… is Amy.
I asked the collective conscious who the biggest Yu Aoi fan was, and it pulled this up.
I’ll take it.
Amy is the biggest Yu Aoi fan.
Archives For internet
Oh, wow. Look at this ridiculously good-looking photo of Dita Von Teese. What a face. What a shot. Bless Beau Nelson for this shot.
credits to Dita Von Teese’s FB, who -by the way- won’t let me access her Linktree because it says it goes against community standards. Facebook has become insane. It was bad before, now it’s worse. It’s almost nearly unusable now.
It took a while, but
Happy 1000th fan!
If you aren’t following the list yet, you might discover a gem or two!
My only Letterboxd anticipated message came in the other day, but I took a little bit longer to post because the better side of my OCD got to me.
But here it is!
I went on a Stephen Chow binge, and got to watch a bunch of Hrishikesh Mukherjee films for MUBI. Not to be the Debbie Downer of the terrible 2020, but I hope 2021 picks up. This is the first time in my movie-watching history that I only have one single 4-star rating in my Year Films Ranked list. Two titles if you consider Marona’s Fantastic Tale.
This 2021, I have decided to shut off social media and restart blogging once again. It doesn’t matter if it’s into a blackhole of information. I’ve started with this Spanish translation of a review for Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do, since the film is in rotation at the Indian entertainment channel ZeeMundo. We also have a proper Spanish title for Haider (!).
Greetings, my fellow lurkers, if you are lurking still. Knowing that I haven’t updated anywhere and I’m hardly active on social media, I just wanted to say that I haven’t died and haven’t been swallowed by the Earth. I hope 2020 didn’t wreck you, and that 2021 finds you in a more… calm path.
As I sit here making plans of wanting to do a lot of things, and then getting nowhere, I reminisce the days of internet freedom when roaming through websites was like the wild west. And that’s when I discovered Xiami— according to WP word search find, the earliest mention of the music site on the blog dates back to 2010… with an even older mention of forgotten HaoTing. lol Since then, over a decade ago and many an indie Chinese music discovery, Xiami had been part of my daily life for thousands and thousands of days.
So it is with great sadness, but hardly any surprise, that I report that Xiami will be no more… on February 5th this year, to mark my 35ths birthday, nonetheless. End of an era for my music streaming, end of the era… of my youth, I suppose. With my only consolation prize that a lot of Chinese music is already available on not only iTunes and Spotify, but also on YouTube. I just need to re-find them and subscribe to whatever their channels are. It will be, of course, a lot more difficult to discover brand new Chinese music.
Happy late holidays and New Year, everyone!
My most awaited Letterboxd e-mail came yesterday with my 2019 movie-data. Though my writing input has definitely not improved, cutting down on Mamamoo stuff has increased my movie watching habits, for sure.
Compared to 2018, I logged 480 films (though over 50 or even many more could be short films), which represents a 23% increase. In terms of hours, there was an increment of over 100hrs or 16%. This increase still doesn’t match my 2015 levels, when I reached 530 logged films (9.5% short) or clocked 959hrs (14% short)… but it’s getting there. I am still at 2017 New-To-Me level of movies, though.
My most-watched actor was Glenn Close because I went on a marathon of her movies because I really thought that she could win the Oscar, not that I wasn’t pleasantly surprised to see Olivia Colman win for The Favourite. And Francois Ozon was my most-watched director because MUBI programmed many of his films, including Les Amants Criminels, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Young & Beautiful, and L’Amant Double.
And as my writing output has been so poor, I haven’t written any End of the Year (or Decade) posts. Gomen.
After years [1][2][3] of data; Yes, it’s Mamamoo’s fault. The positives, though, I have registered 31 more hours than I did last year with an extra 18 movies. My movie-watching in general got better because I managed to watch 132 brand new 2018 movies (compared to the 103 in 2017).
This year, I didn’t make any particular movie goal. Though, some of my favorite movies this year were Indian, as reflected by my latest highest ratings. No one has been able to surpass my love for Rene Liu’s Us and Them so far, though. It’s been an incredible year for… not movies made by Netflix, but they have expanded their distribution library enough to make it interesting.
My goal for this year is to increase the titles I watch; seeing that from this interview at Film Independent, the guy from IMDb states that “You should feel disappointed if you haven’t seen 700 movies in a particular year [laughs].” O.o I don’t feel half bad about registering half the amount of movies the guy from IMDb watches. Just saying.
Damn, I missed ya, Gaji~ I still miss Seju and all her drama, but Pet Aesthetics (애완의 미학) is as close as it’s gonna get for a while (at least), and I did see what you did there *wink wink nudge nudge* Also, I missed those *badump badump* The art, the aesthetic. Damn it.
