From their ideology, you'd think Christian anarchists were a bunch of delusionally idealistic, paranoid, hypocritical, theocratic, close-minded, solipsist crackpot zealots who oppose the state to the point of moral neglect.
From their ideology, you'd think Christian libertarians were a bunch of principled, devout, well-read, concilatory philosopher-kings who understand the realities of human nature and attempt, perhaps misguidedly, to reconcile it with the necessity of the state in a rational way.
Somehow, each side of the theocratic small-government camp has ended up with the other side's followers.

(For the record, I am neither.)

In a perfect world, Christian libertarians would behave like Christian anarchists, and Christian anarchism would have little reason to exist.
Alas, both philosophies are predicated on the existence of an imperfect world.

There's no questioning, however, that Christian anarchists have more impressive iconography.



This is the logo of Jesus Radicals, a site devoted to "challenging the church's involvement in the idols of miltiarism, capitalism, and the state." Yes. Your eyes do not deceive you. That is indeed the anarchist raised fist with a hole through the wrist.



Jesus in the style of Che Guevara, subverting the historical roots of anarchism and socialism with popular iconography of the Passion. From The Jesus Manifesto, which is far too sane and open-minded (and astonishingly free of kookery) to be a real radical leftist site. Their title banner is pretty clever, too.



Image from The Jesus Manifesto's current front page article Letters From A Common Sense Atheist series, which contains--unabridged--an exchange of letters between site owner Mark Van Steenwyk and Common Sense Atheism's Luke Muehlhauser. The letters are posted on both sites, and the debate is astonishingly respectful and insightful, with each participant intelligent, well-read, and well-informed about the other's side--none of the dewy-eyed naivete of undergrads discovering their side's viewpoints for the first time, or the typical befuddlement as to why anyone would think differently. A refreshing change from the usual exchange of insults, personal attacks, and canned arguments that dominate 99.98% of all Internet debate. And it's weirdly appropriate that their names are Mark and Luke.

Not only am I amazed that Steenwyk and Muehlhauser present each others' letters so candidly on each other's sites, I'm impressed by Steenwyk's humility in choosing this pastiche of the Sistine Chapel ceiling to represent their dialogue. It's a little insulting to his own point of view but it dramatically frames the context of their conversation. The digital wristwatch on the atheist's wrist is a nice touch.



An increasingly popular Christian anarchist symbol, which repurposes the Spanish Revolution circled A to be an alpha and an omega. (This and other Christian anarchist icons at Squidoo.)



...okay, even I agree that this one makes no sense.

• 21:36 Well the first day was fine. It seems fairly relaxed in this new job thank goodness!! Lets see what day 2 brings :) #
• 00:21 Meh stupid jet lag again :( .... #fb #

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• 15:50 I adore my nephews, but this Seattle wknd was a strong reminder to never impregnate anybody. Unclehood is way more painless than fatherhood. #

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I hate these memes, but this one seems to be genuinely useful in Getting To Know People Better, so.

Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."

• I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

Here is what theotherbaldwin asked me:

1) Where is your favorite non-home place in the city to chillax?
2) Out of all the dudes & dudettes in the Double Dragon series, why THAT GUY as a usericon?
3) Do you have anything like a favorite dish or sandwich or something that serves as "comfort food"?
4) Favorite puzzle game?
5) How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

And here are my answers:

1) The Bowery Poetry Club. Cheap sandwiches, coffee, vegan smoothies, and free poetry 'zines out front; a bar and a coffeehouse-ish performance space out back. Books everyone from popular avant-garde filmmakers to homeless beat poets to high school bands. It reminds me of the Cat and the Cream, Oberlin's on-campus coffeehouse and performance space, but my emotional attachment to the BPC runs deeper than that. I'm not really sure why, but it feels like home.
2) I have a coat, shirt, and pair of jeans that look exactly like my icon, and I used to wear them around campus. I even used to have the same haircut. The likeness is similar enough that some non-gamers told me they thought it was a portrait. Also, though the dude is apparently really well trained--he's one of the very few enemies in the game with two different attacks, and he can duck punches and jump out of a helicopter--it never does him any good, because he's always placed on the edge of a rooftop or on the ladder of a fire escape or under a spiked ceiling, where one well-timed hit will knock him out. His perpetually shitty luck endears him to me. He's like the one ninja from action movies of that era who gets a five-second nunchaku kata just so it will seem more awesome when the hero kicks him into a grain thresher. Additionally, he has a cool four-frame walk cycle, and I like walking.

