Real life and fandom meandering
I've survived my first week as manager! I've scheduled myself the day off Sunday! \o/
And all in all, not horrible. Narrowly averted a personnel crisis, spent the first three days trying to figure out why our printer was leaving scratches on photographs (and solved it, I hope *crosses fingers*), was up to my elbows in processor racks cleaning them out in the course of solving the above problem, sold a couple little cameras (>.<) and delegated training of new folks to the veteran personnel. I'm alive. *flop*
To steal a line from mousapelli, I think, it's kinda hard to rebel against The Man when you are The Man. It sucks. I was forcibly reminded of that my first two days. My brain is a crazy, twisty place, in that I've spent a fair amount of time being anti-corporate America, and cognizant of the fact that capitalism and the continued health and welfare of human beings are two relatively mutually exclusive concepts. And yet, and yet, as soon as I became a manager, I kinda forgot that. Somebody needs to kick my hard in the pants. A lot. I owe a lot to my mom for helping me figure things things out the first night I came back, so that I wouldn't do anything irreparably stupid.
So yes. People, please tell me when I am being corporately stupid. :\
**************
Fandom is my escape, my stress relief, the place where I have met interestingly crazy people who are crazy about similar things as me, or have caused me to become crazy about the same things as them. XD It is full of crack, gay, rainbows, rubbery pirates, aliens with no pants, eternal rivals, characters and people who love each other and share that deep affection largely through snarky remarks and violence (with or without bigass sparkly rings), and communities of awesomely creative, insane, hilarious, wonderful people who share the best (and worst and all the bits in between) parts of themselves to the world at large.
Fandom is full of mind-bending meta and analyses of storylines, characterization, the roles of race, gender and various other intersections in stuff we do for fun; stories that have made me giggle, fall off my chair wheezing, sit in shock processing the implications, and cry. Fandom has the contributions of some terrific artists, and I love seeing how other people see my favorite characters, no matter what their style. I need to go raid beckerbell's journal again; a while back she had a post of some really funny Arashi fan videos, like one to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." XDDD
I dunno, I'm just kinda sentimental today. Or something. BIG HEARTS TO EVERYBODY, I don't know the html. HEARTS AND SPARKLES AND FEATHERS AND GLITTER. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
******
Oh, incidentally, I was having a conversation with my mom today and she has some mild ISSUES with regards to my being so interested in Japanese music and language and media. And I mentioned that I got baited in anime fandom by a friend in high school, and since then I've relied a fair amount on recommendations to get into new fandoms and fic and music and so forth. Except for where I do a lot of random cd browsing at the library, but that's really hit and miss.
Anybody out there have recommendations for some good Chinese music that they like to listen to? I've listened to (and liked) S.H.E. from Taiwan, and I like some of the really really old school melodic stuff my mom likes such as Deng Lijun and Lin Zichang (Um, not sure of the Mandarin, I know him in Cantonese as Lum Zicheung or something like that, I have no idea how to express written Cantonese even though I studied a little bit for a linguistics project).
Open to Korean and everything else, I leapfrogged from Arashi to other styles of music a couple nights back because I was watching something for Arashi called Ultra Strong Game on Youtube, and it was a version with all the television commercials still in. And the background song for a whiskey commercial stopped me in my tracks, and after some searching (Arashi led me to improve my Japanese to this point o.o) I found this, which just blew me away. So I discovered Stardust Revue, Kobukuro (two guys who did another version of that song and have wonderful voices), andrediscovered WaT. And then last night my fannish subconscious evidently decided that I'm finally going to be receptive to the DBSK stuff floating around, and I watched a whole bunch of their a capella performance clips. Beautiful. Gosh.
