It's been awhile since I've updated this blog.  My life as a near-graduating student has been pretty hectic, what with running around doing my final project on top of school and work.  There is nothing like it, though.  I'm not going to lie, it is quite a ton of work, but the production crew I'm a part of is wicked awesome and we get along very nicely. 

Having come back from a shoot today, I figured I could plug our group a little, found here, if you want to check us out officially at www.dungeonesscrabs.com

....however since I'm in charge of web and haven't gotten around to doing much to the site yet, the working blog: www.dungeonesscrabs.com/blog is much more interesting to watch.

Anyway, doing all this stuff has made me wax a little poetic in nostalgia....more specifically, the childhood kind.

Now, I've done enough schooling to understand the negative affects of nostalgia of childhood and exactly what the blinds us to [as people who've done countless Children's Fiction essays can attest], I still do remember the toys.

Mind you, I really never ever wish to go back to childhood.  Mine was the kind that involved way too many strict rules, not being allowed to think differently, second-hand toys and clothes, and not being able to cross the street to go play because it was 'dangerous'.

As we got older, though, I remember that, despite all the crazy rules, my sibling and I had a little more choice when it came to the toys we got to ask for.  And we started to get a bit of preference for certain types of toys.  Secondhand or not, commercial or not, these ones rocked my world:


Chi's Top 5 Childhood Nostalgia Toys

5. Street Sharks

Yes, I was a huge fan of these ugly action figures.  I do not know why.  They didn't do anything but open and close their rubbery mouths, but I had a blast.  The original version had four streetsharks, and between me and my sibling, and a friend and his sibling, we had all four.  Each streetshark had a different build and different muscle tone on the rubber used...and I remember observing it and actually using them as models for drawing different characters on my stick figures.  In a way, those ugly streetsharks taught me how to observe differences in my surroundings and translate them into my drawings later on.  Commercialism taught me something odd, go figure.

4. Power Rangers

Oh my god, Power Rangers.  The original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was awesomely cool to me as a kid, and I would have a few of the action figures to play with.  I loved watching the original show, even though back in the day it was pretty borderline racist [Asian kid as yellow ranger, black kid as black ranger, white kid as all-mighty white ranger....it's not hard to put the pieces together].  One of my favourite acting-outs was to turn the red power ranger 'evil' and have mock fights with my green power ranger...I never knew why I liked that to this day.  Might have been that I only had a few of the action figures, and they were all 'good' power rangers, so I had no 'bad' ones to fight with.

Of course, the martial arts used in the show was completely bogus, something I found out when I ended up studying martial arts for about 7-8 years myself.  Still...I love it.

Also, last year or so, I almost had  a brain melt when I started watching the show Flashpoint and saw that one of the characters was the original Pink Power Ranger!! Awesomeness.

3. My Little Pony

I was a crazy tomboy when I was a kid, but for some reason, I adored these overly commercialized things.  Unlike the other toys, however, I have no idea why.  Still, I have a few left in my basement.

2. Ninja Turtles

I LOVED the Ninja Turtles.  I loved loved loved them.  I loved the original movie, I loved the sequel, and I loved the action figures.  I thought the idea was the coolest thing ever: a bunch of martial arts turtles that loved pizza and said 'Cowabunga' a heck of a lot.  Perhaps the idea was so kooky I took to it immediately, but the fact stands that I still love the Turtles today.  Through the turtles I learned about the artists they were named after, and what real martial arts looked like. 

I still have the second movie on VHS, but recently they released a remasted Blu-Ray set of the original movies which Kev got.  Man that set is pure awesome.

1. K'NEX

This was my absolute favourite toy in the world...it appealed to me much more than Legos did because of all the complex ways I could fit the pieces together.  I got my first set was when I was pretty young.  My parents, in their 'let's not pay attention to the age on the packaging way', got me a set devoted to making dinosaurs way above my actual functioning level at the time.  I remember being near tears trying to put together a 200+ piece Brontosaurus...but I kept trying, and eventually did it.  That was a totally sweet day-- and the thing was motorized too, swinging its tail left and right as it wobbled across the carpet.  Unfortunately, the set got discontinued sometime when I was in high school...such a shame.

I was hooked on K'nex after that.  My parents really liked the toy too, and kept getting me sets, which I would dump into a communal tub and make my own models with...garages, bookshelves, a pencil box, all sorts of stuff.  This kept going until around grade 6...

I had noticed my homeroom had a K'nex box stored up high on one of the shelves, and was continuously curious about it.  One day, I asked my teacher, and being curious herself, she pulled it down and we took a look at it...

The box actually housed the school K'nex set...and it wasn't some shitty starter K'nex set, it was the HARDEST MODEL EVER PUT OUT by the company...the damn FERRIS WHEEL MODEL SET..

That's right, the 8550 piece crowning glory that is K'nex craziness.  And as soon as I saw it, I wanted to assemble it.

It didn't take much convincing to get my teacher to agree to let me put it together.  She assigned me with a team, and during the 'free time' periods, me and a few others put thousands and thousands of connections together...slowly, for weeks.  Our fingers started to get sore, but we kept going.

Finally, when we finished the thing, all the classes around us came in to watch us turn the crazy 6-foot contraption on. 

Damn, that thing was crazy awesome.  Like, wickedly awesome.

I never got around to buying any more sets after that, but one day I'll come back and try out some of the other amusement park sets maybe.  I'll never do the ferris wheel again, but damn, that was a crazy set.

Wish I took pictures of it.


Chi out!

