My New York Piggy

My mturk money dropped from $145 because I bought the Sweeney Todd DVD and other stuff. But there are videojug hits again, and there are nearly 30,000 hits to choose from so I have no doubt I can get my balance up again.

Crushing Someone on the Nets

It was 1991, my friend Jojo just turned 32 and discovered the internets for the first time. Specifically, Match.com We were necessarily skeptical but he met Ruud, who didn’t turn out to be a bogeyman. After a few real time dates, they ended up with two puppies and a hybrid car. Hurrah, internets.

That was in 1991. Nearly 20 years later, the internets became slightly freakier.

I can’t imagine how Jojo would even begin his search for true love today. Facebook, Multiply, blogs — everything is so out there and everyone is connected. Of course, friending someone who is a friend of a friend is infinitely safer than chatting up a total stranger, but I remember how Jojo literally found the strength to reach out because of his relative anonymity. The internets freed him from the bounds of friendship and his old self and left him able to reinvent and rediscover himself.

He had agonized over the then new issue of anonymity v. trust v. personal safety. He wanted to establish a connection with his new faceless stranger friends but he was aware that if he was being coy, then the other person could be concealing so much more. Oh, the juggling act of privacy and friending.

Fast forward to 2008 and we discover Crush or Flush. Chatting through text or YM, without the other person having to find out where you are. It’s another social networking site that lets people discover other people through their interests and social demographics. If you like someone, you Crush them. If they like you back, they Crush you and you end up with a Mutual Crush. (Awww, high school prom, anyone?)

The important difference is that Crush or Flush comes with its own “telephone operator” to block unwanted messages. If you want to drop someone, you Flush them, and they will never know that they got flushed because they don’t have your real digits. As the site promises:

If someone harasses you or causes a problem, we will block his number and that person will permanently disappear. No one every gets your e-mail address, real name, or cell phone number – they always remain private.

I guess people can always agree to be more open and truthful as the relationship develops but at least it’s a safeguard against freaky people who reveal their icky quirks too early. Me, I’m a believer in facetime and long relationships where you goad the other person into showing their worst, but yes, sometimes, even I wish for an intermediary to tell the other person, No.

Yearblook, Really?

There’s a new site that purports “to find the best blog post of each day” which I discovered through Mturk. It calls itself Yearblook, an unfortunate name which brings to mind words like “sludge” and “slime” and “icky things that you better not step on, otherwise you’ll find yourself dragged down to the bottom.”

It’s another one of those vote-driven sites where readers can vote on submitted posts. No registration required, so I don’t know how they will handle the multiple clicks generated by a user on a proxy server. (Well, they probably got that covered. I tried voting twice on a post just to see if I can and the site wouldn’t let me. Besides, according to their site, they use a “secret algorithm.” )

Still, Yearblook seems a lot like Digg, the difference being that it intends to publish the collection after a year.

Yearblook, is a contest to find the best blog posts. The best post each day will be compiled into a book (a real, printed book) that is a record of the year in blogs. The Yearblook will be a history of the previous year, as seen through the minds and keyboards of the blogosphere.

To which I am necessarily skeptical. Publication works for PostSecret because it’s very visual and not all postcards are housed on the site. The book is often the only record and it makes for a good coffee table book.

But the best and most revealing personal blog posts are those that are usually flocked and they are flocked for a reason: because the blogger wants to share only with a limited few.

On the other hand, if it isn’t a personal post, then it’s probably available on the internets somewhere. I already keep track of the blogs I want to read, and the posts I want to remember using delicious and Google reader and other blog aggregators. Do I necessarily want a capsule of last year to take up precious space on my limited shelves? Meh. Last year is already on the internets. I can just pull down the site or its cached file without having to get my hands dusty.

Besides, think of the trees that will have to give up their lives for this project. Is it worth killing them for this?

I do miss some lost posts though. The old snarky Television Without Pity (TWOP) reviews, for one thing, before they went all corporate and lost their bite. But I find that my daily reading is too full now to lost sleep over lost posts. There’s always something new up at Gawker and it’s not like I’ve gone through all of Slate yet. Which brings us to another issue: your blogosphere may vary. Your best posts may not be my best posts.

So my prediction for Yearblook: they will end up like my high school yearbook. People posed for studio shots but the kids in charge of putting the yearbook together graduated or moved on or lost in touch with each other or stained the photos with ink and the yearbook just never got published. But that’s okay because we had already moved on.

Thailand

Went off the grid for a while because I went to . . . Bangkok!

Went to see the temples of Ayutthaya

met Buddha

Bought fruits at the floating market

Watched a snake charmer work his magic

And saw elephants.

Apparently, I forgot to take pictures of all the Thai food and shopping places but I did a lot of that too.