8 Asians

If you’ve been following the latest advertising campaigns for the iPhone, “There’s 75,000 apps for just about anything. Only on the iPhone.” And if you want to see up a Japanese woman’s skirt and see her underwear, yeah, there’s an app for that too.  TechCrunch profiles a newly approved iPhone app, Puff!, where you can blow into the microphone of your iPhone and have the skirt of a Japanese woman go up and see her underwear with your very breath. Or even more freaky, you can also lift a skirt up with the multi-touch iPhone screen. Stay classy, iPhone store.

What is it with the Japanese (okay, and a lot of men around the world) obsession with womens underwear? And as TechCrunch comments, how the hell does the application get approved by Apple? Next thing we’ll know, you’ll have iPhone Apps on How to Date Asian Women.

Starcraft — a real-time strategy video game that was created by the same publishers as World of Warcraft — has been around since 1998, and while us American gamers have given up the game for the greener pastures of raids and PVP Battlefields, don’t tell that to the Koreans, where professional players and teams participate in matches, earn sponsorships, and compete in televised tournaments with appropriately screaming announcers, never mind the game has last longer than most marriages.

And if you live in San Francisco, you too can hire a hardcore Korean Starcraft player for only twenty five dollars an hour! I’m not just being a stereotyping asshole either; his Craigslist ad is actually titled “Starcraft lessons from authentic Korean.” For only $200-$350, you can learn everything from basic Starcraft resource building to telling someone to “QUIT QQ” in basic Korean. And lest you think that ByunTae is being somewhat ironic that a couple hundred dollars worth of lessons will lead to “Korean girls [being] intrigued that you’re such a good Starcraft player,” this CBC documentary available on YouTube points out that, yes, professional Starcraft players do have female fan clubs. Groupies for playing Starcraft? Gives the term Zerg Rush a whole new meaning.

(Flickr photo credit — and apologies — to brad_bechtel)

…and the Green Dam Girl doesn’t have anything to do with dental dams.

Actually, Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航) is “content-control software” developed in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Ostensibly designed to block pornography, Green Dam can actually be used to block other content, as well. A week ago China announced that as of July 1, 2009, all computers sold in China must be installed with Green Dam. Under the guise of screening out pornography, its true main purpose is for the PRC government to censor and spy on its citizens. Not only does Green Dam automatically download the latest updates of a list of prohibited sites from an online database, it also collects private user data.

Due to a public backlash to its original announcement, the PRC government later announced that the installation of the software is “optional.” While much of the outcry from users and computer manufacturers was surrounding issues of censorship, the real reason for the PRC’s about-face is because there are many security flaws within the software that allows hackers to take over computers. In fact, typical of what you might expect from China, a place where piracy of all kinds runs rampant, it turns out that Green Dam is built upon copyright and open source violations. ZDNet Government reports that Green Dam not only rips off Cybersitter software from Solid Oak, but that it also uses open source code without proper attribution.

Outside of the security vulnerabilities and its copied source code, Green Dam also has a number of major functional defects. From Wikipedia:

Green Dam Youth Escort recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, complemented by human face recognition. However, according to a Southern Weekly article, the software is incapable of recognizing pictures of nudity featuring black- or red-skinned characters but sensitive enough to images with large patches of yellow that it censors promotional images of the film Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. The article also cited an expert saying that the software’s misrecognition of “inappropriate contents” in applications including Microsoft Word can lead it to forcefully close those applications without notifying the user, and so cause data losses.

Wikipedia shows a photo of pigs, banned because the pink pigs “matched” the color of human skin.

Not surprisingly, says ZDNet Government, “Chinese youth mock the Green Dam program, kidding each other that if they don’t behave, ‘I’ll youth-escort you.’ Anti-Green Dam websites and petitions are popular. And a Manga-style cartoon mocking the thought police has appeared: Green Dam Girl (绿坝娘).” Chinese blogger Hecaitou says that the images of Green Dam Girl show “the creativity of the post 80s generation (i.e. those born after 1980). The character carries a rabbit (the Green Dam software’s mascot), wears a River Crab badge (a pun about ‘harmonious society that Chinese netizens use to mock Internet censorship), and holds a bucket of paint (or soy sauce) to wipe out online filth.” Says Greenormal, “The police cap emblazoned with a crab, a pun on the Chinese word for “harmonious”, the government’s euphemism for a society without unrest, controversy or opposition.”

Despite the temporary “good news” that Green Dam is now “optional,” it is clear that the PRC government will not give up its intent to control internet speech. It will be up to global citizens to be vigilant and pressure the global computer companies to refuse to be collaborators of such government control.

It sounds like a major FAIL, all the way around. But I did get a chuckle out of the picture of Green Dam Girl pulling down Windows XP Girl’s underwear. Come on, you did, too… didn’t you?!

PS – I normally would not be using simplified Chinese characters, but this is an article about the PRC, so the proper names of these things do actually use this bastardized form of Chinese.
PPS – You think if 8Asians wasn’t already being banned by Green Dam that this post will get it done?

