Entries in Life

This week, I discovered Densha Otoko. Originally, I thought it was included interaction on a BBS. Instead, the Internet forum featured in this Japanese Drama is about 2ch.net. A big part of Densha Otoko is the online interaction — people reading and responding to online posts. When I told that the makers did a good job of making this interesting and even entertaining, he said “it’s a hard concept to swallow as interesting.” It could be that this is just a sappy Beauty and the Beast love story and I’m a hopeless romantic, but I really do think this is a well told serial. The dramatic element isn’t overdone and it has maintains a comic feel throughout the series. Because its a serial with 10+ episodes, there is also a fair bit of suspense. Charles Dickens used the serial effectively; why not Takeuchi Hideki and company? (If you’re interested in seeing it, I can help you find it.) Finally, after reading up on 2ch.net a bit, I’m interested in their method of maintaining anonymity on a popular service. (Anyone that has 10 million visitors a day is popular.)

If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don’t know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, “it’s boring,” if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

I gain some sort of sick pleasure when I see other people having problems that I experience during lonely, dark nights.

I don’t usually like satire. And I began reading this with some skepticism. But The Metacultural Gospel has some good stuff. Take this for instance:

The gunshots continued; someone turned on the lights, and there was Nathaniel, holding a powerful handgun, shooting the projector. (It was such a strange thing to see a pacifist holding a gun.) I think he emptied a total of about three clips into it, before putting the gun into his pocket. …

About that time, the pastor got over being stunned and glared at him and asked, “How dare you fire a gun in my sanctuary?” He glared back and said, “How dare you take God’s sanctuary and making it into a circus? This is supposed to be a house of prayer and worship for all people, and you are making it into mere amusement, a consumer commodity. Is this church set up because these people do not have televisions, that they can flip on and be titillated? Church is a place to disciple men and conform them to God, not a place to conform religion so that it will appeal to spoiled brats. The reason that you are losing people to MTV is that you are doing a second rate job of being an MTV, not a first rate job of being a church.”

I think there’s something in there for the conversation on parenting.

If esr is the right-wing nutjob, then Miguel de Icaza is his left-of-center counterpart. Actually, from appearences, Miguel seems to be the stronger developer. Fetchmail? meh… But Mono? Wow! Anyway, the point is that the both say politically provocative things. Most often, I look at what they write, shake my head and think “Why do they do this to themselves?” But they do occasionally say something that makes me sit up and take notice. For example, de Icaza comments on a conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts in which Roberts writes:

Consider the no-fly list. This list has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of Bush’s critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any more dangerous than any other passenger?

de Icaza ends that post claiming that the U.S. will be a third world economy within five years. That’s the part that makes him such an endearing wacko. Of course, I thought Max Mayfield’s warnings about Katrina were a little extreme at the time, too.

“I like saying I have a cousin who hosts my e-mail. It makes me sound so Mafia.” You may now kiss the pinky ring.

Tara disovered that if you want a lot of discussion on your weblog, talk about child rearing. (You have to register to read her weblog.) For those of you too lazy to register, she’s given me permission to summarize and quote her post. She’s teaching her son to read using A Beka Books, but has become frustrated with what she calls “blatantly obvious propagandizing”. “Truth is truth,” she writes. “I want [my children] to find out for themselves that the Bible should be a treasured possession, that going to church is a good thing. I don’t mind having a hand in the convincing but I don’t want to exclude reason and personal observation.” I would counter that Truth is accessible only through God’s gift of faith. You cannot rationalize your way into it. Either you believe or you don’t. Still, I’m sympathetic. The A Beka Book story that she talked about was very heavy-handed with its message. No subtlety whatsoever. No art or craft, either. I certainly won’t be using their books to teach anything to my children. I offer the rest of my comments here as another way of thinking about raising Christian Children continue reading »