Category: Personal

I’ve seen “OTL” quite a lot around the Internet these days, particularly on deviantART. For a while, I’ve assumed it stood for “Oh, the lose!” or somesuch. Today I decided to look it up once and for all, and found out it’s an emoticon.

I suppose the appropriate response would be OTL . Can’t say I feel that bad, though. I’m more amused than anything.

And I don’t even have a Twitter account.

Twitter’s 140-character limit is so darn short and so darn inflexible that it makes every character count. Authors have to revise their posts mercilessly to squeeze in under the limit* and use URLs that completely mask their destination**. If what they’re saying won’t fit into one tweet and they’re unwilling to chop any further, they’ll split it into two, and since newer tweets are shown first this becomes something akin to Ahead Stop.

However, Twitter serves an attractive purpose – it’s great for things that you don’t want to dedicate a “full post”, such as a blog entry, to. I wish my fellow netizens used/had something better to make these “minor posts”. Delicious works fine, but only if your “minor post” exists for the purpose of sharing a link. Facebook seems good for any purpose, but suffers from its own unique problems***.

The Internet is always incrementally improving, and I’m sure our dream site will arrive some day… However, with numerous sites that are flawed, but “work” nonetheless, it’s going to take a while.

* I have a taste of this – I’ve written signatures for forums that had a sig char limit of 255.
** Unless the destination is using rel=”shortlink” and the author is using a tool that supports this. I’ve yet to see a tweet where this happened. Sometimes an author will go out of their way to use a short URL that the destination offered in some other fashion.
*** My pet peeve is that I can’t be Pikadude No. 1; Facebook insists on a real name. I’ll leave it to other nerds to rant about their respect for privacy.

I learned some neat things about my home, San Jose, California, when I went to read about it on Wikipedia.

1. San Jose’s sister cities include, among five others, Okayama, Japan, and Dublin, capital of Ireland.
2. There is an asteroid named after San Jose.
3. The Mario Bros.’ voice actor was born in San Jose. Mama mia! Hoohoo!

So I read Iwata Asks – Rhythm Heaven, and what sprang to my mind almost immediately was “Holy cow… Kazuyoshi Osawa is a lot like me”. My Internet friends probably have no idea what I’m talking about, because I behave rather differently online, but take my word for it: In the meat-o-sphere, Kazuyoshi and I have a lot in common. Nervous, not very good at communication, self-conscious, strong-minded, but multi-talented and wanting to have fun with whatever we do. It strengthens my hope for my own future when I see what sorts of things Kazuyoshi has accomplished in spite of himself, and especially what sorts of people he’s gotten to work with him and support him. Wouldn’t you love to have a teammate who sends you pictures of kittens when you’re feeling down? 😀

I’m going to have to get my own copy of Rhythm Heaven. It’ll be neat to see what someone like me has done.

Speaking of multi-talented, my future as a vector graphics artist on deviantART is seeming more and more likely the more I use Inkscape. I never really enjoyed drawing using MS Paint, Multimedia Fusion, the GIMP, or meat-o-sphere products, but drawing with Inkscape is kind of… fun. Possibly because everything I draw is easily adjustable, so I can do away with any imperfections niggling at me without having to erase a lot of stuff and start over. Perhaps I was meant to be a full deviant; I’ve even got a clear picture of an OC sitting in my head.