When Google came to town......

Lots of pizza was eaten.

Digmon Xros Wars - 38

Kaneda Tomoko's back!

As a one time character "Ruka".

The last time Kaneda Tomoko was with the Digimon franchise was the Tamers series (arguably the best of the lot) as Culumon. She does not disappoint with her one-time cameo in Xros Wars (pronounced "cross wars").



It was a bit of spoiler through, as unusually, the credits for the voice cast are in the beginning OP, not at the end as it is the norm. Still, having some help from Aoni Production means Kuwashima Houko is a regular on Xros Wars.



I have to say this was is one of the funnier episodes since the "reboot" of the Xros Wars series, largely due to Kaneda Tomoko and her character. Her voice may divide opinion, but you've got to admit she's a natural.





I also have to shout out to the staff at Online Digimon and Ryuu-Rouge, for continuing to sub and release this series. In particular I have to single out Splash and onkeikun. They are the true believers, having stayed loyal all these years.

(Through I have to say that I could have lived the rest of my life in blissful happiness not knowing that Splash is responsible for TOMOTO. Really.)

Twitter Gems, part 30

Oh God KitaEri, what are you doing to us?!

Twitter Gems, part 29

Some things should never be translated to Malay. For this, it is far more accurate that I'd like to admit.

Bersih 2.0's milling around in Brisbane

A screenshot of the Event page of the said gathering on Facebook

As 9 July 2011 approached, few in Malaysia, and fewer in the Malaysian diaspora around the world, would have failed to notice that there was a disturbance in the force back home, with both sides of the Malaysian media seemingly talking about nothing but yellow shirts, cleanness(BERSIH), software revision numbers and something called electoral reform.

Rallies under BERSIH's name were planned "around the world", so the organiser's claim. This being the second decade of the 21st century, the rallies were organised and planned via social networking services such as Facebook.

BERSIH 2.0 got to a poor start in Brisbane. Firstly, the organiser hid behind the The time of the gathering was constantly being changed. First it was created by a entity calling itself "Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia in Australia":

Who describes themselves as:

A Victorian chapter of a organisation arranging a gathering in Queensland. Right.

It was also coloured by slacktivist Malaysians:

And the obligatory Malaysian who is oblivious to their surroundings (no doubt due to lack to reading skills):

So it was with a completely non-existent expectations that I made my way down to Brisbane Square on a cold and windy Saturday morning. This is what I saw.

As mentioned previously, the rally was penciled in from 11.00am to 2.00pm. Malaysians being Malaysians, and as a people being unable to stick to a appointed time, the rally only got underway around 11.20am.

When I got there, it was a thin crowd of people simply milling around. The Socialist Alliance hippies stood out.

Oddly, around 11.20pm, the cluster of people grew almost instantaneously. It is as if Malaysians who are late, decided to arrive late, at the same time. Maybe Mahathir's advice to his people to put their clocks 10 minutes to the future had some basis after all.

People simply clustered around the BERSIH banner strung between two trees. Mind you, it was really cold that morning. Brisbane Square and Queen Street Mall is a wind tunnel from the Brisbane river. It wasn't so much as the ambient temperature as the wind chill that bit into your bones. Many who had gathered there disappeared in a time share fashion, only to reappear holding styrofoam cups with presumably much welcome warm beverages.

The Socialist Alliance hippies tried to rally the crowd and chant slogans such as "We want electoral reform" and "What do we want? / (Crowd responds) Electoral reform. / When do we want it? (Crowd responds) NOW!"

It wasn't loud. Frankly I could still head the resident Jamacian busker outside the Casino providing a background surreal drone of reggae.

With the involvement of Socialist Alliance, it makes you think that there might be some truth to Utusan's claim that the BERSIH movement is a foreign plot. Except that the Socialist Alliance is as far as you can get from a "Christian organisation".

Only left-wing hippies like the Socialist Alliance would take up the cudgels of a 3rd world nation that they have no association with. Ironically, some on the Right in Malaysia (think the Chinese culturalists) would call this "foreign imperialism".

"The aristocratic rebel, since he has enough to eat, must have other causes of discontent" - Bertrand Russell

It would be native to think that the Socialist Alliance helped "Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia in Australia" without ulterior motives. These Left-wing hippies are bitterly opposed to the Gillard government's "Malaysia Solution". This occasion was used to peddle their message to impressionable Malaysians in Brisbane.

One which camera obsessed Malaysians were more than happy to propagate. The two-face Socialist Alliance was best shown in the cardbox placecard on the right talking about Coal Seam Gas. Flip it around and it talks about letting the boats in.

Essentially, Socialist Alliance exists to oppose anything that is not mainstream. See also: the aristocratic rebel.

At its peak, I counted no more than 80 people around the BERSIH banner. For those who failed maths and are challenged in the English language, this means that the crowd was anything from zero to eighty.

About 15-20 of them were made out of the Left-wing hippie Socialist Alliance mambers. They're not hard to spot out of a crowd. They were the only white people there, and dress badly. (Through I must admit I'm hardly the best person to talk about dressing up)

The fact I could count how many people should give you the participation numbers.

