a thousand words for solidarity

Regarding the issue of the Pink Dot counterprotest and the "why let a colour define you?" thing...

*Pink Dot is an annual event to celebrate "freedom to love".

This is not about a colour defining you. This is about a show of solidarity for people who have traditionally been marginalised and discriminated against. Sure, we could wear a mix of colour to Pink Dot, but that takes away the solidarity. Let me explain. 

The colour pink is to unite the attendees under a common idea - "freedom to love". Everyone is supporting that one idea. It doesn't matter if you hate the colour pink, if you're Asian or European, if you are an orphan, if you're failing out of school - the colour pink and the idea of "freedom to love" makes you the same as any other attendee at the event. 

I think it's a pretty cool thing. It's a special feeling you get when you look at someone and know for certain that they agree with you on this one thing. It must be a thousand times better for any LGBTQIA person to look at the mass of pink and think, "They all support me and my choices. All these people, they're fine with me being who I am".

(I don't mean to speak for the LGBTQIA, just as an ally who thinks people are being very stupid over this.)

And this is especially important when you think about what the LGBTQIA go through on a daily basis: slurs, bullying, denial and anger from their parents and loved ones. It is so important that we show them that there are people who support them. It isn't for no reason that the suicide rate for LGBTQIA teens are many times higher than heterosexual teens. 

(This is not to erase straight teens' suffering, but rather to highlight the LGBTQIA's suffering.)

When you think about this rationally - it's such an easy thing to put on a pink shirt, but it provides so much confidence for those who lack it. 

Now let's talk about the counterprotest. The idea is to wear white to support the sanctity of marriage - and we must remember that the sanctity of marriage is a religious idea. 

Disregarding the blatant stupidity of this counterprotest, namely:

1. Pink Dot is to support people who are literally offing themselves because society can't pull its head out of its arse, and you want to take this little thing away? You really have to promote your religious arsehole agenda on this particular day??

2. The sanctity of marriage is a religious idea. How many people are even religious, and who the fuck are you to impose your religion on others by shoving it in their faces?

3. The counterprotest is cruel. Support for the LGBTQIA does not constitute an attack against your religion. But your religious display constitutes an attack on their identity. 

4. It's just irrelevant. How is it relevant????????

I am of the opinion that I should gently try to prevent my friends and family from wearing white on that day. It's just a change of clothes, and it prevents those idiots from gaining unintended support. Wearing white, even though you have no intention to support the counterprotest, tells people a number of things.

1. The counterprotest will claim you as one of their own. At least mentally. They look at you and think: "Ah, another supporter. I must be right." Even though you did nothing but wear a white shirt. Humans seek self-confirmation and please just don't encourage them any more. Also, do you really want to be thought of as homophobic? No? Then just change a shirt. 

2. The Pink Dot attendees will also put you in the "counterprotesters" category. The LGBTQIA, especially, will be thinking: "There are so many counterprotesters. I must be wrong." Do you really want to add to their distress? Even if you don't actively support the LGBTQIA, do you want to be a dick and take away the one major event that is exclusively in support of them, in a conservative society where gay sex is illegal even if consensual? Also, do you want to be thought of as homophobic? No? Change your fucking shirt.

This is not about letting a colour define you, and this holds for both white and pink. On that day, either colour is a show of solidarity for one group or another, and you really don't want to be the ignorant douchebag wearing a colour you don't support and saying "don't let a colour define you!!" just to make a fucking point. 

(A friend literally said she thought the counterprotest was stupid but it was okay to wear white because "don't let a colour define you". That is actually kind of the point of Pink Dot, which associates "freedom to love" with the colour pink. And no one is letting a fucking colour define them. And is it that hard to not wear white on ONE FREAKING DAY really. I got a bit angry and we sort of agreed to disagree or at least not talk about it. She isn't going to be at the event anyway so for all practical purposes it's not very important to make that distinction to her right now.)

Because if you do that, you're saying the negligible concept of "not letting colour define you" (and does that even apply anywhere?) is MORE IMPORTANT than the happiness of the LGBTQIA. It's ERASURE in the worst way, at the event that is FOR THEM. That happens only ONCE A YEAR. 

Do you really have to do that on that one particular day in 365 days a years? Take your bullshit elsewhere.

Wear pink, not white. It's important. 

i think i am on a hiatus

today i got bored of studying (yes, i study. a little. sometimes.).

to make up for all the time that i am going to be absent from this blog here are a few pictures of miscellaneous things that i photographed when i was bored today.

was having tea. tea looked pretty.

the focus was hard

wanted to use as wallpaper for something idk

my desk currently. am trying to study. actually did study.

some rainbow looms that i did. somewhat ashamed that the tutorials are
all done by prepubescent girls while I (close to graduating from teenagerhood)
sit at home fumbling with the goddamn bands

shoutout to the group run by ian's friends who are nice and draw nice things.
they will be at the eoy conventions and i plan to commission them.
ian's friends are much nicer than he is (lol)

minnacon2014

Minnacon is some small-time convention that doesn't actually draw a lot of people (my basis of comparison is AFA or maybe EOY or even STGCC) but it's pretty okay I guess.

