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Sayonara!
294 years ago
The bags are packed, the gadgets are charged, and tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off for the 10-hour flight to Japan! The first few days will be spent shooting Mahalo Daily episodes (both at Tokyo Game Show and around the city), and then it’ll be vacation time! I’m not sure how much I’ll be online, so this will probably be the last post for the next ten days or so.
Some of you may be asking: “Mahalo Daily? Way to get that out on time, Veronica!” Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s actually the Japan trip that’s causing most of the delay! We wanted to have a good amount of episodes under our belts before I went away, so look for it soon.
Off to bed now, thanks again to everyone who gave me great travel advice! Arigato!
Soon to be lost in translation
464 years ago
I’m going to Japan with Ryan at the end of September for Tokyo Game Show (as well as vacation) and I’m lucky to have been briefed on the nefarious Butt Biting Bug. Who knew this was such a problem in the streets of Japan?
Anyhow, what I’d really like are some recommendations on fun things do in in Tokyo, or places to visit in nearby areas. I’m going to be there for 10 days, so a bit of traveling isn’t out of the question, but I need to start making plans for places to stay. I’ve watched enough episodes of No Reservations to know that all the best places to visit are off the beaten path, but at the same time I don’t know any Japanese (time to start studying).
Life and death on the Internet
35I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationships that we form online, and how they affect our lives. We interact with hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of people online everyday, but rarely do you know more about a person than a first name, handle, or icon. Regardless, oftentimes an emotional attachment is made (for better or for worse) because you know someone through their opinions and words. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for some time, but I don’t know if I can find the right words to express how I feel on the matter, so stick with me.
This past month, two people whom I knew through online communities passed away. The first was Bruce Galloway, a member of my guild. He fell sick very suddenly, and the entire guild banded together to support him. It was a wonderful thing to see at the time, and when he passed away we shared in our grief together. Only a few of us had actually met him in person, but the feelings of sadness and loss were no less painful because of that.
The second person was Ben High, a listener and contributor to ExtraLife Radio, a podcast that I’ve listened to for a long time. He had a great segment that he would send in to those guys almost every week where he would showcase a new indie band. He was only 19, and he also died very suddenly and unexpectedly. When I learned about it, it broke my heart to think that someone so young and with so much potential was gone.
And when James Kim, my good friend and coworker at CNET, passed away this last December it was astonishing to see the outpouring of support from the online community. As the Internet becomes such so intertwined with our daily lives, it seems like we find new ways to share emotion about the loss of someone important to all of us. When someone dies in a community they come together for the wake, to grieve, to discuss the person’s life and accomplishment. Online we do the same thing, but we’re oftentimes separated from one another by thousands of miles.
I’m not really sure what the point of this post was. The internet is a wonderful way to meet new people, but at the same time the reality often hits that there are real people on the other side of the screen who can get sick, or have an accident, or die. Trying to understand how to deal with the feelings of losing someone you know but have never actually met is a task that we’re all going to have to become more familiar with as time goes on, and as we become ever more absorbed in the online world.
To link to Digg, or not?
23I just did something that gave me a moment of moral pause – I posted a link to Twitter to a Digg article that I myself submitted from the Crave blog. I wondered immediately after I did it that maybe I should have just linked directly to the Crave article itself — and I’m not even going to start wrapping my head around about how meta it is to twitter an article about Twitter.
Do you see the oddness in that? By using Digg as the way point, I might be taking initial traffic away from the Crave site, but with the hopes that eventually it will garner far more traffic in the long run (if, in fact, it gets dugg). It’s like web traffic gambling! Does this break blogging etiquette? Is there a set of unspoken linking rules? When I was on BOL, we would always try to credit both the original source article, as well as the proxy (Digg, Slashdot, Techmeme, etc). I guess if you credit as many sources as possible, there’s less of a chance that you’re upsetting someone along the way.