"Raunchy" Shoujo Manga?

Another piece of trashy J-news from WaiWai, this time about American girls' obsession with shoujo manga. Besides having some interesting observations, the article is chock full of the usual tabloid silliness characteristic of this news source, which is, of course, what makes it amusing. The article starts with:

"Americans can't get enough of shojo manga, the racy comic books for elementary schoolgirls that have recently been filled with stories with such themes as homosexual love and relations between incestuous lesbian sisters"

Heh... "racy" comic books for "elementary schoolgirls." And those topics sound pretty indecent.

"We now devote one third of our entire floor space to comics," Shingo Nozaki, an employee at Japanese bookseller Kinokuniya's suburban New York outlet

About 80 percent of the store's customers are American teen girls.

"Kids from junior high and high school flood into the store as soon as school finishes," Nozaki tells Shukan Shincho.

The popularity of manga is definitely intersting. The "suburban New York outlet" mentioned here seems to refer to the Kinokuniya branch at the Pallisades Mall in Nyack. I do wonder why they go to Kino instead of just Borders; guess Kino is just cooler. And, where in the previous quote they say that this manga is for elementary school girls, now they say that it's junior high and high schoolers who are buying it.

Well then, so where is this "racy" indecency mentioned in the opening paragraph?

Currently selling well in the U.S. is Fruits Basket, a shojo manga by Natsuki Takaya. Fortunately, the weekly opines, that's a decent story unlikely to create an unfavorable impression of Japan.

"Our biggest sellers," Nozaki tells Shukan Shincho "are undoubtedly the shojo manga that have the cutest pictures."

Yeah... Fruits Basket. I can't think of anything less indecent than that. And the biggest sellers are the ones with the "cutest pictures." Raunchy, elementary school indecency seems nowhere to be found.

Those who are reading carefully may notice that yesterday's Techno-Elitism (5) entry is now missing. I made a serious factual error in one of the features I was discussing and have withdrawn the article, pending repair.

Short Beer-Pong Asians

Huh? No, actually, I read three interesting articles in the New York Times this weekend that have nothing to do with each other.

The Short of It
The average height for a male in the United States is 5'10". At 5'5", that means most Americans dwarf me. (The average height for a male in China is 5'6", still slightly taller than me.) And it is this topic of height that is covered in the first article in the New York Times that I read (NYT-Short.pdf in my private stash). The article is quite long and covers a range of topics that would be futile to summarize here. It's basically about a surge in growth hormone treatments in children that is both expensive (~$20K/year for several years) and mild (~1-2 inches of total growth increase). The article also covers a recent study which concluded:

"A team of psychologists, led by David E. Sandberg at the University at Buffalo, concluded that a child's stature, whether tall or small, had "minimal detectable impact" on his or her social standing among schoolmates. At least in this setting, even extremely short children (those around the first percentile) made friends and earned the respect of their peers as easily as kids of average size."

But also makes reference to effects measured in adult earnings, which I had read previously elsewhere:

"There is a considerable literature suggesting that taller men receive higher pay than shorter men, and one recent study concluded that economic discrimination against short adult males was equal in magnitude to racial or gender bias in the workplace."

The article also touches on a number of issues ranging from methodology flaws in earlier child height psychology studies and the author's own experiences.

Beer Pong
I acutally did not know about beer pong until I witnessed it (under the game's alternate name Beirut) while on a ski trip a couple of years after I graduated. I found this second article that I read from the NY Times (NYT-BeerPong.pdf in the stash) quite amusing. It's about how the popularity of this "game" is growing and breweries have been cashing in on the trend. One company even sells portable "beer pong tables" for $150 apiece. They sold 2,000 this year. The article also has a hilarious quote about "Bud Pong":

"This past summer, Anheuser-Busch unveiled a game it calls Bud Pong. The company, which makes Budweiser, is promoting Bud Pong tournaments and providing Bud Pong tables, balls and glasses to distributors in 47 markets, including college towns like Oswego, N.Y., and Clemson, S.C.

Bud Pong may soon expand into more markets, said Francine Katz, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc.

