It takes advantage of SATA’s hot-swapping support and offers a very convenient and well-designed dock for your HDD. It lets you slot a HDD in and access the files on it without having to undo any screws or unplug anything. Essentially, it’s like a drive…for harddisk drives! External USB disk enclosures are not uncommon, but this really makes it so much more convenient.

I shall get one of this and never buy another DVD+R again. I can just buy more HDD and use them like floppy disks! LOL. US$47 from GeekStuff4U.

[ Via Akihabara News ]

I’ve made it no secret that I think distributing media through physical means is an archaic and rapidly shrinking trade. I sincerely believe that everything that can be digitalized will eventually be digitalized, whether you want it or not. It is a destiny that all media companies have to face and it can be an enormous opportunity for those who adapt fast.

And of course, it’s no different for anime. That’s right, it’s rant time.

Evolution

The theory of evolution has frequently been summed up by the phrase “survival of the fittest”, and indeed it is the perfect phrase to describe business models in our era of rapid technological growth. The “fittest” refers not to the strongest or the best, but the ones who can adapt and evolve to survive the next big change. Many mighty creatures had, over the millennia, fallen victim to the waves of biological revolutions in our planet’s short history, and yet the small and insignificant cockroach, whose ancestors once crawled in the shadows of dinosaurs, survives to this very day.

Today, technology has brought about such sudden but wonderful changes to our world that some of our existing frameworks which have existed for hundreds of years are starting to fail us. There will always be those who do not believe that everything they have held to be sacred truths for their lives is now change, evolving and improving for the better. Every effort will be made to build a dam around this torrent of change. At first they will succeed, but no dam can hold off the force of nature that is the power of technology. Pandora’s Box cannot be closed once it has been opened.

Okay, maybe I am getting a little too abstract here. Let us move back to anime.

Declining DVD sales in Japan

According to this ITmedia article forwarded to me by Soulshift, Japan’s DVD sales are dropping. Heck, I will agree with those people who claim that DVD sales everywhere are on the decline, even if I have yet to see conclusive evidence of it. Because it just makes sense. I for one certainly do not think that DVDs are worth their price tags, even if I do buy them for collecting purposes. I think a lot of people in the younger generations agree with me.

This is not to say that I think all media content should be free and no one should get paid for his/her works. I don’t. But I do think that the old way of doing things will not last for much longer. It has nothing to do with wanting to get things for free. I will pay for it if I have to, but the more important point is that I want it in my way, my format and at my convenience. You can air free anime on TV 24-hours a day and I won’t give a damn because I rather watch the shows I want to watch whenever I feel like watching them. Call it unreasonable if you want, but that is the kind of mindset that young people growing up with the Internet as their main source of entertainment will have. And those are the potential customers in this business.

当社のDVDが売れない最大の理由は作品の力不足だが、業界全体でもアニメDVD販売が不振だ。その原因は1つではないだろう」とGDHの内田康史副社長は言う。HDD＆DVDレコーダーのæ®åŠã‚„、YouTubeのような動画共有サイトへの違法アップロードの影響などが、DVD不振の原因として考えられるという。

The ITmedia article interviewed GDH, the parent company of GONZO, and according to them, the main reasons why DVD sales are dropping in Japan are because of the spread of HDD and DVD recorders and the popularity of video streaming sites such as YouTube. You can whine and cry all you want, but that is not going to make technology reverse itself and uninvent things that are inconvenient for your business.

And not everything can be solved through legislation either. Sure, you can waste spend money to hire a bunch of people who sit around and do nothing but send out takedown letters to YouTube, but are you then going to lobby for a law that bans people from recording TV shows with DVD recorders too? It is just not possible. And it should be noted that P2P filesharing is not even a blip on Japan’s radar. I know very few Japanese fans who have heard of, much less utilize, BitTorrent.

Old distribution model, new market paradigm

「当社がアニメDVDを海外展開ãã‚‹å ´åˆã€å­—幕や音声、パッケージなどを海外仕様に作り変えるæ‚間が必要で、どうしても日本よりも後のçºå£²ã«ãªã£ã¦ã—まう。このタイムラグのせいでビジネスチャンスを逃している面はある」

The same GDH representative goes on to say, “When we release our products overseas, it takes time to translate, dub and repackage, so the releases always end up being slower than in Japan. This time lag often results in many business opportunities being lost.”