Incidentally, there was this one time in college when I was playing DD2 and jqsilver's girlfriend saw me beating the shit out of my icon in Stage 2. Her exact words: "I don't know if I can take this. This is too surreal."
3) Meatball heroes! The real stuff, drenched in marinara, no cheese, on a toasted baguette--not the limp soggy phallus they serve you at Subway. There were no meatball heroes in Taiwan. The very concept was foreign. And they existed in Ohio, but they weren't half as good. When I finally made it back to the eastern seaboard in 2007 and had my first New York meatball hero in ten years, it felt like I had reached the end of a long, painful journey.
4) Tough call. Probably Tetris Blast. Only puzzle game to keep my interest past level 300--and the music and battle mode characters were fantastic.
5) Stroke a cat.

"sometimes when it's over, it's just over" Why is that so revolutionary? I mean, it is. There's something within us that allows us to believe that we should be able to change the world in forceful powerful waves, without changing ourselves. And when things aren't going wrong, we don't seem to have that desire to change anything that's in the back of our mind.

Yet another round of video games that stimulate the intellect!

September 12. Perhaps unintentionally, this is not only a commentary on the War on Terror but on genre conventions of video games themselves--that uncomfortable moral neutrality generated by a medium that simplifies warfare to, "There is a dot/polygon/sprite. Click on it to remove it from the game."

A possible inspiration for this game: this grisly 2004 Iraq War video, shot from the gun camera of an Apache attack helicopter, of two armed Iraqi insurgents being intercepted by heavy machine gun fire. Not for the faint of heart, this clip is a rare unsanitized, unadulterated glimpse of the brutality of war--even when no civilians are involved--from a first person perspective. It's interesting that developer Gonzalo Frasca took this kind of thing and made a really heavy-handedly pacifist game, whereas Infinity Ward saw similar footage and made the AC130 Spectre night missions in Call of Duty 4. (To Infinity Ward's credit, there's a traumatically numb element to those CoD4 missions, too--but I fear that it went over most gamers' heads, as by that point in the game you're all pumped up on adrenaline in "woo killin' stuff" mode.)

More subtle, but by the same author: Madrid. This one almost made me cry.

Ian Bogost, associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has written an interesting review of I Can End Deportation, a controversial game about immigration policy that I didn't really care for, that touches on the idea of "rhetoric of failure"--a concept first explored by University of Notre Dame associate English professor Ewa Ziarek in a 1996 book on Kafka, reappropriated to refer to the message of a game that can't be won. The rhetoric of failure is such a powerful way to illustrate an impossible system to people accustomed to the conventions of more traditional video games (clear achievable objectives, meaningful player decisions, suspension of moral disbelief, and so on), that Bogost argues it is already becoming overused. Interesting.

Curled in velveteen
sweet blossoms damp in gentle dew
waiting to spring forth
and implode nectarine beauty
upon an anticipating world.




Tom and his friend Joe have been writing poems every day. Or every other day. Either way, they've compiled a very large collection of really great poetry that has gotten progressively better. It seems like as with everything else, practice does make you better, even when it comes to writing. So much for that inspirational, get your butt off your computer and start doing something productive post from last time. This month I've successfully been absolutely unproductive. I blame too many crazy things going on, despite the crazy things only happening this past week or so. Thank God Tom keeps me sane; too many things have left me pretty short fused and ready to unleash fury-unimagineable to everything in sight.

I've learned that I'm not a manipulative person, but I do find ways to plan ahead and defend myself. It's good to not feel like a victim of a hostile environment, rather, a person who is prepared for the worst. People's opinions of me still affect me too much, although they don't affect my own views about myself. I have trouble finding a lasting connection with people, because I very rarely offer the other person a glimpse of who I really am. I've been trying to change that, drop those defenses. I've found that people still like me for who I am without those guards, but its hard to be yourself when you constantly have to remind yourself to be yourself.

Do I trust some and get fooled by phoniness,
Or do I trust nobody and live in loneliness? - Linkin Park

I'm terrible at keeping in touch with people. I'd like to blame genetics or upbringing, because my parents have pretty much been the same way. It really comes down to a choice though; do I choose to call someone out of the blue and risk awkward phone conversations? Try to keep an online conversation going until one of us trails off and disappears with an elusive "brb"? This aversion to risk is precisely why I am where I am right now. Not that I've ever had to risk anything big; every time I play poker or Texas Hold 'em and I take a risk, I never win. I think that's why I don't take risks. In a world where I also can't seem to control much of what happens in my life, this brings lots of internal conflicts and issues.

