Lovely videos: funny, sweet, and/or just plain awesome.

[animeartistjo]

First, some link dumps:

The ideal casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender

See the effects of this generation's possessing mp3 players and iPods: a hearing test.

A comic describing the typical college student, newly graduated.

An neat-o retro dress I wish I could try on

This is a clearly biased source, but Arizona School Demands Black, Latino Students' Faces on Mural be Changed to White. Oh, Arizona, you're regressing. What was that thing called? Oh, yeah... The Civil Rights Movement!

And on a related note, what if the Winchester brothers were POC(people of color) and happened to have a case in Arizona?

Avatar: The Last Airbender not only was full of race fail and a terrible movie, but had a douchebag of a director who completely misses the whole point of the Race Fail activism.

More reasons why Twilight is made of fail, as if there weren't already enough. More also in the comments.

History shows homosexuality is not a product of these modern times.


She proves that the Governator shouldn't have pulled funding on education:

The Newsies dance to Bad Romance:

Super Junior promoting their country for the World Cup! And if this video shows the average, Korean people are gorgeous.

When watching this, I actually want a puppy just like this one!

I guess Dodge doesn't sell cars in Britain.

Would you slide if you saw this on you commute?

Music made by tools:

Craftsman Music Experiment - Craftsman Labs @ Yahoo! Video

Perfect for those GIANT parking lots. Careful with the eggs though. And keep your eyes peeled around 1:25. ;)

Optical illusions are marvelous!

For the gamers out there, Mario made classy:

We all just need a little bit of love:

Comments

[rykaine.livejournal.com]

RE: the student mural

It wasn't the school that wanted the students' faces made whiter. The mural was a representation of actual students in the school, and the school wanted them painted as such. It was drive-bys and locals who pitched a fit and said the students were "too black" or "too brown" and needed to be made whiter.

I really hate all the criticism and heat that Arizona is taking. It annoys me how they're being forced to stand alone and face an attack from their own damn country and president. It's disgusting.

ETA
I never understood the criticism over Airbender casting. Granted I've only ever seen like 3 episodes of the series, but my general impression of the characters based on those viewings was always more an Indian ethnicity. /shrug

Barring that: the entire series is fiction. They live in fictional countries and kingdoms, with fictional heritages and histories where there's no such that as "asian" anyway, so to say that the characters naturally have to be and should be Asian simply because of how they're colored/drawn/whatever imposing its own racism into mix. It's ridiculous.

[animeartistjo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm very much relieved to hear that. I already figured out the source was biased, but this does bring up the point that often times, diversity is pretty much forced down our throats. I've never been to Arizona myself (the ignorant speaks!), but perhaps it's like the South? Where the majority race is Caucasian the diversity would not reflect reality?

Arizona's actions are the first to be so definite and that's probably what's causing a lot of the uproar. A lot of Californians mutter about illegal immigrants taking away jobs from the natural-born citizens, so we are a bit hypocritical. Still, other news articles I've read have given me the impression that what Arizona has done is endangering the rights of minorities, the legal ones, somehow.

___

The flak about Airbender is that everything was white-washed. Truth to be told, the creators of the show said it was based on Inuit culture, but I really just wanted to see a block buster that had a minority/non-Caucasian-dominated cast. Too many movies have only token-black, token-Asian, token-whatever characters and the heroes are, across the board 99% white. Unless the movie is imported from another country. If I want to see a movie with an Asian hero, I have to watch a Chinese movie with subtitles and being Asian American, that sucks.

As to show being completely fictional, that's true, but there is a very obvious Eastern influence and making the cast white (Katara's skin glows in the dark, seriously), loses a lot of the atmosphere. Also, there are different nations, yet all the main cast/characters, each who represent one of the nations, are white? This just isn't realistic when you're trying to build a whole other world. The Earth had its different races, doesn't it?

Also, the show uses Chinese characters--it's Asian.

*butts in*

[lilian-cho.livejournal.com]

Although the movie did cast a few Indian characters, they're cast as the evil characters. There were other minorities cast as minor characters (a few seconds of African American actors. We're supposed to applaud that, really?)

I have no problem with all-white casts when it comes to LotR and Narnia, because they _are_ based on European cultures. But having white actors play the main characters in an Asian culture-based series is just...insulting =/
It reminds me of that Elvis movie where the "African American" female protagonist was played by a white woman in black make-up. Or Charlie Chan movies only taking off when they start casting white guys instead of Asian guys as Charlie Chan >_>

Disclaimer: I'm not in the Avatar fandom and never watched a single episode, but one can hardly avoid the racefail discussions sprouting all over LJ these past few years.

[lilian-cho.livejournal.com]

Finally got around to watching all the videos in this post X-D

The dog & baby tag was a HIT.

I noticed deconstructed T-shirts worn by the Korean cheerleaders *g*

I WANNA SLIDE DOWN TOO <3