But Ms. Katz said Bud Pong was not intended for underage drinkers because promotions were held in bars, not on campuses. And it does not promote binge drinking, she said, because official rules call for water to be used, not beer. The hope is that those on the sidelines enjoy a Bud."

Uhh yeah... the "official" rules call for "water to be used." I buy that argument... really...

Sister's Think Parents Did O.K.
This NYT article (NYT-AsianParentsRaise.pdf in the stash) was about a book written by two Korean-American sisters who argue that the stereotypically rigid Asian-American upbringing they had was the right approach and outline how they feel children should be raised by this example. It was, perhaps, only interesting for nostalgia reasons, but had this one very amusing quote:

"One daughter's C-minus in biology could cast shame upon them all, so the Kim family reviewed each report card as a group in order to strategize about how each child could address weaknesses."

The use of the phrase "cast shame" brings to mind all kinds of amusing seppuku jokes. Perhaps an untimely F would warrant a trip to Club Sudz...

Techno-Elitism (4): Example (Xanga 3)

When I wrote part 3 (Xanga 2), I included a point about RSS that I meant to follow up here in part 4 (Xanga 3). However, I forgot to include it when I initially posted this entry on 10/16/05. I have ammended this entry on 10/18/2005 to include the forgotten diatribe, which appears at the end of this post.
(3) Xanga compared to the state-of-the-art
The comparison has less to do with having every whiz-bang feature than comparing engineering trust and elegance to the current state-of-the-art. Recall that Blogger was eliminated from the running because it had a few too many features. It's not being used in a feature-for-feature comparison against Xanga as much as a comparison of clarity of concept, quality of engineering, and trust. Blogger targets a more "serious", topical blogger across a wide demographic range, with blogging itself as the primary activity. Xanga seems to target a young, primarily teenage, audience centered around public diaries as a relationship building vehicle. Blogger directly monetizes its user base by encouraging blogs to carry AdSense advertisements, which allow Google and the blog author to share in the revenue. Xanga montetizes its user base by carrying banner ads from RightMedia (all those yieldmanager.com links), by offering "premium" services, and other little things like having the links to music for users' "currently listening to" sections be an Amazon refereral link with Xanga set as the beneficiary.

The structure of these premium services is kind of questionable. Xanga allows free users to upload up to 200mb of images, premium users get this increated to 200gb. However, they allow only 100mb of uploads per month, so really, one wouldn't even notice the difference for two months. The other premium features are also kind of bogus, like the "skins" feature which basically allows you to choose from a number of pre-built look-and-feel templates or edit the html template yourself (something that blogger allows by default but also is probably of limited use to its less-technical target audience), the "custom module" feature that allows you to add your own sidebar boxes (again, by coding the html yourself), "downloadable archives" (download your own historical posts! Wow! I have to pay to retrieve my own content? Swell...), and the ever popular "no more ads" (probably the only reason to do this). I suppose if the ads weren't so obtrusive and shady, there'd be no motivation for anyone to go premium. A WYSIWYG editor used to be part of the premium service, but has been made free as of August 2005. These "premium" features seem to be of questionable use to the target audience, calling into question Xanga's clarity of concept. Except as a side project to milk the occassional ignorant but rich user (or their parents/friends/relatives), there seems to be no particular subset of the user population that would find these features particularly attractive.

Since Xanga's main feature is blogging, users' pages start with their journal. But right at the top of the screen by the user's name are xanga's two main secondary "modes": reviews and events. Well okay, that's cool. But why reviews and events in particular? How do those features function in support of their target audience and purpose? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, these features are just kind of haphazardly slapped onto the site without any concept of how reviews and events would function in terms of diaries and relationship networks. As a result, nobody I can find seems to use them. It's as if someone had read in an article somewhere that reviews and event calendars were "sticky" features and decided to implement them on that basis alone, with no thought of the high-level use cases.

The comment mechanisms of the two sites is pretty similar overall, although they do diverge in a number of telling details. Blogger lets the owner choose whether registration is required to comment. Xanga requires registration in order to comment with the reason:

"Due to issues involving abuse/harrassment, we don't currently allow non-members to comment on Xanga posts. If a friend leaves a comment without creating a Xanga account afterwards, their entry will be lost. :-( As we add more blocking and moderation tools to Xanga, we will consider lifting this restriction."