I think this is a clear indication that they are slowly realizing the fact that the old system is showing its age. Foreign audiences are no longer contented to get slow and outdated releases. If they cannot get the series they want legally and fast, they will turn to the Internet. Illegal or not, the Internet is there and will always be there. Deal with it. The best way to go about solving this problem is obviously to cater to the global audience right from the start, instead of trying to pretend that regional markets are still clearly defined and segregated like they were twenty years ago.

The blame game

　ただ“犯人探し”に躍起になるだけでは、次のビジネスは生まれない。「æ‚代とともにメディアは移り変わるもの。最も多くの人に視聴してもらえ、お金を払ってもらえる可能性が高いメディアを試し、ビジネスを切り開く必要がある」

The best quote: “Just searching for the ‘criminals’ is not going to do any good. It will not create any new business opportunities. Media has to change with time. There is a need for us to try out formats that bring us the greatest viewership and increase our opportunities to make money. We need to open up our business.” Exactly what I want to say. GDH has created a YouTube channel called “GONZO DOOGA” and is asking YouTube not to remove content that infringes on GONZO’s copyrights as long as they can serve as promotional material.

The same article goes on to say that illegal downloading has, ironically, proven a global demand for anime. What needs to be done is not to destroy this demand by isolating potential customers and calling them pirates. The content owners need to re-examine their business strategies and find out ways to tap into that newly-generated demand using the technology that enabled it all to happen: the Internet. Indeed, the GDH representative acknowledges the fact that illegal sites that charge users monthly fees to download anime are very popular overseas and that GDH sees it as a huge business opportunity waiting to be tapped in its quest to expand globally.

Online distribution

That brings me back to Odex. Some people think that I am against Video-On-Demand. That is not true. I am an fervent supporter of digital media distribution that actually achieves its true intention—being convenient. In fact, when I first suggested VOD to Mr. Peter Go many months ago, he was unreceptive to the idea. I am happy that a small step has now been taken in that direction, but it is really small indeed. And the way Odex has sequenced its actions certainly has not helped to bring about much enthusiasm for the minute change.

I mean, it simply makes no business sense to assume that the tech-savvy downloaders are an insignificant minority, provoke them into a frenzy, and then roll out a service that is targeted right at the very same group of people while pretending nothing happened. But of course the people at Odex know what they are doing because they did their market research, right? I sure hope they do.

Conclusions

It doesn’t matter how good DVD sales were in the past. It doesn’t matter how well the system used to work. I see only the future and I think the future will only get brighter for anime. But not for DVDs. Filesharing will not kill anything that is really important and has real purposes, it is simply a new paradigm that will serve to weed out the unevolved dinosaurs that fed on past inefficiencies in the system and profited disproportionately off the physical bottlenecks of old technology that no longer exist. It may make sense for most people to pay for movies on DVDs today, but a new system replacing it will soon emerge to reward creativity in a new and better way, just as a different incentive system used to exist before the invention of the video cassette.

The ones who get to the new winning formula first will reap the most benefits. And I’m glad to learn that the Japanese studios are at least putting some thought into this. Perhaps one day we will pay $30 a month to download and watch all the anime series we want. A guy can dream…

They only printed a selected few of the questions while the full set of hundred is included on a CD-ROM that comes with the magazine.

Continue reading for the printed questions and translations.

1. お名前と、もしあるならば別の呼び名。そしてその由来をæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
こんにちは、DarkMirageと申しまãã€‚小学校のごろオンラインゲームを始めたæ‚に作ったんでãã€‚たまたま二つの英語単語で作り出しただけで、意味はありません。

Please tell us your nickname and its origin.
Hi, my nickname is DarkMirage. I made it up for an online game back in primary school. It’s just a combination of two words and has no special meaning.

2. 年齢をæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
１８歳。

What is your age?
18 years old.