Yeah, contacting people is a risk. I feel like I should have a reason to contact people.


This post clearly makes no sense. I'm tired.

From a facebook comment discussion thread with Jamie. Feel free to disagree in the comments--I welcome constructive theological debate. (Key word being constructive; the Second Hundred Years' War wasn't. Aside from the United States being founded in the crossfire, that is.)

( Read more... )

• 22:30 My lovely oscar sat on my knee :) twitpic.com/ot6ak #
• 22:31 @TheXFactor dear Lucie.. It's a travisty your out!! I will miss you xx #
• 00:20 Hmmm new job tomorrow.. And I still can't sleep. Darn jet lag :( #fb #

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http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?c=513

under pressure from the CBI
and under the confused assumption that we can carry on consuming power as we do now into the future
and too afraid to think out of their own isolated political fuzzy cloud
the british government is commiting to build a new round of nuclear power stations
for which we dont have the money.
great.
just perfect.
well done fellas.
you've really thought about this haven't you?

Greenpeace on nuclear

Friends of the Earth on nuclear


Thom

What I do when I'm not looking for work, doing chores, wasting time on Newgrounds, or watering my crops in Country Story.

( cut, in case my formatting and your css don't get along )

If I finish enough of these, I get to use my Limit Break!

• 20:51 This is weird. My mom just informed me that she made moonshine from the blackberries in my sister's backyard & asked me to test it. #

Posted via my Twitter account.

http://knowyourmeme.com/

that should save time.

Point of clarification, honorable friendslist! Please allow me this moment of narcissism, so that I may spare you some eye-rolling if it comes up in future conversation.

I am:

• A software developer by vocation. Sometimes reluctantly.
  
• A writer by calling. Quite serious about it. This is no mere hobby.
  
• An aspiring game developer, who for a host of reasons just can't seem to put a game together on his own. But not for lack of trying.
  
• A would-be neophyte playwright, if I knew anything about theater outside of doing theater. (More on this later.)
  
• A geek. Yeah, you finally have me admitting it. I've had an adversarial relationship with that lifestyle ever since college, and it took me Otakon to figure it out, but for all its ugliness geek culture has always been where I feel most at home, and that is unlikely to change. (The literally thousands of video games I've played, many of which are generally known only to collectors, speak for themselves.) That said, some subsets of geekdom, while friendly, depress the living shit out of me, and whenever I find myself in those circles I just want to get the fuck out of there. Even if I like the same anime or video games or tabletop RPGs.
  
• A Christian. A devout left-wing Christian. No, that is not an oxymoron--and the irony belongs to the Christian Right. Jesus pushed over tables, people. Tables where people were selling shit in His name. He healed a blind dude who disrupted His sermon, who His followers rebuked and tried to drag away. In His own words, He said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. He was a good guy--the best--but neither a polite nor excessively respectful one. He didn't die for your right to make money and live well, nor to shun outsiders out of respect for His institutions. In fact, I recall He warned you explicitly against doing those things. But these days, Jesus would be labelled a liberal, a socialist, a religious extremist, a cultist, a race traitor, a threat to the American way of life, and--for his claim that he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days--maybe even a terrorist. Which is more or less exactly what happened, two thousand years ago...

I am not:

• An engineer by lifestyle. Don't get me wrong, I love video games, the Internet, new technology, whatever...but I think I'd go crazy living like the guy at the beginning of Fight Club, drifting through my entire life in an endless cycle of unfulfilling work and mindless materialism. Where buying a new iPhone is a lifetime achievement, and going to IKEA is a pilgrimage, and Grey's Anatomy on your TiVo with a couple slices from that new gourmet vegan pizza place on your lap when you come home from work is the closest you'll ever come to real human experience. Yuck. I've had a taste of that life and as comfortable as it was, I never want to go back.
  
• A poet. I can write poetry, some of it passably good, but I don't have any particular talent for it. You want me to write a poem for you, I will, but I can't guarantee it'll be fantastic.
  
• An actor. I'm a better performer than most of my friends who have never seen me live are aware--I've been told I am a forceful speaker onstage, and I don't experience stage fright the way some people do--but I don't crave the spotlight, and I am certainly not a born entertainer. I'm just not enough of an attention whore to love doing stuff like that. I genuinely find it much more satisfying to stand backstage and watch other people bring something I made to life than to stand up there and do it myself. (Also, I can't improvise worth shit.)
  