Fine, guess there is the potential of a lot of harassment on the Internet, but wait... something is amiss. Blogger is by far a bigger community than Xanga, yet allows anonymous posting. Is it because it has more "blocking and moderation tools"? Well, no. Actually, it's about the same. Xanga actually has one extra feature (block lists), but isn't comparable since it is based upon the mandatory registration requirement. LiveJournal also allows the owner to choose whether or not commenters must register (plus has a feature for screening entries before they become public). So why does Xanga alone have this restriction? I dunno. But it has the very pronounced effect of making the community very insular. Regardless of the preferences of the owner, non-Xangans cannot participate in the community in any manner. Whether one considers this a brilliant form of viral marketing or an evil form of user lock-in largely depends on one's point of view. In the context of social networking sites like Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, or LinkedIn, this is par for the course. There's no friend-linkage between users of these different sites. In the context of other blog services like Blogger or LiveJournal, this is a notable omission since only Xanga lacks this feature that simultaneously has a large "cultural" effect.

Xanga comments also adds a featured called eprops which allows users to attach 0-2 eprops (basically points) to their comments to indicate some positive reaction to the entry. More on this feature itself later, but there's some ironic humor related to the help on this feature.

"Question: Can I delete eprops that people have left on my post?"
"Answer: You can't delete eprops... but you can block that person from comment or propping your site ever again."

That's just so remarkably... unhelpful. So maybe you don't like eprops, but banning a user for giving you one just seems so harsh!

In addition to the occasionally unhelpful help, there are also a couple of oddities in the user interface. To the left, is a screenshot of the main navbar in a user's administrative interface. In addition to constantly annoying you with requests to sign up for the premium service, some of these links seem to have unknown or unexpected function. Clicking on "Email Posting" doesn't seem to do anything at all but refresh the page. Perhaps this is a premium feature or something, but the help doesn't seem to describe it at all. Clicking on "Archive Files" causes you to jump to Xanga's main page. This feature is documented as a premium item, but the behavior in free mode is positively head-scratching. I had to do it a couple of times to see whether it was some kind of intermittent error, since a lot of (poorly designed) sites will redirect you to its main page when errors occur. But no, I got a mysterious jump to Xanga's main page every time. Positively bizzare...

There's more broken stuff, perhaps the most important screwed up thing. I introduced RSS in part 3, as a feature integral to most blog and news sites. It's also integral to the way that I monitor blog and news sites. However in Xanga, RSS is nowhere to be found... But wait! A quick google turns up this blog entry, which reveals Xanga's hidden RSS capability and how to access it... except the RSS that the feature generates is broken in a way that's subtle to casual inspection but is utterly unparseable by any feed consuming program (and thus totally unusable). Well, fortunately, having some conversion mechanism means that intrepid coders can come to the rescue. In this case, the same blog entry contains comments that link to people who have created programs that can fix the broken RSS, thus I am saved from Xanga's incompetance.

Tomorrow: Real Xanga wrap-up (sorry I lied yesterday, my affliction caused part (3) to end up being way long) and why I am wrong

Techno-Elitism (3): Example (Xanga 1&2)

Case 2: Too Elite for Xanga
This case is more complicated and less historical than chain mail. So, I'll break down the issues into four parts: (1) Initial perceptions, (2) What is state-of-the-art, (3) Comparison, (4) Dubious design.

(1) Initial Perceptions
Two things instantly jump out. The first, is the extremely obtrusive banner ads. The kinds of flashing and flickering things that have gone out of style on larger (and possibly more reputable) ad-driven sites like Yahoo, Google, or even AOL. The second, is the strange list of words on the left that turn out to be the handles of subscribers. Unfortunately, after I tear my eyes away from the heinous banners, they next drift down to "GodSaidYourShitIsMine", "TheSexyBeastofCU", or "xxAznBBAngelxx" (what's with the xx's!!), well before I can make them focus on what is supposed to be the main content of the page. I'm sure this is the reasoning behind their choice of identifier: to grab my attention. But okay, the second thing is a detail that is not really a Xanga issue per se. The ads are still what bug me, not because I have a problem with ads, but becuase these are like, the bottom-of-the barrel borderline-scam ads. You'd have to go to a shady warez or porn sites to get any sketchier. What kinds of ads are there? There's the ever present "free iPod" ad which is basically a pyramid scheme to sell out your friends' email and demographic info. There's one that tries to sell various crappy "online universities," including the ever dubious University of Phoenix. There's one that tries to trick you into subscribing to a ringtone service by offering you free ringtones (so tricky!). But okay, this isn't the first time I've seen sites supported by "sub-premium" ads. Actually, Dave works for a company that deals in such things. The real issues emerge when you examine Xanga in context.