I also have to dispute both BERSIH's claim of 50,000 people on the streets and 6000 illegal protesters by the Inspector-General of Police. As big as the crowds were, the pictures do not show 50,000 people or 6000 people. At best, there were 15,000 people in total. To have 50,000 would see a wide angle shot filled with people no bigger than a few pixels stretching as far as the eye can see.

Much of the pictures of the KL rally were rather close up, and some taken with a fisheye lens, to give then impression of numbers.

The slogan for Malaysiakini.tv is "Small lens [..] no lies". You can't have a full picture with small lens.

A coward taking advantage of the situation. A coward by any other name........

I did see the sole Anonymous unmasked later.

So, what did the rally do? Well, there was a megaphone, and people were invited to go up to make speeches. It was civil and properly managed.

Except that Malaysians being Malaysians, and Left-wing hippies being nuts, no one paid too much attention on BERSIH's 8-point demands printed on the yellow banner:

1. Clean the electoral roll

2. Reform postal ballot

3. Use indelible ink

4. Minimum 21 days campaign period

5. Free and fair access to media

6. Strengthen public institutions

7. Stop corruption

8. Stop dirty politics

The demands themselves are not totally unreasonable, even if some of them, especially the last 3, are a little lofty and idealistic. Yet no one who went up to speak talked about cleaning the electoral roll or reforming the postal ballot. A little was said about the biased print media but no one mentioned that RTM, as the voice of the Malaysian people who fund it, have the right to have a plurality of views.

Corruption was a recurring theme, but no one talked about electoral corruption and only gave a passing reference to vote buying. Instead it became a soapbox for people to share the well worn stories of not being given scholarships, university places, job opportunities and racial discrimination in Malaysia.

On the flip side, it is good to see that the majority of the crowd were students, and having Malaysian students being active in political activism.

If I am really blunt, this is really a case of preaching to the choir. The only people who would bother to turn up are those already aware of the issues and the need for change. Or are they?

I went up to the microphone and asked 2 simple questions to the crowd: 1) How many of them were Malaysian citizens?

A fair number of hands went up, highlighting how many people there were gathered there. I then went on to my next question: 2) How many of you are registered to vote?

Half the hands that were raised went down. I thanked the crowd and concluded my query.

There are 2 ways of interpreting this. The first is that the very people supposedly championing for electoral reform are not even involved in the electoral process. Change cannot happen when the people who hold the power to do so fail to exercise their constitutional right. Such hypocrisy undermines the aim of BERSIH and democracy overall.

The second conclusion is that these people are not fully aware of the issues, and come to this gathering to learn about them. Seeking converts and drawing them into the faith, if you will, to use Christian imagery.

You decide.

One of the Socialist Alliance hippies "sending" a message to the Malaysian Honorary Consul at 239 George Street, which overlooks Brisbane Square.

The Socialist Alliance members, for their part, spun out their usual message of "free political prisoners in Malaysia" and "stop the refugee swap". Absolutely nothing to do with much needed electoral reform in Malaysia.

I can't say this was unexpected. Socialist Alliance are as much as opportunists as they are exploiters. Ever wondered why the Brisbane BERSIH 2.0 rally had their time changed? Because Socialist Alliance were doing another rally of their own at 2pm (conveniently right after the BERSIH rally was scheduled to end) against the Israel-Palestine wall and to support the Gaza flotilla.

So it wasn't too surprising that an invitation was given out to those gathered there to join their own rally. This is how it went down with one Malaysian:

Not surprisingly, Malaysians being the 自扫门前雪 they are, caring only for the least common denominator that stops are their own interests and not any further, almost no one from the BERSIH gathering went on to the "Free Palestine" rally.

Having a one hour gap didn't help in maintaining the impatient Malaysians. The gathering was all but over by 12.30pm.

An extremely curious thing happened when the gathering was over. As people hung around the square, people started clustering into their own racial groups, talking with their own kind.

This encapsulates the problem Malaysia faces: people are not divided so much by race as by language. The problem is language in Malaysia has to be tied to one's racial origins (see the Malay nationalists and the Chinese culturalists), so racial clustering isn't so much as your genetic makeup as the background you come from shaped by your language.

Nations where the people speak the same language have enough misunderstandings as it is between themselves. When people of a nation cannot communicate with each other due to the societal and linguistic barriers exacerbated by race, if that isn't a recipe for disaster it certainly isn't a plan for success!

A street performer from Malaysia (yes they exist you poor deprived inbred people) came after the gathering had ended to entertain the crowd. By then the crowd had thinned so much that some passerby's thought he was just simply performing in a square and left coins in his guitar case.

Ironically another group of people started forming around him, if to watch his performance. Not entirely sure how the classic Malay songs he performed went down with the local populace. On a second thought, that may have been the attraction.

I have a feeling that the person in the yellow jacket with the PAS logo on his shirt was one of the organisers.

Mandatory group shot with the BERSIH banner.

Almost everyone could fit behind the banner, leaving a few, primarily female, to take the shots.

