aleyna lectures

crix, I miss our talks too. I’m having my period break now for a few days, so I’ll try to catch you online
元気 is my name in kanji. Read as “Anni” ^^

LOVE3, I sent you a monster mail back (see, when JDF and JPM are down and I come to the computer, the length of my mails get… scary), reply when you find the time.
wordpress has issues with some characters, don’t mind it

I’ve been bad at updating lately if we don’t count the SMAP-SPAMs. I’ll be doing the summary of the latest SxS-episode this weekend though, and got myself involved in a subbing project again too. So action ahoy~

JDF is the successor of JDA, which was a rather large and influential forum in the 90s but it got shut down because a) it grew too large and b) things started to get spread around from there, which became a problem after it caused some real trouble for a few users at their work places (if I remember correctly, some were close to losing their jobs for real).
Basically, it’s a closed forum that functions both in Japanese and English. It should be 50-50%, but my guess is that Japanese has taken over lately.
To join, you need to get recommendations by already existing members and give personal information. Sounds like mixi? Yes, it does, but in the end the forum is very much different from the chaos that is mixi, or GREE. It’s actually a real discussion forum, but the circles are kind of… closed because the things discussed aren’t supposed to be spread.
Googling for the address will lead nowhere, because JDF is just the English abbreviation. I try not to mention the forum too much (because it’s irritating to read things about something you have no idea about), but since some users know this blog, it flips in at times.
Especially now when we’re down.

This closed forum-ness or “friends only” –status is something western people are having hard time to understand, seen how they (funny, I think I just excluded myself altogether ) use services like livejournal and friend each other because they like the thing A and dislike the thing B.
I recently wrote something about Japanese internet communities for an uni-course, and thought about making it public here after I get my grade in a few weeks. But the main lines are, that Japanese communities are very much inside-business (that creates a rather “false” feeling of security like mixi or GREE) or then go to the other radical end, which is complete anonymousness like 2ch’s huge popularity has proved.
It’s all because of the paranoid attitude (which is, seeing certain things, sometimes very much the right attitude) the Japanese have towards the internet.

I’ll publish that project (or parts of it) within the next weeks, look forward to that