I’m too lazy to find links for all of those. There’s much evidence, in fact, that those self-same sexually-active students are being more responsible than ever. Students have, in my opinion, risen to the challenge of rising personal freedom. Most students only have a handful of sexual partners in their entire college career - how is that rampant?; use condoms and take other precautions to ensure safe sex - how is that dangerous?; and are entirely responsible and mature about their sex lives - you can’t tell me that’s unsatisfying… I think this is one case where the rather vocal minority or the mistakes that everyone makes once or twice in their lives are acting in the place of mass reality in the public mind.

I think it’s true that these issues need to be watched carefully - that if proper steps aren’t taken to ensure America’s youth are well-educated about the risks and effects of sex and drugs, to curtail media and cultural promotion of sexual recklessness and substance abuse they could BECOME a large problem - but they are by no means rampant or uncontrolled now. As always, I think America would find its youth far more trustworthy than it seems to currently believe them to be if it gave them the chance to prove it. As far as a drift towards the “casual” goes… Well, I don’t think it’s worth worrying about. It might be a little unsettling for the older generation at the moment, but in the long run it sounds to me like America could use a little less stress anyways.

Bumblebee! No!

Oh no! Poor Bumblebee! Finally we’ve found a villainous presence worse than Megatron himself - this guy is just plain evil!

Blast from the (not-so-distant) past?

So I have a sticky on my desktop. I created this sticky back when I was in Japan and was too busy to actually post things on this blog. We all remember those times, right? Oh irony of ironies - a dry spell during the period in which the blog was actually supposed to be used.

Not that I’ve gotten around to finishing the blog since then… That’s another thing that’s on the list for “after I outrun real life”.

In the interests of getting that list of links off my desktop, this post will cover the basics.

First off: “You know you’ve been in Japan too long when…”. While I don’t really like the Author’s site, I did (and still do) find myself doing many of the things he describe. Perhaps the rest would have come with more time?

Second: Arudou Debito’s view of the word “Gaijin” and its connotations. Debito is… Unique. From what I’ve read of his work, he tends to take things VERY personally. He also seems to have some kind of “manifest destiny” complex. I agree completely that Japan is discriminatory and two-faced about the question of so-called “Japanese Superiority”, and to be honest I agree with the principle that countries allowing naturalization of foreigners have an obligation to afford those citizens equal rights. Debito’s actions, however, show a flagrant disrespect for Japanese cultural norms and a serious misunderstanding of the Japanese world-view. He’s treating Japan like his own private US, while waving the “I have a right to live wherever I want and to all my rights wherever I am!” card as much as possible (any one else notice how the first thing he does when he hits something he doesn’t like is run to the US consulate?). News flash, Debito - that’s an AMERICAN ideal. According to the Japanese, you really don’t… Who are you to say they’re wrong?

But I digress. His comments about “Gaijin” vs “Gaikokujin” follow similar patterns, though. I mean - I know I can’t really talk about the long-term effects of “Gaijinism” given the short duration of my stay, but I think he once again misunderstands Japanese culture. I mean - granted, it IS technically a form of racism, but the Japanese don’t see it that way. They see it as distinguishing “in” from “out” verbally. It’s not really racism in the way we Americans use it so much as it’s Xenophobia, nationalism, and lingering isolationism. Part of the Japanese worldview seems to be an ever-present sense of “being Japanese”, and to the extent that the word is used to satisfy this part of the worldview, yes an indian in India can be “gaijin” in his own country to a Japanese tourist. I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong except to the American way of seeing things. My problems with the word arise when it’s used to foster genuine racism or when it fails to recognize naturalized Japanese citizens as part of the “in” group - I feel the distinction is important.

