Hello! Mamdani won!! To celebrate, here is a collection of disjointed thoughts masquerading as a Post. (Also, I'll probably bake cookies or something.)

I moved to NYC in 2020 and was honestly super checked out during the pandemic, so I didn't really pay much attention to Eric Adams's election in 2021; I recall learning who he was from a post-election quizbowl question. So this election is very meaningful to me and feels like my first Real NYC Election, now that I have reached milestones like "multiple people who've lived here 5+ years assume that I grew up here" and "strangers on the streets regularly compliment my outfit." Very proud to be a resident of NYC today :)

What's been living in my head rent-free recently—

K-Pop: Demon Hunters was bad

(Spoilers ahead for the movie.)

I watched this movie several months ago with Chansol, who agreed that it is Korean only in the purely cosmetic sense and not in any meaningful way. The characters eat Korean food, the background is a Korean cityscape, and we hear a lot about K-pop. That is pretty much all we get.

Questions of shallow representation aside, everything else is also bad. The writing is incoherent, the plot doesn't make any sense, and the animation is mediocre. The characters look like plastic collectibles. Even the same-faced Disney princesses we keep getting are more visually interesting than our textureless lead trio of Korean Barbies. Which puzzles me, because we've had lots of incredible animated media recently: Arcane, the Spiderverse films, The Boy and the Heron, Flow (a film made entirely in Blender), Kipo, Love Death and Robots, etc. The list goes on and on.

The music is pretty catchy but nothing particularly special or memorable. I know that's the main appeal of this movie but come on, it is just generic pop music.

I could talk about the terrible plot and worldbuilding all day, but to focus a bit on their messaging:

• Still don't know what a demon is or anything about how they or their world works. Apparently all of them are cackling evil goblins, except Jinu and half-demon Rumi. No explanation for these exceptions.
• Rumi feels ashamed of her demon heritage the whole movie, realizes when she meets Jinu that actually not all demons are horrible, and then he dies and she just..leaves them all to be tortured by Gwi-Ma forever? Did he only matter because he's hot? (Why is he hot and the other ones aren't?)
• Rumi finally realizes the Honmoon barrier is a flawed construct and fighting for it the whole time was a mistake...so her solution is to just create a new Honmoon that looks literally exactly identical to the previous one. Nothing meaningfully changes in the whole hunter/demon/Honmoon system; she just goes to bathhouses with her friends now. Yay, self-actualization achieved!

Yeah, none of that has terrible thematic implications at all.

This film just wanted to be K/DA but is never going to have their sense of style or craft.

Ecology and the Korean Demilitarized Zone

To transition rather inelegantly, Eleana J. Kim writes in her book Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ that the two things the South Korean government has really liked pushing for tourism purposes is (1) K-pop and (2) the DMZ. Since I have just discussed K-pop, now onto the DMZ!

Chansol recommended me this book after he read it in a Korean history class, and I've really enjoyed it so far. It's an examination of the various political and cultural forces regarding the DMZ's ecological environment, which has become home to many endangered species due to its lack of human habitation.

This isn't a topic I know much about, so it's interesting to hear about the diversity of perspectives on it. Some examples:

• South Korea's leadership has pushed many times for the DMZ to be certified as a peace preserve or UNESCO heritage site. North Korea has refused, so it hasn't happened.
• Part of this is the SK government's desire for further economic development, such as laying down roads or other infrastructure, so that they can increase foreign tourism to the DMZ. (I did not know DMZ tourism was already a thing, but it is.)
• Environmentalists have also campaigned for the conservation of the DMZ out of concern for the many species residing there. Over 100 of Korea's 267 endangered species can be found in the DMZ (!). However, environmentalists have clashed with the government over the aforementioned desire for more economic development, since it would destroy many of those species' habitats.
• The lower-class rural residents of the Civilian Control Zone (the area immediately outside of SK's part of the DMZ) often don't feel represented in these discussions. Since the DMZ is highly inhospitable—there are estimated to be over 1M+ landmines—and the CCZ is extremely rural, its younger residents often leave for urban South Korea when they grow up, leading to population decline and a shortage of infrastructural resources.

Lots of different intersecting motivations and perspectives in play here. One story I found interesting was that of a local science teacher in the CCZ, who started a program for high schoolers to do field research on the CCZ's ecology. Several of those high schoolers wrote about those experiences for their college admissions essays, examining how this caused them to introspect about the environment, the border, and their Korean identities (and also getting them admitted to several Ivy Leagues). No real moral of the story here or something. I just find it fascinating.

I sewed my first tote bag recently!

I have been wanting to take Brooklyn Craft Company's Sewing a Tote Bag 101 workshop for a while now, and finally did so last weekend. It was really fun. I've taught myself sewing largely off YouTube tutorials and articles, so it was great to have a live instructor to teach me about good sewing practices and answer my questions (finally I understand what a gusset is and how they influence structure).

Shoutout to my best friend the color purple <3

Also—this is your reminder that we collectively produce 92 millions of textile waste per year and that the fashion industry is one of the most wasteful industries in the world. Which makes me sad because I love fashion and if I had the time/money, I'd be tempted to buy clothes every single day. (For what it's worth, I've sworn off buying firsthand clothing entirely—aside from supporting some independent artists—and I do not suffer from a shortage of clothing or opportunities to buy more of it.)

Some ways to be more sustainable:

• Learn to sew—making clothes is a LOT of work, but it's pretty quick to learn to mend small tears, sew on fallen buttons, etc. and you don't need a sewing machine for it.
• Buy from thrift stores.
• Buy secondhand from others, e.g. on Facebook Marketplace or Poshmark. In college, I pretty much solely lived off my college's Facebook buy/sell group (Barnard students are WELL dressed).
• Attend clothing swaps in your local area. I usually hear about them on Instagram. If you have a local Buy Nothing Facebook group, people often give away clothes there.
• Take good care of your clothing. I am terrible at this so I really can't give much advice, but it will last longer and retain its shape better if you fold/hang it correctly, follow the care instructions on the tag, etc.

That's all for now. I hope you have a good day!!