Peter’s Blog V2

I find this story highly amusing.

Teacher asked class to draw something that “reminds them of Christmas”.  Second grade kid drew dead Jesus on the cross (and told teacher it was himself).  Teacher, concerned about the kid’s underlying violent tendencies, sent him for psychiatric evaluation.  Community got furious, labeling it as an antichrist execution of the separation of church and state.  Black dad pulls the racial card.  Everyone is blaming the teacher.

This story is controversial in many aspects, not even mentioning how some of the accused details were made up by the parents.  Judging from the Internet comments, people focus way more on the religious aspect than anything else, complaining about the lack of freedom to express religious beliefs in this country.  Well, if the teacher was seriously having issues with Christianity, how would she give a Christmas-themed assignment in the first place?

What I see is this: teacher suspects of a problem and takes an action, the suspected goes berserk, and the act of suspicion becomes labelled as the biggest crime known to men.  Now, let’s not forget what people say when a crazy kid actually gets violent in school – “oh he showed ‘obvious’ psycho signs but the ignorant teacher did nothing about it…”

It’s tough running a school nowadays.

For the past 10 months, I thought 2009 was a pretty bad year and couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Around New Year 2010, however, I “broke” my left hand.  According to the doc, it’s “just” an inflammation.  I think the formal name is deQuervain’s Tendinitis, but I wouldn’t quote myself on that :p   The cause was unknown – most likely due to overuse with the combination of office work, gym, and video games.  Or maybe it was as simple as a cursed bad luck

Well, four weeks later, as this problem was seemingly on its way to recovery, it got symmetrically reproduced on my other hand.  Now I feel like a big cripple with very restricted range of motion on either hand.  Performing certain simple daily tasks has become quite tricky.

Not sure what to say other than “this sucks”.  After one already unlucky year, this is not my preferred way of starting a new year.  But the benefit of being an Asian person is that, we do follow two calendars.  Therefore, instead of calling both 2009 and 2010 unlucky, I can simply think of the year of ox as the terrible one and pray for a real sweet year of tiger

Storm Riders is an epic comic series started in 1989 and still going strong today.  It was a top legend in Hong Kong’s comic book industry, likely being the most praised and most referenced work of all times.  It was also my absolute favorite epic story… for a long time.  The series started going downhill around 10 years ago, and seeing how the story is going these days, well, let’s not get into that.

Given its gigantic fan base, Storm Riders is probably also the most merchandised HK comic series: toys, replicas, games, TV shows, and movies.  The first Storm Riders movie came out in 1998 and was decently perceived.  It wasn’t awesome, obviously, but given how different the film medium differed from comic books, they did an okay job at capturing the essense of the story.

Twelve years later, Storm Riders II came out featuring the original two main actors:

It sucked ass to an unprecedented heights.  The poster above was honestly much better than any single frame in the movie, and for the last hour and 45 minutes of it, all I wanted was for it to end.  In fact, I went taking a nap after the first half of it.

It should be noted that bad acting and stupid plot are expected in an average action movie, so I didn’t really take any point off for those.  However:

• The character designs are all messed up.  Why does Wind still have both eyes and what’s with everybody’s TV-drama-styled personality?  And the original comic author claims to have been involved in the process?
• So… where’s the script?  Did HK writers also go on a strike?  I partially understood the movie only because I remembered the comics.
• Last but not the least… the special effects SUCKED.  Worse computer graphics than the movie 12 years ago?  How’s that possible?

The only redeeming value of this movie is to remind the hardcore fans how great the story used to be.  I despise the author’s shameless attempt to capitalize on his old work from 15+ years ago, allowing inappropriately funded amatures butcher such a classic.

Growing up sucks, when it involves watching your favorite art trashed by its own creater.

It’s been a while since the average independent short film freely available on the Internet was better crafted than the average Hollywood movie that you have to pay $15 at a theater for.  However, I had never been this impressed before seeing this piece: 李獻計歷險記 (Lee’s Adventures).

If I hadn’t glanced at the forum comments first, I might’ve been turned away quickly by the seemingly rough graphics and ghetto voice.  20 minutes later, I was in awe of the creative, hilarious, sad, and quite deep storyline.  With a plot as random as Alice in the Wonderland, this animation packed in elements of comedy, action, romance, and sci-fi.  The author cleverly incorporated tons of pop culture references and subtle jokes: including the character names.

The story is about a young man with a strange disease trying to get back together with his ex-girlfriend by beating a video game that will turn back time.  His stubbornness about love is a reminder of how naive many of us used to be… but of course nobody I knew had the courage to go through the kind of adventures that he did.

Instead of YouTube, you can also download a higher res version via eMule from VeryCD.

Official website.

Happy New Year.

Logically, however, I don’t see what’s there to be so happy about it.  New Year happens on roughly 0.3% of the days, which is a lot more common than your birthday if you were born on February 29th.  A new year means a rent increase, a new set of work goals to meet, an older age, closer to death, and higher insurance premiums.  Maybe the new year partiers would realize this once they sober up.

I happened to turn my head during the countdown to the “1 hour to go” mark at 11, and the crowd exploded in cheers.  Obviously, when you have been standing in the cold rain for 11 hours and know the suffering will end in one more, you’d be pretty happy too.

The cheering, honking, and other noises were even louder when the 2010 sign lit up.  One avenue, 33 stories, and a thick layer of glass away, those noises could still be heard.  Remind me not to buy a condo in this neighborhood.

For this NYE excursion, I pulled out the camcorder that I haven’t used in about five years. It’s got much better zoom than my point-and-shoot still camera, but the only problem is I have no Firewire on this computer to upload that stuff with.  So here we are stuck with slightly less than optimal images:

The actual ball drop, fireworks, and confetti rain at midnight was unsurprisingly unimpressive.  Perhaps the point of this event is mostly about the celebrity presence and not so much the fireworks?

When you have hundreds of thousands of people, they not only pee in their pants but also produce a lot of litter.  Therefore, as soon as the clock hit midnight, a mile long of sanitation trucks were deployed.  Is it just me, or does everybody think this is more cool than the ball drop?