milkypink [dot] net

Being a bit of a scatterbrain with a short attention span, I adore microblogging. Twitter was my first step into 140 character-limited madness, and I fully abused the sms option after joining. My activity on the site fluctuated as is typical for me, but then kind of dropped off as Twitter’s stability started to wobble. Clearly people were catching on to the fun of one-liner-blogging, which was good, but also bad. Downtime increased, errors were common and at one point you couldn’t even go back through your history to look at old tweets. It was getting more and more frustrating to use – you’d post, but Twitter wouldn’t recognize it, your 140 character thought lost to the ether of the internet.



There were other microblogging services of course, the ones I used included Jaiku and Pownce (now closed as of Dec 15th 2008). Neither of them really caught on for me, although I was a little sad to see Pownce go (it let you upload & share files with friends!). Jaiku’s main fault was not really accepting Japanese characters, which is a big ( ｉдｉ ) for me.



And then… there was Plurk. Somehow, the move to it felt natural, and I’ve made a lot of neat friends through it, but I haven’t abandoned my Twitter either, so I’ll explain the +/- of each here:



Twitter

+ simple interface – just type, send, done.

+ lots of 3rd party apps for mobile phones and computers

+ sms option

+ can follow your favorite famous personalities (or their fake counterparts)

+ everybody and their mom should know about it by now

+ spamming is ok. what I mean is, posting lots in a row, no real penalties (although I think there is flood control)

- spamming is technically ok, so you can get people who are a little too excited about twittering and end up telling you things you don’t want to know. This is a problem related to all microblogging services, but it can’t be ignored.

- even though you can reply to people, it’s kind of difficult to manage a thread since you don’t always know what tweet someone is replying to

- Twitter is like shouting into the void and hoping someone shouts back – the way it’s set up is very individualist. Good for following news, not so good for making friends.

- Serial adders run rampant. You can prevent random people from following you by protecting your updates, but it’s all or nothing – there’s no way to be selective about which tweets are which.



Plurk

+ creativity in posting – using verbs like says/likes/hates/wishes/has takes a little getting used to, but can be a lot of fun to play around with

+/- karma is a challenge and a reward – you’re active, you gain karma. (conversely, if you aren’t active enough, you lose karma, which can be frustrating)

+/- spam is controlled by karma… kind of. If you post too much you can lose karma! An odd idea to be sure, but I can see where they came up with this plan of action…

+ since the interface is designed very much like a chatroom, it’s ridiculously easy to have a conversation with someone (or lots of someones!) without losing the thread

+ continuing on the above, it’s much easier to get to know people in this format!

+ privacy options! individual plurks can be public, private or varying levels of protected (you can specific the users on the spot! no need to make specific filters if you don’t want to) however you can’t change this once you’ve made the plurk – you either have to delete it and start over or grin and bear it.

- no sms option as of yet, although IM is possible.

- there aren’t a lot of good 3rd party apps for plurk yet

- plurk is less well known, so if you’re begging your friends to join a microblogging service, they’re less likely to want to join one they’ve never heard of…

- plurk recently has had more downtime than I’d like, but it’s nowhere near as disastrous as Twitter got during my transition… not yet anyway.



Sometimes, I really do feel like spamming my microblog and chatting away into the endless, unforgiving chasm that is the internet, and plurk would penalize me for it. So I use my twitter. Although these days, I don’t actually log in to the main Twitter site, but into Socialthing! instead. ST lets me post to Twitter (and plurk, through Ping.fm, if I want) and since I’m already watching my Twitter feeds there, it’s convenient. Occasionally I do log in to twitter from my phone, though.



More about Socialthing!…
One of the big reasons why I joined is because it lets me see a feed of my flickr contacts’ latest uploads. I find it hard to keep up with everyone’s pics on flickr directly somehow, so this is an easier format for me. I’ve also got Twitter, Plurk (my plurks only), and Last.fm (my scrobbles only) on Socialthing, even though most of those aren’t that helpful since I already know what I’m doing… XD

New design, same old skin… (*^▽^*)

It’s less… compact than the other one, but I think this encourages more reading and less.. uh, squinting. I’ll probably tweak it more as time goes on but it’s satisfactory for now.

Today has been nice and sunny, if chilly. Still not up to my standards for spring, but moving in the right direction anyway…

Mostly been creating 漢字-related mnemosyne flashcards on the computer from Kanji in Context, recently, while trying to keep warm (a.k.a. ensuring blood is circulating to my extremities).

This. This is what I see when I look out of my bedroom window right now.

….

Yesterday was 60F!

