Freshmen

I remember how it was four years ago, when I first entered the school and wondered how I was going to survive in the domain. Already I had gotten the rumour that there were bound to be 'freshman fridays', events in which newcomers would be ridiculed by other groups for their lack of indoctrination into the scholastic system. Now that I've survived three previous years here, partly due to help from an uncle and students that came with me from Brigantine, I decided I was no longer subject to that. Indeed, when one of my friends, César, came up with the idea of filming a documentary exposing some of the supposed ills brought on by freshmen of the year such as the lunch line glut, I approved it with a nod.

But when I experienced a particularly bad glut that I figured was due to hold me up for at least fifteen minutes, I initially decided to just leave and eat at work before shift started. Then, some students and staff began to ask me why I wasn't eating — and soon enough, I spoke with two classmates that were employed by the kitchens and they decided that they would do something to regulate the line on the side that I usually got in on. That they did (although the other side is still subject to gluts, probably more severe than when flow control was established) — and they were quick to point out that the current freshmen were not posing the problem, but the current sophomores and juniors were.

Thus I came under the assumption that all of the hype about freshmen in this school was predicated on how the sophomores and juniors of this year — about eighty percent of whom I'm talking about are in the nursing programme — behaved. I remember saying that I wasn't really loved before until I had the blood taken, and I developed a bit of respect for those people, but now I feel sorry that I ever approved the film plan. Fortunately, I was able to have the plans revised — I ended up doing the storyboard myself — and as of now we are interviewing teachers about their experiences with the current freshmen. As I had expected, all of them were exceptionally pleased with the ones coming in this year — they had better academic and behavioural standing than any other age group in the school as of now (but it's still early in the year).

End another three-paragraph essay, all I can come up with during the school year.

Bzzzzzzt!

I remember watching a programme about dog whistles; whenever someone blew into one, a dog would rush forth but humans would not be able to hear it. I then learned that it was because our eardrums aren't quite as good as those of dogs.

And then again, such quality can be limited to youngsters. Shortly before school started, a company produced a ringtone, 'Mosquito', that was configured so that only students could hear it. When school started for me, it turned out that the ringtone had become so popular that many techers knew what it was, What may seem as a disappointment may be that two of our teachers were able to hear it loud and clear; in fact, one, our marine biology teacher (I stopped her course to pursue Spanish last week), demonstrated it to other teachers. It turned out that she had been a musician and had kept her ears healthy that way. On the other side of the spectrum, though, our gym teacher — the same one that assigned the mechanical babies — was led into the room as Dan, one of the ringtone owners, played a sample for her. She couldn't hear it, so she made us turn around and raise our hands if we heard it. When most of us did, she accused us of lying and stalked out. The ringtone has proved so successful that I also heard shopkeepers intend to use the sound to drive hoodlums away.

Even so, I haven't seen the need to text in class or otherwise use a mobile phone during those hours. My stepbrother was ecstatic to receive one the Christmas before last, and ever since then he's wanted the best and the most expensive out of it; he's used that thing for more uses than it's been designed for, from what I can tell. I'm the exact opposite; since mine was not a flip phone and it kept turning on when I brushed against a wall, and I never had any cell phone numbers to keep anyway (only that of Tom, whom I haven't communicated with much since I started working), I stopped using it after four months of being forced to have it on me and gave it to one of my father's labour contractors. This Christmas, though, I may be getting one of Cingular's 'go' phones and, when I receive my licence, AAA services. The main concern in my family was being stranded on a dirt road, which I saw as the only use for a cell phone if ever there was one.

And there's also the possible meet-ups. Lily did mention calling Frostweaver via mobile once....

Not gone

...and I bite my tongue at my thoughts since the last post.

Not only has Blaze initiated Shinou.com, touting it as a replacement for PC when it goes down due to intrusion or lack of funding, but PC was hacked yesterday. Last night I learned that someone had been using Steve's account on the sly, but now was when it was really time they did stuff: When the smoke cleared, all of the super moderators had been removed, all super mods except Jake had been removed, and the entire population fell to 225. That number remains at the bottom of the main index but is soon to be fixed. During that time, I admit I had no desire to return to the forums if they came back, seeing as it was, to me at that time, a summation of a horrible server and faulty practical security working as one. Of course, now that I realise that they could just go back and grab a backup of the forums as they had done two weeks ago, although it'd cost them records after 4 September, I now see myself as an idiot.

