One month left!!!

July 1st! Holy crap! In exactly one month, I'll be in Japan!

So much to do so little time. Preparations have been underway and I've been doing what I can to minimize the stuff I'll have to bring back home before I go to Japan. Like sell my 35" TV. So far, two friends are interested! In just a couple hours! Yay social networking. :-)

Also, The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan's latest film, was released today. And it's worse than I actually thought it'd be. Anyway, this article has a bit of Shyamalan addressing the racism issue. But personally, he completely fails to see what the issue *actually* is. He keeps saying that the movie isn't racist because of the diverse cast and the fact that *he* directed it; that *his* name and Dev Patel's name and Noah Ringer's name are on the movie. But that isn't the point. The point is that a movie based on Asian culture (mostly Chinese, but also Japanese, Inuit, Tibetan) features non-Asians as the stars. To make matters worse, he cast most of the antagonists as Indian. Great, so now all of the dark-skinned people in the movie are bad-guys. This movie should have been a chance for Asian American actors to take steps in Hollywood. But it looks like things haven't really changed. It's "Kung Fu" all over again.

The movie was sub-par at best. The things that ruined the movie, even if the actors were Asian, were the bad acting, terrible dialogue/script, and atrocious pacing. The only saving graces were its special effects and okay martial arts. So, if you can get passed the bad acting part, it might be a decent movie. Or just disregard the acting by reminding yourself that it's just a kid's movie (which isn't a good excuse for bad acting).

/minirant

Anyway, so yeah. Moving along...

I've been discussing the meaning of people's names with my friends over the past few days. "Harold" means basically "leader of an army." My most favorite translation was "heroic leader." So how would I translate this into kanji to be used as my name (as a friend had suggested for my name stamp)? "Hero"?

More updates tomorrow. It's late! G'night!

Word of the day: 英雄　「えいゆう」　"eiyuu" which means "hero" or "great man".