• A musician. I mean, I enjoy and write about an eclectic range of music, and I play the guitar for fun, but come on guys. Writing and programming are giving me carpal tunnel fast enough as it is. :]
  
• A theater person, in general. Oh, don't get me wrong, I want to be. I love theater; I've read and seen a lot of plays, and trained in playwriting at Oberlin, and written quite a few. I've been making lots of theater acquaintances (and even a few close friends) since high school, so a lot of them at least know who I am. But I'm just not on the same social wavelength as actors and directors and stage managers and yes, even other playwrights. I'm introverted, I'm not extraordinarily attractive or charismatic, I deliberately refuse my carefully allotted share of attention, I'm not good with big groups of people, I don't know the words to every Broadway song in existence, and so on. Sometimes they make gestures to welcome me in and we talk enthusiastically about Ibsen and method acting and Law and Order for a while, but personality-wise this reverse magnetism eventually kicks in and there's a frustrating, ephemeral sense that we're just not the same kind of people. It's taken me a long time to realize that, as much as I like them and as much as I like what they do, it is highly unlikely that they will ever accept me as anything more than a friendly outsider. Something I'll have to learn to work with, I guess.

In short:

I am a programmer, but not a yuppie.
I am a writer, but not a bohemian.
I am friends with both yuppies and bohemians.
You have no idea how many times I've had to explain this to people.

• 22:07 Anyone know how I get a poppy on my Twitter picture? #
• 20:08 Support Remembrance Day Poppy, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! - bit.ly/11ctu4 #
• 20:11 Gosh I really hope the twins go home tonight #xfactor #
• 20:25 I start my new job tomorrow. Quite looking forward to it now. #
• 20:43 @Ian2773 I hope so #
• 20:58 Simon has obviously got rid of Lucie as she is a threat to his acts.... #xfactor #

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• 21:35 Hey twitter!! I am sat in JFK airport waiting to come home. I just wanna get on with it now. #
• 22:06 OK lets post a photo from my time in NY. Gotta use my bought wifi connection somehow :) twitpic.com/oj0ef #
• 22:36 Night night UK, I will be on home soil when you wake up :) #
• 08:48 I'm on British soil but not off plane yet. Stupid stairs don't work so stuck on plane :( #
• 18:07 @TheXFactor oooh is tonights guest a secret?? I've been out the country for 2 weeks so feel a little outta touch. #

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• 00:30 Partying in Seattle with my one-month-old nephews. And by "party," I mean watching them fart and poo like grizzly bears. So damn proud. #

Posted via my Twitter account.

8048 WORDS

That pound of flesh has become, like, a wart.

On the downside, endgame doubts are making a desperate, last-ditch effort to harry my progress. One of them is that my first publication candidate is a work of crazy, surreal, over-technical experimental white-room short fiction. Like the first serious work of every dark horse with something to prove.

But. As the story was born out of a raging clusterfuck of recent personal experience, I would like to think that my nearly-finished manuscript is significantly more than a bag of tricks emptied over a blank canvas (as amazing as the results of that approach can be). Let's see if editors at the publications I'm submitting to feel the same way.

• 01:50 Hello :) #

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• 14:35 When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. This week, life gave me herpes. Time to make herpes juice. #

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I have seen this four consecutive times and it never stops being awesome.

"Your necromancer has been attacked by a Putin!"

I saw Jonathan Lethem at a reading at the Greenlight Bookstore today! In the flesh! He looks like ece_drihten and talks like me. The lady at Greenlight who was hosting the reading called him "one of the rising stars of a burgeoning Brooklyn Renaissance." That was startling to me--it had never really occurred to me that my favorite contemporary novelists are part of a Movement, with their own colored tab in the high school lit textbooks of tomorrow--but I can't say I really disagree with that assessment, and if there is a new Brooklyn Renaissance then Lethem is definitely a key figure. He seems to take the flattery in stride. Despite the fire code violating throng of fans crowded together in the bookstore to see him there was no aura of greatness or eccentric, Hemingwayesque charisma to him--he really does feel like some guy down the block who just happens to be exceptionally good at what he does.

He's doing this thing where he's reading his entire new novel, Chronic City, aloud, over the course of eight readings throughout the city, and this was number five. Apparently reading parts of his manuscript aloud to his friends was an invaluable editing tool, and he's confident enough in the way the finished product rolls off the tongue that he's eager to perform it in public.

