“Jeez, there’s foreigners all over the place these days!” said a moving company man in the elevator as the door closed behind me. I would have told him I agreed with him if he’d given me the chance. It could be due to the state of the economy in the US or some other factor I am unaware of, but there are definitely a lot more foreign faces in the crowds here. Only 70-80% of them are white males being led around by Taiwanese women, a substantial decrease from previous years. I grew tired of noticing them years ago, and most seem content to leave it at that. But every so often I come across the busker in the underground passageway, the street singer in the West Gate District, or the English-teaching buffoon on TV that makes me wince a little in embarassment. This generation of foreigners may not be as bad as the businessmen who came over in the 70’s and can still be seen today in bars across the “Combat Zone” making fun of the locals and slapping waitresses’ asses, but at least the businessmen aren’t seen adorning buses dressed in cute animal outfits to promote English cram schools. I can’t decide which is worse.

I have eaten at the Q-bar twice in the past three days, and I am still illness-free. Either I now have a healthy resistance to Typhoid or the staff there has started washing their hands. I realize I might not have gotten it there; I could very well have gotten it elsewhere, but I still feel uneasy going there to eat.

On a brighter note, I received my Amazon order. For the first time since I became a Bloom County fan in Junior High School in the mid-80’s, I now possess Bloom Country Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness, which includes many cartoons I’ve never seen before. I remember my parents including the last Bloom County daily strip in a letter to me in Taiwan so many years ago.

I also purchased a lot of comic books, including some Batman, Astro City and Marvels, as well as an Adobe Premiere tutorial so that my next project doesn’t suck quite so badly as the last one.

Just got back from Dean’s, where we watched, or tried to watch, the pilot to The Sopranos, but the DVD player was skipping so badly we had to abandon it before the ending. It was particularly frustrating because I think the show wasn’t too bad and I wanted to see how it ended. Still, playing with Evil Cat was fun as always. I, for one, had no idea you could play shuffleboard with a member of the feline species.

And finally, I am happy to announce that the winner of the coveted “Best-looking Hawaiian Guy Known to Poagao” award goes to Erich Ian, whose website I found through the Mirror Project.

Today looked nice from my window. I pretty much missed it. I’ve been holed up in my room the whole day, spending too much time online, and the more time I spend online, the less I have to write about. Mostly I’ve been realizing that, for someone who doesn’t like people in general, online forums are not an acceptable substitute. People are people, online, virtual or no. Often if’s worse online, as there is that aura of anonymity to hide behind, like people in cars on freeways in LA, and any semblance of respect or thought vanishes under huge waves of pettiness. Virtual pettiness just makes my eyes hurt.

Yes, I am depressed because I probably made a mistake in putting up Alphadogah on Triggerstreet, where it’s rapidly becoming the most maligned piece in the history of the site. Now, apparently, not only am I a horrible offense to the craft in general for my abysmal projuction values, I am also a racist bigot for having only white foreigners in the film. I fully expect it to be dead last of all the films there within two weeks, if it’s not taken down out of spite, and if I ever meet Kevin Spacey I’m going to have to buy him lunch just to make up for it. All of this doesn’t surprise me; I knew it was bad when I uploaded it. But it is a bit depressing. I do take comfort in the fact that most of the people trashing it on a cinematic basis haven’t done anything themselves to speak of, however. But I probably should have chucked it when I was done and forgotten about it, rather than subject myself to the dubious honor of one of the most hated short films ever made.

It’s not just Triggerstreet, however. When I had the audacity to compare the GL2 to the DVX100 on the 2-pop forum, the moderator deleted the thread due to “trolling”. In any of these forums, if you’re not the Resident Expert, you’re nothing, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to contribute. I don’t know why I expected it to be any different from real life. Just naive, I suppose.

The only remedy, of course, is to do something else, something bigger, more ambitious and time-consuming to take my mind off it, but every idea I think of turns out to be impractical or derivative. Back in New York I had to come up with a film a week for three weeks one month; I don’t know why I can’t think of anything now. Perhaps I’m afraid of making another travesty, and travesties look a lot worse on video, believe me. At least crap in a black-and-white 16mm film can be called “experimental”. Do the same thing in video, and it’s just crap. So far I feel like I’ve been doing utter crap, and I’m trying to work my way up to crap.

Baby, it’s cold outside. I realize that 9 degrees Celsius sounds practically tropical to most people, but factor in Taiwan’s infamous humidity and it feels positively frigid. My landlord just came by with a windowmaker to see if they can’t do something about the noise, such as replacing the 3-mm glass with new 8-mm panes and aluminum frames. Sounds good to me, and it should make keeping the room heated and cooled easier and cheaper as well. My landlord is waiting for the quote, however, to see if he can afford it. “So do you want these windows to be transparent?” he asked me. I nodded. A very Taiwanese question, that, as many people dislike having windows they can actually see out of. You can see expensive apartment complexes all across the city with the windows all boarded up, taped over or blocked by boxes and other discarded items because the owners are afraid someone might look inside.

The other night I was walking around Camera Street looking at microphones when I saw the new Panasonic AG-DVX100 in the window of the place where I bought my Canon GL2. I went in and they took out both cameras, putting them side-by-side on the counter so I could compare the two. I had been waiting for the Panny to come out before making a decision, but I ended up buying the Canon first, as you know. Since then I’ve heard both good and bad about both models, and I really needed to play around with the Pana to see for myself.

