What do we have here? A war of some sort? Not quite likely but accord­ing to Danah Boyd there is a rift. Amer­i­can teenagers are flock­ing to MySpace and Face­book and accord­ing to her essay, which go where have some­thing to do with socio-economic class. Danah has been try­ing to fig­ure out how to put this divi­sion into some kinda for­mula. Since she hasn’t suc­ceeded yet we can enjoy her obser­va­tions over at her blog. I have to admit, there’s a cer­tain truth to be found in this paper.

In short, Miss Boyd has observed that hege­monic Amer­i­can teens are all on or switch­ing to Face­book. Non-hegemonic teens are drawn to MySpace. She thinks that a class divi­sion has emerged which is under­lined by adver­tis­ing or pol­icy deci­sions, for exam­ple. Well, con­sid­er­ing the ori­gin of each site, I find myself agree­ing to her line of thought. But I have to ask myself why any­body should even bother? It’s all just a mat­ter of pre­sen­ta­tion and news. Both social net­work­ing sites embrace dif­fer­ent poli­cies, encour­age dif­fer­ent actions. Is it really safe to assume that MS and FB are the prime indi­ca­tors of class division?

18-year-old Alli­son Stokke became a vic­tim of unwanted inter­net pop­u­lar­ity. Appar­ently, Miss Stokke is one of the best pole vaulters the United States of Amer­ica have to offer. If some reports can be believed, she’s just a cou­ple of inches off the best high school girls mark. That makes her an excep­tional ath­lete, I guess.

Unfor­tu­nately, she’s quite beau­ti­ful too, as you can see on the pic­ture. This com­bi­na­tion has led to a relent­less inter­net atten­tion. In fact, it has led to a cult of some sorts. A quick search I did on Google just con­firmed that, even though it looks like the Stokkes got things some­what under con­trol as of lately. Some­times, igno­rance is bliss, they say. But that didn’t work out with poor Alli­son. Ignor­ing these events just didn’t work out. Fans turned her pic­ture into the back­ground pic­ture on their com­put­ers which felt like “becom­ing the vic­tim of a crime”, accord­ing to Miss Stokke.

Of course, most peo­ple want to become famous, a celebrity of some sorts. For Alli­son it’s only sports that mat­ters. Pole vault­ing, that is. She com­plained that “nobody really sees me”. I couldn’t agree more. Most peo­ple don’t care. All they see is a beau­ti­ful young woman with olive skin in a span­dex uni­form. Sadly, that’s all they need to start writ­ing about their sex­ual fan­tasies. It is demean­ing to be reduced to a sex object, espe­cially if you’re a promis­ing young ath­lete. I feel sorry for her, even though there are many oth­ers out there who share her plight.

That’s for sure. Well, first things first. Dead Like Me is a tele­vi­sion comedy-drama set in Seat­tle. The show is about an 18-year-old girl called Geor­gia “George” Lass who hap­pens to be the nar­ra­tor too. She dies early in the pilot episode and leaves a whole mess behind. Although she died, she’s not dead yet because she’s des­tined to become a Grim Reaper. These reapers are the min­ions of Death and their job is to col­lect the souls of peo­ple who are about to die. In short, Grim Reapers are the ones who reap souls and escort them to the after­life. The show mainly explores the lives and expe­ri­ences of a small team of reapers and takes a look at the changes in Georgia’s fam­ily after her sud­den death.

The team of reapers is led by Rube, who gets the list of who is to die. He assigns those unfor­tu­nates to his “squad”, by writ­ing the first ini­tial and last name, the loca­tion, and the esti­mated time of death (ETD) on a Post-it note. Then there are Mason, Roxy, and Betty who is soon replaced by Daisy. But you can check them out over at the offi­cial site. Unfor­tu­nately, there are only two sea­sons out there because the show was – just like FarScape – unjustly can­celed. Just recently I did a search on the show and I came up with some­thing interesting.

On April 17th, MGM announced that they embark on aggres­sive home enter­tain­ment pro­duc­tion strat­egy mean­ing that they will pro­duce lots of direct-to-DVD movies and sequels. The announce­ment states that there will be a movie and accord­ing to Ellen Muth all of the orig­i­nal cast is to return for the movie. I like the dark com­edy and the twisted look it takes at life. Hope­fully, they will bring the series back even­tu­ally. I’d really like to see the movie as the first step in that direc­tion. For once, they could make my dream come true.

This is hilar­i­ous, well done, and there’s a cer­tain truth in it.

All ye nerds, lis­ten up! Here’s a real life-saver for you, giv­ing your rela­tion­ship a new twist. Jen­nifer Chowd­hury has demon­strated her master’s the­sis project with the flow­ery name Inti­mate Con­trollers. These con­trollers work by build­ing game con­trollers into under­gar­ments which allows games being played by cou­ples through phys­i­cally touch­ing one another. The rea­son­ing behind that work is quite simple:

“You can’t fall in love with a gamer and expect him or her to give up gam­ing to spend more time with you.”

In order to cir­cum­vent some of the pit­falls in a geek’s love life, she came up with these con­trollers. The tech­nol­ogy is sub­or­di­nate to the rela­tion­ship, a tool to bring you together and get you talk­ing. Pretty sophis­ti­cated if you ask me, but hey, there may be some peo­ple out there who really are in need of some­thing like that. Wired Mag­a­zine has the scoop. Of course, if you’re hav­ing a hard time to imag­ine how to put these con­trollers to use, watch the video.

It almost seemed ages ago that I last wrote about Sanc­tu­ary. I have to con­fess, I was quite busy and, to put it frankly, I lost sight of it. Now I had some time to check on it to see if these all new webisodes are worth my time. The first four webisodes are avail­able for free view­ing at the usual sites, namely YouTube, Google Video, and sim­i­lar sites.