Some final thoughts:

For some, a turn out of no more than 80 people in Brisbane, 20% of which were Socialist Alliance hippies, would be a failure, especially when contrasted to the 750 alleged "marchers" in Melbourne. Even when the fact that Melbourne has double Brisbane's population and Melbourne still remains the gateway to Australia for many Malaysians, does not palate the armchair critics.

Others will see it as a triumph, that the ideals of BERSIH have gone beyond the streets of Kuala Lumpur to the whole world. Certainly it is a morale booster to those who braved tear gas, water cannons and police brutality while Kuala Lumpur was locked down.

The more discerning ones will note that the Malaysian outflow of people to create the diaspora has grown so much, that rallies can be held from Melbourne to Seoul to Singapore.

BERSIH 2.0 in Brisbane also highlighted the double standards that Malaysians practice. Its one thing to wail about the double standards of the government of the day behind closed doors on a keyboard. Its another thing championing for electoral reform when you are not even part of the process. Malaysians wouldn't realise their own hypocrisy if it came up to them and slapped them with a large trout.

I have 2 minds of some of the speakers that day. Few spoke good English. Some read off a script from their phones. Yet they are the brave ones, despite being crippled by the language shackles, they came forward to speak their mind, however poorly it was articulated. It is not only an indictment of our education system, but the sanctimoniousness of Malaysians.

For all their slacktivism on Facebook, personal blogs and anonymous forums, at the end of the day it simply masks the malaise and apathy that afflicts most Malaysians across race, creed, educational background and lingual bubbles.



But it would be naive and puerile to conclude that BERSIH 2.0 is a waste of time. It is a baby step into raising awareness of the institutions that underpin a democratic governmental rule. People who otherwise would not have even known that the Electoral Commission exists are exposed to the idea of electoral reform.

Whether electoral reform can happen is another matter altogether. But a democracy can only develop when the conversation happens. Not all the points of the conversation will ever see the light of day, but those that do will become requests, then demands, then change.

It is a continuously evolving process. Events like this are but part of the growing pains of a nation as the population grows. As society develops, the needs of the society change. For all its flaws, democracy is the only system of government that is best suited to such variances.

Can democracy fit into the changes requested by the masses? That is a question for history to answer. Until then, we all are but actors on the stage. If the audience (read: the next generation) are going to have something to watch, we'd better get started on the script.

Why Japanese Titles don't show up outside Japan much

Spotted this over a Figure.fm: The Reason Why Japanese Titles Don't Show Up in American Theaters

Posted here originally.

I would think that language is a big factor. Humans are funny creatures: they flock to things that share their own parameters. It is only the few outliers that find another culture and language fascinating to consider it as a hobby. Most people only learn the language and culture of a place by necessity (you need to speak some kind of language to qualify to live) or because of economic reasons (if all the good jobs require a particular language, you need to learn it to be gainfully employed).

This post brought back good memories for me. Funnily enough, for all consumption of Japanese culture from afar, I've only watched one anime movie in the cinema for the entirety of my current life. Continently, it was also Toki o Kakeru Shoujo, the brilliant 2006 adaptation by Hosoda Mamoru.

Back in 2008, the Schonell Theatre at the University of Queensland had a screening of Toki o Kakeru Shoujo. I felt it would be nice to have watch Toki o Kakeru Shoujo on the big screen. Oddly enough it was the first time I'd watched it. Not that I was unaware of it, and many others around me had watched it, but I just never got around to watching Toki o Kakeru Shoujo until I got the opportunity on the big screen.

The Schonell Theatre isn't quite your ordinary cinema. They specialise in foreign language movies, cult films, and stuff that don't justify taking up space in a normal commercial cinema that needs to make money. It was also the first and only time I've been inside it.

So it was a lazy Sunday afternoon when I went to watch Toki o Kakeru Shoujo. And like "Rentarou in Hawaii", there was only 6 people in the whole theatre: me, another guy at the back, and a young couple with 2 children who couldn't keep quiet.

Not that Toki o Kakeru Shoujo is un-family friendly. Hosoda Mamoru has a track record of making films that are very watchable across the spectrum of society. Certainly Toki o Kakeru Shoujo is more family-friendly than the Simpsons Movie, and that was in theatre's for months, not to mention the number of times it has been shown on the Saturday night movie slot on Ten in Australia.

But then again, I do have a knack of watching movies in nearly empty cinema halls. And thats if I even do go to a cinema. Most of the time I watch the mainstream popular culture movies several years down the road on a Saturday night on FTA TV.

The Schonell Theatre is very nice, and once inside was very comfortable, if a little dark even before the movie starts. Sound and picture quality was better than some cinema's I've been in.

Would I like more Japanese films on the big screen in places that are accessible to me? Maybe, but the economics don't quite stand up outside Japan. I'm quite happy with the small screen and RM10 headphones.

Twitter Gems, part 28

I'm confused. Really.

Bernama, 8 September 2010:



I had to double check to ensure this was not some weird SQL injection. Its on Bernama's newswire, so it must be legit.

I use to think that such madness only came from the USA.

The charge was for "disobeying the command of the Raja of Perlis concerning the Hari Raya date". I had no idea that was an offence. ^_^''