Arashi is a group that I like for their music and the members' personalities and interactions. They have catchy music that's perfect for karaoke-ing, in that it's very singable with fun melodies that occasionally twist in unexpected ways that satisfy my need for a melody that hooks you in and flows along and I sing their tunes a lot. XD But true-nuf, they're not the best singers in the business; they're more in the all around entertainment business, which they are. And now I'm looking into all these groups whose vocals are blowing me away. Recommendations please! ^_^V
Love to everybody, hope you're doing well, since I'm bad at keeping in touch. If you made it through all that tl;dr since I'm in the habit of talking a lot, hats off to you! :P
And all in all, not horrible. Narrowly averted a personnel crisis, spent the first three days trying to figure out why our printer was leaving scratches on photographs (and solved it, I hope *crosses fingers*), was up to my elbows in processor racks cleaning them out in the course of solving the above problem, sold a couple little cameras (>.<) and delegated training of new folks to the veteran personnel. I'm alive. *flop*
To steal a line from mousapelli, I think, it's kinda hard to rebel against The Man when you are The Man. It sucks. I was forcibly reminded of that my first two days. My brain is a crazy, twisty place, in that I've spent a fair amount of time being anti-corporate America, and cognizant of the fact that capitalism and the continued health and welfare of human beings are two relatively mutually exclusive concepts. And yet, and yet, as soon as I became a manager, I kinda forgot that. Somebody needs to kick my hard in the pants. A lot. I owe a lot to my mom for helping me figure things things out the first night I came back, so that I wouldn't do anything irreparably stupid.
So yes. People, please tell me when I am being corporately stupid. :\
**************
Fandom is my escape, my stress relief, the place where I have met interestingly crazy people who are crazy about similar things as me, or have caused me to become crazy about the same things as them. XD It is full of crack, gay, rainbows, rubbery pirates, aliens with no pants, eternal rivals, characters and people who love each other and share that deep affection largely through snarky remarks and violence (with or without bigass sparkly rings), and communities of awesomely creative, insane, hilarious, wonderful people who share the best (and worst and all the bits in between) parts of themselves to the world at large.
Fandom is full of mind-bending meta and analyses of storylines, characterization, the roles of race, gender and various other intersections in stuff we do for fun; stories that have made me giggle, fall off my chair wheezing, sit in shock processing the implications, and cry. Fandom has the contributions of some terrific artists, and I love seeing how other people see my favorite characters, no matter what their style. I need to go raid beckerbell's journal again; a while back she had a post of some really funny Arashi fan videos, like one to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." XDDD
I dunno, I'm just kinda sentimental today. Or something. BIG HEARTS TO EVERYBODY, I don't know the html. HEARTS AND SPARKLES AND FEATHERS AND GLITTER. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
******
Oh, incidentally, I was having a conversation with my mom today and she has some mild ISSUES with regards to my being so interested in Japanese music and language and media. And I mentioned that I got baited in anime fandom by a friend in high school, and since then I've relied a fair amount on recommendations to get into new fandoms and fic and music and so forth. Except for where I do a lot of random cd browsing at the library, but that's really hit and miss.
Anybody out there have recommendations for some good Chinese music that they like to listen to? I've listened to (and liked) S.H.E. from Taiwan, and I like some of the really really old school melodic stuff my mom likes such as Deng Lijun and Lin Zichang (Um, not sure of the Mandarin, I know him in Cantonese as Lum Zicheung or something like that, I have no idea how to express written Cantonese even though I studied a little bit for a linguistics project).
Open to Korean and everything else, I leapfrogged from Arashi to other styles of music a couple nights back because I was watching something for Arashi called Ultra Strong Game on Youtube, and it was a version with all the television commercials still in. And the background song for a whiskey commercial stopped me in my tracks, and after some searching (Arashi led me to improve my Japanese to this point o.o) I found this, which just blew me away. So I discovered Stardust Revue, Kobukuro (two guys who did another version of that song and have wonderful voices), andrediscovered WaT. And then last night my fannish subconscious evidently decided that I'm finally going to be receptive to the DBSK stuff floating around, and I watched a whole bunch of their a capella performance clips. Beautiful. Gosh.
Arashi is a group that I like for their music and the members' personalities and interactions. They have catchy music that's perfect for karaoke-ing, in that it's very singable with fun melodies that occasionally twist in unexpected ways that satisfy my need for a melody that hooks you in and flows along and I sing their tunes a lot. XD But true-nuf, they're not the best singers in the business; they're more in the all around entertainment business, which they are. And now I'm looking into all these groups whose vocals are blowing me away. Recommendations please! ^_^V
Love to everybody, hope you're doing well, since I'm bad at keeping in touch. If you made it through all that tl;dr since I'm in the habit of talking a lot, hats off to you! :P