I found myself wanting to know more about the person behind that awesome video DEADLINE, so I reached out to the creator, Bang-yao Liu (劉邦耀), who was kind enough to answer 8 Questions (the first in a new series) for 8Asians.

It turns out that he’s actually a graduate student getting his MFA in Taiwan, but was in the US taking undergrad classes as a part of his scholarship. He shares more with us, including some exclusive behind-the-scene photos, too… thanks, Bang-yao!

8Qs for Bang-yao Liu
1 ) What part of Taiwan are you from?
I was born in Hsinchu city and study in Taipei.

2 ) Do you plan to return to Taiwan after you are done with school or to stay in the United States?
Actually, I am a graduate student in Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA). I am a transfer and visiting student to SCAD for one year because of a scholarship from Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE); this program only lets me to take undergrad classes at SCAD, but that is still good though.

When I finish this scholar(ship) program, I will have to go back to Taiwan. I can not stay here over one year. However, I would like to work in United States or other country if I have the opportunities, but I have to finish my MFA degree in TNUA and one year military service first. It sounds complicated, doesn’t it?

3 ) What are your career aspirations?
I wish I can be a filmmaker someday, it is a long road to go, I think. I will just keep learning, create more, and have fun with doing animation.

4 ) What color of Post-Its did you use most of?
Pink and blue.

5 ) Did you run into any unanticipated problems while producing DEADLINE?
A lot. The biggest problem is “time”. Actually, the original animatic is longer than the final film. Why did not finished it is because where I shoot is a classroom; I only can use it on weekends. So it took us two weekends, almost four days unsleep, to finish it. After that is the final of the quarter.

6 ) Did you have a lot of leftover Post-Its and what did you do with them?
Part of them I gave to my friends, and other were throw away. It depends on the post-it is still sticky to use or not.

7 ) Can you share any other “behind the scenes trivia” about your production?
I want to share some photos of my friend. We have fun with that. [See below]

8 ) Do you have any future projects planned or anything else you’d like to share?
I already have a new concept in my mind, it is quite different. I will start to plan it later.

Bang-yao was nice enough to share exclusive photos of Chun-yao Huang, Jay Tseng, and Kelly Wang — some of the many people who worked on DEADLINE! 謝謝, Bang-yao!

This has been making the rounds (including shout-outs from Ashton Kutcher on Twitter), but I love it so much I’ve watched it three times and still feed the need to share it.

Made by Bang-yao Liu, a Taiwanese student at Savannah College of Art and Design as his senior project, it took 3 months of planning, 4 days of shooting, and over 6000 post-it notes. Wanna go behind the scenes? See the equally fascinating “Making of” video below!

UPDATE: Coming soon! An exclusive 8Asians “8 Questions” interview with Bang-yao Liu!

You’ve probably played Plants vs. Zombies, even though you never played it before — as one of those tower defense games on the web that are hot right now with the art direction of a Bedazzled game, think of the Plants vs Zombies as one part real-time strategy game, one part flash applet that housewives and stoner college students play during the day to pass the time.

With zombies.

But the reason why I bring up the game is specifically to call out the promotional music video made for the game, There’s A Zombie On Your Lawn, a delightful little ditty about a sunflower and the hordes of zombies coming her way. Written and performed by freelance video game composer (and half-Japanese) Laura Shigihara, I’m fairly certain that this is the most adorable tune about zombies as a video game promotion ever; while the original English version of the music video is adequate, 芝生にゾンビが, the Japanese translation of this song — done at the last minute with zombie voice overs by her father — puts this over the top in fucking kawaiiness. MP3’s of both the English and Japanese version are available on her blog, and are a perfect addition to your cute J-Pop songs about zombies mixtape.

Ever since CBS broadcast Survivor: Race War Survivor: Cook Islands, the series has been pretty good about casting diverse contestants. And for this season, Survivor: Gabon have themselves an token Asian contestant in the form of SephirothKen, or Ken Hoang, world champion Super Smash Brothers player.

An Asian who likes video games! I know, right?

Ken has been given a mixed edit this season; he’s clearly portrayed as an underdog both strategically and personally, when he admitted to the cameras a crush on the pretty girl that ultimately got voted off the first episode and then as cocky, after realizing that his voting strategies had been proven effective. But he’s still one of five remaining players to win Survivor: Gabon and not you, so there.

All is not looking good for him to win a million dollars, however: After being labeled “arrogant and entitled” at Reality Blurred for his cocky attitude and penchant for voting off people for personal rather than strategic reasons, a member of his main alliance was voted off last week and he’s now the outsider — all signs lead to him being a giant target coming into the final episode tomorrow night, and with Ken himself saying that physical challenges aren’t his strength, well, we almost certainly haven’t another Asian American winner like Yul Kwon, to John’s dismay.

As for how the Super Smash Brothers community is reacting to Ken being on Survivor, here’s what fP_tHuG has to say:

“Wavedash backwards then forwards for mind games, neutral A short hop fast fall l-cancel . Yah his gonna b the shit lol.”

Uhm, I have no idea what that means.