As Suanie Sees It

… for winning not one but TWO awards for The Chicken Rice Mystery at the BMW Shorties!

Thanks to you, I can tell people with a straight face that I was in an award-winning film!

Sometimes I feel like I am losing it. I seem to be stuck in the 90s when things made sense, and the world is moving on without me, and not even blinking half an eye while doing that.

I’ve watched assorted videos by assorted people attempting to do the ‘Crank Dat’ dance by Soulja Boy. I’d seen Soulja Boy and his posse on some chat show doing the dance, showing every move bit by bit so the rickety host could follow. Intrigued by this 21st century ‘Macarena’-esque movement that I’d somehow seemed to have missed, I searched for the original ‘Crank Dat’ video. You know, because in order for the masses to pick up something as to generate the highly imaginative viral marketing success as achieved by ‘Crank Dat’ and Soulja Boy, well… it’s just got to be something damn special lah!

And this was the music video I found…

I still don’t understand.

In any case, my favourite version was performed by Richard Stallman and a few MIT people…

I admire their bravado. I also hope that they keep their day jobs.

I’ve been telling people about this case I am following (via Google news and various blogs) that I think I might as well blog about it. Saves me from having to re-tell it every time I think about it.

Actually I first got to know about it from The Wilful Sunflower’s post. A 13-year old teenager Megan Meier from Missouri (USA) committed suicide last October. She had been diagnosed with ADD and depression, and like all teens before her, clearly had a self-image problem. Read the rest from Wikipedia.org, or the article that broke the story recently here.

For those who can’t be arsed to read, I summarised the popular perception of what happened:

1) Megan Meier and a friend ended their friendship.

2) Friend’s mother created a MySpace account, pretending to be a good-looking 16-year old boy named ‘Josh Evans’ to find out if Megan Meier had been saying anything about her daughter on-line.

3) Josh Evans befriended Megan Meier, gained her trust and confidence. Megan Meier was thrilled by the attention of an older, good looking boy.

4) One day out of the blue, Josh Evans messaged Megan Meier, “I don’t know if I want to be friends with you anymore because I’ve heard that you are not very nice to your friends.”

5) A series of MySpace bulletins and messages including “The world would be a better place without you” led Megan Meier to freak out. Later she attempted suicide by hanging herself with a belt in her closet. She was pronounced dead the next day.

6) Six weeks later, a single mother told the Meiers that ‘Josh Evans’ never existed, and was in fact Megan’s ex-friend’s mother. This ex-friend’s mother also enlisted the help of one of her employees to maintain Josh Evans’ MySpace account. The single mother found out about it because her daughter had been encouraged to join in the ‘joke’. A few other children who knew Megan were also into it.

7) One year later, Steve Pokin wrote an article on the incident, published on the St. Charles Journal.

The Internet community (if there’s one) was angered by what they viewed as a crime committed by the friend’s mother. Big news everywhere, bla bla bla, a blogger (Sarah Wells) followed trails from Steve Pokin’s article, traced down the family’s information, and revealed the name of the ex-friend’s mother. She was identified as ‘Lori Janine Drew’, and the family was friends with the Meiers (prior to the single mother revealing that Drew was involved in the prank, of course).

9) The Drews knew that Megan Meier took medication for depression as she had went on vacations with them before. So it was not as if the Drews did not know what Megan was suffering from. Their lack of remorse was incredulous; according to a police report published by The Smoking Gun:

Drew state she knew “arguments” had broken out between Megan and others on “my space.” Drew felt this incident contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel “as guilty” because at the funeral she found out “Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Another blogger said that outing Lori Drew was the right thing to do, because her behaviour was parallel to that of a typical child predator. The atmosphere is that Lori Drew is right up there as one of the most hated person in America at the moment.

10) After all that heat, city officials where Megan Meier used to live declared this Wednesday that on-line harassment is a crime.

