Blog... Blog Exciting and New

Come Aboard, We're Expecting You!

It's come to my attention that blogging is on the outs with the yutes.

According to a study by Pew Internet & American Life Project:

Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 percent of Internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends' blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.

Lordy. I would comment on this further, but I'm already getting the urge to check Facebook to see if anyone is up for wings next week. I'm looking forward to three years from now when 140 characters is considered "in depth."


The Love Blog! Soon to be Making Another Run

Valentine's is almost upon us. I was reading something insane today on Kotaku about a game available only in Japan for the Nintendo DS, Konami's Love Plus.

From the article:

Love Plus was released in September 2009 and was unlike anything Konami had done before. Konami had developed dating games, but those titles focus on the beginning of the relationship. Love Plus gives players the pursuit, but then asks this question: You've got the girl, so now what are you going to do?

The game allows a player to talk, send emails and even "caress" her via the Nintendo DS's mic and touch screen. It's the combination of senses (audio, tactile, oral) that separates Love Plus from Konami's other dating sims. The fact that the game takes place in real time and uses tens of thousands voice expressions and over a hundred cutscenes makes Love Plus seem far more organic than anything to hit the Nintendo DS before it. The game's characters even change the way they speak to the player over the course of the game.












Always in love... 365days

My first instinct is to say, "creepy." My second instinct is also to say, "creepy." However, a sober reflection: is this really all that bad? Earlier this week I read a Daily Mail article suggesting that boredom actually lessens a person's lifespan.

More than 7,000 civil servants were studied over 25 years - and those who said they were bored were nearly 40 per cent more likely to have died by the end of study than those who did not.

I'm imagining a future filled with decrepit elderly people cozying up to their digital companions who've never aged a day; audio receptors tuned to a hoarse voice describing the minutia of the day. To go through life knowing love only as an illusion.

I think what makes real love profound, inexplicable, and powerful, is a shared, subconscious feeling of impermanence.

Yoshida Kenko defined the feeling brilliantly:

If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished,
if the crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded,
men would hardly feel the pity of things.
The beauty of life is in its impermanence.
Man lives the longest of all living things...
and even one year lived peacefully seems very long.
Yet for such as love the world,
a thousand years would fade like the dream of one night.

From, Essays in Idleness

Heavy.

Anyways, Happy Emotional Holiday!




























(Props to io9.com for the image)

-Jay