The first guess was that Blaze and BGTFamily, the owners of Total Pokémon, were connected to it as they had been hounded out of the Community and Shinou.com was opening right around the time of the hack. Yet both contended that they weren't, although Blaze foresaw the hack after a chat response warning him against a friend of the sender coming to take down the site and PPN, which is slated for removal from the fold soon anyway. The decision to remove PPN, though, and leave just SIVPH, was the genesis for Blaze's guess that Shinou would survive and eclipse PC once funds falter.

There was me thinking that PC would have to obtain yet another database, as they did in September 2003 when their old database failed. Instead, Kwesi insisted on moving house — the URL became www.theud.com/pokecommunity (the old URL will redirect — in fact, the URL was redirected the night of the hacking, right when the boards were ready to go public again; that may have been a factor) and mods had to fix up glitches that resulted from the move (which were generally confined to broken images). Of course, a backup of the boards from 4 September had to be put in — the boards were down completely for five days at that rate, so little difference was made.

Oh, and at time of writing Shinou.com was still closed. I'll say that by tomorrow night they should be open. I guess having bilingual forums and a hassled agenda went quite a way.

Pokémon Community gone?

Update: It's not closed. Kwesi moved the board, but records after 4 September have been wiped clean. I will reveal the URL when it comes time.

Original announcement: Nearly a week has passed since the Pokémon Community has been out of order. Many thought it another denial-of-service attack, but what with Kwesi not speaking and Steve telling no-one but Matt where he's been over the past months and why the Community hasn't been brought up to order, it's now best to guess that, amid the rumours of a relaunch and Total Pokémon leaving the fold, the Community may have met its end. For the second time.

In a conversation I had with an insider, I was told that Jake had tried to have BGTFamily, an administrator inaugurated in June, demoted. Blaze, a co-owner of Total Pokémon, had had that end of the stick when the forum for Total Pokémon had been established on PC, with the excuse being that his representation didn't warrant the right to have full moderation rights to those boards or the right to be in the staff dominion. Blaze was reinstated shortly afterward. As a result, when it became the accepted rumour that PC wasn't returning at all, Blaze and the folks at Total Pokémon started their own forum, Shinou.com. According to this insider, none of the petty administrators with the exception of Erica was invited to maintain their rank at this new board due to Jake's alleged belligerence, and forums were going to be switched around and original mods furloughed.

The board, the insider says, should be open sometime next week or so.

Who are you?

Now it's time to ask someone who they could be.

There is a person visiting from Cerulean, Kentucky, running on Cinergy Communications and using the IP 216.135.53.81. If that is you, leave a comment. No rush, just want to know who you are.

Popular. Yeah. I guess so.

Popular Girls

I'll assume that this is not a mock site like one I was once showed that was made by Democrats that tried to insult Radical Republicans by creating an anti-Pokémon page with supposed evidence of demonic affiliation. If there's one thing I hate, it's a girl that tries to delude others by establishing a code of conduct that promises to make you popular but requires acts that will more likely drive people away from you.

First we have clothing and bag brands. Last year I had to do a project in my health class (this came before the baby, thank you very much) in which we were to evaluate the expenses for raising a baby in its first year of life. Although we know the cost is quite high and should prove prohibitive for teens, the figure — nearly $91,000 — was offset by designer labels such as Gucci for clothes to even diaper bags. The very same label makes a cameo here, along with other labels and their respective websites. (It can be argued, though, that Aéropostale is so commonly worn that it's basically cheap by now.)

It then goes on to mention pearls, earrings, and torn jeans if you want the Gothic look — I'm afraid that's all too common and detractive. For one thing, it doesn't make a great impression when you're taking a job interview or attending school for that matter, as most dress codes will want you to not have holes in the jeans. Unfortunately, the dress code at my school, which disallows revelation of the leg past the ankle except in cases of skirts or gym shorts, has been flouted so many times that I've just accepted it as a fact of life, but it's gotten considerably better since measures were stepped up in my sophomore year. And for another, the British have a name for people, especially girls, who deck themselves in excessive amounts of jewellery and vivid clothing — they're called chavs.

Next, what populars do. They go to the mall, have five way conversations, post provocative pictures on MySpace — check. It's all the same, thanks in part to shows on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and ABC Family — we're at prep schools, tapping away at our keyboards and spitting out dialogue on AIM or chatting up the corridors by shopping at the mall. There's a store called Hot Topic in a mall near to me, but the clothing there is extremely expensive and many people know it; in fact, not many people from my area shop there at all.

They read the teenage tabloids such as J14 — that fails to extend into high school. If you want the material you can get in that magazine, go pick up the National Enquirer. I guarantee that fifty percent or more of what you read in J14 or Tiger Beat is fake and directed right at the girls. I feel terribly sorry for Jesse McCartney.

