Cross Stinging Reality

Facebook

2009-03-18T20:13:00.003-04:00

In September 2008, Facebook — which has effectively taken the place of MySpace as the medium of choice for groups, activists, and students, having risen from obscurity as an exclusive college network — imposed what would be the first of two highly controversial page design changes. Last month, it had added to its résumé of customer service mishaps by releasing a set of terms and conditions that, by stating that any material would remain on the servers even if the person who posted them withdrew them from the social networking site, gave the impression that Facebook was taking as property everything its users said or displayed on the site; these terms were later suspended and, after a user referendum, discarded entirely.

Now, the issue lies in a drastic change made to the page layouts, mainly the home page, which no longer offers a simplified feed of what your friends are doing, instead relying on photos and wall posts for fodder. (Facebook for iPhone, at last update, still offers a simplified feed.) In the bid to perfect the site to make it more attractive or engaging than, say, MySpace or Twitter, the development team seems to have forgotten that the only reason people stayed there was because it wasn't MySpace or Twitter. To me, the fact that its prohibition of website layout and colour changes by the user qualifies it as better than MySpace on any occasion, but with only 25,000 members approving the change against 333,000 against the change (and more hype in the previous, wholesale makeover) as of writing, Facebook ought to learn from the 4chan message boards and change only when the community clearly benefits from it (4chan had a new home page go live in 2007, but the thread format, which remains its distinguishing feature for its quick-and-dirtiness, has never changed).

To allay the assumption that I'm wholeheartedly joining an asinine bandwagon, there are two points I need to make. The first is that I approved of the previous design change. The design it bore when it first went public was clunky and bore the marks of early attempts at dynamic effects on television (closing logos, anyone?). The second is that change is human and natural, but only when moderated. There are people out there, like me, who will resist widespread or otherwise perceptible change, and there are others who believe that change is an adventure.

In Web design, the quandaries are new W3C regulations, popular demand, the addition of new features, and — this is the big one — time. Despite its roaring success, Facebook has only been public for three years, having spent two in restriction to college and university students and staff, so in Web terms it's still an infant. Fark.com, on the other hand, was on the Web for eight years without drastic design change before a new design went live; the members mutinied. Personally, I forgive both — for Facebook, nobody gets it right the first time; for Fark...come on, the three-column quick-and-dirty is for the...well...quick-and-dirty.

Clothes

2008-11-16T21:14:00.002-05:00

Behind me are bags of shirts that came from Pac-Sun, American Eagle, and Old Navy. Yes, they're my shirts, and it was at my father's behest that my cousin, Jen, take me up to Toms River to get them.

As a male, I find it hard to fathom why women like to shop. There's the argument that dressing up dolls has manifested itself in them after ten or so years, which for the sake of this entry I am going to assume. Indeed, it was with no regard to the clothes I recently washed after a two-week laundry cycle and wear when I'm not working, and that the shirts I wear to work are given to me by Acme corporate. In the winter months, I have no use for more clothes unless some have torn apart or gotten too small. Yesterday's expenditure of over $200 on clothes from the three aforementioned stores more than makes up for these shortcomings — a waste of money and an example of horrible timing.

The day before began innocuously enough — I went to visit Jen in the hopes of meeting some of her friends, which I did at the Applebee's in Manahawkin. The next day we were supposed to go there again at the same time, but due to some people falling ill or not being allowed to go, it ended up being me alone with Jen and her friend at the Ocean County Mall, trying to guess which clothes would suit me best:

The stores I went to, with the exception of Pac-Sun, have a habit of acknowledging themselves on their clothes, which is a decent thing to wear if you're a girl but a warning sign to the community if you're of the opposite gender. I met one guy over the summer who happened to be gay and leant heavily toward Aéropostale — to be fair, this brand is associated more with girls whilst American Eagle and Old Navy lend themselves enough to rustic atmospheres. This aside, I hate having writing on my clothes — I don't intend on being a billboard for a company; much less do I like having symbols or cult designs on them.
I got a lot of thermals. They work, since the heat in this room is being controlled to conserve energy, so they at least are practical. The brand-name shirts I got, though, were purely to appease the gods.

If there's anything I need right now, though, they are twelve hours of precious sleep, a pair of better work slacks, and a washer and dryer for my room instead of queuing for the ones that exist for the other five members of my family. I don't need to stave it off by buying more clothes, and it seems that that's all that happened.

Or I could just use my own money to root out summer clothes on my own and throw what I have accumulated on the top wire shelf out. I have two other trash bags to go, too.

Where's the candid camera?

2008-10-28T00:43:00.002-04:00

Yes, I'm still a cashier.

No, I'm not going to mark down your candy bar to one cent. Acme, which acquired the store I worked for in January, brought in a more demanding atmosphere. I don't know if it was the management changing or the quality of the store going steadily downhill, but I feel different. A lot different.

As I reported in an old entry, I was a cashier at a supermarket called Shop 'n Bag (an alter ego of Thriftway, which a customer referred it to today). Up until the summer of 2007, I did very little else than work the cash register and fold up paper-and-plastic bags, due to my runaway attachment to one task and one task only. From then until the ultimate takeover by Supervalu, which was supplying food to us from May 2006 to December 2006 (during which time we were known as Brigantine Supermarket), I got to push carts and put away unwanted items. I initially got into these side tasks thinking, on my father's advice, that I needed to 'broaden my horizons', and expected little more than what I was doing now when I signed on as a cashier when Acme had us reapply.

The truth is, however, I'm doing a lot more. And I actually like cleaning, doing maintenance, and pushing carts more than I like working the register. There are two reasons I can think of:

I do not like change. Because the store is much more active and the stores are encouraged to keep everyone busy whilst the lines are short, cashiers are sent off to do scrubbing or trash removal. For me in particular, being sent back to register during a customer surge is horrible. I started the task in the hopes of finishing it and commending myself on a job well done, and I expected to finish it, and my frustration at never getting the chance shows in my communication with the customer; what would have been a lively 'hello' in the aisles when a customer approached to learn where to find an item became a meagre grunt in acknowledgement when asking for their loyalty card or announcing their coupons. I've also taken my anger out on a manager once over this fact; it took a full day to recover.
Under the management preceding Acme, the store was dirty. There were not as many people cleaning as there were under Acme (since there were no dedicated carryout or bagger positions, the holders of said posts being available for menial tasks). As a bagger, which I was for the past few weeks, I actually got to clean up the store and make things look nice for customers. When a customer is happy to find something on the shelf or have the terms of a sale explained, I'm happy.

Matt, the manager of the store who also runs Acme's Somers Point location, can be a demanding person, although he means well. If there's any inspiration for me to go anywhere in the company, provided I stay there long enough, I'll have to credit him. I feel bad, though, that for all he's had me do with the physical upkeep, my room is still a mess with wires, cables, magazines and union newsletters on the floor and my clothes unfolded. I'm glad he's never over at my house, at the very least.

Hi again

2008-10-08T21:41:00.004-04:00

It's been ages since I last posted, and those who remember this old place are wondering, 'Why didn't you keep doing what you used to love, CW?' You're in luck. I found out that a friend I'd recently made courtesy of some old Pokémon Community friends has a Blogger account, and that drove me to start up again. It's probably also due to the fact that I'm better off writing my thoughts down instead of bottling them up and dwelling. That's basically what happened over the last year.

So I leave you with this note, as well as the promise that the blog will become active once more, this time shunning the Internet drama it became famous for, and the link to this friend's blog.

http://ciarline.blogspot.com/

Note: The LiveJournal might not be updated anymore.

BACK TO WORK SPECIAL: Sharia law in the UK?

2008-02-07T21:41:00.000-05:00

Yep, back to blogging, I guess.

No doubt queasy after a car bomb hitting an airport and a crazy cleric now being extradited to the US for inciting violence, the Archbishop of Canterbury has now suggested that the UK would benefit from having a rudimentary Sharia law system by which Muslims could abide. Theoretically, a Muslim could petition for divorce in a Sharia court in the UK if his or her spouse hasn't been faithful, or custody could be granted as per the religion of the parents.

I admire the decision — but it's a step in the wrong direction. The only ones who would benefit from the existence of an Islamic legal system to sit side-by-side with a universal law system would be the extremists.

Even in Islamic countries, Sharia law is nearing its shelf life; the only ones benefiting from such systems are the politicians, clerics, and radicals. In Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime, there has been legislation to insure sex change surgery. In Jordan, even the queen doesn't wear a headscarf. And the presidential administration of Abdullah Gül and his AKP party has thus far yielded none of the religious reform in Turkey that the military feared would happen. Even among Muslims I have met here in the US, religion is a private matter and nothing to shove down the hatch. For most civilian Muslims, it seems that even Sharia law would not work out very well, and for the rest it would only be a show of bigotry no matter who looks at it.

And what is the point of having two legal systems in a country? It could be easy to switch affiliation if you're homophobic and want your gay son cut off from the rest of the family, even if you're not Muslim; you could (at risk of being charged with fraud) take it out in a Sharia court without anybody batting an eye. Most of the Muslims who enter the UK (or the US) and apply for citizenship know that everything will fall apart for them at first, as the laws in their home country, no doubt bearing the remnants of religion, will probably no longer apply. If you immigrate, you follow the rules of your new home. If it's something that borders on humanitarian question, you might have a case, but if it is a religion that you believe supersedes the law of the land, you will have to adapt. (This isn't exclusively for immigrants, for that matter; I still have my eye on the holy-rollers.)

Not bad for a few months of being away from the blog, but damn it, it's good to be back.

The sorry state of the Union

2007-10-23T21:45:00.000-04:00

As the clock winds down on Bush's presidency, the United States undoubtedly will need to consider its options on how to carry on once he's left and who of all people would do it the best. The war in Iraq was a costly mistake, global warming is making waves (pun intended) across the political spectrum, and traditional values are the foci of concern. With these issues coming to a head as the spectre of Islamist-fuelled Armageddon looms, we have been wishing, hoping, and praying for someone to see us out without bumbling through.

What we got were rock stars.

Ladies and gentlemen of the United States: Those of you over the age of eighteen and registered to vote will unwittingly make a lot of choices when you cast your vote. Some, like myself, are wise enough to watch the news every so often and give thought to who the candidates really are. And I've realised that the lot we have offer little promise. Right now we have Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and others hogging the limelight, at least four of whom have attained rock star status through either breaking the trend or just being too well known. Obama has only been a senator for two years, yet his status as an African-American* has people believing him to be the Saviour of the Democratic Party. Giuliani has been hailed a hero for his swift actions following 9/11. Clinton has kept a dizzyingly high profile ever since her husband was in the White House, and she would be the first female executive to run the United Sates if elected. Romney was known for mandating health insurance in Massachusetts. Thompson was an actor who played the role of an American president. Few are actually known for their credentials in government more than what the tabloids report.

Worst of all, many of the problems I see with this country seem to be gravely mishandled — government handouts (tax-and-spend liberalism in a nutshell), the Islamism situation in the Middle East, and personal responsibilities. Many of these problems politicians skirt around just to get a voting base or two. However, the public has realised that pandering to a voting base will solve nothing. In order to get these issues down, you need to use your head:

Government handouts

Had I posted, say, six months earlier, I would have cast my vote for Hillary Clinton. One of her plans is to give each child $5,000 plus interest to pay college tuition or perhaps a mortgage. However, I now realise that that money is just a lump sum; it's not going to be earmarked for anything, so it can be spent willy-nilly if desired. The same I say for a Labour Party initiative to give £200 to each pregnant woman in the hopes that she'll eat well: Even though she'll have to see an obstetrician to get the grant, the money's not going to be earmarked. This means that the beneficiary could just dip into the account and cash out for booze and drugs. For the full gist of this argument, I refer you to the Have Your Say page on the subject; to summarise, with the poor and undereducated having more and more kids and seeing sex as a form of recreation, what better way to get money to blow on drugs or an expensive television set than to get knocked up?

Right now, people in the US on low incomes but with large families can use food stamp cards** or, if they're pregnant or their child is under the age of five, WIC checks to cover the cost of food. As a supermarket cashier, I see first-hand the most common abuse of the food benefits system: Even though they're given cash in the hopes that it'll go toward food that's actually good for them, not only do recipients not keep track of how much they're getting before they reach the till, but they use their credits on junk food. Instead of buying fruits, bread, milk, cereals, or the other basics for cooking and preparing, they opt for sugary juices, candy, and chips, much of which is subject to tax in New Jersey because of their content.

Solution: The WIC programme is nearly scotch-free because of its strict regulations on what can be bought. Such restrictions should also apply to food stamps. As a start, any food that can be taxed for its sugar content or lack of nutrition, i.e. soda or sweets, should not be covered by food stamps. Then, you move on to anything with more than 1 gram of trans fat per serving, or foods with high levels of sodium or carbohydrates (excluding fiber). Either way, only healthy foods should be eligible; if the parents want to buy soda or Li'l Hugs for their kids, they should work for it. That way, not only do the kids start to realise what little nutrition such things have anyway, but you also advance your assault on obesity.

Islamism

Conservatives love to point out that Islam isn't quite the loving and peaceful religion it's purported to be. Add to the mix the fact that most of said conservatives are Christian. The result is the notion that Islam is a spectre that needs to be vanquished in the name of Jesus Christ.

One thing is correct: Islam isn't exactly a peaceful religion — when the Qu'ran is taken to heart. But Christianity has been the same way — before World War I. From the inception of the Catholic Church to World War I, Europe was embroiled in religious warfare, and all partakers were Christian. The first wars — the Crusades — were fought for control of Jerusalem, as the Christians and Muslims had spiritual stake in the city. Eventually the Syrian sultan Saladin defeated a crusade led by King Richard, but he opened the city to Christian pilgrims.

Then came Martin Luther. As soon as he nailed the Ninety-Five Theses, Europe was up in arms, with the Catholic Church struggling to counter the newly-conceived Protestant movement. For hundreds of years, the struggle for ideological control of Europe would carry on. In fact, the United States was founded on principles that its founders learnt from the warfare in Europe: People needed their freedom of religion, press, speech, assembly, and redress, which no religious faction in Europe could offer. The whole point was to avoid religious and ideological oligarchy — a point many Christians in this country fail to realise as they champion those who champion 'traditional family values'.

The Middle East has been fraught with religious warfare long before Europe has — from the death of Muhammad's grandson. One group thought the next holy ruler had to be a direct descendant of Muhammad — the Shi'as. The other, the Sunnis, considered any righteous person eligible. They have been fighting ever since they split over whom should be the unifying force, trading blows to push what they believe is true Islam. This has only been aggravated with the discovery of oil, a commodity the West has pursued ever since the birth of the automobile.

It would eventually take two world wars and a Holocaust to slap Europe awake to realise that religious rule was not the answer.

Solution: The Middle East needs a World War of its own — and the West must stay out. First thing to do would be to finish up what we need to do in Iraq and withdraw our troops gradually. Then, we sit back and watch the sparks fly as the Muslims kill each other off in the name of the Qu'ran. Soon, once their populations have dwindled and their economies have been torn to bits, they'll come out like Europe.

'Family values'

Is the United States a 'Christian country'? Is it based on the 'family'? Those who feel sentimental would be quick to say yes to either question. Many groups, such as the Family Research Council, want a country to which 'traditional family values' are central; to do this, they say, a Biblical code should be implemented. The argument here is that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, suggested by the presence of terminology such as 'our Creator' and 'divine Providence' in the Declaration of Independence. It should be considered, though, that such language was the best to be had in the day; you didn't have science, and you needed some outlet for ideas. Even Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was atheist; the truth was that the terms so lovingly cited by the Christian right were purely metaphorical.

As stated above, the whole idea behind the Constitution was to distance the country from religious oligarchy. The Christian government these conservative groups want so badly simply defeats the point of the nation's existence. If you're not convinced, examine the row in the Anglican Church over the consecration of gays. When the Episcopal Church, the American arm of the Anglican Church, consecrated the openly gay Gene Robinson, Anglican factions in Africa cried foul. Last year, members of the Church met in Tanzania and gave the Episcopal Church an ultimatum: Stop dealing with gays or get out. If that's not enough, imagine that you find in the Bible cause to treat gays as your equal and the country's laws prohibit homosexuality — you'll have a rough time gaining a following. Even the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints faces pressure, even after the Short Creek fiasco, because of their supposedly divine support of polygamy, counter to federal law still supported by the pro-family lot. The point is that running a Christian nation would only cause friction through the many denominations present in the country who claim that their way is the way to go.

The issue of family is, in effect, something that the government should have no business in. What defines the family is something that the people should decide on their own terms — it is not to be dictated by law. We all know by now that the 'family' the Family Research Council has in mind consists of a bundle of children raised in a household supported by a man married to one woman. This is a decent family — for those kind of Christians. However, you have homosexuals who, bereft of attraction to the opposite sex, miss out on the love said to be needed to keep a household together. These people would love to have their own children themselves, but at the same time they don't find a woman that appealing. Imagine the case of former New Jersey governor James McGreevey: He seemed to be this happily married family man, with a wife and kids. As soon as lover Golan Cipel threatened to expose him for his vapid appointment to the state's homeland security department, the house of cards collapsed, and Dina Matos McGreevey ended up demanding hefty amounts in alimony. McGreevey and Cipel have now entered a civil union, and I can bet that one of the things on their mind is raising a few kids of their own.

If you need a more convincing argument: China has a policy that requires that families have no more than one child. This has resulted in a severe disproportion of males over females, even after gender selection has been outlawed. If you abhor the government there taking control of families, why would you want it over here?

Solution: The answer to the two questions is no. For my full take on abortion and same-sex marriage, both of which I support, I refer you to my televangelism piece. The point is that the family is only what the ones involved make it out to be. Christians can raise their families as James Dobson recommends; that's their choice. They cannot, however, impose this on those who don't agree with Dobson or his so-called research council.

* Obama's father was Kenyan. When I say 'black', I refer to African-Americans who have American lineage going back to times of slavery.

** Electronic food stamps were introduced after paper food stamps found themselves on the black market, usually pawned or exchanged for drugs.

speaks

2007-10-02T21:13:00.000-04:00

Given the many times I have tried to speak on the subject of my fights on the Internet — including the one with the Pokémon Community, you would have thought that I would have heeded the final words of Arcanine: ‘Get a life CW.’ This marked the last post I wrote before I wrote a message to Articuno Avianos to remove my account from PC through illegal access to the administrator control panel — I gave Lightning a copy of the PM, and I was banned for ‘instigating a severe hack threat’. This unceremonious expulsion, which followed six months of wrangling for my Other Voting Polls position back, led me to believe that I, in all respects, had just proven that I had no consideration for what others thought, and I have been wallowing ever since.

Little did I know....

The Composition lesson I had in college today involved an essay called 'Caring for your Introvert', written by a man who considers himself an introvert over the fact that he wishes to have his time alone. He wrote of introverts that ‘to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating’, and extroverts ‘are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone’. He also debunks popular speculation that introverts are arrogant, stating that ‘this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts’. In other words, an introvert would rather be alone for some time, but they are just as functional as extroverts in large social scenes, albeit for a shorter time.

Of all the criticism I have received on the home front and on the Internet, you would figure that my recoiling would be the result of introverted tendencies. I even thought this was so, inferring from my imbalanced attention to my own needs. I may be on the computer a lot — but I have WLM open whenever possible, ready to receive IMs at any moment, and I normally find myself on a message board. And I have said from time to time that I loved attending the youth summits in Rhode Island due to the fact that you’re almost invariably around other students, and talking to them even if you have absolutely nothing in common.

After reading Jonathan Rauch’s screed, I saw all this in a new light — I am an extrovert.

Here’s the truth, folks, and it took me a long time and a lot of pain to come to this conclusion. The fights I have had were not over a mod spot, although I can attribute my clinging to the post as a result of Asperger’s syndrome. Rather, it is the fact that the loss of the position, which is incalculably worsened by the ban, effectively cuts me off from the other members, and I’m reduced to hearing what others have to say only when they send me a message on WLM or post on their LiveJournal or Facebook blogs. Indeed, now that I’ve come to realise my status as an extrovert beleaguered by Asperger’s syndrome, I’ve seen the company of members as infinitely more valuable. Indeed, I’ve felt that just mentioning and making it clear that I was an ‘aspie’ — rather than suppressing the fact, dismissing it as a sympathy hook — could have saved the situation (yet as far as Andy personally goes, I doubt he’d have any sympathy, given his overall attitude — and possibly the fact that he was homeschooled and most likely sheltered from ‘wayward’ society).

I’ve had to grapple with this practically since I began attending school in Brigantine. It was sometime in elementary school when I realised that my intelligence amounted to admiration from others, including teachers themselves. I have said before that I would brag about how I could multiply and divide and the majority of the third-graders had yet to learn it — that in particular was successfully muted when, as challenge, my teacher handed me an advanced multiplication sheet and I cringed in fear, and then the following year when I turned up a ‘dismal’ C in the first grading quarter. I also remember memorising the names of the presidents of the United States, but bragging about it led to the current stops on the street from people who just want to use me as a walking almanac. I would also use big words — Roget’s Thesaurus put an end to that. While I’m sure it’s nature for kids my age to brag about things other kids don’t have, I’ve seen mine to be acquired other than material; one kid could brag that he had a PSP whereas I ‘just’ had a Nintendo DS, whilst I’d counter that he couldn’t name the book of the Bible from which he’d draw his conclusion that Adam and Eve spurned humankind*.

The intelligence thing, as can be inferred from the above, was invariably coupled with social crutching. I began to depend on the fact that I had a photographic memory and could list things for my social needs. In middle school you could see me hanging out outside kids’ homes around a basketball net, although I wasn’t necessarily inclined to partake in the sport; being smart and well-known was enough in their eyes to validate my attendance. I would eventually make the cut for a trivia team called Think Day, which eventually competed in a gym hall at a high school in Linwood, but I was too confident; we ended up in eighth place after I hijacked many of the questions (although the position was still respectable as there were thirty teams present, and, looking through school report cards later in my life, many of the questions asked would stump most students at higher levels of public education). Through the years, my grades would not be very exceptional; I even ran the risk of failure twice. Intelligence, I would later learn, did not equate to brains or responsibility; it was merely the ability to figure things out from the raw, and nothing more.

Then I learnt that I had Asperger’s syndrome.

Reading books on the disorder explained most, if not all, of what I needed to know — I was insanely intelligent, but responsibility and social skills were impedimenta. At first it didn’t seem to faze me in school, but it soon sent my perfect, delicately balanced world crashing down during high school. I met a student, who came to resent my intelligence, and I framed him for deletion of school files; we did not reconcile until graduation. I tried to go for the method of passing at minimum to save face until I met my physics teacher — who turned out to be my uncle; his class proved to be the hardest, and I credit my protection from a failing grade — and being the top student in his class the following quarter — to doing mountains of extra credit.

It was also in high school that I met the Internet. The first forum I joined, as you know, was PKMN.NET**. Being a rising SuperCheats.com star, I expected them to know who Cross Stinger was — but after snapping over a prank censorship of the word ‘Muuma’ and increased unwelcome involvement with staff affairs, I was forced to re-examine who I was. Even when I vowed to start anew at the Pokémon Community, I expected people to recognise me; they didn’t until Wikipedia got involved, and that, coupled with being promoted to moderator over those circumstances, brought me into the chaotic world of PC staff drama, which I lived off as someone still recovering from railing against Jeroen the previous year. In the end it was quarrelling over how the forums should be run and grumbling over my reduced seniority as moderator of Other Voting Polls — being invited to staff chats satisfied my social need but led to me feeling horrible once the chat finished, as I would be hard-pressed to mutter anything good and would eventually give Andy the impression that I was a stuck-up suck up who was rigidly against what Encyclopedia Dramatica would call ‘lulz’.

Whatever the case, I’ve seen this today as a warning that I would have to keep my mouth shut about how I was better in order to move on; in fact, I still think about the past and hold it tantamount to the present and future, as I believe that these three things shape the human psyche. I’m sure that had I refused to state unequivocally that Andy was right on the n00bs thing, I would have survived — yet at the same time I wonder whether ignoring the Wikipedia incident altogether would have made things a little easier. I’m sure that had I not spoken out against pairing and ‘families’, I would have had a lot more dignity engaging in it two months after I was given the mod job (which means Andy pulled the ‘paired up just to get modded’ assumption right out of his ass). The truth, ladies and gentlemen, is not necessarily that I should have just kept my mouth shut and been more consistent — I should have tried to look for the positives of families and pairing up, and probably left Kelsey alone as she genuinely had a relationship with Jorge.

And for all I have come to beforehand, I always feel as if I cannot bring myself to act upon these emotions. I hold the past in high regard, in an attempt to make myself clean. Why can I not just live with the errors I've made? The fact is that I do not have any incentive as of yet. More accurately, if a grudge I have is considered to be obsolete by most, I don't give up until an official announcement is made. That's why I have fought, while others hated it; that's why I placed great emphasis on forgiveness all these years.

I should have said this as soon as I set foot on the Internets — I have Asperger’s syndrome, and I am prone to explode if I feel alone or miserable. This is how I am. I might never change that.

* Observing as a Protestant growing up in a Catholic and Republican town, it's hard for any kid to say otherwise, unless they're Indian. I am not a creationist, and I respect the beliefs of those who are, but arguing over it on the street in front of the arcade when you're under 25 — actually, at any age — is just silly.

** I joined PKMN.NET on 7 July 2004. The SuperCheats forums did not come online until 31 August 2004.

Encyclopedia Dramatica

2007-09-25T22:11:00.002-04:00

Link not safe for work.

I have a confession to make: While I have decided to venture into smilie territory, I will not use textspeak, and I'm not fond of using FAIL — as with any other Internet quip like 'r0xx0rz' or 'haX0r', unless I'm using them in a context that defames such users except in the case of Fark.com). As someone who has come to revile the evils of the Internet as far as attention and drama are concerned, one site that has come to my attention is Encyclopedia Dramatica, a compendium of Internet fandoms, quips, trends, and insanity. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the reason things like Schadenfreude and FAIL exist — to be preserved and consecrated in this little library.

I'll seize the opportunity to capitalise on those who are amazed to find that it rests on a wiki by noting the type of articles that are written as to emphasise the beauty of the lexicon they know. Rule 34 is quick to have raw porn, as does the entry for 'rape', and even the one for 'Pokémon'; it even has a longer screed on Chris Hansen ('Why don't you have a seat?') and Dateline: To Catch a Predator than Wikipedia can muster. The Guardian has even written an article about the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) entry, which, appropriately is filled with incoherently placed texts. True, a lot of it can be offensive, but when it comes down to it, the collection of quips and expressions this encyclopaedia has to offer leads people to decide whether it would be a good thing to have their own little trend immortalised there or a bad thing to have rude anecdotes made about you.

Of course, following a ban from the Pokémon Community, I end up being mentioned on its 'Pokecommunity' entry, which echoes the little Wikipedia tiff last year. No matter, the article might be thrown anyway given their policy regarding Exhibits A through D.

SPECIAL REPORT: PPN shutdown

2007-09-21T20:55:00.000-04:00

The following has been posted as part of the newsletter circulated by PokéZam:

I thought I'd begin this article with a Pokemon site closure that happened just a few days ago. PPN had been a major Pokemon website for over 5 years. It was best known for its frequently updated Pokemon news and for being a founding member of the Pokemon Community, one of the most active Pokemon forums on the Internet today. If you try to access PPN today you will get a message from the webmaster, Steve, stating that his website was shut down by Pokemon USA due to copyright infringement. This seems suspcious to me because Steve has always worked closely with Pokemon USA and didn't have anything such as ROMs on his website that would get him shut down. In a subsequent news post from TSS Killer, a news poster on PPN, Steve is claiming that his house was raided by the police with everything from his computers, Nintendo DS, and even posted notes taken. This seems like a bit much if he was just breaking copyright laws. It is fact that Steve is a registered sex offender in the state of California, which may have lead to his house being raided. Also, if you may recall, Steve disappeared for over 6 months last year with no explanation of his whereabouts. We will keep you informed as this news story develops. This is easily the most bizarre situation I have ever experienced as a Pokemon webmaster in the past 8 years.

