Hey, Ev! Do you remember seven years ago, in 2002, when I had my birthday party at Min Jung’s house and we were all high on ecstasy and then you guys swung by and you were all, “are you on drugs” and I was all “yeah, I’m totally twacked” and you were like “oh hey, so does it feel weird when I touch your arm like this?”

No? Nevermind, then. Oh hey! You’re on Oprah! Good job, man.

Jason: I’m wondering if the age of personal blogs that have any meaning are over. It seems that a) you can do your own thing, but be obscure because instead of being one of 200 or 2000, you’re now one of 20,000,000 because the barrier to entry is a lot lower and everyone has an opinion,

b) if you do become popular you get a community of commenters and suddenly you have a relationship with your readers and that steers your site overtly because it’s not all about you anymore, or even subtly because you want to keep the readers you have, and unless you have a personality strong enough to go “fuck you, this is my site” and have people love you for it, you have to deal with that.

c) we’re in the age of mega-blogs, like Gawker and Perez and newsblogs and et cetera, and personal blogs are seen as quaint at best, ridiculously egotistic at worst, and that’s filtered down that

d) some personal blogs have become personal brands and all about selling the writer as an expert, and all the politics that that engenders that gets obnoxious for people like you and me who just want to write something funny occasionally, or make a point from our respective perspectives on culture as it affects us.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m completely aware of this blog as my personal brand. When something mildly hilarious would happen, I would run back to my computer, bring up a text editor and start writing, often adding mildly hilarious embellishments to fully get my point across. Two things happened that really changed this: At 31, the stories I would share back then seem distinctly more private now. Blogging about my parents separation and eventual divorce was therapeutic and defiant then; now, not so much. And blogging about the periodic depressive periods I have would just be, uhm, a downer.

The other thing is that whatever happens, I’m just trying to enjoy the moment, I guess. Owning the moment, as opposed to mentally processing it into an essay to share with others. And while that comes with a downside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life, it comes with the upside of not having these moments recorded on the Internet for the rest of my life.

I guess this is just my way of saying that I’m not sure what the status of the blog is at this point. Like a lot of other old-school bloggers fascinated about web based communication tools, I’m on twitter and tumblr, which reminds me a lot of the type of blog posts I wrote my first year or two of blogging. It’ll be impossible for me to hide any of my identity at this point — I work for a social networking company, for gods sake — but as the methods of communication have evolved, so has blogging, and so I will as well. In what ways, we have yet to see.

Richard has a whole meme of songs as chartage, mostly from his LiveJournal community.

Not wanting to to pass a good meme when I see one, I humbly submit my own chart to the project:

Note that Ludacris does, indeed, have very little hos in the Manitoba area.

More than a year ago I was nominated for the the same awards, similar to the Weblog Awards that are announced every year at the SXSW conference except with categories like “Best porn star,” “Sexiest Queer candy” and sponsored by a bunch of gay porn all-male adult entertainment websites. I didn’t win the “Best Gay Asian” category, and after a year of therapy and mild sedatives to dull away the thought of being the “WORST GAY ASIAN EVER,” I’ve moved on with my life.

When they invited me to join the contest, I hesitated. Blogging now is very different than when the first community of bloggers developed in 2000 – it was a time before 9/11, corporate blogging or social networks like MySpace gave non-computer nerds an internet presence. Nowadays, it feels like people are more self-aware about putting things up on the Internet to reveal to the entire world, and rightfully so – the blogs I skim across now seem to have blog titles like “15 WAYS TO MAKE MORE MONEY OFF YOUR BLOG” or “20 WAYS TO EFFECTIVELY ENGAGE YOUR BLOG READERSHIP.” (And yes, there is a little hypocrisy in writing that since creating 8Asians and dabbling in corporate blogging. Thank you for noticing.) Gay blogs in particular seem to be hyper-glossified (thanks for the word, pk) with posts about celebrity gossip or targeted ads for gay cruises or HIV medication. Hey, I’m a blogger that wouldn’t mind getting paid, but that doesn’t necessarily mesh with my vibe, either.

Then I found out they were offering $2,000 for the winner. And subscriptions to gay porn sites, but mostly $2,000. Two thousand dollars is also the answer to the question, “How much money will Ernie sell out to compete in a contest sponsored by what is, essentially, a gay porn portal?” Ding.