Questions:

a) Is it fair for the Drew family to experience such a massive wrath of Internet mob justice? After their private information was revealed all over the Net, they’d been receiving all sorts of threats, and were victims of a prank call leading to the police rushing to their home thinking that someone was dead.

b) Could it be that Lori Drew had nothing to do with ‘Josh Evans’, but was protecting a loved one (i.e. her young daughter) who was pretending to be Josh Evans? Based on the single mother’s account, it seems unlikely, but you never know.

c) Why can’t MySpace be held accountable, even if so slightly? I once wrote an article about MySpace and crime, and in the course of research, signed up for a MySpace account as a 14-year old girl, the minimum age to be a MySpace member. There was absolutely NO verification process involved, and as 14-year old unverified member, I could EASILY search for other MySpace members to talk to.

Yes, sure that parents need to be responsible for their children’s surfing time as well. The Internet and its various social networking sites are just another means to crime. Somehow I still feel that there are a hell lot more that those sites can do; but in the US, privacy laws seem stricter than ours.

d) Holy fuck what is the world coming to these days?!

Also malas to blog, so might as well copy and paste my own entry from Monsterblog.

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Sounds scary…

PETALING JAYA: Laws should be amended so that action can be taken against webmasters and bloggers who post lies and other statements which could have serious repercussions.

Umno vice-president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the Internet was good in the sense that a person had the freedom to think and decide, but there were those who posted lies and tried to incite feelings of ill will among the different communities in Malaysia. ( Story link )

Perhaps Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin should meet up with a large group of bloggers so beliau could better understand the nature of blogging, and why people do it. And hopefully he will soon come to realise that the majority of bloggers do not blog to spite the country; in fact some blog because they love the country, and depends on how you look at it, being patriotic in their blog posts.

For some people, blogging is a hobby, like collecting stamps. Only that my personal view is that collecting stamps is boring. I’d collected stamps for 4 years, and I’d been blogging for more than that. So I’m right

For some people, blogs are a platform for voicing their opinions and views which have no place in the current mainstream media. Contrary to popular belief, people are not stupid. Some of them do have things to say, and they say it well; only that they find themselves lacking of an appropriate venue to voice their thoughts, hence they turn to blogs. When I was in Form 6, I was pretty much lonely and left alone. I built a website using a free on-line software (Trellix on Tripod if anyone would remember) and on that website, I wrote of personal experiences, such as ghost stories that I personally ‘experienced’.. Back then blogs were pretty much non-existent, at least in Malaysia anyway (this was in 1999). But my activities of chronicling my thoughts and daily life was akin to a blog entry today. I had a grand total of 5 readers, but being able to express myself in that way sort of built my confidence in my personal journey in life.

I came across a blog by an American, Tom Hespos. In one of his year 2004 entries, he wrote:

[…] I think blogs are part of a social movement. All social movements are driven by an unaddressed need, and in this case I think the need is for trusted, alternative sources for news and opinion. And I think that’s partly due to the mainstream media consistently getting things wrong over the past few years.

[…]

Blogs are coming along to fill this void. Relatively speaking, they cost less to produce and require the expenditure of fewer resources. When you can’t trust the mainstream media, maybe you can trust someone who spends their time gathering news and opinion from multiple channels, analyzing it and putting it out there quickly for consumption. Maybe you can trust somebody who’s more like you than like Paula Zahn or Soledad O’Brien - someone who’s not a beltway insider or member of the media elite.

I think blogs are filling a void for a lot of people, mostly the void of reliable information, whether that information comes in the form of news or opinion. As I’ve talked about here and in my column several times, blogging software enables the citizen-publisher. So now in an era of unreliable information, we’re seeing the electronic rise of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “Marketplace of Ideas” where the blogging community determines which ideas and facts stand up to the test of widespread scrutiny. And I love it - It’s exactly what we need in a democratic society and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Me too.

I’d wanted to blog about this for some time now, but never got around to it.

Well Monday is always a good day to start doing things. So here it is…

Dr Vagus, the awesome endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic proposed to his girlfriend Kristin, and she said yes!!!

He didn’t do it via his blog (of course), but he posted the sweetest entry on the proposal here.

Time and time again I wonder, WHY IS IT NOT ME?!?!??!? *cry*

Sniff sniff :( Another good guy snapped up… sniff sniff… all your doctors are not belong to me after all

Oh well… there is supposed to be plenty of fish in the sea… that really isn’t much consolation but I’ll just have to cast my net another time…

Heh, congrats to you both

Send me a plane ticket to wherever you will be holding the wedding, kthx.