Blimey. The sex offence claim surfaced back in March, when Kylie-chan posted a notice on PC alerting members to the fact that Steve was on the Megan's Law roster in California (the webmaster of Pokézam has since told me the listing had been removed in negotiations). But all the while, it seemed the PC admins were sweeping this all under the rug:

(9:59 AM) Informant: how old are *you*?
(9:59 AM) --: 19. ;;
(10:00 AM) Informant: You're a creepy paedophile
(10:00 AM) --: Like Steve.
(10:00 AM) Informant: Steve? The admin?
(10:00 AM) Informant: yeah XD
(10:00 AM) --: Yeah.
(10:01 AM) --: Did you see that webpage?
(10:01 AM) Informant: technically Joe's a paedophile too
(10:01 AM) Informant: no o_o
(10:01 AM) --: Oh.
(10:01 AM) --: So you don't know that Steve really -is- a paedophile?
(10:01 AM) Informant: No
(10:01 AM) Informant: OMG
(10:01 AM) Informant: I WANT LINKS
(10:01 AM) --: Kay, one sec. Gotta find it.
(10:02 AM) --: While you're waiting. Answer this question. Who's more awesome, me or Sassy?
(10:02 AM) Informant: Kelsey, she's a chick
(10:02 AM) Informant: Sorry XD
(10:02 AM) --: Thanks, I wanted that. XD
(10:03 AM) Informant: I know. XD
(10:03 AM) --: XD
(10:03 AM) Informant: But he really is a paedophile? DX Is this why Erica left? XD
(10:04 AM) --: No, they all knew for a while before she left.
(10:04 AM) Informant: Oh. ...Then why did they stay?
(10:04 AM) --: Because they loved PC I guess.
(10:05 AM) --: Found it.
(10:05 AM) Informant: This better not be some stupid prank. XD
(10:05 AM) --: [Defunct register listing]
(10:05 AM) --: It's not. XD
(10:06 AM) Informant: HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT'S STEVE?!?!?!?
(10:06 AM) --: Well, the name.
(10:06 AM) Informant: How'd you know his last name? XD
(10:06 AM) --: Pokesph
(10:06 AM) --: Stephen Patrick Heffron
(10:06 AM) Informant: OHHHHHHHH.
(10:06 AM) Informant: So you're 100% sure?
(10:07 AM) --: His birthday is the same.
(10:07 AM) Informant: O___O;;; all this time we were on a forum by a PAEDOPHILE. ew.
(10:07 AM) --: The age is the same.
(10:07 AM) Informant: He's older than my Mom.
(10:07 AM) Informant: O___O;
(10:07 AM) --: And, the conclusive evidence.
(10:07 AM) Informant: yeah, he got those kid's addresses didn't he?
(10:07 AM) Informant: kids'*
(10:07 AM) --: The zip code.
(10:07 AM) Informant: running those competitions and stuff o___o
(10:07 AM) Informant: Did Kwesi kick out Steve? And who found out this?
(10:07 AM) --: Yeah.
(10:08 AM) --: No, as far as I know, Kwesi always knew about it. And one of the higher staff, I forget who.
(10:08 AM) Informant: Does that make Kwesi an accomplice?
(10:08 AM) Informant: Uh... Bobby/
(10:08 AM) Informant: ?*
(10:10 AM) --: Don't think Kwesi is an accomplice. Unless he kidnapped the children for Steve.
(10:10 AM) --: Did you know Bobby is only 14?
(10:10 AM) Informant: No
(10:10 AM) --: He told everyone he was in his 20s.
(10:10 AM) Informant: I know O_O;;
(10:11 AM) --: But one day he confessed to Jorge to being 13.
(10:11 AM) Informant: Maybe Bobby literally was Steve's lapdog
(10:11 AM) --: Yeah, I know.
(10:11 AM) Informant: Uhhh... did that guy who ran VR know?
(10:11 AM) Informant: holy crap! I bet Steve got off to the picture thread O____O;
(10:11 AM) --: Casey? I dunno.
(10:12 AM) --: But, I PMed all the admins with that link and none of them replied to me. XD
(10:12 AM) Informant: Hm, maybe we should report PPN to that site, and they can look up the whois information, and if it's masked, they can get in contact with the host
(10:13 AM) --: Go for it. Because I have no idea what you just said..XD
(10:13 AM) Informant: Do any of the members know, by the way? XD Or is it just some huge staff scandal?
(10:13 AM) Informant: Well
(10:13 AM) --: No.
(10:13 AM) Informant: When you make a site, you have to give your contact details -- the valid ones -- to the webhost
(10:13 AM) Informant: And you can get them to fill up your whois with crap XD so no one can stalk you
(10:14 AM) --: Some of the staff decided that nobody outside of the higher staff knew about it.
(10:14 AM) Informant: you can look up any site, whois it, and find out their details, unless it's whoisguard'd, in which case you try to get in touch with their host if it's legal stuff
(10:14 AM) Informant: but isn't that technically wrong?
(10:14 AM) --: That's what I said.
(10:15 AM) Informant: Would parents want their kids on a site run by a molester?
(10:15 AM) Informant: Knowing he runs competitions and stuff?
(10:15 AM) --: People have a right to know if they're in contact with a convicted paedophile.
(10:15 AM) Informant: =/ It's wrong morally and probably legally.
(10:15 AM) Informant: I think someone should just troll post it.
(10:15 AM) Informant: ...Can I do it?
(10:15 AM) Informant: I don't give a shit about PC anymore. XD
(10:15 AM) --: Go wild.
(10:15 AM) --: XD
(10:15 AM) Informant: OMG, thank you --. I promise I won't blame you. XD
(10:16 AM) Informant: ...how many themes does Jake make a month?
(10:16 AM) --: Meh, they'll most likely know it came from me. I haven't exactly been keeping it a secret. XD Too many.
(10:16 AM) --: He has about four more in the works too.
(10:16 AM) Informant: including the theme contest? XD
(10:17 AM) --: No, these are just his own ones. XD
(10:17 AM) Informant: Oh. XDDD What happened to the theme contest? O_o;
(10:17 AM) Informant: did he ever bother finishing it/
(10:17 AM) Informant: ?*
(10:17 AM) --: I have no idea, I didn't even know there was one. XD
(10:18 AM) Informant: XDDDD People kept bitching to him to get it done. We ran a contest for members to submit images and stuff and Jake would code their layout. It probably never happened
(10:18 AM) --: Probably not, Jake gets lazy when it comes to doing themes that he hasn't created. XD
(10:18 AM) --: Ew, PC's new default theme is fugly.
(10:20 AM) Informant: is Jake still Mr. Power control guy?
(10:20 AM) --: No idea.
(10:20 AM) Informant: I'm so tempted to be a retard and title my threads J'accuse... eh, I should probably plan this for a more lulzy, full-out attack
(10:20 AM) Informant: I mean, is he still bossing everyone around? XD
(10:21 AM) --: Erm, I guess. XD
(10:22 AM) --: I don't think any of the staff on PC has really changed since I was first modded there way back when.
(10:22 AM) Informant: Awww. DX Except some got more annoying XD
(10:22 AM) --: Well, they all grate on you at some point. XD
(10:23 AM) Informant: XDDD Some never.
(10:23 AM) Informant: You, Kelsey, Karli, Jorfe... some others...
(10:23 AM) --: Aww.
(10:24 AM) Informant: come on, you lot are cool XD
(10:24 AM) Informant: Kaga never pissed me off either
(10:24 AM) Informant: god I miss him
(10:25 AM) --: I didn't know him. He came just as I left and he left before I came back.
(10:25 AM) --: I think he was just a myth.
(10:25 AM) Informant: no he wasn't
(10:25 AM) Informant: he was real xD
(10:25 AM) Informant: he rocked
(10:27 AM) --: What happened to him?
(10:27 AM) Informant: http://www.whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=pokemonpalace&tld=net Aww crap, I don't think his whois is gonna help. He must have a dedicated server or something o_O I'unno, I'll ask

Tales from the Arcade IV: More smoking, with 100% more iPhone

2007-08-05T22:57:00.000-04:00

Three days ago, I finally got a mobile phone — an iPhone, that is. It set me back $200 out of pocket ($600 altogether, excluding plan, but my parents paid for part of it), and for the money I'm really enjoying it. What I do most of the time is use the Safari browser or run the camera.

It was yesterday, though, when I decided to take it to the public. Many people were fascinated, some downright jealous, ever since I decided to just take it outside. And yes, some kid made a point of using it to attract the attention of girls in the group. It happened, yes, but this kid dramatised any effect of taking your iPhone out and allowing someone to test it. Tonight, it was one of the talks of the group forming outside the arcade — aside, of course, from smoking. This time around, nearly everyone had graduated from the cigarette to some brand of flavoured cigar — and this time, my chest tightened when I came near some of the smokers, and whenever they tried to release the ash it came off in hot cinders and clouds of smoke, instead of the normal issuing streams.

Those who have read the previous Tales from the Arcade pieces will know that smoking has been a problem at the arcade. Back then, not many people, I'll admit, smoked — today, though, I saw so many smoke that many I suspected otherwise were in on it as well. One kid now had eyes so red it seemed as if he had been badly beaten up. Eventually the smoking offended two girls from northern New Jersey, and once they turned to avoid someone's explosion of ashes on the pavement, they all puffed away from them.

After my stomach began to tighten and the kids started moving to the convenience store to watch a fight, I just went home and took a shower. While Brigantine has had its share of druggies and chavs, it never occurred to me until tonight how common it was in this day and age, and how it's hardened into a social foundation. I have never smoked — I owe that to scary commercials and my participation at youth summits — and having to smell my acquaintances smoking irks me somewhat. I probably have less respect for under-age smokers — or smokers on the whole — than televangelists; anyone who engages in an act to undermine their lifespan in the name of acquaintance has little merit (no pun intended) in my book.

I wish I were Neal Boortz. He can criticise smokers on his show and feel good about it. Although I don't think it's always the case that it's the 'second time her prom dress has come off' if she's smoked during prom, but it makes a lot of sense.

God loves you, so send your money in today

2007-07-23T21:56:00.000-04:00

I dislike televangelists. Rather, I dislike the picture of the Christian right they paint: a swath of people who believe the human is superior to other species due to their allegiance to a deity and their adherence to a set of texts sent down from said deity.

Now, don't get me wrong here: I have respect for all people of any religion in name. Further, half of my family are evangelical, and I love them very much and appreciate what they do for me. However, I believe that if someone decides to follow a man — or woman — on television because of their supposed representation of God, they end up worshipping the man representing God, not God. These representatives include Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn, and Tim LaHaye (and did include Jerry Falwell and Tammy Faye Messner), who all have started as people with faith but turned into veritable megalomaniacs, many of them amassing huge fortunes as a result of running huge ministries or even television stations. While I do not approve of the practices leading up to this, as I will explain later, it should be considered that the message they at first tried to put out was indeed of good faith, yet power and fame simply corrupted them.

Evangelism as a media genre can be put back arguably as far as Charles Coughlin's radio programme, broadcast in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, in which he angered several religious audiences with anti-Semitic comments until, after World War II and failed attempts by the government to control him, a Detroit priest ordered him off the air. The first time money became involved, though, may have been a plea from Pat Robertson to keep his television station at the time, WYAH-TV, which resulted in a telethon that still continues today on its successor — the Christian Broadcasting Network — and many other religious stations, first starting with $10 donations from a benchmark of 700 donors a month (hence the name of the flagship programme, The 700 Club). The telethon, which was enough to keep the station afloat, pales in comparison to the telethons still held on Trinity Broadcasting Network's Praise the Lord programme. TBN, in effect, was formed when Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker broke with CBN, but they eventually left TBN alone and started the PTL network, which would soon become infamous for the failure of a Christian theme park, the imprisonment of Jim Bakker for tax evasion, and his affair with a secretary that he tried to settle with $250,000.

TBN, under the direction of Paul and Jan Crouch, has become probably the largest religious television network in the nation, with revenues upward of $150 million annually. However, much of the money any such network seems to make goes toward the luxurious lifestyle of the hosts. Indeed, according to Business 2.0's Dumbest Moments in Business History, Bakker had diverted more than $3.7 million in revenue for personal issues, including an air-conditioned doghouse. Whatever the money is specifically used for, the fact that the bulk of it comes out of the pockets of viewers as 'donations' is unsettling in the least. Rather than live out as a pay-per-view programme offered with, say, DirecTV, people have to donate to the station. In theory, donating is good — but what if, Chris Hedges asked in his book, American Fascists, you start demanding $1000 or more at a time? You claim that 'you are robbing God', and that 'it is Your show, Your airwaves'. To me, that sounds much like extortion, seeing as no deity like the one they claim to represent would actually need money. Much of money inevitably goes to Crouch or whomever is running the station, and to see them spend an excessive amount of money on a jet plane and several mansions, not to mention cosmetic surgery — rather than give some money to actual charities and keep a modest sum — is nothing short of incensing, and even more so when you back up such opulence as a 'gift from God' for running a ministry.

If money is enough to incense me, I can't bear to think of how awful it is to couple it with the constant purporting that God wants the financial best for His followers. On a Detroit News article that is no longer online, a church pastor evidently got to write off a mansion as a donation from members of his church, which subscribed to the 'Gospel of Wealth', a system of Christian beliefs that come to the conclusion that God wants followers to be as wealthy as possible. There's a little problem with that, however:

And as he was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, even God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor thy father and mother. And he said unto him, Teacher, all these things have I observed from my youth. And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. But his countenance fell at the saying, and he went away sorrowful: for he was one that had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Mark 10:17-25 ASV)

It seems as if Jesus didn't see wealth as necessarily a qualification for getting into heaven; rather, it seems as if he wanted the rich man to be generous to the poor as he certainly had the resources to do so. While it is true that the religious right does tend to give more to charity than liberals and the secular (even when donations to organisations such as TBN are factored out), there are some who, despite the great trend, believe that an expanse of wealth and power is acceptable by God regardless of where it goes. The Gospel of Wealth, therefore, probably isn't a very good interpretation of what should be done on the part of Christians.

Even more harrowing is the thought of not wealth alone, but power — over the government. We see it today, with states passing laws forbidding same-sex couples from marrying, apparently in the light of a Massachusetts ruling that allowed them to do so. Last year, South Dakota even tempted Roe v Wade by banning abortion altogether except in cases in which the mother's life was at risk, even disallowing exceptions for rape and incest. It's unfathomable to me how this could have been the result of a bloc bred on the teachings of pastors in the media — we have the Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell in the hopes of creating a voting base of people opposed to specific or implied actions prohibited in the pages of the Bible. The resulting voting base took credit for putting Ronald Reagan in power, and they almost certainly helped both Bushes enter office. The latter Bush, turned to when America was attacked on 11 September 2001, turned out to be one to cause mayhem in the moral sphere — not to mention Iraq — based on his evangelical beliefs, egged on by religious Republicans and arguably the forces of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Indeed, the latter was featured on The 700 Club two days after the attacks to give his analysis (click the video link below the picture of his face) of what caused it — and it had nothing to do with militant Arab fundamentalists:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularise America — I point the finger in their face and say, you helped this happen.

Eventually Robertson, who said 'Well, I totally concur', recanted. All the same, the attack was caused by militant Arab fundamentalists — and it seems to me that remarks like this could have been the very fuel needed for such an attack. When it gets down to it, these fundamentalists and these beacons of the Christian right are quite the same in their steadfast intolerance for even other religions. That's what the whole mess in the Middle East is over, after all.

While we're on the subject of gays and abortionists, I might as well say what I believe. People like Falwell will use a prohibition in Leviticus as well as Paul's letter to the Romans* to justify such inconvenience to gays. That's fine to me — but it's not fine when rigid interpretations make their way into the government of a free society. The decision that homosexuality is a sin is in the moral sphere, something a straight or gay person alike might see as a hindrance or a sign of weakness. But marriage is a different issue, one that carries legal consequence. I believe that the government has no responsibility to rule on strictly moral affairs as homosexuality when it occurs in the bedroom; as such, denying a couple a legal right based on an individual, moral interpretation is downright wrong. Although marriage has always been sacrosanct in many religions, even as the union of one man and one woman, I do not see this having much validity when applied to legal statutes that apply to all people regardless of their sexual orientation — if marriage is a legal term, I say let same-sex couples marry.

As such, I am adamantly pro-choice. I realise there are many couples who want to have a child and place a value on the foetus any woman is carrying, but this doesn't necessarily apply to them since they want the child. There are some out there who are brave enough to pull through with raising a child even if they were raped — this is not for them, either. The issue here really covers those who have sex as a form of recreation or trust, even outside marriage. On one hand you have the girl who was raped or was a victim of sexual abuse within the family, and on the other you have the girl who had sex with her boyfriend in which no condom was used or the condom or any other device failed. The latter case I do find a little immoral, but it happens either because of indifference to the situation or as a token of trust. In either case, if a pregnancy arises, it's ultimately the woman's decision whether to go on with the pregnancy and raise the child, or abort it. A pregnancy at a young age, while possible in older times, is made much more difficult by college and the possibility of a career (not to mention the scant availability of sitters). Indeed, in Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, the point is made that a child arising from an unwanted pregnancy and not given up for adoption most likely will grow up bearing the scars of his or her mother's resentment and turn to crime. Indeed, Levitt was criticised across the board when the point was made clear that legalised abortion was a major factor in the fall of crime in the 1990s despite apocalyptic predictions for the decade. I think the fact that a pregnancy forced upon by a moral interpretation of a foetus as a separate life — when it's not even counted in population and mortality records — will likely result in the child being raised in an environment conducive to resent and criminal behaviour is enough for me to say a woman should have the right to abort at any stage of pregnancy. Even if it is a little gross.

One of the people I met at the conference over last weekend was pressured into sex four times by a former boyfriend. At the conference, a boy she liked (I'm sketching here) rejected her because of her belief that she should have the right to abort should she find herself incapable of raising a child. She cried for a few minutes before her friend, a staff member, and I gathered around and dried the tears before resuming the water play.

Now, my aunt and uncle donate to CBN, and I have watched two episodes of The 700 Club at their house. The objective of the show, I will repeat, is to uplift viewers with miracles in others' lives, but when they begin political rhetoric — such as the talk on gays and abortion — things get ugly. I just hope there'll be someone who comes along and actually gives a decent ministry without forcing literal interpretations of the Bible on viewers. After all, humans did write the book — from their perception of the world, albeit with insight as to how God wanted the world to run — and humans are interpreting it.

* The last two paragraphs of the first chapter of Romans are a polemic on 'unnatural relations' leading to other sorts of sin, an allusion to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis. We'll assume for a second that the Bible is true: While the documentation of a gang of men wanting to draw other men out for forced sex has led literalistic Christians to say that homosexuality led to the collapse of Sodom, I believe that a collection of graver sins, or perhaps even the simple fact that these men just wanted to force sex on other men to exact misery, but not because of individual orientation, could have led God to supposedly destroy the city. Also, the Archbishop of Canterbury recently issued a statement accusing such Christians of ignoring what Paul wrote at the beginning of the second chapter, immediately after his polemic, invalidating man's right to judge others based on their sins due to this situation.

Obligatory Youth to Youth update

2007-07-22T21:23:00.000-04:00

Six youth summits. Four Youth to Youth summits. You would have thought that I would have become a moderator at one as I eventually gained — and lost — such respect at the Pokémon Community and other sites. This time, you're right: All through this conference, people have asked me to enlist in the conference administration. Apparently I can go straight in and then do Adult Staff duty the following year, or so they tell me. That I'll have to check on in March, when they say applications are going out.

This year, so much has happened that I now have to break it into segments. Unfortunately, there are no pictures; I didn't remember the camera. If you're new to this blog and are a little confused, you may want to read the accounts of 2006 and 2005.

Day one: Fe fi fo fum, we're kicking I-95's bum

On Thursday, I had to be up at 4.00am and hail a taxi since my parents couldn't wake up. A few kids — the ones I normally went with had gone to Costa Rica earlier in the month — were in the van, and the father of one of them was driving as the pastor had to be present for a summer bazaar. The father turned out to be very critical of New Jersey as far as laws go, and he was like me in the mind that more roads were needed if the Garden State Parkway was clogged up at 7.00am (although much of it was due to an accident in which the police cut traffic off to push a car across the carriageway). We managed to get to campus at 11.00am, an hour ahead of registration, and when the rush finally came I made sure to be one of the first to register for courses — a writing course, a class about foreign students trying to learn the native language, and a workshop on Internet safety.

This year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Youth to Youth's operations, so the theme this time around was 'I Love The 80s', meaning that the opening ceremony would often be interrupted (as scripted) by Melissa, who was reprising her role in the Youth Staff, with blurbs about what happened in the year — 1982 — that Youth to Youth came into being. Once that finished, we had a small session in the Rotunda of Bryant University in which we tried to identify whose picture was posted on one of the huge screens (I was in the flicking roster but it never stopped on me).

Then came the first family group session. Once again, I was in Family Group 9, and I had the same Adult Staff representative. The group was also led by Ashley (whom I recognised as the one who did slam poetry the previous year) and included a military man who had been sent to evaluate the programme by some sort of youth agency, a girl who aspired to be a model, a Nigerian girl who taught us our little buzzword 'Amonge' (an Ibo greeting) and whom I believe also wanted to be a model, a guy born in Japan to Sri Lankan parents who was advised against flirting, and four others. We didn't play as many games as before, rather discussing the events that passed as well as our lives, yet when we did, it would be Indian Chief, Mafia, and two attempts at Ha, the first being in a circle when some objected to being laid down on during the first session and the second — producing worse success at going down the line — being held on the final day.

Then dinner came. While I admit I've been eating less these days, I helped myself to decently-sized meals all through the conference. I also was approached by a few people in Adult Staff to recommend applying for Administrative Staff, or the 'A-Team'. It turned out that in order to be on Adult Staff, I would either have to return once as an adult plebeian or go to the administrative level. (I heard a variety of stories, some saying I could join Adult Staff right away.) When the day comes — sometime in March, they tell me — I'll find the application to do so; I'm also guessing that it'll require driving.

As lunch was going on, so did some old favourite round games such as Ride That Pony. There was another game, Jigaloo, which I finally figured out: You stand in a circle and shake and clap, singing 'Jig-a-looo, jig-jig-a-loooo, hey [name]!' before the person they call from the circle steps forward and creates a jive for the others to repeat before the process starts over. Now, I had thought for a while that it would be silly of me to join such games, but the following presentation, led by Bill Cordes, challenged that. He came on-stage with an easel on which an arrangement of letters, YOGOWYPI, was written. He told the conference that it stood for 'You Only Get Out What You Put In' before leading them in a gibberish chant, which I came to realise meant that anyone not joining the mass in following obviously wasn't putting in what they expected to enjoy in it (I'll have more on that later):

Fe, fe fi, fe fi fo, fe fi fo fum! Kumalacha kumalacha kumala vista, no no no nacho vista, vista, vista! Isalini disalini oo ah ah malini acha kacha acha lacha oo ah ah....

Then, there was 'The Big Show'. Instead of it being a talent show, it was a game show that involved the whole congregation: We started by filling out and submitting a quiz with eight questions, and the one who got the most right won an iPod and those whose sheets were drawn before got conference memorabilia (I got another pouch). Eventually one was called up to face the presenter in a 'Let's Make a Deal' session: He offered her a box or five one-dollar banknotes. The audience at first urged her to choose the box, yet as the number of banknotes increased, she leant toward the banknotes — and ultimately accepted them over the box, which turned out to have a dollar's worth of pennies.

At the end of the day, we all returned to one dormitory hall. Since construction was taking place and some of the dorms were out of commission, we all had to take up residence in one hall, the boys on the lower two floors and girls on the upper floors. I ended up with the very same room as last year, yet my room-mate was an East Greenwich envoy (the vast majority this year were East Greenwich envoys; none lived outside the north-eastern Untied States and Bermuda).

Day two: Lost in numbers

With the morning came the next speaker, David Mahan, who had not much more to say than his experiences as a young father and a screed on how abstinence was the only sure way to keep oneself clean of any infection or pregnancy (I'll have more on what I think when I write my piece on televangelists tomorrow — I just heard tonight that Tammy Faye has copped it) as a result of what he went through with having a baby and scraping to get by. Once that finished, we went off to the athletic centre for the team-building games, in which we had to rotate around stations that put us in a game of Hot Potato, cryptograms, and bridge walk in a theme similar to that of Survivor. The one I didn't like much was the cryptogram: We were handed a novel and were told to decipher a code using sequences that relied on a page number, line number, and letter. The codes, which were touted as escape codes, turned out to be Youth to Youth operation numbers, disheartening when the trouble people went through to understand the instructions was accounted for.

Then, we had lunch, a Family Group session, and our workshops. The first workshop I attended was 'A Day in the Life of an ESL Student', led by a staff member who himself had for a while struggled with language after moving in. He led the class off with sheets numbered by level of language mastery; those with the number 1 were written entirely in Spanish, and the amount of English increased as the number went up. The workshop ended wit lists of suggestions to accommodate those arriving from other countries with little or no English. The second, 'The Write Stuff', was initially a course in writing when other people tell you what to include, having us write any sort of work as she announced words for us to include in the order in which she announced them. Soon, though, it became a session in which we gathered in a circle and one or two people would come in and act out a scenario, and one in the circle would yell 'Freeze!' if he or she had an idea of a scenario that fit the positions the people inside were in, causing them to hold their positions and leave if the person who called tapped them out and assumed their position before continuing. Soon enough, we were all doubled over in laughter; one they found more hilarious was my intervention on a parent discipling an emotional child to turn it into me being a healer and the other girl confessing her 'sins'.

Then we had dinner, and the Youth Staff had a presentation that did away with projector idents that gave a glimpse of what the skit would cover and, rather, had staff members come out with flash cards with years written on them. The funniest of them all was a director's cut scene, in which a director had to do two takes on a scene in which a sister found her brother to be a drug addict and near death, whereupon she called her mother, who then hailed an ambulance. Two takes, one with pouting on the part on all cast members and another in which crying was induced, passed before the director announced that there were two many emotions to describe the disaster of such news.

Once that and another group session cleared, we went out to the athletic centre for racing games, food, and a movie. The pool was closed this year, so there went my chances to clean my toe up. The time would be spent with a girl I met during the writing workshop and her boyfriend, both from Connecticut and coming to conference for the first time.

Days three and four: Water and tears

Since the day began with a youth action planning session, I feel obligated to explain the group I came with and have been a part of for four years or so. We are a church group, responsible for many events occurring on the island for the enjoyment of kids and teenagers and for the benefit of the church. However, the group has been falling into disrepair; some of the senior members have ended up smoking, drinking, and causing other mayhem; indeed, as I stated in the 2005 report, one had been caught with marijuana at the conference. As Mike, the member of our youth group who was working as a Youth Staff member, explained in the morning, the previous leaders had been lenient on the other members, requiring that no drugs be done 'at the meetings'. Since laws prohibited it anyway, this had no effect. Mike decided, along with the rowdy bunch we came up with, that a drug-free style outside meetings would be compulsory. However, he warned of opposition from the girls who didn't come because of their involvement in the Costa Rica trip — indeed, according to him, many of them had been caught drinking vodka on the trip. The discussion dragged on into the following morning's discussion session, and we finally agreed on a bill to be voted on at the next meeting.

Back to day three. Once the planning session finished, we returned to the auditorium for another speaker, Harriet Turk. She led off with a story of a cashier who at first refused to talk to her until she gave her an ultimatum: stay put until a word was said. The next day, she came back, and the cashier announced to the whole store what was being rung up. As it turned out, this girl had a problem with the job and her social life that reflected in how she went about work. This led her to introduce a chant — one she would transmit to her daughter whenever she was out — that was supposed to make us assure ourselves that our social situation was within reach of rectification.

Lunch passed, and we had our third workshops. I attended a seminar on Internet safety, in which the officers led off with a few videos, one in which a kid fell off his bike down a concrete stairwell. The message, he said, was that anything could float around on the Internet. Indeed, he showed us a few things about social networking sites and friends on the Internet that shocked me. The first was a MySpace page of a person who legally possessed marijuana but ended up sharing it with teens he met through the page; the second was a story of a kid whose parents were technologically literate but was depressed much of the time, turning to the Internet for comfort before a 'friend' turned on him a week before he committed suicide.

Then, we headed back to the athletic centre for a round of water fights. I was not involved in any of the games in particular, yet I did often hang around people who ended up getting splashed in many places. One of the staff did eventually toss water at me, although it quickly cleared up. Yet I would have another source of water to worry about soon enough: tears. During the games, I chose to tail a pack of students from the snow cone machine. They all eventually were drenched as I followed them, but soon enough, one girl began to cry over a guy rejecting her based on an abortion belief (again, look for my televangelism piece tomorrow). Eventually one of her friends, a staff member, and I cheered her up, and all was bright and rosy again.

We cleaned off, had dinner, and we had the dance. Like last time, the dance was being held in the Rotunda rather than the park, but this was as planned (perhaps since there had been thunderstorms in the area as of recent). Yes, I did have a map or two, but this time, I would not — by my own choice! — be working on it whilst everyone else was having a good time. Time would be spent alongside two staff members, one of whom had, like me, obtained a great deal of college credits in her senior year. (This person I did eventually give a few old maps to.) I ended up dancing with them, and I enjoyed it. I'm not sure if it's due to a crush — if this were the case, it occurred really, really late this year — but when I was around these people or even on the floor, nothing seemed to matter other than how I looked to the people I was actually dancing with. (I might write a little more on that.)

On the final day, the family groups organised and we had a mass picnic outside the athletic centre. Then, we went into our room and made an attempt at Ha, which collapsed as people just couldn't stop giggling. The closing ceremonies followed, in which we were all given fortune cookies to crack at the same time, and I was actually able to get AIM contact lists for once!

So, youth staff?

Yes, administrative staff. Everyone has been telling me to apply, and it's time I gave back to the programme after feeding off it for four years. I can't wait until March.

Nobody tell James.

Web 2.0

2007-06-11T20:37:00.000-04:00

“Web 2.0“. It’s the latest internet buzzword. However, I’m liking the term less and less the more I hear it. This is due to some different things- the Web 2.0 concept is evolutionary not revolutionary, the general “2.0″ stigma, and the nauseating ubiquity of the “Web 2.0″ term. However, I still like the Web 2.0 concept, if not the term.

The Web 2.0 concept isn’t as revolutionary as people make it out to be. User-generated content has been around in some form or another for over a decade - just look at the state of Geocities or Angelfire in 1996 or so. Now Myspace is fast becoming the next Geocities: background music and horribly annoying layouts. (By the way, Xinruilian’s website needs to lose the front page flash and background music. It’s very unprofessional. But that’s for another blog entry.) Anyway, it’s just now that user-generated content is expanding into different forms of media, like video on Youtube. I would say that that’s just natural evolution, rather than some big revolution to be heralded as an entirely different major version number, 2.0.

Speaking of “2.0″, there’s a certain stigma associated with that version number. Take for example Microsoft Windows 2.0. While I have never personally had the misfortune of using that version, I’ve read that it’s horribly buggy, and that the first version of Windows that was actually worth using was Windows 3.11. (Personally, I think the only version of Windows worth using is Windows 2000. It’s relatively stable, and not bloated to the extreme.) Take as another example Firefox 2.0. While I personally prefer it over Fx1.5 because of the integrated spellchecker and other features, others regard it as unnecessarily bloated and unstable. Shiira 2.0 is another “2.0″ browser, one that is actually very buggy and unstable. (It’s for Mac OS X.) The last example is the Texas Instruments TI-34 II calculator. While this isn’t a “2.0″ product per se, it’s still got a horrible user interface. It hides the sine, cosine, and tangent functions under a series of menus, and those are some of the most frequently used keys.

My third point of contention with the “Web 2.0″ term is its nauseating ubiquity. It has over 187 million Google results, and that’s even when it’s in quotes. I can’t even tell you how many times the term has appeared in my IRC logs. I could grep it, but my server would explode from the memory overload. I’m a penniless student, so I wouldn’t have any money to replace it. Suffice it to say that I become nauseated at the first mention of it in any IRC channel.

All this dislike of the term “Web 2.0″ should of course not be misconstrued as my dislike of the underlying concepts, like user-generated content and web applications. Webapps enable more efficient use of the browser; Gmail and Meebo rock my socks. User-generated content is fast re-democratising the internet and taking absolute power from the big content providers. Social networking, as on Myspace and Facebook, connects me with old friends and enables me to make new ones. “Web 2.0″ concepts improve the internet continuously, but I need to see a lot less use of the term.

