The Entropy Blog

I didn’t say anything when we applied for it, because I didn’t want to jinx it, but my company did join the National Council for Children’s Television‘s Nationwide Search for the Coolest Television Program Proposals for Children, and we won. Well, one of our entries won. All the four entries we submitted were among the 11 finalists, which was pretty cool in on itself. Each of the companies behind the three winning pitches will be given a start-up fund to finance the production of the pilot episode.

This is one of those times where I’m reminded how lucky I am that I get to work with such incredibly talented people. When we joined the Search, I offered whatever I could. Which wasn’t really much, as I didn’t know much about television, or how shows are made. The proposals were developed by the others, and all I could offer was mostly just encouragement. Even when I presented the pitches (I did two of the four), one of them — the winning entry — wasn’t even my pitch. M. developed it and did the first draft of the PowerPoint. I showed up, smiled at the panel, and did the best presentation I could.

Chef Sharwin Tee invited the staff of Mangojuiced to visit the set of his cooking show Curiosity Got the Chef during last Saturday’s taping. We were pretty psyched. We loved food and we loved television (I’m pretty fascinated myself with how tv shows are made) so we took him up on his invite. 

Three of us ended up joining Sharwin in front of the camera. He needed a few friends to join him for a little party, and because we’re the kind of people who like to say yes to life (and because I’m a massive attention whore), we agreed to do it. Besides, there was strawberry shortcake (!!!) for dessert.   We chatted and ate the yummy food he cooked earlier in the episode. 

This is me and Mike after the make-up lady made us look a bit more tv-friendly. If you’ve seen my previous tv appearance (a Women’s Day march where I’m covered with fake blood that made it to the news), you will agree this is a vast improvement:

I’m now on episode 9 of the SBS drama Rooftop Prince (옥탑방 왕세자). The plot is possibly the most contrived one I’ve ever come across in a Korean drama, but I’m overlooking that because the show is hilarious. Plus most of the cast is great. I say most, because the actors playing the two villains seem to be trying to impersonate a couple of cardboard cutouts of people wearing expressions. To be fair, they’re not really given much to do other than look surprised whenever someone walks into a room. Or whenever they walk into a room. Seriously, you could make a drinking game out of it: you’ll finish a bottle of soju by episode three.

… but it was good and satisfying. And to be fair, the manga it was based on hadn’t concluded yet at the time they wrote the script for this.

If you’re used to western tv dramas, this Taiwanese adaptation of a Japanese graphic novel starring two Korean actors looks a bit weird. For one thing, it has the subtlety of a stampeding herd of rhinos.

I apologize for all the people complaining about the traffic caused by the filming. Apparently, we are used to filming our car chase scenes half-assed and cannot wrap our heads around why a complicated fifteen-minute action scene in a movie takes weeks to finish. We are happy to suffer year after year the corruption and [...]