(2) The State of the Art
Well, I'm no master of the blogosphere. But in my opinon, the state of the art in hosted blog systems is Google's Blogger service. Before I talk "up" Blogger, a moment to talk it "down" a little and say why I felt it was not a task fit in this case. Blogger has a flexible ownership hierarchy where a user account contains a separate public identity (e.g. handle/screen name) and zero-or-more independantly named blogs. LJ and Xanga are designed solely for diaries, where one's user name is both one's public identity and blog name. Thus for someone wanting to do a diary-style blog, there is a small amount of additional setup effort associated with Blogger, whereas LJ and Xanga are dedicated exclusively to this format. Blogger is structured more towards having titled blog entries with parenthetical dates (although this can be modified). LJ and Xanga use the date to title entries in true diary format.

From a larger-scale perspective, Blogger's system is very elegant since it allows a person with a single login identity to publish multiple blogs each with different public identities. The sign-up process is very straightforward and it takes only a couple of seconds to set up. Comments can be open to the public (w/o registration), restricted to registered users, or restricted to approved members of the blog. You can choose to show or not show the profile images of registered commenters. A "magic" e-mail address is created that you can use to blog-by-email. There is a mobile blogging feature that allows you to blog from your phone using SMS. The posting interface is very clean, with a WYSIWYG editor for composing and formatting your post. There's a spell checker and a really neat image upload and layout tool. (Blogger now allows images to be posted as part of its free service.) And, no ads (this is true for LJ as well). This means not only no foreign and dubious content on a blog, but also that you have complete control over the look and feel of the entire page. This may seem minor, but imagine you have a site with a black background, but the required banner ad is surrounded in this big white box and the color scheme of the ad is whatever the ad provider wants. Without full control over the full page, you would be unable to stray far from the provider's default scheme without risking some truly jarring visual interactions.

But what really endears me to blogger, is that it "plays nice" and its documentation is very friendly and well-written. What do I mean by "plays nice" and "friendly"? Well, Blogger is primarily a text blog service that recently added the ability to add images to posts. It's not a photo-blogging service like Flickr. The documentation doesn't pretend that users don't want to do things that aren't provided within the site and takes into account that they might want multiple choices. The documentation directly addresses questions like "What are other ways to post pictures to my blog?" and then instruct you how to link Flickr to your Blogger blog. Why am I so impressed by this? Remember that Blogger is owned by Google. Flickr is owned by arch-rival Yahoo. Despite this highly competitive situation, they have decided that user experience and freedom is a priority over locking them in, and I really respect that.

There is also RSS feed information in the template for easy subscription. I use the "Live Bookmarks" features built into Firefox's bookmarking mechanism (screenshot to the left, click for a larger version) so that I can see changes and additions to people's blogs, the CJAS gallery, and news, all from my browser. If you look in the lower-right, there's an orange icon in the corner of the screen. Blogger automatically has the template configured so that icon will appear in browsers (like Firefox or Opera) that support RSS. A user can just click on that icon and add the feed as a bookmark. This way, I can scan for new content just by waving my mouse rather than visiting all those sites. There are even online services like BlogLines that will display all your feeds and their content from a single interface. There are even little desktop widgets built for Konfabulator that can track feeds. There's also an external posting mechanism that lets you standalone programs like w.bloggar (there's acutally a whole ecosystem of these things and they generally function with LJ as well) in case you find that more convenient.