You know how there's one douchebag at every reading ever who asks, "Could you tell me a little bit about your process?" Guess who that douchebag was tonight. Yep. What can I say--all that computer science training has given me a keen interest in methodology. It fascinates me how other people turn ideas, experiences, and flights of fancy into art, especially since it's something I obsessively tinker with myself. Lethem says he can't bring himself to work for more than two or three hours a day, and usually cranks out two or three paragraphs, at most two or three pages, in one session. He manages to stay on deadline by forcing himself to write every single day, though he admits his daily progress is nothing to be proud of. (Lethem's a slow writer--he started Chronic City in 2004, and the hardcover has just hit shelves.) Given my periodic frustration with my own creative process I find his answer to be incredibly validating.

I had more to say about process--I had half an entry written up about it today before I even knew I was going to be at the Lethem reading tonight (thanks for the heads up, drabheathen!), but my energy levels keep crashing tonight so it'll have to wait.

Fellow writers, poets, and musicians among you living in New York! How would you feel about starting some kind of bimonthly performance workshop? Nothing as time-consuming or groupthink-prone as the Iowa system you creative writing majors are familiar with, with its critiques and exercises and sheafs of printouts. Just a small group of people in a living room literally reading at each other. Commentary optional--the point would be for you, the writer, to see things in your work you would only notice if you read them in public (and also to give you an incentive to write prose that reads just as nicely aloud as it does off the page). Also, idea-bouncing, with none of the nitpicking over technical details that tends to occur in an environment of mandatory critique.

Been looking for this video for ages. Finally found it. Don't remember who first showed it to me (it was one of maybe three possible people, a long time ago) but she thought it was surreal and morbidly funny. I guess you can't blame her; she grew up in the land of "Stand tough! Everyone's got to walk their own path!" and not "Ganbatte! We believe in you! We're all counting on you!"

Stylistically and thematically, it reminds me a lot of short stories I wrote between classes in high school. Had I been closer friends with Kevin and Jason Yang, the Bilingual Department's amateur horror movie brothers, perhaps we would have made something just like this.

Earlier this year, out of good-natured annoyance at the growing pretentiousness of Internet slash fandom, especially RPS, I wrote a satirical work of erotic fanfiction about erotic fanfiction writers. It has been sitting on my hard drive for about half a year now, and so far no one has read it but me.

Me 1: Oh dear goodness, don't you dare show this to anyone. You love fangirls. If you ever publish this anywhere on the Internet, even LiveJournal, this will ensure that you will never have sex with one. Ever.
Me 2: And this would be different from my current situation how?
Me 1: Point taken.

Warning: Not even remotely safe for work.

( special thanks to my friends on ontd_ai and ontd_startrek for inspiration )

I am doing a movie night at my apartment tomorrow night, and the movie is going to be Cape No. 7! Diversity is a really big theme in this movie (each member of Cape No. 7's ragtag rock 'n' roll band is a member of a different Taiwanese race), and race in Taiwan isn't as simple as black and white and yellow, so I figured I should provide a little context, in case anyone shows up and goes, "Why are they staring at each other like that? Aren't they all Asian?" The film assumes some knowledge of racist stereotypes that will probably be lost on a non-Taiwanese audience. I'm hoping this entry will help.

None of this context is necessary to enjoy the film, although knowing it may enhance the experience. If this is a little much you may prefer to see the film first and then read this entry.

Mainlanders. 12% of the general population. Descendants of citizens, soldiers, and politicians from China's first and only democratic government, the Republic of China, who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek after being driven out of China by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and have since set up shop as Taiwan's official governing body. Despite being a minority they hold a considerable proportion of Taiwan's wealth and political power, and are therefore deeply resented by the Hoklo. They are stereotypically the most worldly and sophisticated of Taiwan's ethnic groups, as well as the most in touch with the Chinese diaspora, which is a nice way of saying that other people think they are humorless, oppressive rich tightwads whose loyalties lie abroad. (Chiang Kai-shek's brutal, authoritarian interpretation of martial law didn't do much to dispel this perception.) Most of them live in the urban north half of the island, and speak only Mandarin. My mother belongs to this group. Aga, Cape No. 7's protagonist, is a mainland character...played by an aboriginal pop star.

