To one, life was safe, to the other, anything but. Who has the better life?
As was (poorly) portrayed in the movie, success was found by ones who were free from the burden of money, both the burden of too much money, and too little. They spent time in relationships, discovered joys to make life worth living.

I believe it is a common dream to make a safe comfortable walled garden around us for ourselves and those we love. But do the walls really make our life better? Investing in bigger, shinier, stronger walls of conservatism is a sure fire way of missing out.

If someone next to you needs help, or has something to give, you can’t appreciate the gift of taking or receiving if you are behind a wall. You also aren’t help them if you are harming them at the same time.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle

rewritten as:

All that is necessary for evil is for good men to do nothing.

What does it mean to live life like this? No big meeting to miss, no work to finish, nothing at midnight on a sunday.

Yes we need to go get rest for the hustle bustle to resume again, but in some precious moments, we dont need to do anything. Just breathe.

Strokes, SNSD

–rock
Strokes
Sound: 10. Showmanship: 4 Crowd fun: 4
Casablancas mostly stood in the dark with shades. But he sounded great and the last song had fireworks.

MuteMath
Sound: 8 Showmanship 8 Crowd fun: 6
I’ve often known of them and their brilliant music video, but didn’t know their great music ability. Wide range and great show all around.

Chili Peppers
Sound 6 Showmanship 9 Crowd fun 7
I wasn’t really up front when they came on since the stadium is far from the rest of the shows. It’s mostly just guessing :S

One ok rock
Sound 9 Showmanship 8 Crowd fun 9
Probably my favorite show, time flew by as every song was a crowd favorite and great quality.

Gazette
Sound 6 Showmanship 8 Crowd fun 7
Full of girls headbanging, it was kinda weird. I’ve liked maybe half of GazettE songs before, and when live, it was also hit or miss for me.

Fact
missed ! I think they were pretty intense though. Many fans had the masks

Maximum the hormone
Sound 3 Showmanship 9 Crowd fun 7
Some stuff is great, some is pretty bad on a few levels. Live, they were mostly fun but it sounded bad. Fans were a bit weird and wild.

Mars Volta
Sound 7 Showmanship 8 Crowd fun 6
Similarly to mutemath, great performance but i’m not sure crowd really knows them and their songs.

Panic at the disco
Sound 5 Showmanship 6 Crowd fun 5
They were at the big stage and lots of people were there. Their hit songs were fine but forgettable.

DFA1979
Sound 7 Showmanship 6 Crowd fun 6
I am happy they are back together. A very weird duo of noise makers, the crowd seemed puzzled but entertained nevertheless.

The telephones
Sound 3 Showmanship 8 Crowd fun 8
I thought they would have sounded better but they fit the japanese crowd with clapping and hand action cues. Kinda fun!

The koxx
Sound 5 Showmanship 4 Crowd fun 6
I also thought they would sound better. I left pretty early.

Idiotape
Sound 8 Showmanship 4 Crowd fun 3
Very small set, but I loved their mix. blur song2 techno style, ha. Nobody was around.

–pop

BoA
Sound 9 Showmanship 5 Crowdfun 7
She acted like she just woke up with lack of interest, but she is undeniably brilliant dancer akin to janet jackson. Also I was impressed by her vocals.

Perfume
Sound N/A Showmanship 7 Crowdfun 9
I dont know how much they actually sing live, but they are so cute and cheerful. The dancing was fine, but not that special. Crowd was intense I got crushed.

SNSD
Sound 8 Showmanship 8 Crowdfun 10
I managed to work my way to the front and get eye contact from them directly, oh to relive that moment, ha. The bg music cut out but they sang on and still sounded pretty good.
They dance in perfect rhythm, total professionals. Some of them were engaged in the crowd, but some were also kinda shy due to language barrier and being young.
I’ve never been a crowd so excited. Very short set sadly.

Pretty Wreckless
Sound 5 Showmanship 1 Crowdfun 1
Taylor momsen of gossip girl fame fronts a rock band that sounded passable. She wasn’t very likeable though and the crowd was very large, but not engaged.

Avril Lavigne
Sound 6 Showmanship 6 Crowdfun 8
I was only there for two songs but she seemed to fit in well in Japan. 20 something women eat up her rebel fashion and angsty songs. I dont think Avril has much talent though.

James Blunt
ha it was almost empty.

Destructors are the opposite, erasing traits, eliminating any capacity to grow, and if you try to perform an action after it is destroyed, you can easily crash.

In the same way, women who describe one of their peers as unattractive, unhealthy, or unfit somehow are destructors — destroyers. Confidence is crushed and then there are fewer people who are willing and able to encourage others.

Why does all this happen? Some women are self-declared ..dogs, to those who cross them. Perhaps this is an effective defense mechanism to hate your enemies and make them weaker so you are the strongest but I dont want to live in that world. I choose to rise above it and succeed by my own growth instead of hindering others. Hate breeds hate so from more hate spewed on others, enemies will accumulate. I don’t want that. In fact it is something very important to me that in various situations nobody has ever hated me. Not in school, with women, in video games, or working various jobs has someone had strong negative emotions and I hope to keep that going. It certainly is easier if my spouse was a uplifting constructor even in the face of adversaries. Jesus said, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Listening to Jesus guidance is always best. No matter how much fun you think it is to rip someone’s head off, or how much you think they deserve it.

I feel I have learned a lot about a different culture and makes me mostly tired of this one. But Koreans definitely aren’t perfect either.

