Last week I cooked up an Indian meal for the first time. It was quite an interesting experience. I felt like I had actually cooked something up properly from scratch — unlike merely steaming veggies and placing a chicken in the oven. I was amazed by all the different ingredients used to create such a simple dish.

However, what struck me the most was how my mum made a minor adjustment to the lentils dish (but adding only a small amount of chilli) to cater to my tastebuds. According to her, i’m not a ‘true’ Indian because I can’t/don’t like eat/eating spicy food. My parents attribute this to me being born in Australia — unlike my brother — and developing different taste buds as a result of that. Whether or not this is true, I could not help but feel interested by how Chefs alter their foods of different cultures…

Today I commenced my second round of autoenthographic research for my media studies. As the focus of this subject is on Asia, I decided to explore India (as many people forget that other than China, Korea, Japan etc, India also comes under Asia!). I decided to spice up my auto ethnographic project by learning how to cook Indian food! I myself am Indian, and I have been lucky to grow up with delicious authentic Indian food thanks to my mum who is an amazing cook. However, despite the persistence from my parents in the past couple of years, I still have not learnt how to cook! I thought it would be a great opportunity to partake in an experience of learning how to cook Indian food.

Today my mum taught me how to lay out a common classic day-to-day Indian dinner Piela Daal (yellow lentils), with raita (yogurt) and roti…

How do I make sense of North Korea through this experience and my research?

This is part three of a series of blog posts which accounts my autoethnographic experience.

I have conducted an autoethnographic study that explores the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (from here on North Korea) through the Instagram account of @Vickyinam. I first came across this account in a BBC News clip on YouTube. According to the BBC News (2015) biography information:

“Vicky Mohieddeen is a British woman who regularly visits North Korea from Beijing where she works for a tour company that takes foreigners into the “Hermit Kingdom”. She knows the place well, has a respect for its people but realises too that she can’t allow herself – or the revealing images she takes and puts on social media – to act as a mouthpiece for the country, so often condemned as aggressive and belligerent by the international community. She…

What’s interesting to note with this game is how minimal the storyline is. Most RPG games coming out from Japan such as Final Fantasy are known for it’s in-depth and emotional storyline with characters that add to the plot. But with Dark Souls the focus of the story is hardly present if only just in the back of the player’s mind. I know it sounds terrible but the storyline is actually not even important in this game, what you truly remember from this game is the atmosphere and the experience of the game.

I think the minimal storyline and character development worked really well for a game because it adds a sense of mystery to your experience. You aren’t given an in-game map so your sense of direction is based solely on gut feelings and the environment. And to add to that, the environment and enemies of the game always…

Dark Souls was unlike any other Japanese game to be had in the current market as it disregarded traditional JRPG elements for a more grounded western action. The game is essentially a Japanese rendition of modern western games, but it manages to still be different and offer a unique experience to the consumer.

When you’re playing this game, you need to be prepared to know that you’ll be spending a fair amount of time staring at the words ‘YOU DIED’. It is so often that you will eventually run out of energy to even respond to what just happened. Some games may offer you to decrease the difficulty but in Dark Souls there is no difficulty setting in place.

The game is particularly difficult in that even the smallest mistakes come at a painful cost. The ‘dying’ that you do so much is in fact a game mechanic that basically…

In recent weeks I had a thought about what pieces of Asian media I had consumed to pursue as a research topic and it almost slipped my mind that just a couple months ago I played ‘Dark Souls’, an action-RPG game developed in Japan. The reason being is that it was nothing like popular Japanese games at all.

If I had to describe the setting of this game, I would say it runs along the lines of a world of dungeons and dragons. Completely different from Asian culture, the medieval fantasy theme placed you in a world filled with popular western folklore such as gargoyles, stone knights, imps, and countless other creatures with a sole purpose to kill you over and over and over…

You most likely have heard through the grapevine that Dark Souls is one of the hardest video games out there and by god, you heard right…

The auto-ethnographic process allowed me to think deeply and critically not only on my own experiences on how I feel about technologies overloading our lives but also how this is portrayed in Japanese anime, particularly investigating how this theme is the main plot for Psycho Pass and Sword Art Online. My first encounter in Psycho Pass really drew me into the idea that technologies could be in control of an entire state. This anime allowed me to think deeply into the idea that perhaps the director is not far off in the fact that our privacy and very existence is always being recorded and surveyed wherever we are. My digital artefact investigates the factors of the sci-fi and technology genre and image representation in Psycho Pass and Sword Art Online, specifically the third series Gun Gale online.

Before I watched Psycho Pass, I always had feelings of suspicion, like big…

I was sitting in my living room scrolling through Netflix on television one night when I first encountered an anime section. Psycho Pass was one of the anime shows on there, and as it was recommended for me I decided to watch it. I turned off all the lights and lit some candles with a chai latte and biscuits in hand. I have watched anime since I was very young, so I’ve had some experience in some of the anime crime genres such as Death Note and Sword Art Online III Gun Gale Online.

“My head is overflowing with thoughts I can’t allow anyone to know about”

 A helicopter rides over the city with a theme song that delves into perhaps a characters thoughts. As she tells the story, she narrates her surroundings and experiences.The heavy sounds of rain surround the livingroom and suddenly I am looking into the…

Recently there has been an increase of media raising the many topics and issues surrounding paedophilia, and of course it’s an immoral act so it will drag along with it a negative connotation; But my idea of paedophiles instantly focuses on creepy old men like the grandpa off Family Guy and the protagonist in the book Lolita, and even cases on the news are always about men; and I think this is the image that my everyday influential cultures have created. So when I sat down reading this manga perplexed by these young girls depicted with full-busted bodies of women, I didn’t initially believe I was acting in any immoral behaviour or point any matters of illegal or paedophilic behaviour at myself because I do not fit the representation of what society has specifically illustrated to that category of behaviour.

Culture influences an individual’s belief, values, ideas and behaviour…