Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
They’re coming. Again an evil bug from Asia is stronger, powerful, and a carrier of Dengue Fever and Chikungunya. You won’t feel good if you get bit. It’s in Southern California now. (Patch – Asian Deadly Tiger Mosquito)
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Scary but they say that they can smash “anyone” (the US) in a single blow. Why they’d want to do that? Just ask everyone else. (VOA – North Korea Blow)
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When a pair of Asian American filmmakers in Chicago heard the White House had put out a call for three-minute videos focusing on issues affecting the Asian and Pacific Island American communities, they went to work right away on a topic close to their hearts ~ their entry would address the issue of young Cambodians summarily deported from the United States to Cambodia for having criminal records. Anida Yoeu Ali and Masahiro Sugano said they decided to make the video after meeting several of the young deportees in Cambodia while on Ali’s Fulbright fellowship. Their entry was powerful, showing the deportees reminiscing about what they missed most about their homeland ~ the United States of America. Online viewers were moved. Watch. [youtube]YQxtfCz4B1o[/youtube] The Ali-Sugano entry, among more than 200 submitted, was picked as a finalist by a selection committee that included people with a background in film. After the finalists were announced, the White House said in a video on its website that viewers would help pick winners by watching the videos and voting. But which videos received the most votes was never made clear, wrote L.A. Times reporter Paloma Esquivel. So, why didn’t Ali and Sugano’s My Asian Americana make the final cut? White House staffers aren’t giving straight answers. But you don’t have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows. Ali and Sugano and several of their fellow entrants say My Asian Americana struck a political nerve and that the process was rigged. (LA Weekly ~ Rejected / LA Times – Filmmakers Appalled)
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SEOUL ~ The information superhighway that crisscrosses this nation of nearly 50 million is largely responsible for its rapid economic growth since the ’90s. But there’s also a frightening downside. While it’s true that South Korea’s advanced network infrastructure give its citizens access to news and information that improves their lives, also cruising along the matrix are hate-filled defamation, petty-jealousies, gossip and downright lies. Consider the ordeal Korean rap superstar Tablo (nee Daniel Lee) has been living through the past three years or so since rumors of him dodging military service and falsifying his Stanford University records threatened to destroy his burgeoning musical career and leave him a social pariah. Even the truth and documentation could not stem the tide of hatred, even death threats, flowing to him via anonymous blogs and other social media. “It’s like I’m living in a Kafka novel,” Lee said. Writer Joshua Davis journals Lee’s rise, fall and resurrection “The Stalking of Korean Hip Hop Superstar Daniel Lee” in this month’s WIRED magazine. Davis breaks down the labyrinth of lies and innuendo that forced Tablo into the life a virtual hermit. Add to Kafka, a turn on the Biblical story of Cain and Abel as an envious cousin’s role in sparking the online hatefest emerges as does the sheer weirdness of how a 56-year-old Korean American man living in Chicago continued his attacks on the rapper even after Stanford University officials confirmed Lee had in fact graduated with both undergraduate and master’s degrees in English in the top 15% of his class. Although at the height of online defamation campaign against him, it looked like the rapper was done, Tablo/Lee has apparently survived. Last Fall, he released a comeback CD “Fever’s End” that Korean critics said proved his talent went far beyond his PR. Here’s Tablo commentary on the genesis of that album, ironically, distributed via the video-sharing social media site, YouTube, which had served as a vehicle for slick anti-Tablo attack vids. [youtube]GIr3oXPwSZU[/youtube]
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The Hong Kong Motion Pictures Industry Association (MPIA) is urging the world’s largest video-sharing website, YouTube, to enforce international copyright infringement measures after finding footage from some of its blockbuster box-office hits like Love in the Buff and some 200 other films available for free online. This week, the HK association blamed YouTube for estimated losses of $308 million, adding that YouTube was slow to remove the illegally uploaded version of Love in the Buff, even after Media Asia, the film’s producers, filed a formal complaint. HK filmmakers say a recent search found some of their most popular hits available on the Google-owned YouTube servers, including Hong Kong Film Awards winners: A Simple Life, The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Shaolin Soccer. Blockbuster Ip Man and its sequel were split into 107 video files, while the pirated YouTube videos of clubbing drama Lan Kwai Fong and Jet Li’s Fearless received 1.8 million and 1.4 million hits, respectively. A classic fight scene from Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon was viewed 4.8 million times. (The Hollywood Reporter – HK Piracy)
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