LJ talks

2007-06-05T21:50:00.000-04:00

The following message appeared today on the home page of LiveJournal concerning the dispute:

Hello again.
I want to update you on the status of correcting the issues that occurred earlier this week:
First, all journals and communities that were suspended that did not clearly violate community policies have been restored. Over the weekend and into the next couple of weeks we will be doing the following:
We will contact each user whose journal was both suspended and then restored to explain how they were swept up in this and to work with them to avoid further difficulties. We expect that effort to start Monday and take several days.
We will be compiling and reviewing the input we have received as comments, voicemails and faxes, that made suggestions about how we could improve our policies and procedures.
Using this input as well as input from outside groups, such as the EFF, we will review and possibly redefine some of our policies.
Then we will review the procedures we use to implement our policies and the standard communications we use in the implementation of those policies.
We will also review all of our abuse procedures and standard communications to users to see if we can do a better job in dealing with abuse issues.
We’ve been getting your calls and faxes, reading comments and posts. While we can’t answer each one individually, we do hear you and your input will be taken into account during this process. Will everyone be happy? No. Do I think we can end up with better guidelines, procedures and processes? Yes.
As I said before, we have a lot of work to do. We are trying hard to keep LJ a community where free speech and the protection of children and victims and others can coexist. We appreciate your input in this process.

OMGZ u kuld gt rapd on myspace

2007-05-30T20:37:00.000-04:00

There are times when I believe somebody's got to shoulder the blame for a scourge happening. A case like that would be the current furore struck up by civilians and fire-fighters dying of lung infections brought on by the dust clouds from the falling World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001 — the city has to give them some sort of compensation since there was too little to do since the attacks were so sudden. In other cases, particularly those arising on the Internet, I pity the many sites, such as Match.com and MySpace, who have come under fire due to the plethora of stories of women being raped and killed — underage girls in the latter case.

Many of you who still have MySpace accounts may have taken notice to the new practice of barring adults from contacting kids using the service. This is testament that this whole kerfuffle over social networking sites being responsible for the welfare of underage end users has finally reached the point where things have to be sacrificed in order to remain sheltered from the legal firestorm. In the spring of 2006, a 14-year-old user and her mother, afresh from a date with a 19-year-old — who claimed to be a high school senior with a football record — that ended in rape, sued the News Corporation for neglecting such a danger while running MySpace. Now, like any other social networking site, it voluntarily posted a set of guidelines for young users concerning how to keep themselves safe on the Internet, but for this girl, the site needed an active cushion. While MySpace had for a running period of time been the venue for several encounters that led to assaults, this was the first time the unthinkable happened — someone was suing the site! What's more, News Corp jumped in its shoes and turned the spigot of communication reform.

While it is rather noble of a site like MySpace, which has been no stranger to the ills of its service, to implement cautionary measures, there simply are too many problems for them to handle. Firstly, at time of writing, there is no credit-card or other parental validation since the site meets COPPA with a registration age minimum of 14. Secondly, there is no viable way of making sure the pervs don't join; it's not like booking a reservation at the counter complete with tête-à-tête communication between the customer and clerk, and there exists no database capable of extorting the aliases of sex offenders every second of every minute. Tech buffs like me have been aware of this for ages; a web site cannot perfectly verify anyone and there will always be a lot of room for error.

MySpace is nothing more than a web service. It is not a day-care centre; it is not a parent. To its users it seems to be just like a game on OneMoreLevel or even one of the Math Blaster games, where there is little interaction that equates to human communication. The most that can be done to intervene is to instruct users on how to use the site, even setting up an account if need be. When you suspect a message to contain a virus, don't open the attachment; ergo, if you think somebody's trying to impress you so much as to get credentials needed to contact you in real life, you should think it over and decide whether it's worth the risk. This is why I believe your best friend is a webcam, especially if both ends are using it; you know exactly with whom you're communicating and you have body language available to you.

If MySpace had openly solicited sex offenders, it would be in a violation tantamount to the actual assaults; however, it is merely a web service, and it should not have any responsibility for what happens off the site unless they directly sponsor it. The meeting referenced above was arranged by the girl and the boy on their own terms, independent from anything MySpace specifically set down, so MySpace technically is not responsible; and had the case made it to, say, the Supreme Court, MySpace would have won, and we'd have had another resolution indemnifying such sites just as McDonald's was indemnified for obesity.

By now you might have clicked the link and realised that it led to a LiveJournal picket rather than the ubiquitous news story of someone meeting a man on MySpace and being assaulted. As is MySpace, LiveJournal is a web service, and what it can do in order to promote a good environment is essentially the same as moderating a forum. While discussion of illegal activity in general is something that can't be punished, a journal dedicated to the promotion of such is a totally different matter, and there are laws prohibiting the service from knowingly playing host. Here, the user roaring has rallied users to protest SixApart's surprise practice of removing journals and communities that have to do with paedophilia or pornography, among many illegal intents. The cited yaoi_smut_fics community apparently spawned after two deletions based on the fact that it, well, housed gay porn fics! Also cited was the following comment:

It's not that I don't care about anyone or anything. It's just that I'm too lazy to care. I don't mean anyone any harm and I sincerely hope everyone in the world leads a great life but I really don't want to do anything to help them have a great life.

There is a 13 year old girl who lives a few houses down. I want to [expletive] her and [elaboration removed for taste, as the intent is pretty clear from the start]. I'm 18 years older than her and I'm a woman.

The comment was reported, but LiveJournal's service team stated that such comments were nothing they had a hold of — although in the interest of taste it should have been removed — or even at that, who the hell unscreened that comment?

We understand and agree that this is very disturbing, we cannot take action against a user for admitting that they have committed illegal activities or are thinking about committing illegal activities. It is not illegal to discuss illegal actions. We can only take action if the user is actively encouraging others to commit such actions, or if they are soliciting or providing information on how to do so. Because this is not the case here, we regret that we cannot take action.

The protest's prosecution is a default removal notice sent to a friend:

Your journal and/or its associated profile or interests has been reported to us as containing material which expresses interest in, solicits, or encourages illegal activity. As this is a violation of both LiveJournal's Terms of Service and United States law, we have permanently suspended the journal.

If you read carefully, though, you will notice that the said notice was delivered based on an offence created by the entire journal, not by two or three comments; a judgement otherwise would be egregious. While the comment should not have appeared, and I assume SixApart wants such decisions to rest with the journal or community on which it appears, you just can't deny that posting porn on a public venue isn't a great idea.

This, however, is where the difference between profiles and comments comes in when it comes to moderation. LiveJournal, of course, is a blogging site. While MySpace and LiveJournal both have an obligation to remove porn and they both cannot be indicted for actions taken off the site, the reason LiveJournal has ignored the comment — and the reason MySpace would do the same — is probably because such territory is that of the one running the profile or blog, and it's the fault of whomever unscreened it if it remains on the page.

In any case, if something bad is posted as a comment, or if a date set up on a social networking site goes awry, the ones involved have no-one to blame but themselves. I'll say it again: MySpace is not your day-care, and LiveJournal can only care more about the blogs it's hosting more than the comments. After all, not everyone with a balanced mind would have responded to the aforementioned comment the same way.

GTS <3

2007-05-19T21:37:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's a heart emoticon. Blame Memory.

Those of you with Diamond and Pearl are probably aware of the Global trading Station in Jubilife City. This facility, which operates through Nintendo WiFi Connection, allows you to put up your Pokémon for barter with anyone around the world. Theoretically you could have no-one around you and you could get a Pokémon badly needed for Pokédex completion or your party. While the GTS allows you to search within your Pokédex only, it's otherwise fun to put your Pokémon up or see what others want for theirs.

For me, I also like looking at locations on that massive globe. You can register your permanent location there to see where all of your Pokémon come from, and if you're like me you'll want to rack up as many locations as possible.

I first paid attention when a thread appeared on SuperCheats concerning people using Action Replay to obtain Pokémon and quickly put them up for a cheap deal. While this is possible, the really funny part is actually examining the offers: When I was looking for a Dialga, some had it at around level 70 but wanted a level 100 one in return, a complete paradox. Then again, a lot of the requests I'd seen made sense considering I grew up in an environment in which legendary Pokémon were always a precious commodity. While I was screwed as far as searching went, I could simply put a Pokémon on offer and wait a few minutes for a response. I was thus far able to trade:

A level 52 Whiscash, fresh from the wild, for a Spiritomb — which came from Japan at level 1 (newly hatched) and infected with Pokérus
A level 63 Altaria for a level 26 Milotic from New York
A level 7 Jirachi for a level 70 Rayquaza from Pennsylvania
A level 52 Hippowdon for a level 46 Torterra from Michigan

So I decided: Why not wheel and deal? Dig up a Pokémon, trade it, put the received Pokémon back on offer for something I really needed. I think I'm going to have some more fun than just training.

Fonts

2007-05-14T21:49:00.000-04:00

The link above goes to a BBC Magazine piece on Helvetica, a font that you'll find almost anywhere. It's a Macintosh font, it's a logo slogan choice, it's something you perhaps didn't know the name of but saw everywhere.

However, another link on the page goes to BanComicSans.com, an attempt by two Canadians to push legislation to outlaw the use of Comic Sans in publishing. As many of you know, Comic Sans is that Windows default font developed first for use in help bubbles and then anything directed at a juvenile audience, such as a comic. Now, though, it's likely to be found on anything in attempts to connect with the consumer at a colloquial level. It may seem to be reasonable to the people pushing for its removal due to the fact that its ubiquity does no justice to the fact that it looks really out of place in the commercial environment, but no, it will not be banned. This is due to two main reasons: It's a ridiculous idea to make a government ban a typeface, and — hold your breath — it's a Windows (and now Macintosh) pre-load.

Because Windows operating systems come with fonts such as Comic Sans and Verdana that were developed for use by Microsoft, as well as fonts like Arial that are licensed from the Monotype Corporation, those fonts are probably going to be the ones you encounter in a world of small, fledgling businesses and MySpace-like placards. Decent fonts, such as Univers (I would say Helvetica, but that's a Macintosh pre-load), are not cheap, let alone free — so what choice do you really have if you're starting out or are just a regular guy writing invites to a house party? Even at that, you have the fact that such fonts will not render for many others on the Internet, so you're stuck with Microsoft pre-loads. Decent fonts, even non-Microsoft fonts, end up being in graphics.*

Personally, I don't like Comic Sans. I really don't like any of the Microsoft pre-loads, but Comic Sans is probably the most misused of all. I would use it for school activity worksheets or flyers, but that's where it stands; in my mind it's not even a good candidate for — well — comics! The line height is too high, upper-case letters are far from uniform, and mixed-case captions in comics never really took off (unless they were in Mad). Instead of banning it, though, I would probably seek to educate people in decent and tasteful graphic design and typography, and maybe call on Monotype, Linotype, ITC, Adobe, and Agfa to lower their rates.

* There are, however, a few notable exceptions: The websites for the Guardian and the Sun use Macintosh-native Geneva as their primary face. Also, Photobucket has started using Adobe-propagated and newly Macintosh-native Myriad in headers.

Pearl

2007-05-09T21:09:00.000-04:00

I got it last Wednesday, and it's all I've been doing for the past week, explaining why I haven't updated. And through completing it with the help of Marilland's walkthrough (and here are some things he missed, so I'll be contacting him about it), I've found it to be addictive. I haven't even touched Ranger and Diddy Kong Racing DS (supposedly a remake of the Nintendo 64 game, and I've heard that Banjo and Conker have been dropped since Rare moved over to Microsoft) yet.

Then again, that happens with every game I get; I get deliberately stuck. That, and I haven't had any WiFi battles yet, although I have 8 numbers registered at time of writing. And all the while, I have posted that I'm training, yet a lot of what I'm doing is working out the cogs (caves, items, buildings, etc.). Simply put, I'm a slow mover, and I have to focus just to get my team trained, which is difficult considering the landscape and lack of competent trainers. I miss Match Call, which let you come across trainers in Sapphire who obviously have improved; instead you have a VS Seeker, which you got in Fire Red to rematch everyone (some not changing level at all, but others making some headway).

What I like in particular are the changes in battle rules, particularly the contact attributes. It now seems fair that Fire Punch, for example, is a physical move instead of a special one by type default (although it still made you susceptible to Carvanha's Rough Skin). Now it seems a little odd that you have a stat for use of certain move elements, which undermines type match-ups, which are probably one of the most crucial aspects of battle. Also to be mentioned are Quick balls; they make it easy to capture Pokémon and eliminate much of the fainting mistakes.

What I do not like, however, is the registration of a Pokémon as seen being enough to get a National Pokédex. Rather, the National Pokédex should have been given if you had captured a minimum amount, as in Fire Red. In fact, I strongly believe it takes much of the objective out of training. Then again, you get a colour upgrade for your Trainer's Card if you do capture the whole bunch of 493.

All the same, it's an excellent instalment — it's just that I have yet to get some people who will actually battle and not be so arrogant about it. I'll have my credentials posted later on.

Has hell frozen over?

2007-04-30T22:18:00.000-04:00

For once, I'm thinking that a lot of the drama going on between PC and me has root in my position as a Super Cheats administrator. On one side, I run to the root admins at PC and I get hounded away by the people they employ to stand in as superior moderators. On the other, I happen to be the one at a disadvantage just because the other has decided to exploit glitches to prove his point.

The latter case is that of David and me. Ah, when we were super mods; we didn't have to worry about banning others or setting massive rule codes. The ones with the power to ban were Rich and Dennis. Then Dave is promoted in place of Rich, who had been in the process of moving to Spain, and soon enough he's fixed in that position. Before then, we were neutral, often agreeing with each other, but ever since he became the administrator (I was to follow a few months later), things came unglued. All of the sudden, lower mods were complaining that he had been putting his foot down with personal opinions, a few times having to ban some for annoyances over MSN (and now Andy blocking me on that plea doesn't seem so bad after all). Since Nintendo_dude would soon leave his post as admin, I ended up being the one having to rake the muck.

There were a few problems by the time this came to be, though. First, I was by the time I became an admin a full-fledged PC member, becoming a moderator a mere month after Nintendo_dude and I became Super Cheats' newest administrators. Naturally I would have to lay down some ground rules in my part to make sure the forums were running fine, but as I sank deeper into PC, I actually began to drift away from Super Cheats. These days, a lot of the actions I take are the result of being buzzed on MSN, instead of me doing regular patrols. The first sign, though, was dropping off with submissions; I initially attributed that to an increase in working hours. So I sometimes feel that I'm not as sharp with situations as I had been before I found PC; in fact, even after I fell out, I still felt as if I now had a void to fill, and being an administrator at a site as popular and prone to spammers as Super Cheats was becoming unpleasant, what with Dave being hospitalised and cut down a few bars by Rich in the past that he sought madly to make up for misinterpretations of his own agenda — really, the rules he made as well as flawed interpretations of the ones I set. So I constantly bear the brunt. It's not that I have MSN or that I've been around longer; it's that I've written a lot of the rules.

Then I think: Andy, David (Origin), Jake....They must be in such a position as well. The staff administrators and root administrators, as I have said before, are not on the best of terms. The former group has been found to effect policies that I would normally expect of Steve or Kwesi given their position. And that's all I've critiqued them on. Yet I wonder: Could my criticism of them have root in my position on Super Cheats? It very well could. I've been so bitter to not realise that it was all a reincarnation of my attitude toward Dave for not following through on a plan I had set for the forums, although in the latter case I probably had significantly more grounds for it as I was at the same level as Dave and I looked up to Rich for what his position as site owner meant for him.

So as I crawl into bed, I think: Am I not cut out for Super Cheats anymore? Have my instincts spread into PC and paralysed it? Am I becoming, like Mewthree, an admin with decaying criteria?

Have mercy on the criminal

2007-04-19T21:38:00.000-04:00

Rage over the massacre at Virginia Tech is one thing. However, I really believe that one of the worst things anyone could possibly do is pay attention to the video that suspected gunman Cho Seung-Hui made announcing his decision to attack the students.

Reports have swirled that Cho had made the video during the intermission between the shooting rounds at the university; he'd even gone as far as to send it to NBC. But should it really have been broadcast at this time? Personally, I don't think so. It's nothing more than fodder for the tabloids, and the immediate shift of focus by all the mainstream media from the concern over the sale of guns to this one dramatised video is more or less a desecration of the victims and survivors.

Cross Stinging Reality offers its condolences for the victims and survivors of the shooting on Monday.

Read the rules

2007-04-19T17:15:00.000-04:00

It's really a shame that I have to rant about something that should have been planned by forums, chat rooms, and social networks everywhere but often isn't explained well enough.

When you register for any of these types of sites, you have to read and agree to a set of terms. Often you're presented with a little blurb describing the forum and what is expected before you register. On boards built on vBulletin, Invision Power, or whatever more, they write the terms of service for you. Of course, everyone knows that you have to read such terms in order to be a member, but not enough effort is made to make sure everyone goes by them. This is due to three reasons:

no-one is quizzed about it;
such terms of service don't often constitute the rules referred to when moderation is carried out; and
in normal cases you just have to click a little checkbox or button to get past the TOS screen.

In these cases, it's easy for any of four things to happen: A law-abiding member registers and posts, and eventually things get sour, a person joins to spam the hell out of the board, a person joins and assumes that the rules are probably the same for the board as any others they may be members of, or a bot registers (which is beyond the scope of this entry).

In the first case, either the person is hiding it really well, or something develops from something insignificant into a major glitch. This could result from repeated harsh experiences with the moderators or lack of agreement with much of the community on certain domestic or moderation issues. In half of such cases the administration is just full of miserable people; in others the member develops his or her own ideas that either misconstrue the objective of the administration or certain rules. The trigger either is a case of mini-modding (which obviously suggests superiority on the part of the person doing the modding) or an intramural event such as a relationship breaking up or a change of blood. In cases in which the member errs, it is usually resolved after the member is subject to peer mediation or insight therapy; in cases of the administration just being sour, you don't have a chance.

Then we have people who join, assuming that rules across the board are the same. This is a risky interpretation, seeing as, for example, PC has a whole section dedicated to emulation whilst PKMN.NET and SPPf don't want a word said of it.* A sub-problem can also be the lack of explicit regulation, leaving members to discern for themselves what the rules of posting are and potentially make posts bound to offend others. As a former PC member, I can tell you that implicit regulation made what the staff is today: While behaviour on the forums is average, some of the staff really wish they could have implicit regulation again. Here's the problem, though: You really have to trust all of the members who sign up, and bots and career spammers still are liable to join. Andy, in particular, isn't giving in so easily to this fact from what I can tell; I personally believe he's as much a piner for the old days as Paul or Ty, given his ramblings about how his perfect environment of unwritten rules was tragically spoilt by an influx of n00bs:

I'm sure if you read all this then you'd know by now you'd know I can't stand n00bs (and most if not all of this is about n00bs). I wasn't always like this, there was a time where I wouldn't put anyone down. Times change and n00bs came in, over the past few months it's like PC has had a rush of n00bs. It's like setting out food on a table outside and watch all the flys come in after it. And sadly n00bs has gotten to most if not all of the Staff of PC. I know all of us had last 1 run in with a stupid n00b on PC. And I know tons of members had run ins with them too. So everyone knows how I feel about them (at least a little). Lately I've been getting too many n00b PMs and threads for my own good. And if given the chance I'd ban every single one of them, just so I don't have to see their stupid posts. I get PMs from members crying about their thread not showing up, or about a friend that's banned. n00bs don't read the rules unless told, they also don't try to do better on PC. They just go on with their stupid ways and know it all attitude. I hate it when they think they know more about PC then the Staff. They think they know what should be changed better then the Staff. I'm open to ideas, but when you walk into PC a week after joining and wanting to make a major change to PC for your own good, then that's a little stuck up and self centered. Even more so when Staff say it's a bad idea and that n00b keeps going on about it. I tell you, if I didn't have a bad feeling about telling someone off then I would. I'd tell them off so bad (not flaming) that it'd make them cry and leave. But I know if I did it then it'd come back and bite me in the butt one day. But it still doesn't change the fact I HATE them. And I wish all of them would just leave PC. We'd be soooo much better off without the stupid n00bs that bugs the living day lights out of me and all the other Staff and members around PC. To me if I happen to end up leaving PC (or at least the Staff) one day then it's going to be the stupidness of stupid dumb butt hole n00bs. Members are members, newbies are newbies, and n00bs are n00bs. Incase you didn't know, there's a difference in newbies and n00bs. Newbies are new members on PC that tries to learn the rules and to get around with other members and so on. Every good member on PC was a newbie at one time (no one joined PC and knew the rules and how everything worked right off the bat). But n00bs on the other hand will not learn and won't listen to anything Staff says. There's a big difference in the two and so I hate n00bs. I am not going to cover it up with some nice word or try to make them happy. I hate n00bs, did you get that? I HATE n00bs! Let me say that one more time I HATE THE F-ING n00bs ON PC!!!

While this excerpt does the term 'n00b' justice, defining the boundary between the sort and the law-abiding newcomers, it simply dismisses the fact that that's what you get for running a forum with no written rules. The fact of life that they are, spammers and flamers are actually technically protected by unwritten rules — meaning that there's no excerpt of code or TOS that can be used to cite their offence and keep them banned. As the tone of this blog section is conveyed, he must have been reeling (and he probably still is) from the shock. In fact, what he said about me in response to another accusation from Paul in the April DCC buffered by my 'predictions' suggests that he expected others to take his rants seriously:

Oh, CW. You mean that stuck up ex-Mod that thought he knew everything on PC and thought so and so should have done things differently only because he had a Mod/Member prospective about things? Said I should listen to n00bs, respect them, I should change my ways because he thinks he's the ruler of the world? That said he got paired to a Staff member** so he could get Modded? That said we should have a smaller Staff only because [PKMN.NET] has a smaller one? You mean that CW?

This rant arose mainly from my complaint about staff redundancy and a complaint about the Simple Questions scheme going on in the gaming forums. I'll explain the latter here to make better sense of the rant: If you look at all of the gaming forums on PC, they're usually brimming with locked threads under an ordinance requiring that 'simple' questions go in a designated sticky thread. The issue I raised was that the word 'sticky' was rather vague and, judging by the amount of locked threads, the scheme obviously wasn't working. As a SuperCheats.com admin, I can tell you that as soon as someone gets into a game talk forum there's potential for help requests, and someone's going to make a thread asking for help on a certain subject. To resolve the situation, I offered three suggestions: clarify 'simple', shift the 'simple questions' to a subforum, or retire the scheme. Nope, Andy simply delivered his hollow 'n00bs' argument and it was over.

In order to keep this from turning into a full-out anti-PC rant (you can't hate a forum, you only hate the members or the staff for the way rules are executed — perhaps this is an anti-Arcanine rant?), I'll just move on to the third case: career spammers. They can take the form of mental patients, thugs, and bored schmoes. Whatever the case, a career violator is a career violator to the name, posting derogatory rants, deliberately flouting decency rules or making topics filled with 'SPAMSPAMSPAMSPAM' just to get a reaction. In that case, you have to do something, and fast. Of course, this would require explicit regulation, as I said before; otherwise, not everyone will stand idly by.

The fourth case I won't elaborate on. Okay, maybe a little. A lack of security precautions — image verification or remote activation, to name a few — can mean your site is prone to hijacked computers through which people send bots (and also HTTP requests, which contributed to a lot of the crashing that went on prior to the big hacking) to advertise services or trick members into contracting a virus.

For admins, the message is clear: You can't trust your members. Also, moderation is subject to trial and error; if one thing proves cumbersome, it's likely to all fall down. For members: Read the rules.

* The argument for PC is that they are not distributing ROMs, and their rules prohibit members for requesting or distributing; also, most of the ROM discussion is over the creation of spin-off games using the dump files. For PKMN.NET, such information is bound to be useful for real pirates as well as hackers who have downloaded dumps whilst they had the actual game in their possession.

** This is a fallacy; I paired with Lily two months after my promotion.

'OMG im leaving'

2007-04-17T21:43:00.000-04:00

For those wondering, this isn't a new PC rant (but I have been refused a return to staff — but that we can cover later).

On the subject of departures, however, there is a funny side. All over PKMN.NET these days there are a lot of proclamations of 'I'm leaving!' because of several incidents that the poster has gone through. I admit that before I was banned from PKMN.NET I made a long one of my one, declaring myself the 'enemy of PUK'. These days, though, the fact that the author is more and more liable to back down on a leave is ridiculous, and the reasons have become more and more hostile and unforgiving.

I know it seems like a trend to leave, but I'm leaving permanently without any sub-accounts, attempts to come back or anything like that.

Basically, I just seem to you guys to be a wanderer who says stuff that everyone ignores than someone who can be considered a friend. This isn't for pity - or saying I have 'lack of friends' - I just don't seem to very popular or fit in well. Getting voted underrated several times (yes, I have paranoia, so I nominated myself), really struck my confidence. I guess I never broke my shell - I guess I just didn't hit off with you guys.

I wasted almost 2k posting here, only to find my opinions are totally misregarded. I think I've just wasted my time, you have better Team Builders, cooler people, and me to talk to through MSN, so it shouldn't be a problem.

I'm sorry that I put so much detail into this post, I wanted to come off blunt really, but I wanted to make it clear why so I didn't make you think it's a joke and, on top of that, make it clear I expect absolutely no pity (which I don't).

I'm still gonna be on IRC, occasionally, I just don't see any point in being on the forum. I'm not deleting my account - for that ever common habit to come back - but I'm not going to be here.

Hicky, supposedly beleaguered by lack of recognition for his efforts, decided it was time for him to go, and in doing so he published a harsh screw-it topic to declare that he was out. Had he considered coming back or even just cut the hostility out, I would have more sympathy for him — as I've felt out of place on PC on numerous occasions — but I've only ever recognised him for being standoffish.

Unfortunately, the trend is that the ones to publish a farewell post are the ones who have the most ire. Some people do give reasons and are generally calm but down-to-earth about it, as Akinari was before he left on school commitment, but many times you'll find in such a topic severe resent for joining and lack of insight. Worst of all, as I said, many do break their vow, returning with even more ire for the moment. This doesn't mean, however, that you shouldn't post an advance for a vacation or if you're going to appear less due to a restriction or some mulling. You could probably even make a post saying that you feel out of place and might not see it worth coming back, but the worst thing you can do is arrogantly proclaim that you will never come back.

I've done it quite a few times, yet most of the time it's been via email, on this blog, or on IMs and PMs. That way you keep your reputation intact with the mainstream, although not necessarily the friends you send it to.

Reinstatement letter

2007-04-09T17:58:00.000-04:00

I am writing to inform you of my decision following the events that occurred over the past few months, inclusive of the offence I dealt Kelsey and my removal from the staff. The conclusion I have reached is that my actions over this time have been done with lack of forethought and a relentless generalisation of members, and would not have been done had I simply accepted that what I had done to Kelsey before, when I was confronted by Dawson, was itself without forethought or consideration for situations prior.

You may be aware of the statements I made regarding how PC was going to 'die' and such. I realise now that, although some of what I predicted and hoped for initially has come true, such statements were only of blasphemy to the Community and indicative of my own search for benefit. As part of my plea for forgiveness I have removed such statements from my blogs.

A lot of my anger was also rooted in things that I either had no control over or were the result of paranoia. When Dawson and Karli confronted me, I immediately assumed that the staff for which they worked backed their reaction. The truth is, what I said to incite it was spiteful and irritable. In the delusion that the staff was, for these reasons, organising against me, I ended up copping out and throwing a fit at everyone I came across, eventually asking to be removed after an attempt to incense the staff over one of the statements I wrote. My hatred went on, eventually driving me to deep regret, which, with the only tools I was familiar with, could not move anyone.

I think the root of this all comes down to a few things. Many of you know I communicate very often using the MSN service. I use this service because I expect a quick response if I need to talk to someone, and for that reason I do not like communicating through the private messaging system or email. Therefore, when someone cuts me off, I become very upset. I understand that some of you have blocked me for good reasons, yet before I was too concerned with this method to allow for them.

This aside, I have two disorders: I have Asperger's syndrome, and I am passive-aggressive. Thus, it is very hard for me to keep my emotions in check, and I usually rely on them to make my decisions for me. I see my life as a balance, which I try constantly to keep.

And because of this, the thought that some of you are put off by what I've done still lingers, which makes it difficult to remain active on the boards; it's as if there's someone out to get me. I'm mainly writing to see if I can talk to you as a whole to help put these misunderstandings aside and become happy chums again, even if you decide against restoring me as a staff member.

The prom

2007-03-14T21:10:00.000-04:00

This is ridiculous. I stop blogging to brood on the end of my moderation career at PC (I won't get into it until I get the reinstatement review back), and something lands on my desk like a football. It's in a tiny, cute embroidered envelope and takes the form of a decorated card (printed with printer ink, albeit). I read it and it says the promenade is scheduled for 1 June.

Wait, what?

The prom. Are you going or not?

Do you have to squeeze every lurid detail out of me, man?

Life was better, as we know, when I was in middle school. Too young to work a job, and your parents could easily pay into a big function such as a church dance. If only that were the case in this day and age. True, my own parents, for starters, said they'd pay for me to attend the prom (my father never did), but even if they're paying, $60 for admission compounded with $70 for a tuxedo, $20 for a corsage, and prices for drinks varying are nothing to sneer at — and you can double the admission and corsage if you're paired. And in the extreme case — this is from the men's point of view — in which you end up footing your pair's dress, you can add upward of $250, more than twice the cost of admission and grave considering whether that dress will ever see use again.

Middle school was slightly different — at the very least for us men. Now, I had been dragged kicking and screaming into the dances at the beginning of seventh grade and ended up attending both of the promenades held in the cafeteria as long as I was eligible. They were called 'semi-formals' — the admission was a mere $14 per person, drinks were free, and formality was restricted as per the guidelines. There were no corsages, and limousines were prohibited. For the men, it was easy to get away with the bare-bones minimum, but when you look at what most of the girls were wearing (some others were more conservative), you'd expect it to be a full-blown prom upon stumbling into the arena.

