The Conversation
- Jeremy Lin: Our Generation’s Joe Louis (9)
- Amy Chua: Chinese Conceit, Chinese Ignorance, and the $24,000 question (247)
- bigWOWO: Not sure if you’re a “bot” or a real person, Andre, but I know lots of Chuas. Only...
- Andre M. Smith: Further on Chua as a Chinese surname . . . My wife, a gyn surgeon, hails from a family of...
- “But he hit me back first!” (44)
- King: I will be kissing Asian women like Linda against the wall without a shirt”. Yuck!!!
- Raguel: “I’m glad you guys are pissed off at blacks. It takes the pressure off of me while you are hating...
- Siegfried: I’m glad you guys are pissed off at blacks. It takes the pressure off of me while you are hating...
- Seeking Asian Female (8)
- Raguel: Yes! I mean with me. How did I miss that part out? And why do I suddenly feel some anxiety?
But here is an... - King: “If I ever get a mail order bride I will get her addicted to sex first.” I assume you mean with you...
- bigWOWO: Linda, Haha! Maybe that dude is on to something with the foreign language nagging. But to be honest, maybe...
- Raguel: Yes! I mean with me. How did I miss that part out? And why do I suddenly feel some anxiety?
- The Other-Directed Personality (1)
- Siegfried: Mitt got Obama worried. He is shaking in his boots. It’s over for Obama because Mitt is going to...
- Holy Jesus, Jeremy (9)
- N: @TD Good pick up on that one.
- trolldetector: @Colin I love how whites keep trying to troll their divide tactics Asian blogs under different guises.
- Eurasian Sensation: @ Colin: I’m pretty sure Jeremy Lin and his supporters are not the same person.
- Jeremy Lin shines (21)
- trolldetector: GO JEREMY LIN
- N: @danny You should youtube his college games. The two against Boston college and the one against UConn. Lol, he can...
- Lingyai: @Ben Efsaneyim Why would it be surprising a non Asian crowd cheering for Lin? Most of the NBA fans going to...
- What Cultures Value (22)
- trolldetector: @Colin. Dont you belong on a Lord Of The Rings filmset? Thats where most white trolls dwell isnt it?
- colin: A bit late to this, but bigwowo, you grossly underestimate the anti-work and anti-intellectual ethic here in...
- bigWOWO: Yeah, I could go for that.
- About A Boy by Nick Hornby (6)
- bigWOWO: That’s a really good point, Raguel. Like it or not, TV executives control everything (including what...
- Raguel: I could be wrong but the distribution windows for media and especially film seems very hierarchical. If you...
- bigWOWO: Illegal streaming? I had no idea anyone did that! Well, I really should check out some movies one of these...
- Superbowl Recipe and Xenophobic Superbowl Ad (22)
- Raguel: Time to get your concealed carry licences, folks!
- Eurasian Sensation: Jeff Yang has a good article about this ad: http://inamerica.blogs.cnn....
- Raguel: I haven’t even gotten to why the ad really is so offensive to us, ROFL
- Stop SOPA and PIPA (9)
- Raguel: ^ Nice one Byron! I’m reading through the NYT picks, they’re good!
- bigWOWO: The Times had an Op-Ed by the President of the RIAA, and I commented. My comment was picked as a...
- Raguel: Found a great website, take a look at this: https://www.cdt.org/ Why should privacy be important, in an age...
- The Perversity of Human Biodiversity, a.k.a. “Scientific” Racism (402)
- bigWOWO: Here’s an interesting suggestion coming out of MIT: Connectome by Sebastian Seung...
- Battle Hymn of the Kitten Daughter (36)
- Raguel: You know Andre, you and me, I think we and a lot of other folks may have gone through some pretty harrowing...
- Andre M. Smith: Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew....
- Two podcasts that address racism in the military, and Danny Chen the person (9)
- Raguel: The origins of racism in the American military as described by loudestfuckingazns is accurate. Very recently,...
- bigWOWO: Sorry, Larry, just noticed that the spam robot junked your comment. Approved!
- bigWOWO: Agreed. It just has more weight if you include your name. Not that the ideas are any less valid, but it just...
- Facebook IPO (5)
- King: Actually WOWO, I bump into plenty of Asians up at the Art Center College of Design http://www.artcenter.edu/a...
- bigWOWO: Agree with King. This might not be a bad thing for Asian Americans to hear about. We can jump off the STEM...
- Raguel: People are too accustomed to thinking about value only in terms of money. Even artists are guilty of it. Some...
- Activism is as activism does (10)
- trolldetector: Brooks also goes onto say ‘You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of...
- bigWOWO: By the way, speaking of activism, there was a great David Brooks column recently. He talks about how people...
- Raguel: I have no experience whatsoever with activism. I simply do not feel safe participating in it. There is always...
- How to Win a Streetfight (18)
- bigWOWO: No worries. I feel the same way. Nothing against her, but just doubtful.
- Raguel: Hi Byron! I’ve been occupied doing a lot of reading and thinking recently. I suppose its just another...
- bigWOWO: Hey Raguel, What about your comments on ASSK?
I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
- UFC 117 Sonnen vs. Silva Recap (1)
- bigWOWO: I think Michael Bisping solved the Chael Sonnen puzzle today, even though he lost a controversial decision....