3. どこにお住まいでãã‹ï¼Ÿ
シンガポール。

Where do you live?
Singapore.

4. 職業についてæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
高校生。

What’s your occupation?
High school student.

5. 身長は？
１８１センチ。

Your height?
181cm. (I realized that I overestimated it by 2cm.)

6. 好きな食べ物をæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
刺身。

What’s your favourite food?
Sashimi.

7. 嫌いな食べ物はなんでãã‹ï¼Ÿ
にんじん、ブロッコリ。

What food do you hate?
Carrots and broccoli.

8. なにか特技があればæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
耳を動かãã“と、それとジャッグル。

Do you possess any special talents?
I can wriggle my ears and also juggle.

9. 自分を動物にたとえるなら、なんでãã‹ã€‚
猫かな、éã‹ã§æ€ ã‘者。

What animal would you compare yourself to?
Probably a cat. I’m quiet and lazy.

10. 自分をオタクだと思いまãã‹ï¼Ÿ
はい、オタクでãã€‚

Are you an otaku?
Yes, I am.

11. あなたにとってのヒーローまたはヒロインは誰でãã‹ã€‚
科学者のスティーヴン・ホーキング。

Who is your hero/heroine?
The physicist Stephen Hawking.

12. 尊敬している人は？
元アメリカ大統領å€è£œã‚¢ãƒ«ãƒ»ã‚´ã‚¢ã€‚

Who do you respect?
Former American presidential candidate Al Gore.

15. 座右の銘は？
“God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world.”

What’s your personal motto?
“God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world.”

21. 理想のガールフレンドってどんな人でãã‹ï¼Ÿï¼ˆå®Ÿåœ¨ã®å½¼å¥³ã¯åˆ¥ã«ã—て）
ToHeart2のタマ姉みたいのがいいｗｗｗ　冗談は別として、趣味が合うのは一番大切だと思いまãã€‚明るくて大人っぽいのもプラスでãâ€¦â€¦ã£ã¦ã‚„っぱりタマ姉かな。(笑）

Describe your ideal girlfriend. (Not your current girlfriend.)
I want someone like ToHeart2’s Tama-nee! Jokes aside, I guess having someone with compatible interests is quite important. Cheerful and mature would be huge pluses too…… Wait I guess that is Tama-nee after all. LOL.

30. 好きなアニメ作品についてæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱、エヴァンゲリオン、ナデシコ、星界の戦旗、気まぐれオレンジロード。

What anime titles do you like?
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Evangelion, Nadesico, Banner of the Stars and Kimagure Orange Road.

54. 知っている、または好きな日本の単語をæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
神無月。

Please tell us your favourite Japanese word.
Kannadzuki.

59. Ramblings of DarkMirageを簡単に紹介してください。
最初は自分を話題にして書いてたブログだったが、二年前からアニメやアキバ系のサイトに変更しました。ビジターはアメリカから一番多い、それからシンガポールと日本。

Please introduce us to “Ramblings of DarkMirage”.
It started off as a random blog about my daily life but slowly transformed into an anime related site two years ago. Most visitors come from America, followed by Singapore and Japan.

66. いま、注目に値ãã‚‹ã‚¢ãƒ‹ãƒ¡ä½œå“ã‚’æŒã’てください。
「コードギアス」……って言うかもう皆観てまãã­ã€‚じゃ、「京四郎と永遠の空」かな。

What series should people look out for now?
“Code Geass”……but I guess everyone’s already watching that. “Kyoushirou to Towa no Sora” then.

69. アニメで、いちばん好きなシーンについてæ•ãˆã¦ãã ã•ã„。
「涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱」の第１２話で、ハルヒが「God knows…」を歌ってるところが大好きでãã€‚

What’s your favourite anime scene?
The scene in episode 12 of “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” where Haruhi sang “God knows…”.

79. 「アニメオタク」と「アニメファン」の違いとは、どういったことだと思いまãã‹ã€‚
あるレãƒãƒ«ã«é”成ãã‚‹ã¨ã€ã‚¢ãƒ‹ãƒ¡ãƒ•ã‚¡ãƒ³ã¯ã‚¢ãƒ‹ãƒ¡ã‚ªã‚¿ã‚¯ã«é€²åŒ–しまãã€‚ポケットモンスターみたいに。

What do you think is the difference between an anime otaku and an anime fan?
Upon reaching a certain level, anime fan evolves into anime otaku. Just like in Pokemon.

