I recently renewed my subscription with an online DVD rental service, which of course is great for having a look at movies I wouldn’t normally buy, or in this case, watch. But I did enjoy the Japanese pop-rock-melodrama anime, NANA, a couple of years back, so I got this to validate my theory about modern Japanese films (simply, that they suck).

What I received was a DVD so bad, I suspect it’s a fake. No studio logos upon startup, it just goes straight to an ugly static image that lets you play the movie, and choose between Chinese, English, and Malay subtitles. I’m pretty sure that’s the order in which they make the most to the least sense, because the English ones read like they were babelfished from the Chinese ones, and the Malay ones were probably completely made up. The video quality is also terrible, but that could just be a Japanese shot-on-video thing.

I wanted to go onto the rental website and leave a comment on this DVD but their primitive system doesn’t allow for that kind of customer interaction. I’ll give them a couple more months, but if I have anymore bad experiences, I’ll likely be switching to VideoEzy.com.sg which has a rating system to almost make up for its smaller selection. If anyone currently uses VideoEzy, I’d love to hear about your experience.

*This post is really just an excuse to try out the new Skitch screen-capture/sharing tool from Plasq, which is finally open to public beta testing!

What Is It? · Twitter is sort of an extended low-speed low-intensity bulletin board. Some people almost exclusively react to others’ tweets, some contribute mostly fresh little nuggets of wit or wisdom. A lot of tweets are just a link with a few words of commentary.
I personally use it to post little observations or cool links or minor snarks that don’t merit a blog entry.

If you could only choose one, would you rather have free calls to any stranger in the world, or pay to call your friends? That’s really how big the gap between them is, and how hard it’ll be for Jaiku to catch up. That said, one of the joys of Jaiku for me has been the ability to update constantly, about silly and minor things, without having to feel guilty about causing several phones to beep in the middle of important meetings. That’s really the chief cause of my Twitter neglect. Guilt for being too noisy. On Jaiku it feels good to speak freely, and get away from being superconnected. I’ve also met a number of similarly-geeky strangers on Jaiku through the comments feature, but then I find myself asking if that was the point – essentially the question has always been the same: What Is Twitter For, Exactly?

Is it vanity blogging on a micro scale, eg. “Picking up lunch, hope it’s tasty!” directed to no one in particular? Is it a tool for letting friends know when something of interest comes up? Or following strangers/celebrities just to have one more stream of online information? I know it’s often all these things, but then, should it be? When all your messages are sent out to an unknown number of people, at least one of those uses is going to conflict with another.

I’m thinking now that I might just try an experiment with Twitter, and update it with the freedom and frequency that I have been doing with Jaiku. Putting the guilt aside, just to say what I want whenever I want, and to have it come up on the front page of my blog. It might get annoying, it might lead all my friends put me on silent. It might lead me to see that it’s pointless, and give me back a few minutes each day. It could motivate me to do different things, help me to see events for the linear progressions that they are, or just get me to tell more interesting stories while I’m at it, strictly out of some sense of conscience.

I’ve set my Twitter account to public mode now, in anticipation of moving over completely, but the Jaiku info above will stay for a little while longer, until I sort this completely asinine predicament out for my neurotic self.

PS: If you’re on a Mac and using Twitterific, ditch it. Thwirl (written in Adobe AIR) is much, much better.

Being based in Singapore, with her friend in New York City, it’s tentatively titled “little dot:big apple”. Out of sheer luck, many of these uncoordinated photo pairings have resulted in a kind of visual and contextual symmetry that either reveals how alike the two girls think, or how little difference exists between our modern lives, regardless of how far apart we are.