Ian made me go but he didn't show until after five because he went with his friend Mr Unmemorable to some Love Live's character's birthday event. Anyway I went with Gabrielle so it was okay. Kind of boring. Ian's female classmates had a booth and they were doing commissions. Their drawings are pretty good but by the time I went over I was already broke. So. I awkwardly said hi.

Afterwards another girl thought Gabrielle and I were from that booth and asked if we were going to Anime Matsuri (another small-time convention I bet) and complimented the drawings..........very awkward.

Anyway there was a booth setup by a certain university's comics and animation society, and the A3 prints were really nice, and so I bought two, and the dude (with awesome hair by the way) mistook Gabrielle and I for university students.... which was, again, rather awkward, but for once in my life I was mistaken to be older. Yesssss.

To continue with that dude - he went to draw on the graffiti wall afterwards and the drawing was bloody awesome and people kept staring (including me of course) and then after he was done someone wanted to take a picture of him with the drawing. So he was very awkwardly standing there and more and more people came to take pictures of him and his drawing and his face started twitching and I saw and I started laughing and I think he saw me so he started laughing and then he made his escape.

look at it. it's so pretty. towards the end he kind of fucked up though and he said "shit" but
whatever if i can't spot the mistake then it's probably not that terrible

close up

his signature. can someone stalk that please.

The convention hall was pretty dark and there weren't many cosplayers so. The anime karaoke level was pretty high though. Better than what EOY's level used to be. Or the single SOY that I went to before it was cancelled.

Gabrielle and I spent some time being bored, having lunch, stoning in front of the stage, etc. After Ian arrived with Mr Unmemorable (no I still don't know his name and I still can't recognise him) we played a board game at some section of the hall. It was called Hanabi and was pretty confusing I think.

Some pictures follow.

gabrielle was excited about this. but is this denko it looks like denko.
reminds me that i never finished denko. what happened to denko anyway.

no game no life cosplay. i have been pimping this anime like you wouldn't believe.
am ecstatic to see a cosplay and quite a lot of fanart and merchandise.

matt smith love. am i right about the doctor though
bc i have never watched doctor who i would hate for angry fans to come after me

a sexy grell. a real man. no im not kidding this is a dude. v good. v nice dude.

cute female pink monobear. i still don't get the deal though. i never played danganronpa
i only watched the anime. am i missing out on something.

halfway through a spiderman appeared and gabrielle was kinda excited so.

ahhh, no game no life cosplays make me feel fulfilled.
what do you mean i am creepy.

v cute inori. at least i think it is inori i can be hard to tell. also i gave up on guilty crown
the protagonist was so fucking stupid oh god.

the cute little one from diabolik lovers. diabolik lovers seem popular.
why though. the art is nice but oh god it is so tedious i almost gave up.
there are too many dudes for me to remember any names.

more cute art

okay so this is what i bought and believe me it is bloody expensive i am broke

1: Rin-Len A3 poster set of eight, plus card stickers

2: One Kill la Kill A3 poster and one Free! A3 poster

3: Two "baka" badges and three Mekakucity Actors stickers

4: One Death Note poker card set and one Free! poker card set

5: One Sora A5 postcard and one Shiro A5 postcard and one Jibril bookmark

model united nations

So I attended my first MUN not as a delegate, but as the press.

Somehow, coincidentally, both my CCAs ended up being press-related. The editorial club and photography club were both asked to cover the three-day event, so I spent the first two days typing down everything the Human Rights Council said, and then frantically trying to write an article to be printed for the next day, and the last day roaming around five venues all alone because my partner photographer was sick.

The editorial club had three issues: pre-MUN, first day, and second day. Why wasn't the third day covered? Because no one cares. There's no fourth day to read the third day's news.

Also I found my favourite delegate in a suit (MUNs are suit galores and I feast my eyes): the DPRK delegate of HRC. He wears a suit really well (I think he just has good posture and body language) and he's kind of evil-looking, which it seems only I can appreciate (as tragically others do not share my views).

Unsurprisingly almost everyone who looked older than me turned out to be younger. This is a travesty and I should hurry up and look a bit more mature.

(If I put your face up but you don't want your face up please tell me and I will take it down.)

fancy gavel and everything. mainly used for faux-serious "laughing is not in order"

much shenanigans. also many motions to "adjourn debate for lunch" and motion to exile UK delegate intermittently for reasons unknown to me (but it was probably for passing notes with pick-up lines) 

my favourite DPRK 

look at all the people in the HRC

pretty girl

enthusiastic voting amidst much laughter

editorial club's newsletter featuring the mock supervolcano eruption crisis

love for a male notepasser

my angelin baby

medan ovia

Last week I went to Lake Toba in Medan, Indonesia, for some service learning thing. It was kind of terrible, but not very disappointing because I wasn't expecting much anyway.

Here's some information (read: warnings) for the average first-world traveler:

1. Everyone smokes. By everyone, I kind of actually mean everyone. Teenagers, men, women. They smoke everywhere, all the time. And they don't smoke good cigarettes. They smoke those really cheap and terrible cigarettes that give off huge clouds of noxious fumes that make you wonder if they're actually inhaling anything at all. Or, like, just fake-smoking like actors sometimes do. Seriously. It is bad.
2. You may want to get a local card for your phone. Because there's no internet, and whatever internet you get at the hotel is likely to be intermittent and extremely slow. Sometimes it's oversubscribed and you can forget about any internet at all. Data roaming's not much of an option because it's kind of really expensive.
3. Hot water? What hot water? Because Lake Toba is at a high altitude (Sinabung was at an even higher altitude) there's not much water pressure. Or hot water. At Sinabung all we got was a pathetic trickle of lukewarm water. It took forever to shower with somewhat less cold water, and by the end you're shivering like crazy anyway so you might as well just give up. Heads up: the hot water isn't 24/7.
4. Much insects. I am not kidding you. Flies are everywhere and so are ants. You might want to seal up your food somewhere lest you discover ants crawling about inside your bag. You need long pants, and/or an abundance of insect repellent. Good insect repellent. Trust me, you will be using it a lot.
5. I forget. There are more warnings in the post though, so read on.

Anyway, we were there to build a water tank for some school's toilets (school number 17 I think) (side note: usually their toilets are non-flushing, i.e. you need to scoop up water and pour it into the squatting toilet to manually flush it) but there were already workers building it and they just kind of pacified us and let us try out cementing things but we kind of sucked and so had to leave everything to the workers basically.

We were also supposed to teach the primary school kids a bit of English, but due to some fuck ups - like having two out of the four days we were supposed to teach being holidays, and overestimation of the children's English level, and lack of translators, and bad weather, etc - we had to do lots of improvisation. Which was utter hell because I really don't have any energy to deal with children so it was more like me teaching for half and hour and then escaping to go take photos.

Oh yeah, for some reason, I was designated as the trip's "official photographer" (probably because I'm in the photography club). I use quotation marks because I don't actually think there was supposed to be a designated photographer but whatever. It gave me an excuse to loiter around places that I shouldn't really be at. 

Also people kept borrowing my camera and taking photos which were usually too dark or too bright because I like using manual. Also now that the trip is over they keep asking me for photos and I'm like seriously I don't know what the shit went on with my camera, okay? I don't know who took all of those one thousand three hundred pictures.

The food was subpar and extremely dubious and almost everyone had a bout of illness (mainly nausea and vomiting and fever). The tap water there is not safe. IT IS NOT SAFE. Do not even attempt. Do not even boil the tap water and drink it. Almost everyone who fell sick fell sick because of food made with dubious water. Also be careful of the food because you never know if a fly was on it two seconds ago. I found three separate bugs in three separate pieces of bread, which almost made me forswear bread forever. 

Anyway when we left the school people were very emotional and stuffs and crying lots etc, which made me a little uncomfortable because I felt a total of zero. Zero anything. In fact I couldn't wait to go back to high-tech civilization. I believe that I have mentioned before that I get extremely uncomfortable spending prolonged periods of time in places without accessible internet and very tall glass buildings. Also clean toilets.

The good part about Medan was that things are really very cheap. You have to bargain though, with roadside stalls. Try for half-price, and then walk away and ask another stall, which will most likely be selling the exact same thing. Attempt to convey to them that the other stall said that x price was okay. Ask for lower price. Profit. 

Even the supermarket sells things at lower prices. I am really not kidding you. Oh but be careful of airport food - even airport food is not always reliable. We ate at A&W before departure, and it was extremely disappointing. My cheeseburger wasn't even warm, and the cheese was... not even melted. Deep sigh.

Anyway. I made up some mushy non-concrete standard crap for my reflections and slept on the flight. Thus concludes my Medan post. Some photos follow.

where we stayed for the first five nights

roommate being too athletic for me

fancy chandelier in the dining hall, the fanciness is a lie

look at the view wow

some grass

some flowers

someone said this is native to samosir island but idk

the principal's dog

more flowers

a hen sitting over her many chicks

roommate teaching hey soul sister lyrics

our primary 6 class going wow

dog

the primary 5 class playing fruit twister

it's a real pristine goat

flower

this thing is fucking huge it's terrifying

more flower

grass pic that i wanted to use for backgrounds

stone pic that i wanted to use for backgrounds

kids playing captain's ball

flower

another flower

i got a customised keychain made - he's cutting out "helen"

this is some cool flower that grows in a ball

it comes in many different colours

another flower

don't judge me i just really like flowers ok

the ball flower

really cute cat at the second hotel we stayed at

more cute cat

dewdrops

more ball flower

baby cow. also cow poop really fucking stinks

classy  jolene

look at her so pretty

ok last picture of ball flower