Now, though, it's a different matter. Gone are the days of hushed activity. You're about to spend nearly $300 — individually — perhaps once each of the two years — for one night on the town, and you're a junior or senior. (The figure can be nearly double if you're a female, and triple or so when paired.) Although this cost situation is relatively the same, and probably could be negotiable if it were applied to a suburban high school, there are further causes for my own inhibition. Firstly, my school, a charter school operated by the county, has a very small body, so selection is rather limited. Secondly, as I explained before, the school is remote. Although it's perfectly possible to rent a limo, you still have the fact that not many people can drive out and carpool. Thirdly, it's still a situation in which you have the rap blasting, as could be seen from the youth summit earlier this year, and not much decent (I mean sans shaking the ass and grinding) dancing is likely to get done.

So no, I'm not going. Unless, of course, one of the girls at the table (all but one are juniors) approaches the subject....

It's a girl's world

2007-02-22T21:17:00.000-05:00

I get to explain away my failure to update often with an ostensibly lame excuse: I'm a boy. And it seems to carry truth when you compare the journals of a normal guy versus that of a girl.

I'll share my findings with you and admit that most of the material is in the LiveJournal spectrum. Indeed, if you look at my friends page, you won't find too many updates by men like us, and when they do, they're concise and abbreviated. soanevalcke's journal is a good example aside from mine; his updates are far and few between and the latest post at time of writing suggests that the practice has become boring for him, which is backed up by the statement in writing and the length of time it took to come up with what's called a 'meme' (which I assume to be a diminutive of 'memory', a tool available on LiveJournal that I've never had the patience to experiment with).

Now look at a post by any of the women and compare. Here is a public entry made by the blogger mentioned before:

Walked in the park today. And then, as a bit of side time to burn off, Lucas (my dog, might I remind most of you), Vincent and I decided to jump across the river. Vincent said that I wouldn't make it, and I did. Lucas swam across, eager to get back to me. He got his toes wet.On the second try, I wasn't so lucky. One leg of mine made it across, the other slipped into the smelly creek. My shoe's currently out to dry, and I quickly ran home to wash my right leg. Lucas got drenched all over. D:

Then look at a post that otherwise would have a similar mood, this being by lightningchan:

Right, so skipping over early morning stuff since it's just whining about cramps and no one cares. So. School.

I got there around eight and only read one of the signs on the door, and even then only half of it. XD I thought all the homerooms were posted in front of the caf, so I had to shove my way through a MASSIVE wall of people to try to see, since god forbid the kids go to their frigging classrooms, or move out of the way, or even INTO the caf so that people can see the lists, or even move around in that huge hallway. Anyway, I figured it out a moment later and went to the gym where I figured it would be anyway. XD It was there and I got my room number and headed off.

Dude, I know almost EVERYONE in my homeroom. There are only...5 people I've never seen before? And even then, I think I've seen them, just not had any classes with them. It's insane. o_o Of course, best part is how Dean, Lisa, Mara and Alyssa are all in the class, too. :D Yay. Our lockers are RIGHT there too. Mine's a palindrome and third-closest to our class. XD; I'm not upset about them moving the lockers around now. I have no classes on the side of the school that Physics is at, so it'd just be annoying to still have my locker there. Anyway, we really didn't do very much in Philosophy. Just looked at quotes and then wrote down what we think Philosophy is and what we want to get out of the course. I copied Dean's second answer: "a 90." XDD; Then I drew Axel and Marluxia on his paper. Which evolved into all the Obvilion Orgy members. That was fun.

Next was Discrete with my old Calculus teacher. WHAT FUN. And...it actually wasn't bad. It really is just my Physics class over again with less people. XD; There are only two or three people who weren't in it. The teacher handed out a review sheet that was just a lot of simple trig. The hardest thing we had to do was rearrange the formula for the cosine law to find an angle. The other side was pretty much the same, but with graphing, so we didn't do that. Overall it was pretty good though, and the only question on the front that we didn't know, we actually got a lesson on. o_o; And I understood it after he taught it, too! If he actually teaches like that every single day, I may do well in this course. How exciting. XD;

After this class was English. In a portable. DX I managed to ask someone in my Calculus class where P7 was, though. Didn't have to though, since I was right in assuming the seventh one was one of the newer ones, right out one of the nearest doors. XD So I went there and saw Ann sitting at a group of desks in the corner. I don't know her amazingly well, but we sat next to each other in Grade 10 Science so yeah. I sat with that group. Sharon's there too so at least I know people. We didn't do very much in that class. Just took papers, she explained our CPT and wants us to choose our books by Monday (wtf! so early!) and then we did some brainstorming on the word "fragmentation." XDD We ended up talking about asexual reproduction since, technically, it could be a type of fragmentation. :[ It involves cells splitting apart or whatever.

English teacher let us out early, so I went to the caf and bought food. It was good, and we've all got the same lunch again, so this semester should be fun. :D I've missed having lunch with the whole group, even though not everyone was there today for some reason or another, including a bunch of guidance visits ~~which for Dean's we took the liberty of eating his pizza so it wouldn't get cold~~. XD

Last but not least as Calculus. Fomg, I zoomed through the worksheet she gave us. :B I didn't finish, but damn I remembered everything. So proud of myself, even if it was just simple things like evaluating functions, expanding, factoring, and finding roots. XD; Ann's in that class too so I sat beside her and Mitch sits in the two-desk row beside us. So yay, I know people. I got 75 last year (or was it 74? I dunno.), but I want higher. Hopefully I'll get a much better mark this time. We're doing review today and tomorrow and then we start the course. :D It's sad that Calculus is probably going to be my favourite class this time around. Philosophy will be fun, but I miss being good at math and having already taken this course, I'll probably be good at it.

Now I'm home. Gonna wait for Bryan to come home so I can open the door for him, considering he's too lazy to take out his key, then go get changed and then...start on my homework, I guess. Two math worksheets to finish up, got to pull together a few binders and organize them for my classes and then...get mom and dad to write out cheques for my textbooks.

~~Hey, I can use my school:calculus tag again! XD~~

Blimey. I admit I don't make it a point to detail the school day, given that I'm pretty much restricted as it is as far as classes go and not much goes around socially since the school is so remote. And even if scenes were made every day and the school I attended was in a more urban area, I probably wouldn't find it in me to record it.

The conclusion then comes from my stepmother: It's a matter of them being more vocal. Now you wonder why there are so many books in the library written in the point of view of girls — seventh-grade Bebo users, ninth- and tenth-grade MySpace users and clubbers, all ignominiously leaving out the boys in such roles, except perhaps as hot crushes or concerned relatives. I know that there are some boys out there who probably love to document their outings, and many of them have pictures that generally take the place of words, but when it comes to the Internet, a vision I have been seeing seems to have credit: In the Internet, it's simply a girl's world. It's a world where cute animated backgrounds, pink and black stripes, fluorescent colours, and stars are accepted fixtures. It's also a world where, whenever the aforementioned is absent, animé characters, Photoshop images and icons, and text smilies dominate. And a lot of it can be attributed to the impact women have had on the Internet. And that's being masculinely conservative about it.

So what can be said in conclusion about the men? I really don't know. I believe we should leave it to the women to say that.

St Valentine's Day: Just a vestige?

2007-02-14T21:38:00.000-05:00

No, I'm aware of all the public hullabaloo and the pressures on many of you with significant others today, and I'm sure your endeavours may have been worth it, but this screed is, once again, about me.

I can't help noticing how vapid this day is. Like I said, it's oriented toward those with actual infatuation or love in their lives, but as far as the man who writes a blog, had a few fleeting infatuations, had been chewed out by a friend of one of those objects, and hasn't been subject personally to a shred of the theme in the past four years, the day is, I have to say it, terribly inflated. I even believe that the ones who celebrate it often suffer — not necessarily at the hand of their significant other, but themselves as a result of trying too hard. Yes, I know it's nice; no, it's not a day to reserve for only a spastic draught of 'I love you', since that should be present as much as possible. I'll say this about myself about the day: It was only up until grade four that I actually had to go out of my way to buy those Valentine cards for the class, and ever since the day has just avoided my attention, save for the two I got from a pen pal four or five years ago.

So as far as I go, I don't know the pressure that most people are under today, but I still feel sorry for those who adhere to it. As is is today, I just find the idea to just be a needless acme. This day is on par with Mother's Day, Father's Day, and any other subject-specific holiday only in the idea of theoretically dedicating one day to a certain person and screwing off the rest of the time. While I can understand honouring your relatives for raising you well (with an emphasis on the word), I just don't see the point in reserving one day to demonstrate how much you love another. When it comes to love — and I'm being theoretical here — you need to exhibit it as long as you feel it, in moderation, without putting too much pressure on yourself. If you just wait for today to let it peak, it will eventually end up being systematic and irrespective of feelings that you might really have.

The funny thing is that this day started out as a generic Catholic holiday to honour any priest condemned in the Roman Empire before the time of Constantine. The pertinent feast coincided with the feast of Lupercalia, in which runners would streak through town and touch women in the hopes of aiding pregnancy (such a scene is present in the first act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). According to legend, St Valentine of Genoa, one of the martyrs the Church chose to celebrate, happened to have secretly arranged marriages and possibly fell in love with a jailer's daughter. Along the line, Geoffrey Chaucer associated the day with romance in a poem. It was later left to modern commercialism to introduce the notion of giving jewellery and chocolates.

As a result, you'll only see the Vatican holding on to the tradition of honour, whilst all the world uses the holiday to go out, don red and pink, and scoop up anything red and in the shape of a heart with which to shower another with the affection they've ostensibly accumulated throughout most of the year prior.

Bah humbug.

Youth summit #4

2007-02-11T18:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know, I promised you all another youth summit summary, so here I am. The thing I want to address now is that my throat is not in the best of conditions first due to congestions and then karaoke singing and some speech I had to make for the rest of the table. (It's called laryngitis. Gah.)

The first thing I did on Friday was sweep right out the door without telling anyone; I'd reserved the day for it and notified work and school, and it was nearing 7.30am, when I would have to appear at the church for transport. This time we were headed to another Elks conference, so that meant I was rearing to get my iPod going via a transceiver, but since we could not find one to purchase on the island, I had to crank it to full volume whilst the girls in the van found their iTrip and blasted rap and punk rock the whole way. (Even worse, the pastor was in a separate car, so he had no iPod of his own to counter with.)

Normally the summit would be held at a hotel in New Brunswick, but since it was closed for renovation we were shunted into one in Princeton, where, unfortunately, pilots were sleeping before their next flight and could not be disturbed. This did not stop the conference from becoming its noisy and cluttered self; on the first day my room was one of a few that received silence orders, which my room-mates continued to flout. When we got there, we put our luggage away as usual, but it was in a partition that was removed later as the day wore on; I put my coat on a rack provided in a room, but once the partition was removed and I had collected my luggage, the rack disappeared; the coat was never announced during lost-and-found claim calls. As a result, I now have no winter coat other than two fleece layers.

First, we had our luncheon and opening. When I sat at my group's table, I found it hard to concentrate on a new map I was drawing (an area I called Rana'l, a collection of cities on a ragged seashore) since the others (we know who they are) were throwing ice cubes, napkin bits, and crumbs across the table. This continued for the next three meals I had with the group before I finally sat with another group, one from East Plainfield. One of their number had come across my map and told the rest of the group; since they turned out to be a happy bunch I basically stuck with them for the remainder of the conference.

After lunch, we had the first of our workshops. Again, we never stuck with our workshops; there were no schedules and everyone just flooded to wherever space was free. I ended up in a tobacco seminar that revolved around a hidden code of ethics in RJ Reynolds' corporate policy that, needless to say, was never heeded (the header even said VOLUNTARY CODE OF ADVERTISING ETHICS). Before the seminar, however, we had an icebreaker round, which many of you will know to be some sort of jive or game that helped you identify other members. This round, though, devolved into factional madness, with one party representing 'Kool-Aid' and turning out to be extremely obnoxious and the meek other representing 'Sunny D'. The first was 'If You Love Me You Smile': we had to get a member of the opposing team to smile by saying 'Honey, I love you, will you smile for me?'; the other will either smile and join the proposing team or hold it back and turn the proposing member down to force him or her to defect to the opposing team. Then, we played a human 'Guess Who' followed by a tournament of rock-paper-scissors, which all devolved into confusion and bickering. Needless to say, it ended rather quickly.

Then there was the first of our speakers, 'Dr Mike'. Although his message ('good choice, bad choice, my choice) applied well to the mass, especially the poor chap who was handed a toy car, radio, phone, and banknote to denote freedoms and then drawn back with a fishing line for each represented shortfall, his matter was quite juvenile; this was reflected in a wrap-up session.

Then there was dinner, and a hypnotist (I could have sworn that I'd seen him at the first or second Youth-to-Youth summit) came on-stage and selected a handful to subject to hypnosis. One of our members arose. Once he'd gathered his few, he put them in chairs and coerced them to sleep, and then he proceeded to force them to imagine a variety of scenarios. Some were tapped out when the hypnosis failed; some that remained slumped on each other. At the end, they all got up, evidently dazed at reality.

That ended, and we were down in the conference rooms at the base of the hotel for any of a few sessions of films and karaoke. I chose to go to the karaoke and, despite my nagging throat, registered to sing. I was called up to the surprise of many, especially those that had seen the map. One member in my travelling group responded with what people at PC call a 'glomp'; one wanted to dance. I shook them away and took the microphone, singing to emulate Garth Brooks as best I could without cracking. Although I got through with it and received a large ovation, it was nonetheless the first step to a nasty throat.

The following morning, we were in the ballroom for breakfast and a speaker — Josh Shipp. I'd seen him at my first Youth-to-Youth conference and expected him to carry on with his story of the exploding lasagne and the ensuing reaction from his mother: 'Bless your heart!' In other words, he was later told, he was supposedly stupid. That he was not, as I'd known; he did have attention deficit disorder, but he nevertheless carried out a witty and intelligent session with the mass. (I asked him during a recess whether he had actually appeared at the Youth-to-Youth conference; I was right.) Then came a 'town meeting', in which selected students would come up and share stories that explained why they were there. While plenty others were standing up, no-one at my table seemed willing to say anything. Then I had an idea come into my head as I wondered why the hell I was there. My idea was that everyone was unique and not fit to follow a mould (okay, I took the idea from another speaker in the mass), so I gathered up what to say about that and, trembling, got up to motion that I wanted a say. 'We are here because we are all unique!' I managed to proclaim. 'We are here as we choose to embrace our identity and thus use it to become leaders!' I nearly fainted, and the destruction of my voice was complete. Still, it was the largest ovation of any for the town meeting.

After lunch, there were two workshops, again subject to availability. I managed to get first into a seminar on prescription abuse; it included a video of a woman who drank Robitussin on a daily basis for a high as well as a teenager who hanged himself in a 'roid rage'. Once that cleared, I ended up in what was probably one of the most interesting sessions I have ever attended: perception. The speaker first sorted us out and had us come up with an answer as to his lowest maths score, manufacturer of his car, and nationality of his mother (97 percent, Nissan, Greek). Then, he presented us with a matrix of nine dots. I knew the trick; you had to connect them all using a certain amount of lines. The trick was that it was oft assumed that they had to be straight and you could not let the pen leave the paper before all dots are connected. However, he assured us that we had to see instructions as to these puzzles for what they literally were; the problem could be solved with one line with a paint roller or with zero straight lines by crumpling it or scribbling. That's something I should have showed my psychology course had this taken place before the senses class.

That finished, and we had two hours to ourselves, in which the East Plainfield students rehearsed a poem to read at dinner. Dinner came and they performed beautifully. Once dinner ended, you guessed it, it was another Motivational Productions feature. This one was called 'freedom', intertwining the tale of a kid whose father was at war and who was coping with a crowd that was notorious for partying.

Since there was no talent show, of course, we had the dance afterwards. The staff had been generous and let us stay out an hour longer than intended; I simply stayed out of the main frame and stayed with some Plainfield students who had a paper game going in the foyer. This did not, to my surprise, come without a few girls demanding rather flatly that I come in and dance with them (the ratio of girls to boys at this conference was 3:1, guaranteeing all the boys a potential partner, which many would see as beneficial to me). I did enter the ballroom a few times and prop the map out, but alas, I didn't have another follower. I decided once again, though, that I was not capable of getting in there and dancing.

The final day was uneventful, save for the loss of the coat and the lack of a map for the return trip, forcing me to call to mind a few interstates to get back home.

You know better, Max. What was this all for?

Again, you've beaten me to the kerb. You'll have noticed in the screed above that I was drawing a map again, and you also should have noticed that many of the gawks were from women.

Okay! I admit it! I used it to pick a few up. No, the decision to go wasn't prurient; I did learn from the conference, and I did increase some of my confidence as demonstrated by the karaoke session and the speech (albeit at the expense of my throat), and I was still without a thing to do but wander around, and I needed a few more ideas for another large map I've been planning. But yes, I caught on to the gawks and tried to run away with them. Sure, I didn't has much interest in the whole scenario this time, but if you go back in time, you'll find that most of the time I've drawn a map and demonstrated it at least one girl would respond. It's happened, first with little motive but to just brag, then with, I admit, a few other things in mind that I later wrote off as they proved to be too whimsical. I caught on to the notion that whatever I could offer would be a decent pick-up line.

I'm such an idiot. But hell, I did do something great. Anyway, now isn't the time to jump into an entry about this, Blue and Natsuki with the Dawson factor, and other things along the line that I can possibly think of. As I said, my throat's trashed, and I'm waiting for it all to set into stone before I can reach a viable conclusion.

Beauty gimmicks

2007-02-08T17:30:00.000-05:00

It's not very odd to see something like this happening, but the surprise of the news coming made sure that I didn't hold you lot over until I returned from the next youth summit, for which I leave tomorrow. As a result, we have a new rant on how the world has to be improved. By following the link you'll find that former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, burdened with the death of her son, the spectacular failure of Trimspa (which we'll look at), and a new husband and daughter, has died today of causes yet undisclosed. This does not stop me, however, from inculpating a lot of gimmicks she's gone through — plastic surgery, pills, you name it. Smith is no hero, yet beauty gimmicks are worse.

Alongside the tendencies I've noticed in the past, pills, eating disorders, and plastic surgery are things that I can personally do without. First, we have pills and other 'medications' and regimens that promise spot reducing (Cortislim was nailed for this in particular). Many diet pills offered on television are often not evaluated by the FDA, yet their advertisers still aren't afraid to boast, with as much information they can ply us with about secret ingredients, herbs, and such, that they'll catalyse a dramatic yet seemingly safe drop in weight. The truth is that most of these pills just don't work — many of them are addictive or are toxic to the body. The most incriminating thing of all about them is the lingering history of the CDC diet, based on Herman Taller's Calories Don't Count book, which allowed you to eat as much as you wanted whilst taking tablets that really contained nothing but safflower oil.

Then there's plastic surgery. I can excuse this for the removal of cysts or severe weight, but to just reshape your face is something I question. Many times these surgeries leave the patient looking even more hideous than before, and a few times they actually addict the patient. Beauty consciousness is not an excuse to me, unless it cures something that can lead to infection or removes something that hampers normal movement. Not as bad as constructing the face, but still something to abhor, are breast implants (not reductions, as those actually releve pressure on the mammaries from what I hear) — do we have to go over the fact that they aren't a sexual organ but merely objects of eroticism in most beliefs? Simply put, and I admit that I've been stymied otherwise, if you're proud of how you look, you do look good. If not, you don't; it's not always in the eyes of the beholder.

Then, we have, quite unfortunately, eating disorders. This is not something we can get rid of easily, but I suppose it'll die once people start thinking for themselves. Not too recently, a model named Ana Carolina Reston died of heart failure due to anorexia, and at the time she had a strict vegetarian diet and weighed a measly 88 pounds (39 kilograms). This coincided with advisories put out by Milan and Madrid over model stature, the latter requiring a body mass index of at least 18 in order to be in the show. The lesson, folks, is that there is a thing called 'too thin', and if the tabloids and activist groups are the only other public forums shouting about it, I'm going to cry. The rest of the media will not necessarily bother with minimum weight or BMI; they'll do anything to get money, even if they inadvertently create a sex definition. Yes, I realise that there's too fat (circulatory failure in that territory too), but it's no use whittling girls to the bone or compelling them to whittle themselves.

Girls, I pray you, put down the pills, consult your legtitimate, certified doctor, and work out a healthy diet that encompasses as much of the food pyramid as possible. And exercise.

Too many moderators?

2007-02-01T12:28:00.001-05:00

Number of forums: 901. Number of members: Upward of 120,000. Number of moderators: 123.

Hang on, 123. Why does that number come into play as far as management is concerned? The common justification is that there are enough forums on the board to warrant a staff that large, yet counterexamples seem to be everywhere. For one, we have PKMN.NET, which makes do with seven administrators, three active super moderators (Bre and Continue don't count) and really one active page moderator; things move smoothly since there are more people who are prepared to intervene in conflicts on the forums (whilst the others work on main-site projects), including a few who act in times when the big boys are out to lunch; the only weakness is that all active staff members (except one) reside in the British Isles. Then we have the Pokémon Community, which, I've come to observe, probably has a larger staff than it really needs (I'm pretty sure some other moderator could whisk my post away, especially given what's happened with a bungled rule in OVP and the stalking issue); we have more than twenty page mods and we end up having the higher staff doing the bulk of the work. In all honesty, I personally believe the site could run quite fine if a couple more higher staff members were added, a couple of page mods who do their job enough stay at post, and all the rest cleared out in a mass lay-off.

And now the subject is SuperCheats. It's got 123 moderators among 120,000 members or more and 901 forums. What seems to be the problem?

I remember having a disagreement with a new, haughty member over the subject, but in a way he had a grain of truth in him. I'm not sure as to what the genesis for the mod application idea was when Rich decided to implement it (I only remember being told in advance of a democratic system), but after it was implemented, the vast diversity of the forums seemed to require it. Many of the 901 forums aren't venues everyone on the forum can access and relate to — and I don't mean small differences such as between the Pokémon TCG and Game Boy games, but individual games from all different franchises altogether. One person who has enough knowledge in games of one franchise, say, Grand Theft Auto, that he can help others progress through the games and mediate discussion thereof is bound to have as little enthusiasm in Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts as he has much in Grand Theft Auto, so he probably would not be an excellent candidate for a position to moderate a large swath of video game boards (although he could stand a chance as a super moderator, but that's a different story). The natural response to such a deficit would be to hire someone with enough interest in the Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy games.

If the concept seems to work, why isn't it? The problem isn't in the diversity of the games, but rather in the number of people assigned to one specific game forum. And mind you, forums are not set necessarily by franchise, but by individual product. That means you have a forum for Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas with a different moderator or two for each. Add the different forums for different platforms (I don't know whether this issue has yet been covered) and you have an ideal maximum of 18 posts between the three instalments and the two platforms (PlayStation 2 and Xbox), with a maximum of three mods for each instalment. Occasionally you'll have more than one of these posts held by the same person, but often the ones holding the posts are vastly unique.

I'll be blunt here: There are simply too many moderators, and they're causing too many problems for the site. And it's not necessarily the application system, but the number of people Rich wishes to have working for him. These days, unfortunately, we have plenty of skirmishes over who's going to get the last toss-up for a general board position (each of which usually has five spots); the most recent one was for Team and Clan Boards, which I'll admit has a few management issues. The facts are clear, as in the aforementioned sites: A better choice would be a set of well-rounded staff members who know enough about franchises and can easily go through a set of forums labelled under one franchise such as Grand Theft Auto. Failing that, we could probably use a couple more super mods who come around more often; we're down to three already.

Here's the type of overhaul I'd recommend, in short: Reduce the number of normal moderators on the forums and increase the amount of moderators who can easily work in more than one forum by adjusting to the expectations therein. PKMN.NET has it right.

Another census

2007-01-27T20:11:00.000-05:00

Hey, hey, hey! It's time for another reader census!

The objective, as you may have noticed, is to see who's been reading my blog. Those from PC, PKMN.NET, Super Cheats, or the Dell Computer Corporation. I urge you, the reader, to post a comment here and tell me who you are. Go on. The lines are all open.

High school is no fun

2007-01-22T18:02:00.000-05:00

When I left middle school, many things changed. For one thing, I wasn't able to get away with murder — well, that was the only thing I was aware of until recently.

In your public library, I'm purely assuming, there's probably a section called Young Adult Fiction. A lot of this stuff consists of television fanfics and novelisations — Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sweet Valley High — and dramatic kid novels that supposedly document a kid's adventure in seventh or eighth grade, or perhaps facing the impending age of seventeen. One book in particular at my library is modelled as a collection of blog entries and has a back cover that looks roughly like a profile you'd encounter on Bebo. This wasn't the thing that shocked me; rather, it was that the narrator was a thirteen-year-old girl. Just passed the COPPA clearance, a year away from eligibility on MySpace — and from the looks of it, one of many in a breed that's been hunched on the Internet so much that it partially governs their lives. Many of the teenage books on the shelf are in the same format — many girls under the age of consent blogging about their school life. (Now I understand why MySpace is taken so seriously.)

And this past Sunday I eavesdropped on some of the high-school freshmen that attend the youth summit with me chatting fervently about MySpace and comments made by boys they'd dumped or girls they'd faced off against. And there was me thinking that this was only supposed to be characteristic of high-school upperclassmen — how wrong I was.

These days, I'm starting to miss my old middle school days. I'm thinking that it should have remained the same through high school, but two things happened: There were three schools to which we could go without much hitch, and I went to the least popular of the three. On top of that, I'd decided that, after introspection, that it wouldn't be worth any effort to contact any of them thereafter, instead relying on chance encounters. As a result, I ended up where I had no support from anyone else except an uncle (who put pressure on me in his Physics classes). I was done with the graduating class merely because I was too lazy to attempt to connect.

When you compare my high school years to middle school years, it's no contest. Even though I had been in withdrawal for some middle school years, I couldn't love them more. It's probably due to the fact that I had people who knew me and admired me — probably for the wrong reasons, but I still had some sort of company. I was able to go to dances with them; we could simply trot down to their residences in cases of projects; secrets were few and far between. I only realised this when I looked through those books at the library — I found that my best years were back in the seventh and eighth grade, and they would remain the best as long as I lived. It doesn't matter to me that I had a big head back then but didn't realise it; I'm making this comparison using mind settings of those times for each one. Even if I hadn't been as big-headed, there still were dances and secrets. Someone was paired up and dances were always fun, even if you did get your helmet destroyed or got embarrassed trying to dance for the first time, later to sink so deep into it that you got a fetish for the next four years. The drawback, though, was that I had been hit in the face with a short anti-Pokémon spell, rumours going about that I was infatuated with a Muslim student, and (this killed the rumours right away) the stigma of having sworn at another student for spitting in the group's cheese dip.

In high school, though, this was not present. If it indeed was, it wasn't widespread. In my first year both major dances were cancelled due to attendance issues. Plus which, more anti-Pokémon sentiment was in the air, and it took four years to go away. It was only until year three, when the health sciences programme was in full swing, when anything started happening. Compared with the students who were either unhealthily obnoxious or immersed in their studies, the breed the nursing programme drew in was a mixture of the two. Sometimes you'd have a few who wouldn't really be learning to be a nurse (I wonder how their internships will go). All in all, however, they had some charisma; alas, since it's been three years since I started, I'm going to narrowly miss the real activity I could have had to rival the days of middle school.

And had those books mirrored what my life in seventh grade was like, I'd be a giddy little fish that James wouldn't stand — probably solely based on the possible ownership of a MySpace or Bebo account. But for my time, Kidz Bop did rule. At least that was enough.

Pattern switch

2007-01-19T22:06:00.000-05:00

I promised myself that I'd update the blog on Monday when the outcome was decided, but the internship in the IT office, alas, has been cut short. The reason was that online courses were beginning on 16 January and instructors would be demanding work at specific dates thereafter. Now all that's left to do is summarise the last of the internship and the way the courses are flowing.

On Wednesday, Tim introduced me to Look@Lan and Remote Desktop Control. This was set up to watch over the workstations in the IT room (the one with the Macintosh computers; they just recently got more widescreens), on which, the instructor noted, students were goofing off. We watched the students work on Flash projects and stayed to capture anyone who delineated from the task. After a few minutes, we caught up with one of the students, who had been viewing a forum; Tim stepped in, took over the computer on which the forums were shown, closed the browser, and typed a message on Notepad to deter the student from doing it again. It took a few more interventions and Mike finally blacklisting the site before he gave up.

Then, at the end of the day, Nick was confronted by a girl in the class who had found another one of seemingly countless ways to circumvent ESS to access MySpace. We finally got the name of the site down when the circumvention occurred on one of the control screens and blacklisted it; as a result, she created a notice in Paint — a red background for the desktop on which were the words IF U CAN C THIS, LOSER. Another student joined in, writing DORK on his custom wallpaper. Thank God for Clean Slate. And an image we were doing for the IT instructor who ran the room which would prevent further circumvention of task.

On Friday, I was all alone in the office, save for Dot and Mike, so I ended up labelling a few envelopes before I decided to finish another image.

On Tuesday, however, I got the course books and was informed that my internship was to stop abruptly for the reasons I've already given. On the first day I was not able to access any of the WebCT courses due to the fact that my details had not been given to the database. I had trouble with CourseCompass as well, but when a counselor gathered a required access code, I was onto that immediately.

But the trouble didn't end there. On Wednesday I pulled the trial version of Visual Studio that came with my textbook out of the sleeve and installed it. However, when it installed .NET Framework 2.0, it fell silent. After a few attempts over the next two days, I decided to get another laptop. When that and moving to the library failed, I took the newer laptop up to Mike, who discovered that no prior version had been installed, making installation impossible. Today he had installed the prior version and installed everything from the disc, so I completed the week's course in about an hour. Everything's due on Monday now, it appears....

Out and in

2007-01-09T19:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Mike failed to show up, relegating me to the main office where I would help another senior sort out envelopes that were to contain mailers and recruitment notices. This senior managed to tell me that my permit to drive had expired as I had failed to show up for my examination, so on Friday I will need to file once more.

Today, though, he did turn up. The task of the day was to finish the computer that had reported the error of doom and return it to the nursing instructor; as it turned out, the keyboard had been antagonistic. Other than that, we just had to reinstall Windows XP on one computer, amid several tests that we found were unnecessary as the CD-ROM had merely doubted the integrity of the installation CD.

Mike, though, had something else on his mind. He had recently received a hard drive from Advanced Internet Management as an upgrade for the ESS firewall switch and was prepared to forward an announcement that the Internet would be down for a half hour whilst he installed it. This half-hour started right after lunch, when he returned from his own break. While it was a rather easy task removing the switch from the rack, the removal of the covering revealed something hilarious: Aside from the method of screwing the current hard drive into both the interface and the bottom plate, all the cables servicing the hard drive were secured with gel!

