eveninghawk’s links

I checked my email this morning and noticed that rts updated. Joy! More of Part 3 for me. Seriously, I know the comic doesn’t update regularly, but I like it so much that I could care less. I’m just happy to get more.

An interesting board game was mentioned over at Boing Boing, which is pretty neat. It has me thinking about boardgames I have played and loved, and I am sure that will lead to a post later. Why? This would be because a friend has had me thinking of things that make me happy. Board games, silly as they may seem, can make me happy. Besides, I like silliness.

I also stumbled back across a Royksopp CD yesterday, and have been listening to it on my MP3 player, meaning I can walk around and do the laundry while jamming. I’ve been particularly enjoying the tune eple. I think it’s worth checking out, as is Poor Leno (and be sure to check out the Poor Leno video).

Social censorship was one of the topics that came up today over at Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine. This is an interesting twist in a puzzle of me rarely being able to connect to some interesting websites.

Living in China, there are certain things that I take as fact about the Internet:

• I cannot access geocities
• I cannot access angelfire
• I cannot access Justin Hall’s stuff online
• I cannot access tripod sites
• I cannot access blogspot blogs
• I used to be able to get around this by using google’s cache, but this no longer works

It surprises me since some Chinese free blogging community services have popped up over the past bit. Also, contrary to popular belief, porn and illicit drug information is extremely accessible from China, which only confuses me. Also, what is available in different parts of China is not the same. In Southern Gansu’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, many Tibetan dissent websites were available, no problem. Those aren’t available from anyplace else I’ve been in China.

Then again, young monks there played a lot of Counter Strike, which struck me as very un-monklike. So much for predictable patterns of behavior.

Today has been most exciting. First off Randy has made his goal and can quit his job to do Something Positive full time. That’s just too neat for words, and says a lot, to me, about the power of fans as well as the wonder of webcomics.

He also got mentioned in Neil Gaiman’s journal, which is neat and only enforces my point above about the wonder of webcomics.

What Neil also mentioned, if you go through that post, is some info about Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki’s up and coming summer or fall movie. For me, this is bigger than any Hollywood movie news I could hope to see, so I’m pretty excited.

I will certainly be keeping an eye on nausicaa.net’s news updates to see what is going on.

Funeral March (2001)
is a great, if overlooked, movie. Hong Kong is known for action flicks, gangster flicks, cop flicks, and comedies. I too enjoy a good laugh over many of the vapid romantic comedies, but this movie isn’t that. This movie is great, and interesting, and dramatic, a great examination of the human spirit.

Not too long after this, I realized that Eason Chan (陈奕迅) is a pretty neat musician, and lots of his music is also pretty intriguing and original.

If you have anyway of checking out this movie, I highly recommend it. I saw it back in 2001, which is ancient history today in Hong Kong movies, so I am having trouble tracking it down.

I’m in a joint venture tech company’s office this evening catching up on my global news, and stumbled across some neat summaries of what Shanghai is from Michael Rogers:

• The China Puzzle
• China’s Mixed Message
• If You Can’t Beat ‘em…

Anil has made a modest proposal for the arranged marriages circuit, and while amusing as anything, I also find myself taking pause to think. This is the nature of much of Anil’s writing, and certainly one of the things that makes me read his journal.

I do know a small handful of people in an arranged marriage, and they are happy. This is strange to me, since it seems like such a breech of personal freedom, but there you go. This is not the same as a friend of mine who just sat back while his family said “you know, you should marry that girlfriend of yours.” That’s just power of suggestion to do something that wasn’t a really good idea in the first place.

The only question I find myself asking is this: where do these marriages get arranged? In Canada? Australia? Massachusetts? Other places seem a bit risky in terms of validity of the engagement, as well as validity of the union itself. The other question is this: how are visas to be dealt with, and will there be mail order husband/brides?

The amusement and silly questions seem almost endless.

Check it out! I knew that wireless stuff would be useful beyond neat internet access and still relevant to me. Wireless impact sensors will help high-technify sports like fencing and taekwondo.

Sometimes I see the development of new technology, or new fun things to use, and what do I do?

I drool.

Who wouldn’t want an Apple airport express?

My folks have been behind aspartame since forever. This was something that struck me as not necessarily being a good thing. Then, eventually in science class with Mr. Hanlon, we talked about how aspartame acts much like nicotene. You can’t get rid of it, you just build it up in your system.

Well, then my dad became a diabetic, and the landscape of our kitchen went from being an awful lot of aspartame to almost all aspartame. At this point, little alarms went off in my head, but I didn’t much know what to do with it.

Eventually I sent my mom a lot of resources about aspartame and how it is not necessarily a safe substance, not does it necessarily help diabetics as much as everyone thought it did.

All in all, this was all scary but relevant stuff to me, and my folks did listen. For that I’m glad.

Well, today I read about another item on shelves and in products that had my hackles up (because it’s in everything and just seems like a silly way to avoid sugar, if you ask me): fructose. What is fructose? Fructose is something else my dad has to stay away from: fruit sugar. In yet another field of inquiry where science starts to point the finger at our problems, fructose is being seen as a possible factor in obesity.

This sounds a little preachy considering the amount of research, but it does point to the more important issue at hand: it amazes me that as a supposedly intelligent critter running around on this planet, we can’t figure out that moderation is really the way to go. There are no shortcuts to being healthy. You have to eat well, from all the food groups, in moderation, and you have to exercise. There are no shortcuts, and yet, everyone must believe in them because look at the industry in weight loss.

I find myself smiling knowingly when a friend echoes my own unvoiced opinions. Today I got that from Andre, as he wrote Not an Accessory.

Here is my thought… the phone does not surpass face to face contact. It is a tool to be used when face to face contact is not possible. Then there’s also the issue of respect: respect the people whose presence you are sharing and get off the stupid phone. Nothing makes me feel more insignificant than to be cut off for a prolonged phone call. This is not to say that I am the center of the universe. Important things happen, emergencies happen, crises happen. Sure. This is usually not what is going on when I’m sitting across the table from someone engaged in a long conversation. For the most part, they’re just shooting the breeze.

The other thing that I have noticed about the phone, people use it as a pacifier substitute when doing things alone. I have sat at coffee, enjoying my time, reading a book, and there I see someone alone and incapable of being at peace. The person picks up the phone, flips through the address book, and proceeds to call everyone possible to have a conversation with. In this case, why bother going out and spending the money on the coffee?

Warning: If you are out with me and spending a stupid amount of time on the phone, I might walk away, because I’m not needed in the slightest. Either I’m not interesting enough, or you have too much going on.