I do wonder… are you gonna make me cry? lol
Interesting! I figured I watched less movies this 2017 than I did in 2016, but turns out I got a couple more films/hours logged. And there were a couple more titles that I didn’t log because they’re not on Letterboxd. They just happened to be not current movies, I suppose.
I’m still, currently, very much obsessed with Mamamoo, though. LOL That’s 30% of my movie-watching time doing Mamamoo-related stuff.
2018 doesn’t look to be an improvement to 2015 levels xD
I’m also not sure whether Ryo Kase is my Most Watched Actor this year, considering I went on a non-logged marathon of Shweta Menon movies— like 4 or 5. But, once again, latest highest-rated movies reflect some of my movie-watching; a little American indie, a little Indian and a little Chinese.
I did find enough for my usual Top30 Favorite Film Discovery post :)
And a super lengthy post on my favorite films this year, which has already changed xDDDDDD
There was a time, a long time ago, when I really took to streaming music. My music buying habits, but specially my music download habits, changed to basically streaming to the point when licensing and catalogs began changing, and I found my music collection shrinking. In the end, I started downloading once again.
I have come to the realization that I buy less and less physical albums, or it takes me longer to buy them. :(
As I found myself deeper and deeper into Kpop fandom once again, so deep into Mamamoo fandom that I begun to get irked by fans who publicly post about their illegal downloads AND complain about numbers of comebacks/group activities. I ended up writing this nonchalant post about music earnings, as well as other Mamamoo activities fans can support besides comebacks [1][2][3]. Yes, I’ve become that type of fan. The old one. LOL
As a grown-up who loves the arts, I always try to remind people that if they love and support their artists that they should buy instead of stream because streaming doesn’t pay. I was literally shook when Hyori mentioned that she had learned that PSY’s Gangnam Style only made $38k [1]; even though I knew some of the horror stories like the one of musician Lee Lang (이랑) who, during her acceptance speech for winning Best Folk Song at the Korean Music Awards, stated that she had only made $370 USD in total earnings on the month of January, so she decided to auction her award starting from the base price of her rent [1].
You can support Lee Lang by buying her album, Playing God (신의 놀이), on Bandcamp :)
And to my surprise, one of my favorite groups this year~~~ the lovely girls from Bolbbalgan4, who are considered digital monsters with their songs almost always charting within the Top10 of Melon, South Korea’s most used music site, had made only $61k USD by August this year [1]. Red Diary Page.1 didn’t drop until a month later, and all 5 songs in the album charted within the Top15. But that’s still besides the point. The point being that your faves don’t make money because you stream music on YouTube or Apple Music or Spotify.
So stop demanding expensive music videos that can cost from $100k-$500k for an average medium size budget, or go up to $1M for the splashy ones that we don’t often see nowadays. At the height of the music video era in the 90s, Michael Jackson and Madonna’s most expensive videos hovered the $5M budget without adjustments for inflation [1]. Stop demanding multiple comebacks a year with infinite number of physical prints (these cost production budgets AND storage budget for large stocks) that you will be waiting for price drops and re-sellers.
So now, let’s do some math~
Let’s say a physical album, a regular jewel case priced at -let’s say- $10 USD. According to prices in 2017— Apple takes a 30% cut [1], Bandcamp takes a 15% cut for digital sales and a 10% for merch [1], whereas CD baby takes a 9% cut off digital sales and $4 USD off physical sales [1]. That means that by selling a $14USD album, the independent artist makes $10USD. In the parallel universe in which your fave is an independent, they keep $7 of those $10 in iTunes, but if there’s a label, the artist (meaning singer) probably gets $1 of those $10. If they’re their own lyricist, musician, producer or sound engineer, fees are different.
Streaming is a whole different beast— according to this post on Digital Music News from 2016, to make a single dollar $1 in Tidal, Google Play, Apple Music and Deezer; you gotta play the song +180 times. 196, to be exact, for Apple Music and Deezer. Make that 279 times on Spotify, 483 times on Vevo, 766 times on Soundcloud, and… at the end of the list, YouTube, where you gotta play songs 776 times to make that one dollar. That means a song/music video that has 100 million views on its YouTube official channel, has made roughly $125k USD, which would be made by selling 12.5k physical albums on CD Baby.
So remember, the next time you complain about X official store prices or limited stocks, it’s because all adds up to the price. If you found a cheap album, it’s because someone along the way lost money.
Yes, I’m low-key talking about Bizent LOL I’ve compared prices with YesAsia, and since I don’t get YesAsia free shipping, that’s paying double shipping because the YA price includes the Bizent $20 shipping fee. I’d rather that money go directly to Mamamoo. xD