As for hygiene, I'm glad it looks out for clean hair and teeth as well as healthy skin. It also advises that you allow for better grades, so that's about the only kudos I'll give it there. It took me some time to find something positive to back up the 'don't be stupid' calls throughout some of the site's pages, but dang it, I managed it.

Believe me, being popular is nothing you want. Popularity, in a sense, is wanting to be somebody from the scope of power, influence, and ability. I was popular in middle school because I could use big words and seem as if I knew what they all meant. True, I did know what some of them meant, but usage was generally lackadaisical — I realise now that it takes far less pressure to say what you want in simpler terms or, if it's a big word, check the dictionary before you proceed. Unfortunately, this led many to believe that I could be tripped up, and even today I have friends stop me on the street and ask, 'What does supercalifragilisticexpialidocious mean? Who was the fifth president?' I sometimes answer lightheartedly, but when it comes to math problems, especially when they begin with the line 'I'm having problems with my work', not only am I annoyed, but my confidence back then comes back to bite me in the ass. Of course, it then raises the question whether it was actually thickly veiled personal resentment.

In effect, the very word 'popular' is undermined. The word is supposed to suggest few role models, but as soon as people follow suit, whatever is done becomes a standard. It's like being in a rave full of shouting moshers and a heavy metal band blaring onstage, and you're convinced as much as the next person that your shouting will somehow get you noticed. Now when someone does something differently, they're referred to as deviants, at term otherwise reserved for the 'popular' girl.

Now I just let people see my maps, especially handwriting samples. Now that I know better, I don't randomly spew out trivia and lift my head to assert its authenticity. I'm already paying my dues for all that, especially when I see the consequences levied on girls that try to fit in the crowd.

Livejournal again

Again, I screwed up.

I decided to keep a parallel LiveJournal blog to relect the school flow and save this for reall issues. I'll cross links between the two on occasion. I've added a link to the top so you can read.

Next project will be designing a skin for it.

SPP overcome at last (?)

Well, from the events of recent days, it seems so.

When I returned from Maryland, not only did I hear that Steve Irwin had gone, but now something else was beginning to go. If you type in the URL 'www.serebii.net' into your browser, you'll no longer come to the splash page that leads you to Serebii.net — in fact, even typing it with any attached file path will lead you to a YouTube recording of Rocky Horror's 'Sweet Transvestite'. This morning it seemed as if Joe had wrestled the domain back, but tonight, at least for me, it had gone back to the recording. As of now, and I hate to do this, the URL that'll get you back to the site is just an IP address: 64.72.117.249. (Maybe you can edit your hosts file and ensure that the domain goes to that IP.)

And that's not all. Yesterday it was reported that a hacker was loose on the board and had managed to ban every staff member aside from Joe. In the picture at right (contributed to Wikipedia by Hakerius) you will also see that the hacker, if it's not a joke, changed the vBulletin template so that the columns were in reverse order. He also cleaned out the Announcements board and soft-deleted topics in another board (so that the mods could restore them).

Now, it's easy to say that the site will bounce back. After all, a few months ago it recovered from a server debilitation. But with the increasing hatred of SPP for its attitude toward other forums — especially PKMN.NET — will getting out of a rut like this for even a short time be sufficient? It could very well be a case of resentment by outsiders for failing to keep up a reputation and, at this rate, security.

Steve Irwin

Those of you from PC wondering why I, along with several others, have a turtle preceding my name on MSN, it's our swan song to Steve Irwin. No one will doubt that he was a man not just of nature, but of Australia itself.

He first developed an intersst in reptiles when he received a snake for his sixth birthday. He then went on to help his family take care of wildlife on their reptile farm, which he transformed into Australia Zoo later in his life. It was at this zoo that many of his documentary shows, the most popular of all and the one giving him that title for eternity being 'The Crocodile Hunter', in which he, his wife Terri, and his pet crocodile Argo put on a show for audiences and, many times, set out to investigate the predatory habits of dangerous creatures such as boas and rattlesnakes.

Personally, I think I never watched his shows as much as I should have. My cousin is an animal lover and almost certainly was a devout fan of his; in fact, at a glance I could probably say that her affinity was derived from watching his series on Animal Planet a lot. I knew, though, that he loved animals so much that he was destined to make himself into a conservationalist renowned throughout the world. That, he cerainly did. Nonetheless, this led, as many sceptics were undoubtedly hoping, to his untimely death: Whilst filming a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, a stingray poked its tail right into Irwin's heart, and Irwin died before the others could get him to the surface. But in the interest of honour, he died doing what he did best, making the world more aware of nature.

Goodbye from a friend who, in retrospect, really wanted to know you more.