Third:

I laughed about this one for like… 30 minutes. It’s so true, too. All my friends - and I DO mean all my friends - have Macs now. So much for the “underdog”. Apple’s gone and become the NEW evil empire. Then I found this one:

Which is just plain awesome. Fourth (And I had to dig for this link…): The Defense Ministry’s moved to using manga to explain their defense policies. Apparently the whole idea of a Defense Ministry and defending themselves is so new to the Japanese that they need pictures to help them understand?That was a low blow. I actually think the manga is a pretty creative idea. America could probably use some of that kind of creativity.Also in the Wai-Wai section of Mainichi (albeit this week) comes these gems:
-Japan’s Celebrity Cannibal
-Deep thoughts on sex and gender from the Japanese
-Said thoughts seem to be a theme this week…

Fifth: More crazy “news”. That’ll show ‘em kid. Especially when they mix it into EVERYONE’S salad, and you wind up answering the age old question “how do I taste?”

Sixth: Summertime in Japan. Guess they really DO like crowding? Sub-headline: “Hundreds die as the ‘Baby Ruth in the pool’ trick turns deadly…”

Seventh: Apparently you really CAN live in the mall. This guy did. What does that say about mall security that they didn’t notice him dragging a kitchen hutch into the bowels of the mall? It’s not like he could have asked them to deliver it there.

Finally: I think I meant to read these two and never got around to it. Someone want to give me spark notes? They look interesting… For all you history buffs out there.

Aren’t you glad I’m done? Me too.

Oh, so THAT’S what my life is like…

It was determined several years ago that if my life were a movie, its title would be “Superhero: The Exposition Phase” . You know - that awkward period in any comic or Superhero story where we’re getting to know the hero before the accident that gives him/her his/her amazing abilities?

Seeing this, though (albeit for the second time…) makes me wonder if I don’t somehow have it all wrong? Maybe it should be “SuperVillain: The Quiet Life Before a Tragic Accident Phase”?

Reason #183 why I love Japan…

So this entry will officially be of a “Quasi-NSFW” nature. Please be forewarned.

The first video I’d like to offer for your consumption is this:

Now I know you’re thinking, “what ARE you watching these days?” In my defense, Orson sent me this link last night, which led to much hilarity amongst my room-mates. Especially once you understand the Japanese, the video becomes MUCH more interesting.

I haven’t bothered to understand the guy’s part of the conversation, and I think we can all safely assume that in this situation it’s more or less moot. The girl’s part, however, is hilarious. She starts off with a cryptic “Ki ga tsukimashita?” - “Have you noticed/realized/become aware (of it)?” (Okay, “Are you awake?” is also possible, but where’s the fun in that. Besides, it’s possible she did something horrible to him while he was asleep…). I’m not sure what we’re supposed to have noticed, but she might be referring to our protagonist’s rather bizarre physical characteristics, as will be discussed in detail in a moment. I’m sure he hadn’t, too, because who the hell notices things like this? He must also have decided to use this opportunity to take his frustration out on her by poking her, because she seems to be hiccuping through the next few lines. This is the last time he does this - apparently he DOES realize in a moment.

Her next inspired utterance is “Kimi no suki ni shite iin dayo” - “Feel free to do as you like.” If that’s not sketchy, I don’t know what is. Given the game though, I’m going to assume that she’s referring to the advertised total freedom to use (or misuse?) the environment around you.

Of course, we all know it’s an EROTIC FPS, so obviously it’s built to let you do as you wish… In multiple ways. Next, the ever-hopeful soon-to-be victim cleverly offers “Toriaezu, atashi to hanashitoka shiyo?” - “At any rate, how about we just talk a bit?” Bad idea, babe. The protagonist evidently has discovered his rather amazing physical talents, because he signals his thoughts on this idea by showering her with… An “unidentified” *cough* gooey, white substance *cough*. Aaand… Her only response is a mild, “Uuuuun sonnna….”, which is basically like combination scolding and “I don’t know about that…” Not very convincing, animated-girl - try saying “no”. She does, at least, say, “‘Pon-pon’ tte, Okorasetari…” - “I’ll get mad or something…” Real convincing, babe. Then, “Ne, ‘Paaaa!’ tte! Ureshiku naru koto ippai shite!” - “Feel free to do whatever that makes you happy!” Do I even need to comment on that? Her temperance for this is, “Demo, amari henna koto shichau iya dayo” - “But don’t do anything too weird, okay!” Uh-huh. By this point, you’ve lost the right to complain about anything he does. Especially if you’re putting up with his goo-firing firearm and happy trigger finger thus far.