80. サイトへのクレームなどもありまãï¼Ÿ
最初はなれなくてãã”く気にしたんでããŒã€ä»Šã¯ç„¡è¦–しまãã€‚

Do you get complaints about your site?
Yes, I was quite bothered by them at first, but now I ignore them. (Speaking of which, Doremi just sent me an e-mail a few days ago…)

85. 尊敬している、字幕職人っていまãã‹ã€‚
Anime-KeepのDeathWolf。

Do you respect any fansubbers?
DeathWolf from Anime-Keep.

88. オススメのYouTube動画ってありまãï¼Ÿ
「Ask A Ninja」というシリーズ。まぁ、英語でãã‘どね。

Do you have any YouTube videos to recommend?
The “Ask A Ninja” series, but it’s in English.

92. 一番人気があるアニメサイトといえば？
darkmirage.com…というのは嘘でãã€‚多分animenewsnetwork.comだと思いまãã€‚

What’s the most popular anime site (in English)?
darkmirage.com… Just kidding. Uh, animenewsnetwork.com I guess.

93. マジコンって知ってまãï¼Ÿã€€ä½¿ã£ãŸã“とありまãï¼Ÿ
知ってまããŒã€DSは持っていません。PSPでカスタムファームウエアと使ってまãã‘ど。

Do you know what’s a Magicom? Have you used one before?
I know what it is, but I do not own a DS. I do use homebrew software on my PSP, though.

97. ひとことでいうと、アニメはあなたにとってナニ？
生き方でãã€‚

How would you describe anime in one phrase?
It’s a way of life.

100. 日本の読者にメッセージお願いしまãã€‚
いつかアキバで会おう！

Please end off with a message for the Japanese readers.
May we meet in Akiba someday!

You can view the rest of the questions that came with the CD-ROM here.

Alternatively, you can purchase the magazine itself from Amazon JP. The CD-ROM contains a few pictures of me which I shall not post here. :P

P.S. I have been without Internet access for the past few days due to a series of incidents. So yeah, I’m still alive.

Before Akismet was added to WordPress as a default plugin, I manually moderated all comments. Those were the days when I was lucky to get a single comment for any post. After that Akismet took over and it worked fine for a while. I would still go through all the spam comments to check for false positives but at least Akismet ensured that comments from trusted sources (well, most of them anyway) appeared immediately without having to wait for my moderation.

Staring into the face of evil

Well, recently the increasing spam volume has made it impossible for me to check through them for valid comments. I’ve been getting nearly 1000 spam comments a day and I’m very, very certain that some of your comments have been eaten up by Akismet as false positives in the process.

So I have finally implemented an image verification system for commenting. I hate image verification systems, especially since half the time I can’t tell apart a capital “i” from a lower case “L”. But it’s the lesser of the many evils. An e-mail verification system is even more annoying, Akismet eats comments like Cookie Monster eats cookies and a forced registration policy will just turn lazy people like me off.

The good thing is that if you register an account and remain logged in, you won’t have to enter a security code when commenting. Hurray!

Oh well, hopefully this is enough to stop the spamage. Please tell me if you find any bugs with the verification system.

Image from Akiba-blog

From Akiba-blog: Enter 「ツンデレ☆りなっくãã€ or “Tsundere Linux”, a book that supposedly teaches you about the famous open source operating system in a totally moélicious manner. It even has a cute abbreviation もえりな (moerina).

Image from Akiba-blog

The book apparently covers various topics such as getting cheap second hand computers, explanations of the various distros and installation procedure for Debian, Firefox and 2ch browser. And a tsundere girl. Don’t forget the tsundere girl.

They totally need to make one of these for Cisco networking, the most goddamn boring topic in the world.

The Long Tail is a book by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and the person who first coined the phrase, that explores how the theory can be applied in so many different aspects of the world today, from YouTube to retail marketing.

