Ultradust

Ha! I {censored}ing knew it. I told my woman that loads of the songs sounded like Hoppipola but she said I was imagining it. Thanks for the reply. It was very interesting. Bingo! It seems that you're a tad more perceptive than your woman. Be ye careful. I'd talk more about my years doing K-pop, but that's for another day.

Ultradust thanks for some of the more interesting posts this forum's seen! I appreciate the kinds words, despite where the topic has now gone( for the moment!). About half of my posts at shortscale.org are not unlike those I've posted in this thread.

i just talked to a guy who came back from korea. he said it was funny that when south korea would put up a flag, north would put up a bigger flag, and then south would put up an even bigger flag, etc until they have these ginormous flags that have to be taken down when it rains because the polls can't support them. The biggest part of that incident the guy was referring to involved the negotiating room at the Panmunjeom DMZ, on a table 25 years ago. Both sides eventually ceded to replace them with equally sized smaller flags, but they each side nonetheless maintained flags on both sides of the DMZ that are rather huge, and just South of Gaeseong you can easily see the massive one that the North still flies: All 600lbs of fabric. Remember that Korea is a young democracy that is still working through some crazy times led by despots and corrupt military leaders from 1960~1992. I've been in Korea since well before the first properly elected president and can tell you it was a much different world back then with things you'd find hard to believe if you were to visit today.

Good man. I've a question - why are so many of the adverts on Korean tv accompanied with a song that sounds like a rip off of Sigur Ros Hoppipolla? A reasonable question. The answer is that many companies here as of late really like piano ostinato lines accompanied by dramatic build ups and stuff to add emotion to ads. Variations on Coldplay's Clocks (some ridiculously blatant) were another local commercial phenomenon that saw about 3-4 different appearances (from different companies) from 2008 to 2010. I won't beat around the bush (since you've probably heard my SIII ads more than once)...In no less than three promotional pieces (although 2/3 weren't for TV) I wrote in the past 2 years for a number of different clients I was requested to use Hoppipola as a primary reference, and had to take an extreme amount of care to skirt the melodic phrasing and predictable chord inversions to avoid trouble, through it all discussing all relative components (use of a different melody's motif in specific repetition, contrasting overall melodic phrasing, completely different chord progressions) with musicologists and promo staff to steer clear of trouble. As someone who was active in the K-Pop scene for over 15 years as a songwriter/arranger, I can tell you that unlike many a peer, I have always refused to rip-off another artists (a few times to my undoing), but I know how to recreate arrangement elements in a song that will leave similar impressions...Which ultimately is the goal. I have simply trained myself to know how to steer clear of danger, and the following three principles are always on my mind: 1. Don't be an idiot and copy melodies. Ever. 2. Similar chord progressions (even while using a reference piece's choice of instrumentation) are "safe", but non-musical people invariably WILL cry foul. 3. Play it safe, even when told to do otherwise.

If you think Koreans all look alike you should see Swedish-Armenians. Haha. Although completely unrelated (my FOB parents met at UCLA), surprisingly my distant relatives in Malm

ultra is hella white. and hes awesome so dont {censored} with him hi ultra! korean girls are cute! ECHO-DEE! Will post more, if I need to prove my point further, hehe. And yeah I'm white indeed, and I was as blond as Shavo Odajian's braided beard in my younger years. I guess the point of my wallpapering of this thread with K-Stars is my obstinate assertion that for many women, normal application of minimal makeup is the best thing next to none. However, those who grow accustomed to daily applying paintball-melee-loser faces probably won't want to head in that direction. We grow accustomed to what we see and something new tends to freak us all out, as Hollywood has shown us.

Ahhh Koreans have no sense of humor, fair enough. Do you really think American give a flying {censored} about Nicholas Cage though? LOL this conversation is destined to get weirder, if people start assuming that I'm a humorless Korean. I'm a Swedish-Armenian mix who lived in San Gabriel for the first 20 years of my life, and my Nicolas Cage reference was nothing more than a pointless link to Long Beach. Excuse my slight thread derailing while I clear that up. Peace. I think my yet-to-be-posted broken links might be fixed. I'll check.

Ultradust your links must be messed up because it looks like you posted the same girl 5 times Er...That was almost funny. Right about now is where Nicolas Cage is ashamed that he was born in your place of residence. Then again, I have about 20 more "broken links" I could pull out if needed.

Nice pics, thanks. Most of them are wearing makeup though... You're right, though if you see how the images are laid out, you'll notice that I didn't put them together at random. The separation of each individual's make-up and no make-up images was very much intentional.

??/Jiyeon ??/Kahi and ???/Dambi Son

???/Hyori Lee ???/Hyorin Min

???/Segyung Shin ???/Minjung Lee

What a depressing thread. I'm nominating ten random Korean Celebrities to save the world of frequently makeup-free faces. To be fair, the following are all between the ages of 19 and 35... In no particular order: ???/Taehee Kim ???/Mina Shin ???/Hyegyo Song