In the fine tradition of sulz’s postcard project, we present the New York Post’s Postcard for Paris. Download it from them here, for printing and mailing fun! Up to you which still from One Night in Paris you use for the reverse.
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cross-posted from runningthroughrain
Remember sulz‘s postcard project from last month? Well, we registered right away and it’s arrived and we finally got a scan for your delectification. Yay, we’ve got a penpal in Malaysia! Unfortunately, half the text is in Malay and my Malay is just the teensiest bit rusty. Can anyone help a sister out?
The text on the reverse reads (at least I think it does: her writing is very neat but the postmark goes right over parts of it):
Helo raincoaster!
Apa khabar? Bagaimana dengan statistik blog hari ini? Ada makan sos mumbu baru-baru ini tak? =P
Terima kasih banyak-banyak kerana menyertai projek blog saya!
Dear raincoaster,
Have fun figuring that out! =)
I’ll toss in one more:
Saya harap postad ini tela meyerikan hari anda!
Which means, as far as I can make out:
Hi raincoaster, how’s it going? Are your blog stats doing well? Have you eaten any bum sauce lately? Thanks for participating in the postcard project. Now I know where you live, fool! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Upper Yankistan, here I come!
Or something like that.
You can see our post about the project here, and her original post announcing the postcard project here. Officially it’s closed, but if getting a postcard from a total stranger in a foreign country would brighten your day a little, this might be just the thing…or it might inspire you to do some postcarding of your own. sulz has used the WordPress.com contact form so that people can post their information and it remains confidential, going straight to her private email. Don’t ask people to put their addresses in your comments section, because you just never know who’s reading it; confidentiality matters.
Think about this the next time you look at your stats and see nothing but a gaggle of numbers. Each of those little blips is a person, some of them people you’ve never met (maybe ALL of them people you’ve never met), each one with a beating heart and a hope that reading your blog will inform, entertain, educate, or cheer them. Don’t be afraid to get real with them; the postcard project is a great way to start. Didn’t Griffin and Sabine start this way, after all?
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or is that “dominatrices”? Yes, technically it probably is, but the things we do when we’re dumbing down our blog for the sex trollers, eh?
So I was at a party some but not too many years back and I got into conversation, as one does. Now, this party was held by my friend Hermione, who is stylish, sharp, artistic, not a half bad writer, and, most importantly for party purposes, possessed of a wide and colourful variety of friends attained through the exploits conducted during her wide and colourful past. Not that her present is colourless, but relative to the bad old days it’s at least somewhat beiged-out in acceptable Canadian fashion.
One of her friends is a pretty well-known fetish designer, and it was this woman with whom I was chatting. She was much more interesting than the two Gaysian pretty boys who were friends of friends or said they were and who dosed my drink with roofies and sat around watching and giggling all night. Apparently I’m lots of fun when I’m wasted on the stuff, but how would I know if I hadn’t asked the person I woke up next to the afternoon after? Eh? How I located those long-lost earrings in the state I was in I will never know, nor why the furry scarf seemed like the thing to wear to bed. Nor do I wish to know, quite frankly, but I do wish I’d had some of the stuff around to dose myself with when I lost my lovely winter hat, as the superhuman accessory-location ability it apparently confers on me would draw me to the sadly-missed article like Greek playboys to LA celebutwats.
But enough of me: you want to hear what happened when Felicia hooked up with the fellow she met online. What happened was this:
She was in need of a little company, and being busy growing her own company single-handed, she didn’t exactly have the time to make the scene at Sin City every goddam night, even presuming Sin City was on every night, which it is, but only if you exclude 29 days out of every 30 or so, and that would be a very peculiar way to count indeed.
So she looked for love online.
Now, if you’re a fetishist of any experience you already know there’s quite the online community for just about any particular peculiarity, including but not limited to the look-but-don’t-touch underage Gothic Lolitas and the touch-but-don’t-look blackout scene. My own particular favorite example was one Yavanna told me about: a site on EZboard dedicated to restrictive Victorian clothing. This couple had set a webcam up in their dining room and living room and they’d come home from work, change into restrictive collars, ties, bustles, hobble skirts, etc, and then cook and eat dinner and watch tv and do all the other dull, everyday things that people do in their mufti, only they were doing it in these Petticoat Junction outfits, for money.
Seriously, I gotta get me a scam like that. Wonder if there’s a *looks down* overall and thermal undershirt and sneakers fetish market? Mebbe not.