Before we move on to my thoughts, I shall explain the concept of a Long Tail. Here’s a primitive graph I drew with the pen tool in Photoshop that shows the relationship of sales with respect to popularity of products.

Figure 1

Popularity is sorted by rankings, with the most popular starting with “1” on the left. As you can see from Figure 1, the most popular items sell significantly better than the less popular items. (Well, duh!)

The area shaded yellow in Figure 1 contains products that a brick-and-mortar retailer will stock. It makes sense to stock only the most popular items so as to maximize profit. CD shops can only stock a limited number of titles because they have a limited amount of display space. Cinemas can only screen the latest Hollywood hits because old and independent films do not get enough audience to pay for the limited number of screens and timeslots.

But what if an online service like RealOne’s Rhapsody can offer as many songs as they can license, all at the same time? We’ll get a graph that looks like this:

Figure 2

It’s still the same graph, just extended further. Online retailers are not restricted by the traditional retail bottlenecks. Having 100 million songs costs only slightly more than having 1 million songs in a digital library, and digital storage is only going to get cheaper.

When online retailers increase the variety of products they offer, they notice an interesting trend: the popular items still sell better, but even the least popular item sells at least a few units.

In traditional retail, an item needs to sell a predetermined amount per time period or else it will be unprofitable due to the overhead costs of maintenance and the potential revenue you are sacrificing by giving shelf space to a less popular item.

In online retail, it doesn’t matter. An item is profitable as long as it sells one or two copies. The cost of maintaining a huge catalogue online is so low that the cost of including more items in your offerings is virtually zero. You don’t have limited shelf space, you don’t need to hire more workers to maintain a bigger shop and you don’t need a bigger warehouse. Hard disks are getting cheaper by the second.

When you have such an enormous catalogue, the items at the bottom of the popularity list are really unpopular, to the point of selling one copy every year perhaps. But even then, you still make a profit off it because it costs you nothing to offer the product. For every day a CD sits unsold on your physical shelves, it lowers your overall profit margin. But a 10 megabyte song left unsold in your terabyte-size music catalogue costs you nothing to offer. In fact, when it does sell, even if it’s just one single download, you automatically make a profit off it.

The idea of the Long Tail is that instead of making millions of dollars for each item near the top of the popularity rankings, you can make one dollar each from a million items at the bottom of list, something that was not possible before the Internet due to the bottlenecks associated with physical retail.

Tyranny of the Mediocre

The area that is most affected by the Long Tail revolution is the entertainment industry. In the days before the Internet and even now, Hollywood’s business formula has always been to create mass-appealing works. These are not the best movies in any sense of the word, but they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everyone watches Hollywood movies not because they are that person’s favourite movies but because those are the only movies available.

Each Hollywood movie must sell a set number of tickets or it will be unprofitable and therefore a failure, therefore each movie was created with the Average Joe in mind. If you are a film critic seeking higher forms of artistic expressions, well too bad for you because you aren’t part of the majority and therefore insignificant in terms of overall profits. Independent films may be better in terms of artistic merits, levels of creativity or entertainment value, but they will never capture enough of the average audience to find a place in the cinemas.

Let’s face it, everyone has different tastes. A movie that I think is the best movie in the world may not be so for 90% of the world. People differ so much that it’s simply easier and more profitable for Hollywood to create one single mediocre movie that appeals equally to everyone instead of a million extraordinary movies that each appeals greatly to one or two person. When the only movies available to the average consumer are Hollywood movies, he or she will end up watching Hollywood movies, simply because there is no other choice. It is the tyranny of mediocrity.

Internet is changing all that. A video that involves in-jokes about a specific interest such as anime can get a few thousand hits on YouTube. To an anime fan, that video targeted at people who share the same interests as him can be a whole lot more meaningful than a Hollywood movie targeted at no one in particular. To him, that video might just be the best video in the world, even though it’s FAAAAR from a Hollywood movie in terms of popularity.