After fooling with the chisel, laughing at the lack of accommodation afforded by the gel method, we put the switch back in. The next step would be to figure out why the login details to the interface were not maintained as promised.

'Dell can go to hell' — Zapdos

2007-01-04T19:33:00.000-05:00

There should be a post on The Sky Temple of Lugia and Articuno in which Zapdos consoles a member who turned to Dell for his or her computer problems by saying the line 'Dell can go to hell'. The truth I knew was that Dell had done a right job of outsourcing, meaning that the majority of the technical support were operating in India, which — and I do not intend to offend any readers of Indian descent — due to many employees having to juggle two or three indigenous languages (out of more than 50 from what I've heard) with English, resulted in either faulty communication at the core or rather insufficient knowledge of the model in question. The case today in the office was the latter — Zapdos' line said it all, and now it's a post on my blog.

The day started normally but ended up revolving around one maintenance request that should have remained moderate. A nursing instructor had reported connectivity problems with a few of the laptops in the room's chest (no doubt attributed to the reconfiguration of the switches yesterday). We went down there and ensured that all other networks were not being accepted and that the computers were responding optimally to the new network configuration. They all did as we had hoped.

Then there were beeps.

One of the laptops emitted a long sequence of beeps before booting Windows XP — for those of you who may be able to figure it out, it was 24 followed by 10 followed by 11 — or thereabout, as Tim, the person working with me, doubted whether I had counted correctly as my tally changed often as he heard the sequence over and over. Regarding this as a fatal error, we returned all the other laptops and took this one upstairs.

The first idea was to ensure that it wasn't a connectivity error. When it was resolved that it wasn't, we did what may have depleted our stock by one: try Dell's support chat. The representative that spoke with us started by telling us to go to the 'PC Card' icon in the Classic Control Panel (there is none) and then told us to make sure the memory was in place. The memory was in place, and nothing abnormal occurred once Windows booted, besides run slowly even with 50 processes. By the time the clock told me to go to lunch, the representative had told us to dismantle the laptop and then turn it back on.

When I returned from lunch, the hard drive, NIC, memory, battery, and keyboard were out. From what Tim told me, the representative had actually closed the chat due to inactivity whilst he was unscrewing the desktop. In defeat, we just decided to place it on the desk for Mike, the IT head. He did glance at it when he returned, but not before turning to Tim, the other employee Nick, and me with a sceptical countenance and saying, 'What happened here?'

Does Hewlett-Packard have good education deals?

Intern

2007-01-03T20:38:00.000-05:00

What an eventful span of two days.

As you know, I am in the technology department of my school as an intern for the next four weeks, and two days have passed since I've entered. Now everything I've been taught last year in networking classes is starting to flood back into me.

Basically the routine will be like this for the next few days: I'll pick up my lunch, hang out on the boom as usual before the session begins, and then retreat upstairs to the data processing room. This room, as you may have guessed, is probably the most enigmatic room to any IT student as it's where the MySpace blockage, Clean Slate woes, and computer maintenance executions originate. When you actually enter the room, however, it's a very orchestrated disarray. Due to the transformation of the entire network, as I've explained before, we've needed to get whole new servers and fiddle with models in use to see how things would work. Combining this with the official release of Windows Media Player 11 and Internet Explorer 7 results in a trunkload of maintenance requests, many of them being fifteen-second reinstatements of the proxy settings from before. (The proxy is 10.10.1.5:8080, and the installation of a new switch affords only the principals of the schools subject to the network and the police officers unrestricted Internet access; supposedly the Macintosh computers are affected as well. I'm not going to throw my dice on it just yet.)

As far as it has been, it's been quite lively and never falls short of an opportunity to move, except in the case of the IT head, who enjoys being able to monitor every device from one laptop (Alienware, which I seriously need to consider come September). We, though, have been moving from computer to switch to computer or any way around; today was mandatory reconfiguration of the switches in the three buildings that comprise my school and the school next door, while yesterday we gathered IP addresses and subjected computers to external drive capability. (The latter required the use of a master password to suspend Clean Slate...no, do you think I'd really tell you that?) I work alongside two paid workers, one of which seems to have some website plan in mind involving Flash and has congratulated me for 'coming to the good side' after the proxy mess from last year.

I hope this blog qualifies for the journal assignment that had been mentioned but never formally administered.

Hmmm....

2007-01-01T21:55:00.000-05:00

...Who saw this coming? XD

2006: Year in review (Or should I say 'My Head Was in the Clouds for 365 Freaking Days'?)

2006-12-31T20:25:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, 2006 is gone. Quite honestly, given the mess that took place in 2005 — not exclusively the 26 hurricanes, but the trouble I got in with PKMN.NET and the close realisation that it was silly to stay with such disagreeable people) — I thought this year would be better. Alas, it resulted in my deconstruction and forced me to look over the year with the hopes that all will be brighter when the little hand points to the twelve.

In the beginning of the year, we had the pleasure of watching Saddam storm out of the room (God rest his soul now). I, however, publish a sceptical review of the karma system adopted by PKMN.NET (and it's survived to this day). I also lose the last of my respect for Serebii.net when someone by the name of Ama but who masquerades as Encyclopika publishes a piece called Treehouse Saga, resulting in a scathing attack by this blog, which had seen darker days. Of course, four months later, the installation of a tracker (the little globe thing on the left) revealed that the author had published a retaliatory statement on her own blog. Thus led to a series of arguments between the two of us that made me decide that the site wasn't worth bothering with, except to sometimes laugh off the fact that it boasts that it's the best and latest while there remains a rocky and rough side to it. This is for you, Ama: I'm still prepared to have a go whenever I see something fishy.

Next, while PKMN.NET fades out of focus on my radar, the Pokémon Community zooms into clear view. After noticing the clash (which is no longer as perceptible) between the mods and old-time members over seniority that culminated in a defamatory Wikipedia article, I speak up, and two weeks later I'm a moderator. Of course, I have to try a second time before it really goes away, but in its place comes another splinter site or equivalent thereof, Shinou.

Finally, we had two youth summits, one hosted by the Elks Association and another by Youth2Youth International. The former gets me an admirer, while the latter gives me an opportunity to explain away the smoking problems at the arcade.

What's it all for now?

That's a good question.

I recount my mother telling me that I've had my head up too much, looking down on others. I have to say that she was right; the fact that I'd subconsciously resorted to all this in the lack of maturity probably made this year hell. I'll be honest here: You'll be happy to hear me admit that everything that incurred hatred from others, especially in school and on the forums, was my own doing some way or other.

The evidence of life going that way in school can be found on the tongues of those in my technology class. Our project required us to create a video yearbook to accompany the printed and bound one we were organising, but this yearbook would go solely to the seniors. Although I had been assigned to shot watch and editing, I, dwelling on how foolish I had made myself during the previous years, didn't do as the rubric told. Rather, I tapped away at the Macintosh computers without a single thought to the others, finally doing little more than stand guard during filming, but not before yelling at a student who had given me the role in reparation for lack of activity in shot watch. The teacher ended up marking me on par with the rest, but given the fact that I had done absolutely nothing to contribute to the film aside from a single hint at the cover art, I felt I didn't deserve a single point. If I'd foreseen this, I'd have asked to move to Mr Leitz's Java class, which I would have found of significantly more use. Even before that, I was under the delusion that I was, out of the blue, hated, but after a mediation session that knocked the reason for such hatred into my head, followed by a bungled session with another student and my sudden upsurge in work ethic in my uncle's class, I began to veer to the opposite end of the spectrum, turning from a person who demanded attention to one who had no answer to give and wanted nothing to do with the rest of the students. This went so far as a request to have my name extracted from the yearbook — at my parents' urging my picture would remain — on, as it turned out, the sole basis that I would have been labelled 'rudest'.

On the forums, my life started going up, but then it took a devastating downturn in the last few months. The restriction on teams on SuperCheats was gone on protest, I was falling out with even more people than before, and, it seems, I've lost almost all credibility as a moderator. The last few weeks were shaped by the failure of a rule that Scizz and I had fabricated to remedy tangent habits by a single member, after which I just sent Erica to announce the removal of the rule to hide my shame. Then fallouts with Kura and the Blue and Natsuki pair reveal more ignorance on my part that I hadn't squashed before. The truth in all cases here was that I was on the staff under the delusion that the forums couldn't survive without me, and in many cases I got everything horribly wrong. One time I would blame Super Cheats for not having a cohesive staff while the depression would really be rooted in my lack of professionalism as a Pokémon Community moderator. On another occasion I may have said that PC was supportive of me while Super Cheats put me down, while I in reality had flaws in both areas.

The truth is, I'm more or less a fraud. I probably shouldn't have Brigantine's school system (which I was in until 2003) shoulder the blame for it, as I had liberal psychological help while the students would be tricked into thinking I was the greatest. As I may or may not have mentioned before, I had people walking up to me asking 'Who was the sixth president?' or 'What's the square root of 7895778?' and waiting in the hopes of either a prompt answer or, more to the comedian tune, a sputter of failure to conjure an answer. This carried over into high school and PKMN.NET, where fights with the staff would lead to TPL. Soon enough, I find myself on the staff of a prominent Pokémon forum when, as was more or less demonstrated by my failure in TPL, I probably didn't have the competence. Moreover, the board I was assigned to had so few instances of infraction out of which so few occurred whilst I was online that other staff would race to it and resolve it. Not even an internal restriction of superior moderation of that board helped; I just looked for technical issues while other things could have gone on. The same, interestingly, may hold true for my supermarket job, although many have said that it was for the best; I'll have to analyse that later.

As a result, I went around asking for resolution ideas. All I wanted was someone in my age group who I could call on in real life and who could relate to me and point out what I was doing wrong. All I had was a group of girls with whom I would sit at lunch and laugh gaily for thirty minutes, and I was innately afraid of bringing anything up with them. It's no matter, though; I probably will not see them again until 29 January, when internships end. As for the seniors, I may have just seen the last of them; they're going to remote locales for internships and either going to the ACCC campus for the rest of the semester or working at those locales. If not for the decision to take online courses, I'd have opted just to stay off campus and work full-time at the supermarket. I suppose it's too late now, unless I reimburse the school for $300 for failure by default.

Then again, I hope to attend a college far away from home, so I can start anew without any of these problems chewing my back. The next step will be applying, and by now they've all gone into rolling basis mode. I'm screwed.

To the AAMAYL searchers....

2006-12-20T20:28:00.000-05:00

I'm noticing that lots of people have turned up this blog looking for the fan fiction piece 'A Day Inside May'. This fan fiction has been removed in Serebii.net's pruning process.

The closest you can get is this.

...Let's not do the 'part' scheme, let's just get around to the summary of the past three days

2006-12-20T19:33:00.000-05:00

As suggested by the previous entry, I have spent two hours out of each of the previous two days as well as today learning to drive. Submitting to my request that we get an independent instructor, we hired out of Safety First and out came a lad named Justin at 6.15pm yesterday.

As soon as I got into the car, my heart started to race. I was on a road restricted to 15 miles per hour (due to a few people down the road). I decided to tap the accelerator when I was told that we were still in park. I moved to drive position and started slowly down the road until we came to the stop sign, at which point I felt my arms lock. For the first day, my steering and method thereof generally was wanting — whereas I would witness quick motion of the arms crossing over as others turned, I remained to shuffling shyly around the steering wheel. This ended up dogging me the entire night, during which we cruised around Galloway Township and Port Republic. The instructor seemed to know the parts, although I was merely familiar with the route numbers. After a few juggles with the wheel whilst trying to remain in the lane and braving a six-way junction in Absecon (my classmates know the one), I finally managed to drop off a previous student and make my way back to Brigantine. I didn't want to share my experiences in public that day; I'm lucky the entry below is here.

The second day, following some words of confidence from table friends*, I met the instructor yet again, this time waiting in the roundabout in front of the school. I cautiously made my way out and we headed for Galloway yet again. This time glare, not curves, posed the problem, although it was only when we retreated into Linwood that I finally managed, painstakingly, to execute a proper, non-shuffling turn in a work zone of all places. The highlight, though, was parallel parking: We made our way to a park and the instructor took a few cones and poles out of the boot. My objective would be to scoot by the cones until the smudge on the back starboard of the car lined up with the forward pole facing the street, reverse, turn the wheel full right, and back up until anothe smudge lined up, and so on as many of my driving friends would know. I'll leave it to them to explain the 'K' turn. Nevertheless, this continued for ten trials or so until it came time to pick up the next client.

Today, I started at 4.00pm. We made our way out once more and took the previous client home in Egg hrabour Township. Once that was done, we took the promised shot at the city, Ocean City. Once we had covered a few blocks in the city and my turning had improved, we outed and went to the Linwood client again. When we parked outside a pub in Brigantine, the instructor filled out a few forms for me to deliver and I walked off, realising only a few seconds later that the pub was closed on Wednesdays.

* I don't sit with the seniors, due to irreconciliable differences. Rather, I now sit a table with five nursing juniors, a culinary student, and one senior. They're all female, and are interestingly enough those I didn't like in the beginning due to their social mischief. I've settled down with them now.

Driving school: Part I

2006-12-18T21:30:00.000-05:00

A pot binge downs the Ski Club. A girl's given birth and one junior is already pregnant to the rumour. That's in school, whilst I'm in the car. For the first time, I'm on the driver's side.

This isn't pushing them as a kid. This is driving school. Real pedals, real gas, nothing to stop you except counters from your instructor. Today was day one, starting at 6pm outside the house. The objective would be to drop off a kid in Galloway and then tour Port Republic.

I need to make sure the lever is in the right position before I push the gas.
Due to nerves, my arms are always locking. When I turn, I find it hard to execute a decent one due to these arms. I guess I'll get over that.
I need to look on my right. I have a map at home that requires you to drive on the left, so that's somehow influenced my thinking for the past few years.

Vote for your favourite member!

2006-12-17T20:48:00.000-05:00

...not elected officials, as I missed doing as my birthday was on Election Day.

Rather, I'm talking about class superlatives. As seniors, we're involved in the creation of a student yearbook, printed and bound as well as video. on Thursday, we were handed out leaflets polling us on whom would fit for superlative categories. A few weeks earlier, though, I had approached the head of the yearbook development department and made a decision that shattered everyone: I asked her to omit and substitute my name if it were listed as a superlative. Only two weeks ago I had fought with my parents to not have my pictures taken, which I found to be extremely stupid in retrospect (I ended up getting them taken in the end). While the latter turned out to be calamitous for me, the former decision both surprised and infuriated the seniors. As people ticked off the leaflets, I found that my motive could have been justified by two details:

Two members short-listed me as 'rudest'.
I had, as I told Brandon on PC, done a right job of deceiving and berating people in a daze of thought of my own academic prowess. In reality, though, my grades were standard and I had been found to be unfairly advantaged by my middle school in the conclusion of a peer mediation session. I even found myself to be an entity apart from the rest of the class at times. Finding it hard to admit this, I simply wrote a short Word document and printed it to hand to my homeroom teacher in what was probably cowardice.

Not a decisive detail, though, was the declining respect I had for such a system. Back in middle school, when I was voted to be the most intelligent and artistic male, I saved face simply by not voting for myself or even skipping categories. These days, though, the desire to have a photo in the section became more and more compelling. One of the guys went around as we typed up paragraphs in the library and asked people to vote for him as the most attractive male; in reality, he was good-looking, but a pregnancy by him as well as his ostentation, which annoyed me chronically but not severely, beset him. One of the girls even shouted in response, 'If you go around asking people they won't vote for you!'

Point well made. Then, however, I realised that this was exactly what happened on forums, or could happen. As many readers know, the Pokémon Community manages to get away with Member of the Month threads without a mass of hype that would come as it did with the yearbook, even considering that there are less than 60 people in the graduating class. Some months, though, this is due to lack of interest or a narrowed field of acquaintance. Elsewhere, and I'm sure PKMN.NET has experienced this, such threads start generating 'VOTE FOR ME!' spam. Although such resorts indicate that the person behind it isn't nearly as qualified as those that would naturally be voted for (and it's a proven fact — do you see Forest Grovyle trying to champion her work?), they still do it, and the threads are eventually canned.

Although I don't like the system, I still go to the Member of the Month threads and vote. Over there, the honours are temporary and are unlikely to reflect the real person as known by real-life friends. In the yearbook, though, it'll be accessible to those in the family who want to inquire about the past, especially the kids. If it's seen in the yearbook that you were recognised as the rudest, it will reflect off anyone voting it. If it's seen that you were the most intelligent or artistic, they'll probably challenge it — and all they'll get is a subway or alley map. For that matter, they'll challenge you on your intelligence — Stephen Hawking, regardless of whether he had the honour in his yearbook, is probably challenged so many times. For me, the fact that I had made such a big point of my intelligence makes me cringe even today — I'm bombarded by questions even at the register, there are girls who appear to like me on the grounds of my supposed intelligence, and there are the guys at the corner who try to make me recall an image with my eyes shut or prophesy something. And I've done it for so long, sometimes arrogantly. And it needs to stop. But the cost of leaving it behind will probably mean the loss of many admirers, but maybe it is worth it if they're there to challenge me....

The people upstairs

2006-12-09T08:09:00.000-05:00

I am terribly sorry I didn't blog this, but it took place on the day of my previous entry and was followed by an actual day at work.

In order to graduate, we're required to undergo interships — two weeks if you're taking a college course during the second semestre, four weeks otherwise — with a potential employer in the field of our major (in my case computer science). Last Tuesday we were given a series of seminars about presentation in a job interview in order to prepare us for the following day, when interviews would take place. The first was the course director discussing how to dress and present in an interview, which basically meant many of us would have to borrow blazers from her the following day.

The second, though, subjected us to the treatment: the senior cosmetology class. We filed in and sat down to have our fingernails manicured and hands washed at the first layer, and then they sent us up to dip our hands in some container. When I neared the container and viewed the prohibitive orange contents before turning toward the hands in mitts and plastic bags, I was slightly apprehensive. I was then to learn that it was a deep wax, which was supposed to clean out the lower layers of the hand skin. I still had the mitts on and my fingers were held together by this solution when the fire alarm sounded. Once everyone was outside, one other student's hands became cold and asked for a mitt, so one cosmetology student took mine off and massaged the wax, which had now hardened, off my hands. How great to have my fingers move again!

Once that was over, it was a job application course hosted by a recruiter for the Harrah's properties. That ended the interview courses, leaving us to wait the following day to forage for dress shirts and pants to dress in for the interviews. I was the only one staying at the school to complete the internship, so I went upstairs and spoke to the head of the IT department.

As I explained earlier, people had been using proxy addresses to gain access to MySpace (for the most part). The man I was going to talk to that Wednesday morning was the guy who made sure it didn't happen. I sat down and picked up my course description and we began to talk. After I asked him about the environment of the rooms upstairs, we lapsed right into a talk of how bad the video game console war and then how calls from downstairs turned out to be very funny causes such as stray plugs. Then, he told me something shocking: The whole network had to be refitted. The old Dells had to come out last year since many programmes such as the NCLEX courses refused to work on the old Dells, so in came the flatscreens at bargains from Dell due to the educational cause. The old laptops were being phased out as they required external NICs, which would be bumped against stack pallets, damaging the hardware. There were even some Inspirons bought five years ago that had succumbed to damage one way or other (he noted that it had become cheaper to buy a new computer than to replace the LCD screen) and would no longer boot up. That explained the introduction of the WiFi-optimised Latitudes.

The most shocking thing of all was that Novell was going to go as well. It turned out that NetWare 6 would be the last proprietary operating system Novell was to produce before it would build verything in Linux. (It had bought SUSE, making this possible.) While this wasn't a concern for the school (although it was a lamentation as NetWare could not be hacked due to the use of its IPX protocol), course programs would also reject NetWare. On top of that, Novell was not lenient with pricing for eductaional purposes. This meant that the system was going right over to Windows Server 2003. (Whether it'll allow ESS to affect Macs this time around, as BorderManager had a little ground there, remains to be seen.)

Shocked by the new development, we concluded our interview. It was fun talking to him, as we managed to laugh throughout at how the developments came to be, but the fact remined that if things weren't to get done with the system by end of break, I'd have a lot of work on my own hands. But it's an intership, and we're putting this on our résumé, so I'm personally ready.

Sky Temple IRC Down

2006-11-29T08:34:00.000-05:00

Forever.

Apparently the forums failed to generate any activity while the chat existed, so the licence will not be renewed. Shame.

Verdict: Ash's new voice is better

2006-11-23T09:05:00.000-05:00

I'm sure Alyssa will probably have a fit.

Although two weeks have passed since I saw the episode, I should say now that the new person playing Ash Ketchum on the Pokémon television series, Sarah Natochenny (Jamie Peacock was removed after the Mastermind snafu), beats Veronica Taylor. She manages to give Ash the correct boyish voice, which Taylor had for the first few episodes but let devolve into a more squeaky voice as time wore on. (Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Brock, whose new actor Bill Rogers doesn't quite emulate the mature voice Eric Stuart was able to give.)

It's been over two months since the decision to replace 4Kids' actors became final. As I reported before, 4Kids withdrew from the animé following financial woes and had to transfer or lay off members of the original cast due to the contract they had. While the promise was that 4Kids' attempts to Americanise the series would stop, the tradeoff was the removal of the original actors. Thus resulted what was a letter claiming to be from Taylor urging fans to protest the action, resulting in the SOVA snafu that affected the fandom.* Despite the SOVA claims that such a move would be worthwile in spite of the financial detriment, the series, to me, is actually coming along much better. A television series based on the upcoming Diamond and Pearl versions is apparently due in the United States around the time of the games' release, and Pokémon USA are ready to have it transferred.

* I only found out about this letter after I wrote the entry. Not only does it seem odd to me that 4Kids would take her back after writing such a letter, but I have reason to believe that all of the interviews on Pokébeach and perhaps the 'letters' themselves are fake. Taylor likely didn't know of the existence of Bulbagarden, which claimed to have received the letter Taylor supposedly wrote to touch off the hullabaloo, and if she did, I doubt she would turn to people like them for a reprisal rather than consulting an actors' union.

Cross Stinger in 'sucks' shocker

2006-11-15T19:41:00.000-05:00

d---head no1: cross stinger
and followed by annefranman52 from the supermod of supercheats....he deserves to be called a n00b.not a d---head.
d---head no3: tornado212 another shameless motherf---ing d---heads......edit: not a d---head. but dumbass.
edit: he shouldnt be called a d---head. he should be called a f---er.
demote meand ban me from being a moderator if you dare you son of a bitch cross stinger.......

See what subscribing to details on MSN (my new address is crystalwalrein@hotmail.com; the old one, linked to at the top and bottom of the blog pages, will be used for emails only) gets you? A moderator, whose signature I had previously had to disable after his stand for 'freedom in signatures' — be it the freedom to curse out Chelsea footballers — challenges the notion that sedition alone won't get him demoted, let alone banned, from Super Cheats. But I think I'll use this quote, taken from his account on Windows Live Spaces, to create an entry on how I've been viewed on Super Cheats.

Members of Super Cheats who are currently reading may or may not have disagreed with me on letting Mr King of Games re-enter — after it became clear that he had fabricated the accounts RKO-123, Dr Advice, and Mr Kennedy (they actually weren't JCD, as I had previously reported), David gave him a few hours to recant before banning him permanently. Not even a month ago, he returned under the account KOG and pleaded forgiveness, whereupon I decided first to put it to the vote and, four minutes later, when I had realised it wouldn't go anywhere, immediately bade him re-entry.

A more recent argument — in fact occuring earlier today — was over the standing prohibition of election of moderators who had been banned for clear offences. Shadow GX had previously been banned for a disagreement with Dave and later received two moderator positions, and yesterday Dennis, who had subscribed to the rule, removed her and Lurch5000. However, Rich, who had said that Shadow GX could stay after I probed the possibility of her asking Nintendo_dude for a position, was infuriated and removed the rule altogether, claiming that there remained chances that previously banned members could have reformed enough.* This touched off an argument between all of the moderators and eventually led to questions as to how far I really was able to go as an administrator.

Personally, I'm doing what I can. I respect Rich's opinion and have in fact asked him to approve certain segments of rules I had drafted, but, as with the removal of team objectives, I'm slightly disappointed. Far be it to say anything against myself, as this would prohibit me from attaining a position at PKMN.NET if ever I was considered if that rule were in place there, but this rule had some sense to it. It's extremely difficult to place any trust in anyone liable to spam and flame or proven to have done so and been banned for it, unless it came from a mutual disagreement. For us, it was an incentive for members to stay out of trouble if they wanted any position of authority.

Then again, having written that whole screed, I'm brought back to the moderator system. I'm sure this was what ultimately befell PC's election system back in the day: In a similar vein to what's happening here, a former administrator, Sarah, insulted another administrator's religion on several occasions and ended up out of the fold after, from what I see in the search results, Jake put his foot down with her. Although administrators aren't appointed through this method, it may have signalled the end of such a system if it was in place at that time, or a reason for it being thrown out previously. This is the flaw our current system has: Our community is so large that we find it difficult to survey individual members for potential mod material, so we let them come to us and look at them. We usually give out ten or more spots out this way before Dave prunes them, which still tends to leave us with eight or more. Between these successful applicants and considering the current crowd we have in the Staff Forum, only one or two of them, if the applications are all to videogame boards, will go on to moderate community boards (General Chat, Team and Clans, etc.), three or four will remain on their board but will be known pretty well throughout the fold, and the rest are likely to tire of their position and leave or end up banned. It may seem inaccurate due to what seems to be a variety of people in the Staff Forum, but in reality only about twenty different people end up discussing things regularly behind the curtains as opposed to the full count of moderators, which has consistently floated above 100. Even among these twenty or so, there will be two or three moles who end up being kicked out or otherwise in disfavour. Thus the quote at the top of this entry.

And as long as there are moles, the abilities of super mods and administrators will remain in question, even if they're selected by Rich himself without much input.

* This can be said for Kylie-chan, currently a super moderator on PC. As Dark_Pikachu, she was banned for spamming and flaming but was later brought back on demand of the other members. It probably wasn't even three months afterward when she was promoted.

Update: Due to excessive flaming in the comments area, comments are disabled for this post.

Admins

2006-11-08T08:47:00.000-05:00

Again, a good forum rant, something I haven't done in quite some time.

As a moderator on what's arguably the largest and most recognisable American Pokémon forum (which is currently undergoing a domain change as its normal URL was ripped out of their hands by the staff of an absent administrator's site), I have to carry out consequences for infraction of rules set by a collaborate authority, the administrators. The fact that these people have so much power and are usually responsible for bans makes their job probably the most misunderstood in the world.

When you're a member who fears the boss and resents the rules, you can forget the moderators, who merely serve as a police force. No, your enemy is the administrator. And those who have the audacity to demand that they turn over control of the forum know full well that the admins have that happy power. If they fear the principal in their school due to their ability to throw them out of school or refer them to potential employers, they fear administrators. Administrators are basically the top of the heap, cream of the crop. The boss. Führer. Allah. God. Unfortunately, with this power comes a sudden upsurge of hatred and resentment, which I had to absorb as a super moderator on SuperCheats and later as an administrator in larger measure.

I believe the reason for this is how people start to realise, at a very young age, that someone's controlling everything. If you're Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard (which there are now doubts thereof), or Jerry Falwell, you'll say it's God. They also realise that there's a long and bumpy road to that position. However, it culminates in the delusion that, as an administrator, God, principal, President, or whatever, you can wield as much power as you want without reprehension. This delusion sometimes evolves into challenges to the current rules or, for the particularly but not surprisingly crude, spamming up the place in a vain attempt to garner attention. It can even go as far as hacking, which I've been through once. No matter the cost, people crave unlimited power.

Our best defence, though, is the fact that this assumption is far from true. If administrators wielded power without scruple, there would be no forum, as everyone would have left. Even PKMN.NET's administrators, although they'd like people to think otherwise, have limits, although I'm sure the assumption otherwise may have led to the departure of old-timers such as Mewthree, Morkula, and Lightning — and I've confirmed that it's undone Imperial Dragon. As an administrator, you have to manage a lot of things: SQL, HTML, possibly PHP; member inquiries; moderator promotions; affiliation; a main site if applicable; downloads; and, of course, the server and associated costs. The last bit applies most when you're the owner — meaning that you'll have to resort to ads, a hated element of web design. Add the possibility of facing people who want your position so badly they'll create a little chaos to destabilise you and....

Note

2006-11-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

I asked Lily to do this for my eighteenth birthday. Seeing as Kayleigh got one. Needless to say, hilarious.

Even more army

2006-10-30T22:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/letters/story/6886704p-6751377c.html

Two students finally got their voice in.

Blazing comments

2006-10-30T19:49:00.000-05:00

It's a disappointment to Blaze, evidently, that the Community failed to collapse after the hacking, but he had hopes for Shinou.com to surpass PC in some time due to either a lack of funding for the server or lack of general linterest. His aspirations have gone so far as to create a blog — one that now has the Community Staff kicking up a fuss.

Blaze's blog has contributions from many members of Shinou.com, including BGTFamily, who owns the back end site Total Pokémon. In his post 'Guest Blogger', he allows BGT to post what seems to be evidence of Shinou.com steadily overtaking the Pokémon Community and provides numbers courtesy of 'some fellow fans', while the numbers prove, on further examination, to be completely fabricated. BGT rates the Pokémon Community to have 3,344 members against Shinou's 2,060 at the time of writing, but a quick look at the PC boards will tell you that the number of registered users — not active users, since the article doesn't say that — is currently 20,839, the day after publication of the article.

Another piece of information contributed by kind Blaze is a review of Paul's PokéJungle project. Upon hearing that the domain is 'Spinarak', he jumps and yells that Spinarak is a trademark of Nintendo, which it is, and warns against removal of the domain. It may seem like a shrewd warning, but wasn't it Blaze himself who took the domain Shinou.com, another trademark of Nintendo? Any sane person will know that copyright laws don't extend to the use of these domain names for fan sites, which Shinou.com and the Spinarak domain are.