So, Felicia went online, looking for love. Lust, actually. Felicia is a smart girl and she knows that asking Bill Gates to supply your soulmate when his own mother had to tell him to pop the question from her deathbed is somewhat unrealistic. But boy, can he connect you with the vast, horny multitudes for cheap, meaningless hookups, as countless VPs of various Microsoft customers can probably attest. Oh wait: those ones got the expensive LA hookers. My mistake.
And what did Felicia find there? She found a man who wanted to be abused. Oh, not branded, not the whole bloodplay thing. He just wanted a woman who’d make him feel like a complete doormat for a few hours now and again. And if there is one thing Felicia is good at (my friends and I, we have so much in common) it’s making a man feel like a doormat, particularly when he is asking for it.
So she emailed him. When you’re the dom, there’s no sense waiting for him to make the first move, right? Right. And he emailed back eagerly. And this went back and forth for awhile until she and he came to an agreement that he would show up at her apartment at a certain date and time and that she would do whatever she liked with him.
And he showed up, quivering with eagerness, and she led him to the hall closet, handcuffed him to the rail, closed the door, and then she turned around, took off the leather, put on jeans, a t-shirt and an apron, and cleaned her apartment.
She let him out the next morning and he could not wait to see her again!
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Have you been to Digg lately? Yes? Then you’re probably an apolitical male in the lower levels of technology as a career and lifestyle. Everyone else has largely been chased out of there; the intellectual gene pool is self-selecting for inbreeding as a function of the way the system has been set up and the way the system has been gamed. It rewards people who form reward-based gangs to muscle the conversation in various directions, and it works very efficiently at this. It works this way in every social bookmarking network, as far as I can see.
The half-life of a useful community seems to be shrinking as well, as the gamers catch on that the games themselves are tranferable and they can simply take the exact same plan to wherever pops up next.
Reddit, for which I once had some hope, is quickly becoming a ghetto populated by amusing pictures of questionable provenance and American politics, period, which is a shame. With a wider base to begin with, and less scope for self-serving blather, there was every possibility that it could have become a general interest site with enormous reach, but that, obviously, didn’t happen. Part of the reason was the inability to categorize your submissions, so that everything was simply thrown into a huge pool (there are Sub-reddits for uh, for uh, for two things that apparently don’t interest me enough to remember them at all) and thus the single most popular conversation quickly becomes the only functioning one at all, as all other conversations are marginalized off the radar screen. And its functions facilitate vendetta: you can view everything posted by an individual, and just click through the whole list, downvoting things without reading them; as I type this, I’m losing points at reddit as someone does this very thing to my profile.
Truemors is very new, and entirely unfocused, but as yet it’s not reached a critical mass. A site based on rumours needs a certain minimum number of people who are both informed of interesting facts and of mixed enough loyalty to share them with strangers rather than keeping them to themselves. Guy Kawasaki‘s base does not consist of those people, let’s just say that, and there are times when it feels like I’m the only person who is NOT a marketer who’s posting to that site or even reading it. What it becomes will depend entirely on who it reaches; if he’s planning for the long term (which he probably is not) he should make it work as a Facebook add-on and recruit students, because in a couple of years they’ll be exactly who and what he needs for this site. As for right now, trolling Consumerist or some of the political sites might be more useful, because that’s where you find the vast disgruntled.
In each case, it looks like the way to keep the conversations meaningful is to keep the conversations separate. Fark has its niche and it rules it well, because it knows this lesson and it is edited by a dictator, yet another useful tip. If the techies want to talk tech, give them a tech forum for that or they’ll gang up and steal your site. If the politicos want to release media statements every fifteen minutes and flood the front page, give them a place to talk to the politically minded or rant into dead space as the case may be, so they don’t hijack more than their NVIP section. If you want to host one global metaconversation, the only way to prevent the hijacking seems to be to make distinct sandboxes and pull the most popular stories from each, which should be done by a dictator with a heart of stone and backbone of molybdenum steel. Ongoing antigaming action should be a given, but it’s not. If you build it and it functions, that does not necessarily mean it’s functioning as you intended it to; just ask a guy who builds guns for a living and who gets shot.
Now, us literati and other dwellers in the virtual Montparnasse get our own sandbox to play in, as Gawker reports. While we have an entirely too well-documented tendency to become addicted to gambling (and what are futures, if not gambling, eh?) Media Predict will, in all probability, be co-opted by some smart criminal who realizes that the methods of taking over a site like this are well established, widely available, and free to implement. Offer payouts in real money, have your army of runners collect the cash, skew the odds, and rake in the dollars from people who dare not turn you in lest they implicate themselves.
Oh. Wait. I need money. brb.
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and what do we do with it?
That’s right. We use it to put YouTube videos in our blogs instead of writing something.
Here’s a classic from the WaybackMachine.
raincoaster 