But there are millions of little videos just like this, targeted at millions of differing interests shared by millions of different communities. Each video, viewed by only a few to a few thousand people, is just a small part of the Long Tail, but together that Long Tail reaches a larger audience than the biggest Hollywood movies. Such a long tail cannot survive in the traditional market because distribution used to be limited by physical distances.

If there are only ten fans of Movie Y in the whole of Country X, then there’s no point for a shop to stock Movie Y DVDs because the potential customers are too few and too dispersed for the shop to make a profit off it. However on the Internet, all the tens of fans of each country are connected to one another by near-instant digital communication. An online retailer can sell 10 DVDs of Movie Y to 10 fans from each country and still make a profit off it, even if less than 0.00000001% of the world has even heard of Movie Y.

And if the movie is stored and sold digitally, then it costs next to nothing for the store to stock it. And since in such a system an independent film costs just as much to distribute as a Hollywood movie, there is no reason not to offer both. The Hollywood movie will still sell a few thousand times more copies, but there is no reason not earn a little more profit by offering an independent film too, or any movies you can get your hands on for that matter. Unlike running a cinema, selling an independent film online is not depriving you of a chance to sell ANOTHER Hollywood movie and thus earn more profit. You can afford to stock and sell them all.

And when you offer more choices, people will choose them. An estimated 40% of Amazon’s profits come from books that even the largest brick-and-mortar book stores in the world cannot afford to stock simply because they are too far into the Long Tail. Of the tens of thousands of CDs released every year, a CD store can probably afford to stock only a few hundred of the most popular titles, but ALL of them can be purchased online. And people do buy them. The untapped potential of the Long Tail that stretches to infinity is just beginning to show itself.

The Long Tail is NOT Junk

It is a common misconception for people to think that the the Long Tail consists of nothing but junk and those items are unpopular because they are bad. That is probably true for some of them, but the reality is that the Long Tail consists of both ends of the spectrum. For example, compare a 4″ portable TV, a 32″ TV and a 60″ plasma TV. Which one is going to accumulate the highest number of sales?

My bet is on the 32″ LCD. The 4″ and 60″ do not sell as well not because they are bad or useless but because they have more specific targets. Not everything in the Long Tail is bad, just niche.

Beyond Retail

The Long Tail is not just an economic theory, its social implications are also far-reaching.

So… what has this theory got to do with you, a reader of my little blog? Well the truth is that by reading this blog, you are part of a Long Tail: The Long Tail of Blogs.

There used to be a few publications read by millions of people each, now there are millions of blogs read by a few people each. My blog is one of them. The Chris Anderson calls this the “democratization” of mass media and I agree.

It doesn’t matter whether you think that those millions of blogs are worthless compared to professionally made publications. A majority of them are probably trash if you judge them by journalistic merits, that is the truth. But at the same time, those blogs hold unique meanings to their readers that a publication targeted at the masses can never hope to achieve.

A blog about anime is a lot more meaningful to me than an entertainment magazine that occasionally has one page on anime. A blog about Gundam is a lot more meaningful to a Gundam fan than an anime magazine that occasionally has some articles about Gundam. There is no such thing as a niche too small for the Internet.

Indeed, anime itself is part of the Long Tail niche and it received a huge boost from the Internet. Before the Internet, only the most mainstream of anime can hope to ever reach an audience beyond Japan. People did not watch anime simply because they were never given a chance to try it. With the Internet, people are now given to chance (albeit illegally) to watch anime that they would never have otherwise watched and more and more of them find that they like it. Anime is still a niche compared to mainstream entertainment, but now it’s a profitable one for American companies.

In Other Words…

In traditional media, things that are mainstream (popular) are given more airtime, more shelf space, more advertisements and more of everything simply because they are deemed to be more likely to succeed. And if they do eventually succeed, they become even more mainstream. Similarly, things that are niche are not given any attention by the media distributors and these things can never hope to raise out of their niche status.

With the Internet, everything is given equal opportunity to succeed and you find that surprisingly some things that were classified as niche do a lot better than expected.

A really good Hollywood movie and a really good anime movie both cost nothing to download from BitTorrent. A person who has never watched these two movies can download them both with equal ease and, after viewing them, decide on which one he/she likes better. Out of a 100 people, perhaps 20 will end up preferring the anime and watch anime over Hollywood next time. I am one of them.