So here I am, competing against a former go-go boy and a porn star and a bunch of guys with really good abs and Dan from The Real World: Miami. (A sidenote: Dan actually sent me a really nice e-mail to me, saying that he called into a radio show and was going to “wipe my face on the floor.” Which is really awesome when you think about it – it’s kinda like Omarosa from the Apprentice popping out of the television “The Ring” style and telling you that you totally suck. Kinda.)

I feel like I’m probably not going to win, but it’s an experience I’ll take full advantage of. It’s been a while since I’ve been motivated to write on a regular basis, and I’ll probably repost some of the stuff I’ve written there on LYD as well. You can visit the contest here, but a word of warning – while my content will be tame for the most part, I can’t gaurantee the same about the banner ads and the links and my competition. (In other words, quite possibly NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Alas.)

You might be wondering why I’m doing this, or why I haven’t done it sooner: a long time ago, I had thoughts of compiling all this madness and somehow using it for financial gain. There’s no shame in admitting that, I think: old school bloggers have their Adsense or their book deals. I’ve also learned that doing something like a book deal takes effort, and that my time is better spent, well, living my current life rather than spending energy trying to capitalize on my past. Not to say I wouldn’t mind some kickback, and maybe I’ll still spend a chunk of time trying to edit down three megabytes of written text into something feasible, but until then, have at it. (Hell, maybe one day I’ll make the whole thing available on a Creative Commons license and someone can write the damn book for me, but I think that will be for another time.)

Going through some old posts and coming back now, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• My really funny posts – the reason, I’m assuming, why most people came to my blog – happened between three to five years ago, right before I got in my relationship and roommates with my friend Paris, who is a thoroughly hilarious person. Then I entered a relationship, where I cocooned for two and a half years, went through a break-up and watched my parents separate. I mentally fell apart and now that alls been sorted out, I’m less manic and not trying so hard to be “funny ha ha,” as my friend Anil puts it. I’m like a fucked up Frasier-like funny, in that Frasier really isn’t a funny show at all.
• Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox. I had a mini-blog a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, although integrating it with this blog didn’t seem to work so well. I miss that, so for that very reason I’ve set up a tumblr blog – a place to quickly blog about videos I like or links or thoroughly hilarious yet trashy Instant Messenger conversations. As my friend Jason says, it’s 1999 all over again, in the form of gradients and rounded corners. And it really is.
• After reading some old posts, I don’t think I could ever make myself so vulnerable to such a large audience again. But it’s a reflection of a life previous, and the more I realize I’ve changed since those days, the more okay I am with having this stuff available on the Interwebs.

Some notes:

• For the majority of his podcast shows, Dan usually interviews experts in technical fields: OS Software Experts, Ruby on Rails Programmers, lecturers of the Agile Programming environment. Then he decided to interview me. I don’t know why, but hell, I’ll roll with it.
• I’m not really liking the sound of my voice in this interview; I sound “hella gay” (to quote my college friends), the sound of my laugh annoys me, and you can easily tell I’m in an anxiety-prone situation because I do start talking really fast. Really, I’m only blogging this for two reasons: Because Dan wants me to, and because in five to ten years, when I’m on my cocktail of sedatives and anti-anxiety medications, I’ll be able to look back and say to myself, “Christ, did I ever sound like that?”

(Oh yeah – I’ll also be in Vancouver for the next two weeks; if you’re in the area and want to hang out, drop me an e-mail to ernie AT this domain address.)

8 Asians is a collaborative blog of eight different people of Asian decent. We’ll be posting about whatever Asian issues are currently relevant in our lives, whether it be pop culture or current events or politics. Think “The View,” with Star Jones and Rosie O’Donnell and that chick from Survivor. Now, replace them all with Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians. Yeah.

My role in this weblog is one part editor, one part blogger, one part casting director because I’m trying to cast a bunch of different writers. Some of the writers are relatively familiar, while others are first-time bloggers. That’s on purpose. Admittedly, the blog is pretty rough both in terms of design and process, and I’m doing this in my free time when I’m not working at the start-up, but it’s something to pass the time, I suppose. (And, if you’re a writer interested in writing about Asian-American issues that might want to be on the blog at a later time, let me know.)

