Public Relations: A Lost Art

Here's one by way of Gothamist: NYU Asian Heritage Club protests appearance by non-Asian Heritaged band Ching Chong Song, which then renames itself the Church of Lurch. As noted, a Ching Chong Song appearance was previously nixed at Bryn Mawr, prompting band member Julia LaMendola to (presumably) get Gibson drunk and write a poorly-thought out rant to the school paper which was promptly published, as the editor rightly smelled dynamite:

Growing up a child of a gay parent in a tiny town, a poor second-generation Italian girl, I also have experience with the nuances of language. And give me a break you stupid twats.
...
I am mad that I was asked to back out, just another way the small-scale mirrors the large-scale of “shut-your-mouth-you’re-scaring-me” tactics are infiltrating our f’d up sweet spunky youth. By the way, “ching chang chong” is what people in Germany call the game rock paper scissors, and stupid petty retards is what I’m calling you.

That'll totally get Bryn Mawr's sympathy. In any case, the notion that membership in Category X and/or experience of Y automatically immunizes anyone from the charge of offensive or insensitive behavior is not a recognized defense in this jurisdiction. Nor was the band named after any type of German Roshambo. We decline further review of the appellant's argument. Appellant continues:

Let our band be what it is: a gay and omni-sexual duo that writes song about life and it’s crusts and death, and most of all love and open-eyed Acceptance. You stupid petty retard girl school twats!

Ching Chong "commited to Bodhichitta by getting pissy and calling names" Song/Church of Lurch speaks for itself not only with keen tact and language-nuanced oratorical skills, but with the inevitable MySpace page. With songs! File under Instrument-Aided Hipster Masturbation, Self-Conscious Tunes for Coffeehouse Poetry Night Intermission, and Not Good Enough to Get a Free Pass on Willful Public Stupidity.

Rooty tooty fresh and fruity

For whatever reason, it's vaguely fashionable these days to name your yaoi/yuri imprint after a fruit. Witness Seven Seas' Strawberry line and the upcoming as-yet unofficially named but definitely ovarian yaoi imprint from Broccoli.

Can't wait to start my own yaoi/yuri imprint, which I intend to name Durian. Sure, some people will think it stinks and refuse to touch it. But that's before you force it open and take a taste of the total creaminess inside.

I hear Frylock is looking for someone to rent the spare room

Via Variety: after 13 years at the company, Cartoon Network executive Jim Samples resigns over Mooninite incident.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the front page of the Boston Globe's boston.com sent Samples gently into the good night like so:


Because they love, Samples. Because they... "love."

You like me! You really, really like me... in Akira

This via AnimeCons.com, since the American Anime Awards are averse to punctual site updates - the five finalists in each of the AAA's award categories have been announced. Sorry, Del Rey! Tsubasa and Negima didn't make the cut, no hard feelings about that whole leaving you off the ballot for a while thing.

And yes, Johnny Yong Bosch is still in the running for Best Actor in a Comedy. For Akira. Never was I prouder to know my vote was not in vain, although NA tragically failed to garner a top five finish in any of its two (in)eligible categories.

According to the release, the Babes of Anime presenters will be wearing fashion from ADV's fellow Texan, Chloe Dao, who'll present the award for Best Package Design. What other synergistic wonders hath appearance fees wrought? We can only wait and see.

Dao's Lot 8 boutique provided some of the clothes for last year's Babes of ADV photoshoot, which brings us to the question: what makes a Babe of ADV--er, Anime--a Babe, fit to join a group of "the most prominent voice actors in the business"? Does it take more than auditioning for the cover of a European gothic metal album?

Well, apparently it takes an anime dubbing resume you could tally on one hand - as long as two fingers are set aside for your roles as an extra and, uh, another extra. If you know any other anime voice-over credits to help the case of Most Prominent Fulks, let us know! Perhaps she's even the same Fulks who directed The Most Massive Woman Wins to encourage people "to examine themselves as a community and to raise questions about how body image shapes the way we view and value ourselves."

You're not supposed to take that "America's Finest News Source" thing seriously, you know

The Onion recently did a story called Area Man Needs Two More Trips To Best Buy To Beat Xbox 360 Game. Should I put "story" in quotes? Do I need to make it any more obvious?

Apparently yes.

Blogger Blake Snow (who wrote the Joystiq post) wants to make it clear that he knows The Onion is parody. Or does he? The "yes, the parody newswire" part feels rather tacked on. And who the hell calls the Onion a newswire? Newspaper, yes. Website, yes. But newswire? That's like, AP and Reuters, which are newswires that have their articles reposted verbatim on other news sites (which is what's supposed to happen, that's what a newswire does).

But wait, it all makes sense, because you see, Snow doesn't even bother writing an article for this one, he just paraphrases the article and puts in a large block quote in the middle. It wouldn't be so bad, except that well, the block quote is over half the article, and the paraphrasing is like a half-hearted re-write of the rest. You know, like those reports you had to write in third grade, and you would just pull the encyclopedia off the shelf and work from that. Or was that just me?

To top it all off, and boy, is it topped, is the comments, which are split between "you know the Onion is fake, right?" and "wow, this can't be real!" And then there are the "this can't be real, and here's why."

* How much as he spent on gas to go to Best Buy and back over the last 3 weeks? Probably enough to buy the game!!!

* 2 things that make this story fake...1) How many displays have you seen with access to the memory card slot?2) How many stores have you seen with a full version game on display that is M-Rated? It is against policy. Its like showing an R rated movie on the TVs in Blockbuster.

* Yeah, add me to the "fake" tally: M-rated game with disembowelments, decapitations, and the f-bomb on public display at Best Buy equals someone getting fired.