In the old model of media distribution, the executives decide that the anime movie is not even worth releasing on DVD and you don’t even get to make that comparison. Out of a 100 people, 100 of them will watch Hollywood movies next time simply because they know nothing better. You as the consumer do not get to make the first decision.

And that is why Chris Anderson calls it the “democratization” of media: The consumers are taking back our right to watch what we want to watch and not what the companies THINK we want to watch.

So really, anime fans and companies in America owe a lot to online piracy for breaking down the vicious cycle found in traditional media distribution.

The Problem of Diversity

One huge problem with this trend is that people are watching and reading more and more diverse topics. Thirty years ago, you would have been watching the same TV channels, listening to the same radio stations and watching the same movies in the same cinema as everyone else in the neighbourhood simply because there was no other choice.

Today, you can instead surf the net, rent some movies through Netflix, play a MMORPG, watch a video on YouTube, listen to a podcast on an obscure topic or watch one of the hundreds of niche and diversified channels available on cable.

This means that a teenager of today’s generation has less interests in common with his or her neighbours than one from any generations in the history of mankind. Only two people in my class watch the same anime I do. No one plays the games I play (and I’m not even talking about eroge). I bet no one has read “The Long Tail” besides me. Thanks to the Internet, people can spend their time on what they are really interested in. But at the same time, we lost the common topics needed for small talks and social interactions in real-life. As popular as anime is, if you are an anime fan living in a small town of a few hundred you are likely to be alone.

That is why many have turned online and why you are reading my blog. Instead of trying to find common topics with the people around us, we can instead find people online who already have the same interests as us. Arguably, this is diluting social bonds in the modern world.

The Paradox of Diversity

But is it really a problem?

People used to organize themselves based on physical proximity. We used to associate ourselves with our town, our city and our nation. A nation of people with similar culture bonds together, often with the encouragement of shared xenophobia.

Over a century ago, an East Asian was unlikely to have much in common with an European, whether in terms of interests, life style or mindset. The physical distance between places prevented people from sharing their ideas with anyone other than their neighbours. Barring the rich, the scientists and the politicians, no one knew what was really going on in other countries and what the thinkings of people of other nations were really like. This set the stage for the two World Wars, where the national leaders fully exploited the ignorance and xenophobia of their people and their soldiers.

The diversity brought about by the Internet is actually unifying the world, as counter-intuitive as it may sound. Fifty years ago, the only things my grandparents in China knew about America was that it supported the Nationalist enemy and fought against China in the Korean War, in other words it wasn’t exactly what you call a good impression. My grandmother had not met any Americans before in real-life until late into her seventies. By diluting the traditional bonds we share with our neighbours, the Internet is at the same time allowing us to form new bonds with people on the other side of the planet, something that my grandparents could not do just fifty years ago.

I have chatted with anime fans from America, Finland, China, Japan and Australia and found that lot of them were nice people just like most people I meet in real-life. I also read about the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution and the Nanking Massacre. Twenty years ago, I could only have done the latter and I would have formed my opinions (extremely negative ones no doubt) about those countries based on that alone. It’s no wonder that in the last century, people hated each other so much that they fought two World Wars over it. Those people never had a chance to understand each other.

Physical bonds will always be there. No matter how advance the Internet becomes, we will always need to maintain physical relationships for a variety of reasons. But the Internet is creating a whole new world by allowing us to communicate and to understand one another despite our physical distances. Not only does it give us the means to communicate, it provides us with the countless common topics we can talk about. Thanks to our common and often niche interests, I can get to know a person on the other side of the planet so well that it would have make no difference even if he lived next door to me.

Perhaps when everyone gets on the Internet, we may someday finally have world peace.

Of course, I can foresee a few possible problems with my idealistic dream. For example, the world could end up being redivided into countries with Internet access (and thus eventually have similar culture and values) and countries without (outside the global culture sharing network). Also, the Internet world, while unrestrained by physical distance, is still currently fragmented by language barriers. It is entirely possible for geo-political influences to be redivided into a few language blocs, perhaps as few as just two: English and Mandarin, after the rest gets assimilated as Internet progresses.