*warning immature rant*

So next week is my music exam.  Every day for the last 20 or so days in July I:30- have gone to an extensive exam-preparing class in the mornings, and then run to work.  That takes me up until 8 pm or so, and then I go home. And do homework.  And then sleep And then go back to school..  And prior to my classes starting I worked from 9:30 to 7:30.

Every day. Starting from May.

The summer is almost over.

I have no life.

To say that I am jealous of pretty much fucking everyone jet setting off into different parts of the world [Paris! States! Dubai! whooptiee-do] and not worrying about tuition and how they're paying it, is putting it mildly.

Call me an angsty young person and really I don't care.  Because you know what?  Come this September comes the biggest-assed graduating final project I will do in my life and I KNOW I won't sleep.  And then when I graduate I have to spend my life searching for a permanent job.

Oh and paying back student loans.

Where the fuck am I going to have time to go have fun?

Fuck this timetable and fuck this summer and fuck the fact that I'm graduating have never even slightly gone anywhere out of Canada.  Fuck, even out of ONTARIO.

fuck fuck fuck.  And if anyone's being judgemental, well, fuck you!

*end of immature rant*

So life has been so busy I haven't had time to even REFLECT on how it's been.  There was a time at the end of May where I wish there was a pause button, I was so busy I was pulling down three jobs and worrying about media for the con and fretting about my Harmony exam that I didn't really have much time to sleep.

...

In any case, my life has passed that harassed state and I'm settling into a more normal pace.  My full time job for the summer is pretty awesome, I have to say.  I think its pretty cool that I get to hang out all day working on audio edits and photoshop mockups and cutting video.  My boss and coworkers are pretty cool too.  My favourite part may have to be the lack of a dress code and my ability to blast music from my workstation.

I mean, I loved my camera job with the legislature, but sometimes being business casual was kinda stifling.  So for the rest of the summer at this job, at least I can lounge in shorts and a tee.

Today was especially weird because all of us got treated to a summer staff BBQ.  Pretty much the whole of Rye summer staff came out for it, but the weather was not even close to accommodating.  Five minutes before people started getting food, the clouds rumbled and pretty much I'd say ripped open a torrent of water.  It got so bad that a quick 5 second walk to the ice cream truck meant you were completely and totally soaked.  It was that kind of weather.

So, after moving it indoors, we got treated, soaked and slightly unhappy, to some delicious hamburgers and hotdogs.  And then I had the fortune of winning some stuff from the prize draw.  And then after that I went home because it was my early shift day.  WOOOOOOO I'd say the day was great.

In other news, I would like to slap the lady that did my bloodwork early on in the week. 

Chi's Story about Bloodwork

Now normally bloodwork is pretty standard- you sit down, the person finds a vein, ties your arm with a band, and then shoves the needle in your vein to get the blood.  On me, it's pretty easy to get a vein, I'm not that hard.

There must have been something wrong that day with my vein, though, because the lady shoved it in about twice, couldn't find my vein, and then proceeded to shove it in my other arm.

Now normally I'm not scared of needles or what have you, and I'm fine with bloodwork, but when someone shoves a damned big needle in your arm multiple times and still have not drawn blood even a seasoned bloodwork person starts to get kind of ticked off.

At this point it's starting to ache.  Especially when on the last shove, instead of pulling it out to find another spot, the lady kind of ...WIGGLES THE DAMN NEEDLE AROUND INSIDE MY ARM to see if she could blindly find a vein.

I'm not going to lie....as soon as she started to wiggle that needle in my arm I was getting shooting pains down my body.  That feeling is oh so not cool.

By the time she got the needed amount of tubes of blood out of me [TEETH GNASH GNASH] I was ready to murder someone.  But what do I do instead?

"Ah...well, that sorta hurt.  Thanks."

I really have to stop internalizing pain >.>  I may have been able to stand it, but god forbid that lady does a kid next, I feel sorry for the kid.

The End

My arm juncture still kills everytime I move it...and it's adorned with a wonderful looking bruise.

Moar stuff Chi has done but has no time to write about now:
-Zoo!
-Going to Anime North as Media reps!
-Getting my camerawork live on the CP24 channel!
-Star Trek!
-Roomba!


Oh btw let's shower this blog with some amazing camera work:
Yay Pretty

My boyfriend doesn't just look good, he also takes awesome photos.  What more could a girl ask for?

Cheers

Chi

So recently I've been listening to the Ting Tings.  Damn are they freaking catchy.  The singer is not what you call explosively full-range, but the two of them in the band have this rare sense of when to pop a good beat.  A lot of their stuff reminds me of White Stripes Seven Nation Army song-- a really strong main and back beat, almost surf-band like, but on top of it, a great amount of musical layer.  And their songs are just so damn fun, which is something worth listening to. 

If anyone is interested, here's a sample of the album, probably their most famous single [I've caught this song in a bunch of trailers, including a promo of Slumdog Millionaire]

The Ting Tings: Great DJ

The more I listen to their most recent album, the more I'm reminded of the band Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, but more low-key [NPSH's songs remind of psychedelic flower pants lol].

Anyway, just wanted to do a short post.

Chi

I think they look pretty swanky man, check it out:



Listen to Anime Brigade Uncut, LIVE,

Wednesdays @ 1-2 (GMT-5)
on
www.spiritlive.net.

I'm setting up a website soon with an rss feed to archived shows in podcast format.  Should be fun.

cheers


EDIT:

PS, maybe some of you noticed, but I reverted back to my old layout.  Somehow I missed the nice neutral grays and whites.

...

And Lucky Star is always teh awesome, no matter how you slice em.