8 Asians

• Disney/Pixar’s Up and the Voice of Russell, Jordan Nagai
• KFC vs. KGC: WTF???
• Asian Males Behaving Badly
• Asuka Kondoh and Ricky Sun on So You Think You Can Dance
• Hollywood Chinese

• 4th Annual Talent 1 Media Film Festival – The Film Festival will feature workshops and films all day at the Japan America Cultural Center, Little Tokyo Downtown LA. (6/13, Los Angeles: More info here.)
• East West Eats: An Evening with the Bay Area’s Best Chefs – The Asian American Journalists Association is holding a fundraiser for student journalism scholarships by serving food from the best restaurants in San Francisco and cooking demonstrations by Martin Yan. (6/14, San Francisco: More info here.)
• APAture Happy Hour – Kearny Street Workshop is now accepting submissions in all disciplines for APAture 2009; artists can drop off their submissions and grab some food and drink,. (6/17, San Francisco: More info here.)

(Want to promote your Asian American event? Add your event to our social network; events added may be blogged about on 8Asians.)

You know, it’s too bad that a couple of bad apples can spoil the entire barrel. After two years of relatively drama free comments, the past couple of days have seen a spike in especially hateful comments towards the people who write on this blog. And while I’m all for setting up an environment for debate and all for displaying the opinions of people will disagree, something I absolutely won’t stand for are personal threats and attacks.

As a result, we’ve made the following changes on 8Asians.com:

• All comments on 8Asians.com are now maintained through disqus, where you must be a registered member to post. To become a registered member, you can log in through your Facebook account or twitter.
• We are now going to ban inappropriate commenters more often. All comments on 8Asians.com can now be flagged to moderators, and all comments are subject to moderation, as determined by our comment policy: We have the right to ban comments such as, but not limited to, personal attacks, hate speech, defamatory remarks, commercial advertisements (e.g., spam), or deemed anonymous (written using a fake e-mail address), vapid, off-topic, and infecund may be subject to restrictions at 8A’s discretion. There will be no warning and no appeal process.

Again, I’m all for people who disagree; the whole reason I started 8Asians was to get a wide variety of blog posts on a bunch of different topics from people of different mindsets. But for Christs sake, don’t be a troll; own your opinions and don’t hide behind a fake hotmail account.

(Flickr photo credit: Mysserli)

Did you guys know 8Asians has a social network at my.8asians.com?  We’ve had a community site for a while, but we’re going to be emphasizing the community site over the next couple of weeks as well. And what better way to kick off this blatant cross-promotion than highlighting one of our more active members? Stephen is from New York City, is one of the team members behind GreenSoul Shoes and is a self-proclaimed “conscientious, well educated, purpose driven, risk taking, problem solving, highly motivated, disciplined, optimistic truth seeker.” He has a blog of his own and recently started one of the more popular threads on our forums: Who is your Asian Hero?

Want to be profiled on 8Asians as well? All you have to do is sign up for the social network and become involved in our forums!

• Comedian Joe Wong Debuts Nationally on Letterman – He looks and sounds like William Hung. So are we laughing with him, or are we laughing at him?

• Betty Brown: “Really, Just Change Your Name” – “… calling Betty Brown racist for this is ridiculous and a cheap shot. It looks to me like she’s making an honest attempt to try to educate herself on what’s a tricky topic.” – Kai, from the comments

• What Yao Ming Not Dunking Tells Us About Asian Culture – “…he isn’t aggressive enough. He passes too often. He doesn’t demand the ball when the game is on the line. He doesn’t dominate a game the way Shaq does. And … this explanation is that it’s usually followed up with, he isn’t aggressive enough because he’s Chinese.”
  
  
• 8Asians Interviews Bai Ling on “Crank: High Voltage” (And Some Other Stuff) – “Bai ling may not be a role model but she has guts. I can’t see why as a community we can’t appreciate her for her drive and individuality.” – Katherine, from the comments
  
  
• White Canadian Male Asks: “Why do most bad drivers seem to be Asian?” – “I deliberately drive badly just because it pisses off white Canadians, and I’ve persuaded many of my Asian friends to do the same.” – Confuse-us, from the comments

A couple of astute readers might have noticed the Thursday 8Asians.com Photo Zen and Video Zen posts going on for a couple of weeks; no dialogue, no witty opinions, no angry, controversial diatribes — just linking a photo or a video and letting the image speak for itself. It was a good run, but it’s better as a separate free-standing tumblelog. So here I am to officially announce that we now have our own, aptly called 8Asians – the tumblr!

So, how is a tumblelog different than a blog? There’s no real difference from a blog, really, except that it “favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” And the perfect person to do that of course, is 8Asians.com blogger Jun — Brooklyn native, architecture student, and our resident at all things badass. While I may contribute time to time, Jun will be your emcee on “highlighting Asians — and uber talented non-Asians — who draw, dance, build, film, sing, write, invent, paint, teleport, and of course, tumble.”

Jun has been updating the tumblr for a while and I always look forward to the things he posts; surely you will as well.

• Say My Name: Changing my Adoptive Name – “Sitting down in a chair the other day, a funny thing happened: I turned a year older. It got me thinking about my name. Six months earlier I’d handed over some papers and a check for two-hundred dollars; just like that I became Chun-Soon Li.”
• Asian BMI: How I Became Obese in Ten Seconds – “I showed my reading, which indicated that I was overweight, to my doctor. ‘You can’t use that reading,’ he said.  ‘You have to use the Asian BMI.’  He looked up my BMI on the Asian BMI scale.  ‘You are obese,’ he declared.“
  
• Mixed Company of Yale’s “Single Asians” Isn’t Very Funny – “…my general rule is that if it’s really funny, a lot can slide me without being offensive. And guess what? This isn’t funny at all; it’s cringe-worthy and doesn’t pull off the irony and sarcasm of other parody videos. And the girl on the left is totally off.”
  
• NSFW: Justine Lai Paints Herself Having Sex with US Presidents – “…every single heterosexual Asian man is wincing by his laptop because, oh hey, if the image of the Asian female against a white guy is an uncomfortable one to begin with, there she is giving head to Abraham Lincoln.”
• Finding Religion – “With my mother’s passing this last year, we’ve been to Buddhist temple quite a bit, and we’ve also started going to a United Church of Christ. As a family I know we’ll continue to go to UCC for services, but how much do I expose [my daughter] to Buddhism, without adversely affecting her developing faith in Christ?”