LiveJournal

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

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.

1. Go to the Battle Tower in the Battle Frontier. Go to the PC and save your progress.
2. Deposit the Pokémon you wish to clone in an empty box by selecting Deposit Pokémon.
3. Log out and save again. Now access the PC again and withdraw the Pokémon you deposited.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. The Pokémon you deposited and withdrew will appear in both your party and the PC.

The Board of Biffo

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?!

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

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.