He takes this suggestion to heart, obviously, because the next thing he does is take a look around the room. And wait - oh, oh no - he settles on the baseball bat. Uh-oh.

He takes a few practice swings and approaches the victim (See? Victim! Get your mind out of the gutter!). And, ever the paragon of intelligent comments, our gal lets out, “Heeee?!? Sono mono de nani surun desu ka?” - “Whaaaat?!? What’re you doing with that?/What’re you going to do with that?”

NOT USE IT! Because he definitely takes her down with the “sticky white goo” gun. And she slaps him a bit, then RUNS AWAY INTO THE WALL. Which, I might add, he takes as his cue to “fire” a few more times. Pleasant chap, this protagonist.

Oh, the Japanese… There are a few more clips from this game:

This one needs no explanation… Remember people, physical violence is never a solution… Except when it’s not real and is funny as hell.

And this one:

This girl speaks like a cat, but essentially says similar things. It’s largely boring until the protagonist figures out how to use the “get naked” (”Get into undergarments?”) command, which apparently involves the girl’s own super-power, which seems to be the ability to lose outer clothing by yelling “Cast off!” Kamen Rider references aside, man do I wish I could use THAT command on people at parties… Reminds me of a certain Patrick Stewart moment. Ever-hopefully, and not getting the message, the girl brilliantly suggests that what he wants to do is maybe a little too embarrassing for her. This is when our hero discovers the “bitch-slap” command. Yes, apparently there is a bitch-slap command. Tell me you didn’t see that coming.

While the game may be a little inappropriate on some levels, I haven’t seen much over-all erotic content. I might find a way to get it just for the ability to do horrible things to the virtual people inside. I mean come on - it’s like the Sims. Nobody really wants their Sim to live a happy life - who DIDN’T torture a whole bunch of them in creative ways first?

Aids and Gay Rights - ooh, I’m getting political!

Tim appears to have been too lazy to post this gem, which is arguably the creepiest “children’s book” I’ve ever seen besides the one I posted earlier.

I’m particularly angry at this book because it appears to be a book that exists entirely to serve the “nurture” end of the “why are some people attracted to the same sex?” argument. Seriously - are they trying to indoctrinate young children now? Oh - that attraction you’re feeling? Yeah, you’re just not right in the head. Go see a therapist and get some drugs; they’ll fix you right up!

Seriously people, this is not the solution. Shouldn’t we be trying to teach our children to be more open-minded rather than closed-minded? Sometimes I feel like the government should just take all children at birth and raise them in a government-sponsored institute. I mean, sure - we’d never be able to create a government responsible enough to raise them without bias, but the idea of ridding the world of prejudice once and for all seems wonderfully tempting.

I don’t really know enough about the issue to be able to say that attraction to the same sex is definitively an issue of nature OR nurture, but I do know that what the friends I have who are gay feel is real enough and that those of us who aren’t gay have no right belittling their feelings because it doesn’t fit our narrow conception of correct gender roles. Teaching children that it’s “all nature” or “all nurture” is not the way to go - kids should be taught to examine the facts and view these things with an open mind (My how Post-Modern of me!)… Of course, I’m not really sure if that’s even possible. It seems natural to believe that you need to teach kids SOMETHING for sure so they have a frame of reference… If you must teach something, then, doesn’t the more open and accepting idea seem the better one to teach?

Just to end the night on the same note it started on, here’s an interesting pro-safe sex (really anti-AIDS) commercial I found on Stage6. Fair warning, this commercial is NSFW.

Booya - Safe Sex

If anyone wants to see it full sized, the original can be found here.

Oddly, the ending makes this commercial seem to be promoting abstinence as the best option, but the commercial doesn’t really show any consequences of pre-marital sex (other than it being boring or just not the right “fit”), and the ending just really seems to flow as a natural consequences of having found the right fit at last… It’s kinda hard to tell what they’re trying to say, actually, except for the final frame’s blatant “fight aides” message.