Tomorrow: Xanga wrap-up

Techno-Elitism (2): Attempted Definition & Example

Techno-Elitsm
What is it? It's about tool-task fit and elegance of design. It's about trust in the technology and meeting a definable need. It's about a relative comparison to other similar objects or the current state-of-the-art. It's a shared sense of what is "elite" and what is "lame". Above all, it's about setting criteria and searching for the best instead of settling for what's provided or what's popular (although both may be criteria).

There's a shared mindset, a common foundation for analysis, that's not necessarily related to the amount of technology one posesses, although perhaps related to the amount of technical knowledge one has. Shared, in that in communication, people who are so-afflicted take this framework for granted. For instance, when discussing products and services with, say, Jerry or Rourke, we approach the comparison problem in the same way and tend to apply that approach uniformly to just about anything that consumes our time or money. There are also, certain shared knowledge and assumptions, some of which may be so deap-seated that they cannot be consciously recalled.

This framework is also incomplete.

But first, the definition I've provided is somewhat unintelligible. So, concrete examples of how techno-elitism functions in the context of the two cases above.

Case 1: Too Elite for Chain Mail
The key triggering phrase in Carol's email is:

Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know

It sets off the chain mail alarms that forces non-action even though (1) others just replied, with no need to spread it to new people, and (2) in an era of intense spam, chain mail's infrastructure impact is minimal. I suspect that, in terms of Internet time, the concept of a chain mail threat is positively archaic. So what is this threat? Well, at many institutions, especially those who have had Internet e-mail for a long time, propagating chain mail is a policy violation. CIT describes the nature of the violation in several locations, including a FAQ and a list of rights and responsibilities. Why is chain mail forbidden? Becuase it is among the activities classified to "impede, interfere with, impair, or otherwise cause harm to the activities of others." How can chain mail be so harmful? Well, in the old old old days of UUCP and dial-up based e-mail links it's acutally possible for such manual behavior to clog up the mail delivery network. But those days are long gone and the issue of chain mail is miniscule compared to the volume of spam modern e-mail networks need to handle.

There are also the issues of general netiquette and that chain mail is generally associated with bad results whether from ill-concieved but genuine altruism or from various kinds of malicious or disingenuous intent. There are no examples of chain mail being a tool with positive value. The very form of a "please pass it on" style e-mail is enough to discredit it.

Imagine, if you will, the Red Cross sets up a three-card-monte table in Times Square to raise money for disaster victims. Who would play? The concept of three-card-monte is so closely linked to cheap criminal activity that there is no way to disassociate the two.

Of course, if one isn't aware of the and sordid history of chain mail, there's no reason to eschew it.

Tomorrow: The more complicated case of Xanga.

Techno-Elitism (1): Triggering Events

I started to write this entry 4 days ago, and it has turned out to be incredibly long, more like a paper than a blog entry. Thus, I've decided to break it out into shorter chunks and put it out over a period of days, backdating each entry to the approximate day when it was written so that relative date terms like "yesterday" will still make sense.

The Email
About two weeks ago, Carol sent out an email to 23 of her friends (including myself) with a list of fun personal questions like "Favorite drink?" or "What do you do to vent anger?" and the following instructions:

Welcome to the new edition of getting to know your friends. Okay here's what you're supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun! Just copy (not forward) this entire e-mail and paste into a new e-mail that you can send. Change all the answers so that they apply to you. Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person that sent it to you.

Three people I know replied to this. I did not. Carol has sent this kind of thing out before; I didn't reply to those either. Two of those who did respond, Greg and Lillian, listed me as the response to the question "Who is the least likely to respond?" It's not because they're not my friends, or becuase the questions are too personal, or because I'm too lazy. It's because one particular phrase in the email triggered an almost conditioned response. More on that later, the story continues.

The Blog
Yesterday, Catherine IMs me about starting a blog. The general requirements boil down to a diary-type (like Ben's) rather than a topical (like Lawrence's or mine) structure. The candidates that come up are Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga. While I love Blogger, it wasn't a good fit (more on this later). Between LJ and Xanga, my recommendation was LJ because it was ad-free (especially since Xanga's ads are of the particularly dubious flashing "free iPod" sell-out-your-friends pyramid scheme variety) and also because something about Xanga triggered an almost conditioned response that rubs me the wrong way. About 9 hours later, a decision was made.

turns out i got a xanga site because i know a lot of people on xanga

No problem, it's certainly not uncommon for people to not follow my recommendation. Especially in online media, the power of network effects is well known. Social proof is one of Robert Cialdini's six weapons of influence. Xanga has certain (and some dubious) features that take advantage of this. Still, my sense of disappointment was profound. It felt like one of my friends had just walked willingly into the jaws of an evil beast.