Hoklo. 70% of the general population. Descendants of people from Fujian Province who came to Taiwan with Koxinga during a failed Ming restoration in the early years of the Qing Dynasty. Most of them speak Mandarin as a prestige dialect, as it is the ROC's official language, but consider Min Nan ("Taiwanese," not a dialect of Mandarin) to be their native tongue. Lives and careers have been ruined over the uncommonly said yet commonly believed racist contention that they are the "real" Taiwanese, and that all other races (save the aborigines) are outsiders--an idea Hoklo ex-president Chen Shui-bian was frequently accused of perpetuating during his second term in office. They populate the farms and fishing villages of central and southern Taiwan, and are often stereotyped as parochial, simple, ignorant people who nonetheless live by a profound, earthy folk wisdom. (Except for the ones in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's largest southern city. Those guys are stereotyped as crass, loud triad bosses.) My father is a Hoklo. As are Old Mao, Frog, and The Town Council Representative.

Aborigines. 2% of the general population. Seems like the story of every isolated indigenous people is the same--technologically advanced outsiders come in, obliterate the local culture under pretenses of trade, attempt genocide, assimilate whoever is left, apologize, put a tiny remnant on reservations, and then let them all suffer a legacy of systemic racism. As such, the stereotypes of Taiwanese aborigines will strike a chord with anyone familiar with stereotypes of Native Americans. They run casinos. They drink. They work menial jobs. They pretend to be caricatures of themselves in tacky theme parks run by their oppressors, and they have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously at work because people think they are lazy. Their culture is revered as a point of national pride, and their historical treatment is viewed with some remorse, but the people themselves face social persecution, are held back by lousy schools, and are at a severe economic disadvantage. Officer Rauma is an aborigine.

Hakka. ~20% of the general population (some overlap with Hoklo and mainlanders, and a frequent mixed-race ingredient). A Han subgroup from southeastern China. Known as the "Jews of Asia" (despite there actually being an ancient community of Jews in China, the Kaifeng) due to their history of systematic persecution, their tendency to form closed communities, and stereotypes of being thrifty and conspiratorial. Mao Zedong was a Hakka, as was former Taiwanese president Lee Tung-hui. Speakers of the Hakka language in Taiwan are rare--most of them speak Min Nan instead. Malasun is very, very stereotypically Hakka.

Japanese-Taiwanese. A dwindling, extremely small minority of Hoklos who were raised during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), and therefore speak Japanese as their native tongue. China grows bloodthirsty with rage at the very mention of these people, as these folk were drafted into the Japanese army during World War II and some of them were known to have participated in the Japanese invasion of the mainland. Right-wing Japanese, for the very same reason, venerate these people as heroes. Few if any identify as Japanese (despite a few of them having Japanese blood), and fewer still teach Japanese to their children, but the experience has noticeably alienated them from the rest of Taiwanese culture and history, and the horrors of war even more so. My uncle is part of this group. Lin Mingchu is Cape No. 7's Japanese-Taiwanese character.

Hua chiao. Diaspora Chinese. Everyone hates these traitorous, cowardly, materialistic wannabe laowai, but eh, they're family. All those obnoxious rappers and pop stars have to come from somewhere, don't they? Also, something about Republic of China founding father Sun Yat-sen calling them the Mother of the Revolution, whatever that means. They all speak English or something, but they can generally communicate passably well in Mandarin (or else something is SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH THEM, I mean, my four-year-old daughter can speak Mandarin, why can't you?), and they worship a creepy dead guy on a stick. They are noisy and arrogant and uncooperative and have no sense of discipline. I belong to this group. I suspect Dada, the token Christian girl, is one too, but I can't be sure. Whoops, sorry, I was wrong about this one...

Japanese. Elves from the Distant Lands. Built roads and factories, sent the Hoklos to war with on the mainland, and left forever, leaving a stunned and bewildered populace with the fruits of industrialization to do with as they pleased. China is fond of blaming "colonial sentiment" and "brainwashing" for the good rapport Taiwan and Japan share, as well as Taiwan's inexplicable ability to survive for half a century without Chinese oversight. Tomoko and Kousuke Atari, obviously, are Japanese.

Laowai. Mysterious, extinct group of backpack-wearing, technologically advanced, golden-haired albinos rumored to live across the sea. The first people to settle Taiwan, aside from the aborigines (whom no one cares about). Officially abandoned the island before the dawn of Taiwanese civilization (around 1662 or so), but left lots of cannons and fortresses and shit for tourists to make peace signs in front of. Occasionally a few of their supposed descendants will drop by to teach English and star in commercials, where they will bring the island lots of valuable tourism revenue and magically turn computer parts into money. Frequently apologizing for something called "privilege," which on this island they have absolutely none of. It is customary to be polite to laowai, the same way you would be friendly to a unicorn. Also, they all look the same.

If any of these stereotypes sound awfully familiar to you, well, racism has never been known for its originality.