Cheap Asian Horror plus Long Resource Notebook (aka glimpse into an MLIS program)

(11:41:26 CDT)

Cheap Asian Horror plus Long Resource Notebook (aka glimpse into an MLIS program)

Amazon.com is having some sort of sale on lesser known Asian horror movies. There are several to choose from for under $5. I ordered a couple—Marebito and Cello—knowing that there is an equal chance that it will be money well spent on suck as money well spent on doesn't-suck. From what little I have seen of Marebito, it has a weird, slow charm to it. All I know about Cello is that it has been described as having a "Western like bodycount". I'll let you guys know how that goes.

Since it will be Monday or Tuesday before I get the movies, at least, I started getting this really weird jonesing for some cheap Asian horror. I had a $5 off coupon at BestBuy and so went there. My choices were limited to Voices, Tokyo Zombie, and a two-for-one boxset from Tokyo Shock containing the Thai horrors The Commitment and The Unborn. While TZ was something of my first pick, except it was the price of the other two (three) movies combined, and Voices would be something like a second choice, I ended up deciding on the double set of Thai horror. Not only has my experience with Thai horror movies been limited to the work of pretty much one director/writer team—Shutter and Alone—but the $12-for-two Thai movies fit the unknown and cheap angle I was aiming for.

I've watched The Commitment already, and I will try and have a review up tonight, but the short version comes out as "If you like to look at pretty, teenage Thai girls who are really friendly to one another, then here you go...oh, and something like a horror movie is going on but don't let that confuse you..." I will probably due The Unborn tomorrow sometime between studying.

Speaking of studying, I am probably about to head over to Salmon and work on my resources notebook. Just to give you guys a glimpse into the workload of an MLIS student, here is the assignment. We are to take 70 resources. A resource can be pretty much anything of a general reference that can answer questions in an authorative way and fits a handful of basic reference categories. Think encyclopedias and directories and bibliographic tools over simply non-fiction books. The professor wants a mix of print, online (meaning "free"), and electronic collections (meaning "proprietary database"). For each one, we write from about 0.5 to 1.0 pages of material (he warned us not to go over this). The end result is a roughly 35-70 page assignment that is due by the first of July. I have obtained about 24-25 resources so far (mine are averaging about 0.75 pages each), and want to get about 35 or so resources based on what I can find in print at Salmon. I am doing this both for the assignment's sake, and for my own. As a reference librarian there, it is too easy to try and prod information out of Google no matter what the student asks. According to another UA-MLIS student I talked to on Friday, some of the reference courses are now primarily talking about "how Google is the #1 tool of all reference librarians", which to me sounds similar to Gamera is friend to all children. Then again, I'm weird. By the end of this assignment, I will not only have a better grasp of what Salmon has, but just a better grasp of what sort of hands-on print materials are better at answering certain types of questions and more authoratively.

Note: come the Fall semester, one of my classes is going to be studying Young Adult fiction and non-fiction books en masse. Meaning it should be pretty much the opposite of this class. Heh.

Si Vales, Valeo

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