* this is by far the most pathetic attempt at saving money I have ever heard. If he is a situation where he has to reort to this he should not be into playing next gen games.

This proves... well, that these people don't bother actually reading the article, or the other comments, but most of all, I'm going to have to agree with baby sea tuna on this one:

* These comments prove that at least 70% of the people that read Joystiq should never, ever breed.

Say uncle. Say it. Say it!

So, as everyone now knows, Turner reluctantly took perfunctory responsibility for the Day of the Mooninite and agreed to cough up a smooth $2 million to make Menino and pals go away. Also, the Boston Globe still can't stand Berdovsky and Stevens and continues to valiantly pretend everyone shares their sentiment.

Today's news was that Berdovsky videotaped the police removing a Mooninite but didn't tell them it was harmless. Okay, whatever. But comes now before the court of public opinion the counsel-cum-art-curator for the defendant:

"That's what he does. He videotapes things. He's a videotape freelance artist."

Yeah? Then that makes him, the kid from American Beauty, and my uncle at Christmas. Me, I'm gonna be a videotape freelance artist right now; I think the neighbors across the street are making out.

Bring me back some of that freeze-dried ice cream I like

Cinderella III: A Twist in Time was just released. I know Disney loves those direct-to-video sequels, but I can't help but be a bit perturbed - for Cinderella's sake - that we're only on the second sequel and she's already fucking with the space-time continuum. Because once you've done that, there are really only two other places you can go next: space, or the hood.

Being righteous don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing

Boing Boing is one of those Internet car crashes: you shouldn't look, but yet you cannot look away. Sometimes you see something cool, sometimes you see something you shouldn't and end up sick to your stomach, where all the unicorn chasers in the world won't undo the damage.

The most egregious offender is Xeni Jardin, who has developed a cult of hate such that people are creating sites like XeniSucks. Which is a fun read, though not exactly a bastion of coherent writing.

Today's Xeni offense occurs in this post, on which you could say, "yeah, that Wal-Mart page is coded pretty badly," but then again, the page loads fine for me, and I'm using Opera, which is the gimpiest of the gimp browsers.

From the screenshot it appears that she's using Firefox on a Mac, and Macs can't access the movies anyway. But then again, even if Macs could watch the Wal-Mart downloads... she's a Mac user, a Firefox user, and as a BoingBoing contributor, probably a communist, so she wouldn't shop at Wal-Mart anyway.

And yes, I checked the Wal-Mart store in Firefox on a Windows machine, and it loads like crap, but hell, even I won't shop at Wal-Mart. So who really cares?

And how can the movie be anything but solid cinematic gold

The Dead or Alive franchise celebrated its 10th Anniversary last year. No problems there, though I've never imagined that a life of rigorous martial arts training uniformly results in a figure buxom enough that the passenger in front of you should please keep an upright seat back at all times. But I could be wrong.

Besides, they could be cunningly disguised armor implants. Silicone might have excellent impact-absorption properties. Jiggly Kevlar; it could happen.

Sadly, for all the 10th Anniversary pimpage, the girls don't actually look that appealing. It's like Lara Croft in early Tomb Raider; there'd clearly been effort spent on smoothing the taut stretch of fabric between Lefty and Righty, the pert gravity-defying curves... but if her face looked like a Cro-Magnon, then so be it. Even the new Lara Croft is rocking the one-plastic-surgery-too-many pornstar look.

Which brings us back to Tecmo and the Dead or Alive 10th (Credit) Card, featuring mildly cross-eyed versions of either Kasumi, Hitomi, or Ayame. The overall effect is less sexy fighter, more pneumatic lobotomy. And chicks with all the intelligent expression of a landed fish just aren't my thing. Oh, game developers. There's more to being attractive than a lovingly modeled chest. Millions would disagree, but hey.

Even though you still won't be convinced that Ayame could give you change for a dollar if she had four quarters, DOA 4's character designs are a slight improvement. Even if Bass is totally copping a feel on Tina on his way down.

Keeping that Internet alive!

Oh Wikipedia, please bestow upon me your sweet baby tears of knowledge about uh, visual novels:

A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル) is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art. As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays.

I'm all for the interactive, the fiction, the anime-style art even, but tableau vivant? I clicked on that link, and um, no. Just no.

But enough of the font of pointless knowledge. The seedy underbelly of Wikipedia that are talk pages are a much better read, sometimes, especially when they're longer than the actual article. Does the visual novel talk page follow this example? Oh hell yes!

While I recognise that free images are vastly preferable to copyrighted images, I don't think it's really reasonable to illustrate an article about a game genre with a fake "screenshot". Particularly not if the caption claims it's a real screenshot of a "typical" game, which the Wikipe-tan image definitely would not be.

You see, the image currently displayed on the page to illustrate what the hell they're talking about is this:



"Hey, look at me, I'm on Wikipedia! And I am Wikipedia! Wikipedia is awesome!"

So you could see why this user might have a problem. Seems perfectly reasonable. But it's Wikipedia! So instead of "sure, let's find a real image to illustrate the article" we get:

I'm not opposed to the use of fair use images, and I think they usually add great value to our articles. I'm usually on the side defending the use of a fair use image. However, in this article, this specific article, that kanon image does nothing more than the Wikipe image. If fails policy. This is not optional. Had that image actually added some value to this article that Wikipe-tan's could not (an image of a girl in front of a backdrop with a dialog box) then you might have a point, but that's all the image is. This is not the same as those other articles you listed.

Ah, policy. Because Wikipedia policy is the Constitution and you're Justice Scalia.

After that settles down, we get a discussion about what the "fake" image should look like. Everyone seems to hate it, but with the last comment made two months ago, the image still hasn't been changed.

Wikipedia: You always get what you want, if you have a longer attention span.