- 6 on 1 Beatdown of Asian Man (36)
- King: “I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima...
- SWR: Apparently the girl in the second video was not the girl who filmed the fight. It was probably unwise of her to...
- Raguel: I mean I look around me and 99% of the time there are no women that look like or dress like Adriana Lima in...
- Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan (Review) (6)
- bigWOWO: Jeff, You called it! They were (if I recall correctly) 7 (twins) and 2. He’s still in the honeymoon...
- jeffat8asians: “Overpaying?” With the possible exception of college tuition (and even that is arguable),...
- Hitler: Kids suck lol.
- The Asian Rock Thread (16)
- ben: I’ve been getting into Asian rock music recently so thank you all very much for uploading all these videos.
- Simple Pickup on ABC News (132)
- Tommy: I think I’m coming here more for Moro’s comments than BigWoWO’s posts.
- “Lazy” Americans and the Decline of the American Middle Class (6)
- bigWOWO: But kobu, how can we have literature and art without money to support artists and writers? About...
Tag Archives: Writing
Ray Bradbury in action
Ray Bradbury
88 years old and still fighting. That’s how I hope to be.
Ray Bradbury is fighting, speaking, and fundraising for public libraries in California. The famous sci-fi writer is helping to save the libraries, which are suffering due to declining property tax revenues in the Ventura area. I remember reading Bradbury’s account of writing Fahrenheit 451, where he rented space at a typewriter to start and complete his novel. That’s some serious history. I love this guy’s take on libraries:
Writing Ethnicity
I saw this blog post from a gay White male author named Michael Thomas Ford on how it’s assumed that authors always write characters of their own race. This goes back to a point we made a while back about being race blind to the highest extent possible. When is it acceptable? When is it desirable? Most Asian American authors explicitly mention race or ethnicity in their writing. Why do we focus on race? Is it holding us back, or does it make a point?
Medium's Genius Screenwriting and Acting
Natasha Bedingfield's Soulmate
If you didn’t catch the last Medium, you need to. Check it out here (look at the episode list and click on “Bring Me the Head of Oswaldo Castillo.) Not only was it an awesome episode; it also had a really dark song as the backdrop, Soulmate by Natasha Bedingfield. Medium itself has always been dark, and it was a great finale for NBC before Medium moves from NBC to CBS. I’ll talk about it below.
Podcast: Interview with Jimmy Aquino
Last Thursday I had a podcast with Jimmy Aquino, one of the writers of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. Download it here, or hear it here:
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It is 36 mB and runs just under 40 minutes. I’m consistently having problems with GarageBand, so I guess y’all will have to get used to the large file sizes. In this podcast, we discussed Jimmy’s career, his previous life as an html coder, his interest in comics, his involvement with The Minority Militant’s website and Project X, and his goals for the future as an Asian American writer.
Piracy Hits Print Media
Writers have remained relatively unscathed and unaffected by digital piracy. Until now. With the proliferation of E-books and digital devices, it’s only a matter of time before writers will face the same problems as recording artists and filmmakers. From the Times article:
Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.
Respect and Love
Article on Seth Godin’s blog about what makes a good presenter. He says it’s just two things: love to the audience, and respect from the audience.
I think this is true, not just for presenters, but also for bloggers and writers. You can’t be a good blogger if you hate the people who come to your site and are not trying to help them. You can’t write for people if you don’t care about them. I’ve seen some people try their hand at blogging who were so self-absorbed that they couldn’t type a sentence without the condescenscion coming out. Needless to say, they failed.
Call for Asian American Writers
(Pic from here.)
If you are a fiction writer of Asian American descent who writes about Asian Americans, we are forming a writers group. We have room for one more person. E-mail me (naruguard-44 at yah oo dot com) if you’re a writer who is interested in a writing group. If one group fills up, I can always introduce writers to each other so that people can form other groups.
Deep Pockets and Asian American Culture
(image from here)
The NY Times had a great editorial about Bernard Madoff and the allure of money: If Looks Could Steal. In the editorial, Daphne Merkin, sister of a Madoff investor, talks about how we as a society respect money and how money seems to validate everything that a rich person says. She brings up an example of a dinner with George Soros, and she describes it thus:
Posted in Activism, books, Writing
Tagged Activism, Asian American, books, money, Writing
2 Comments
Typewriter Envy
Olivetti-Royal Typewriter
(Picture from here.)
It’s part of the writer’s toolbox: the typewriter. I wrote longhand for the first twelve years of my life. When I moved to a new school, they required papers to be typed, so I learned how to type on a typewriter. This was back in the day before there were computers in every house. Typing on a typewriter tends to be a more pensive activity than writing on a computer; because it takes more time to correct mistakes, one has to think a bit ahead of one’s actual typing. From my experience, it’s much faster than writing in longhand, but it’s slower than computer typing since one has to wait for the mechanical parts to stop moving (electric typewriters tend to be a bit faster than manual typewriters).
Recalibrating
bigWOWO has been in operation since September 23 of 2008–six months this Monday. Originally I was hoping to post almost all commentary on Asian American issues. I was thinking that it would be similar to my work at the 44s, with perhaps a more experiential and less theoretical foundation. I think to a certain extent I’ve succeeded in that, but I’ve also branched out into different areas, and the end result has been quite different from what I was originally anticipating. This change has come about mostly for three reasons:
