Five Questions from babybixler …. finally answered!

5 Questions Meme from M!

If you want 5 interview questions from me, just post a comment to this entry. I’ll comment with your questions, which you repost (including answers) to your journal.

1. “Fish-shaped ethylbenzene”?
It’s from Portal! These eyes fall off of GLaDOS in the last room, and you have to pick them up and drop them in the incinerator. If you pay attention during the fight, they all say different things. The blue one recites a recipe for cake. I put the whole text in my livejournal. And here’s a video of the eye reciting it. hahahha
Candy coated peanut butter pieces… shaped like fish.

2. How did you get started in music/singing, and what has kept you going in it (I have been feeling a bit musically starved lately)?
My parents aren’t musicians, but they bought us a lot of cassette tapes with music for kids… wee sing, chinese folk songs…
I started going to Mrs. Tan’s choir in like 2nd grade. It was a local chinese children’s christian choir. (I had no religion in my life at this time besides this choir.) She’d point at a voice part, and that part would stand up and sing. I remember she made the motion for all of us to sit down, then she pointed at me, so I stood up, but nobody else did, so I sat down again, alarmed, but she pointed again, so I stood up, and that was the first time anyone ever told me I was a singer. That was my first solo, in “all things bright and beautiful,” so I guess that’s how I got started. I never really took formal voice lessons… there was training from Mrs. Tan, infrequent group trips to her house in Salinas, eating Lemonheads in the car, giggling at myself in the full-length mirror she made us sing in front of so we were aware of our posture… she told me it took time for her to learn to control her diaphragm, and also it took time for her to take Jesus Christ into her heart. I was confused a lot as a little kid.
I started piano in 2nd grade too. Mrs. Rae was awesome. The pinnacle of my piano career was playing this polichinelle by rachmoninoff (obviously the video is not of me). So it was all classical, and she crusaded against the kind of pedagogy where you “learn to play by ear” or “by rote”, so I never looked at that. Nowadays, I don’t have a piano, and I’m way out of practice, and I am completely useless at trying to do anything with pop songs. Functionally I don’t play at all. haha.
What keeps me going: http://sites.google.com/site/spottheoctopus/members
We still meet every week. Yes, we do! Also, we have goals. Yes.
Actually, there is also my old roommate Derek, who I lived with on Channing Way (next to DG DG Sweeter Than A Bumblebee). He and his musical partner Tvu are famous hip hop stars now. I went to a concert they performed at in December, and they’re really inspiring.
Somebody interviewed them for the Go!Style event (that I went to last Friday, but missed), and his video’s outro song is one that I sing the hook on!!! ahahahah http://www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=472097685295&ref=nf hahahahhah yayyy

3. I didn’t know you were from San Jose! Where in the world do you think would be the most awesome place to grow up?
Oh dear. I have no idea! I was born on the east coast (rhode island’s where it’s at, baby!!!!), but my family moved out here when I was 4. I definitely had a charmed suburban childhood in San Jose, but I hated high school and did not excel in a competitive environment. I haven’t lived in that many places… I’m dating a native Berkeleyan, born and raised, and we have very different perspectives on things… despite this, we’ve reached a lot of the same conclusions about values and the world and stuff, which is one reason I like him I guess.
That’s not exactly an answer. Maybe I would have liked to grow up on the beach in Hawaii or something. haha.

4. Top 5 games of the last 5 years and why?
DON’T MAKE ME CHOOSE AHHH. Well, I could go the easy route, and pick the obvious.
– World of Warcraft. It ate my life. It’s good because it can really be all things to all people.
– Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, because it’s the first FPS i ever played. The single-player is done really well–the story is actually compelling
– the chain-picture-caption game, also known in other circles as eat poop u cat.
– This is predictable, but I’d put Portal on my random list. The writing is amazing. It’s a very short game, but the plot is fantastic; everything makes sense, you get extremely attached to things and then the game makes fun of you for getting attached, and you love every second of it. The gameplay is like nothing else out there and every puzzle is fun. It’s witty and irreverent and sensitive and whimsical and that’s why everybody likes it so much. Also, cake. Also, JONATHAN COULTON.
– Agricola, because Settlers is more than five years ago. Everybody loves a game where you have farm animals, and renovate your house, and go to the market, and have babies. But mostly farm animals. SHEEP. We made our own set of animals out of sculpey. The game is really really complicated, but every action is simple, so it’s a melding of the easy-to-understand and the incredibly-deep. I haven’t even ever played the hardcore version with more professions =(
– Race for the Galaxy. That’s six D: When this game came out, we did nothing else. It’s like playing a solitaire game, but not… you have to think of competitiveness in a different way, and keep track of what everybody else is doing, while trying to maximize your own efficiency and make bets.

Actually, the above games aren’t really about me… they’re about what everyone around me was really into. haha

5. Should they make The Subtle Knife into a movie? I say this on the heels of Twilight and it’s, uh, very different message about sexuality and morality!
Guh…. I think Nicole Kidman is so glamorous, and Daniel Craig is so good-looking and lethal-like, and that girl they chose for Lyra looks so perfect, and O THE STEAMPUNK, THE GLORIOUS STEAMPUNK, and the armored bears… but I was really let down by the first movie. The girl who played Lyra had to carry the whole thing. While she did it with considerable good cheer, every scene plodded along, and all the beautiful sets with their gilded windows and shiny curved metal ornaments felt like fluff unsupported by any sense of passion or drive. Which is what the books were all about, passion and experience and growing up and burning curiosity and being alive.
I think they’d never be able to make a movie where the child protagonists kill God accidentally, or where a creepy albino monk stalks a young girl, or 12-year-olds have to have sex in order to save the world. It would have to have all of the anti-organized religion stuff completely stripped away. At least Iorek still ripped off Iofur’s bottom jaw. Yeow.
How would they do the whole third book, with the mulefa and stuff? I THINK I read that Mary Malone is completely cut out of the stage adaption, with Serafina Pekkala taking over her role, but I don’t remember whether the mulefa were in the stage version. I guess they’d have to make it a conflict between the witches and the Kingdom, instead.
I think they *will* make it into a movie, but it’ll be flatter than the books, not the next lord of the rings (like I was hoping it would be, sort of, even though I know it can’t)

I’ve never read Twilight, though I have read these recaps.