But eventually, whether it takes three hundred or three thousand years, the Internet will unite mankind. You can quote me on that.

Wow. 2800 words. That was a long rant… 眠いよ　＿|ï¿£|O

1. Intel Core Duo
2. Less than 2.5 kg
3. Glossy widescreen
4. Well-cooled
5. Non-integrated graphics maybe…

After collecting handouts from every major brand name except Dell and HP (…seriously), I was torn between Asus and Samsung. Both are 15.4 inch WXGA and 80 gb HDD. The Asus one is slightly heavier than my requirement but has dedicated graphics (X1400 Radeon if I remember correctly). The Samsung one is nearly 300 SGD cheaper and weighs only 2.48 kg, but has 512mb of RAM instead of 1gig, and Intel GMA 950 graphics.

I couldn’t decide, so the Samsung salesperson threw in a free upgrade to 1gig RAM (which sealed the deal) and a 100gb USB external harddrive (which I didn’t really care for). And now I’m the proud owner of a Intel Core Duo Samsung X60. Weee.

It’s very cool and quiet, which is probably not possible on a laptop with dedicated graphics. I probably won’t be using it for games anyway. (At least not the ones that require 3D acceleration… if you know what I mean. *cough*)

The full specs are:

• Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.66 GHz)
• 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 80GB 5400RPM HDD
• DVD-RAM drive
• 15.4 inch TFT WXGA
• SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, xD reader
• Bluetooth, Wi-fi a/b/g, Firewire, VGA-out, S-video out

It’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance difference when multi-tasking as compared to my AMD-64 3500 with 2gig RAM desktop. Of course, I don’t think I’ll be running World of Warcraft on it…

Speaking of which…

Zephiris, lvl 60 Night Elf Rogue

Epic kitties are t3h win! Sadly, I’m only half-equiped with Shadowcraft and my mainhand sword is a lvl 51 quest reward. Sigh… Well that’s one two New Year resolutions done…

More blogging later.

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil – but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case – or should we say tank – also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.

Here is some Christmas Day good news for you! IT Media has announced some details on the Blu-Ray region coding and it holds a nice surprise. Japan, North America, and East Asia will all be sharing one region code. This potentially means that American gamers will be able to import Japanese PS3 Blu-Ray games, and will definately be able to import Japanese Blu-Ray Anime/Movie titles without any hassle. Europe unfortunately will be sharing a region code with Africa so likely not much cross-gaming there. Sorry Europe, looks like you will be getting the gaming bone again. Oh and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from all of us here at GR!

Depending on their definition of “East Asia”, this could be a good thing for Singapore. ^^ No need for modchips for play any import PS3 games that matter. Europe, which has the same DVD region code as Japan, has been shafted this time round.

I can’t seem to find the original source article on IT Media, but if this is true, it could seal the deal for PS3. (Well, except in Europe…)

I was most impressed with Mr. Weskamp’s work on using Flash to present complex data graphically. His Social Circles project uses circles and lines to represent activities within a mailing list, allowing you to very easily visualize who in replies to who and who talks the most. The Newsmap is also a very impressive program that generates a colour-coded table based on Google News feeds and resizes different cells according to the importance of the news topic. Thus, the user is able to compare how different countries (based on the selection available on Google News) place different importance on different types of news. The algorithm used to resize the cells is very advanced. His latest work, the Flickr Graph is also quite neat. His presentation was the only one that I really enjoyed. Oh yeah, he studied in Tokyo and is currently living in there.

The live demo of Macromedia Flex during the keynote speech was pretty intriguing too. The use of “states” instead of a timeline with keyframe makes it much better for application development. Damn, almost everything uses XML to parse data and provide API for 3rd party applications these days.

It appears that Macromedia is quite serious about making Flash an all-purpose tool for interactive applications and user interfaces…but I think they need to implement full 3D rendering support for that to happen. They are also pushing Flash Lite quite strongly but I’ve yet to see a fully working commercial Flash Lite application…even though my phone supports it.

One more day tomorrow…