Author Archives: Guan Chao Liu

Sure, some of them were a little funny (a little), but that’s the only compliment I can give them. Trying to be deep or philosophical, no, they should stop. It really doesn’t work out and it’s really not that deep. It’s simple, cliched, pretentious, and worse of all, flawed, how they think of things (although the last one is arguable). They should all stick to being funny, that way, we’d be known as the funny semester. Oh well, at least they worked harder on it than me, I have to accept that. The actors were decent, although I didn’t like how they  mixed around the order to be “artsy”, but that’s just my OCD kicking in. Well, it’s not like I had much to do on Thursday anyways.

-Guan

Guan here, this workshop starred Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn, which I’m SURE most of you have read.  So, since all of us were there, or were supposed to be there, there’s no need for me to summarize what he told us about. So it turns out that the idea for his story was based off a real life event, meaning he wasn’t very creative. Not bashing him though, since it certainly takes quite a lot of skill to write about it skillfully like he did. I’m glad he chose to speak about how he wrote the book rather than talking about school-related stuff and encouraging us to succeed.  I found it a rather interesting workshop, at least more than the last one, aside from the questioning session near the end, mostly because I didn’t like the students’ questions. Would have been more enjoyable if it did not force me to stay in school later than I would have preferred.

Guan Chao Liu Playlist

Honestly this is the kind of thing that I listen to in my spare time. So we’re going to start with What’s Up? and America F— Yeah. America F— Yeah is from Team America: World Police. Guess who thought of that movie? Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park guys. It’s a pretty funny movie full of obscenity and marionettes. You can’t really go wrong with things that are pretty funny. As for the, What’s Up? It’s not actually a funny song. However, if you hear He-Man sing it on youtube,  you’ll find it to be quite comedic. So as you see, I like funny things.

Kalimba is a free song that comes with Windows 7. It’ s an alright song by itself in my opinion, but it’s free. I put it here to show that I like bargains. Unless it’s harmful or worse, contagious, I’ll take almost anything that’s free.

This Is The New S— is a song from The Matrix: Reloaded. Although the first movie was my favorite, I couldn’t find any songs that I liked too much, so I just went with this one. Marily Manson is the artist of This Is The New S— so that’s a plus. He’s a pretty interesting guy to say the very least. Sadly, I found out who he was from a Family Guy episode. But the main point is that the first Matrix movie just might be my favorite movie of all time, or at least one of them.

Smooth Criminal is the first Michael Jackson song I’ve ever heard. Considering how popular he is, I might have heard one before that, but it would be hidden too deeply in my subconscious that I can’t bother trying to figure it out. That being said, not only do I like the song, but the music video as a whole was about…well…a smooth criminal. Normally, I’m on the side of law and justice, but not if the criminal is as smooth as this one.

So what’s left is Soviet Connection and Prayer. Grand Theft Auto IV is probably tied with Fallout 3 as my favorite video game of all time. However, I couldn’t really find any good themes in Fallout 3, so I went with Soviet Connection from GTA IV, which is the main theme. Now, Prayer is from Silent Hill 3. I could not find the song I originally wanted from Silent Hill: Homecoming, so I went with this one since I found it to be the only one that was somewhat scary. That being said, the main reason I like the series is because it scares me.

So, what do these things say about me? You can’t really jump into a conclusion because it just goes to show I like many things. Note that most of these are soundtracks from a movie or video game rather than an album by itself. That goes to show I rarely listen to music for the fun of it alone, but I would prefer to do something else that just happens to have music.