Forbes: Great content, lousy design. You can’t even see the meat of the article until you scroll down.
RIP Joshua Bok 1987—2012. You always had a smile handy. ATEC was hella fun.
Uncle Teng Chuan wasn’t really my uncle (neither are half the people I call ‘uncle’), but he was important enough to my father to have his firstborn—my brother—named after him. I went to see him when I was back in Singapore last summer. But I hardly ever got to see him outside of Chinese New Year and maybe some other thing. This time he and Aunt Mary talked about their time in London back when they were young—about thirty years ago, give or take. Like uncle Yen Kee, I liked him a lot but never got to talk to him much, so it was really nice. They both always had stories to tell.
It got me thinking, as death does, about life and death and how it affects people who aren’t directly involved in the proceedings. I was in the army doing basic, I think, when some kid from another platoon got word that his mother was taking a turn for the worse. Platoon sergeant told him to wait as we were in the middle of something and that he couldn’t let him book out just like that. Kid goes “But sergeant, my mother’s in the ICU—if she’s getting worse then…” and leaves it at that. You could see it in his face; he was going to cry his eyes out in front of the entire company right then and there. It’s easy to think that the sergeant’s an ass, but I wondered how he must have felt standing there with everyone’s eyes on him—it wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to let the kid see his mother, but he was helpless as well. He couldn’t do anything unless the company OC okayed it.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on long enough—rest in peace, uncle Teng Chuan. You will be missed.
![theatlantic:
Schoolyard on Fire: Coming of Age During the L.A. Riots
On Wednesday, April 29, 1992, I left Emerson Junior High School in West L.A. and took the RTD bus — colloquially, the Rough, Tough, and Dangerous — to Fairfax and Wilshire. I walked the two blocks north to the barracks-style community Park La Brea where I lived with my single mother, and, once inside the gates of what I’d begun calling the White Man’s Projects, plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV.
Angelenos are used to the odd car chase, mudslide, earthquake, or fire disrupting regularly scheduled broadcasting, so it was with something like ennui that I flipped through the live footage of urban infernos on every channel — fire, fire, DuckTales, fire, guh. I stared at the helicopter shots in a trance until something slipped the bolt of my attention and I realized I was looking down on the roof my apartment.
I jumped up off the couch shouting with pride, and then with confusion. How disorienting to see the city, the neighborhood I knew down to a molecular level, from this new vantage point. That landscape I’d prowled so often that I would have noticed a new cigarette butt, a different blob of gum, a new tag or sticker, was here somehow changed, shrunken in scale but magnified in importance through the looking glass of the tube.
For the next five hours I watched the stores, malls, and streets where I’d grown up burn to the ground — and with them the protective walls around my adolescent idyll: the corners where we’d joined Hands Across America were now homicide crime scenes; the area of Koreatown where my mom worked now looked, in the aerial shots from news choppers, like the neighborhoods in Baghdad we’d gotten to know so well the year before. But none of this footage felt far off, abstract, as the Gulf War had. It was personal, the topographic map of my own memories. It was also right around the corner, and the fear came knocking.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m35nf1y2s11qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Schoolyard on Fire: Coming of Age During the L.A. Riots
On Wednesday, April 29, 1992, I left Emerson Junior High School in West L.A. and took the RTD bus — colloquially, the Rough, Tough, and Dangerous — to Fairfax and Wilshire. I walked the two blocks north to the barracks-style community Park La Brea where I lived with my single mother, and, once inside the gates of what I’d begun calling the White Man’s Projects, plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV.
Angelenos are used to the odd car chase, mudslide, earthquake, or fire disrupting regularly scheduled broadcasting, so it was with something like ennui that I flipped through the live footage of urban infernos on every channel — fire, fire, DuckTales, fire, guh. I stared at the helicopter shots in a trance until something slipped the bolt of my attention and I realized I was looking down on the roof my apartment.
I jumped up off the couch shouting with pride, and then with confusion. How disorienting to see the city, the neighborhood I knew down to a molecular level, from this new vantage point. That landscape I’d prowled so often that I would have noticed a new cigarette butt, a different blob of gum, a new tag or sticker, was here somehow changed, shrunken in scale but magnified in importance through the looking glass of the tube.
For the next five hours I watched the stores, malls, and streets where I’d grown up burn to the ground — and with them the protective walls around my adolescent idyll: the corners where we’d joined Hands Across America were now homicide crime scenes; the area of Koreatown where my mom worked now looked, in the aerial shots from news choppers, like the neighborhoods in Baghdad we’d gotten to know so well the year before. But none of this footage felt far off, abstract, as the Gulf War had. It was personal, the topographic map of my own memories. It was also right around the corner, and the fear came knocking.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
What I want for Christmas/birthday 2011. Click for details. And yes, I actually really do want a Lumia 800 (or whatever phone comes out after it) once Skype becomes available for WP7. I tried one out at the Starhub shop the other day and was pretty impressed.
Always. Yes.
(Source: dailydoseofstuf, via noirandblanc)
Survey for Londoners
This survey is part of my group project research and we need responses from Londoners and Americans. The link below is for Londoners only.
If you guys could help me out that would be awesome. It is short and requires zero writing.
Thank you!!!
“Vignelli’s 1972 map wasn’t just lovely to look at. Its obsessive clarity turns out to be the perfect basis for digital information. It’s more modern looking than any of the maps that followed it. Now that people at the M.T.A. have figured out that this map is good for things other than dresses, why don’t they go the rest of the way, and bring it back as the basis for a more complete interactive map that will be kept live seven days a week?”