…

What happened?!? D:

It’s been going back and forth between snowing and slushing (that is to say, snow/freezing rain mix) for most of the day. The roads are pretty much clear (if slushy) but still! It’s 35F out now （πーπ） I know snow isn’t impossible for March (the first day of March this year was snow, actually…) but I was so full of hope for the coming Spring~

In unrelated news, I have discovered that there are Lucky Star Nendoroids. Konata~~ ♥♥♥ ebay was full of jacked up prices so I went to y!Ja and scored myself a homepage version Konata （V＾－°）イエイ！ Still looking for a homepage Kagami (that isn’t $150, anyway…). I want to get a Tsukasa and Miyuki eventually but I feel like I should make sure I actually like Nendoroids before I get carried away XD Their shape really compliments the Lucky Star cast, I think. Suzumiya’s can go either way (normally proportioned type or chibi) but Konata looks really weird proportioned like a normal human （＾▽＾笑） it’s just not right! The last DVD of Lucky Star is coming out in the US this month, so I’ll be looking forward to the eventual series box version~ it’s not definite to happen by any means, but publishers seem to be catching on that Box Sets are a Good Idea so one can only hope… I watched a little of the dub on youtube and while it doesn’t make me want to claw my ears off I still prefer the original 声優 – Konata’s has a style I really like (and that isn’t easy to replicate in English anyway).

I have to be careful not to overindulge with Lucky Star merch… （*’‐’*)

Tonight we move the clocks ahead one hour. Since it’s been lighter and lighter lately this means the evenings will be mildly sunny now~

I really dislike how dark it gets during winter here. Once it’s dark, it’s dark, and there’s no way to know how late it is by the darkness outside… it’s disorienting. 6am and 6pm are both the same pitch black emptiness. I think… if it was still warm, but dark, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s just not possible since the sun is what produces the light and we’re farther away during the winter months so it’s colder…

I’d like to live somewhere warmer, but I’m discouraged from trying. Warmer climates have so many unfamiliar problems, like hurricanes, earthquakes… it’s not like snowstorms can’t be dangerous but compared to other things it seems almost safe. Safe, but cold.

I don’t know how I’ll fare, continuing to live in this climate. Previously, growing up, I’d think about moving somewhere else after school. The possibility was always there, so it was something to look forward to. But now… this weather will never change. When I say things like, winter is really hard for me, people brush it off, because, “Winter is tough on everyone” or some baseless blanket statement like that. So I don’t bother to mention it much, although it should be evident anyway. Maybe I’m not strong enough, but I don’t know what I’d be working towards.

Yesterday it finally got up to around 45F, and in celebration of the coming spring, I opened a bunch of windows in the house.

The fresh air really helps my motivation to do things, especially cleaning. This may be part of the reason why I’m really unproductive in winter – the house barely stays warm as it is, if I were to open a window, even for a few minutes, all would be lost… ( ｉдｉ )

Laundry is the easiest task to tackle, since even though I don’t air-dry much anymore (I have too great a love of warm cloth coming out of the dryer to avoid it) I do hang up blankets to let them air out periodically. Plus, with fresh air, I naturally think of clean clothing~

Cleaning flat surfaces like tile are also much easier to deal with when there’s a nice breeze moving through the room. I do try to avoid using harsh chemicals anyway, but it can feel so stuffy, not to mention all of the junk that gets kicked up into the air during cleaning…

The cats enjoyed it too, I think, and spent the hours with open windows racing around the house. XD

Unfortunately today has been rainy and gross, and kind of chilly out…

For the past month or so, various health problems have prevented me from continuing my 365-day blogging experiment as planned. Since the weather will likely warm up in the next month or so (or at least, it better!) I may feel up to writing more.

Unfortunately the same problems that kept me from blogging also delayed my kanji studying… (- -；) So I’m still stuck on the final test of level 4.

Lately I’ve been interested in making 弁当 (bento) again, reading all of the entries at Just Bento (justbento.com) and now moving on to Just Hungry for other various recipes XD Whenever I get into a cooking mood, I find there are a bunch of utensils I don’t currently own that would make my cooking life a lot easier… however this time, I’ve run into a problem of having a full set of almost-no-longer-usable pans, which is quite a problem. It’s not as though I don’t use pans to cook on a regular basis, but it hadn’t become so apparent until recently that replacing all of them would become mandatory, not optional. I’d like to get some better quality stuff this time so it will last… but we’ll see what happens. (I rather think pans should last more than say 5 years, don’t you?)

Been pondering the budgeting aspect of things recently as well. Tracking spending, reducing spending (the ban was completed without any issues, by the way!) thinking about saving… Fortunately I’m not hit as hard as others during this downturn but it’s still quite depressing.