Why am I such a party pooper? I happen to be afflicted with a particuarly acute form of techno-elitism.

Tomorrow: An attempt to describe what this techno-elitism is.

Serenity

So, I saw "Serenity" with Rourke and Jen this weekend. Usually, movies don't form the kinds of cross-activity linkages that make me think to write about them. But there was something interesting not only with the movie itself, but a whole set of "things" surrounding it.

From the start, there was something strange going in to the movie theatre. For some reason, I had no expectations. Not that I didn't know anything about the movie. The topic had been on irc for a few days. I had seen a few episodes of "Firefly" and was aware of the buzz around Joss Wheedon. We'd discussed the topic and I shared the opinon of several other friends that I didn't really watch "Firefly" because I felt it had been boring. The idea of having a 2-hour long sci-fi movie that was boring seemed like a potentially intruiging piece of work, but I can't say that I was expecting it to be boring. Rather, all of the buzz and my personal experience summed together in a weird way that resulted in a net expectation of... completely unknown.

But the clincher is the movie itself. I liked the movie. When we were exiting the theatre, Rourke and I asked each other the usual "what did you think?" My answer was "it was good" followed by a slight backtrack of "it was certainly entertaining" and then a "i thought there was something interesting about it."

Although "Serenity" stands on its own, it's chock full of references to please "Firefly" watchers. There is a certain amount of expected familiarity about the characters. Supporting roles (or at least what seemed to be important supporting roles) are paraded in a number of varying cameos. The punchline of the movie seemed understated for someone like myself, but according to Rourke (a "Firefly" watcher), has a lot of importance to viewers of the TV series. A lot of effort and emphasis was placed on the one-liners and service scenes. In fact, in the most pessimistic view, one could see "Serenity" as a sequence of nostalgia and fan service strung together with a plot.

Hmm... this sounds like a movie I watched just one week prior. "Advent Children" is Square-Enix's Final Fantasy 7 movie, a kind of epilogue to the game. Not unlike my experience with "Firefly", I'd never played the game, only watched select parts of it while being played by others. "Advent Children" is chock full of fan service cameos and nostalgic references. It's also borderline unintelligible without significant memory of the game.

However, whereas "Advent Children" is interesting, "Serenity" is both interesting and good.

Really, the similarites are startling. "Serenity" doesn't have a cinematic feel, possibly due to Wheedon's greater experience with TV. But when everything is summed up, the two movies arrive at completely different levels, despite their remarkable similarity. Maybe it's because the overall storyline is simpler and clearer. Maybe because the one-liners are actually witty as opposed to juvenile. Maybe it's because "Advent Children" is heavily soaked in adolescent male power fantasy whereas "Serenity" is much more emotionally sophisticated.

As usual, elucidating comments are welcome.

One Track Mind

You might have noticed that my previous entry ("Not My Job") claims to have been posted on Sept. 14, but didn't actually appear until just now (Oct. 2). So really, for all of September, I made only 1 post at the beginning of the month. This is not to say for the entire month of September, nothing of interest crossed my path or crossed my mind. But rather, I hate to abandon projects and really like to finish what I start. I generally feel that if it's worth starting, it's worth finishing.

It just turned out that some things, once started, turn out to be somewhat more complicated to finish than others. The previous posting is an example of that. Not that it turned out to be super long or super complex, but between Sept. 14 and today, it acutally went through a number of incarnations before I could figure out exactly what I wanted to say. And since I really like to finish what I start, I couldn't bring myself to add other postings until that one was complete.

But now it is, and hopefully that will mean more entries for the month of October. It seems like I haven't done anything on technical topics, which seems odd since I think about technical topics almost all the time. I'll definitely need to get some of those ideas out.