Lap-POP!

This year is the 10^th annual APATURE, and I attended Lap-POP! on Sunday, September 21, 2008. It consisted of blog readings, story telling, and video clips from many artists, some of which were made famous from the internet.

We listened to a story told by Annie Koh, who was born in Chicago and now lives in Seoul. She said she loves telling other people’s stories more than her own. She told us about how life in Korea is different than life in America; most importantly, the nightlife. Many places in Seoul are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while here in San Francisco, you will be lucky if you even find a 24/7 restaurant. I always wondered what it would be like to live somewhere with nightlife because it sounds great to not have to worry about a place closing.

We also had Hasan Minhaj, a stand-up comedian, grace our presence. He has performed at numerous places, including Punchline and is the next up-and-coming comic to watch. He joked about race, which we all need to do, because it is taken way too seriously. Even though he’s a comedian and is trying to make us laugh, a lot of the ideas he put out was true, like how Indian isn’t put on one of those forms that tell you to bubble in your ethnicity, but Alaskan Native, or some other obscure population is.

Eric Wu has a webpage, where people tell him to make faces depicting the emotions viewers send in, and he didn’t even know he was going to be on APAture, so he didn’t have anything planned. He made the performers compete against each other to try and show the emotion he says best. He cracked up the whole audience, and I would say this was the best part of Lap-POP!

Ernie Hsiung read two entries from his blog, and I really liked the way he wrote it because it’s informal and told like a campfire story, which makes it more interesting.

Min Jung Kim who told us a story about her experience as an Asian American blogger, and how it was like to be recognized in the real world because she used her real name in her blog.

Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders of the site Icanhascheezburger.com, explained how the LOLcats phenomenon came to be. It all started when Eric needed some cheering up because he had a bad day. Kari shows him a funny picture of a cat and Eric thought it was SO BRILLIANT, that he had to post some up with captions as a gag for Kari. What started out as a site just for the two of them because so big that they were begging for more web space all the time, since they were getting thousands of hits on the site per day.