Then there's a quip below that article: 'While we were at this once amazing forum, we were in talks with Kwesi (the humble and quite rad owner of PC) to co-pay for a server for PC/TotalPokemon.com. Approximently about Five Days after Kwesi paid for the Server in full, did we pull out of the agreement due to the arrogant PC Staff who did not like the idea of us having control . . . [and] decided that they rather pay for the Server, then have us have anything to do with it. Apparently they didn't keep their word, because about a few days ago PC once again has ads featured all over the forum.' They broke the word when the agreement was broken, so they had no choice. This post is effectively bull.

Most unfortunately, I'm not the first to report on the sleight of hand and otherwise plain and simple tosh that this blog offers. Remember FandomObserver? While he refuses to reveal his identity (and there have been calls for him to do so), he's become a good contemporary of mine. While he maintains the idea of just reviewing the fandom as a whole, he's gone in and criticised Blaze, something I should have done long ago, closing the first part of his latest review with a title, 'Misguided Webmaster With A Big Ego'. All I can say in addition to that specifically is that Joe's eating his heart out right now.

So what is Blaze? Does he have an ego? Yes. Does he remain true to his contemporaries, especially Erica, whom he said would be the only one out of PC's staff administrators to get any staff holding? No. Does BGT? No, he relied on ridiculously inaccurate statistics (Alexa, which is generated by users using the site's toolbar) after three months of quibbling with the rest of the PC staff.

It's a good thing Nicola's not including Total Pokémon in her collaborative 'Autumn Always'.

Texting

2006-10-30T09:24:00.000-05:00

Di-di-dong, goes the chime emitted by AIM on a Sidekick. Someone's replied to what is construed to be an urgent message when it merely adds to the current drama consisting of anger over an unfaithful boyfriend. Sometimes it's a girlfriend. But whatever the case, texting is another feature of cell phones in which the purpose is defeated.

My main concern is the charge incurred by sending a line of text. On TMobile it's probably two cents to send a line of text, but compared to a five- or ten-cent minute, I'd say the vocal minute is more productive. I'll assume that the average person sends and receives four or five lines a minute: Usually in five lines you get about a quarter of the conversation done whilst the conversation is nearly over (about 80 percent) when the vocal minute passes. And it's a separate charge, one that many teens have compromised to pay for separately.

But what is the logic here? I happen to know that LiveJournal and Blogger allow you to blog from your mobile, but when people do, as I've observed from the blogs that link here via the Next Blog function, it's usually to send a picture, not necessarily text, but since it has to be posted as HTML it still counts as a line of text — two cents more. Compare it to taking photos on a digital camera and then uploading them onto your computer at night, when time is plenty. I'd take the latter any day. Plus which, for all cell phones (don't mention the Treo, Sidekick, or Blackberry to me; they're called PDAs no matter how you look at them), the lack of a QWERTY keyboard makes posting and recording difficult for the poster and potential reader; it's designed more for short recording and the usual speak on AIM.

Of course, this applies to the United States. In Europe and Asia (except China, where text messages are censored), texting is as useful as the vocal minute due to less reliance on the car. For the Americans, the fact that texting diverts your eyes off the road is another lack of support. We already have states passing laws against the use of cell phones whilst driving; with new studies coming out, they might push for harsher penalties on those texting whilst driving. In Europe, you're sitting on a train or walking much more than you can drive due to the city's unaccommodating layout, so it's a lot safer and more productive. They have an excuse, at the very least.

Note to self: Don't start this habit if stuck with the GoPhone for Christmas. The smilies have been knocked down and the tilde is starting to crumble away.

More army

2006-10-26T19:50:00.000-04:00

The newspaper that printed the article about Matt's objection to saying 'Yes, sergeant' decided that it warranted a column by the editors yesterday:

“Yes, sergeant!”
You say that a lot in the military.
But should students at the Atlantic County Institute of Technology have been told they had to say it — and do 20 push-ups, if they didn't say it loudly enough — when Army recruiters gave commands during a phys-ed class last week?
Matthew Rodin, an 18-year-old senior, didn't think so. He refused to say “Yes, sergeant.” As a result, he was removed from gym class and sent to the library to sit out the period. Rodin says he also was threatened with a grade of zero for the day. The school principal says Rodin's grade will not be affected if he completes an assignment he was given in the library.
Partisans of both stripes — supporters of the war in Iraq and opponents of the war — no doubt quickly came to their own conclusions about this incident. We're just guessing, but we suspect one group immediately thought: This is outrageous — Army recruiters have no business being in a school. The other side: This is outrageous — the military deserves our support, and Rodin is an unpatriotic, ungrateful jerk.
Allow us to make what we hope are three more reasoned points:
One: Military recruiters have a tough job to do. This nation is at war. The all-volunteer Army needs recruits. And there's nothing wrong with recruiters having access to students and students having access to recruiters. But allowing recruiters to lead a gym class — a captive audience, so to speak — seems a bit unfair to students who may not be interested in the recruiters' message.
Two: While we certainly respect our military and support our troops, no Army sergeant in this country has the right to come into a school and order students — or any civilian — to say “Yes, sergeant” or anything else.
Granted, this incident may well be much ado about not much; other students say Rodin took it more seriously than anyone else and that the only one who had to do any push-ups was one of the recruiters, because students out-shouted him in the “Yes, sergeant” department.
Nevertheless, point three: Rodin is clearly a young man with strong convictions; he had every right to express those convictions; and he should not be punished for having done so.
And if you disagree with any of that: Get down and give us 20.

Of course, Chris McMahon of Absecon had another idea today.

Regarding the Oct. 20 story about the student who was terribly offended when some Army recruiters were invited to the Atlantic County Institute of Technology for a demonstration about physical fitness, even though it was not a recruitment visit:
I cannot for the life of me understand why this man deserves the amount of press space he was given. People like him despise the very military that has guaranteed him all the rights to speak as he does. Without our military to defend us, none of our rights would be worth the paper they're written on. Those who have served and died for our country are the reason the coward and wimps of this country can whine and moan about how terrible things are without fear of reprisal.
There will always be people like this student. He will live here and benefit from all that our military does to defend his rights. But like the majority of liberals, he will despise them and probably never have the courage to serve himself. It is a disgrace that he is given a headline on the Region section as if he is some defender of values, when it's quite obvious what he really is.

I think the other matter is that Rodin distorted the story — he was threatened with a zero, but his alternate assignment made up for it; the Press misinterpreted the interviews to mean that Rodin was being penalised for not participating. I'll have more later.

Pokémon PDF

2006-10-23T21:05:00.000-04:00

I came up with an idea in a vein to the new team rating forum to assist members in competitive and progressive battling: Create a PDF document detailing attacks, battle statistics and probablilties, natures, contests, etc. Anyone interested in contributing to this document can send information that they have compiled in a text file (.txt, Notepad), rich text file (.rtf, TextEdit and WordPad), HTML document, PDF document, or Works (.wps), OpenOffice (.sxw), or Word (.doc) file to me or contact me via MSN or Windows Live Messenger.

Here's what I'm looking for in your contributions:

Thoroughness and accuracy. If your information is found to be false, ambiguous, or thoroughly incorrect, it will be rejected. You should provide as much detail as possible in explanations therein.
Formality. All submissions must be written legibly with all code (if applicable) correct and friendliness of content, i.e. no swearing or defamation.
Original work. Do NOT take text or other information from sites and claim them as your own. I will not accept anything determined to be taken directly from another website or publication that is not your own work.

All submissions can be sent immediately and must be received by 12.00am GMT -5 on 5 November 2006.

So if you're a decent writer, know enough about Pokémon to help others, and are willing to contribute to the cause, start right now. I know some stuff, but I'm going to need all the support I can get as I can't write it alone.

Canoe

2006-10-18T21:35:00.000-04:00

Had I decided it was not worth it plunking down $16 and not had been threatened with academic penalty for the decision, I wouldn't have gone. I did have doubts about the worth of the trip, yes, but what happened in the end was a different story.

Today we went up to a canoe rental service on the other side of the Mullica River. When everyone had sorted out their partners, I ended up in the same canoe as my friend Nick and thus went down the path to the creek landing. Once we determined where we needed to stop for luch and then end (I didn't bring any lunch of my own), we loaded the ten canoes out and shoved down the creek, which ran perpendicular to the CR563. As I had gone canoeing before and did not sink, I didn't expect the journey to incorporate hazards that would provoke the incident over and over.

Less than one hundred yards down the creek, the current split and left a small islet covered in moss and divided the creek into shallow and narrow streams for the next thirty yards. One team managed to get stuck perpendicular to the current and asked Nick and me to ram into the side so they could get rowing again. We did, but they remained stuck. When we reached out to their boat to correct them, we overbalanced and fell into the current — the first hazard failure. A minute later, we decided to climb up onto the islet and manually remove the canoes from the current and turn them in the direction of the current so that we could continue.

I had not rowed in years, my last time probably being in Belize going down a river after visiting the Altun Ha ruins and then being scooped aboard a boat that took us to our cruise ship when the storms arrived.* As a result, I found it difficult to alternate sides to paddle on to keep the canoe away from overhanging branches or completely felled and submerged trees. I ended up crunching up against heavy branches at some points but failed to draw blood, and often we had to correct when the bow of the canoe (where I was rowing) crashed into the bank. Although none of these corrections caused us to capsize, we did capsize a second time a mile down from the first incident when the canoe came upon a submerged tree branch and tilted us to the right. The water wasn't freezing and it helped out my toe, but I began to shiver slightly when I climbed back into the canoe once we managed to correct it sufficiently.

Although we didn't capsize after that, my clothes remained soggy and my rowing improved gradually but slowly. We did manage to block the creek after lunch break after we exited a pond and managed to get stuck between the bank and a trapped log while other canoes passed by right over the log. Luckily, the terminus of the route wasn't more than a half mile further, and we managed to make it with the other five able canoes that had passed us at the log. Once we were gathered at the bridge, we stacked up our canoes and walked to the bridge deck to listen for the following canoes, but it took nearly an hour before we were able to hear anything distinct. At 1.15pm, we saw two canoes coming down the creek — the one in front was completely submerged and the occupants were still rowing! Oh, how we shared a laugh at that.

The end result: shower off when I get home and arrive an hour late but not miss the employees feed a stray fox with a milkshake and some chips. As an added bonus, all of my cards in my wallet are soggy, but my ATM card should probably be working now.

* The same cruise in which the teenaged girl was stalking me, not the one in which I was ground against my will. There's a major difference. If you have any questions, just drop me an email and I'll be happy to answer.

Four years on

2006-10-17T11:39:00.000-04:00

Surprise, surprise. I actually didn't have any form of Internet contact until I entered ninth grade, when it was required in order for us to send any assignments to the teacher. And it wasn't until January that I actually registered for a web service — in this case, Super Cheats. And when I stumbled across the Internet, I had already observed, and decided not to subscribe to, the type of speaking that used abbreviations, pipes, and such. Now that it's been almost four years that I've been in the net, I've changed a lot — not much in real life, as I'm always the one who chooses to remain behind as far as that goes, but in the sense of communication over the Internet.

My first submission on Super Cheats was a hint about capturing Regirock, Regice, and Registeel as well as how to get to Rayquaza. (It may no longer be in the system since submissions were regularly pruned before the archiving programme that started in November 2004 or so.) The hint was typed out in a meticulous format, although it eventually was broken up by the editors' habits that preceded the new PRO-submitter system, and it reflected much of what my stance of speaking was: formal, abusive of big words, and haughty to a point. And when I pioneered the question-and-answer sections on the site, I pretty much kept the same sort of tone.

Then, PKMN.NET. In May I came across its Spanish extension looking for photos of Mirage Island. In July I found the main site and registered — this was the first forum I ever joined. My first posts were shallowly demonstrative, many of them being experimentation with BBCode and copying and pasting of Pokémon reports I had written earlier in my life. As a result, I was regarded with looks of 'wtf?' all over the board, but then again, I hadn't been on the scene that long and had much more to learn. And when the admins pulled their joke of September by censoring 'Muuma' (there was a massive team called The Muuma Army, led by Rex) and then responding to calls for the censor being lifted by replacing several common words with 'muuma', I became ever more frustrated. It finally boiled over when my name at the time, Vennblomster, was censored. This rage followed me all the way to the formation of TPL.

Then, it was back to Super Cheats. Their forums opened in September 2004, and the members that joined immediately made a joy of it (the rumour had been circulated a few months back). This was just what I needed to get my forum use on track. Over time I developed an understanding of how it worked, helped mostly by tooling the rules from PKMN.NET to provide examples of how I thought the forums should be run (until I found that the configuration of the forums made full application of those rules impossible, and it was eventually discovered that the rules had just been duplicated and modified, so we were left with a meshed list that survives to this day and was geared mainly toward issues that were at hand at the time of writing. Nevertheless, it helped me so much that I was able to experience the joy of being a moderator of a respected website in March of the following year, although the promotions unfortunately coincided with the PKMN.NET fallouts. But I can't forget the smaller forums where I would communicate with people and help run things. One of hese forums was the Crow's Nest, the first forum at which I became an administrator, regardless of the foundation of the forum (a failed roleplay on PKMN.NET). I was very harsh there, as I later would become at Super Cheats upon promotion.

As far as speaking went, I got a lot better. Normally I didn't think about the topic before I replied (and admittedly, I still don't sometimes), and I kept up the formal speech for a while. When I used MSN, I adhered to graphic smilies that are now abhorred where I am. I can probably say that the graphical smilies were something of a change for me — I found it difficult to convey emotions any other way. By the time I had come out of TPL and returned to PKMN.NET, I had lost much of the formality, but it would still be some time before I reduced my speech, became slightly more terse, started using asterisked cues, and then moved on to text smilies at the endorsement of Lily. Each time I would get a reaction of surprise from whoever witnessed it — as you can see, Lily was astounded and Shiny Zapdos was horrified to see me use 'XD'.

So here I am, a moderator at the Pokémon Community, a DCC regular, and an MSN hog. Who knows what'll come next? I have a LiveJournal, which is good, but will I probably migrate to using the tilde instead of the ellipsis? Only time will tell~

...Drat.

The army

2006-10-14T07:28:00.000-04:00

No, no, I'm not enlisting, folks. I'm already fed up with the situation in Iraq as it is.

Rather, it's the second time in my career that my gym class had a set of Army drillers come in. I expected the day to be just walking to increase our endurance for the big stroll down the bike path to the shopping centre, which I had done last year (and walked the entire way while others had to stop and board the bus for transport; luckily the bus driver kept a canteen at ready hand). Alas, no — it came right out of the blue that three recruiters were in the room we called the gym, although it was small and cramped with the large exercise equipment taken into consideration.

We had the recruiters before; however, we were advised to eat a large lunch beforehand. This time, there was no notice (although I did eat some breakfast). We briefly shook hands with the recruiters and then were sent to the back of the gym room. The recruiters had the girls form two rows in the front and had us boys form two behind them. Once we were filed in, we went to the instruction of posture (attention was arms bent vertically with elbows to the back and shoes to 45-degree angles; normalcy was standing with arms held behind the back) and then to a set of exercises that, the recriters claimed, was performed four times out of the week upon rise.

Many of these exercises involved the upper body (raising the roof, overhead clap, and jumping jacks). Since I do not swim often and do more walking than lifting, in which case that was just packages of water, I tired halfway into the period but was determined to go on in order to allay embarassment. I would rest when there were no recruiters pacing near me, and sometimes when we performed exercises that I was structurally weak at, they would have to correct me manually, an example being bicycling, in which it was nearly impossible for me to hold my legs straight six inches above the ground.

Then, after we had been sprayed with enough sweat to fill a drinking glass, we were led out. It wasn't that cold, but it was enough to dry our faces. Nevertheless, we started sweating even more once we were compelled to do the '30-60': we sprinted for thirty seconds, walked for sixty, sprinted again, and so forth until time was called. Then the last three were 100 feet of bowlegged walk and sinking stride, and then a continuous sprint once around the traffic island.

I don't find it amazing that two of my classmates are enlisting in the armed forces and were used to this sort of stuff. I, unfortunately, wasn't. Luckily, I only have to work this morning, and I should have recovered enough from the ordeal to at least hold a pack of Deer Park above the counter.

Update: Turns out one of my friends likened the drill to Nazi imperialism, accusing it of being a recruitment in disguise. Trust me, if three people in the class have decided on the armed forces before the Army came in last year, it's probably not. Sorry, Matt.

Four things that have to go

2006-10-07T23:46:00.000-04:00

It's time to kick into gear. While this blog is primarily used to document forum ills and, to an extent, Pokémon and my life, I have been toying with the idea of adding quips like this, in the mode of George Carlin. So here we are with a few things I've been wanting done and over with.

Sequence ordering for exit numbers. The objective here is to number exits in a streamlined fashion, starting from 1 for the first exit and numbering them in order of occurence. However, as more interchanges are often added, the system collapses and you need to add letter suffixes such as 'A' and 'B'. For example, the stretch of I-4 outside Walt Disney World had five letters tied to the number 24, and once all of the interstates in Florida were switched over to mileage numbering, this anomaly was reduced to three exit numbers, one for US-192, one for FL-417, one for the Walt Disney World thoroughfare. The advantage mileage numbering has is that it's flexible and it's easier to use the system to judge how far you've gone since mile markers are actually not posted on most stretches of highway, especially in New England.
And on the subject of interstates, the southern half of the new Jersey Turnpike (NJ-700). Having this and I-295 within five miles of each other for the majority of the way and running parallel, especially when the latter provides more access to the area south of Philadelphia without any tolls, is stupid. Whenever you can see a motorway on the side of the one you're travelling on and the pattern persists for 50 miles, it's a sign of error. And while removing this half of the Turnpike resolves the road burden for the south, it'll also provide a definite path for the I-95 in place of the path that the town of Hopewell rejected.
Foreign alphabet glyphs and accentuations in place of English alphabet characters in forum posts, MySpace profiles, and the like. I have gone over this before — there is no place for bars, parentheses, brackets, and numbers as letters, and the same can be said for Greek, Russian, Armenian, and Hebrew letters. This could be said of a certain PC member earlier in the week.
Friend lists. I believe the people you choose to talk to and randomly assort on your MSN or AIM list constitute your friend list. You do not need to go off to another site and arrange something that states otherwise, especially if by adding a certain friend you end up incurring far more than that one friend. And going beyond the Internet, friend lists turn into slam books in which you're free to write whatever you want against a certain person. In fact, the staff had more than 10 slam books confiscated in 2001. But yes, with the news of bullying on MySpace, it seems these slam books are unfortunately eternal.

Macintosh

2006-10-05T07:55:00.000-04:00

As you can guess, this is currently being typed on a Macintosh computer — my school has a few of them but they're all in one room.

Of course, it's now an opportunity for me to reminisce about old school days. I was part of an after-school programme in the first and second grades since I had wreaked havoc at the local daycare and really didn't have many places to go once school ended. While it was a time for me to do any homework that had been assigned, it also allowed me to go into a room full of computers, all running on the old, columnal Macintoshes. In fact, the fist computer I ever used was one of those. I remember the maze games and calendar setups I had used as long as the computers were there.

And for eight years, once the old Macs had gone, I was grounded on Windows. In fact, almost everything I used for some time, if there were versions available, were created by Microsoft — MSN Messenger, Streets and Trips, and Office. Then, three years ago, I stumbled across an iBook and started looking it through. I eventually stumbled across SuperCheats using that computer, looking for Pokémon Crystal hints. Two months later, I joined.

Although what I don't like about Macs is that you can't load MSN Web Messenger on them (sorry, Shadow), I liked nearly other aspect of it. One thing was the graphics capability, which had been pounded into my head for some time before. The other was the fact that I was getting to meet an old friend after eight years of lack of communication. To be honest, I probably want a Mac now.

Or maybe it's just me. I know, I know, I've been accustomed to Windows for eight years (and have used Linux a few times), and I like trying out new things. But there's a Mac right here for God's sake....

About time

2006-10-02T21:35:00.000-04:00

...that someone's decided to make a dedicated review of the Pokémon fandom, since I don't have the energy.

Freshmen

2006-09-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

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!

2006-09-25T20:00:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-17T19:59:00.000-04:00

...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?

2006-09-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-09-12T20:42:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-09-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-09T10:14:00.000-04:00

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 (?)

2006-09-05T20:23:00.000-04:00

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

2006-09-04T20:09:00.000-04:00

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.

TPL all over again

2006-08-30T17:28:00.000-04:00

If anyone remembers the PokéLab, you'll recall that it fell apart after the promise of a site with little posting etiquette and, in effect, consistency of administration. It seems that a site is starting to take a little ride along the same road: In the wake of Blue Mew and a few others being banned in connection with a spam threat, a new site has been formed.

Unfortunately, the accusation of being communists that the admins made to PKMN.NET instantly turned the place into a rough conception of that. The Delibird now says 'Everyone is equal but Delibird is more equal than others', the only member rank is 'Proletarian' (a rank Karl Marx didn't like!), and the members have taken titles such as 'Comrade'. To blast Salamence's Lair for inadvertently promting this, I drew up a post for them to read; I wonder if it's still there as they removed a threat made by Jeroen.

This is ridiculous.

I remember being part of a coalition similar to yours more than a year ago and have seen it fail spectacularly because of internal problems, i.e. the administrators, including myself, tried to separate from PKMN.NET and found a site based on hatred of Jeroen and laxity when it came to the appropriateness of content and copyright issues. Having recovered from such an act, I can only expect an issue such as this just to fizzle out in less than a year.

From what I gather, this arose from Blue Mew and a gang of spammers delivering a threat to the administration to try to seize control of the site by spamming and encouraging havoc. Believe me when I say this: We tried it before and it blew up in our faces, so spamming will get you nowhere if you want to establish a point, let alone a reputation for yourselves. It's nothing more than feces to clean off the cement, not a technical problem — this seems to be the delusion under which you all have been labouring.

Now to call PKMN.NET a group of communists was not only completely unequivocal, but exactly what James was waiting for. You've seen the user ranks and names change to reflect it. They're not declaring any kind of war. They're taunting you. They're taunting you because you evidently can't think of a way to bring your case to them without acting abberantly and thus are making yourselves just look stupid. This abberation is also evident in your deletion of Jeroen's threat and is compounded by hypocrisy resulting from removing William1's post for 'offensive material'. Honestly, I thought lessons were learned after the PokéLab, the site I was part of, fell apart for the very same reasons. Obviously, they haven't.

Unless you all can get over this enmity and renounce your position against us — honestly, as a member of PKMN.NET, I seem to be enjoying the changes made to the forums as a result of your comments, ha! — we're all just going to point at you and cry 'Look at those idiots trying to look cool by making a baseless stand against Jeroen!'. Take it from someone who's gone down the same road you have and crashed on uneven pavement.

Mike and John

2006-08-29T21:12:00.000-04:00

Two headlines today.

Mike

Our Manchester-loving and Chelsea-hating admin at PKMN.NET has finally attained to the age of seventeen. For three years he has waxed his power by using blunt logic, point-blank reality, and the nerve to say what's on his mind to overpower those that tread across PUK to wreak havoc (unfortunately, I was one of them long ago).

À la James: Happy birthday, Mickey!

John

Further to my previous post about the JonBenét Ramsey murder, it seems that the DNA found in Ramsey's underwear did not produce a match to Karr This means that Karr will not be charged after all, and it'll probably be another ten years before something else comes up, if Patsy didn't do it. (On the other hand, I heard from a co-worker that the parents moved the corpse away from the scene of the murder and refused to bit a medical examiner entry until the court forced them to. Perhaps this means another conspiracy theory?) However, he's going to stand charges in California for possession of child pornography. As a guy wanting attention and fleeing those charges to Honduras and Thailand in the first place, it's not even a decent consolation prize for him. It goes to show that some people not only want their fifteen minutes, but some of them will use very little of their brain to achieve it....

John and JonBenét

2006-08-25T19:40:00.000-04:00

It's possible for any huge event worthy of scowling at, such as the attack on the World Trade Centre, the anthrax mailings, and the JonBenét Ramsey murder to be looked at from a point of view that seems wildly off tangent. It's been this way for about a hundred years now, probably starting from the propaganda that the sinking of the USS Maine was an attack by the Spanish. These days, though, anything we talk about has a sceptic in the works. This isn't at the scale of believing Dumbledore to be secretly alive, but to the scale of something that's been dragging on for nearly a decade.

Namely, I'm talking about Ramsey.

The story begins on 25 December 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Not long earlier, according to reports, Ramsey had been told by Santa Claus that he'd swing back 'round for another encounter with her family once his gift round was done. Whether this Santa did really come back becomes the question the following morning, when a ransom note is found where JonBenét would normally be sleeping amid her many plushes. The note suggests that she had been abducted and the author was looking for $118,000 from John Ramsey, JonBenét's father. A few hours later, JonBenét is found dead of asphyxiation. The Boulder police start the investigation clumsily and refuse help from the state police or even the FBI, but do so horrible a job that the case is left open and JonBenét's parents have to endure the agony of accusation and moves from their home to avoid publicity.

This would go on for about nine years. Then, on 10 June, Patsy Ramsey, JonBenét's mother, dies of ovarian cancer. Exactly two months later, an arrest is announced in Bangkok — John Karr, a schoolteacher with a long rap sheet for child abuse and former husband to two women he wed as teenagers, had turned himself in out of the blue, admitting that he had killed the girl but maintained that it was accidental. This raised questions within my store — did he really do it? Did he want to kidnap her but not kill her? These questions are still being asked as Karr enjoys a governor's meal on a business-class ~~extradition~~ flight to Colorado.

Cue the conspiracy theories, the first of many, and one that at least is my own: He had probably said that he did it just to put the case to rest at his own expense, a brave deed but not one worth universal respect. Surprisingly, though, there is no mention of the murder at all in this week's National Enquirer, whilst the other tabloids blubber on about Marilyn Monroe and John F Kennedy. and from what I can see no-one has come out with a Google Video detailing the possible cause of the six-year-old girl's death. But it will happen, no matter how long it sinks in. Take, for example, the World Trade Centre. A group came out with a series of movies under the title 'Loose Change', stating with evidence how the attacks could really be a feint pulled off by the government to bring cause for invading the Middle East.

Getting back to Ramsey, I have set up a few theories that I bet will land on pages in the tabloids or Internet documentaries:

The Santa that promised Ramsey a return to the house could either be Karr or, as the note suggested, some sort of extremist out to snooker the public. If Karr were the Santa, though, he'd have to make his entry into the home apparent — there was no evidence of a break-in.
Karr could have intended to kill Ramsey and penned the note to throw investigators off. The note contained numerous misspellings, indicative of the author possibly being the extremist described therein ('we represent a small foreign faction; we respect your bussiness [sic] but not the country it represents'). It also had a signature that some experts say matches a note he sent to a college friend later on.
Karr could have tried to sodomise and abduct Ramsey, as could be seen that she was sexually abused at death, and tried to restrain her as he shuffled out but unintentionally garroted her and left her to die where she was.
Patsy could have provided a front for Karr as long as she remained alive. While she took the heat from the police and caused the investigation to stall, Karr would be able to get away and conduct possibly more crimes. Patsy's death, then, could have been the sign that it was all over.
Patsy could have committed the murder but Karr could have wanted to give investigators what they wanted by turning himself in.

Start counting down the days until the Enquirer starts taking these theories into their own hands. I daresay I've provided a rudimentary list to start off — come next year it'll have grown to about fifty.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. What? That's All?

2006-08-24T21:57:00.000-04:00

Yes it is, folks. Pluto has been declassified as a planet today.

The International Astronomical Union set forth the definition of a true planet today in order to clear up the dispute over whether Pluto was not a planet or it and about fourteen others, thirteen of which do not even have names, were planets as well. Looking at the article, the IAU declared that a planet must be a sphere and have a gravitational force of its own by rotation — no problem there, it's a sphere and has three moons, Charon and two unnamed. It also declared that it must orbit around a star — no hitch. However, there was a new qualification that automatically ruled out Pluto: It was possible for it to collide with another planet, in this case Neptune, by intersecting its orbit. Despite the length of time before this could happen — presumably more than 30 million years in the future if Neptune takes 160 years to orbit the Sun and Pluto takes 250. Thus, Pluto was banished to the dwarf planet rank along with the other Trans-Neptunian bodies, reducing the number of planets to eight.

Or, of course, that's how it's expected to be for the time being. This decision, if left to stand, would invalidate any science book printed after 1930, when Pluto's status as a planet was confirmed. With this at hand, the debate is likely to rage on, with a loophole possibly added in order to let Pluto stay and those beyond it remain at dwarf rank. At least I hope so. For one thing, the word planet was first used to describe something orbiting a star (it comes from the Greek for 'wanderer'), and to me this new class of dwarf planets should still constitute planets. Let the IAU set aside the other eight as correct planets, let Pluto and the ones to be found beyond it be another subset. But to me, they are all planets, as they spin, are spherical, and orbit the Sun. To me this new clause of being able to stay out of the path of another planet is ridiculous as it was so recently conceived (as far as about two days) and could rob us of a story on the cover of the New York Times titled 'Neptune and Pluto Collide, Both Planets Explode Into Dust', just like those old science fiction movies.

Smilies

2006-08-17T23:20:00.000-04:00

Okay, I screwed up yet again.

I'd been under the impression that non-graphic smilies were some sort of redundancy, but as far as MSN conversations go, as demonstrated in this field test with Lily, those of you who actually have me registered will experience the feeling that I may not be who you think I am.