They take the ‘would you rather’ game to an extreme and compare people doing things all the time. Compete to make the stupidest face, compete for being a more ideal wife. I used to think it was light hearted and joking, but they make no apologies and laugh about it. Then it becomes news and turns into dating rumors. I suppose I had childhood times where we would compare girls and give them numbers, or pick A over B. But, somehow doing this to their face was horribly insulting. Not in Korea.

Shinyoung: Im so good at making steamed riced cakes
Sunny: Oh, that means you will have a beautiful daughter. (Korean saying: she who can make steamed rice cakes will raise a beautiful daughter)
Shinyoung: My mother was also good.
Shinyoung: It’s a lie.

Hara: What do you call someone who sells doors? (door = moon in korean)
Boss guy: moonfany? (fany = selling)
Shinyoung: Sailor Moon?
Hara: Yes! (Sailor sounds like seller… nobody laughs, hara still smiles)
Shinyoung: She’s not even phased!

“Write it as a failure but read it as an experience” – Korean saying

I don’t think it is fair to say that everyone’s total skill is equal in sum, because if i improve in my cross country skiing, my rifle shooting skill, doesnt deplete. I suppose some skills are developed and maintained with time and time is a universal resource. Nobody has more time than another. even if you keep travelling west, and you keep gaining an hour, that international date line will really screw you over.

If you develop skill at a faster rate, then you are a blessed person, and it might be the best use of your time to continue.
If you do not have a fast rate, then doubling efforts might be necessary, with both perserverance and humility needed in order to keep pace.

So to the people who many might seem worthless, do they lack perserverence + humility to apply themself in areas they are slow to learn? Or are they just so incredibly disadvantaged that they will never catch up? I guess a generalization I might make from my observational experience is that lack of skill is most often misguided direction or a lack of willpower.

Instead of news being about reality, i’d have reality show about news. With ‘celebrity’ types, comedian style and supermodel style, because normal newsfolk are boring I imagine. They need to be similar age and would benefit with some playful flirting or games and pranks.

details…

Personnel:
Go to Korea, pay celebrity talent, such as the 9 girls of SNSD once a week for 2 hours, for 90 min prep and 30 minutes showtime.
Find a journalism university and hire a professor and 3 students rotating each week.
Find english, japanese, chinese, korean, translators.

Studio setup:
Setup the room with desks, monitors laptops and a control booth.
Use hand video cameras combined with tripods with a direct feed to control station.
Use stationary cameras in the corners to record the process.
Upload live feed of the behind-the-scenes and the live news camera.

Topics:
Local news, Americas news, EastAsia news, Europe/Asia news, sports, heroes, humanitarian, finance, fashion, music/movies

Work day:
students scan reddit, bbc world news, local papers for the an overview of articles.
The talent comes in, 90 minutes before show time. Live broadcast begins.
Talent hears the suggested stories, or comes up with their own.
A little game to decide who decides ‘first dibs’ on a category for the story.
In the next 30-60 minutes in working with the students, the talent decides on the story to bring to professor. The professor gives input and sets the timeline order

Show time
Have the idle talent operate cameras, do makeup touchups, and the control board if at all possible. Keep the behind scenes cameras rolling with hopefully 100% people in the area being the talent.
IE:
Anchor 5 runs the camera 1
6 on camera 2
7 on makeup
8 runs the switchboard for stories 1 through 4,

Use intermissions to run classic-style ads where they go to a side area and hold the product and read from a script.

Almost end show, have some stalling while the talent changes costume. Throw to a pre-recorded celebrity segment, reporting on news in different country.

End the show with a dance or song performance, not serious, wear whatever they want, joke around.

Internet component, revenue:
have live feeds and a 30 minute delayed translated feed for other languages.
have a running ticker with links to advertised products and news stories.
Use a single brand of cameras, laptops, advertise them with the talent holding it.
Advertise the clothing too.

I still go seek out the indie dramas, and foreign films but I have to analyze the cost to my soul brevity to decide if it is worth it.

I, unlike the average moviegoer, do not have an easy time in a soft contrived uplifting movie and they make me more angry than soul-lifting.

So if the nice movies annoy me and the sad movies are a bummer, I should read more books. That way my bummer or annoyance is spread out over the months and months it takes me to finish reading anything.

Ok, I take it back, I saw a pretty solid, sad-ish indie drama with will ferrell that made me still appreciate movies.

Review:
Confessions (japanese), brilliant story, acting, direction, A
Up in the Air, I also liked this concept and at times the acting was painfully real, I might watch it again. A-
Everything Must Go, less impressive or memorable but solid all around, great atypical characters, felt very real, A-

The composition of a life may be shaped in a variety of ways. However I think most people find some comfort in fitting in a certain pattern with a spouse and a house, or some educational pursuit and travel. It seems like there is a lack of symmetry if someone has a spouse and education, or travels and has young children. They can seem awkward because of their rarity, but also because of the assumed imbalance that a life with unconventional characteristics would have. Someone may be a wizard with time, or perhaps more likely sadly neglecting one of these major areas.

Who is revered in this culture, and why are they there?
What qualities are ostracized and what happens to those who don’t comply?
How long do people stay at the top, and what happens after time?
What are the products of this culture to the rest of the world?

To know, requires a lot of travel and talking with locals. I would like to know more, and meet more people.
Do I know what my own culture’s output is? Does Canada give the world… apologizing, syrup and multicultural harmony? Hmm.