Genta Ogami King Con

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G.O. Group closely resembled a cult, with staffers beating on a taiko drum and chanting Ogami’s 10 commandments at daily meetings. Every Monday, they viewed his weekly video address, in which he stuttered gems like “follow the path of truth” while dressed in a fresh Versace outfit. Employees then had to write reviews of that day’s performance. Ogami read these diligently, and had underlings seek out authors of bad reviews for scoldings. Workers were made to sit in rivers in the lotus position and stand in the rain shouting Ogami’s commandments. He took the stage on these outings, rambling for hours about the Japanese spirit and the country’s honorable role in World War II. “We all shut up and stuck it out because we needed the salary,” sighs Toshinori Nakajima, an executive appointed acting president before he quit last fall. “No one actually believed in any of the stuff.”

King Con. Time Asia on Genta Ogami and G. Cosmos. The article even has screenshots of his movie, Blades of the Sun, where he plays a samurai on a quest for banaba tea.

Candy From Strangers

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Candy From Strangers, an old Salon article detailing the gritty, greedy underside of camgirl culture. It’s like all the nasty parts of high school: only online with pictures, wishlists, and blogs.

DC with Ruffy.org

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It’s been a fun and eventful Sunday. The choir sang Austin Lovelace’s God is My Strong Salvation; pretty easy piece, mostly unison, breaking into four parts for just a few measures. For communion we broke the standard Baptist tradition of passing around bread and wine- er, juice, in favor of having worshippers come to the table to collect bread, Catholic-style, then stand in a circle around the sanctuary as a community while we partook of the elements. Choir practice covered a pretty diverse range of song: Schubert, Bach, Handel, Jane Marshall, and Moses Hogan. Marshall’s My Eternal King was an especially challenging piece for us basses, with parts going as far down as low C and even a B-flat. I hit regions of my vocal chords I didn’t even know I had.

The afternoon was spent meeting up with Nic of Ruffy.org, who’s visiting Washington for business. We had lunch on Connecticut Avenue and went around for some sightseeing, from Dupont Circle, to the White House, to the Washington Monument, to the Air and Space Museum. Hey Nic, hope you had fun!

Well, while it’s still bright out, I think I’ll go sk8tng for a bit.

Baltimore student housing

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Today’s the day I start searching for cheap student housing in the vicinity of MICA in Baltimore. By late August, I intend to be moved in, settled, and ready to take on a year of hardship.

And learning to drive before then wouldn’t hurt. Man, where does the time go?

Update: I found a great housemate in Little Italy through

Indiana Jones, Metafilter, and brownpau

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Speaking of mainstream media, I just got passing mention in E!Online, for a MeFi quip I made about the new Indiana Jones movie in the works. (Scroll down to the part where the article quotes from Metafilter.) I sure hope Harrison Ford doesn’t read it and get pissed at me.

“Isn’t Harrison Ford a bit, um, old for this? Or will Ben Affleck be playing his character too?” quipped one fan named brownpau, alluding to Affleck taking over Ford’s Jack Ryan role in The Sum of All Fears.

I’m in an internet cafe in the Dupont Circle area right now because I don’t have a key to the house, I don’t know where my aunt and uncle are, and my cellphone battery is dead. I’ve been wandering the streets of Washington like a homeless derelict.

“Weblogs aren’t journalism. Period.”

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“Weblogs aren’t journalism. Period.”

Amen, Derek. I’m puzzled at how the mainstream media are treating blogs as some sort of revolutionary new “grassroots journalism,” when most blogs are about as related to professional journalism as poetry is related to biomolecular chemistry — it isn’t. Sure, there are news blogs and war blogs and other such issues-oriented blogs, but the blogging “revolution” is more about individual journaling than it is about journalism. The world of personal publishing does not position itself as an authoritative or intentionally pervasive source of news or commentary; it just exists as it is, in many forms: conversations, diaries, photo albums, sketchpads, scrapbooks…

Motorola Timeport

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My aunt bought a new cellphone yesterday, a Motorola Timeport. I gave it a try, and hated it; Motorola produces some of the kludgiest SMS interfaces I’ve ever used. Too many buttons to press just to get to a complicated and non-intuitive Create Message screen, awkward and buggy predictive text input (you have to struggle to spell out the word, then hit “Select” to put it into the message), and no easy way to simply send the message to a single phonebook recipient. (The Send Message screen starts with a phone number field, and to enter phonebook entries into the field, you have to go through three menus and any number of button presses.) And I hate using the “1” key for spaces.

I’ll stick with my Nokia 3390, thank you.