Lily says:
CWWWWW
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Hmm?
Lily says:
Was Nami-chan on today? o.o
=D?
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Not to my knowledge.
Lily says:
...;_;
'kay, thanks~
! by the wya
way*
Your way with words..is almost like a male version of namine O.O
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
'CWWWWW'....*chuckles*
Lily says:
keep typing~
What about CWWWWW?
:3
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Nothing. *innocent look*
Lily says:
Not working for ya.
XD tell!
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
No, I just found it funny.
Lily says:
Can I ask why? =P
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Nah, just made me chuckle, nothing much ado.
Lily says:
...>O
Fine.
I'll think of more nicknames for you in the future.
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Okay, okay, it was because it sounded as if we were married.
Lily says:
XD!
XDD!
XDXDXD!! Wow.
XD!
That left me laughing irl
What about CW-chan? XD
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Yeh, that'
ll do....
Lily says:
;;
Be happy.
Be h a p p y
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
*laughs with head hooked down*
Lily says:
You always sound so formal.
>___>
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Oh, sorry....*remorseful look*
Lily says:
Speaking of formal,
your blog
descibing the usage of tilde..
XDD
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
What's so funny?
Lily says:
I never knew someone could actually explain it that way. XD
Usually we take it for given, y'know?
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Yeah, we sure do. XD
Lily says:
...
.....
y-you typed XD.
o_o
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
...I did? O.o
Lily says:
o_______o
YAY
omg.
XD! yayayay
you typed XD
>=D
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Thought I'd try something new.
Lily says:
I think that's really cool~
Now..
if only I can make nami-chan do the same.
she never typed anything more than ._. and ^-^
..you suddenly went silent
*weep*
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Oh!
Sorry....
._.
Lily says:
Welc-
you typed ._.!!!
*HUG* 8D
<33 awesome
XD and ._.
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Oh, lord, I'm chuckling at this.
Lily says:
XD and ._., CW-chan
=D
How could we like, NOT celebrate? 8D
Why chuckle?
>O
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
No, no, I just find it funny.
Lily says:
Well, CW
pretty soon
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
How you rejoice at me using something other than 'o.o' and a tongue smiley.
Lily says:
I'll have you typing 8D and ;D and ;3 and ;< and all those Lilyish smilies.
welcome to the life of pair ups. ;D
You disappeared again ;_;
Sorry
I'm very
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
No, no, still here. ^^
Lily says:
attention seeking to-
DBIADBAID
^^?!!
O__O
O______O;
Who are you and what have you done with CW? >=D
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
No, no, this is the real CW here. XD
Lily says:
Awesome
You typed
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
Yes.
Lily says:
three
smilies
today.
I think we've accomplished a lot, wouldn't you agree?
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
I only typed those to make you happy. ^^;
Lily says:
;;
Everyone does that, nowadays!
Do it for your own personal gain, not me.
:3
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
I just wanted to see your reaction. Not as if I'd abandon them that quickly, though.
Lily says:
I see..~
You intimidated me at first. o_o;
So formal. >>;; XD
Crystal Walrein — PNG transparency on Internet Explorer 7! says:
This is being blogged. XD
Lily says:
>=o
XD

Welcome to the twilight zone, folks. :P

LiveJournal

2006-08-15T19:39:00.000-04:00

Okay, I screwed up. MySpace (or Hi5) evidently isn't proficient enough at providing blogging services for a majority of the population that takes the time to record a diary online. At least I knew that for a while.

Rather, the primary generator of creative writing, sordid blogging, and conveyance of emotion seems to be LiveJournal. This blog service, started in 1999 and now a subsidiary of Six Apart (which also produces Movable Type, which is like WordPress), now has become the standard for juveniles on the Pokémon Community and areas around me for producing the kind of text that you'd find in a girl's diary or one of those 'slam books' that cropped up at my school when I was in the sixth grade. It's become so popular that Mad crafts its regular 'Galaxy O' Blogs' section based on a typical LiveJournal page. (Don't thell them I told you.)

Yet is it too popular? As with MySpace, I certainly think so. As proof, I refer you to Erica (Demyx) on PC, who, in response to a blog survey I created, said, 'LiveJournal owns my soul.' (It sure does.) And the resemblances it has to MySpace, when the latter is stripped of the social networking daguerreotype, are quite uncanny. When you post on LiveJournal, you have the option of assigning a mood to it as well as a nifty sprite that renders that mood just to accentuate the tone of voice. On MySpace, where it's normal to type as if you were text-messaging on your Nokia or Sidekick, a post written with correct spelling and grammar and accompanied with conservatism in photos and text content automatically rips you out of the fold as it fails to effectively convey any mood. And here's something that's been passed down the line for years: friend lists, created on MySpace to gain all access to a profile and those that have added the owner of the profile as a friend, and created on LiveJournal to assemble a separate page dedicated to updates from friends and grant access to journals that are closed to the public.

I'm not going to say that I find that wholly negative. One, I have an account (surprise, surprise, it's crystalwalrein) that I use to keep track of updates from journals I read often and, in the case of those closed to the public, throw content into the open should it relate to me. (Which reminds me, I need to have a word with Virtual Headache about links coming from her blog.) I don't post, but I'm seeing if I can have the Atom feed from this blog pressed into my page there so that I can have a legitimate reason for being there. Two, I find that people that post on LiveJournal have a lot more sense when it comes to spelling, grammar, and emotion — and such traits follow them to any Xanga or MySpace pages they may have. One PC moderator has a decently laid out LiveJournal page and adapted to this style of writing both on her Xanga and MySpace pages, which are laid out in lavender Georgia font on a black background (although it's a colour scheme that I'm not particularly a fan of, the style of writing, especially when put next to her first posts on PC, makes up for it).

Even though it's more likely that you'll find controlled writing on LiveJournal, a few grievous habits go unchecked. They're a common sight on forum posts, but on a blog created with Blogger these things would look severely out of place. The first one is the use of the tilde. Barring its standard orthographic use in the IPA and the Portuguese language as a nasalisation indicator, in Vietnamese it's used to represent a rapid cycle of tone for the vowel; this has obviously carried on to the point where a standalone tilde, which is now a swung dash, is placed at the end of a sentence to indicate a trailing off of voice ('days go by~'). It sounds pretty, but when you're blogging, it's a lot better to use an ellipsis, even if your tone is swinging; strictly speaking, the swung dash is never to be used as a punctuation mark. The second is emoticon usage. I tolerate smilies in chats and forum posts, albeit the only non-graphic smilies I'll ever use are 'O.o' (shock, and semicolons can represent sweat, which augments the level of shock) and, very rarely, 'XD' (breathless laughter; the amount of D's is extended as per the length or intensity of the person's reaction to the response). However, you are not to use them when you're blogging; the people at the typography house or printing company making books hate to see glyphs being used to create makeshift faces, and time has proven that it's never going to make it to the printed page or, for that matter, a correct blog.

So what does this make LiveJournal out to be? Forum posts. You have the use of smilies and swung dashes, although posts are a lot more educated that the stuff you see on the typical MySpace page. And I happen to like forums; otherwise, I wouldn't be moderating two major ones. So I say keep LiveJournal and blog away as much as you like on it; after all, it's a lot better than a web page that usually is made with horrible colour choices and littered with ostentatious photographs. And it's been around four years longer than that particular collection of photographs and horrible colour choices has.

Cloning glitch

2006-08-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

Back in the day when Ruby and Sapphire were still new, it was proven that you could not clone Pokémon as you could in Gold, Silver, and Crystal. However, it recently surfaced, thanks to a person named Poketaz (albeit a Serebii.net member, so that site's eaten its lunch), that it is now possible to clone in Emerald.

Go to the Battle Tower in the Battle Frontier. Go to the PC and save your progress.
Deposit the Pokémon you wish to clone in an empty box by selecting Deposit Pokémon.
Log out and save again. Now access the PC again and withdraw the Pokémon you deposited.
Without saving, go over to the attendant hosting the Link Multi Battle tournament (the one farthest right). Confirm that you want to challenge and select your two Pokémon.
When the attendant says she needs to save the game, respond 'Yes'. The game will freeze for two seconds. Once the game starts running again, turn off your Game Boy Advance and then turn it on again. Do NOT save the game at this point.
The Pokémon you deposited and withdrew will appear in both your party and the PC.

The Board of Biffo

2006-08-09T19:37:00.000-04:00

I suppose those that are close to James are aware of his blog and a circle of friends that he evidently is part of, The Board of Biffo. (Paul, the leader of this circle, has a blog here.) As usual, James usually gets the word out about my blog and usually is quick to comment on it for 'Office-type humour', but this time, in a thread that started as asking for the link to a blog and eventually culminated in the contest to see who can come up with the worst blog, he entered mine. The board requires you to log in, so for the pleasure of your viewing I give you the posts in response to James' entry:

James: This blog [link to my blog]. [quotes from Tales of the Arcade I, Interrogation, Yet Another Youth Summit, and Another Youth Summit] It's all real.
[posts follow]
Wayward: Jesus, that's terrifying. [two quotes from Yet Another Youth Summit] Has anyone read the book 'A Confederacy of Dunces'? It really reminds me of that.
Ssslithe: . . . So far, Psythor [James] is winning.

The added infamy of being possibly the worst blog ever — attacks on SPP notwithstanding — has nevertheless garnered a few more hits as you can see from the Extreme Tracking reports. It may seem harsh, but the fact that I'm being recognised for bad posts but have not been regarded as someone at the level of Jerry Springer (remember, they haven't read the SPP posts yet) is at least a comfort. Fortunately, they'll probably appreciate my effort to thank them for giving me such a noble award.

Update: They have — they read this post and deemed it enough for James to win the competition.

Two new admins...at PUK?!

2006-08-08T17:35:00.000-04:00

Nearly two years ago James officially stated that, in response to a response to Venusaur Tamer's sister saying 'make me an admin else I'll sue you!', there would be no further promotions to administrator rank. All the while, though, we had Rex (Terry is his real name, sshhh!) (also a moderator at the Sky Temple) asserting authority over PUK as far as the forums went; at that time he was still a global moderator. At that time Phil (Irrevilent) controlled the Miscellaneous boards, but in a few months he became a global moderator himself. And six months ago, they were both promoted to the title of 'staff member', or the equivalent of the Pokémon Community Assistant Admin.

Today, though, we see James has told a lie after all. Both are now 'senior staff members' — basically the equivalent of Staff Administrators on the Pokémon Community. Both now have the power to go ahead into the main site and wreak havoc with the main site (administrative positions mean FTP access) should they suddenly feel a tingle of resentment. Of course, they'd never have been given the position if Jeroen didn't trust them with it.

Now to count down until Lorelei joins them.

Exit objectives

2006-08-01T22:11:00.000-04:00

On 1 March 2006, a referendum on teams and clams was demanded as spam increased in every thread. The question was raised as to whether the Team and Clan forums were even necessary. When protests from regular users swamped calls for the removal of the board, a member's mention of a team purpose idea made it to my mind:

Exactly SGX, many people would be gone, including myself there, I rarely go to any Video Games board to tell you the truth. Also, people need somewhere to talk about other things, not only the so called "team purpose" because if that is the whole point of a team, why don't you allow teams to go back to the Video Games Board, I mean, they are specialized in that, aren't they??

I may have misinterpreted this, but in three days it culminated in the institution of a new rule that called for mission objectives. The idea was that having a valid mission objective, such as assisting new members around the forum, assisting in moderation, organising petitions, and arranging community events would drastically improve the quality of posts in the forum. Over time, though, resentment boiled until late last week, when a group called ~La Revolution~ used the petition objective to launch a campaign for the removal of the purposes. This morning Rich announced that, although the rule was intended to reduce spam, its unpopularity was grounds for abolition.

Looking back on the rule, though, there were a lot of problems with it that made it hard to enforce and eventually completely undermined it, rendering it a superficial burden. Forstly, I vigourously concocted and promoted this rule mainly because of the hatred I had for teams from the get-go; everyone wanted something to be done about the board without it being scrapped on the spot, but I reasoned back then that it would be better to institute a policy that would, at optimum performance, eventually destroy interest in the board and render it useless. What a stupid idea that was — what ended up happening was that people lost interest due to the sanction, which I had aimed for, but there ensued a longing for the good old days (old PC, anyone? I talked to old PC members about this).

Another issue was the ability to enforce the rule. For someone who's probably the only one given the power to ensure that purposes were adhered to, whilst other mods just checked to see if there was a valid purpose in the first post, and is at work with the rest of the forum and had a full-time job and schoolwork, keeping tabs on teams to ensure that the goal was being worked for didn't just seem impossible, it was impossible. The rule ended up being ignored once the forms had been filled out; it was an empty rule. Then we had the 'member assistance' effect: The purpose that teams found the most convenient to use was — you guessed it — member assistance. The purpose was just to provide a buffer for members that were caught up in a mod situation on the forums, but it was now being used for nothing; members new to the forum would naturally join up and the identity of a team was enough to be individual identity at their stage of life, which rendered the member assistance purpose useless altogether.

Two things, therefore, leave me awestruck. The first was, as I stated above, how blind I was to the possible consequences of instituting such a policy. The other is how long it took for dissent to build up to the point where Rich felt compelled to remove it himself. Then again, there are a lot of things he's done in order to make the forum run like a democracy — such as moderator applications.*

* The old PC, as I recently learned, had the same thing. Of course, it didn't take long for that to get out of hand.

Stores and restaurants

2006-07-29T20:19:00.000-04:00

Now I've got a bit of steam for the blog; seven days was long enough.

Shortly after getting out of the store I headed for a coffee shop in the centre of town to buy my usual apple juice and tea. Once I'd finished talking to my aunt, who was in town with a friend of hers, I went to the girls that I knew from my old school who now worked as waitresses and tillmonkeys. The conversation started with the casual hello, but it wasn't long before I asked them whether they had a policy that restricted positions there based on gender. The answer was no — in fact, there was a boy, the brother of a friend of mine, working there at that moment. I then asked them how much m oney they made on the hour, and I was shocked to see the answers from those that were strictly waitresses: One made a mere $3.15 on the hour and relied on tips to pick up the rest, and the other waitresses made not that much more. One girl that only operated the till made $7.00 on the hour. And there was no union that included the coffee shop.

Now, at the supermarket I make $7.50 on the hour and receive no commission. The state minimum wage is $6.15 and should increase by one dollar come 1 October. Bearing this in mind and obviously assuming that waitresses at that store were subject to the aforementioned wage, I was in shock. I had heard before of waitresses that made money off tips (and since there's no gratuity requirement below 7 people there and whatever you get depends strictly on the mood of the customer and quality of your service, I have no faith in the system myself), but the fact that state labour laws apparently were condoning this (the lack of a union notwithstanding) was just awful. Determined to see what was wrong, I looked at New Jersey's minimum wage standards and came across this segment:

12:56-14.4 Cash wage standard

(a) The wage rate established in this subchapter shall be acceptable in those occupations where gratuities or food and/or lodging are actually received.

(b) Employers subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act must pay the Federal cash wage rate of $2.13 and must demonstrate that the balance of the [$6.15] minimum wage required under State law is paid through gratuities in accordance with N.J.A.C. 12:56-4 and 12:56-8. Employers not subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act must demonstrate that the total wage, including cash and gratuities, equals the [$6.15] minimum wage required under State law in accordance with N.J.A.C. 12:56-4 and 12:56-8.

Looking at this, it seems I won't need to have any faith in the tipping system at all, yet the wage I'd receive as a waiter, if ever I did consider the position and if customers aren't too generous, would most likely be at the $6.15 bar, against the tillmonkey getting tips and being assured base pay of at least the minimum wage. Although this segment made an effort to equivocate wages, I was shocked to see the customer having to manually give the waiter pretty much the same money he or she'd spend later on.

My concern arose from not just being very close with these girls but also from prospects of moving there from the supermarket if I'm dismissed. Seeing as I have to walk or hitch a ride for five miles to the other side of the island to work where I am now, I have seen the coffee shop as more convenient as it's only a fifteen-minute walk from my house. Then again, there's a plus side to working where I am: Shifts aren't as long, there's more traffic, and I'm assured a wage that isn't counterbalanced by personal gain, regardless of how little it is and how much it is discouraged by the managers....

Yet another youth summit!

2006-07-22T20:22:00.000-04:00

Photographs

Refer to the list in the article for descriptions of the above pictures.

Yes, folks, I went to the summit. And I have pictures, which I'll show you once the boring verbal synopsis is out of the way.

The day began with me climbing into the vans — yes, John the reverend was coming with us again! — and volunteering to navigate again. This time, however, the same junior high students that went with me to the camps at Donegal two years ago, the ones that held a mortal grudge against my friend Tom, were coming as well, and they were in the same van as me. When everyone was settled in, we decided that it was time to bypass New York completely and reach the end of the Garden State Parkway before heading east again.

The last time (click the link to see how Youth-to-Youth works; I'm not going through it again) I went up, we took a bus and there was not much leeway for the group due to another faction coming with us and there being no access to the radio. This time, though, it was time for an iPod war. John had his turquoise iPod with oldies in tow as a threat to the company that sat with us all the way up, whilst this company had John's daughter's iPod on them and managed to cram it into the receptor before John went in and as a result got their chance to annoy us with comedian skits, Chamillionaire's 'Ridin'', and a slam song named 'Date Rape'. The war only ceased at the two stops we made along the way, the first at the Asbury Park services to wait up for Elliott and the second on Route 3 in Rhode Island. Of course, waiting for Elliott denied us the opening ceremonies and half of the introductory games and also complicated workshop and dorm registry.

I turned out to be in Group 9, the same number I was tied to when I went up in 2004. In it was a violence counselor, a college student bound for California, and a girl that had wrangled through a divorce and crack habits of her mother, among other people. This group, however, was somewhat more vague to me as they tended to keep in small groups themselves, yet we still were capable of laughter, especially when we attempted to create a string of 'ha' and 'yo' sequences but eventually succumbed to natural laughter.

This year was very different than the one before overall. Firstly, there were only two workshops, one led by a youth staff member and one led by a presenter, both held on day three. The ones I selected were 'Connect Fore', a seminar on initating and maintaining a conversation, and 'Root Causes of Sexual Violence', an investigatory seminar on sex crimes and how magazine articles and ads (one FHM article distorted feminists completely) fostered such situations (I was one of only two boys that entered the second seminar, and the other slept it out). Secondly, the dance on night three was commuted to the campus as the park had been closed due to a thunderstorm. And the Warm Fuzzy Board remained (one notice asked whether you 'chuck or husk' corn, and during the conference I received eight fuzzies, five of which were found on day three), yet in my group 'secret fuzzies' were never assigned, although a few girls opted to create circular notes for the rest of the members. We did, however, have a few things remaining intact. Firstly, we had our four presenters:

Covin Perkins told us stories of a childhood in which his imagination, even when restricted by his mother, was unruly. He was active in the Youth-to-Youth programmes for some time and even led an improvisation workshop.
Tei Street was evidently proud of her figure of a short and 'voluptuous' woman, as she said her husband liked his women back in her day. She went on to explain her obsession with stunts such as those of Harry Houdini — toss into a pool with arms bound by rope, anyone? — and had it culminate in a story of taking skydiving lessons. She was able to turn this story into a motivational piece of material. As James would say, 'ten out of fantastic'.
Robert Petrocelli is someone you can really call a survivor of tragedy. As explained in one of his books, he was sleeping with his wife Ava when he was thrown out by a drunk driver that had crossed a motorway median and careened into the house, smothering Ava. This, coupled with the emotion he put into his stories of coaching sports teams in Texas and Brooklyn, nearly drove me to tears — again, if someone had told me that this would happen prior to the conference, I would have thrown them from the room as well.
Javier Sanchez was the liveliest of all. First he started by leading the congregation in a rap assisted by his friend, and then he introduced us to his two children in the forms of pictures, cellphone recordings, and the tale of his son Mateo charing out of the bathroom after a long sojourn to scream 'Introducing, Naked Boy!'.

The sports session was also in place on day two, although this took place during the afternoon. I managed to get a bit of swimming in that time, as the water was not as cold as it was the previous year. Still in place, also, were the jives and group games such as 'Ride that Pony' and 'Shake Your Booty'; I have pictures of the games in action below as well as explanations. And yes, the energiser rounds and the world-famous Dexterity Checks were back, in the same fashion (five claps, five more, three more, three more, then arm cross ('We'), arm extension ('are'), clap ('drug'), fists back ('free'), and three fist thrusts ('unh, unh, UNH!')). And as before, time would be invested in a map that I drew of a town. This time it was called Margaret, situated east of the map of Ilfracombe that I drew the year before. I 'officially' completed it at the end of the dance on night three, had one of the adult staff photograph it for the CD and inal presentation, and, once the closing ceremonies were through, handed it and an old colour relief I had drawn over to a youth staff member named Hayley, one I'd known ever since the 2004 conference.

The trip back was along the same route, and for good reason, too: I learned today that Interstate 95 had been cut off by the collapse of a dummy missile. Still, it took so long that it wasn't until midnight that I finally returned home last night and slept once the rap music and the PC updates were cleared up.

So now that that's out of the way, it's time to show you the photos, as I promised before.

This one is of me, taken by John's daughter.
This was of Sara and Tara horseplaying, a result of the usual fights that went on whenever the iPod war was at ceasefire.
The audience looks on in the Janikies Auditorium during the staff introduction.
Team Rocket make a fool of themselves yet again on a cafeteria television screen.
With Hayley. We had met two years before and only spoken once from that point to this conference.
Family Group 9. Top row: Amanda, Britney, Katie, Lindsey, Ginny, me. Bottom row: Stephanie, Samantha, Trevor, Alex, Estrella.
Talent show, or, simply put, 'The Show'. Mariah Carey has always been a popular pick, mind....
'Ride that Pony'. In this game, you arrange in a circle and send an amount of students into the circle to have them prance around whilst the outer ring claps and chants 'Here we go, ride that pony, ride upon that big fat pony, here we go, ride that pony, this is how we do it'. Once that finishes, the participants in the circle approach members of the outer ring and each pair begins thrusting forward ('front to front to front, my baby'), turning back to each other ('back to back to back, my baby'), then turning side to each other ('side to side to side, my baby') and then taking the partner's place in the circle and sending the latter out to prance within ('this is how you do it').
'Shake Your Booty'. A member calls to another random member, 'Hey [name]!' The target responds, 'What?'. The sender repeats once, the target repeats once, and then the sender yells 'Show us how to get down!', to which the target says 'No way!' and the sender yells the request again but this time around the target yells 'Okay!' and begins rotating and shake-dancing as the congregation yells 'Jump, jump, shake your booty' four times before they either end or call on another member. In the lunch periods it usually ends up with the whole mass shake-dancing.
Following the scavenger hunt on day two. Everyone gathers around the clue list and what I have of the map at that point.
Mick's 45-second Dance Break, a spoof session that occurs every morning. This time, instead of leading the congregation in dance, he faces off against an aspiring breakdancer.
Jigaloo, which I never understood.
Another game I neither understood nor knew the very name of.
Youth Staff skits. I forget what this particular one was from, but the skits included a man skipping out in an inflatible ring and trunks speaking in an Irish accent and clarifying a cannabis hustler's objectives in one skit and an interracial relationship conflict in another.
A view of the dance during Casper's Cha-Cha Slide.
Youth moderators in assembly of honour at the closing ceremonies.
Admins in assembly.
Completed map of Margaret with my certification. Seventeen hours after this photo was taken, I handed it and the colour relief to Hayley for personal records.
Another view that didn't include the aforementioned song, thank God!
Adult moderators in assembly.
Final presentation. I hated how the snapshot of my maps turned out....
Construction of Interstate 95 in New Haven, which has persisted ever since 2004. It's evidently interchange works for Interstate 91.
The same.

Tales from the Arcade III: More Smoking...and Teen Pregnancy?! (That's Three, Articuno!)

2006-07-15T21:08:00.000-04:00

Chances are that you'll remember the posts I made about the arcade and the smoking business I saw there. Today, there was yet more smoke about, and since my throat was not cooperating I was rather indignant about going to hang around them, especially when they barraged me with a good round of trivia. I'd been known around the town for knowing who was the president in which order, and I'm surprised I've been able to hang on to that in the summer.

However, trivia was not what I'd come home to blog about; neither was it wholly the smoking and the ability of street officers to miss one of the thirteen-year-old girls carrying into the arcade a pack of Marlboro menthols. This was about a sixteen-year-old that I was unfamiliar with, bantering with the rest of the lot. It eventually got down to where one of the girls made a joke of being 'two days pregnant' and everyone began rubbing her abdomen. A few minutes later, one of the boys went over to this unfamiliar sixteen-year-old and began blowing on her abdomen. When I edged in closer, I could see the abdomen portruding quite a bit and everyone was soon rubbing it — she was pregnant.

Now, I had known two other pregnant teens in my entire life. The first was in my school and was taken out (shortly before the baby project!) in April; her baby shower coincided with my turn to do the baby project. The second was outside the school by the poles when the buses arrived and was seldom seen by me within. I'd talked to a friend online about it, when I was under the impression that it was just an anomaly, but she asserted me that it was nearly everywhere she went (mind you, she lives in southern Devon). When I first took a course on birth control, I was merely told that there was an alarming teen pregnancy rate and I thus decided not to get in the mix by having sex so fast — but it didn't really hit me until I saw it happening twice at a secure school. The third time, now, was the charm. It was real, all right. What worried me, though, was that this sixteen-year-old was around cigarette smoke and a mere four months along. (Good for the older girl having a hormonal patch in sight when she was taking her drag!)

With this in mind next to the party held at a neighbour's house prior to a concert in which nearly everyone, aged 15 to 20, was either drinking beer or smoking a cigarette — which leads me to believe that Brigantine is going to the dogs at the same rate as the rest of the nation — I think I'll have a whole litany to read off when I go up to Rhode Island in...three days already!

Saving the dub

2006-07-10T20:13:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago, 4Kids declared that it was backing out of producing the Pokémon animé series, instead leaving it all to Pokémon USA. At first this was greeted with exuberance because of the changes to the storyboard and dialogue that 4Kids tried to make in order to Americanise the dub — which was partly the reason, when I finally realised it, why my interest in the animé itself dropped away. But if there were to be any improvements to the rendition of the animé outside Japan, it would have come at an arguably great cost: When 4Kids left, it wanted to take Veronica Taylor, Eric Stuart, Addie Blaustein, and some other voice actors with them.

According to Animé News Network, the old actors, save for Erica Schroeder, were wiped off the board. Ikue Ootani, off for maternity leave from what I heard, had to turn the Pikachu voice over to Shinichiro Miki but will probably return for the voice if Pokémon USA allows. Veronica Taylor, the voice of Ash, was replaced with Jamie Peacock. Exit Eric Stuart, the voice of Brock and James, enter Bill Rogers. Rachael Lillis — Misty, Jessie, and May — had to give way to Michelle Knotz. Addie Blaustein (Meowth) had to give up her seat to Jimmy Zoppi. Compared with the original actors, from reports I read, the new actors were wanting, even with attempts to emulate the original actors, but since I haven't seen the movie in which this change was introduced, Mastermind of Mirage Pokémon, I can't really say whether I like them.

So when it became clear that the removal of 4Kids would cost them most of the original voice actors, all of which (except Erica Schroeder and Ikue Ootani) were signed under the 4Kids contract and could not be transferred, the campaign to 'save the dub' started. Now, I admit that when I first saw the topic on PKMN.NET, I put my signature down for a rudimentary petition before I realised why the change was taking place. Since then, I've pretty much regarded the subsequent campaigns on the Pokémon Community, Pokébeach, and Serebii.net with little more than disgust — to put it short, everyone wanted to have the cake and eat it too. Apart from the fact that most of the protests were occuring on the Internet and few responses actually got to the offices of Pokémon USA and 4Kids, I was able to determine that the campaign was both ill-fated and bound to last no more than a few months. Some still have banners in their former signatures, echoing their call of sedition.

Why there was no point in having this whole hootenanny with the voice actors comes down to a few good reasons.

As I mentioned before, the protests were conducted over the Internet more than via snail mail. And as for the snail mail, chances were high that such letters, due to paratactical reasons, would never get to the people responsible for the actor changes.
The only indicators of progress apart from updates on respectable websites were emails claiming to be from the old and new voice actors, the former sort congratulating everyone for their solidarity against the change and the latter sort discouraging others from going any further. Exceptions to this rule were present, though; in one email Addie Blaustein claimed to have been pleased with Jimmy Zoppi's characterisation of Meowth.
The fact that Taylor and company were under a contract that prevented them from defecting to another contract was largely ignored. It was technically impossible to keep the voice actors because there would have been legal reprehension that might have cost both parties more than just adapting to the change.
There are other examples that demonstrate how such changes could be beneficial for the franchise. One is Scooby-Doo. The first episodic series, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and Scooby-Doo (featuring Scooby-Dum, the white-coloured relative of Scooby) had 89 episodes between them all, compared to more than 400 for Pokémon prior to the voice-actor change, when they ran from 1969 to 1979 and still remain popular as the cornerstone of the surviving Scooby-Doo franchise. Then popularity fell when the next seasons gradually omitted Fred, Daphne, and Velma, leaving Shaggy and Scooby with Scooby's cousin Scrappy-Doo, and popularity resumed only when the older episdes containing the original characters were re-aired. Using this as an analogy to the Pokémon voice actors, Pokémon USA will agree to re-broadcast the episodes using the older voice actors once popularity fades enough due to the quality of the new actors, just as the quality of Scooby-Doo episodes diminished when characters were removed. In other words, the voice actor change could turn older episodes into classics and inherently be better for everyone!

Now, I realise that this is bound to touch a major nerve in the world of Pokémon and am publishing this rant in the fear of receiving hate mail in response. However, as James had said about politics, you have to take a side knowing that you're ready to give your all to defend it. Here, though, it was a matter of people being so stubborn that they missed the details altogether and overall refused to take the good with the bad.

Tales from the Arcade II: More Stalking and Smoking (and a few more rounds of OutRun in between)

2006-07-08T20:25:00.000-04:00

Further to the post I made about the arcade and the activity there yesterday, I was today told that Christian had been apprehended by a prominent cop and hauled off the island, prohibited from re-entering.

Again, though, that was a lesser worry and more of a relief, but now it was left to me to see that the two that came out of the truck were not the only smokers. Anthony (with whom I shared a room at the Elks conference!) came out of the arcade once and accepted a drag from one of my OutRun opponents, aged 15 or so, who also smoked. In all, that meant there were about six boys (if Byron, a friend of mine, and the girls I was eavesdropping on didn't light any up themselves) under the age puffing in the courtyard in plain view of motorists.

I remember saying before that an older arcade had been on the northern end of the island before the owner was convicted on association and drug charges and the facility condemned. Notwithstanding that the owners of this new arcade seem like solid citizens, are we headed for a repeat of the situation, but with the patrons on the wet end of it?

Tales from the Arcade I: Stalking and Smoking

2006-07-07T19:43:00.000-04:00

Far be it of me to disclose anything that goes on in a menial day, I think it's time I lived up to the promise of more regular updates for once.

I apologise if I haven't said before that the reason why I've been working the morning shifts is due to the abscence of juvenile activity at that time. Sometimes it can be at the beach, although this is beleaguered by the requirement of beach badges between 10.00am and 5.00pm, so what I do is troll the middle section of the island instead, where there's always an arcade and a line of pizza, Italian ice, ice cream, and fizz shops. The former had been opened shortly before Memorial Day and didn't have a large selection then — perhaps only ten games against the current 30 or so — and I tended to stay awa from it out of the doubt that anyone I knew from the old school would have the audacity to appear there.