Writing this list was surprisingly difficult – there’s been a lot of trivial stuff about my life I’ve already blogged about over the past five years but have since gone off-line. And while 90% of my life is an open book, what is there left to share to all of the Internet, knowing that friends, co-workers and family members will be reading this as well? Needless to say, here we go:

1. I come from a military family. To anyone who’s ever met me or seen a photograph of me in person, this seems like the most ridiculous concept ever, but it’s true. My paternal grandfather fought under Chiang Kai-Shek, fought the Communists but lost, retreating to Taiwan. My father served in the ROC navy before our family immigrated to the United States some time during the early 70’s.
2. I wanted to be an actor in high school. I was really into it Freshman year; I was in the high school improvisation troupe, my first (and last) play was as De Pinna in our high school version of You Can’t Take It With You. Shortly after that play, my father decided I needed to take more computer courses, pulled me out of all my extra-curricular classes related to performing and made me take a junior college course in Pascal, not that I’m bitter or anything. (Some trivia: also in that play was a senior named Adam Sessler. Thirteen years later, he’s now the host of a little TV show called X-Play. And me? I’m writing this blog entry. Such is my life.)
3. If you already knew this fact, consider yourself an old-school LYD reader: Blogs got big around the same time as Survivor, so I used to do blog versions of popular reality game shows, where the winners would win real money. SurvivorBlog was the first game I did, and I also did a version of The Mole called PuppetMaster, which got profiled in Entertainment Weekly. (More trivia: SixApart’s Mena Trott had applied as a contestant for PuppetMaster, but didn’t make the cut. I’m still kicking myself in the ass over that one.) I would LOVE to do another blog game some day, but knowing how blog-savvy people are nowadays this would be a logistical nightmare.
4. Most American universities seem to have an abundance of a cappella groups. UC Davis didn’t have such a group. Me and three other guys DID, however, create a horrible R&B group called Unrealized Potential, where I would play the piano and harmonize. Think “Boyz II Men,” except really, really not good – I think we spent more time making sure our matching vests matched, rather than making sure we could actually hit the notes. We ended up singing “On Bended Knee” and Jodeci’s “Lately” at a dorm talent show, where we were promptly laughed off the stage. I think we did, anyway. I have a tendency to block things out from memory.
5. Now that I think about it, I guess most people don’t know I used to play the piano. Like all Asian kids, piano lessons were forced upon me when I was four years old; I took classical piano lessons until Junior High school, and then “rebelled” in my piano playing by playing jazz piano and accompanying a church choir in high school. A part of me wishes I still kept up with the piano – I haven’t sat down at a piano bench in years – but I can still read sheet music, albeit awkwardly.

I’ll update this blog post soon as to who I’ll tag. God, I’m so late on this. Hopefully they get the memo.

1. Joe.My.God.
2. Ariel Meadow Stallings
3. Glenda Bautista

Yes, the meme says to tag five people. I’m a rebel.

• All Blog award nominees must be gay men, and “Bloggers must be able to prove (!!) their ‘gay authenticity’ via their weblog” according to their rules and procedures page. Okay, so… do I scan in a gay certificate? Do I get one of those javascript flash applets that people put on their MySpace page that say “YOU ARE 100% TEH GAY?” If someone comes out as bisexual, do they put an asterisk next to your blog on the winners list?
• The Bloggie Awards, the last time I checked, did NOT have a “Best Porn Star” category.
• Also unlike Nikolai’s Bloggies, all the awards are subscriptions to gay porn sites.

So, yeah. I’m in the “Best Asian Blog” category. Taking a cursory glance at all the other blogs nominated, everyone seems to be either this uber-fabulous personality or have a photo of themselves with their shirt off. Some of them are masturbating. I briefly deduce that I am the fattest person on this entire page and contemplate not eating for three and a half weeks. As I’m currently eating a carnitas burrito at the moment, the thought quickly passes.

But somehow, I’m on this list. Because I’m funny.

None the less, I do appreciate the people who nominated me for the competition, for no other reason than to say “Hey, Ernie is Asian AND gay, let’s put him in the category.” As far wanting to win, I don’t necessarily need a subscription to CircleJerkBoys.com, but thanks for the offer.

Update: My co-worker Brian, after reading this post, decided to make a “gay authenticity certificate.” Kind of horrifying, but he did spend a lot of time with Illustrator working on this.

�With all the troubles that we see around the world, it gets more and more challenging to communicate with young people today,� said [Mannie] Jackson, [owner of the Globetrotters]. �Through efforts like today with the Pope, and in the future with Reverend Jesse Jackson, we can use this as a way of reaching young people with positive messages and examples.

The frail Pope was later seen going to the masses regarding the meeting, and said: “Sono vecchio. Dove sono? Perch� � tutta condizione scura alta di questa gente al lato di me? Sono vecchio.”

(So going to hell. Thanks, Wahine and Babelfish!)