NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

For almost my entire life I've played video games. I played Double Dragon, Startropics and Dragon Warrior IV for the NES. I played Street Fighter II, Final Fantasy III and NBA Live 95 for the SNES. I have played a bunch of games for SEGA Systems, including Night Trap and even Dune for SEGA CD. On the computer I played games like World Builder, Pool of Radiance, Pirates! and Civilization in many incarnations. Most recently I've played games like Monster Hunter, Starcraft II and Hearthstone. Video games don't take up as much of my life as they used to, as I am busy with working, family life and activism, but they still play a role in my identity and how I see myself culturally. For some their "Chamorro" identity may be rooted to visiting ranches on weekends and attending mass with their grandmothers. For me, Chamorro identity comes not just from working with my grandfather in his blacksmith shop or reading the Chamorro Bible with my grandmother, but also yelling

Grooming the Champions of the Keyboard Alan Feuer The New York Times 9/28/13 ALAMEDA, Calif. — On a picture-perfect East Bay afternoon — 75 and a clear blue sky — a few top players for the Evil Geniuses were holed up in the Lair. Preparing for a qualifying match, a StarCraft prodigy named HuK was sitting in one of the gaming rooms, communing with his monitor and limbering his fingers on a keyboard. Down the hallway, his teammate DeMusliM was running through a replay of his own last match and working on his manual dexterity, swirling a pair of worry balls in his hand.  It was 3 p.m. and the California sunlight was beating at the windows, but the Lair’s front shutters were drawn tight, leaving the gamers to focus in the darkness on their training, which meant playing video games from dawn to dusk each day, or from dusk to dawn each night. Their physical needs had been seen to: the kitchen refrigerator was stocked with bagels, the living room cooler with

Siempre bai hu gaige guihi. Anggen "geek" pat "nerd" hao yan sumasaga hao giya Guahan, kao pon saonao lokkue'?

From the first time I saw the preview for the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World I knew that I would like it. All the random jokes, the tone, the look of it, seemed built for someone of my generation. It was an interesting blend of geekiness and coolness, meant to be appeal to nerds, pseudo-nerds, hipsters and other assorted sorts of subcultural wallflowers. I found myself the first time I watched it, constantly poring through the dialogue, the sounds, the music, the background, the t-shirt art, for all the friendly fan service that I knew was coming. Over the past few days I have ended up watching Scott Pilgrim vs. The World several more times. My daughter Sumahi loves the movie and wants to watch it not just everyday, but a couple times each day. She doesn't watch it intensely, but wants it playing in the background and at certain moments she'll turn her attention that way and check it out. Sometimes commenting on what she sees, sometimes cheering a character on. She likes Sc

Every night when I get home from work and turn on my laptop I do two things. First, I go to GOMTV to see what is happening in the GSL, which is the biggest Starcraft 2 tournament in the world today. I don't have any cable and so my evening of television is usually watching professional Starcraft 2 players smash armies of pixels into each other and then watching (if it's the right night) an episode of The Daily Show. Earlier tonight there was a particularly exciting set of matches between two Starcraft: Brood War pro players who are trying to make marks for themselves in the sequel. The first is (Startale) July, changed the way zerg was played in Starcraft, especially in terms of muta control, and is known for being hyper-aggressive, almost relentless in his style. The second was (oGs) Nada, who is one of the most successful Starcraft players of all time, known as "the Genius Terran" and who once whitewashed July (3-0) in an OSL finals. To see two such legends of Starc

Esta måtto ta’lo i tiempo para bei in che’gue ta’lo “Sakkigake Chamorro!” It’s been a while since I did one of these, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. I never was really an Otaku, but rather an anime dilettante, and so I very rarely go through periods of sleep depriving anima obsession, where I make unwise decisions to stay up for most of the nights reading through back issues of mangas such as MPD Psycho or Gantz (ta'lo !) or start watching an entire season of anime late in the evening, knowing full well that each episode I watch will just make me want to watch one more and the closer I get to the end of the season the more I will be able to convince myself that it is tomtom that I stay awake to finish it. The rest of the time however, my approach to anime is very temperate, ko’lo’lo’ña since I moved back to Guam. While in the states, cheap, sometimes pirated anime on Ebay or at flea markets would constantly feed my habit, on Guam finding titles I’m intere

This Friday, July 16th my most recent art show, "Before the Storm, After the Fire," at I.P. Coffee in Mangilao, will be coming down. In its place a new exhibit by artist and editor of the Marianas Variety Mar-Vic Cagurangan, called "Naked Truth" will be opening. So Friday night from 6-8 pm we'll be having an opening/closing party, where you can meet both artists, enjoy some good food and wine and also try to pick up some of my pieces before they get stored in the trunk of my car. For this last show I divided my artwork up into different themes. When I paint things, even abstract imagery, they tend to follow a set of regular themes. So even though the artwork is abstract and open to interpretation, when I paint it and when I title it, I often end up coming back to the same sorts of themes: movies, song lyrics, puns, Guam history and so on. So when I was figuring out how to hang my show, I decided to divide them up into groups based on shared imagery or names. Th

I asked a few people before I left Guam what, if anything, they would want me to try and get for them while I was in South Korea. Most people, thankfully said nothing, since I knew I wouldn't have alot of time for commercial exploring or shopping on this trip. My brother Jeremy (Kuri), is helping my stubstitues with the AV equipment for my classes while I'm gone and so when he said that he didn't want anything from South Korea, I pushed him further to come up with something I could get for him, to pay him back for helping me out. Put i tiningo'-hu put i che'l-hu, ya hafa ya-na, siempre guaha minalago-na. Last year in one of my Guam History classes a friend of my brothers outed him as a closet K-Pop fan. Apparently a few weeks before, a K-Pop group had been on island for a vacation, and so when Kuri and his friends heard about this and found out what hotel they were staying at, they rushed down their to try and meet them. As they wandered around the hotel, like all