The arcade, it transpired, was the complete opposite. The first day there, I realised that my friend Mike worked there, so he was always up for a game iof air hockey or OutRun 2 at his expense. The second day, Dave, his close friend, appeared there amid the crowd I knew from the old days, but it was then that Mike managed to tell a blonde about my maps and, when I neared her, who I was. I was shocked to see that she was so happy to see me although we had never met before!

But as time went on, Dave's crowd only proved to be part of the sporadic clientele. A few days in, I noticed a group of girls that aged about 14 or 15 that hanged around the sister of the girl who always takes a shot at me in the store. The girls instantly recognised me when we first saw each other — I wasn't surprised since the people at the doctor's office also recognised me for that. It was only today, though, that the lot would actually show signals that they wanted me to be part of the group, even as they knew I was sometimes hovering over their closed discussions and competitions at the Dance Dance Revolution machine (this, like my school's version, required you to move your feet to register arrows). This acceptance, though, proved to be at the expense of a boy named Christian, who would pretend to be established with one of the girls; after the acceptance phase of the day, he summoned me and pointed out the girl he was following:

Christian: Are you following her?
Me: As in stalking or overseeing their discussions?
Christian: Overseeing.
Me: Yes. But they actually have accepted me, if you must know.
Christian: I don't care for that. Stay away from her.
Me: Why? What is your point? What is your objective? It's not as if you're the pimp of the group yourself.
Christian: Forget that. Just stay away from them. They're my bitches.

Which, of course, the girls refuted. As I continued to surround them, he kept going to the girl he pointed out and pointing at me, evidently reprimanding her for talking to me. Even so, when I inquired, they assured me that he'd do that in any case; after all, he wasn't the only other boy involved in the lot.

However, that was a lesser worry. Soon after I confronted Christian, a truck pulled up, another girl and the sister of the girl that terrorised me in tow. They had left amid the possible penalty of being punished by parents so as to drop someone off at a marina, but when they came back I smelled something awful: When I next glanced at the two, they had stowed in the mouths a half-worn Newport cigarette. Having attended two Youth to Youth conferences and an Elks conference, I began to back away slowly, only looking sceptically on as the two finished the last of the drags amid arguments from the rest of the lot. The younger girl was 18, a year below the age to purchase tobacco in New Jersey, but even if my prior assumption that she was 15 was not correct, I was still disgusted. Afraid that I would get dragged into the mess surrounding it, as the girls that weren't smoking were nonchalant about the presence of Lorillard tobacco, I excused myself ten minutes after the girls popped up amid hugs from the nonsmokers.

Now I'm thinking the same thing James did, although his ideas weren't forged by youth summits and he even looked in retrospect on possible enhancement of comedy by such. Why would they do this to themselves? Why would their families (the older girl's mother would invariably order three or four Newport packs at my register) do so? It did run in the family, and cigarettes were evidently having a gradual effect on their countenances. The girl Christian pointed out had optic orifices that flapped on the top and bottom, a warning sign that she would probably trip over into smoking, the older girl emerging from the car had a lot of fat between the breasts and pelvis and had a flat face, and the 18-year-old had a splotchy red face. Even worse, though, will be the bill when they have to have the throat or lungs repaired. Of course, they could also do what my father's father did: Ignore the fact that his aorta was blocked from smoking three packs a day, downing two beers a day, and driving one block to the beach to hunt for clams — and, a month after notification of the blockage, lapse into a coma and die.

I've got a story to tell on 18 July.

New look

2006-07-05T22:15:00.000-04:00

Rejoice, for Cross Stinging Reality has developed a new orangey look!

Well, so much for the jovial side of me. I decided that since I had started up this thing with 'News on the 40' to advertise the blog I might as well upgrade the blog to reflect what people expect to see from that.

So, here I'm welcoming any criticism you may have on the new look. Go on!

Crash

2006-07-03T20:36:00.000-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5140884.stm

Two weeks ago, my father had me taken to a motor vehicle department outpost to vouch for my permit, a time when I had become (and I still am) dependent on my feet to get anywhere I wanted and refused to stray from that property. Although I really didn't feel like getting the permit then, even though my parents insisted that I would drive to complete internships at a college near to my school, I now have to say it was a good thing: as of Saturday, it would have been impossible, as all motor vehicle agencies and roadworks were shut down then.

Today, store customers were distraught at the fact that they couldn't buy any lottery tickets, some having come from outside the states and willing to indulge in state gambling. The very moment motor licences ceased to be handed out, ticket sales were stopped. And the day following, horse racing was stopped, depriving holidaymakers of more gambling. And on Wednesday morning the source of the bulk of New Jersey's revenue, the casions in Atlantic City, are scheduled to stop gambling operations since all casino inspectors, required to remain on site at all times, would be furloughed.

Here's how the Garden State turned, over the course of three days, into the Sorry State: The state's Constitution requires that a balanced budget be submitted by 1 July. However, governor Jon Corzine's move would be to reject increases of other taxes and elevate the sales tax by 1 percent, a move met with fervent opposition from his Legislature. Because the Legislature wanted to slash federal funding for most projects and increase subordinate taxes rather than hike the sales tax, the deadline came and no report was even close to complete. Frantic, Corzine declared that all nonessential employees and services would be suspended — this meant the DMV would become inactive and road construction would stop, and the lottery would be suspended at 7.55pm Saturday.

However, the key problem behind this measure was the fact that there was a city in the south whose revenue weighed mainly upon the operation of twelve casinos. In New Jersey, a casino needs an on-site team of inspectors in order to run. According to the shutdown measure, these inspectors would be found to be unessential, which would mean that the casinos would not be able to operate. The debate over this alone floundered for some time until this morning, when it was declared that the inspectors would be removed at 8.00am Wednesday — granting a reprieve for the 4 July weekend that otherwise would have resulted in massive income losses for the city — and the casinos would close then.

Gambing notwithstanding, the budget impassé would mean no welfare and medical assistance checks could be mailed out. July's checks have been mailed, thank you, but there will be no August check until the budget is balanced. In turn, stores, which receive money from the government in response to purchases made with food stamps, would lose money due to overstock. And for a cashier like me....I just hope I'm significant enough as my employers say.

Benefits for the poor and the loss of income that could potentially overturn the deficit is not the solution, and everyone that I've rung up today says the same. I just hope that somehow we'll either see the positive effect of Corzine's mind of a Wall Street broker or a mutual consent of tax modifications and see the balanced budget we need to keep going. Yet, as a customer said, 'those casinos won't be closed for long!'

One blog bites the dust

2006-06-27T21:42:00.000-04:00

Ama announced that the blog section of her site would be commuted to Xanga, doing so in the form of a final rant satirising Mike and me.

A note to those who read and liked the rants and anyone else who's gonna bother reading this,

Thanks to certain somebody(ies), we will not feature the rants section anymore since I can't tolerate stupid...><><>< stuff from happening. And I swear if I get complaints about my rants and raves on xanga, I'll start drawing graphic fanarts about said person's death and posting it at dA, which I am allowed to do with a warning for graphic material. In fact, I'll probably do that anyway for this...>< stuff, and post it in the IRL section or something. It won't be so graphic, or anything, but you'll get the point. Who knows...maybe I'll change this page into a page for Demons of Metropolis, another NC17 fic...ooooo, what a kick in the ass that'll be. Oh noes!! I said ass! I'm a bad person because I'm expressing myself in a way I'm comfortable with! No way! Who ever heard of freedom of speech? I mean really...if you get to say whatever you want on your blog, why can't I? It's the internet and this isn't the forum. Separate it, please. Hey, Umi, DWR, Jo, Chelc, SM, Orion, Swifty, Kiori, and Alopec...thank you for CS GGG. I guess without you, there'd be plenty more to complain about here besides these...><>someone's bound to come across it and rant about what I said at their own blog. But if i never see it, I guess I couldn't care and even if I did see it, I'm sure i would have run into a warning or two, in which case I won't bring it to their attention that I'm a hypocrite and don't like what they said and rant some more about what they said about what I said. It's a never ending cycle...and why are you reading this? This is perhaps the longest rant I've ever had without outside help and curse words, which I'd love to use, but seeing as you'd be a complete...><><><>< *it rhymes with itch* about, and if you do, you cause people a lot of trouble. Perhaps if you "itched" out of large public, like I did (as you did too, at first), then we would not have this problem. Personally, still, I don't really care about how negatively you feel about what I said, nor do you probably care about how incredibly angry I am at you for making this a larger deal than it had to be. Still, one has to wonder, why? I have to say, after I had "itched" about what you said, I never took another trip to your blog again...yet, like a child, you kept on coming back for more fight when evidently you were wrong. And you still are wrong about every point you made, which I'm not going to go into detail AGAIN because I'm sick and tired of it. I won't change what I said, because I can't change the past. You already know what it said, so why should I even bother? I know you were wrong about what you said, and I had a lot of right to voice my opinion the way I wanted to do it just as you had. I'll just be on my merry way about now, possibly not because I'll probably think of something else to say, and just say that I hope that this is finally over, because, as I've said, I'm sick and tired of it. There's no point to continuing...you probably got what you wanted and had me get so annoyed that I completely deleted the whole page I enjoyed very much. ...><...I had something to say, but use your imagination. I have to say that you really haven't fixed your problem, you only moved it. As a mod, I get stressed out, and I need a place to vent it in writing, yes, online. It's not on the forums, so quit "itching" and let me be with whatever fantasy land you think I live in. Whatever...keep to yourself I'll keep to myself. If you have anymore problem, please...hesitate to contact me about it.

Well into summer

2006-06-26T20:51:00.000-04:00

Right, I've pretty much sensed that I have to update this to keep up with James' impressive record of blogging and the usual LiveJournal records set by others as well as find a crafty way to get the ads to pay (James had his Google AdSense account banned since he used methods to steer others to the ads — 'Please keep clicking every six hours', folks?) I've vowed to make posts more regular. Hopefully I'll be able to post enough to close the nagging five-day gap that usually separates the old post and the next exciting one.

What I regret not reporting on is my experience thus far with Windows Live Messenger with Messenger Plus! Live. I must admit that after four months of having to live without it I eventually got used to having long Messenger queues and restrictions on the length of messages. Thankfully, all that has been brought back, and I've finally been able to figure out how to create coloured names using the software. Even before then, though, those that had the time to notice would have seen Dark Mightyena and me staging a status bar and signature war — probably enough to admit that in the midst of having a pair on the Community as a publicity stunt (after I knocked it before) there was a mistress.

The online side of things aside, it's time to examine what's going on in the real world. Although summer has officially arrived, the new pattern that my workplace has been sticking me to has decided to scrap the tradition of hiring me at night, instead giving me morning shifts — this ensures that I don't have to painfully switch from the regime of getting up early and submitting to SuperCheats before going to school to sleeping late with little hours and back again two months later. Over the past three days, I've been given a challenge that everyone else has passed up: train two cashiers at once. A set of twins had been shunted from the deli department and were instead assigned to the front for reasons unknown, and from that point I had had to keep them from going insane enough to fistfight each other by strictly regulating who gets to work the register and who gets to pack (their mother would much rather prefer that they bag, as I had met her today). Today, though, a series of confusions and discrepancies in the computer had led to me running back and forth, exchaging items as I went along, and having to reteach how to handle WIC checks and most produce codes.

Seeing as work pretty much follows the pattern of school now, I'm left with almost nothing until I get home, which is going to an arcade that opened recently (the previous one at the end of the island was foreclosed due to the owner's involvement with a shooting and drugs gang). Yesterday I had been able to meet the old crowd from the northern end of the island as well as a girl that Mike had pushed in to request a map of the place (I'm known for drawing road maps). Today, though, I was tortured there by a girl that appears at the store occasionally with a family that usually buys $300 or thereabout of groceries.

...Well, that was an attempt to liven up the day. Seeing as I'm in a routine that'll be monotonous from now until 18 July, when I head up to Rhode Island for the next youth summit, I guess we all will have to live with the five-day gaps. Or will we?

Messenger Plus! 4: Part 2

2006-06-21T07:18:00.000-04:00

Further to the assertion that the Messenger Plus! add-on for Windows Live Messenger will be released in June, we can expect something great on Saturday.

They did it! Microsoft finally released Windows Live Messenger publicly today. After the longest period of public testing for a MSN Messenger client, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger 8) is going to be a pleasant surprise for old time Messenger users. The interface of this new version has been completely redesigned, it's more simple, cleaner, and yet more powerful than anything else MSN has released so far. You'll have to get used to talk about Windows Live though and not MSN (although I suspect most of us will keep on calling the client "MSN" for a long time).

Because of the new direction taken by Microsoft, Messenger Plus! was also completely redesigned. It took 8 months of full time work but your favorite add-on is now ready to go public as well. The new version of Messenger Plus! (4.00), distributed under the name "Messenger Plus! Live", will be officially released this Saturday, June 24th, at 23:40 GMT. The new web site will also be put online at the same time, and a last post on this site will be made to start the transition period. These are exciting days for anybody interested in Microsoft's Messenger clients and its surrounding communities, make sure you don't miss any associated event!

See you soon at msgpluslive.net :).

So there you have it. When the add-on is finally released, it'll be on a new site, Messenger Plus! Live.

Old PC, new PC

2006-06-17T14:46:00.000-04:00

The underlying matter of the Wikipedia situation last month, as brought back to me when Paul himself contacted me yesterday, was not a simple matter of spammers going off and retaliating, as they had done when TPL formed out of a coup on PKMN.NET. Rather, it was about the Pokémon Community's past, one that many members have tried to hold on to in the midst of what seems to be the new administration.

If you look at the Pokémon Community forum index, you'll notice that there is a board called 'Pokémon Community Reference Library'. (Of course, you can also get there by clicking here.) This library actually is an archive of the old Pokémon Community board with most posts as of the migration still intact. (The board was commuted to SMF for archival purposes as, from what an administrator tells me, it was impossible to transfer a licence to the new board and leave the old vBulletin board up.) Here, according to conversations I attended with people that have become disgruntled in the face of the current administration, was what was often referred to as the 'soul' of PC — back then, they say, there was an administration that respected others on their time at the board. Indeed, the fact that more than 1,000 members were immediately shunted from this old board to the current vBulletin one (and a look at the member roster will match the ID numbers of the members there to the numbers on the new board, creating the illusion that the accounts were transposed) has caused a massive rift between the members shunted in to the ones that have just arrived.

Seeing as I joined in September 2005 (two years after the migration) and have no real experience with the old board, I can't really judge on how that board was; rather, I've had to interview mods and old members to get a view of it. But Paul was a remnant of the old board and views the administration as a shadow of its former self. Shinin, with whom the administration had a war about the Wikipedia article (and recently caught being Zone on PC), called the mods 'n00bish'. Even Kahoshi, who joined in May 2004 under Suzu (there were no name changes allowed then), was enamoured by the old life and eventually resigned after Kura was promoted to moderator on the Daily Chit Chat merely because she couldn't cope with the current administration what with Chairman Kaga on indefinite leave, so Kura got control of the Other Chat area in her place. With that being said, this distinction between an 'old' and 'new' PC is awful to say the least. These people don't change. They merely have carried on about how good the old PC had been and how incompetent the moderators today supposedly are.

I myself remember when Super Cheats went through the stage. Weeks after the forums opened, it came under attack by Gaming Update members — as it turned out, there had been a forum on the site before, as well as on PSXGamer (which was the most active out of the lot), and one on Gaming Update. The Super Cheats board in that day merged with the other forums and eventually became the Gaming Update board. As a result, PSXGamer's clientele has been sourly low, and when Super Cheats acquired forums once more it was regarded as a hotbed for immature spammers, which prophetically started to develop after the attacks stopped. Since then, we've had mod fights and even a massive dirt bomb shower by Ilovemissyelliott and Bleepman, both of which carried out the attack using Bleepland as a base after Dave criticised their administration and their comments on Super Cheats over there.

Here's something to chew on: Does it really matter how the forums used to be run? This is today, not yesterday; unless you manage it civilly, you won't restore anything. Plus which, you'll have to cope with anyone who becomes mod or is promoted once the years wear on. Anyone who is clinging on to the old PC needs to grow up and adapt or leave. While this is defence for Jeroen against Imperial Dragon, unthinkable in the past, it's also a little message I have for Paul and Shinin themselves.

Update: Kahoshi has been removed as the focus of this article due to a contradiction of conveyed opinion here.

Out

2006-06-13T09:39:00.000-04:00

...from two institutions.

Firstly, today is the last day of school, my junior year. As I stated in the entry regarding the start of summer, the end of the year heralds more hours at the store (a shift this Saturday starts at store opening at 6.30 am and ends at 12.30pm) as well as a populace coming in from the mainland to sunbathe, have a go at the new arcade, and participate in the seafood and sailing contests popular all over the town. However, my predictions for having a girlfriend as stated at the start of the year have all but failed; there is a girl in Galloway Township that I may have access to if I visit my friend that lives nearby, as well as an older girl from Jersey City (remember?), but as far as the school or town goes, I'm still single. Of course, though, there's no reason for me to cry about that; what with work, another youth summit in a month (and I'll be blogging that!) and moderation duty, I can't expect to go on a full dating scheme.

Now would be the time to fill in the tiny gap between the summer post and now. Two weeks past, a group of freshmen were invited to our classes and made to follow around some sophomores and juniors. The Galloway girl I just mentioned was assigned to another person, but in my uncle's class I showed her around the problems assigned for review for the final and she decided to tail me instead without dismay from the original host. Then, the following week, the actual finals took place; I did not get my Algebra final back, I scored 90 percent in the Network+ exam, I scored 90 percent in the Physics final, and I scored 93 percent for the health final. Now we just have to amuse ourselves with Call of Duty on the Network+ course room.

And yes, there's a second institution that has yet to put me out. The thread that encapsulated Treehouse saga on Serebii.net devolved into you-know-who mentioning my name in her deviation of the topic to express her distaste for my comments on her blog.

Dragonfree: Okay, I'll admit right away that I only looked at this out of curiosity about the sex. I despised the last NC-17 fic I read here, so I thought I might as well look at this one too and see if it was any better.

Now, I first looked at the first page, where you announced that there wouldn't be sex right away. I nodded to myself and flipped to the last page, but while scrolling past the comments I couldn't help being a bit interested. Hey, mysterious islands, people dying and symbolic stuff - clearly this fic had a plot. So I went back to the first page and decided to read the whole thing.And I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised. The idea was very intriguing - heck, I can just picture a good horror movie with exactly this kind of plot. And I love good ideas. As I've already said, it was what made me want to read the whole thing in the first place, and what kept me in throughout. (I had had the ending spoiled, admittedly, but I enjoyed it just the same.)The execution, however, I could pick at in many ways, and if you don't mind I think I will pick at it.

Firstly, some nasty word confusions in a couple of places - I remember a dozen "lied" instead of "lay" ("lied" always means "told a lie"), at least one "their" instead of "there" and some "breath" instead of "breathe" ("breathe" is the verb, "breath" is the noun). Maybe you should get a beta reader or something.

Secondly, I thought you overhyped the sex - not in the fic itself, but in the thread. You literally went on and on and on before and after every chapter about how there was no sex yet and how there would be sex in April and how we were all waiting for April and how you had written the first contestshipping sex at the forums and blah blah blah. It really ruined the plot when you were acting like the plot was just some sort of a frame around that April sex scene. Didn't you say yourself in the end that the sex was just to show how much they loved each other? Sure, to a point it's understandable as a joke, but sorry, I can't understand how any respectable author could write a fic with an extremely creepy, symbolic plot and then not only let the one little unimportant sex scene in the middle be hyped up like this, but in fact actively participate in the hyping and be proud of having written the first Contestshipping porn on the forums. You should never write sex and make it seem important to you that it is sex. A successful insertion of a sex scene is one that makes it seem like a natural part of the story which is not any more noteworthy than any other natural parts of the story. You did that just fine in the story, really, but it bothered me how much attention you seemed to want to draw to the fact that this fic contains sex. Sex doesn't deserve all that attention. When you draw so much attention to it, the story starts seeming like something written to turn people on, and personally I really don't have a particularly high opinion of that sort of fic in any literary context. (They're fine if you're horny and just want something to wank to, but there is no other reason for anybody to want to read them, which is why you really shouldn't want that label.)

Now, thirdly, some style issues. In many parts the sentences seemed too simple and short - just sentence after sentence of "This was like this. This was also like this. He did this. She did that." (I'm kind of the opposite, though - my sentences tend to be overly long and complicated, so maybe I'm not the best person to judge on that.) It got on my nerves. . . .

Generally, description should be stuffed into as few sentences as grammatically possible. One of those masters of description (definitely not me, so I won't even attempt it) could probably fit more or less all that information into one sentence instead of your four. In some places, it's appropriate to have short sentences, but you did it way too often in places where it was not appropriate at all.

Fourthly (and lastly, unless I forgot something), the fic seemed a little rushed. There were just so many things I felt could have been elaborated upon. Really, this fic could have been much, much longer. For one thing, I wanted to see the beginning of May and Drew's relationship on the island, because that was probably really the most important part of it - first kiss, first "whoa-look-what-just-appeared-in-the-treehouse" moment, and the confusion of being on the island in the first place. They could have been developed a great deal better if you had just included that. Also, symbolism is generally something you either get when you read the fic or you realize when the author mentions it, "Oh, of course it meant that!" Some of the stuff you explained after finishing the story really didn't give me that sort of feeling - you didn't hint at it in the story in any way that ordinary readers could spot. For example, the thing about the island being a "state of mind" and with Drew having "offended" it and made a part of the island. It didn't make sense to me either how May was the one who burned the flowers when she was destined to live. In a way it would have been more clever if May had been the one who died because of the whole accepting and not accepting the things that happened on the island, actually - it's a bit icky to promote just accepting what's happening to you and would make more sense if she were somehow 'deceived' by the island and ended up being the one who perished while the one who was cautious and wary of what the island had to offer would have escaped from it, but meh. I think if I hadn't already found out that Drew ended up dead, I'd probably have thought something like that would happen in the end to May, exactly because she so easily accepted the strange happenings on the island. (Incidentally, their attitude towards the strange things on the island seems contradicted by how they thought of the outside world - there it was Drew who just accepted being on the island while May wanted out. That could be interpreted as irony to hint at May, the one who missed the outside world, being the one who dies, and Drew, who didn't really mind being on the island as long as he was with her, ending up alone in the real world.) You could have added many more hints and such to the story, more weird things happening on the island, etc. It would have been nice to elaborate upon whether the other people who went to the island while unconscious in the room had also experienced something with the island appearing to want to get them together (naturally, only to rip them apart again). I think the story of all the island's "victims" should have been told a little later to keep the suspense a bit longer, too.

But that being said, I did enjoy it, if just for the idea. I have a soft spot for cursed things, character deaths and mysterious forces more powerful than the main characters.

Encyclopika Quote Dragonfree:Secondly, I thought you overhyped the sex - not in the fic itself, but in the thread.

And now you know why I'm incredibly p*ssed off with people like Crystal Walrein and Sunshine188 who say they had absolutely NO warning about it before the chapter. >.> I did it so that I wouldn't run into that problem, but evidently, I was wrong. Next time, I'll just warn them on the first page and see how that goes.

I have to admit that I was also nervous and excited because I was writing about something I had never done before and based most of it on a clip from one of Jo-Jo's un-posted fics and two movies. That's not a lot, so I was anticipating myself, really while trying to strain all those who didn't want to read it, but I guess only true reviewers like yourself actually read EVERYTHING in a fic thread, so that doesn't work I've now learned. -_-

Quote Dragonfree: (They're fine if you're horny and just want something to wank to, but there is no other reason for anybody to want to read them, which is why you really shouldn't want that label.)

Ow. Okay, I'm not. And I don't want that label, I wanted to write about something I had never written before for experience. I was merely trying to warn people because I didn't want the bull I had gotten anyway from CW and Sunshine. And then afterward, I think the "good job"'s had gotten to my head, so I was proud of myself that I had pulled it off. Anyway, we're here to review the fic itself, not that things I did four months ago. I can't change the way I felt about my new accomplishment then, all I can do is change it for the better next time.

Anyway, thanks for reviewing my fic and giving me some pointers. I'll definately use them with my next fic Demons of Metropolis which I really want to be the best fic I ever wrote. And I'll take my time, only warn once about the explict content, and focus.

Dragonfree: The more I think about it, the more I think this doesn't really deserve the NC-17 rating. Yeah, there's sex in it, but it's a) not explicitly described, and b) not the main focus of the story. As far as I know, that only constitutes for an R. (There's a bunch of R-rated movies with a plot that include sex scenes without actually showing you tab A in slot B - off the top of my head, I remember The Matrix Reloaded.) I can understand Crystal Walrein's point about damaging the site's reputation when it comes to stuff like A Day Inside May because that's something you can actually call a porn fic, but this just isn't one.

Encyclopika: I know, good point. But before I started writing it, Kiori and I discussed it and she and I agreed that we should put it at NC17, as I'll do again for Demons of Metropolis. It's just safer and easier I find. =\ Though you're right.

Nathan Madien: I agree with you on that. Ama's fanfic had sex, but A.) it was very soft and B.) it didn't drown the rest of the story. I've read A Day Inside May, and I felt it would've been better posted on MediaMiner than in the Serebiiforum. I mean, it was okay but it went overboard a bit and just drowned the rest of the story.

Me: That's quite enough.

Following my rendezvous with Torched Chicken in which he says he posted a thread about porn tolerance on this board in your mod discussion area, I asked him to convey to those reading my apology for mishandling the situation.

I do realise that there is a sharp contrast between A Day Inside May and Treehouse Saga. The former was dedicated most of the way to a graphic depiction of a sexual encounter between Ash and May and, from what I recall, an attempt to cover it up from her parents. That was something that, even if it was well written, as I must admit it was from reading it myself, was not something that I would personally like to see my younger siblings or, in future, my own children reading out of curiosity. I do give credit to him, however, for signifying in the thread title that it was an NC17 fic, yet the fact remains that sex was essentially what it was. As for Treehouse Saga, things were not as severe, seeing as the actual sex encompassed one chapter and there were instead some playful banter and an emergency room drama scene occupying the rest of the story. I admit that from the first post of this thread I was looking for a point in which I would be able to report this as evidence that there still existed blatant tolerance of pornography in this forum, and I jumped at Drew and May being bare-chested in February (save for her bra) and reported it on my blog accordingly.

With that distinction being made, I want to repeat my apology to Encyclopika for orchestrating the row on her own blog, which started when the ________ administrator ________ wrote an attack on her presonal response to my review of Treehouse Saga. Although my act there was immature and miscalculated, I still am fearful that you're using the very attitude you have on your blog — even if it's to vent on others, which is actually a violation of Freewebs' terms of service — to deal with miscreants in this forum or wherever else you have such power; do you really expect me to respect a moderator that would tell someone to kill him or herself if he or she could not handle a situation, rather than just go up to that person and set things straight?

Looking back at the fic itself and what Dragonfree said — she's read my blog, she can tell you how livid I was — I realise that I misjudged you as far as the content of the fic goes. However, I will never forgive you, myself, for your reaction. You devolved into one of the flamers that you, as a moderator here, are expected to defend the forums against. You insulted me, as well as my friends, and made a bare attempt meanwhile to reiterate the outline of the story. Still stuck in your head was the knowledge, which I regret to admit, that the forum can't necessarily be held liable for what's posted. Next to this, though, you and the moderators that support showing porn fics here are taking advantage of the fact with blatant disregard for the visitors. Tell me, how many will read any precautions you may have before they move onto the story? And tell me, if the slogan for this place is 'The Place For Everyone', is it limited to those that are mature enough to handle material like this? I surely hope not. This forum is to be as open to younger audiences as much as they are to people your age, and you must respect that fact.

Encyclopika: Crystal Walrein - I'm fine with you not respecting me for what I posted at my site, but at my site I'm not a mod, I'm regular old me...so having respect for me as a mod here has nothing to do with it. And even though you didn't go as far as I did, you still weren't too nice and very judgemental to something you didn't look further into, which had me loose my temper since I waste plenty of space warning people about things, only to end up with this problem. =
. . . . Yes...HERE... [sic] which I do no matter what character, person, or ship/idea is being flamed, even if I myself agree with the flamage. I do my job, so what I do somewhere else has no connection here at all except it's about it.

. . . . Actually, we all said tough nugs to those people, to tell you the blunt truth. ^^;; No one can be responsible for that except the reader him or herself. We mods and admins expect everyone to read and follow rules and precautions so that we don't have to deal with stuff like this...we can't help it if some person is too lazy to read the warnings. Next time, I'll only warn once since it only gives respectable readers like Dragonfree the wrong impression.

And anyway, this is no place to discuss what happened at my rants section or the general posting of explict romance...you're supposed to be discussing the fic at hand. So, stop going off-topic with this. Really. As I said in the rants section I don't want any emails, PMs, emails, or posts about it. How I was is how I was, but if you'd like, I'll move the personal ones onto Xanga or something and keep the rants for and about the general public.

Oh goodie, I can't WAIT for Demons of Metropolis to come out.

Case lost. I had started to realise then and there that, even if I had pushed further and had gotten small support from people like Nathan Madien and the Sunshine guy Ama failed to clarify, I now had no voice there. What with the previous blog entries against SPP, sending a spammer out, and my personal attacks on Ama, everything I had done would be grounds for a ban as there is a policy against criticism of the site in any form by members. Now, my stance has not changed — it's only now that I was forced to admit that they were not worth dealing with. I now feel sorry that I ever turned to them after leaving PUK just because there was a rivalry between the two for a copyright snafu, and I admit I was a fool for ever trying to deal with the arrogant dogs who act as mods on one front and decide to vent on others elsewhere. What's more, she persists to propose a new fic (Demons of Metropolis) that seems as if it'll reach a level rivalling that of A Day Inside May!

As a result, I've decided to turn in everything I ever said about them here, as well as bring back my affiliation with the spammer, and have a mod liaise to ban me from there. It's been no use arguing — why should I step into the way of rabid bulldogs that are out to attack anyone who opposes them? I've been mauled, my reputation ruined there if ever I had one. All because social skills count zero there, just the mechanical process of closing and locking threads.