The DVX100 is larger and heavier than the GL2, but the picture looked significantly better on the monitor, though a bit dark. The Pana has a 72mm lens as opposed to the Canon’s 58mm, and it’s CCDs are 1/3″, larger again than the Canon’s 1/4″ CCDs, so the picture is naturally going to be better, more true-to-life I guess. I really liked the zoom and focus rings on the DVX100, much better than the Canon’s single focus ring. There have been claims that the 24p mode puts the picture 2 frames behind the sound, as well as high-contrast artifacting issues with the Pana, but it looked very good on the store monitor. The Pana also has phantom power for the audio, including XLR plugs in the camera, whereas the Canon requires a seperate fixture on the top mount, and requires powered mics. The Canon does have a greater shutter-speed range and longer zoom than the Pana, though. Both have good lenses; the Pana’s just has more glass and projects it onto larger CCDs, and it’s cheaper than the XL1S.

But the fact is, I’ve already bought the GL2, so unless someone walks up to me tomorrow and says “I’ll buy that off you at the original price”, I’m probably going to stick with it. Both cameras are ver, ver nice-ah, so I can’t lose no matter which I ultimately decide on.

After that I walked a block or so over to the West Gate District, where I took this week’s video clip, basically just to show you what a Times Squaresque place the West Gate traffic circle (not a traffic circle any more, but everyone still refers to it that way) has become. In the subway I was examining the photos of old Taiwan in the underground mall when I bumped into Jeff Steele, lately of ICRT, and we talked a bit. On a related note, I recently got an email from an old classmate from Tunghai University who stumbled across this blog and somehow recognized me after all these years. Amazing machine, this “Internet”. He gave me some publishing advice and suggestions for publishers to solicit concerning the damn book.

Last night Kirk and I went out. I let him decide where to go this time in light of our expensive trip to the Taiwan Bear Club last week, so he chose Funky. I was late, however, and Kirk was half frozen waiting for me outside the club. Sorry about that. We went downstairs and had our ID’s checked before being let inside. Funky’s been around for a long time, at least 12 years that I know of personally, but it’s still a hopping place. There didn’t seem to be quite as many people there last night, probably due to the cold, but that was just as well, as it’s usually jam-packed on weekends. This arrangement was far more comfortable, and everyone seemed to be having a good time doing the Cha-cha to Ah-mei songs.

Today we had the kind of weather we should have had on New Year’s Day. Fresh, clear, bright, not too cold, not too warm…the kind of day that feels like the start of something. I would have liked to take a trip up into the mountains or up to Danshui, but I had to go to work instead.

My supervisor, however, was surprised to see me walk in. “What are you doing here? Weren’t you told?”

It turns out that they’ve decided to hide me at another office while they wait for the contract to be approved, so I caught a ride with my boss Dr. Lin in a brand-new Lexus, complete with driver, down to their office in the Technology Building. There I was shown where I would be sitting this month, in a cubicle in a smallish room facing Heping East Road. The chair is the kind that leans back until you fall over backwards, and the Internet connection was so slow I couldn’t even download Trillian after almost an hour of trying. “Just take it easy here for a while,” Dr. Lin told me. “We’ll call you if there’s any need for you to come back to the regular office.” The Technology Building offices are where most of the bigwigs have their offices, so I should watch my step and avoid losing my job because I wear the wrong hat to work or something.

After work, since I was in the vicinity, I walked over to my old neighborhood for a turkey sub at Subzone. I’ve been anxious to start another film project since I washed my hands of Alphadogha, which, shocking though it may seem, has yet to reach the top ten at Triggerstreet. “Film what you know,” some people say. What do I know? What do I have? I have a facinating urban environment, especially at night, the friendship of a few good actors, an impressive collection of hats and a basic knowledge of swords. I talked to Azuma about a girl he knows who writes scripts, but all he knew was that they involved the relationship between a guy and his bar of soap. Ah, maybe…not. We get enough of that on TV these days.

Two more Mirror Project photos up, coincidentally right next to three of the BWG’s submissions. Talk about yuan-fen.

Happy New Year. The only celebrating I did was going over to Dean’s to watch TV and rented movies with him, Kay, Mindcrime and Janice. There was absolutely nothing left at the rental store, so we got Kung Pow, fully expecting it to be awful. Boy, we couldn’t have been more wrong. This is the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. The guy who did it was also the comedic genius behind the second Ace Ventura movie, and this is far funnier than that. It was like MST3K, but better. Basically he digitally inserted himself into an old Kung-fu flick and redid all the voices and sound. The result was so funny it hurt. We’re talking the-first-time-you-saw-Airplane! kind of funny here. I have to wonder what the original actors of that film think of it, though, assuming they’ve seen it.

I finally managed to get Alphadogha more or less done, or, at least, I’ve learned all I can from it and am ready to discard it, so I added it to my films page and uploaded it to Triggerstreet (Bad reviews are already pouring in. Rah.) In any case, it’s over. Next!

Today being New Year’s Day, a national holiday, everyone was out and about. The subways were crowded when I took the train up to the Yuanshan Station for sword class, but I must have missed something during last week’s class (on Christmas Day), because nobody was there. I was all ready to practice, though, so I just went through what I knew of the form on my own, over and over again. I had been looking forward to learning some more of it, but it looks like that will have to wait until next week.

Work tomorrow, but I don’t know where I’ll be sitting since the 2003 budget hasn’t been approved yet, and I’m not officially employed until it is. I suppose I’ll find out when I get there.